Collecting my thoughts

I like to write. Note, I did not say that I'm good at it, but it really helps to just sort your thoughts out sometimes on paper (or paper-like substance: the category under which this website falls). I have actually been journaling for awhile. Specifically, my main journal is a prayer journal. I've been doing that for years, and my bookshelves are filling up with used journals that are starting to tell the story of my life, one day at a time.

And apparently now I've created a pre-journal journal. I have this little book that I take with me almost everywhere. Initially (and there's a bit of history here going all the way back to my A&M library days as a student worker - more on that later) it was just something to keep with me to jot notes down. You know, to-do lists, grocery lists, places I want to go someday, a funny bumper sticker I saw...stuff like that. Well now, it seems that I have so many things going through my head that they can't wait for my prayer journal to show up, and they make their way into the tiny pages of the pre-journal. It's so bad now that I've perfected the art of fishing the journal and pen out of my purse, opening it to the next blank page, scribbling sentence fragments on a few pages, and placing it back in my purse - all while driving 60 down I-35. Creativity may well lead to danger, my friends.

But I get overwhelmed with the feeling that I must, in some way, hang on to the spontaneous, random phrases before they leave me completely. I'm not a song writer by any means, but sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with a few verses in my head of a song that has yet to be written - and I don't want to lose them, so I reach for the pre-journal. And it's almost rude, because sometimes I break it out in the middle of a conversation, cutting the other person off because it seems more important to me to document my thought process than to listen to a friend. My sincere apologies if I've ever pre-journaled you in conversation.

Needless to say, I had to stop this morning in the middle of drying my newly-cut hair to write a thought down about an onion. What's wrong with this picture?