December 07, 2005

Smed Professes His Love...


Ahoy, Clipchick readers. It�s Smed from Smed�s Corner.

Clipchick invited me here to waste some of my time and your time (I guess we�d be wasting OUR time then).

Right now, about � of my entries are dedicated to a project that I talked myself into, listing 150 of my favorite albums of all time � 10 at a time. I am also writing other entries, so I�m burning up a lot of bandwidth this month. So if you add me to your list or bookmark me, you will get your money�s worth, for sure!

While I await my beautiful and terrific office schwag from her, I wanted to let you in on a little Smed office supply secret.

I have a thing for pens.

Not THAT kind of thing for pens.

I really like a nice pen, though.

From as long as I can remember, I have preferred pens to pencils, even if my choices of pens were restricted to Bics back in my primordial ooze days. I could never successfully run a Bic to completion, as either it would spring a leak, or I would bite them and they�d go all cattywhompus and break.

Either way, I was hell on Bics.

Then Flair pens came out, and they were nice, but when they introduced the HardHead Flair (and gave them away at McDonald�s � do you remember �Breakfast at McDonalds is served with a FLAIR?� Of course not, I�m the only idiot who does.)

Then out came the Uniballs, and Pentels, with their smooth writing and for the most part smudge proof ink.

(I always smudged and smeared. My hands were always laden with ink stains. I was, literally, an ink stained wretch for most of my life.)

Sure, for math problems I went to pencil (I had to. I was a math major and some of the complex I was doing in Real Number Analysis and Abstract Algebra always resulted in several false starts for me. Now if I could only remember what the hell I was doing back in College. Of course, that was the Reagan administration, and I was lucky to be sober. That was a bleak time to be an idealistic progressive who eschewed many capitalistic tendencies. Ah, naivet�) (Did I tell you I tend to ramble on and use countless parenthetical thoughts? If not, I should have.).

But for everything else, I�m all about the pen and ink.

I use pen all the time now, even at work. I use pen to do crosswords. (I�m a bold, brave man � I even try to do the Friday NY Times puzzle in pen).

And I notice that my daughter Katie�s first choice for writing implements isn�t a crayon, it�s a pen!

I like the feel of a nice micro ball pen in my hand while I�m writing notes at a meeting, or sketching out ideas and plans for future information sharing ideas. I like the boldness of the stroke (heh, he said stroke) and the way ink looks on paper. It�s so authoritarian.

My wife, while not out and out professing love for pens, also enjoys writing with ink. She even has a secret stash of Uniballs somewhere in the house. (With an almost six-month old and an almost four-year old, finding ANYTHING around the house is a challenge, a chore, a non-starter).

So while I love music, sports, beer, steak, pizza, wine, and beer, I also do like a nice pen.

Now if you�ll excuse me, I gotta wash my hands. Somehow I have a blue streak along my right index finger. Hmmmm�must be a leaker.

clipchick at 4:29 p.m.

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All thoughts, ideas, and musings are � Clipchick. Please don't snipe my stuff!

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