My coffee spill disaster in the middle of a weekly spread

I was setting up my bujo at a cafe in Seattle last week, and my whole latte tipped over right onto the open page. The ink from my favorite Pilot G2 pens started to run immediately. I grabbed a bunch of napkins to blot it, but the page was a soggy, smeared mess. I ended up cutting that ruined page out with a craft knife and gluing two fresh pages together to make a new spread. Has anyone else had to do major surgery on their journal after a spill?

3 comments

3 Comments

jessica_robinson231mo ago

Honestly, cutting out a page seems like a lot. It's just coffee, not a permanent record. My own journal has a few spills and smudges, and I just let them dry. They become part of the story of using the thing. A little mess shows you're actually living your life, not just making a perfect showpiece. Seems like a lot of stress over something meant to be useful.

benclark1mo ago

Exactly! I read a blog post once where someone said the same thing. They called those little messes "patina" and said they prove you're using the object for real. Like a coffee stain on a favorite cookbook, or a small tear on a well-read map. Trying to keep everything perfect just makes it feel like a museum piece, not something you own.

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the_alice1mo ago

But what if the spill makes the page totally unreadable? That's not patina, that's a lost to-do list. Sometimes surgery is the only fix.