hi! i'm ren! ghostingpen is mainly a tumblr blog for me to share pretty academia pictures and educational posts to refer to later. i also use it to share my journey as a writer and my writing process.
i also share pictures of my journal, as journaling and collecting practical yet pretty stationery are some of my top special interests.
@lawtism - death note / misc blog
@distortedenvy - persona blog
A few months ago I posted a couple photos of my index cards, saying I still didn’t know how and where I’d keep them, and I’ve since developed an Archiving System that combines the cards with a digital spreadsheet and has taken more hours than I will ever admit.
So, since I don’t have a “notebook system” to speak of, I'd like to share the way I archive my journals / sketchbooks / whatever you wanna call them, because I’m very proud of it, and who knows, someone might find it helpful :)
Drew these instructions for this one-page zine and I figured I'd post them on their own just in case anyone finds them useful :)
instructions clear !
I printed this at work and will treasure it with my life, thanks @don-pom 🥹
"Call me conspiratorial, but when I see the brightly-coloured Instagram posts encouraging me to cut off my friends and focus on myself, I can’t help but notice a convenient side effect of isolation: it forces us to rely on paid relationships in order to grow. The relationship between you and your therapist is transactional and safe, free of the messiness of attachment or stakes or love. And there are times, to be sure, when that can be a very useful relationship to have. But a serious issue arises when professional, unattached relationships are positioned as a replacement (or a requirement) for fulfilling, challenging, passionate ones. When people say that one ought to go to therapy to become a perfectly stable, functional, “healed” individual before they dare try to experience love or community, they are imagining a world in which a fundamental purpose of human connection has been replaced with a capital exchange. Welcome to the ideal relationship: one between two perfectly realized individuals who would be totally fine alone but choose to hang out because they like splitting rent and watching Law and Order. No passion, no growth, no difficult conversations — that’s your therapist’s job."
[Image ID: Text reading: The process of becoming yourself is not a corporate desk job, and it is not homework, and it is not an unticked box languishing on a to-do list. You do not have to treat your flaws like action items that must be systematically targeted and eliminated in order to receive a return on investment. You have no supervisor; you should not be punished when you fail. Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.
It's hard, certainly—it's painful and exhausting and fundamentally terrifying to rip yourself open and leave the guts at the mercy of the people you choose to love. But if I know anything, I know this: It's better than being alone. /End ID]
2024 in notebooks (#40 - #44)
2024 also marks my frist time starting a planner and sticking to it for the whole year! I still use my notebooks to plan tons of stuff, but my everyday life has become convoluted enough that I need a single place to write it all down. I got a Hobonichi Weeks, didn't use it in a particularly groundbreaking or super aesthetic way, and absolutely loved it.
A year of journals. Usually there wouldn’t be so many of them, but two big trips meant two big travel journals.
Week 47 in my Hobonichi Weeks. It was one of those weeks where many small things bothered me, so I just had to vent lol. It’s a pretty boring spread, so there’s a surprise Cherry at the end to make up for it🤭
"Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world."
Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always
This was from a speech at the Children's Literature Breakfast at BookExpo America, Chicago, 4 June 2004, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I found a transcript here
I just love how she started:
It seems very strange to me to fly 4,000 miles to speak for ten minutes at breakfast. To me, breakfast is when you don't speak. At most you grunt. Nothing more than that should be required. I wish I could just grunt at you in a friendly, polite way that meant "Thank you all for being wonderful people who bring children's books to children!" and then sit down among a chorus of moderately appreciative grunts. However.
And proceeded to address some cogent topics about children’s books and fantasy the first one being: the characters are white. And when you look at that first in the context of the “Battle Between Good and Evil”:
you can tell the good guys from the evil guys by their white hats, or their white teeth, but not by what they do. They all behave exactly alike, with mindless and incessant violence, until the Problem of Evil is solved in a final orgy of savagery and a win for the good team.
Isn’t it very interesting?
jan 6-12 weekly spread
jan. week 2 / hobonichi weeks
new year new journal, here first pages in a new style
coffee, fanfic, fursonas, and little surprises from my past self
My 10 year Hobonichi stack!! Cannot believe I’ve kept up with this journaling hobby everyday for 10 straight years. Thanks so much Hobonichi~
Happy New Year!
