So the other day, I took a long, romantic stroll across campus in the icy Chicago rain (so far away from my squishy desk chair and central heating wafting luxuriously around me) to pick up my used-rental half-chewed 10-bucks-a-pop textbooks from the LPC bookstore when I realized, I don’t have a planner notebook because 2018 is over.
Sh*t.
Maybe in a galaxy somewhere far, far, away, where I am unceremoniously not included, there are collegiettes who would feel absolutely delighted to buy a brand new 30 dollar planner notebook and proceed to exuberantly pin adorable pinteresty boards and take a whole mess of Instagram photos with “hashtag new year new me hashtag smart hashtag summa cum laude here I come”, but not I.
Planners are silly little notebooks that cost quadruple the price of regular blank notebooks that have 200 more pages to write on. But they’re so damn helpful. And they really do have cute designs – aesthetic all the way. And where else am I going to write stuff down so I don’t lose my mind?
You see, last year I used a planner notebook for the first time. It was spectacular. It was hardcover yet surprisingly and oddly soft. It had pretty girly flowers on it in pretty pastel girlypop colors. I got it for zero dollars and zero cents because it was in a Her Campus Survival Kit, those magical Christmas-In-The-Middle-of-Semester phenomenons.
And so, with each step I took up and down the bookstore shelves, anxiety swelled in my throat. I had really liked my girlypop planner. I liked its good quality binding and bleed-proof pages and surprising indestructibility (y’all have no idea how many times I dropped/chucked/forgot/almost set on fire my old planner notebook).
Eventually I found a really nice soft petal pink spiral hardcover planner with my favorite Eleanor Roosevelt quote of all time – when I was super cool and fourteen, this quote was my Facebook cover photo. I still had to convince myself to let myself fork over the cash for it, though. It wasn’t the cheapest planner notebook on the shelf, nor was it even close to the most fantastically extravagant sticker price, but I still felt like I was splurging on something nonsensical.
In the end, I decided that it truly was a high-quality planner notebook, I’m a busy bossy babe with a lot to keep track of, and since I didn’t buy a fancy planner notebook freshman or sophomore year because I was too cheap, plus the junior year one was a present, technically I’m not doing too bad. With all the ink poisoning my hands have narrowly avoided all these years, one girly planner notebook that will make me happy can’t be all that bad.