Prosaic Paradise

I stumbled into a great pen the other day, thanks to amazing happenstance and Jack’s quick mind for trivia. Sometimes we attend a weekly social event (called Tea) wherein there is a trivia prize, and this week I walked in all full of pen talk and our friend David and I were merrily talking pens, and then the prize was announced – A fountain pen!

It took me about 15 minutes when I got home to figure out what kind of Pelikan this was. You can see in the Pelikan website that they only list a rollerball and a ballpoint for this design, but I found some links on the Fountain Pen Network explaining that the fountain pen version got discontinued. That’s a pretty comprehensive review, but my opinion diverges on a few fine points.

The second I felt the weight of this pen in my hand I knew I wanted it; I truly love a weighty pen. I had this problem with a Levenger pen in that they feel light and cheap to me, so the heft of this pen was welcome. Since this wasn’t originally an expensive pen, I was surprised that it had a screw-on cap, which I had to get used to (particularly since I am so used to the Lamy). The FPN link above recommends a Conklin converter for this pen although it is meant to be cartridge only, so I hope to find one of those at the pen show next weekend.

Oh, what’s that? You want to know how it actually writes? Oh fine. I found that this nib performs one task I really appreciate – writing well on crap paper. I know that crap paper can gunk up your nib, but sometimes that’s what you have to write on. At work I spend a bunch of time writing comments on printed documents, so I need a pen that I am not afraid will be unable to handle it. (Although I will note that the nib is misaligned! Not sure if I’m going to get it fixed or god forbid try to fix it myself since it writes fine.)

I like the line that this pen lays down very much. You can see in the large size that it seems to handle stops and starts well; when I’m trying to write a sample for a pen review I find I write slowly trying to rein in my hideous scrawl and with some pens that leads to lots of bleed and extra ink on the paper, but not with this pen.

The pen came with a purple Pelikan cartridge inside, so the Levenger ink bottle there is just for show. I have an ebay search set up to see if I can find another one of these; someone else at Tea wanted this pen as well and I feel kind of bad that I got it when I’m already so pen-blessed.

Tags: Pens, Stationery

Up until recently I’ve been blissfully ignorant of how many people hit my WordPress blog and where they come from. I’m coming to realize that this fact may be important to me, and I should consider adding plugins to track these things. But I have no idea which plugins capture all the data I’m curious about. I am also mildly afraid I’ll find out just how few people even look at the site, but I have to know that to try and do anything about it, right?

So WordPress nerds, what do you recommend?

Tags: Meta

This weekend I definitely made some negative progress on my purging efforts in the form of a shopping spree. Fortunately it took place at two thrift stores and a Ross, thus having the least impact on my pocket. Unfortunately, it also meant I brought more stuff in the house in the form of clothes and a winter coat.

Jack already has a hit out on my coat collection. It pains him to no end that when our friends come over, we can’t let them hang coats on our coat hanging dealie because… well because it’s already full of my coats.

So when I brought in this new frickin’ sweet Hello Kitty brown winter coat (no really, it’s sweet! also pure, innocent…), I was ready: “Jack-I-promise-to-get-rid-of-one-of-my-coats-Iloveyou!!!” But of course then I had to decide on one. I should probably get rid of half of them (they don’t fit, duh) but I can’t bear to part with them yet. Maybe in the summer it will be easier. But I do have this used letter jacket that seems to be disintegrating. It goes!!

I got it at an antique mall because a) I’d never had a letter jacket and I thought it was flattering and b) it was conveniently in my high school’s colors and had the year of my graduation embroidered on it and c) I just was hoping someone would run up to me yelling, “Angie Balser!!!” That never happened. Someone with more time can probably fix the stitching on it and be a little warmer. It gets donated.

Tags: Purge Thursday, stuff

No, I promise, I am really excited about Barack Obama being the next president in a matter of days. I am super happy about that. But for those of you who live outside the metro DC area, you might not be aware that currently it seems like the entire eastern seaboard is experiencing Total Inauguration Panic.

Lots of you know that the most important topic at the water cooler right now isn’t who got kicked off of Top Chef (I don’t know yet!! It’s on the DVR.) or what happened on the Rock of Love bus (I don’t care and worry for the future of humanity) or even how ding dang cold it is. Currently the hottest topic is:

• OMG How many port-a-potties will there be in DC on Tuesday?
• OMG how many bridges are closed?
• OMG what kind of white van is parked ANYWHERE right now??@#@\
• OMG state of emergency!!!
• OMG everyone’s favorite band fill-in-the-blank is playing!

So if you want to know how my days have been, I will say “peppered with constant inauguration talk.” And if you want to know if I am going, that is a big, fat, “NO”. I will be under my bed having a panic attack merely thinking about the influx of enraptured citizenry. I am lucky; my boss is understanding and let me take leave. My heart goes out to those who work inside the beltway and are forced to participate. Particularly anyone who works at the Smithsonian which has been mandated to stay open.

If you’re going, just… bring yourself some TP, ok?

Tags: local

I think it was that Batman movie. People keep talking about movies they’ve seen lately and I just… haven’t seen movies. I wanted to catch Milk before it left theaters but now I’ll probably have to wait.

Then Genie reminded me accidentally why sometimes I just can’t get excited about the movies. Years and years ago, when I was a more vocal and angrier feminist (some of you out there might remember this), I’d go to the movies and go on about how I needed to see a film that passed 3 rules:

1. Is there more than one woman in the film
2. that talk to each other
3. about something other than men.

What I’d forgotten is that I got this from Alison Bechdel. Or perhaps I heard it on the internet and never did know the source, I can’t recall now. It’s probably been a decade now since I learned that ruleset, and it’s still just about as hard to see a film that passes as it was when I used to be more activist.

I did really like reading this article that was linked from the blog post. It reminded me why I should still be concerned. I don’t like to get angry any more; it’s not productive and it just hurts me more than it helps any one person or a cause. But that doesn’t mean that there is not still something very wrong.

As a footnote to this, I don’t often endorse graphic novels, but Bechdel’s Fun Home was absolutely worth reading.

Tags: Feminism, movies

Apart from niggling details like my incredibly scratched up glasses lenses (no wonder I have headaches) and the return of my terrible nail-biting habit and my ubiquitous interest in finding more things to hand-write, I just thought I’d share random shit that has been on my mind this week.

1. Pharmaceuticals. No, just the legal ones. Ever since I read this article by Marcia Angell, I’ve been really angry about drug marketing. I mean, I knew there were issues, but the way she describes the drug companies’ influence on the academic research, and the extremely muddy research surrounding psychiatric drugs particularly… well I just want to read every one of those books. And then one of the nursing blogs I follow relates that pens have been banned from being handed out at some conference… really?? Pens?? Is that the problem with the system? Phew, thank goodness you guys got on that pen menace. You think in the field of medicine people would know that treating the symptoms alone are not going to cure the underlying disease. I could go on and on about this, and wish I had more time to read the primary source material.

2. Middle Earth. I have listened to the audiobook version of The Lord of the Rings (narrated by Rob Inglis, who I think is the best narrator ever) about a million times, sort of. I say sort of because for years I used it primarily as a sleep aid. But this time I haven’t been able to fall asleep, and have been focused and hearing all sorts of details I missed the first million times I listened. So I had the local library get me a copy of the Atlas of Middle Earth and now I’m reading that along with my audiobook. I think it was the song about Nimrodel that caught my fancy after years of merely halfhearted  and half-awake interest.

3. Zodiac. Not the dubious star reading & newspaper space-taker-upper, but the killer. I’m reading the Graysmith book and hope to catch the film soon. A coworker lent it to me and I’m totally riveted. It’s been a while since I had a true crime reading spree!

4. Ladies Rock Camp, Rock Festivals, etc. I got an email from the Portland Girls/Ladies Rock Camp that they are really keen on signing up more Ladies for rock camps this year. Since I committed to BlogHer, there’s no way I can afford to do that and LRC in Portland, but if any ladies out there still have a hankering to go, DO IT. It was life-changing and awesome. I am also eagerly awaiting news about Nearfest tickets because my favorite band of the new millennium is playing there.

Tags: books, controversy, medicine, Music

That’s my favorite thing to hear Elvis sing. Tonight I went out with 2 of my ladies for an Elvis birthday dinner. Cuban food on Elvis day! I don’t know why.

We had a good long talk about adult friendships and about how we have some nostalgia about the way friendships were when your geography was limited to your neighborhood or your college campus. Back when your time seemed like it was there for the sheer purpose of bonding. It was asked, does anyone carry on that kind of friendship into adulthood, when there are partners, kids, and honest-to-god careers in full swing? I am confident people do, I’m sure I know some of them. I also feel like I could be capable – emotionally anyways – of carrying on that kind of friendship.

It’s difficult to think about the implications of that conversation. It seems simple – reach out and speak when it feels right, listen when a friend is talking.  Slow down a little. When I’m really paying attention to what’s going on (in this case in an interaction with a friend) instead of looking at how things will shape up later or agonizing about how things played out in the past then I feel like… I’m trying to think of a good way to put it. It’s like walking at normal speed toward a destination that becomes clearer instead of staying far away and trying to look at the destination while squinting, or running headlong at the destination creating a bouncing, moving image.

Yeah, it’s not the best way of putting it. I gotta work on that. (Expressing myself AND being a friend.)

Tags: Friends

There is the fact that fondue is a cleaning-intensive food project. There is the fact that my ownership of this fondue set was the product of an acrimonious breakup with a fiance eight years ago who for whatever reason really fought me over this fondue set. There is the fact that I haven’t used it once since I somehow won it in said breakup. There is the fact that it doesn’t seem to run on fuel like most fondue pots, it’s expected to run on like, votive candles or something. There is the fact that fondue restaurants exist in this part of the world if we get really, really desperate for fondue.

But for me none of those facts beat the fact that it takes up like a 4-foot-sqare patch of kitchen cupboard real estate we could use for, well, anything else but a never-used fondue pot. I would rather like, build a diorama of the 1976 Summer Olympics in that cupboard than let this thing live there anymore.

That said, if you have been really, really jonesing for a fondue pot I have decided to offer this one up to the internet friends (yes, after that ringing endorsement) because hey, I don’t know, maybe some people enjoy cleaning burnt cheese out of a ceramic pot! If no one bites by the weekend it goes to freecycle.

Tags: Purge Thursday, stuff

Yeah, it’s a classic song, and if you don’t know it, just read. I am particularly fond of the Judy Collins version.

But this post is about thinking about how I spend my time, since sometimes it seems like I don’t understand why I don’t have time for the things I enjoy. I was looking around online for people’s notetaking strategies for school when I found this incredibly simple tool for visualizing your daily time. I mean, I know you could do this with Excel in a heartbeat, but I hadn’t thought of it yet. So sue me. I find that most paper planners or things like google calendar don’t actually lend themselves to daily breakdowns like this, and I actually do like to know where my time is going without making a bunch of assumptions.

If you fill this thing out and then get depressed about how little time you have after clocking work, commute, sleep, etc, my advice is to try to think of it as a knowledge = power situation. If you know how much time you have left over to tend to your cactus garden, go to zither lessons, and watch videos of kittens falling asleep, you can then set your priorities so that the things you most love get tended to first.

There’s a weekly tool on the site as well, since nobody does the exact same thing every day.

Tags: organizing

I really set myself up for failure in 2008; I had all sorts of very rigid ideas about how to conduct myself, which was pretty ironic considering I hadn’t conducted myself that way at all in 2007 but had been really, really happy. I think at the time I felt I had a ball rolling and that I’d use that momentum to enforce some things on myself I considered “good habits”. In fact, my daily orders are still up on my whiteboard in rainbow splendor, none of them perfectly achieved.

I did floss more and pay my bills on time and check my bank balance, I just didn’t do that stuff every day. Well, it worked out just fine; no new cavities and I managed to pay down my student loan debt extra and save some money. I didn’t meditate every day, and I certainly didn’t play the drums every day, in fact my frustration at feeling like such a failure at it was pretty intense and in the end I put school as a priority and quit lessons.

Instead I’d say if I have any advice for myself in the coming year it would be to be present. I sort of asked the same thing of myself last year but I also hung out all these weird expectations on myself.

The best changes in my life have come about kind of spontaneously, like deciding to go back to school for nursing. That certainly didn’t happen in January. Or finding my new favorite band and deciding I wanted to learn to play drums – that happened in the summer or fall! In fact I bet if I looked back, I’d find the best self-motivated initiations of effort happened when the weather was much finer than this.

Oh well, I’m sure in a few years I’ll forget how fruitless I thought it was and be ready for the festive annual self-recrimination.

Tags: hindsight, introspection