Bujo Weekly Spreads to Maximize List Making

All I ever want to do in life is make lists. To do lists, pro and con lists, any choice to fill up a page with things that I can check off. This past week I had a lot of things I needed to do but not a lot of events. Full page spreads with lots of space for events always make me embarrassed about how infrequently I leave my house. I always want easy spreads that leave me to my own devices of list making. The page below is a result of that recent effort, and I really enjoyed the freedom to write as much as I needed without having to tie a task down to a specific day.

I expanded the list after writing it, but I'll spare you the grossly personal details of my week (Although I did see Rachel Bloom perform on Wednesday and that event did make my whole life worth it). I themed the color scheme around that neon sign photo. I have no idea where I got it from, but it might have been an advert or an art show review from Modern Luxury. I cut it out weeks ago and promptly forgot to use it. It let me add a pretty element to this spread. And let's be honest-- I do not need two full pages of list making. I can afford to use a quarter of that space for a little print detail. I'm not that busy.

(On a side note, I cut the photo too small, thus requiring me to color the background black. I went too hard on the markers, which ruined the page on the back of this. I needed to cover up the fucked up page. To see how I did that, read this post: "Salvaging a Ruined Page in Your Bullet Journal.")

Being as horrendous at math as I am, it took me way longer than I'd like to admit to divide that page into thirds. Each box is 9 dots wide and 12 dots tall, on average (there are 27 horizontal dots and 40 dots vertically, so one set of boxes is slightly taller). The stupid uneven dimension of the dotted pages makes it very hard for my dumbass brain to split it up into even chunks, and although I have made a template page, I still end up confused EVERY TIME.

Don't follow my example on this too closely. Be better at math than I am and just take the spirit of this idea with you. I use this journal from Lemome, and I am just so bad at math that it is possible I ruined these dimensions and I'm unwilling to to change it. This page is the opposite side to one of my pages for the table of contents. Since it is on the lefthand side, it makes it easy to hold it open for reference while I fill out another page. Too bad that it might be incorrect, but it's my journal and I don't care that much.

This journal is also impossible to split into an even number of horizontal dots, so one of my two long lists is chunkier than the other. I used one for my ever-growing to do list and the other to review all of the bras I just bought to see if I like any of them. The nice thing about this is that if I needed an extra list one week, I can use one of the rectangles that I filled with doodles as a list instead. There are plenty of journalers who love to make really in depth weekly spreads, but I just want to write. This spread only required me to do basic math that is beyond my skill level (I was an ENGLISH MAJOR, I haven't taken a math class since 2015) and to use a straight edge for clean lines. You don't need to be an artist to make weekly spreads that look pretty, you just need to swallow your pride and do some math.

Rachel Bloom's Live Performance is Giving Me Life

This is a review for Rachel Bloom show in Dallas for her "What Am I Going to Do with My Life Now?" show that no one asked for. I have a lot of thoughts and they have to go somewhere.

Rachel Bloom is the co-creator and the lead of Crazy Ex Girlfriend and she is a star. I had October 23 marked in my brain for months as the day she was coming to Dallas. I'm especially glad I got the tickets because she announced the night before that she was cutting the last leg of her tour due to the stress of her pregnancy. Dallas was going to be her penultimate stop. I paid a lot of money in fees to Ticket Master and got seats for myself and a friend in the balcony. The first two rows of the balcony were just full of women with single tickets who had asked to be moved up closer, and that atmosphere made the show so fun.

Danny Jolles, her long time friend and collaborator, opened up all of the spots on her tour. He worked with her back when she did pieces for College Humor (Like "Mary Poppins is Efficient") and he played the awkward and fidgety George on Crazy Ex Girlfriend. His comedy is hilarious and self-deprecating and a little absurd. He ruined Beauty and the Beast by proving how stupid the library gift is, because essentially the Beast doesn't put in any effort, he just allows her to use a room in his house. I definitely appreciated his scheme of making mattress commercials that advertise based on how great a mattress is for sex, too. He introduced Rachel after his set and she was just as good as I had hoped.

Before she had even told a single joke, she literally undressed on stage to put on a T-shirt someone from the crowd gifted her.

I stole this photo from Scott Michael Foster's Instagram, which you can reach by just clicking the link of this photo.

The "toad of shame" lanyard, as she explained, is a relic of CXG history. The prop master, Manuel Baca, who had also worked on True Blood, laminated a squashed toad and anyone who broke a prop, ruined a shot, or was disruptive in any way had to wear the "toad of shame" (She also talks about it in this Instagram post). She gleefully told this story while actually stripping, turning her back to the crowd to peel off her shirt and put on the new one, which she wore the whole show.

I had no idea what I was in for when I bought the tickets since the whole mystery of the tour was wondering what she was going to do with her life after CXG ended. It was essentially a "greatest hits and new directions" sort of show, mixing stand up with musical comedy. She moaned about her pregnancy, told anecdotes about her celebrity, and would literally shout "HIT IT" every time she wanted to burst into song.

Some of the songs were old standbys from the show, like "The Sexy Getting Ready Song," but others were new, like her song about the Virgin Mary's period, which was both hilarious and horrifying. She has a true talent for making the most seemingly random things funny and damn, that woman can really sing. Her powerful belting rang out to every corner of the Majestic Theater, and her physical comedy is so wild that it read clearly even to my seat in the top balcony. Her fine tuned facial expressions are so perfect for TV, but they added a subtlety to her performance that I definitely appreciated. In short, I am obsessed with Rachel Bloom and I wish I could have her make musical numbers for all the boring moments in my life.

Click to see this posted originally on Danny Jolles' Instagram!

She also brought along Scott Michael Foster, a Dallas native and Nathaniel on Crazy Ex Girlfriend. He wore a Dallas Cowboys' jersey and he is just as cute from the upper balcony as he is on TV. I was really impressed with his live performance of "Let's Have Intercourse," accompanied by plenty of hip swiveling.

He paired up with Danny to play the chorus of mathematicians in another old favorite, "The Math of Love Triangles." You can just tell that these people actually like each other outside of the show they put on, which just makes my rewatching much more enjoyable. Kathryn Burns, the two time Emmy Award winning choreographer from the show, joined the party to teach audience participants the choreography from "Friendtopia." (She's insanely talented and I'm pretty sure her jumpsuit was from Madewell). Her and the boys played the ensemble of cats from another CXG song, "F*ckton of Cats" (turned to "Butt Load of Cats" on live TV for obvious reasons).

(I would embed the shaky video I took but none of them are even slightly recognizable as actual human beings rather than just shiny blurs...)

The performance was the perfect walk down memory lane for those of us missing the show after the conclusion of its final season, but I especially appreciated Rachel's inclusion of new pieces. She talked about how she's going to be a "real pop star" now, which she used as a segue to singing a comedic song with an echoey, bass-heavy beat about how she was actually stuck in a cave that caused all of the echoes. She told us about how her pregnancy had caused her to think over cultural idiosyncrasies like circumcision in a truly horrifying song about "the foreskin angel" (as she is having a girl, this is no longer an issue she needs to ponder, but essentially the song is about how the result of circumcising a child will give them a guardian angel made out of foreskins who will protect their penis... and as unpleasant as the image is, I was literally screaming with laughter).

an angel

In a weird way, I'm so proud of Rachel and the evolution of her work, and I'm grateful for her continued emphasis on body positivity and mental health awareness. I started watching CXG during my first summer home from college when I was at the downturn of a truly intense depressive episode. My older sister recommended it to me, citing that "it's like a musical about depression and feminism, you'll love it!" By that point, the show had been running for almost a year, and I eagerly awaited new episodes while scouring Youtube for her other works. I spent the summer after that forcing everyone in my life to watch the video for "Fuck Me Ray Bradbury" and singing it in the shower.

Her work is a perfect mix of absurd and powerful, and Crazy Ex Girlfriend did a lot especially to talk a lot about issues that are so often hushed in the world of entertainment. It was one of my first times seeing a woman who was empowered emotionally, intellectually, sexually and who was also shown as vulnerable and broken without reducing her to her illness. Musical numbers like "Sexy French Depression" (another song she sang live) parodied the common portrayal of mental illness and showed a sliver of that actual experience. It was the first time I've even heard Borderline Personality Disorder even mentioned in pop culture, and they actually showed Rebecca's progression as a character who was learning to deal with a scary illness.

I'm going to miss the show a lot and continue to do private performances of the soundtrack every time I go on a long road trip. I'm going to try not to burst into tears when I think about how Rachel sang "You Stupid Bitch" and "A Diagnosis" (above) with such honesty and how she told the audience how important it was for her to hear from viewers that she was not alone in this experience. And I'm going to set up post notifications for Rachel's Instagram so that I can be in the loop about her upcoming ventures, because I know she's not stopping here. She is a woman with so many talents, a soon to be mom, and a real, truthful, vulnerable, and down-to-earth person. Even though I didn't get to live my dream of Rachel inviting me on stage to sing a power ballad with her, I enjoyed every minute.

Salvaging a Ruined Page in Your Bullet Journal

If you are anything like me, which I'm guessing you are, because why else would you be here, you have an overzealous love of markers. Doesn't everyone? As a perpetual first grader I love to color, and I have no concept of "coloring lightly" or "shading." I chose my journal because it has the thickest pages for the best price, meaning bleed through is less likely (I use this one from Lemome and it's my favorite). Unfortunately, I'm just so enthusiastic with my marker use that sometimes even the thickest of pages cannot protect me.

I went overboard in my journal with markers coloring a border and ended up ruining the reverse page I had already completely finished. This time I lucked out because it was a to do list that I had already checked off, so it was not a big problem if I covered it up. I loved the spread opposite of the list, so I wanted to keep that vibe without having to see the bleed through and be ashamed every time I flipped past that page.

I make a lot of mistakes in my journal and I've already talked about how I use collages to cover up spreads that I didn't finish. I learned another handy trick from Amanda Rach Lee's video "How to Fix Your Bullet Journal Mistakes! (7 WAYS)" that you can glue the pages together to completely hide a messed up page. Sometimes you don't want to be reminded of your mistakes.

A straight up collage didn't seem to match the energy of my anatomy sketch on the other side, and I didn't want to hide the opposite face. I combined my love of markers and my love of collages to make an upgraded quote page instead.

As you can probably tell, I love obsessive, even lines, so even though you can see all of the strokes on the black page, I'm chill with it. I cut a piece of computer paper to size and colored it completely black. Since the background to the sketch was Halsey quotes, I went with another quote from her song "Hurricane" that had been running through my head on repeat.

This page really tested my obsessive nature and my short attention span which are so often at odds. I only wanted straight lines rather than scribbles for that clean look, so I took my big, fat dry erase marker (that I had actually ruined the page with in the first place) to have those dummy thicc lines. I wrote out the quote on the other half of that blank sheet of paper and then cut out every line. Cutting out every letter for "hurricane" definitely pushed me to the limits as I wanted each block to be nearly the same size, but it created a very cool, dreamy sort of feel.

Though my handwriting in the quote is still absolute shit, the spread came out feeling like an inverse of the other page, which I absolutely love. And now I don't have to stare at my panicky list that I made while trying to logic myself out of a downward spiral.