I have been remiss in my blogging as of late, and so I apologize to the 3 of you who still read this thing.

In an effort to blog more regularly, I’m going to start a lot more personal writing. Not necessarily, “Here are my dirty secrets,” or, “I had sex in public today,” type of stuff. Just day-to-day diary entry type stuff.

Since many of the people who read this blog know me personally and read this as a way of keeping in touch with me, I don’t think that switching to a more personal approach will be a bad thing. It’ll get me to write more often and it’ll give you more info about what’s happening in my life.

I rarely remember my dreams. When I was a teenager, I actually thought that I didn’t dream, because for a period of several years I didn’t remember a single dream.

It turns out that everyone dreams all of the time. Even if you never remember a single dream, you still dream at night. That’s just the way that the human body works.

Last night, or early this morning, I had a dream that I remember very vividly. It was long and story-like. And it was horrible.

In the dream, my girlfriend was pregnant. (Insert joke about that being horrible here.)

Things were going along well, and I was able to gather that, in this dream world, the pregnancy was a good thing and that we were very excited to have our first child.

Then it got bad.

I don’t remember a lot of the details at this point. Mostly it was just visceral, horrible emotion.

There was a miscarriage. There was crying. There was sadness. And there was some of the most intense emotional pain I have suffered, especially considering that it was a dream and none of it really happened.

When I woke up, I was seriously messed up. I was in a daze of depression and devastation for a couple of hours this morning before I left for work.

Shortly after waking up, I looked up miscarriage dreams online to try and see if I could figure out the meaning. Perhaps not surprisingly, everything about this type of dream had to do with women having them. Why would a man dream about his girlfriend or wife having a miscarriage, after all?

So, I pretty much have no idea how to interpret this dream, other than that it was the worst dream I have ever dreamt and that I’m still pretty damn shaken up about it.

I have rarely felt an emotional pain this raw and visceral, and never as the result of a dream.

Dear Gap,

I like you. I do. I may be 10-20 years later to the  party than the rest of North America, but I’ve come to realize that you sell great casual clothes for a (usually) reasonable price. I’m not so much for the $50 shirts, but when you send me a 30% off coupon, like you did over the weekend, I’ll definitely buy some.

However, when the “4 days only!” during which said coupon is valid expire you immediately send out an email telling me that those same things I bought for 30% off are now 40% off, I’m apt to get a little annoyed.

Not cool Gap. Not cool.

Regards,

Adam Snider

When it comes to books, I am a bit of a fetishist. I really appreciate books as physical objects. This appreciation is quite separate from any appreciation of the ideas that may be contained within a book.

This appreciation carries over to notebooks, too.

For a while now, I have been scribbling down my poetry, blog ideas, business plans, and shopping lists in Moleskine notebooks. I appreciate the quality of construction that goes into a Moleskine, and there is something about the creaminess of the paper that makes writing in a Moleskine a very pleasant sensation.

The one thing that I don’t like about Moleskines is that they’re very expensive, as notebooks go. Depending on where you’re shopping, a large standard-sized Mokeskine can cost as much as $25 CAD. That’s very pricey, but I’ve been willing to pay the cost because I like the notebooks so much.

Recently, while shopping at Notables, I found an alternative to the Moleskine: Ecosystem Notebooks.

The Ecosystem is almost identical to the Moleskine, but comes with a number of advantages:

• it’s less expensive (by about 30-40%)
• it is environmentally-friendly (most materials are 100% recycled),
• you can register your notebook to help track it down if you lose it.

Registration also allows you to find out additional information about the carbon footprint of your book, where it was made, and even how many people were employed in the production of your Ecosystem notebook.

The one possible disadvantage is that the pages are perforated for easy removal. While this is occasionally a convenient feature, more often it just makes me worried that pages will be accidentally torn out.

Having said that, I haven’t had any problem with pages coming out of the book when I didn’t intended them to, so perhaps this will prove a non-issue.

As long as the perforated pages don’t cause problems, I think Ecosystem notebooks will become my new staple. Sorry Moleskine, but it looks like someone has created a better—and a greener—notebook than you.