blogger profile

Sabrina Heise

Editorial Assistant

True confessions: * Not as politically aware as I should be. * I bite my nails. * I didn't love the Sex and the City movie. * I am actually, really addicted to sugar and should probably be in a 12-step program. * By addicted, I mean, I lash out at people and get grumpy when I haven't had my sug...

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Little Things

Yesterday, I wrote an entire blog entry about inspiration, but I must have clicked on something wrong, and, therefore, my entry was sucked into the eternal abyss that is technology.

I must admit that I feel uninspired to ever rewrite that entry.

In other news, I was thinking, today, about tiny things. Our darling managing editor, Kelly Love Johnson, or, as I like to call her (in my own mind), K. Lo, wrote a fantastic essay for skirt! about her love of Tiny Vegetables. 

I realized that I, Sabrina Nicole Heise (or S. Hei, as I like to call myself), have a love of something tiny.

I am a shameless lover of tiny notebooks/journals. I love them. I covet them. I find myself palming them in stationary stores, flipping through their practically microscopic pages. If it is the size of a deck of cards, or only a smidge larger, I MUST HAVE IT.

I have them scattered in every drawer of my desk and in each bag I carry. I lose them constantly, as well. They’re like my calling card. A half-filled notebook of puzzle-like notes, sketches, grocery lists.

I love the way your hand contorts to scribble on the tiny pages, your handwriting turning almost invisible as you try to write a complete thought on one page. They look less like letters and more like specks of dirt that cling to the pages in lumpy groups. No beginnings of a novel for these pages. No...more like, “As days turn into months, Amelia finds herself going back to the same diner, hoping that somehow, in the bottom of cup after cup of coffee, she’ll find the answer...” with the next page reading, “deodorant, Bagel Bites, ice cream, lite beer” because you’ve given up your idea. Your hand hurts, your pen blotches, and you can barely read your writing anyway, because it’s so freaking small.

Despite their shortcomings, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give up my tiny notebooks. If I do manage to complete one without losing it, I enjoy reading back over my mixtures of to-do lists, definitions for words I’ve learned, small sketches of amazingly human-looking trees, and endless scribbles that have added up to no great work.

I will just continue to keep them and store them, as a squirrel does with acorns, saving up for the day when I will overcome my cramped hand and write an entire novel on  700 tiny notebooks and leave them scattered at bus stops, on park benches, in pharmacies, forever and ever, amen.