Re-discovery of The #2 Pencil.

Saturday night, I was sitting at Heine Brothers with my laptop, several notebooks, a pile of receipts, and Friend-with-a-Truck. It's often hard for me to concentrate at home, and I haven't been able to finish a song there in months. Getting out of chaos that is home -- the unpainted walls, piles and piles of books, scattered piles of receipts that need categorization, and various other chores -- is necessary for me to really accomplish anything. So I do a lot of work at coffee shops.

Friend-with-a-Truck was on his laptop -- an adorable Dell mini, pretty cute for a PC -- and I was writing in a notebook with a brand new #2 pencil. Then something disturbing happened. My pencil became dull due to my vigorous writing, and I reached into my bag, pulled out a little pencil sharpener, and sharpened the pencil to a delectable point. As I finished and returned the sharpener to my purse, I caught Friend-with-a-Truck staring at me.

"That was pretty nerdy, wasn't it ... pulling a pencil sharpener out in public," I said to him.

"Um, yeah, it was."

He still wants to hang out with me though. But he's totally right. What's come over me? Here I used to only like writing with fancy pens, and I'm now one of those people who sharpens pencils in public.

There's just something so fun about writing with a sharp #2 pencil -- the sound the graphite makes as it swirls on the paper, the steady movement of the eraser, the ability to obliterate any thought you want with a few back-and-forth movements, and that quick puff of air you instinctively blow on the paper, following by a wipe of the page.

What can I say? I love school supplies.

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