Pens

[rebeccmeister]

I was going to begin this entry by remarking that writing implements are hardly a subject to get excited over, but then I remembered that, for example, parents often give children nice pens as graduation presents and that the sheer volume of pens and pencils that are for sale in stationery indicate otherwise. Rather, there is probably a large population that is secretly obsessive about the materials they use to put marks on paper.

Anyway, what I was going to write about was a trip I took last fall, to Boston. While I was there, I stopped by one of my favorite Boston Stationery stores, Bob Slate, Stationer. I'd been rather unhappy with the various pens I had been using in Arizona. As a left-handed person writing a right-handed language, I'm forced to be a bit more choosy than the average writer. Pens that leave marks on my hand and smudges on the paper are right out--and that rules out a sizeable quantity of pens. I'd had some luck with some rather expensive Uni-Ball pens that could even be refilled, but they would run out of ink quickly and had a tendency to unscrew themselves because, once again, they were threaded for right-handed users.

So I went back to Bob Slate, and was fortunate to discover a type of pen that I'd been extremely happy with while in Boston--they're called Pilot V-Ball Extra Fine pens. I couldn't find them anywhere in Arizona, and I'd been looking for over a year. So I bought about ten of them at the time.

The remarkable thing about these pens is that they take forever to run out of ink. I've been using two of them for the past five months now, and only one is on the verge of running out of ink. I should note that, since they're my favorite pens, they are pretty much the only pens I ever use.

In any case, yay pens. (:

Comments

[boolean263.livejournal.com]

Yay pens indeed. (: I'm not in a situation to be all that choosy, myself; it's hard enough for me to find a pen that writes nicely to begin with, so I usually either put up with a blue left pinky, or...

A few years ago I started to teach myself to write upside-down. It's slow as heck, but it keeps my hand from smearing my writing. It also forces me to slow down and think about the shapes of the letters I'm writing, rather than just scrawling as fast as I can in an always-futile attempt to keep up with the rate my mind spews out thoughts. I've never had good handwriting for just that reason, and even my upside-down handwriting isn't graceful by any stretch, but at least you can read it. Which is more than can be said for otherwise.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the aforementioned pens are great because the ink dries fast enough to avoid making marks! For a while, I tried writing backwards, like Leonardo Da Vinci, but then it's hard to read what you've written. I was quite impressed by your typing umop apisdn. Maybe I should try that for taking notes in the statistics class I'm taking... (:

[bluepapercup]

As always, I am more than happy to ship sundries from Boston. Pen bliss is a cause I can get behind :)