Imagine having a friend you can always talk to without spending phone credit, or data bundles, or bus fare to go and meet them. All it takes is a kasuku notebook and a Speedo pen and you can rant all you want. It won’t stop you with impatient glances towards their watch. It won’t criticize you for whatever you are saying. And maybe one day, ten years down the line, it will transverse across space and time to whisper to you words applicable to your dilemma or predicament at the time.
You don’t always have to go to Ranting Mode. Sometimes you can go to Recording Mode, just tell your diary every boring detail of the day. Including what you ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Maybe you’re already a writer. Maybe you’ve written on an air sickness bag 15,000 ft above the ground or on a tissue paper inside a coffee shop; writing is an OCD you are not interested in treating because you know treating it would bring about more serious ailments of the mind and heart.

Think about it, your journal acts as a reflective diary, a recording tool, an insomnia cure, a travel companion, and sometimes, just a companion when no human is willing to give you the time of the day. It is an outlet for your rage without doing something you would regret, it is a home for your worry worms to rest in so you can sleep at night, it is a tool that captures all the inexplicable images and words that keep on bothering you, day in, day out.

Your journal doesn’t have to be boring. You can fill it with pic collages capturing moments you’ve had with friends. You can color it across the edges, and place a cup of coffee on the page so that the coffee ring stain reminds you of your love for coffee…and words. The pages don’t have to be pristine. You can staple interesting news, or all the napkins and sickness bags you’ve written on before. Your journal is an expression of who you are.

Maybe one day when you’re old and senile, your children will read it to you in the nursing home. And you wouldn’t recognize the words but you would feel some sort of comfort in them anyway. Maybe your children will feel that same comfort in them after your gone, carrying a piece of your mind wherever they go.

You don’t have to get an expensive Moleskine journal (I never really understood why they were expensive anyway) and you don’t have to get a Cross pen. As mentioned earlier, a Kasuku notebook and a Speedo pen would do just fine. Those notebooks are usually easier to ‘hide in plainsight’ because the more expensive your journal looks, the more chances a nosy person might try to peek in.
And sometimes you have to let them. Welcome them to your world because when they see you quietly sitting with your head over a notebook, they might think you are quiet, stupid and boring, but when they flip through the pages they realize how expressive you really are.

As you make your New Year’s resolutions, remember to make journaling at the top of your list. You never know what that would lead to.