Pen Blogging - I Don't Need A Reason

I spend a lot of my time writing, and my penmanship needs all the help it can get because there are days when I can't read my own notes. I probably failed a test because I wrote a paragraph about the "llack freedom marmot". But when my penmanship is that bad, I generally have the help of a bad pen.

By "bad pen" I mean any pen where the ballpoint is sticky or drags a lot, any pen where the ink skips, or flows so heavily that I smear the words when I write a sentence (I'm left-handed, so that happens a lot). That means that for the most part, the Bic Roundstic medium point is just about as low as I can go without becoming frustrated or poorly educated. The fine points scratch like pencils and skip like schoolgirls, and I just can't tolerate that kind of behavior out of a pen. Similarly, all those needle-fine Pilot Precise-V pens can take a flying leap; they're the worst culprits when it comes to runny, smeary ink. Every time I use one, the bottom of my hand gets so black it looks like I got frostbite from an alpine expedition gone wrong.

Not to mention the fact that if you have bad paper, these pens turn a notebook into wet toilet paper full of tiny, .5mm holes at all the intersections in your lettering.

As a result of the pen industry's general failure to produce a pen that doesn't scratch, skip or bleed without costing eight thousand dollars or being made with such a wide barrel that you have to write with a clenched fist, I usually retreat to using automatic pencils - the technology seems more complicated than that used in a pen, but for some reason they're far less frustrating, and at least there's a point to it when they scratch.

But, there is one pen that I can write with that doesn't give me any of the usual inky hell, and it's not shockingly expensive and the barrel is only a little bit larger than strictly necessary. May I present to you, the UniBall Jetstream Sport.



When I went to England, I got two plain Jetstream pens with retractable points before I left, and I took literally all of my notes with them for four classes, for the duration of my three-month stay. They didn't run out, and they very rarely skipped (I had some Jetstreams before, but they were the plain capped-type and had some skip issues). They wrote so smoothly that I could actually hear my lecturers over the sound of them writing, the points didn't drag at all, and the ink dried fast enough that I never had to worry about smearing.

My only complaint was that the barrels were pretty big, and that made an otherwise very graceful pen feel a little clunky. They were covered in black rubber from point to tail, they had big clear logo windows on them, and were generally wasteful of petroleum-based resources.

The Jetstream sport is a very happy step away from that nonsense. They write with the same smoothness and the same non-smearing ink, and they feel a shade more graceful because the barrel doesn't feel like it's wearing a wetsuit. Now, if I could just get a whole pack of black or blue Jetstream Sports, instead of just getting one black in a fivepack of rainbow-colored pens with pastel pink and green inks, probably for the purpose of celebrating Easter and Diversity at the same time.

Now, take all of the above for what it's worth. I just hope that I haven't convinced too many fringe lunatics that I'm actually a corporate whore for Big Ink.