*just a warning - after writing this post I went back and read it, only to realize it was the most boring and pointless thing I have ever written. you might as well just skip it
Yesterday was my birthday. I am now 28 years old. I don't feel any different or anything like that, and I didn't find it to be such a momentous occasion. Birthdays are fine, but in the end it is just another day. Maybe when I turn 30 it will seem more important. More likely it will just feel more sad. For my birthday my wonderful wife bought me a gift I Have been wanting for a very long time. She got me a moleskine notebook. I realize moleskine notebooks are a very hipster trendy thing to own. I don't own it so I can look cool and artistic while I write at Starbucks. I freaking hate Starbucks. No, I just really enjoy writing.
I have been keeping a journal since my freshman year of college. I wish I would have started writing one during high school. I would love to go back and read that now. I don't really know why I started one, but I have done a fairly decent job of keeping up with it on a regular basis for the last 9 years. I started out with pen and paper. For the first couple years I wrote only this way. Then I realized how much faster it is to type things out. I started a soft-copy version, and rarely wrote anything in the hard-copy version. To add to the fragmentation, I started this blog. This is hardly a journal at all, I am not even sure why the hell I feel the need to write on a website that everybody can read.
There is just something missing with a digital version of my thoughts. I mean, my helvetica font looks like anybody else's helvetica font. My sentence construction is there, but my character is not. There is just something so much more personal, so much more connected with something that is hand written. With the gift of the moleskine I have started the renaissance of my of pen and paper journal. I hope to continue to fill notebooks, and one day look back on them and feel more connected to the person that wrote them, than just words on a computer screen.
We also need to consider the fact that I love pens. I have had somewhat of an obsession with writing utensils for a long time. From a young age I have been very particular about what pencil I use in school. Back then I loved pencils; really bold fat lines. I would buy special 2B lead to put in my mechanical pencils. HB just wans't good enough for me. I've always taken great pride in my penmanship. I have been told hundreds of times that I have the handwriting of a girl. I never cared. The pain felt from the teasing was not severe enough to offset the pleasure I felt from looking at a neatly written page of text. I was never much of a pen user until I got to college. I was forced to start using pen, so I embarked on a search for the perfect pen. I tried tons of pens for taking notes. They couldn't be too bold, or too thin. They couldn't bleed through the paper as to make it difficult to read my notes from the other side. The pen had to come in multiple color options so I could organize my class notes properly.
My pen of choice for class notes was the Pilot Easytouch fine point pen. For everything else I used the Pilot G2 gel ink pen, .07mm width, which was the only width that was available. Then my junior year of college I found out that G2 made an ultra fine version that was .05mm wide. I couldn't find them anywhere in stores so I set up an account with an office supply store and ordered all the colors. This was my go-to pen for a long time. Recently I found that Pilot now has a G2 that has a 0.38mm wide tip. They only had black, but that is now what I use to write in my journal. I still use the .05 or .07mm versions for taking notes at work. I also bought a special limited edition metal barrel that will hold the G2 ink refills. It cost me $10, but that is pretty minuscule compared to what some people spend for a good pen.
Okay, I need to stop writing about pens. This just shows you the level of neuroses that I deal with on a daily basis. Something inside of me just really gets pleasure from the idea of putting pen to paper. It is almost like creating art. I have always loved to draw. Writing gives me a similar sort of pleasure. This doesn't mean that I will stop typing on this site, or even writing in my digital journal. I am in front of a computer all day, sometimes it just just more convenient and faster to type things. Still, a digital sentence will never have the complexity and personality of hand written one. The ultimate would be if I could somehow make a font type from my own handwriting. I really need to look into that. I would love it. Maybe my next post will be written in my own custom font face. What should it be called?
