Unproductive Hobbies, part 2
I can't believe I haven't talked about fountain pens yet
The longest romance in my life has been with stationery. Of all the frivolous things I could enjoy in my childhood, it was always pretty pieces of paper that I would gravitate to—and of course, the perfect pen to never write on it with.
My earliest memories of this fascination was going to Mass on Sundays. Close to the church was a small commercial complex, and one of the stores there sold stationery. Every week, I’d drag my mom there and make her spend a few pesos on cute paper. She’d always ask who I meant to write to, and the answer was simple to me: no one. I just wanted to have that cute paper with cartoon flowers and indecipherable, badly translated English phrases. I still have some of those stationeries squirreled away, never let go despite the yellowing pages and through the numerous iterations of spring cleaning. Call it sentimentality or my proclivity for hoarding pretty and useless things.
It was also in this age that I began developing a particular taste for pens—something that my mom also played a significant role in. Growing up, I’d always find clusters of Pilot Sign Pens all over the house, and my mom would use those pens for everything: from writing grocery lists to checking my homework. (She still hoards pens to this day, even if she’s mostly given up the habit of handwriting notes.) My mom’s specificity led me to feeling that I should follow her lead: I wouldn’t go for Panda pens that cost nine pesos (or less, at the time?). No, I went for Pilot pens, that were quadruple the cost. They just felt better in my hand, and the ink never skipped. Those two things mattered to me, at age ten.
These two fixations carried on through my prepubescent years, even when collecting and showing off stationery in between classes had fallen out of style. It stayed on until high school, when I had found a Fully Booked-brand gel pen and saved money to buy Miquelrius spiral bound notebooks for class. It was just my thing. It made me feel right, to have a pen and notebook on me at all parts of the day.
It was only in college, when P introduced me to a book that she and her mom had come across at a Booksale, that my love for pens and paper reached a new level. This love for pens that has—with no exaggeration (see previous notes on The Artists Way and the 2022 campaign)—helped me understand myself better. The book that led me to this point was “Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, and the main character falls in love with a fountain pen.
One day we decided to go into the shop and inquire about the blessed artefact. It turned out to be the queen of all fountain pens, a Montblanc Meisterstuck in a numbered series, that had once belonged, or so the shop attendant assured us, to Victor Hugo himself. From that gold nib, we were informed, had sprung the manuscript of Les Miserables.1
The fountain pen doesn’t play much into the narrative, but I found myself latching on to the image of a beautiful pen, gleaming in the shop window. As a college student, the idea of even purchasing a Montblanc seemed completely impossible. So instead, I turned to my lolo, who did own fountain pens—vintage seemed cooler than buying my own, anyway. My lolo had two Parker Vector pens, and I took them to class with me immediately after buying a bottle of ink from National Bookstore. I didn’t know any better about pens at the time, and suffered through the squeeze converter for the better part of a semester. I had ink in my hands almost constantly, because I had no way of telling how much ink was left in the pen unless I squeezed to check. I think it’s a bit poetic, that my first two pens from my lolo turned out to be Parker’s own line of “starter pens”.
Thankfully, my interest in fountain pens began in a time when specialty stores began to carry options beyond Parker and Cross. I worked through numerous cheap, almost disposable fountain pens until I graduated to a Sheaffer that P got for me as a birthday gift. Throughout the process of buying, writing, and selling fountain pens, I begun to appreciate craftsmanship and, more importantly, I learned to take better care of my things. In a way, this hobby makes me feel like I’m taking better care of myself, too—I spend money and time on something that is, for the most part, just for me to enjoy. Using fountain pens is, to use a term of the zeitgeist, intentional. Cleaning them, filling them up with ink, testing them out on different types of paper, is as close as I think I’ll ever get to weekly meditation. It’s one of the most joyful, solitary activities of mine. No one is ever going to see my tiny reviews of the combination of pen, ink, and paper, and that suits me just fine.
Even those notes bring me specific joy: the language of hobbies. It’s wonderful to me that I now have words for when ink can been seen on the other side of the page but didn’t exactly bleed through (ghosting), or for when ink spreads out too much on paper that the lines of penmanship are no longer clean (feathering). I like that I know the different parts of a pen and can comfortably take one apart without fear of ruining it.
Most of all, what I enjoy about this totally unproductive hobby of using fountain pens is that it gets me excited to write. From simply jotting down a to-do list, splitting the dinner bill, or journaling daily, simply uncapping a pen makes me smile. It feels silly to admit that, but I suppose I can blame the cult of productivity for sometimes still making me feel like this is a guilty pleasure.
My favorite pens & notebooks
If you’re looking for a starter pen, the Platinum Preppy is the way to go. Of course, I didn’t know this when I got it for around ¥300 in Tokyu Hands. I was pleasantly surprised when I tried it out during my trip, and more so when I got home and read reviews. The great thing about this pen is you don’t have to worry about ruining it; mine survived numerous drops, and I threw it in my bag without a pen case or a care that it would uncap and leak everywhere. I only retired this pen after a few years and after one spectacular drop that cracked the cap. (I still tried to make it work with some tape, but that soon gave way as well.)
the resting bitch face is strong in this picture, but look! i’m holding my platinum preppy! My favorite pens are my Sailor trio: 1911 Large, Pro Gear, and Pro Gear Slim. The 1911 I loved out of the box; to this day I still find myself smiling as soon as I use it. Meanwhile, I had a difficult beginning with the Pro Gear Slim—I wanted so deeply to love it, but I found it to write too finely. This led to me finding a pen specialist who fixed the pen up for me. The Pro Gear is the one I save for special days, just because it’s so pretty. I think of it as the pinnacle of everything I wanted in a pen.
My Sailor 1911 Large, Pro Gear (Cappuccino), and Pro Gear Slim (Dragon Palace), all held by my other favorite things: ceramic chopstick holders. Perhaps life is about finding what kind of small, pretty things you want to surround yourself with. This month I’m turning 30, and I’ve asked my friends to get me notebooks from Atelier Musubi. I’m so happy that I happened upon someone selling their Mitsubishi Bank Paper notebook on the Fountain Pen Palengke. I’ll never stop loving Midori notebooks, but Musubi is definitely a close runner up. I like the way the pen feels against the paper, the way that these days I can really tell the difference between a smooth glide and one that’s a bit more toothsome.
The Bridge — C. Dale Young I love. Wouldn't we all like to start a poem with "I love . . ."? I would. I mean, I love the fact there are parallel lines in the word "parallel," love how words sometimes mirror what they mean. I love mirrors and that stupid tale about Narcissus. I suppose there is some Narcissism in that. You know, Narcissism, what you remind me to avoid almost all the time. Yeah, I love Narcissism. I do. But what I really love is ice cream. Remember how I told you no amount of ice cream can survive a week in my freezer. You didn't believe me, did you? No, you didn't. But you know now how true that is. I love that you know my Achilles heel is none other than ice cream— so chilly, so common. And I love fountain pens. I mean I just love them. Cleaning them, filling them with ink, fills me with a kind of joy, even if joy is so 1950. I know, no one talks about joy anymore. It is even more taboo than love. And so, of course, I love joy. I love the way joy sounds as it exits your mouth. You know, the word joy. How joyous is that. It makes me think of bubbles, chandeliers, dandelions. I love the way the mind runs that pathway from bubbles to dandelions. Yes, I love a lot. And right here, walking down this street, I love the way we make a bridge, a suspension bridge —almost as beautiful as the Golden Gate Bridge—swaying as we walk hand in hand.
Ironically, Victor Hugo actually preferred to use pencils.
Hi, what's the 'Fountain Pen Palengke.'?