A "Blogger" I'm not... but perhaps I can be a journaler?

Soo... yeah. Long time no post.

In the rush of everyday life (and absence of plants on which to brag about) I lost any sort of inspiration to write.

HOWEVER... I did get a fancy new journal. My sister gave me a pretty purple Leuchtturm book for Christmas so I could indulge myself in this little interest in Bullet Journaling I'd developed.

No, it has not turned my life around. I do not track my emotional states or list the things I find myself grateful for in it, and the spreads are NOT the handwriting- or analog-graphic-design-porn you see on other bullet journal blogs, though those layouts were inspiring I was researching the system.

With coffee. Like ya do...

It's a planner. It's job is to help you plan and remember stuff. I list what I have to do for the day and sometimes note what actually happened or was accomplished on a particular day. I bought a bunch of planner-specific stickers to use in it - indulging my inner 9-year-old, who had a sticker collection on notebook paper - and I use a different colored highlighter each week. There are also loads fewer scraps of paper with random lists floating around my bag/car/kitchen because of it.

Part of why I wanted to do this post was to throw out some not-gorgeous bullet journal layouts. I see a lot of people afraid to try it because their handwriting sucks or they can't draw. Every bullet journaling blogger on the internet will harp that "that's not what it's about" as they showcase pages that look like what I'd imagine an ecstasy-fueled layout and design Instagram feed would.

Pictured: NOT MY JOURNAL. It is beautiful, but what average planning person has the time or skill?

I want to show the other side. Look at this crap:

It's clumsy, messy and smeared. There's a lot of bare, unused space. It's badly thought-out in some places and crudely executed in others. My weekly spreads improved as I experimented and figured out what works for me, but the important part is that it functions, even when it looks blah.

Even if they aren't ga-ga worthy, I do enjoy making layouts. I research what other people track and come up with my own take. For example, some people make fancy spreads to remember upcoming birthdays. Facebook accomplishes most of that for me, so I made a movie premier tracker instead, with spaces to log when I saw the movie, where, with whom and what I thought of it.

Six months was about as much as I could fit on 2 pages. I'm kinda behind on the more recent movies.

Habit trackers are rampant on BuJo (see how with the trend I am?) posts. I tried it for March, only to realize I do most things so infrequently they're not really worth tracking. But I have kept an ongoing record of my attempts at the treadmill, which is kinda cool I guess.

You might notice the milestones list on my treadmill page. Not that I've met any of them yet, but I've always liked the idea of having written, quantifiable goals. Part of my down-ness the last few months has been a realization of the fact that I don't have any real, plannable goals in my life. There are things I want, but nothing that has been something you could make a step-by-step plan to achieve. Honestly, I didn't even really care whether I could run a mile or not when I started. I still don't, if we're being up front here, but if I bribe myself with new stuff for hitting certain benchmarks, I'm way more likely to keep trying, even through some damn shin splints (yeah, I learned what a shin splint was last month!).

No, this new dot-grid journal has not made me a better, more functional, more punctual or more enlightened person in any way. I had my "make-a-list-when-you-need-a-list" process down and it worked all right. Now my lists are simply bound together, along with my random thoughts, idea dumps, doodles and discussion notes for me to review as I desire.

Here are some other not-Pin-worthy pages I happen to like.

"The Eventually List," where I dump all the gotta-remember-to's and oh-I-really-should's that swim in my head.

The day I got the stickers :-D Plus doodles and the weekly spread I'm mostly sticking with lately.

My overview for the next 3 months and April. Note that I messed up the spacing 

for April at the top of the left page. THAT'S OKAY.