XLVI. rip little black book*

on my ultimate folly

Disaster has struck. Not to overstate it, a tragedy has befallen me.

In 2023 I started using a physical calendar. I had missed several meetings with a collaborator and she told me, in no uncertain terms, to find a new system. In an attempt to curb my phone dependency I had taken to leaving it in other rooms, letting it die, leaving the house without it, which meant I did not hear or see notifications. Or I would put appointments in several different online calendars and forget to check all of them. Because I have always remembered things better when I actually write them down, I thought a physical agenda might help.

I’m a very linear visual person. I find this to be one of my most boring traits. In class, I always admired people with creative note-taking strategies, people who drew or clustered different ideas in maps around the page. My notes have always looked the same, on lined or blank paper: very little white space on the page, straight lines of notes from left to right, top to bottom, an exact mimicry of the page of a book. It is not only that the act of handwriting helps me remember (I could never be typing notes), I can recall in a mental image where information is on a linear page. In my mind’s eye I could reconstruct my page of notes that to others looked like a homogenous block of text and then remember what I had written by ‘seeing’ where on the page I had written it. This is also how I remember what I’ve read in books. I don’t really have a very good memory for what I’ve read—I can usually only recall a fragment of a line or the general gist of a scene—but I will remember where it was and then I can go hunt. (The line I was obsessed with in Ethan Frome I found because I knew it was in the last paragraph of a right page towards the middle-bottom.) I cannot create a mental picture of shapes, I am horrible at constructing distance, but boy can I draw a line.

All this to say, my life greatly improved with a physical calendar. I stopped needing to remember (and of course forget) so many things. This year I furthered my dependence. I stuck with a monthly model—I find it extremely helpful to see how the weeks are shaping up next to each other—but I switched to the Moleskine Classic Planner which gave me more room and more pages for notes than my little recycled-paper Muji one did. This meant I could really fit my life into the little black book. I stopped devoting any brain power into remembering the contents of my days. When asked, what did you do this weekend, I often had to consult the book to jog my memory. It’s full horcrux vibes at this point.

The tragedy, of course: I LEFT IT ON THE PLANE. Damn the seatback pocket straight to hell. Here we are a week out from 2025 and I have lost an entire year of information—birthdates, notes from Marilyn Robinson’s NYPL book launch of Reading Genesis, a dated list of everywhere I have been this year, notes on the character I developed for my friend’s RPG, the reading list for an alumni class I took on evil—it is the full account of who I have spent my time with, what I was anxious about (so many tiny to-do lists), all the jobs I had and auditions I went on, all my canceled plans. A well-loved calendar, perhaps even more than a journal, is extremely telling. Earlier this year we found my mom’s old planner from my first year of life. Each day there was a little notation “M with ___” the name of whoever was watching me while she was at work. In the back there was a sticky note with all the numbers where you could reach my father, a little insight into these two young new parents trying to make it work from opposite ends of the country.

why did this man have six numbers? what was he up to?

I love an analogue life. I love ephemera—it’s one of the things I am so afraid to lose under the impending regime of our AI Overlords—scraps of paper, missives scratched on napkins, doodles in the margins, ideas written and crossed out. Sometimes I forget that it is all so fragile. Fire, water, time, and being very sleepy on a morning flight can render all of those beautifully captured moments moot. Now I am so sad. I’m hoping for a Delta-delivered Christmas miracle. As per usual, this whole thing was a handwritten draft first. The notebook I am currently on was started 7/31/23 and is almost full. I will be holding it extra close during my upcoming travels.

xx

Mia

*also I am aware that little black book does not mean a planner but my planner is a little black book…so this is how it must be