duck-shaped pain

2000-07-11
Where I Don't Buy Any Folders

I now have some new pencils -- even though I never use pencils.

I made a trip to the local enormous office supply warehouse today to get some new bubble wrap to ship books in.[1] They had just put out this year's new selections in school supplies, so I took my time looking around.

Gel pens seem to be as popular as ever, but I refrained once again from buying any of the pastel ones you can use on black paper. I have difficult inner battles each time I see those, wars between the side of me that loves all new pens and the rest of me, which is ashamed of cuteness.[2]

It would suck to be me right now, if I was 10 years old and looking for some new folders. All the folders they had were either Pooh folders or NASCAR folders. That's not a choice.

I was impressed to see that they had a roller ball pen to match the fountain pen I bought a few weeks ago. I thought about buying it, but I remembered I don't like roller balls, and it would be weird to have matching pens. [3]

I was happy to see that good pencils were on sale. The best pencils of all, even, -- Dixon Ticonderogas. Not that they're demonstrably better than most pencils. They're just made of nice wood, have an attractive green stripe near the eraser, and have the best name a pencil can have.

Others love these pencils, too (yeah, this is where the above pencil pic came from). I always swipe them from work and offices whenever I run into them. One comic I read recently, Slow Jams by David Chou [4] was made even better by the fact that the main character was named Dixon Ticonderoga [5]. It's a good comic for other reasons (art), but that always sticks out in my mind.

The French word for paper clips is "trombones." You have to like that.

Anyway, I bought myself a new box of Dixon Ticonderogas -- No. 2 1/2s. Not too soft, not too hard, unreadable on Scantron tests. I don't plan to use them much, though. I'm left-handed, and I have the usual left-handed problem with pencils. My hand smears across previous pencil marks as I write, making both my hand and the paper a grey, smeary mess.

(When I was learning to write, my mother switched me to pens as soon as I could be relied upon not to eat them.)

Besides the pens, I also purchased a new road map to the Southwest. I like to carry maps around with me wherever I go, and I lost my trusty map of the region a while back. So I found a new, improved, published-in-Germany map. I figured it had to be complete, because it had Peagreen, Colorado on it. Nobody lives in Peagreen, really, but I always figure that if it's on a map, someone somewhere did some homework.

I should know better. While the map may include Peagreen [6], it omits such minor places as Mt. Elbert, the highest mountain in Colorado (14,431 ft.). It does include, however, the National Carving Museum, which seems to be somewhere near Colorado Springs. I guess that's what Germans want to see. Still, I like my map very much.

I went to go see Chicken Run yesterday, too, with Z. and his woman. It was great. One of the best parts not in the movie was that we were the ONLY people in the theater (9:30 p.m. showing), which was sort of surprising. So we could laugh as loud as we wanted and we could even...talk. I hate talking in theaters, but when you're the only people there....



[1] My horrible, terrible secret when it comes to sending out the books I've been selling isn't bubble wrap. It's that the best material I've found for the outer part of the package is those thin cardboard Priority Mail envelopes they have at the post office. Take them apart and reverse them so the cardboard is on the outside, and you've got a finely wrapped package. The other advantage is that they're FREE and I don't have to buy expensive bubble envelopes. I am so lame.

[2] Japanese cuteness excepted, of course. Then again, guess where pastel gel pens came from?

[3] I'm not ready to be that kind of adult yet.

[4] In Non, issues 3 and 4.

[5] "Yeah, like the fuk'n pencil, but I'm over it."

[6] I'd tell you where it is, but I can't find a mention of it anywhere on the net, let alone a map. Hint: It's near Olathe.

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