My First Journal
Do you remember your first notebook? The first time you kept a journal or diary? Notebookism.com asked their readers to share the roots of their obsession of notebooks. This has inspired me to find my first notebook/journal and rediscover what I was interests I had when I was much younger.
I’d like to share a few pages relating to entomology and talk about them.
I bought this notebook from Barnes & Noble in the summer of 1995. I would have been 19 years old at the time.
I glued on a collapsible folder I’m pretty sure I designed and made myself to hold the newspaper clippings, postcards, letters, and other papers I thought might be interesting to hold on to.
In college, while working on an archaeological dig, I found an a nymph cicada three feet underground. I kept it and brought it to class to show my biology professor. I remember how excited he was to see it, considering the facts behind the life cycle of cicadas. He explained to me that they spend 13-17 years living underground only to come to the surface once. He said that even after coming up to the surface, they’re difficult to capture because they spend most of it at the top of trees.
It looks like I can track back my obsession with spiders to Saturday, September 14th, 1996. On this day, I read the September 1996 issue of National Geographic Magazine. Here’s what I wrote in my journal that day:
After I read these two articles, I gained a whole new insight into the world of spiders (creatures that has given me the willies in the past). I now know that black widows will not bite unless “excessively provoked – that is, when uncomfortably confined, or unmercifully squeezed, or when its web is violently disturbed.”
I remember one day during the Fall of 1993 I was returning from football practice to my house and walked through a spider web. I remember a heavy spider crawling on my head and falling to the grass. I frantically tried to remove the web from my hair as my heart raced at high speeds. I remember seeing the spider crawl away into the grass and I became even more shaky when I was that it was the size of a nickel.
Today, I was mowing the lawn and found a spider running on the grass feeling the monstrous vibrations of the lawn mower. Before, I would have run over it with the lawn mower – but today I stopped, picked it up, and let the spider crawl on my hand! It was about the size of a nickel as well. Thank you, National Geographic, for erasing my arachnophobia.
Found a dead painted tiger moth (Arachnis picta) in September of 1996. I taped in the actual wings into my journal.
To see more scanned pages, head on over to my other site, kolbykirk.com.
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