Pencil Fixation*

Yes.

I want it

fat,

hard,

and

sharp.

I want it to

just

barely

fill

my

hand.

Pencils. The Goliaths.

***

I learned to write (and when I say "learning to write," it involves sheets of paper with blue and red linings, riddled with thick lines in every imaginable orientation, but then, imagine the sense of direction of a four-year old and well...you know.) with Goliath pencils. It has something to do with children under seven not having refined motor skills, so the pencils must be fat and long and hard (steadier on the hand).

After the unintelligible (although the scribbles could mean something to some obscure sect, maybe they'd find encrypted in kindergarten calligraphy the meaning of life, or some equally high order wisdom) scrawls, it's the ABC's. Then I start writing words. DOG. GOD. CAT. RAT. CUNNILINGUS. (No, that wasn't the four-year old me. That was me test driving a new pencil).

So I lost yet another Pilot G-Tec after Saturday night's voter registration. It was crazy. Deadline was the first minute of All Saints Day, 12:00, Nov 1. My sister and I got started on Step 1 of 7 at 11 pm. The literal 11th hour. Wait. This is another story, which ends with the pen being lost anyway. Let me park the story of how I ended the night wiping ink off my thumbs.

Oh. Right. The lost G-Tec. These murder-fine point pens cost P70 each. The hair strand tip makes my already ugly handwriting uglier. I lost Basilio (that's the name of my lost pen) while I was asking for more tokwa to go with my goto. I decided I was depressed, and I am entitled to do retail therapy...at National Bookstore.

Forty-nine minutes. This is my average pen-shopping time. I'd buy a dozen at times, only 3 of which I'd ever get to use an entire sentence. The nine left, I'd use to write at least one word, which is, more often than not, "doppelganger". (It could be "cow" if I'm lazy.)

I was having an unusually hard time picking out a pen that day. This, I attribute to not having sugar for almost a day (another story). So I figured, why don't I buy a pencil. Back to the basics. Back to when I was writing words that don't make men want to turn their liver into liver spread. Back to trying to stay within the right red and blue lines, and having an eraser handy to fix mistakes that could make me repeat Kinder II. Back to when the world was more forgiving, and so was I.

I asked some saleslady where their school pencils are. She asked me, "Misis, ilang taon na yung anak ninyo?" I looked at her, from the pimples on her forehead, to the dust on her shoes, and I walked away, whispering something in a language that I just invented. There's this smelly 11-year old kid (a fat one, who is probably using the same size of underwear as his Dad's.) by that section I was heading for. I had to go elsewhere.

Anyway, I ended up with a Zip-Loc blue mechanical pencil. I didn't buy a stash of leads, I'll just waste them by attempting acupuncture on myself. The pen, it sits by my new notebook. I last used the new pen to write "buy lead."

*Oh. This wasn't really about sex.