RE: THE HUMBLE PENCIL

This is one of those silly personal preference topics that I've 
dismissed previously as beeing too mundane to ramble about here. 
But IanJ talked about his introduction to the merrits of pencils so 
I thought I'd write a response anyway:
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Money-saving-and-minimalism/The-humble-pencil.md

For someone who seems to have exceptionally few childhood memories, 
I remember a surprising amount about my early writing experience, 
which is to say probably an almost average amount. My formal 
introduction in school was by combination of chalk and slate as 
well as pencil and photo-copied worksheets. The slate boards seem 
exceptionally antiquated for my time of schooling at the beginning 
of the 2000s, and it wouldn't surprise me if they're using tablet 
computers there now.

Once the basics of writing were established, pencil and paper 
became the sole tools of the practice until at some point, without 
me really noticing, ball-point pens were allowed to us. This was 
more a case of lifting (or not enforcing) a prohibition rather than 
encouraging a switch, and probably for this reason all the kids 
rapidly adopted these once-forbidden grown-up writing implements. 
Except me.

Two reasons come to mind, for one I didn't like the lack of 
resistance moving over the page, but the issue was certainly 
decided the first time I made a mistake and, on thin workbook 
paper, attempted to use one of those blue pen erasers to eliminate 
it. This of course was a futile exertion of significant effort with 
the closest result to success usually occouring a short moment 
before the paper tore entirely under force of excesive abrasion. 
Others chose to cross mistakes out, even before switching to 
pencil. I could never stomach that, the result never seemed 
readable to me, and I didn't want to reveal my thought process 
while rephrasing myself.

So it became one of my recognisable quirks through secondary school 
that I was the one who always had a pencil sharpener, rubber, and 
often an unusually small pencil (getting the most out of my writing 
implements was a little challenge that I set myself). In fact I 
didn't quite grasp how quirky my opinion on the merits of pencil 
was until for final exams at the end a teacher took me aside for a 
grave discussion of how I'd have to use a pen, assuming that I was 
somehow incapable of writing with one - presumably the only 
explanation they could see for my preference.

After finally escaping the horrors of the education system, I 
shortly discovered mechanical pencils. I think my first was, as 
usual, inherited from a deceased relative. It was well made and I 
came to adore it, but nevertheless lost it about a year later. 
Gravely upset, after having spent a huge amount of time searching 
for it, I unleashed the power of the internet to identify the exact 
model and even discovered that it was still in production. For a 
moderately excessive price, I ordered myself an exact 
replacement... which I also lost within about six months.

With that I gave up on quality and just bought some cheap plastic 
ones in a couple of very cheap bulk packs from local shops. 
Although I've lost these a few times, to my borderline aggravation 
I've always found them again, whereas those first two good ones 
have never been seen since. Or maybe they were seen, and unlike my 
current models they looked good enough to nick while I was 
distracted, who knows?

Mechanical pencils are a great improvement, not only for making the 
most of one's graphite without writing with one's fingertips, but 
for the sharp lines that they enable. This indeed makes them a 
traditional choice for engineering work, and I've enjoyed 
continuing that practice, albeit self-taught, of hand-drawing 
schematics for electronics I design. In fact I do keep a decent 
0.5mm mechanical pencil for that, while those cheapies I use for 
everyday note taking are 0.7mm. For the latter a pack of six tubes 
of twenty 0.7mm 2HB leads that I found extremely cheap at a 
discount store should keep me going for a very long time (except 
for me regularly washing the leads away when I leave the pencils in 
shirt pockets and put them through the wash). 2HB is probably a 
little harder than ideal, but it makes them last and the little 
lead poking out the end is a little less fragile.

Rubbers are also dirt cheap ones from a bulk pack at a discount 
store which have lasted me at least ten years now, littered around 
the house whever I might possibly want to write something. What I 
have eventually learnt is not to leave them in the sun for a long 
time or else their consistency changes and they just smudge. I 
avoid wearing out the ones on the end of the mechanical pencils 
since they're more useful for fine corrections. The rubber on the 
end of my 'good' 0.5mm pencil is exceptionally good, or perhaps all 
the others are especially cheap and nasty, but anyway they do the 
job.

Seemingly unlike many in Gopherspace who try to get away from using 
computers, I often feel that I write too much down manually. Paper 
notes pile up aground me like walls, and when I go to refer to 
something I have to manually scan through them all instead of 
simply doing a search for a key word in my text editor. That's if I 
can find the relevent piece of paper at all, which I frequently 
can't. Yet as a way of putting my thoughts down I prefer it. While 
I still remember where I wrote things I can go back to them quicker 
than by wading around in a huge text file, plus I can draw lines 
and arrows around freely to clearly expand on earlier writings 
without needing to rewrite the context. With electronics of course 
I can also doodle circuit diagrams, though eventually it is handy 
to put them into a circuit design program to at least get a netlist 
against which an eventual PCB design can be automatically checked 
for errors.

Mainly though my problem is writing too many notes either way. I'll 
write pages, then later read pages, but still not put down the 
couple of key pieces of information that I want later. It kills me, 
and it's part of why I tend to be slow doing things. But since I 
tend to just stop or go in circles in the face of problems if I 
resist writing notes in order to explain things to myself, I'm 
pretty resigned to it just being the best I can do when attemping 
the always-dubious objective of achieving something.

 - The Free Thinker