Combining My Two Great Loves: Shoes and Journals

Let's face it: I am obsessed with journals. I'll disagree with the claim my dear mother always makes that I'll "never be able to finish all those journals!" but it did take me seven years to fill eighteen. Then again, I guess eighteen is a pretty substantial number. And that's roughly how many blank journals await me in a box that's tucked away in my room. Talk to me when I'm 27.

The reason I'll never fill all my journals is because I doubt I can ever muster the self-control to buy at the rate I write. Or write at the rate I buy, for that matter. Snagging one journal a season? No way. If I see one I like, I'll buy the whole series. Continuity, I tell you!

Regardless, I've fallen in love with Paperblanks. I filled two last summer and I loved both of them. And so, as I often do to avoid real work, I surfed around their Web site to check out the available styles. And I must say, I think I need all four of the "Fabulous Footwear" collection. Or at least just the High-Button Boot. Add it to my wish list, folks!

Reclaiming Home.

"Home" is always a very loose term when you're a resident college student. Some people say, "hey, I'm heading home," and walk back to their sterile dorm room. Others use the same phrase and hop on a plane, train, or bus to visit family and friends in what is often the land of their youth.

As much as I love school life, it's still school life. I feel comfortable in my dorm room, but it's not home. Home is where my mom is making cupcakes and my dogs are fighting me for the couch they've claimed since I've been away at school. It's pumping the "Spring Blossom" hand sanitizer in my bathroom and smelling what home smells like. But perhaps the most important part of home, my very own bedroom to do with whatever I please, doesn't greet me with the same fondness as my hyperactive pups or my welcoming mother. Why?

We moved. In May of my senior year in high school, we moved a couple of towns over. Long enough to unpack boxes and situate furniture before my late August departure, but not quite long enough, when spliced up by a 12-day trip to Italy and frequent commuting to the Jersey Shore, to create the perfect sanctuary.

Especially when I never quite unpacked everything, and the boxes multiplied as my stuff continued to collect on the floor of my closet, and my dresser conveniently fell apart during my first month at school, causing my mother to package all of its contents in plastic bins before shipping it off elsewhere. And so here I sit, on the floor of my bedroom, surrounded by twenty three--nope, missed one: twenty four--plastic bins, filled with roughly a third of my life. Don't ask me where I got that proportion, I'd never be able to tell you.

And so I wonder, how does one reclaim home in six days or less? I'm home for an extended long weekend (oh, the joys of national holidays, Jewish holidays, and convenient college scheduling, all working together in perfect harmony.) That's my project for the week. Wish me luck.