10 March 1999: Pens

Yet more proof, if any were needed, that CLH and I think oh-so-alike. Last week in the video store I saw a tape case for a movie called "The Legend of Boggy Creek." I found its page at imbd, printed it, and wrote her a letter on the obverse. Today in the mail came a advertisement she found for cheeses from Boggy Meadow Farm. Now I'll have to send her that web page too.

I have decided not to beat myself up any more about misfiling. I do file, and therefore may occasionally misfile something. But everything's somewhere, damn it. Except NBM's Christmas card, which had a really cool sun front and moon back and which I planned to Use or something but which seems nefariously to have disappeard in the move. I am sure I put it somewhere very clever, but it's not with the rest of last year's Christmas card haul nor with my art supplies. Sigh.

In this spirit, let me share the rapture that is Shiny Blank Pages for my DayRunner. Slightly marred by my Today marker being split and not staying in the binder rings. But shouldn't rapture be marred, like perfect comfort? Would Ishmael and Queequeg have felt so warm if their noses hadn't been cold? Anyway, I found (at Walgreen's) a little tiny ring binder with little tiny 4x6 pages, just right for the DR, so now it's more of a note-taking diary than before. No more scrunching my scrawl into little DR lines. I did use to scrunch my scrawl so, partly to be neat and partly not to waste paper.

In a moment of our souls' fingertips touching, CGK and I realized we both like to use Only One Pen in our DayRunners so that everything Matches. We found this out when I called to tell her Margaret Atwood was coming to the Tattered Cover and excited as she was, she didn't want to write it in her DayRunner with a different pen. The idea of it! Considering it made her feel like the White King: "The horror of that moment, the King went on, "I shall never, never forget." "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it." After all she wouldn't want to miss Atwood. For her, it can't be just the same basic color of ink, 'cause you know Biro and Pilot make different shades of blue. It has to be the same style of pen, 'cause a ballpoint's stylus is different than a uniball's. For me, it should preferably be the exact same pen.

But then, I use the same barrels over and over and over and over and over and over, just getting refills. I have a Pilot barrel from whose embossed logo the silver has been worn. That, the eldest, is the Journal pen. Another with a fine point is the DayRunner pen. Another is the Desk Pen. And I will use these same three barrels until the main shaft breaks away from the tip, which will happen before I lose any of these said pens.

Now that I've confessed that, let me return to the DayRunner. I made up templates so I can print lists of unread books, unwatched movies, unheard music. I do line-out items from these lists rather than continually reprinting them. I get environmental if not sanity points, since the line-outs (cross-outs being too messy) are, of course, all in the same color. I have a new month-at-a-glance calendar and 365 spandy-new page-a-day pages (on 183 sheets). The A-Z index is full of new people and daily people while my home address book is the historical record of people sneaking in and out of my life while they move ninety times in ten years. That address book has been with me since PGN gave it to me as a going-away present when I left for school. The first address written in it is PGN's, in SMS's elongated pink script. I'll never give it up.

RDC and I agree we have poor-kid's attitude about using something, more like using something up. In December I was yammering at HAO about CLH's and my traditional stocking stuffers. We would get a roll of tape and a bottle of glue, and those would be our tape and glue for the year. Her jaw dropped. Not only did her sister and she get as much as they wished, they didn't have to wait for Christmas to receive it. When she made her Bill, Veto, and Law badges for Hallowe'en at my house, my little bottle of Elmer's was almost empty so I told her not to worry, that I had more somewhere. During this Christmas discussion, I clarified that I was not only assuring her we had enough glue to finish her project but reassuring her that she wasn't using anything up, which I always dreaded doing as a child (especially at someone else's house, as much as I dreaded their doing it to me).

The poor kid's approach to crayons, glue, cookies, etc. is not to use anything up. And therefore, better not to use anything at all. If you were frivolous, you might use something until there was only a little bit left, but then you'd stop and save that last little bit for emergencies. If you were frugal, you wouldn't use any of your construction paper because then there wouldn't be any more.

This isn't the attitude of an actually poor kid. An actually poor kid might not have crafts to begin with. I was never hungry, but money was extremely tight in my household. Both RDC and I grew up with comparatively less than most kids in our schools, and I was well into high school before I realized my relative wealth.

Anyway, so I struggle against the poor kid mentality. But I still don't like to waste stuff. I saw SARK at the Tattered Cover last spring and she said she had heard recently of a woman who died leaving a closetful of bath stuff. She used that example to encourage people to pamper themselves, to slather on lotion, to indulge in bubble baths. There's truth in that, but there's also the truth of excess consumption. So I write small in the DR and splurge scrawling in my journal.

SSP wrote a tiny, fast, yet wholly legible hand, even with a fountain pen. I always envied that. His was the only boyfriend's handwriting I ever envied. My own hand and PSA's become legible through familiarity, like Stephen Hawking's speech. One boyfriend wrote illiterately, not because he didn't know how to read and write but because since he neither wrote nor read by inclination, he wasn't fluent, as it were. His vocabulary was small and his writing a stilted print that had never flowed into cursive. After him, handwriting became another external gauge by which I evaluate people, along with handshake and gait.