My dad used to have a pen set he'd received as a gift a long time ago. He kept this at his old desk of the basement of the house I grew up in. One was a ball point and the other was a fountain pen that had a lever on the side to draw up the ink. I used the pen all the time and still love the control I have with a fountain pen. Today I found a place in Crystal that sells new and vintage fountain pens. I bought this awesome vintage British made pen from the 1940s and have spent the whole rest of the day writing stupid things in notebooks and on strips of paper at work just to try it out.
It's so much fun to write with. I've been nerding out over it all evening - buying ink and paper for it, talking to it, naming it, speculating about its past, writing to it. If you give me your address, I'll send you a handwritten and useless fortune cookie sans cookie.
8 comments:
umm...we need to hang out. soon. and preferably around a big piece of turtle chocolate cake. i don't like capitalization.
Wow how cool! Here's my address:
1234 You Are Such A Nerd Way
Geeksville, MN 00666
Sunday sounds fun! I'll be there! Call me.
And yes, my job kicks ass. I am at work right now and I'm about to get off early after having made about $300 this morning alone. Love ya!
I enjoy hand-written notes. Send one to me and I might even reply!
I am very excited to see you used the acronym "RAF" in your fakey letter, Matteo. I had just been thinking, Oh, a fountain pen. That makes me think of cigarette holders and the RAF. Why, I don't know.
You are so cool. And you know what else is cool? Cigarette cases. I wish that I smoked enough to own a cigarette case. Wouldn't that be glamorous and cool? My friend Rob owned one and it made smoking such a ritual, something to do at the end of a long day, which I really appreciated. I hate careless smokers - people who light up a cigarette two minutes before they're about to step into Walgreens and so they end up throwing the half-smoked cigarette onto the ground. This really bothers me, for reasons I can't explain. Maybe it's the whole lack of a ritual? I like rituals. I like order and I like associations and I like to really dedicate thought to my vices. Now this is getting really long and dumb, so I'll wrap it up, but yeah. Modern technology is great, but there's a certain class associated with having a permanent object and always using it for specific tasks, like writing a letter or carting around your smokes.
And... done.
Well said, X. Here here.
I made a discovery my junior year of college: I still wrote like I was in 6th grade. The letters were round and bloated, gnarled and shaky under the weight of the deliberateness I assigned each stroke. When I first started doing my teaching clincials, and acutally had to give written feedback to students, I realized that a teacher loses a smackload of credibility when their handwriting is a juvenile scrawl. So I set out to actually change my penmanship. I held the pen at more of an angle, and skidded through words instead of pointedly drawing every letter.
The result? My handwriting is still shitty. My piano professor says it's because of my narrow hands and long fingers; he has the same problem. But my handwriting did develop more of a character, though-- lowercase g's with long hooks, crossed z's, capital letters with more oomph. Maybe I need my own fountain pen.
Matty boy,
Love the links section, although I'm not sure what my name means...
Love the links. Love the pen. Love the sepia tone.
Ummm...
Nice. When I convince my friends that they should start blogs and they reply with "I have nothing to write about!" I will reply, "My friend Matt wrote about a pen. Hmph."
And, to Chadley: Do you want to have a shitty handwriting contest? Because I will kick your ASS.
Oh yeah, Anskov. Sorry about being really shitty about not returning phone calls. But I promise that if you Hitchcock it up this Sunday that I will, for once, be in town and not driving aimlessly around Minnesota.
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