Wednesday, October 24

Taking note

'Pens Galore at Tokyu Hands' by GOD - FlickrI have a stationery fetish. More than that even. I'd call it an Obsession but I think Calvin Klein has that copyrighted.

After the book store, the library, and the private club down the road, the Stationery store is my favourite place in the world. You can drop me off in a stationery store and happily pick me up 5 weeks later, and I'll still have a tantrum and refuse to leave.

I love stationary. I love ink flowing from a pen for the first time, I love the smoothness of unsharpened pen and I love the perfect white of a blank sheet of paper.

And most of all I love notepads.

Notebooks, spiral bound and not. Rfin. FlickrThere is something magical about a new pad. You've felt it no doubt, that thrill page that runs up the arms and into the brain like a pair of athletic earwigs, when you open to the first clean page. Every new pad has the potential for greatness. By the time it has run out of pages it could contain a best selling novel, world changing philosophy, or the recipe for Kentucky fried chicken. It could be the pad that changes the world.

It never is though. A few pages in my writing stumbles into an messy four word pile-up, marring the beauty of the canvas. Leaves are torn out, floating to the ground as if ripped from a tree by a frustrated October Wind. Over the pages my handwriting decays until it reads like a intoxicated man declaring his love of underwear. The bindings bend and clog with the fragments of torn pages, the corners crease, the ink runs, and before long my dream pad has become a collection of half finished to-do lists and stick men doodles. In short, the notebook is no longer any good for anything except… well... notes.

Every single pad I’ve ever brought has gone this way, and I've brought a lot of pads in my life. Every new idea is too precious to live on the same pages of as a failed endeavour, so I buy a new pad to nurture it in, and put up fences so it won’t be disturbed by the neighbours. Then, like always, the idea falters and gets left on shelf to ferment, the pad once a infinite canvas of possibility now reduced to emergency toilet paper.

I've never made it to the last page of a pad. In fact I'm pretty sure I've never made it to the tenth page of a pad. My Bookcase has a whole shelf devoted to unfinished notepad, crammed in side by side. I get through more pads than a pre-menstrual woman, and have less to show for it. I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover I’m single handily responsible for Global Warming and...

Wait! That's a great idea! What if there was one person who wrote so much rubbish and wasted so much paper that he caused the ice-caps to melt, and whole nations to be flood, and became public enemy number 1. Living as an outcast on the edge of society, fighting for every scrap of paper, writing to keep himself alive for another day...

Quick, somebody get me a new notepad....

13 comments:

Danielle said...

I too love all things stationary and can truly relate to abandoning a notebook that has been defiled by messy handwriting.

Wishing you well

Danielle

Modern Musings new home

Miss Elle said...

I too have a stationary fetish. Having spent almost half an hour looking at the notepads in Paperchase today... I very nearly came home with a new one! I like the small ones, I use them for when I'm knitting to mark how many rows I've done :P In fact... one of them is nearly finished!

xxx Miss Elle xxx

The Ferryman said...

"I get through more pads than a pre-menstrual woman.."

I wish I had written that.

Dale said...

I stopped writing in them long ago but I still buy them, notebooks I mean, not the other pads, haha.

Anonymous said...

Remind me to never let you loose in my home office, you'd be embarassed by the wet spot when you saw all the paper and pens I keep in here... :-)

My craving is fountain pens, Moleskine notebooks, Rhodia pads and more... I could spend hours going through all the shelves in my favourite stationery stores in Toronto. And I think most of the fine writing stores know me by name now.

Hell, I still write all my posts by hand first before I publish them on my blog.

But, you have given me ideas for wedding gifts (hehehe)

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Unknown said...

I love stationary too!

LMFAO @ the last line. :-)

Anonymous said...

Danielle - You love all things that don't move?

Miss Elle - With notebooks as in life, i prefer things bigger, I like room to spread out.

Mr Fab - Well be happy, you just did

Dale - You buy them and don't write in them atall? Now THAT is a fetish

Vanyel - Moleskines...... orgasm

Ed - looking now.

Angelika - Why can no one spell stationery?

Linda said...

I love those bound journals that they sell but considering I have handwriting worthy of a doctor, there is no reason for me to ever write in one of them. Heck, I can't even read what I wrote five minutes later so the last thing I need is for it to be bound forever in a lovely book that no one else can read either!

Wouldn't it be great to have a laptop with a moleskin casing? I'd put it down even less than I do now!

Anonymous said...

A laptop with Moleskine casing.... oh Linda I think I love you!

Patent Pending!

aMus said...

hey...make sure u don't meet up with my son..he's on a save the environment mood...perhaps i could give you the stationery i've managed to hide from him :)

Anonymous said...

Thinking aloud. I think that's the first time anyones ever used their children as a threat against me :)

MOT said...

New notebooks are awesome! I love the newness of the cover, the crisp pages, the endless possibilities...

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