Snoozing and record-keeping

Me, every morning for the whole of last week:

I just look a lot less cute when doing it.

Granted, there’s times I end up hitting the snooze button because work has worn me out more than usual the previous day, such as digging through dump layers during the heatwave last year, or when my brain just won’t shut down for whatever reason and I don’t sleep until gone midnight, but my struggles to get out of bed last week were entirely my own fault.

I mentioned in my last post that I’d been up late on Monday night reading Ms. Mooney’s blog Thorn the Witch. This was also true of Tuesday through to Friday night, so I was going to bed anywhere up to an hour later than I should have, which on top of nine-hour days and having to drive to and from work makes me even less of a morning person than I usually am. Hence the continuing thumping of the snooze button. Late to the party I may be, but I find Thorn Mooney’s writing style very engaging, not to mention thought-provoking regarding the topics she covers. Add to that the fact she also has a blog on Patheos called Oathbound and I end up reading long after I should have shut my lappy down, got ready for bed, and been sleeping. I did the same thing when I added another Dresden Files book to my collection – thought I’d read a bit of it before dinner, didn’t stop reading, and finished it somewhere around 1am having had no food whatsoever. Thankfully this happened on a weekend, but I don’t know why I was so surprised – I’ve been doing this for decades after all. Maybe each time I think that this time round I’ll grow the sort of willpower that stops me reading new things all in one go?

Thankfully for what little remains of my sleep hygiene, by the time I went to bed last night I’d worked my way through the whole of Thorn the Witch and Oathbound so I might actually get that early night I’ve been promising myself for about a week (depending when I finish writing this). However, all of this reading has left me with at least two dozen open tabs on my browser containing a variety of posts from both of Thorn Mooney’s blogs. Some of these are entries I wish to leave a comment on and am marshalling my thoughts for (I don’t always do well with sponteneous commenting – I feel I either end up fangirling or make very little sense), but most of these tabs are because there’s a paragraph, a couple of sentences, or even just one sentence that has stuck with me, hit home, or given me a kick up the arse regarding my own practice. Sometimes it’s the whole post. I knew these were things I’d want to go back to, so when I found one such I just did ‘right click, open in new tab’ on the ‘next post’ button, and slowly the collection grew. Problem is, my browser window is already full of an embarassingly large number of tabs kept open for similar reasons, and even if I bookmarked the posts for future reference I’d still have to read through it all before I got to the particular bit I wanted, even if I could remember which post the particular nugget of wisdom was in.

Then I had a brainwave, or rather two. First was ‘well I could always copy the bits that resonated into a Word document’, in the same way I did when I was pulling quotes for my university essays, not just for Thorn Mooney’s work, but also fellow bloggers such as Melissa Zupan, Jason Mankey, Beth Dawe, Marietta Williams, Jolene Dawe, and various others who have written things that stick in my head and which will occasionally float across my brain like a news ticker when I’m doing something completely unrelated, like walking to the supermarket or trowelling back an area at work. The second brainwave was ‘and instead of putting it all in a computer document that I wouldn’t read as often I could use that really nice thick notebook I’ve had for years and haven’t found a use for yet’. Granted, this would be a static-yet-evolving text so I wouldn’t be able to search for specific things or keep things sorted into either themes or by who wrote what, but I am ok with that. I can always head the pages with their name and a couple of words on the subject matter or something, and I quite like the idea of having a sort of chronological pillow book of these things.

This does however mean I’d be starting another journal-type record, and I’m not great at keeping up with the rest of mine as it is. Both Thorn Mooney and Melissa Zupan have written about the importance of keeping records, indeed, Melissa’s done a whole series of posts on the subject, and I have to say that a lot of mine are bullet points in various places on my computer or on scraps of paper tucked into a folder under my altar, rather than in the journals where they’re supposed to be. Not out of being precious over writing in beautifully-bound blank books however – I am after all using these notebooks from Paperchase, along with the wire-bound version – but because I’ve mislaid the book when I need it, or I’m nowhere near the book and typing stuff in to my Habitica to-do list instead. In fact, the only one that gets updated properly is my tarot journal, and that’s only because I now do most of my readings these days sitting on my bed instead of at my desk in front of the computer.

But it now looks like that along with my tarot journal, dream journal (a coven-training requirement), ritual journal, book of mirrors (something else I only started along with my training (because I’m really not good at journaling)), and the record I’m keeping of my outer court training, I’ll have what I can only think of as my own personal Hávamál. Which, being in an actual physical book, will get read a lot more often than a list of bookmarked webpages or printed-out Word document.