The Notebook (2E)

I mourn for these notes, needlessly defiled.

Twentieth Century American Literature is not an interesting enough class to pay attention to for two hours.  To stop myself from falling asleep my friend and I resort to good old fashioned note-passing.  She writes something in her margin, points, and laughs, and I laugh too, but I don’t write a response in my own margins.  Because I can’t.  Sometimes they might lean over to my page, and I tear my notebook away from the tip of their pen and snap at them.  The margins need to be left completely blank, or else the whole note is ruined.

It’s times like these where I think I have OCD.

The first notes of the year make me nervous.

It’s the first day of class.  You’re excited to start the new semester off on a good note (pun intended?).  You sit down in class.  You’re nervous, but what about?  Worried that you might not like the course, the professor, or the selected readings or marks breakdown?  Do you shift around uncomfortably because you don’t know anybody else in this class, and you’re too shy to strike up conversation with somebody new?  Or all of the above?  That’s the case for me, but these things barely matter: my biggest concern is with how I’m going to write my first class notes.

You might think that this isinsignificant, but it’s a big deal for me.  However I decide to write my notes in this first class is the benchmark for my note taking for the rest of the semester.  I can’t mess it up.  The thought of having a notebook full of mismatched notes is preposterous.  Everything needs to be neat, identical, and uniform.  It’s a weird habit, but it’s in line with my usual organizational compulsions.  If you were to come into my bedroom, it would be like stepping into an alphabetized and categorized heaven.

I treasure perfection.  The decisions I make on that first day ensure that the rest of the year will follow suit with cleanliness and crisp looking notes.  I’m often complimented on my penmanship and I’ve had many people tell me my notes look like they’ve been typed, and that nearly brings a tear to my eye.  Success!

What, then, is my formula?

The Notes:

• The title.  Should I write it all in capitals?  Should it be centered, or justified to the left?  What do I write as the title – the lecture number, or the title of the reading for the day, or both?  Do I write it on the very top line of the page, or on the second?

• The date.  Numbers and slashes, or words?  If words, do I write the day of the week, too, and if I do, do I write it in full or in short form?  And the month – long or short version?  Top left of the page, or top right?  If the title’s on the top line, the date has to share its space; if the title’s on the second line, the date gets the top line to itself.

• The bullets.  I always use point form, mostly; bullets, dashes, or dots?

• The keywords.  In red, obviously, to stand out, but in capital letters?  When I come to a second line for any given keyword definition, do I start writing at the margin or do I line up the start of the sentence with the end of the keyword above?

• The red pen.  When and where?

The Red Pen:

Oh, my red pen.

Ever since the seventh grade when my teacher made everyone use a red pen to underline the title and the date, I haven’t been able to part with red pens.  I’ve since abandoned that practice – I find underlining things to be messy because I can never muster a perfectly straight line.  Sometimes I write the title in red, or the date, and most times I write the course code in the top left corner in capital letters.

As good as the red pen is, it’s not a big enough superstar to scribe a note itself.  Always black.  Never blue.

The Margins:

NEVER TOUCH THE MARGINS.

The Finished Product:

Drumroll…

Perfection!

To my friends, my note taking habits are a bit of a mockery.  What usually follows my snapping at them is a quick strike and before I know it they’re smirking at the small black dashes they manage to get on my pages.  Little do they know, it isn’t really a victory.  I get to go home and recopy the notes and make them look even better.

So, ha.

• Note taking
• OCD
• stressful