Sick Day Nonsense!

Had to call in. After showering and trying to eat breakfast between coughs, groans and sneezes, I finally realized that I was too ill for office work. The mere thought of walking to the metro sent my virus-riddled brain on a tailspin, much less the notion of riding it. It would be inconsiderate to force this on my colleagues.

I sent my boss an e-mail, knocked back some Nyquil and slept for 4 hours without waking up - all this after a night of 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep. What is up with me? I thought I'd spend some time here, as I muzzily drink my first cup of Pacifico light roast of the day (withdrawal headache still clamoring for attention in the occipital lobe), describing to you (my loyal readers) my most recent obsession: Pilot Frixion .4mm.

All my life, I have put up with a perpetual preoccupation with pens that is placed purely on perspicacity and not at all on price. I have discovered some killer dollar store writing implements and likewise rejected high-quality German models. My journal's companion is a leather and silver encased little gem of a fountain pen with a superfine iridium nib, enameled in brown with silver plum blossoms.

On a whim, I recently bid upon and won a single Pilot Frixion .4mm on eBay... And I'm just flabbergasted at its awesomeness. I refuse to even pick up a pen (unless I have no other recourse) with a rollerball, nib or tip wider than .5mm, and this, this pen has the most satisfying needle point so fine that it's almost invisible against your writing surface. The words one writes seem to float up out of oblivion and imprint themselves magically upon the lucky paper.

Now for the "friction" part of things. Prepare to be amazed. This is an erasable pen, and the mechanism is, you guessed it, friction. The pen has a little rubber nubbin at the opposite end that can be used to send words, godlike, back into the oblivion from whence they came... And it's nothing like those hated, traditional erasable pens, which skip and spit globs of ink, whose erasers quickly wear down and whose words remain etched after erasing, ghostlike and disturbing, upon the page. With the Pilot Frixion, what was done is undone, utterly. And the ink is gel! The nubbin never gets used up, because it's not subsuming the ink, the ink is undergoing a chemical alteration that has nothing to do with the substance of the nubbin! Feel free to quote these medicated words.

If you have no qualms about making trans-Pacific purchases (and waiting 2-3 weeks for your goods to arrive), I definitely recommend these pens.