Slip of the Pen

The Moleskine (pronounced “mol-a-skeen-a”) is a nice-to-have notebook. Period. But more commonly, it’s billed as:

The legendary notebook, used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries, from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Ernest Hemingway to Bruce Chatwin.

Having those huge names tossed around so casually might do wonders for the regular chaps using the moleskine. Or, in some cases, actually intimidate them enough that they don’t get to move beyond Page 3.

In my case, I use the moleskine simply because its smooth pages embrace the tip of your pen without hesitation, not to mention it’s a treat to hold in your hands when browsing through all of your “conquered” pages. I admit, the big names hyping the moleskine did help draw me in, but that’s where it stops.

The moleskine, for all its history and mystique, is useless if I can’t make it work for me.

I got my first-ever moleskine on December 6, 2006 (from Moleskine Philippines), and blogged about it on the next day. However, it took me almost three weeks to spill the first blots of ink.

Sometimes, I write regular, spur-of-the-moment musings on my “mol-eh-skin-ah” (that’s how I call it). (Since June 2007, my notebook goes by the name Karimlan, Filipino for “darkness”.) But most of the time, what I write inside it becomes encoded into digital pages and filed under my ‘literary works’. Whether those works can actually elicit “Hey, nice” nice-to-have-but-preferably-not comments is a question I can’t answer.

If you want to learn more about the moleskine and its mystique, Moleskinerie.com is the perfect starting point.

You can also read my blog posts filed under Made on Moleskine.