A Message to Friends of Living Outside the Stacks
To read the message, click the picture

As a teenager, I used to love to write letters. My letters took days for me to write. I’d start them on Monday, finish them on Thursday and stick them in the mail on Friday. Yes, I really thought my friends cared that much about my ~ whoa, wait! I was blogging on paper.  But I was also incredibly, um, anal about my letters. They had to be perfect. Each letter had to slant in the same direction, they had to perfectly formed. There were no mistakes. I didn’t cross out and continue writing. Nope, I scrapped the entire sheet and started all over again. Even if I was already at the bottom of my college ruled notebook paper.

I was equally demanding in my pen preference. Pilot Precise V~5. Hands down, the best pen ever. The ink flow is even, you never get those stops and starts or splotchy ink spots. The pen tip allows for crisp and even letter formation. And it just feels good in the hand. I love these pens so much that my previous supervisor ~ Hi, Mari ~ gave me handful of purple ones as a “Welcome to the Library” gift because I’d mentioned in my interview that I loved those pens and that purple is my favorite color.

But there’s a downside to being so exacting in my writing style, it takes me forever to write. In fact, it takes me so long that I’ve developed my own form of short hand so that I keep up when I’m taking notes during lectures or meetings. I credit my father for making me this way. His handwriting was so beautiful that it was almost illegible…

But I love my sweet little Vivi, my Vivienne Tam Notebook. Like my beloved pens, Vivi is elegant and stylish. Everything she produces is sharp and crisp. The keys perfectly mold to my fingers. Seriously, the keys have gentle slopes so that my fingers nestle into each one. My thoughts flow from my brain to my fingers, without me having to stop to grab a new sheet of paper. There’s no starting and stopping because I’ve made a mistake, I simply hit “delete” and it’s as if the mistake never happened.

National Blog Posting MonthVivi is the perfect writing companion, she checks my spelling, offers synonyms when I can’t think of the right word and she keeps me connected to friends and family like no pen and paper could ever do. She stores my hopes, my dreams, my photographs. She keeps my secrets and shares my joys. Yes, there’s something to be said for technology.

But when the chips are down and I want to show I care, there’s nothing like grabbing a pad of paper and my Pilot Precise V~5 and writing a letter.

What about you, do you prefer the pen and paper or your computer?

Today’s post was written in response to the writing prompt for National Blog Posting Month. For more information, go here.