Prosaic Paradise

This weekend I set about getting ink all over some “Eco” paper of two different stripes. I have heard, over and over again, tales of the Staples Eco-Friendly paper. I learned about how they make the paper from the remnants from sugar cane production (“80% sugar cane waste”), the pros and cons of that. Around the same time, I was gifted with some swag from my office in the form of a Leeds Eco Recycled Owl Journal. I don’t have all the details on that, but Leeds describes the paper as being made from “100% post consumer waste recycled sheets”. I am not the best conscious consumer, but this seemed like a good opportunity to point out that there are greener options – and they are good and affordable. For the most part I think the pictures speak for themselves and I got out the P&S (since I don’t have a macro lens for the DSLR yet) and took some macros so you could see really fine detail of the ink behaviour this time.

There is an immediate upside and a downside to the Leeds paper when you look at it: 1) it has a cute owl watermark on every page, front and back but 2) it’s really thin and where it’s bound at the top, you can see buckling. I felt like that might be a fault of the binding, but it’s a real & practical issue and will be a turn-off for lots of paper users. In terms of accessibility, I happened to luck into this product at my workplace, so getting your hands on some might be hard.

There was slightly more feathering on this paper than the bagasse, but so much less than I expected. I expected fountain pen ink to tear right through it, and there was no problem at all. I did notice that on a second pass with the ink, the paper started to get “nubby”; I note this for fountain pen users  because with wide or scratchy nibs with watery inks I think you might notice some disintegration.

The bagasse paper performed much as the glowing reviews predicted. It took the fountain pen inks well, whether in the Fine Sailor nib or the Medium A.G. Spalding nib. It was fine to write on, maybe not the buttery smooth sensation that Rhodia offers, but we’re not talking about the same league here. The paper isn’t so thin as to torpedo your confidence (acceptability of thinness seems highly subjective, though), and I will note that it ripped off cleanly at the perforations without any fussing. At less than a buck a pad (at least on the website), unless we find out they are creating this in an elaborate ritual involving virgin sacrifice and that’s why it’s so affordable, I can confirm all the reports: thumbs up on the bagasse. It also comes in spiral, journal and loose leaf formats – though I have read that the way the notebooks are packaged you get some rippling in the paper.

The clear punisher in these tests (apart from the obvious challenges that Sharpies pose to any paper in terms of bleedthrough) was the Pilot G-2 1.0mm. That ink is all over the place. It feathered on both of the papers and never dried and etc. etc. So for worst case scenarios, it’s great. Finally, here’s your gauge of whether you could get both-side use out of these papers.

Bonus: you get to see my kicky casual weekend footwear because I forgot to crop. Yes, on Sundays at home I wear green socks with my green birks. (Who am I kidding? I’ve worn that to work.)

Tags: paper, Pens, Stationery

Please note that chewy Spree is an abomination.

Anyways.

I don’t have much to show you today, no fancy pictures of my junk. Yesterday I found a large, sturdy shopping bag sitting in the bedroom from Christmas shopping or something. Rather than just throwing it away, I ran around the house grabbing obvious things I want to get rid of until I filled the bag up. The bag which is on its way to goodwill is currently holding:

• 4 stuffed animals
• 4 pairs of jeans
• 6 more candles/candle holders
• 2 bras

Next time I’m out and considering tossing impulse buys into my shopping bag, I need to think about how annoying it will be when I’m going on a purging spree through my house tossing things in a bag because I know I don’t need them and can’t use them. Of course, you never think those things you’re buying today are going to end up this way, do you?

I once came up with this rule, based on my fetishy relationship to tiny houses and my fantasy life where I live in one, wherein if I were trying to get rid of something I would say, “would I want this in my tiny house?” and hope to make a snap decision based on that. As time has passed, I’ve stopped applying this directly because I should make use of the house I do live in, which is far from tiny. But it’s still there in the back of my head, and was certainly present yesterday on my purging spree.

Tags: Purge Thursday

Question 25 bested me with semantics:

“List all the possible [emphasis mine] subshells of the 5th shell of an atom” with the options I couldn’t decide between being:

a) 5s 5p 5d 5f
b) 5s 5p 5d 5f 5g

So, does possible mean “hypothetical” in this context, or “actually possible”? And Jack pointed out that there were excitable electrons out that far that can jump to higher subshells, but I really, really, really don’t think the prof intended our class to know that.

Vote?

Also I need to figure out where I can pick up dinner fast when I get out of class at 10pm and know that there’s only like 2 Triscuits, soy sauce, birthday cake, moldy bread ends and beer in the house. Not that those things don’t make a completely acceptable dinner. Minus the moldy bread ends.

Tags: class, School

It’s not often that I’m near a radio and simultaneously actually using it. It just so happened that I caught what was probably the best hour of radio listening all week on Saturday when Jack and I tuned into This American Life on the way out to Leesburg. The episode was about making the banking crisis understandable to the layman, and you and I both know that sometimes folks miss the mark of “layman” when they create something like this, or they make it horribly boring even though you understand it. In this case, it is no lie, the whole discussion is highly listenable.

So I strongly suggest giving this a listen if you have time. You may not be able to make direct use of the information but I am willing to bet you will be glad you listened! (Unless you are already an expert in these things, I guess.) Of course, SNL may have already said it best:

Tags: Money

For Genie’s latest challenge she asked her readers/fellow bloggers to write up a post about what we love about our bodies. “Oh, what a lark!” I thought. “I won’t be doing that!” I thought. But loyalty got the better of me, so here goes.

I’m not one for spending a bunch of time listing my assets – not physically anyways. I muddle along blending in and looking average. If I want to draw attention to myself, I have to do it with personality, personal style and ornament – like wearing giant black nerd glasses or capri pants with teal leg warmers.

That’s not to say I don’t care about what people think of my appearance. Who gets through living in our culture not caring? Even the folks about whom we might think “whoah, they clearly just don’t give a shit” probably notice us judging and it probably hurts them.

Which brings me to the exercise that finally let me see what it’s like not to care. To only care about what I feel. That exercise being the slow, steady creation of the work of art that is my tattoo sleeve. I, who am so hung up on what people think of me, manage finally to let go in some small way. As soon as I began paying an artist to change my body permanently I was able to see what it was like to “own it” with no apologies.

To give you an idea, I took this picture after rolling out of bed, shaking my hair out, and… nothing else. And I actually like it. I have been following the amazing self-portraits of Qathi Hart lately. And I find them totally awesome and compelling. I am not the photographer she is, but her work inspired me to be able to do this challenge after rolling out of bed.

So there you have it. I love my arm, and my arm helps me love the rest of me. And while I am sitting here feeling extremely uncomfortable about writing any of this because I conditioned myself never to lay claim to beauty, I want to also say that I love my hair. Especially on weekends when I can let it go native and curl and frizz out and just do its thing. Sometimes I can’t get homework done because I keep looking at it. There. I said it.

Tags: Tattoo

On the way home from Leesburg today after getting a tattoo in a building that predates our house by a good 75 years at least (our house is a Victorian era building), my now-psychic iPod decided to give us a civil war song. While my hometown is in Virginia and I’ve lived my entire life south of the Mason-Dixon line, my ancestry was either Yankee or European that far back. Nevertheless this confederate ditty caught my attention and I made Jack listen to it about 6 times so we could piece out the words and try to figure out the history.

As it turns out, there’s a wikipedia entry on the song, and plenty to learn about why Fremont is referred to as the Wooly-Horse. The version I have and like excised the last two more offensive verses. It was done in the 60s by The New Lost City Ramblers, the music of whom is making me want to go watch A Mighty Wind again.

This is my favorite verse:

Then said Lincoln unto Pope, / “You can make the trip, I hope / I will save the Universal Yankee nation, / To make sure of no defeat, I’ll leave no lines of retreat, And issue a famous proclamation.” / But that same dreaded Jackson, this fellow laid his whacks / And made him, by compulsion, a seceder, / And Pope took rapid flight from Manassas’ second fight, / Twas his very last appearance as a leader.

That last bit seems to be non-historical, but funny all the same. Jack said that the excerpt I read to him from Pope’s letter to his army sounded to him like a terrible CEO speech at an all-hands meeting just before you know half the company is going to get laid off.

I am sure you long for an opportunity to win the distinction you are capable of achieving. That opportunity I shall endeavor to give you. Meantime I desire you to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of “taking strong positions and holding them,” of “lines of retreat,” and of “bases of supplies.” Let us discard such ideas. The strongest position a soldier should desire to occupy is one from which he can most easily advance against the enemy.

No wonder they all thought he was a jackass? At any rate, you can check out the entire Smithsonian Folkways collection including Songs of the Civil War on emusic or elsewhere if you like. Or you can just listen for free on youtube. I myself am going to ponder how giant topics like History and Science failed to be interesting to me when I was in school and had all the time in the world to pursue them, but now that I have a job and a house to clean and all that adult rot, I could sit around and research all day and be a happy camper.

Besides; If you’ve been on 95 South between Alexandria and Richmond lately, you will agree that Richmond is a hard road to travel.

Yes, apparently my previous time spent with Doane and Rhodia pads was not enough to make me happy! A friend at work swapped me a Levenger pad for a Doane pocket notebook to test. So during a meeting with the tools at hand I jotted down some tests to see if I liked it.

One thing I noticed is that with the fountain pens & inks, there was virtually no feathering. I didn’t write out a dry time test, but the Baystate Blue dries up pretty fast (5 seconds maybe?) and the Noodler’s Red-Black a little longer, but then that stuff takes forever to dry on every surface I’ve used it on. You can see detail here and here.

This paper, while serviceable, is not nearly as fun to write on as the Rhodia or the Doane was. I truly adore the annotation format for sure (I have convinced my friend Joy to take all her class notes this way), but despite this paper having a nice thickness I feel like there’s a teeny bit more drag than other papers. As for how much bleedthrough, check here to see for yourself. It’s the standard Sharpie-causes-a-mess situation, but note that the Red-Black also tries to get through. I think that has more to do with the amount of ink the Lamy M nib lays down than any lack of fortitude on the part of the paper.

I already kind of had a bad attitude about Levenger. I am not their demographic. I always felt, in a reverse-snobbery kind of way, that they were geared partly toward the exec with more money than sense type. Then I bought a “nice” Levenger pen and was sorely disappointed with the performance of the nib and the quality of the molded plastic body. So that didn’t help my bad attitude but I wanted to give them a fair shake with this paper and I admit it’s pretty nice. It’s just too bad I’d tried the others first.

This one comes down to cost… again. At 3 for $20 this is not a steal. I get that you need to pay more to get more high quality paper – those trees won’t just cut themselves down! Hah… ugh. This is why the next paper I’ll be writing about is the Staples eco-friendly bagasse paper everyone on FPN is crazy about.

Tags: Stationery

This week I decided to hit the bookshelves. This is something that will undoubtedly happen again as the weeks wear on and I find myself desperate for things to get rid of. In this particular case, if you don’t know, I’ve been in a book club for 8 years now in which we read about ten books a year. Since I started the whole book club thing, I have felt obligated to maintain the physical artifacts of our legacy of reading.

Well, that ends now.

Some of the books I outright hated. Some of the books I just didn’t like enough to finish. I wasn’t able to bring myself to get rid of the ones that I liked but won’t ever read again… maybe later this year when I’m better at non-attachment. The infamous Patricia Cornwell “worst book we ever read” Portrait of a Killer goes! V.S. Naipaul, who I thought was a dick even before I read his shitty book, goes! The high-school lit classic The Catcher in the Rye? Hated it. Past that it gets less vitriolic, but their presence in my house does not stand up to scrutiny.

So if you see anything in that stack you want, let me know. I think I may try to become an amazon seller for the remaining books. Can anyone tell me about their experiences using amazon to sell books? Anyone have a better idea? Is it worth the hassle?

I also need advice on taking 360° photos of a room. I want to take before and after pictures of our office for a total overhaul, but it’s a really cramped space and I am not sure how to do it – do I need a fisheye lens filter? Do I simply need to use photo stitching?

Tags: book club, books, Purge Thursday

This has certainly been a week of weirdness. For one thing, this is the longest Jack has left me alone in the house since we moved in. Sure, I often run off without him to do things he would find boring or what have you, but it doesn’t work the other way around, Jack being somewhat more of a homebody. The house seems strangely larger when he’s not in it or about to come around a corner or call to me from upstairs. I don’t even sleep in the middle of the bed – it’s just habit to sleep in my spot and it feels like I have to leave room for him, or I can’t take up his space.

Combine that with weird dreams and weird work hostility and weird attention span issues and getting the baby in the king cake (when so many people are talking about babies and I had a freaky baby dream) and the cats being extra clingy (they really love you, sweetie) and things seem a bit like they all shifted to the left a degree without warning me.

So while I was trying (and failing) to take pictures of paper products for a blog post, I took this weird self portrait. Paper product reviews will have to wait. (Note to self: You do not need to drop $100 on a light kit.) (Particularly when you think you might drop $200 on a Blackberry Storm.) (In fact, self, please stop thinking of 3-digit things you want to spend money on.)

Did I mention that our Chemistry lab instructor is into new-age self-tapping? And that we did some yoga stretches? In lab? Actually the yoga stretches kind of help. But I really hope to be able to get an A in the class without the benefit of doing accupressure extra credit. That said, I could probably use some stress-relieving placebo effect!

This weekend I got to see one of my oldest friends Genie in the flesh. I love this, because sometimes the internet doesn’t cut it. Lately she’s been my independent blogging inspiration but this weekend she just got to be my friend. We talked shit about shit, which brought up relationships. Genie said something like:

“My 11-years-ago self would have laughed at you if you told her where I am today.”

I immediately identified, maybe for slightly different reasons. Why 11 years? I guess as it happens she and I were both going through sea changes then. I think of my 1998 self as a very… special version of myself. If you’d told 1998 me about the ways I’m currently working on my relationship and where my priorities are today, she would have thought 2009 Kim was some kind of sucker. She would have thought I was pathetic and sad. She would have said, “never!”. But see here are some of the other things she would do:

• sacrificed/ignored all her dreams and ambitions to lavish attention on a dude
• cheated on that dude when she was unsatisfied or hurt
• had no self-worth that was independent of her relationship with a dude
• reaped no significant enjoyment out of anything but praise and love from a dude

And yes – 1998 Kim still considered herself a feminist! So, you know. Fuck 1998 Kim. If you are out there, and you are reading this, and you knew me in 1998, I’m sorry if I was a jerk. I was a little pathetic and sad back then. I wouldn’t call it regret, because I’m not much for that, but it sure puts things in a comfortable perspective.

Tags: introspection