A Bouquet of Sharpened Pencils

I remember hearing that from Meg Ryan on You've Got Mail, and I've always liked that.



School will open here next week, and with it will come heavy traffic jams, streets teeming with pedestrians, and general mayhem in school zones. Every where I look, school supplies are abundantly displayed in stores. Most of the parents I see on the streets are toting huge plastic bags (stress, kelan kaya masasanay ang pinoy na gumamit ng eco bag?) crammed with notebooks, pads of paper, crayons, rulers, pencils and other whatnots.



I, personally, am addicted to school and office supplies. Nards knows this. Often, when he loses me inside a department store, he'd invariably find me in the stationery section browsing through all the items on the shelves and glass counter.



And I've always had a thing for notebooks. I have this COMPULSION to buy notebooks, even though I don't go to class anymore, and I just list down things. (Like right now, I have a notebook on my weightloss project. Another one on photography. There's another one for recipes. Another one that serves as my dream journal.) You know how there's a bag lady? Well, if there was a notebook lady, I'd probably be her.



But going back to the pencils. I remember I used to have this green Kero Keropi pencil holder that I filled with Mongol No. 2 pencils. Every morning, I'd get a kick of keeping all those pencils uniformly sharpened. And when things got stressful, the sight of those pointed lead tips always relaxed me a bit. I remember my number one pet peeve was when people, without my permission, grab a pencil from my holder. Worse, they don't return it.



I miss my bouquet of sharpened pencils. It's been replaced by this dual ink gel pen (that I picked up from the Japan store -- the Japanese have the best school supplies!) and my highlighter with a little post-it dispenser.



I miss school.







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This blog entry was borne out of the blahs. I should be working on the revisions on my paper which is due tomorrow. But I'm not in the mood to write. So I wrote this entry instead hoping to kick start my motivation.



...it's not working. I'd rather play video games.





[photo source]