This is a post about pens

[damselfish]

I was talking to a friend about Levenger yesterday, and she mentioned the fancy pens, and I was like "I know!" I want one of their fancy pens despite having little use for one because I can't use fountain pens and it seems wasteful to spend that kind of money on a rollerball, or god forbid, a ballpoint. She told me about the seven year pen yesterday, which makes a big to-do about how many pens are thrown away and all the waste, and how this pen will last you seven years. Mostly I liked them because they were cute.

Well I decided to google around, because I'm easily bored these days. And I came across this review that pointed out that after those seven years you still throw the pen away. Oh, but it's refillable!

Turns out, the refill is the exact same as one for a Parker Jotter.

I look down at the Parker on my desk. It was given to me because an attorney I worked with said he had tons of them and I needed a pen because I don't always walk around the office with paper and pen, because who seriously does that.

It's a good enough pen, but it's thick. A standard 1.0 mm ballpoint, same as all the free pens you get everywhere you go that are too big for good cursive because they tend to scratch at hard angles and you lose the nuances of all those loop-di-loops in the fat lines.

But the refillable thing got me thinking.

I'm left-handed and write with a hook, like President Obama does* which gives me several problems: I need fast drying ink, I need a pen with minimal drag, and since hooking is hard, I write tiny to minimize movement, which means I need a fine point.

Every fine point pen I have is a 0.5 mm rollerball like the Uniball Needle or my favorite, a Bic Triumph, which is hard as hell to find and both are non-refillable. In fact, googling has turned up a few that are refillable, from companies I've never heard of. 0.5 mm pens (needle tipped) are hard enough to find. Refillable ones? Pffft. I've long had dreams of fountain pens, but since I hold my pens funny (close to the nib) I can't use them-- needle pens seem to be fairly close in terms of the point, but it doesn't have the flow.

Then, as I'm thinking about all this, I realized something:

Aside from people demanding lawyers write on yellow legal pads (my lefty nemesis!) even though I can type faster than I can write so having me write is just an inconvenience to everyone but it makes the appropriate impression, when do I actually pick up a pen and write anything? All my writing is on the computer. All my correspondence is online. I handwrite thank you notes, when the situation arises, but that's about it. Maybe once every two weeks I take out my notebook from my bedside table and write a few sentences that make no sense in the morning.

If anything, a lot of the circles I run-in snub their nose at writing anything down because it's a terrible waste of paper and we should all go paperless (the other circles are all about writing long hand). Me, I'm just a fast typist and my hand hurts from writing too much, which should surprise no one. The fact that I haven't injured myself probably surprises everyone.

Knowing that, why do I still love pens so much, and spend so much time thinking about them?

*sidenote: I know why lefties hook, but I never learned how to write properly so that gives me something to try out! I had penmanship classes from 1st to 4th grade and never lost the hook, though I don't know if it's because the teacher didn't know how to teach lefties and just tried to mirror right-handed writing or because I could already write and leave me alone about how I hold my pen! A lot of my school time was embroiled in "I can already do that, and faster," but I'd like to believe that, ha! You were wrong, 4th grade penmanship teacher!

Comments

[conuly]

I used to hook my hand all the time too, but made a concerted effort to stop so I could show Ana how to write cursive. The trick seems to be to turn your paper so it exactly matches the angle of your writing arm, and to grip the pen a little higher up so that you can make sure your hand is always on the line under (under and vaguely leftward if you're lefty) the one on which you're writing. It's a knack, but once I worked it out it turned out that writing isn't very painful and my handwriting is neater.

[damselfish]

I've been trying-- actually found a website with lots of pictures of the different ways left-handed people hold their papers/pens, and there's a lot more variety than I ever realized (possibly because none of us were ever taught to do it right in the first place). I end up writing with the paper at 90 degrees so I'm writing up, it feels the most natural while holding the pen properly.

Though I probably shouldn't practice with cursive. Cursive also makes me feel like I'm writing in a secret language, in part because no one can read my tiny handwriting. Most parts are because few people can read cursive, or if they can, they can't read a cursive that's not standard font cursive even if the letters are formed properly. Granted I've had professors with cursive I can't read, so maybe cursive is everyone's personal secret language.