Sunday, May 16: outrageous flair
“Some illnesses are self-inflicted.”
I doubt there are many writers out there who don’t have a thing for pens and paper. Like a big thing. I have more notebooks, markers, highlighters, stickers, washi tape, planners, and sundry office supplies than I can use in multiple lifetimes of writing. I have washi and paper that I love so much that I will never use them. And I have pens that I love so much that I’ve exhausted the ink cartridges.
Last Friday, my son gave me a pencil that he’d sharpened down to about an inch of lead with a pristine eraser. He wanted to pretend that he’d written so much this year that his pencil was a nub, but I know
he types everything;
when he does write, he erases and rewrites compulsively so his used pencil could never have an unused eraser;
he would never be able to keep track of one writing implement for more than perhaps a couple of hours.
Every once in a while, I get overwhelmed by my hoarded writing ephemera and do a little purge—free-cycle or sell—depending on what it is and my impatience with having it gone. This morning, as I was typing up this title, it occurred to me that I’d sold most of my PaperMate felt tip Flair pens. Outrageous.
Because every once in a while, I pretend, like Henry, that I don’t need certain things—I can sharpen a brand new pencil down to the eraser or get rid of a set of pens because I haven’t used them in a while. But now that I realize I don’t have them anymore, there is an outrageous Flair-sized hole in my life.
So I turned to Amazon. They have Flair sets in Candy Pop (which I apparently bought before), Tropical Vacation (who doesn’t want that?), and Retro Accents (have we discussed the 70s recently?).
Recently, I’ve heard various podcast personalities discuss the value of giving yourself affordable luxuries—small things like, say, nice pens that cost around—I don’t know—$10, that when you use them will make you happy.
But that’s the condition: I can’t just have them, I have to use them. My self-inflicted illness is that I don’t use the things I love the most—I just treasure them. But using things up isn’t wasting them, it is giving them purpose. Or elevating them to new purpose, like the 1” pencil with a perfect eraser in a frame on my wall.
