Prosaic Paradise

This post is for Genie’s Living Out Loud Challenge #8. Assignment: Write about something, some object, that you treasure.

There have been many objects that have captured my adoration and been the focus of my superstition. I’ve had lucky exam shirts and special poker chips and favorite keychains. I’ve had pet rocks and post-it notes with special messages and plastic toys that serve as desktop wardens from job to job to job.

When I was little, you’d often find me with my favorite transformer – Ravage – in my pocket or my jacket or my bookbag. Ravage was the cassette that turned into a cat, and while nowadays he has been irrevocably changed by the passing of old forms of media, for the time he was perfect – for one thing, he turned into an animal and not some dumb car or humanoid, and for another, he presaged my strong relationship with music at a time when I was barely getting past the Cabbage Patch Kids songs. He went with me everywhere and was what passed for a familiar, though I didn’t know the word at age 8.

Later in middle school I had gone through many more and varied personal talismans. Recently I found amongst my things a pig. He is about 4 inches long and has a plastic ball inside him so that he squeaks. I think this should give a pretty good indication of how much I tried to adopt “adorable goofball” as part of my persona as a way to cope with junior high. (Not that I ever really stopped doing that.) I brought him with me to all tests and I am sure through some strange osmosis his potential squeaks from within my bookbag helped me get an A or two over the years.

Nowadays I try not to be so attached to objects. Accumulating two more decades of treasured objects when you find yourself treasuring objects like it’s your job gets a little cumbersome. But in my bag I have two things (three if you count the ink in the fountain pen) that accompany me virtually everywhere.

One: The Miquelrius 300 page notebook I bought sometime in 2005 and have been desperately trying to fill ever since. At the rate I am going, I will be able to retire it to a fire safe sometime in 2015. Its contents include but are not limited to to- do lists, weird scribbles, research on schools & jobs, guest lists, packing lists, doodles of yetis, journal entries, and wine tasting notes. On the way to BlogHer it got soaked with sweat from a bottle of water, but somehow retained its flatness. It is adorned with stickers of a unicorn and my aborted “Choose Barbarism in Prince Georges County” joke. Its binding stalwartly holds on to all 300 of those pages even after being toted around all these years. I am serious when I say this binding is the shit.

Two: My A.G. Spalding M nib fountain pen in maple wood (black). Filled with J. Herbin Gris Nuage fountain pen ink. This is not an expensive pen. I bought it because of the look. The combination of that, the gray ink, some quirks of the nib that allow the ink to shade in a special way, makes this my favorite writing instrument at all times right now.  (Note: I also purchased the aluminum-body version of this pen and it sucked, the threads that screw the feed & section to the body come loose too easily and the cap doesn’t post solidly on the back.)

This pen and notebook combination makes me want to write. And writing is healthy. Particularly the kind of writing that is unedited and methodical, that allows your mind to wander but forces your brain to slow down to the the rhythm of your hand.

A few times in this summer I was caught without these things, thinking that my pen wrap and my monster notebook were weighing me down or causing potential back problems someday, and each time I was called on to write the perfect thought or doodle the perfect doodle, and had nothing to do it on. Well I am not making that mistake again, despite having to up the size of my current bag.

Tags: Living Out Loud, Stationery

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