Random Post: I Love Ink Pens!

06 Dec 2011 3 Comments

by Tammy in Everyday Life, Random Stuff Tags: pens, writing

Call me a nerd, but I LOVE ink pens.  For most of my adult life, I’ve worked in an office setting.  Whether it was a doctor’s office or business office, there were pens and post-its galore.  Over the years, I’ve developed a mini obsession with finding the perfect pen that showed off my wonderful penmanship (so my mom says, anyway).

*Random question: is it just me or do different pens change your handwriting?

Anyway, I was introduced to a “needle point” gel pen this past weekend and I knew I had to get some for myself.  I went to Office Max and it wasn’t hard to find what I was looking for.

I think the brand is “Tul” which I’ve never heard of before, but that’s all it says on the pen (other than “needle point”).

I love the point of the tip.  It looks super-fine, but because it’s a gel pen, the ink comes out nice and even and dark.  I’ve used fine-tipped rollerball pens where the tip was so small that the ink was barely visible and looked more like a pencil than a pen.  This one isn’t like that.  It writes like a dream.

Compared to medium rollerball

It was $5.99 for a pack of 4 and they didn’t sell them individually (that I could find).  But it was a nice little investment.

I know this post was random and if you’ve read this far, then thank you.  I just enjoy writing.  Finding and buying a great new pen motivates me to write.  Whether it’s simply my thoughts, meal plans, or basic To Do lists, I find joy in putting pen to paper.  Call me old fashioned.  Writing things down is faster than typing them in Notepad on my phone (cuz I’m not one of those teens who sends over 50,000 texts per month or anything).  Having things in black & white (or my preference of blue & white) also means no accidental deletions.  I’m notorious for “cleaning” out my phone and deleting things without always double checking if I’ll need them again.  I’ve learned the hard way that if you want to keep important notes, write them down.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve thrown away things by accident, too, but throwing away paper takes more effort than just hitting a button (uh, bloggers, have you ever “lost” a long post and then dreaded having to retype it all out again?  Yeah, it never has the same tone the second time around, especially if you’re like me and forgot almost everything you said not long after you typed it out the first time.).

There are pros and cons of typing vs writing, but having the perfect pen encourages me to write things out over typing them.  It encourages me to know how to spell correctly (no spell check feature installed in my pen, although that would be a pretty awesome pen if it was).  It encourages me to use proper grammar and also how to use proper punctuation.  It also forces me to remember the correct way to write z’s, b’s and s’s in cursive (or should that be s’?).  Writing is good for the brain, and it can be good for the soul if you choose to send someone you love a note or letter (wouldn’t you rather get a handwritten letter than a typed email sometimes?).  I know I love getting letters from my 99 year-old grandmother.  I love seeing the slant of her letters and how my handwriting resembles hers in some ways.  Those are things that I can keep forever.  No power outage, system crash or hacker can erase her pen strokes, and long after she’s gone I will have them to look back on and share with my kids some day.

So tell me, are you a pen geek like me?  Is there some other old fashioned choice you make that makes people wonder why you don’t move on (like cassette tapes, VHS, land line phone, snail mail or real paper books/magazines/newspapers)?