Pens of the tough love variety

A conversation with a close friend has me reflecting on the way I classify pens. Challenging schema on how to measure variance across my collection. Reimagining my considerations with how pens may be used each week.

I typically classify pens into types. I use how a pen is constructed, such as out of metal or acrylic. I also commonly group by filling mechanism: piston, converter, vacuum, or magic. And I often organize pens by who made the pen (or the pen’s parts). This last yields groups like “Lamy” and “Kaweco” and “Mythic Pens.”

Toying with taking up a new lens on pen types, JO and I considered use case as a sideways perspective into which kinds of pens populate our collections. And a novel perspective can unearth values and preferences and “what works for me” that I’ve only yet to subconsciously pull together. For the betterment of future, smarter, more personalized curating.

In short: where and how we use a pen suggests its type. Some pens are to be tossed carelessly into bags and pants pockets. Others are to be delicately handled with only the gentlest of breathing.

At first blush, five use cases rise to front-of-mind: tough love, case to table, house arrest, pocket peacock, and white gloves. This post highlights the first pen-types: Tough Love.

Tough Love pens wear their wear well. Worn edges, dents, and scrapes define their colorways — fermenting wabi-sabi histories over time. Scratches, dents and dings over time write a beautiful, imperfect story.

Tossed casually in a bag while heading out the door. A regular bag. Alongside keys and coins and a wallet. Tough Love pens take a beating and write eagerly on. More than a workhorse, a Tough Love pen is built for intense use, and possible misuse.

Kaweco’s Sports are an exemplar for tough love design. Compact as to easily fit inside a pocket or a bag. Absent of adornments like clips which minimizes the potential for snagging and breakage.

The thick extended cap protects the weakest joint where the pen’s section meets threads into the body. Design with hard use in mind.

This Kaweco survived US Army Basic Training with some handsome scars to prove it

I’ll tackle the other pen types in future posts. What other types of use cases should be added?

This week’s Inked Tines update includes last week’s currently inked writing tools.

Toolset

Pens. The Carolina Charlotte (EF SIG) provided stable, consistent lines. A light touch is needed given the sharpness of the EF SIG grind. Horse: here’s your work. Task management, lesson plans, reading notes, scratch notes, and D&D notes. No nonsense. No drama. No question this is my standout combo for the week. 1/5.

• Cypress Cone Micarta (M SIG) — 1/3. Dries out after an evening in the pen cup. Writes a dark, monochrome black-green with shimmer as the primary visible color. Perhaps a drier feed would bring out more of Best Wishes’ base green? Lesson plans, meeting notes, and D&D notes.

• Platinum 3776 (F) — 1/2. Clean, narrow lines in a stately whisper-green. Excellent in the margins of readings and on students’ papers. A combo worth revisiting.

• Franklin-Christoph 03 (F CI) — 1/2. Wrote from the first stroke, each and every time I uncapped this pair. The blue was a go-to for reflective writing as the F-width lines accommodated detailed writing in the 5mm grid of my work Kokuyo. Also: journaling and meeting notes.

• Franklin-Christoph 45 (F) — 4/5. Aonibi is a dream writer in this F nib: legible, quick-drying, and muted. Excellent for serious meetings and thoughtful teaching reflections. Also: lesson plans.

• Sailor Pro Gear (Z Architect) — 4/5. Virginia’s red is a searing affair: wet and awash in gold sheen once dry. The wet pairing limited this pair to well-sized papers: teaching reflections and reading notes. I simply didn’t reach for this pair much. Perhaps red remains outside of my aesthetic happy-place.

Notebooks. Work bujo. Kokuyo Century Edition Dot Grid (A5). A quick five pages of notes added to my work bullet journal as I enjoyed a two-day workweek. I started on page 172 and landed on 176 by the end of the school day on Tuesday.

My typical two-page weekly task list incorporates six lists: one per weekday and a sixth titled “Later” for tasks that accumulate but don’t yet need my attention.

I shifted to a single page two-day task list spread. Monday and Tuesday each had a list, along with the accompanying Later “dump” list. A logical adaptation in grey.

The Spock of spreads

The next three pages are lesson plan outlines. Laying out the transitions between my lessons’ activities in Best Wishes, Arctic Blast, and Aonibi.

Aonibi is an ink for plebeians … apparently

Journal. Kobeha Graphilo Grid (A5). I wrote two journal entries last week. Two pages total. A week of widespread inconsistency in journaling. A little breather after a string of heavy writing weeks.

Refreshing

The first entry is a one-page documentation of my first day off on holiday break. The play-by-play of the places my partner and I toured.

I dug into my trove of 8ml Diamine Inkvent bottles for a long-unused blue: Arctic Blast. Multicolor shimmer, pink sheen, and a violet blue captured the cold weather we enjoyed during the day o’ outings. Thoughtless retellings in fun cursive italic lines.

The other entry runs two-thirds of a page. The M SIG grind spreads Best Wishes to show infrequent glimpses of green at the ends of long words. Otherwise, the pair is a dark green-black. So serious.

The outcome of asking my partner to choose a pen-and-ink combo for me to journal with is that both Diamine Inkvent shimmer inks from my currently inked kissed paper this week. Arctic Blast’s shimmery violet-blue and Best Wishes’ murky black green. Go figure.

Best Wishes … channeling an ent cosplaying Twilight

Written dry. Stalled success with emptying pens. All six writers scribble happily on as of the end of the week.

These six work on their cardio

Newly inked. My six-pen plan worked well throughout the week. I always felt I had a useful option to-hand whenever I had notes to record. Win.

The collection

Incoming / new orders. I’m loathe to wake acquisitions. Let them slumber on.

Outgoing / trades or sales. I gifted a second pen to a new work friend. That’s two pens onward and outward, past the horizon of my desk.

An eccentric assortment of lovingly cared-for fountain pens remains in my outflow pile.

Currently reading and listening

Fiction. I am approaching the conclusion of Ryan’s The Traitor. I traveled 105 pages, from Chapter 28 to 35, last week. All of my fiction reading continues to live in Apple Books. If it fits it sits.

Alwyn Scribe (the protagonist) has come full circle back to his old allegiances — after a Lord of the Rings style excursion into the land of magic and premonitions.

This series resonates most strongly with me when it rests philosophically on Scribe’s relationship to power. He’s perpetually wielding power but not of power. Ryan is toying with a fun thought experiment there.

Nonfiction. I dedicated meaningful reading time to two nonfiction books last week: Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and Frantz’s Authoritarianism. It feels great to have two more books on my “read this” shelves. And in my Hobonichi’s reading tracker.

Huzzah and hooray

Authoritarianism proved a skimming project. The margins of conceptually interesting sub-sections are adorned with thinking annotations — connections to other texts I’ve read. The majority of the book is an essay designed for reference, not consumption. Fair enough.

Music. I’ve been listening to mommy on repeat all week. Their collaboration with Philanthrope, titled inaudible, feels like winter to me. And, with the weather by me now frigid, inaudible resonates strongly.

Additionally, mommy’s gentle orchestral swoons alongside reading, lesson prep, and even underneath my teaching as a calming soundtrack. Whoosh.