My first purchase (well, not really).

When I decided to start a blog, I knew I would need two things: a Mead “Five Star” notebook and a Pilot “Precise: V5″rolling ball pen. Call me old fashioned, but as a writer I need to feel the words through my arm down to my fingertips as I’m writing them. I need to feel a certain rhythm to decide if a sentence works or if somehow I could re-word it and make it sound better.

My notebook and pen.

Now, I say “practically everything I ever wrote” because this was not the case in grad school. In grad school, I had a part time job, had to read many lengthy books and long boring articles about said books. I couldn’t write every paper out by hand. I tried doing it for the first paper I submitted in grad school, but it just took too long. So I wrote the rest of my papers off the top of my head (well, with notes and an outline), but it just never felt right. Subsequentially, I can’t say that I’m pleased with most of the papers I wrote in grad school. If I typed “the” (for example), hitting “T,” ‘H,” and “E” on the keyboard just didn’t feel the same as writing it out in pen and paper. Another problem was that my brain just didn’t move as quickly as my hands could type, there’s a nice even pace between thinking a word and actually writing it out.

So for me and for this blog, I shall start everything the old fashioned way, with pen and paper! Sure I feel bad about all the paper I’m wasting (as this very post that I am writing now already had a two page first draft), but I figure that I save trees by owning a Kindle, so that evens everything out, right?

Now, I choose the Mead “Five Star” notebook because it has a nice durable plastic-y cover to keep everything from getting frayed and nasty. Now, I haven’t tried this yet, but I suspect if I put a cup of coffee down on the cover, I could just wipe up any ring marks. Or if I spilled said coffee, as long as the notebook was closed, my work should be safe. Perhaps, of greatest importance, the rings on the notebook are closed tight so that no wire ends protrude and ruin my favorite sweater when I’m carrying it!

My pen of choice is the Pilot “Precise:V5” rolling ball pen. It’s just so fluid on the paper and the lines are nice and thin. The V5 doesn’t write as thick as the V7, so the letters don’t blur together and look funny. It’s my favorite pen and I have to say that when I was in grad school it was the preferred pen of most Boston College students in the English Literature department. I often wondered if I sent in photos of a classroom full of BC English grad students taking notes with their Pilot pens, if I could get a sponsorship or endorsement from Pilot for the grad program (or at least lots of free pens would have been nice).

I planned on making the trip to Staples and the purchase of these items my first blog entry, aside from the introduction. While this still is my first blog entry, there was no purchase involved! I mentioned to my mom that I was starting a blog and was going to Staples to get a Mead “Five Star” notebook and a box of  Pilot pens. I was hoping that they might still be on sale because it was “back to school” time, but I was also worried the store would be ravaged. Then my mom said she had some notebooks. I felt a bit like the girl in the “Ebay” commercial who tells her mom that she needs jeans and her mom goes off to look for a box of her “mom” jeans to give her daughter. As luck would have it, my mom actually had a blank Mead notebook. I had the pens already, but was worried they wouldn’t write anymore after years of neglect. Low and behold, the pens still wrote beautifully! So I didn’t need to buy anything for my first blog post. While I was happy to save money, I was sad that I didn’t have an excuse to go shopping at Staples.