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“But if you forget to reblog Madame Zeroni, you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity.”

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Dear world: this is how you make tasteful jokes about this kid who wound up in this dreadful position.

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I let a sloth take a selfie on my phone in the amazon.

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I knew she had a degree but didn’t know she was the most educated First Lady.

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Getting Started

After my last post I had quite a few people tell me that they’re ready to make their own journal. I cannot even begin to tell you how much I love this community, and bringing new people into it is such a great feeling. In this post I wanted to go over step by step, how I set my BuJo up, as well as share some of the wonderful resources I’ve used along the way.

1. Get a Notebook

This can be any notebook your heart desires. The brave may choose a blank-paged notebook which allows for ultimate customization. My personal favorite is either the grid or dot style notebook. Lines are also great and obviously, the most easy to find, however they can limit some of your layout choices.

2. Learn about the 4 Modules.

I would definitely recommend perusing the official Bullet Journal website to see what this thing is all about. Ryder Carroll is the guy who started it all. His version of the Bullet Journal is a no frills system that, in its purest form, works because of its customization and simplicity. It’s easy to get sucked into the internet rabbit hole of beautiful page layouts and pretty colored pens — and while all of those are great, they can be very intimidating. Not to mention, they can be extremely time consuming. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to keep track of your life and what you need to do for the day, spending four hours per page isn’t quite ideal. The journal in its most basic form has four modules to get your life organized: The Index, The Future Log, The Monthly Log, and The Daily Log.

The Index:

This is going to be the first page you come to when opening your journal. This page is instrumental in staying organized and of all the modules, it is the most important. This is just going to be a running list of your pages and what’s on them. Simple enough. It might not seem important when you only have six or seven pages, but once you hit page 100, you’ll be wishing your index was nice and organized from the beginning.

The Future Log

This page is for logging things that will happen in the distant future. The bullet journal website recommends a two-page spread with 6 months (3 on each page). This can be for things that happen beyond the month you’re currently on or things you just want to get done at some point in the 6 months/year.

The Monthly Log

This spread is for a more detailed view of the month you’re currently on. This is where your month’s goals, appointments, assignments, etc… will live. It’s where you can go for a quick glance of what needs to be added to your daily log and what you need to accomplish for the month.

The Daily Log

This is your every day, go-to page. This has your daily tasks and appointments. The traditional rapid logging method is a quick and easy way to plan your day. Eventually you may find that this section is the easiest to customize and every person has their own way of making it work for them. This is where I will stress the importance of keeping it simple at the beginning. Sit down and think about your day to day organization needs and go from there. Meanwhile, even though it’s tempting to lay out your daily logs a month in advance, I would advise going day-to-day.

3. Just get started

The hardest part of starting your Bullet Journal is just sitting down and getting started. It’s easy to get sucked into the thousands of posts about bullet journaling on the internet, and it is easy to become overwhelmed. If you’re determined to start off pretty, find a couple of layouts that interest you and try them out, but stick to the basics at the beginning. Below is the order of spreads I plan on starting my next journal out with, which may help you decide how to get yours started:

Index

DO THIS ONE FIRST ALL OF THE TIME

Key / Staedtlr Pen Color Reference

I like to keep mine simple. I would recommend starting with a few and then add more down the road if you find you need them. Some of my trackers also have their own keys on the specific page.

Morning Routine and Night Routine

This is one of my favorite spreads I currently have, but I often have problems referencing it because I currently have it buried in the middle of my BuJo.

My most used lists/trackers.

I’d like to have my “Books to Read,” “Books Read,” “Banner/Header Inspiration,” and “Migraine Tracker” a little closer to the front of my next one. Take a few minutes to decide what you want to focus on over the next couple months of your life and start your lists!

Future Log

Not sure what this will look like in my next one yet. This is where my useless Calendex currently sits.

Month Highlights

This is actually a spread I stole from Instagram user @my.life.in.a.bullet. Her journal is absolutely beautiful in its simplicity and I loved this spread. It felt like the perfect solution to my not wanting to keep up with dailies but still wanting a spot to jot down a few sentences about my day.

Weekly Log

And here begins the weeklies. You could opt for a monthly log here if you felt like you would use that more, but as I mentioned in my previous post, I prefer all of my weeklies for the month to be laid out in advance.

And with those you’re pretty much all set! If you get yours started, take some pictures and send them my way. I would love to see what you come up with!

As promised, here is a list of some of the many places I’ve pulled inspiration from:

The Bullet Journal Website

This one is pretty self explanatory. I linked this one in my last post, but if you try and get started without watching at least the intro video, I’ll be impressed.

BohoBerry

Kara has one of the best BuJo blogs I’ve come across, which is probably why it’s one of the first ones that pop up when you Google “Bullet Journal.”

Pinterest

I don’t post anything to my boards very often, but I can happily scroll through the Bullet Journal tags on Pinterest for hours.

This Google Search

This pulls together the best of everyone’s borders and headers and puts them into one nice, neat, little space. My inspiration page with headers and borders was supplied with a lot of things from here.

The Bullet Journal Junkies Facebook Group

I just found out about this one after someone recommended it in the Facebook comments on my last post. I honestly don’t even know what I did on the internet before this group was in my life, but I’m thoroughly enjoying looking at everyone’s notebooks. I did have to turn off general post notifications for it though.

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My Bullet Journal

In my last weekly update way back in March, I mentioned that I started Bullet Journaling. After having used it for the past few months and trying many, many page layouts, I’m finally ready to share what I’ve learned. I honestly believe that this system would work for every person and my goal is to get as many people into it as possible. If you have any interest in getting your life together at all, go find a notebook you abandoned (it’s okay we all have them) and just try it for a week. You won’t regret it.

So without further ado, here’s my BuJo.

The Index

Upon opening, the first page you come to is the Index. Mine is one of the less aesthetically pleasing ones I’ve seen, but it works. I also gave myself two pages just in case I ran out of room on the first page. Most people don’t keep track of the daily log pages, but I liked the ease of flipping to a certain date. To save room and keep the day pages separate from my other lists and pages, I have list-type things on the right and dates on the left.

The Key

Next comes the Key. Pretty much every BuJo I’ve seen has one of these, but mine is pretty much useless at this point. I started off this whole process a little over-enthusiastically. I wanted every color and line to have meaning. So that’s what my key says. However, in practice, I found this all a little too time consuming and I was spending way more time flipping back and forth to check what color things were supposed to be than I wanted. As far as the symbols go, I pretty much now just use bullets for tasks, X’s for when I complete the task, and little arrows to migrate the task to the next day or later in the week (you’ll see pretty much every “cleaning” task has an arrow until Friday or Sunday).

The Calendex

Following the Index you get to one of my favorite best intentions gone wrong, The Calendex. I originally found the Calendex on BohoBerry’s Future Planning post (her blog has lots of fantastic ideas and that’s where I pulled a lot of inspiration from in the beginning). Unfortunately, as you can see it is mostly blank and I never quite figured out how I wanted to use it properly. It required a lot more page flipping than my ideal system, so I’ll have to figure out a better year-long option in the future. Right now this two-page honker has pretty much just become a useful tool to quickly check which Fridays are “Summer Fridays” at work.  I did really want this one to work though, and it is a very pretty way to see the whole year. If you can get it to work in your own BuJo, let me know how you managed it.

The Monthly Log

This is my first “Monthly Log” also inspired by BohoBerry’s post from above. For the most part I really liked how this layout works, but as you can see it didn’t get much use. I only started my journal in the last week or so of March anyway, but even after that I rarely used it. It was useful for tracking my work schedule, but as you can see on 3/23 I had that interview listed in the morning…and within a couple of days my changing work schedule became obsolete. Huzzah!

When April rolled around I tried a slight variation which gave pretty much the same information but also included trackers. As you can see I did a great job with those. For a total of four days. I really like the tracker idea but now that I have a Fitbit, I pretty much have an app that tracks all of that for me, and while having it in my BuJo would be nice to look at, I don’t really need it and it’s just more time I have to spend every day moving things over. And again, I rarely referenced the monthly log enough to make it worth it.

The Weekly Log

I think weekly logs and monthly logs are one of those things that are very one or the other for a lot of people. When I first started I had decided to implement both to see what I liked more. To this day I’m constantly going back and forth about what the best method is. Originally I had the monthly, weekly, and daily log. While it gave me a lot more room to write things down, I found it was a little excessive. It got repetitive transferring from monthly to weekly to daily, so things started being left out of the weekly or the monthly…and soon enough neither was quite reliable.

While this page is just about as perfect as I could ever hope it would be, I am fully aware that the dates of this week are, in fact, not the “fifth to the eleventh.” I may have initially labeled an entire month’s worth of dates wrong. It’s chill.

The original weekly layout and the newer one have mostly the same information, except the newer one offers more space in the day columns, a quick daily note to sum up the day, a smaller “notes” section, and small date calendars for the current month and the next month. I also hate how the original one looked, but am in love with the newer one. At this point, the new weekly logs are the only section I’ve decided to definitively keep. It does take a while to set up, but I spent one morning at work doing the layouts for the month, which a) made it so I only had to dedicate my time to drawing lines once a month and b) allowed me to scrap the monthly log for June. This way I could plan ahead for future weeks and not sacrifice the space I was able to dedicate to each day.

The Daily Logs 

When I first started my BuJo, I wanted it to be more of a hybrid between a planner and a journal. Many BuJos showed multiple days on a page, but I decided to do one day per page so half could be dedicated to tasks and half could be a paragraph or so synopsis of my day. While I really liked all the space, there were several days that were basically empty wastes of a page, so eventually I moved to two days per page. Once I started at WME I had a lot less to talk about day-to-day, so I didn’t need all the “Daily Reflection” space. While I like the two days per page system, I still think that it’s a little too much room.

For June, I actually wound up scrapping the daily log entirely and opted to only use the weekly log. For anyone with a really hectic schedule, this probably wouldn’t work great, but I actually find it to work pretty well. However, I do miss having a spot to do a small recap of my day, so for July I think I’m going to have the weekly logs scheduled the month out and then try doing a daily log day by day. Previously, I had laid out the days for the whole week and there was a lot of wasted space. By doing day-to-day and picking up where the last one leaves off, I think I’ll save some pages and wind up with a better looking journal.

Lists!

One of my favorite parts of the BuJo is the ability to just throw in random lists as you come up with them, and instead of becoming lost in the middle of a random notebook or planner, it’s purposefully accounted for in the Index. I’ve always been awful at keeping track of the books I’ve read, what I want to read, and many more, but now I have a place to keep everything. The above are some of my prettier lists, but I also have them for wines I’ve tried, podcasts I want to listen to, shows to watch, celebs I’ve seen, and many, many more.

Hopefully by this point, I’ve convinced you to start your own BuJo. If I have, keep an eye out for my post on Friday where I’ll tell you how to get yours started, along with many of the resources I used to start mine.

Happy Hump Day, Everyone!

See you on Friday.

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Didn't realize that! They started getting circulated in my area of the U.S. so I assumed it was a reprint. (I also wrote this post a few years ago during a YA Lit class that was talking about how covers are created for specific marketing purposes, so the point behind it still runs true whether or not it's the UK cover or a reprint)

They gave the series what Tamora Pierce would call “Twilight Covers” in the reprint of the books. They aren't as bad as the Alanna Series covers, but they’re pretty close, and I’m upset about it.

I’m tired of the sexualization of female characters in books who spend the entire novel rebelling against this sexualization. It’s a way to completely go back on every message the text is trying to bring forward.

And don’t even get me started on the whitewashing of Fire.

She’s ambiguously colored so at first glance she could be white or maybe light-skinned. Also Bitterblue wouldn’t be white either, since she’s from Leinid heritage, which she very clearly is in the reprint cover. So..there’s that.

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Why not vote third party?

Listen I am all for political revolution and dismantling the two party system but I would rather attempt that on a year where using my vote for a third party might not result in the election of the antichrist.

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congressional fraud: the next generation

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I'm back. I promise (?)

I’m probably going to regret promising anything, but I’m really going to try to get my act together now. I’ve taken a break from writing (obviously) but I’m ready to get back into the swing of things.

I’m fully acclimated into work life after having been at WME for the past couple months. I’m enjoying it a lot and it’s definitely given me the opportunity to meet a ton of new people. I officially have no idea what I want to do with my life now, but I figure for now I’m just going to keep my options open and see where life takes me. The benefit of working at such a large company is it opens doors to almost every facet of the entertainment industry, but for now I’m definitely going to spend the next year + just figuring out where I want to go and get some agency experience.

Other than getting fully into work things, life’s been relatively quiet the past couple months. I’ve definitely kept busy and haven’t stopped exploring, but nothing particularly life changing has happened. Mom’s visited a couple times, and a couple weeks ago I had one of my best friends from college stay for the week. I’m so thankful that despite moving thousands of miles from home, I haven’t lost the relationships I’ve worried might become strained in the distance. If anything, they’ve become stronger as everyone has to try a little harder to stay together now that we’re not living in the same town.

I have some ideas for posts coming down the pipeline and am going to try my best to get them up and running. At reception I do have nearly 8 hours every day that can be dedicated to whatever I want them to be (while occasionally busy, I can guarantee reception is the least stressful job at WME).

So here’s to writing a little more and trying to get a little better at being productive with my time instead of spending hours wasting away on Reddit.

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Low key obsessed.

After months of moving it around, I {finally} found a layout for my room that I’m absolutely in love with. I barely ever leave it anymore because it’s so pretty 😅

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Or uh. Just wear sunscreen first.

This summer’s gonna be a SCORCHER. Grab an ice cube tray, some aloe vera and get to freezing with this tip from truTV’s HACK MY LIFE!

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deadass

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when you wanna show your muscles but you don’t want people calling you a show off so you gotta stop a helicopter to make it seem natural

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Chelsea Peretti: One Of The Greats