School has started again, and since the faculty didn’t get a new calendar from the school (as in the last years), I decided, I need to have a calendar, so I can keep track of my appointments and projects. Now, everyone who lives in China knows that going to any stationary store (or even supermarket for that matter), you can get notebooks of all shapes and sizes, and in any fashion you could imagine. However, the ones I would call “cute” probably make up the vast majority of them.

Hence, last Monday, I went into the stationary store across the street, fully intent on wanting to get myself a new calendar/notebook. But alas! The choices! Flipping through the various calendar/journal type notebooks, I quickly came to realize however, that the calendar type notebooks are quite different from what I had expected, and whether they are that useful is a judgment everyone will have to make on their own. Certain things I did realize though:

1. Notebooks usually come with many pictures, doodles, graphics, etc. Some of them will take up entire pages, making them useless for taking notes.
2. Pages in notebooks often are assigned a specific purpose: diary/journal, projects, notes, calendar pages etc. This makes it difficult to fill a notebook evenly – while my note pages might be filled quickly, maybe I don’t have many projects going on, etc. In the end, you might have a notebook that is full in some areas, and empty in other parts – quite a waste in my eyes.
3. Calendars! I was fascinated to find notebooks that were filled with pages of various kinds of calendars: monthly, weekly, daily calendars. But most of the time those calendar pages don’t really make sense – for example, I found a really cute notebook with a pretty layout, but had to realize that it had two double pages with a monthly calendar, followed by two double pages of weekly calendars, a couple pages for projects, journaling, notes, and then again, the two monthly calendars. Now, I couldn’t quite figure out how exactly you would use two pages of weekly calendars to keep track of your schedule and appointments.
   Another notebook with a very pretty design had about five different sections, all of them weekly calendars, however. Either, you’ll have to keep that notebook for many years (due to the number of weekly it has, and it will fall apart before you get through half of it, I’m sure), or for every differing type of projects you’d use another section in the book (but then, how do you keep track of all the things you have to do in one day? It seems too confusing!).
4. Chinglish! The variations of Chinglish when you look at notebooks is amazing! I never stop being astonished at all the creativity of the layout designers, coming up with yet another (mostly incomprehensible) example of Chinglish!

Anyways, after feeling a little overwhelmed at all the different choices in notebooks, I narrowed it down to one notebook which I eventually purchased – only to find out later that the monthly calendar has openings for just 28 days. It, too, comes with lots of weekly calendar pages, but the amount of graphics is rather limited, so I can use a lot of these pages for my notes and little projects. Now, I am a proud owner of my very own chinglish-notebook-calendar!