Exotic Offic Supplies

Office Supplies are wonderful things. Pens, paper, pencils, markers, paper clips, binders, stickers, crayons, erasers...

It's the pens I like best of all.

They come in all sorts of sizes. Tiny pens, fine line (my favorite), bold, somewhere in between. Black pens, blue pens, orange, red, green, purple pink... I have way too many pens. I love smooth ink that floats out of the pen and my thoughts spill with them, a snapshot in words, creeping across the page, the shape of the letters conveying my mood. When money is tight I stay away from the office supplies isles (both of them) at Walmart. It's the height of geekiness, but I can really mess up the budget indulging in new pens.

This year, when the Daddy went to Japan, as usual, he asked me what I wanted. I had just discovered that they use a whole different type of pen. With a brush tip, rather than whatever you call the end of your typical American pen. A nib? A point? I don't know. Anyway. I've been studying kanji (Japanese characters) again, read that they use cool specialized pens to write them, and so that's what I asked him to get me.

Hon, while you're on the other side of the world, could you get me some pens?

And he did. Now I have a whole new type of pen to play with. And brushes, with ink sticks that you rub on wet ink stones to get ink.

They're pretty awesome.