Big Notebooks and Big Textbooks

When I met with my professor yesterday, he mentioned that I should get a lab notebook. It made sense. Something to write things down in, so I would have all of my notes in one place. I'd already been scribbling some things in the margins of my planner. He said to use the account number we had (I apparently have funds!) and to go to the stockroom and "buy" a notebook or whatever else I needed.

So in the stockroom, there were some weird notebook choices. Most of them had graph paper on the inside, which I didn't know if I would like. I just wanted something normal. Several of them were hardcover, which I didn't really like either: felt too much like writing in a book.

But when I finally found the only normal notebooks they had, they were all wide-ruled! And if there's one thing I can't stand, it's wide-ruled paper. Call me crazy. But it makes you write bigger, which makes you write worse, and then you're writing less things in more space and it's ugly and it annoys me to no end.

Starting to feel overwhelmed, I grabbed one of the graph paper notebooks with a flexible cover, and a 30-cent folder for good measure (to store the papers I have to read). But now that I'm writing in this notebook, I realize how big and obnoxious it is. Especially since I don't need to put any diagrams in it or anything. It's SUPER fancy for what little I need to do in it. I guess I didn't realize it at the time because the hardcover notebooks were fancier and they distracted me.

This notebook makes me feel very pretentious. Like look at me I'm a scientist ho ho ho with my big notebook it even has graph paper do you write on graph paper I didn't think so that's for scientists like me

My professor also gave me two textbooks to read. One just says QUANTUM PHYSICS in big letters on the cover and looks very intimidating. The other is a solid state physics book which at least has a colorful cover. Most of work today will be getting through those and some scientific papers. I might even take notes in my notebook! That'll fill its pages and make it look like I actually need it to be large and heavy and expansive for my expansive scientist thoughts. I already copied over all of my margin-notes from my planner, which fill a whole page. I really did need a notebook of some sort.

I should add: I mapped the elevation change from where I live to where I work.

186 feet of elevation. That's approximately 18 stories. I climb 18 stories to get to work, in only four tenths of a mile! And almost half of that (84 feet) occurs in only a quarter of that distance! (That stupid slope. Most miserable part of my morning.) So now I feel justified in complaining.