January 21, 2010

• I hate pencils and mechanical pencils are the worst!

  You know for every post I write there are about ten potential posts I had the ideas to write that were never written. And generally the post I do end up writing is the weirdest and least interesting or useful of the posts I considered writing. That is, it’s a miracle that I ever write any informative posts at all. The vast majority of the posts I didn’t write would have been so very much better. Usually by the time I sit down to write at night my brain is already half burnt out so I usually just write the easiest of the things I want to write. Oh well it’s rather sad for you, dear readers. Though for me it’s probably a good thing since you only get the barest glimpse into my chaotic thinking.

  Today’s post will be perhaps one of the most random and completely insignificant of all the posts I’ve written at least in the past year (go back further and you might see some even less interesting ones). You see, I’m going to write about pencils. Yes, pencils. And I have even less to say about pencils than I do about aluminum foil. Really I only have one thing to say about pencils and that’s that I HATE THEM.

  And you know I hate many things. Like for example I hate loudmouth racist liars who have their own television and radio shows. And I hate supreme court decisions that treat corporations the same as people. And I hate days in January that have matching digits greater than one (there is an inordinate probability of snow and rain on those days). And I hate books by Terry Goodkind. I hate LOTS of stuff. But pencils, pencils have a special place in my heart of true despite.

  What’s funny is that I hear a surprisingly large number of people who love pencils. Really I constantly seem to meet people who are secret pencil enthusiasts. I suspect there’s probably enough of them out there to create a cult to restore the pencil back to its pre-eminence.

  Perhaps that would make a good story. The harrowing tale of one man’s quest to stop the evil pencil cult from taking over the world! It’d be great

  Anyway, the default position of most people I think is slight preference for the pen solely on pragmatic grounds. That is, pencils are more work than pens since you have to sharpen pencils, so people prefer the ease of pens. But the pencil enthusiasts, who are, I believe most rebelling against the majority, proclaim that the pencil has so much greater utility than the pencil! You can ERASE the pencils, and much easier and more effectively than you can pen with a pen eraser! Further pencil doesn’t run when it gets wet! And if you use a mechanical pencil, the holy grail of the pencil crowd, you don’t even have to bother with sharpening it and you can even refill it! The pen crowd is barely passionate enough to even bother to argue about it, but when they do they cite that well there’s utility in the permanence of ink pens, that pens can be refilled to, and that pens don’t break as easily. Thus the standoff. The age old conflict was born.

  For me though, it’s not that pens are so much better than pencils, it’s that pencils are so very very horrible.  What do I mean? It’s the way they write! It’s a horrible sensation. I can’t stand it. Some twisted rough painful rubbing sensation. It’s jarring against my skin. Writing with a pencil just feels utterly wrong to me. It feels like… like I’m tearing a wound across the paper with every stroke. It’s just a very bad kind of friction. It feels like I’m destroying something, whereas with a pen it just feels like a smooth transference.

  I’ve always felt like this when writing in pencil even when I was a little kid and that’s all I wrote with. I disliked writing for any long period of time if I had to use a pencil to do it. It just doesn’t feel right.

  Of course I dealt with it and wrote because I had to. I found that if I sharpened the pencil to the sharpest possible point it would minimize the sensation. But then of course the pencil would lose its sharpness after a while and I’d have to sharpen it again. And again. And again. It’s tedious but absolutely necessary in order to keep the grating rubbing feeling from pounding in my skull and driving me batshit insane!

  Mechanical pencils I discovered, are the worst.  You’d think as many people told me that mechanical pencils don’t have to be sharpened and they’re so thin that they kinda are like always having a point. NO. They are NOT like a point. They are like a little circular completely square dull edge that just happens to be very small. As a result writing with a mechanical pencil gives me that same rubbing gritty sensation only insanely worse. Writing on a new mechanical pencil or a new piece of lead in a mechanical pencil it’s the worst tactile writing experience I know of. I absolutely cannot stand it. Now after you use a mechanical pencil for a while the point does become fore fine if you write on the edge and then it becomes usable. But then I have another problem. I KEEP BREAKING THE DAMN LEAD!   It seems I have no ability to moderate the strength with which I push down on my pencil and with mechanical pencils I always push too hard causing the lead to break! And of course once the lead breaks I have to start all over with the horrible sensation. Likewise when I run out of lead and have to reload. Altogether the mechanical pencil experience is the most intolerable.

  AS you can probably imagine I’m also not particularly a fan of writing in crayon or chalk either. Some brands of markers and pens also feel incredibly wrong to me. Markers that are drying out or running out of ink are especially bad. I don’t know why this is, but it just is. I seem wired this way. I can’t stand those tactile sensations.

  I think the annoying feeling of writing with pencil is a large part of the reason I never did learn the proper way to carry pencil though it was taught to me many times. I still hold a pencil with all my fingers scrunched up at the top in an awkard cramp inducing position. I do the same for pens. I’ve never been able to break the habit. I wonder, do people still learn that in school?

  Anyway, pens are okay. I can tolerate writing in pen. And honestly I don’t mind crossing things out. That feels better to me. Erasing things, in addition to being a weird almost as annoying tactile feeling as writing itself, makes things disappear and I’ve never been fond of thinking of things as being lost. I like to think that the things I cross out are still there is some meaningful way and even if they’re the wrong words it doesn’t feel like I’ve lost something precious forever.

  I guess that makes it odd that my absolute favorite way to write is to type on a keyboard on a computer. I mean I obviously delete typos all the time on computer and sometimes eras whole paragraphs and sentences. And yet the computer feels more permanent still. Every bit  of information is stored somewhere, can be copied over and over and over and over again so that it can be preserved for all time. Furthermore, most people say that they can put their thoughts in their head to paper much faster when they write by hand so it’s more organic. Not me. When I’m using pen and paper I tend to be paralyzed by the fact that if I make serious mistakes I’ll have to rewrite the whole damn thing so I end up pontificating over every word choice to the point that nothing ever gets written. Also there’s just the matter that I type way waaay faster than I write by hand. So I can just type almost without thinking and the words just flow into the computer screen. For me it’s the next best thing to my thoughts direct to paper device that I have yet to invent.

  Anyway, that’s just all I have to say about that. DOWN WITH PENCILS!  Unless of course they are much more environmentally sound, in which case DOWN WITH PENS! OR maybe DOWN WITH PAPER AND ALL PAPER BASED WRITING MECHANISMS! Let’s get with the digital world and save some trees!

  Well whatever. But god I really really do hate using pencils. I hope I never again have to.

  • 9:49 pm
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