These past two weeks, Instagram has been on my mind—not because I’ve been posting, but because I haven’t. I said I’d stay active, but I haven’t followed through. Maybe Instagram just isn’t my thing. I end up scrolling and then feeling unproductive. I can’t just post without commenting (or at least that’s how it feels), which means thinking about what to say, which takes time. And when posts have hundreds of comments, the chance of mine being seen is minimal. It makes me wonder if all that time spent scrolling, finding, thinking, writing is even worth it. I think I’ll stick to blogging and maybe posting on Instagram here and there. I like blogging, it’s fun, creative, and thoughtful.
I’ll start this post where I left off on Instagram, the nopal zine (which I’ll keep about on IG until I finish). I’ve been working hard on this, honestly, maybe overthinking it, perfecting, and getting too caught up in my vision of the final product.
But you know what? Rather than seeing it as a completed zine, or booklet, I’ll look at them as single pages. That’s it. Simple, fun, quick. Done is better than perfect—that’s what I said I’d focus on, and I forgot.
(Side note: I need to write a post on being a creative and having to work hard on organization and strategies after realizing you haven’t done that throughout your life.)
Back to the post: what will this be for? To print and add to my creative journal or commonplace book, a concept I recently learned about on YouTube. Simply put, it’s a journal where you keep information on things that interest you.
Commonplacing goes way back with people keeping notebooks filled with quotes, ideas, and lessons they didn’t want to forget. These weren’t diaries. They were more like places to store things that moved them, challenged them, or made them think. Think of it as curated remembering.
Even though it was usually writers and scholars who kept commonplace books, everyday readers used them too. Students copied passages from books by hand, adding notes and reflections. It was part memory aid, part tool for shaping how they thought and wrote.
In colonial Mexico, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz kept notebooks filled with excerpts from philosophy, science, and poetry from both European and Indigenous sources. Not all her notebooks survived, but the ones that did show how she thought: always questioning, always gathering. For her, it wasn’t just about remembering. It was about making sense of the world on her own terms.
This is what I want to use my nopal printables for: to answer, or attempt to answer, my many questions, to gather information, and to share what I find. Of course, they can be used in an art journal too, as decoration, or to keep as part of your personal history.
This is where I’m at so far:
All I need to do is finalize and digitize. I imagine them printed on vellum! Delicious!
Also, my cochineal is still drying. They’re starting to feel dry, less gel-like (or gelly). I accidentally squished one, and the red that came from it—wow! Excited for that!
¡Hasta la próxima!
