Pencil sucks. I was looking through my Grade 11 stuff to find something and I get to the part in the pile that’s all math. I flipped through it and it was pretty disgusting. Here are a pile of math papers rubbing against each other under its own weight, causing the pencil to smear all over the page. It’s still readable, but it’s just set against the backdrop of a cloud of grey. Hence, I don’t write in pencil except for math tests and homework. I write in pen whenever I can, even if it’s math notes.

In Grade 9, I wrote with ballpoint pens, the Bic Crystal ones where you can get two billion for a dollar. They came in three million blues, two blacks, and a red. Always. No wonder then, that the habit I had of using different colours in my notes was dropped swiftly. At the beginning of Grade 10, I switched to what I a slightly higher quality ballpoint. That is almost an oxymoron. There is no such thing as a high quality ballpoint, because ballpoints suck.

Ballpoints aren’t very smooth. You tend to print more with ballpoints. I also find that it’s not the same colour throughout the letters. It’s a bit scratchy really. And you really have to press down for ink to come out. It doesn’t look that bad with blue, but with black, you can really notice. For the first week or so of Grade 10, I wrote my notes with a black ballpoint. The result was a metallic greyish looking thing.

Then I started to run out of ink and the only other pen I had was a Sanford Uniball Onyx Micro. This was not a ballpoint pen.

The first thing I noticed was how smooth and easy it was to write with this pen, even though the tip was incredibly thin. Not only was my writing smooth, but it was thin and precise. The other thing I noticed was that the black was a really deep black that really stood out against the page. Very nice for reading.

I promptly used up the rest of my ballpoints and switched over to using only black Uniballs.

A long time ago, I thought that I would never handwrite again. And I never did. Handwriting is kind of ugly, if you ask me. But, the Onyx was so smooth that it felt like a waste stopping at every letter. Now I have to join the letters to create a hybrid of writing and printing. It works quite well with these pens. It feels natural.

Let’s take a look at how my writing has changed over the years.

This was my writing in Grade 9. This particular thing was something from Canadian Geography. I probably forgot everything from that class. Ah well. Anyway, you can see that my letters have at least a tiny bit of space between strokes. Relatively neat for me.

This is Grade 10. I’ve made the switch to the rollerballs. My writing is still relatively neat, because it’s only been a few months. You can see that it is still about the same size as the Grade 9 piece, but the letters are starting to join to each other.

This is from late in Grade 11, which is about the point in the year where everyone stops trying. You’ll notice that my writing has gotten huge and is much more handwriting-ish. That has to do with me getting lazy I guess. Anyway, this is how I write right now. It could be even messier because I barely wrte during the summer, so I have to get my hands back in practice.

Final plug: Sanford Uniball Onyx Micros are the best damned pens in the universe.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 24th, 2005 at 10:10 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.