I am Weird About Pens, and have been for a long time. My process for remembering information is to write it down by hand. In high school, I would take notes in class, then come home and painstakingly copy them over using a black Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen, wherein they would become a hot commodity. For all I know, my complete notes for AP Bio are still being circulated. I still remember, a few days before 10th grade began, getting a call from a senior who had heard I was taking AP European History and that I would almost certainly have comprehensive reading notes for the summer reading, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
They didn’t make up for his not reading the book. It actually turned out that I was the only one in the class who had read it, coming to light in a rather strange situation wherein the teacher came in and said, “as you learned in your reading, X,” and everyone nodded seriously while I paged through notes in a class of mostly seniors and then very tentatively said, ‘Excuse me, I must have misunderstood, but I thought the book was saying [opposite of X],” whereupon the teacher slammed down the book and said, “Well, at least ONE of you did the reading.”
I have what I think of as Gen X handwriting. I’m old enough that I was taught and expected to use cursive, but as my schooling continued it got pushed out of the way by computers. The result is a hand that’s a mishmash of cursive and print. It’s never been super neat, but it was generally legible.
In the late fall of 2020, I did a course of electroconvulsive therapy as a treatment for depression. They warned me about some side effects, like memory loss, but the thing that happened that I swear is a side effect is that my handwriting went to hell. Being a librarian, I did a literature search and didn’t find anything that mentioned that outcome, except for two citations from the 1960s that were in German and possibly contained the word pen somewhere. The timing matches, though, and it seems within the realm of possibility that maybe inducing a bunch of seizures could cause some loss of fine motor skills. This was a problem, though, because my entire productivity system is based on handwritten lists.
I went through pen after pen trying to find something that fit in my hand and would cooperate. Formerly, I had been a pretty devoted Pilot G2 fan, with the occasional foray into territory of the Uni Ball Vision Elite (President Obama’s favorite, a good pen, but I am prone to losing the caps). I went through a sampler pack of black pens from JetPens, the finest online emporium of pens, and it was still chicken scratch. In desperation, I picked up a set of PaperMate Ink Joy 0.7 gel pens at Walgreens, not expecting much, but it worked! My handwriting isn’t as good as it used to be, but with the right grip on this pen I can get a legible list - and it comes in a rainbow of colors which is very important for marking things done in my productivity system.
If anyone wants to talk pens, please sound off!
A quote
“For example, disconnected countries give the world a hurried, slapdash feel, like a magazine that’s poorly laid out. To solve this, eliminate that broken-off wedge of Russia near Poland. Likewise for the similar part of Oman. And while we’re at it, attach that Upper Peninsula to Wisconsin.
Applying this guideline, one might fear the loss of Alaska to our northern neighbor. But those who would worry about a new, resurgent Canada, fear not: Our primary goal, remember, is a beautiful world map. Canada, for reasons unclear, is always pink on world maps. Pink is a horrendous color, even for Canada. Alaska can never become part of Canada simply because it will increase that country’s territory and hence the overall pinkness of the globe. Better instead to grant Alaska full independence.”
Design Intervention, in Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp
A postcard from Pippin