Be your own dork
About two weeks ago, a box arrived from Japan.
I’d been tracking this box, but not obsessively. I was trying really hard not to refresh the tracker every twenty minutes because I knew that would be a waste of time, and ultimately not useful since the tracker kind of stopped knowing where the box was after it made it to customs in NYC.
My husband was home when the box arrived, and he mustered as much enthusiasm as he could for the contents. He’s good about not raining on my little parades. Still, he can’t really share in the geeking out. He’s not really a stationery person; he keeps all his appointments in his Google Calendar on his iPhone and he can’t see any reason why anyone would do it differently. “It’s always with me and it reminds me.”
I get it. I really tried keeping appointments in my phone. I’m a modern enough gal. It’s not the same, though. I need to write out my to-dos next to my appointments and schedules so I can see it all together, so when I over-anticipate how much I can do in a day and feel bummed, I can see all the time blocked out by other stuff and get over it.
Besides, my phone doesn’t have Tomoe paper. Fountain pens are useless in an iPhone’s presence. And when I put stuff in my phone, it’s like it disappears into a dark hole as far as my brain is concerned because without reminders, I’d never know there was anything in the calendar. I’m not unorganized. I’m just analog.
I find that happens to be fairly often, the getting excited about things the people around me are immune to. Vegan food, pens, black lipstick, tiny foreign notebooks, new sai kata…
It also happens pretty often that people are excited about things I should be stoked about, but I’m just not.
— I cannot seem to like Pilot Frixon pens no matter how many people tell me they are a gift from the heavens. Ditto InkJoy pens.
— I have found few uses for washi tape and refuse to buy anymore until I find a use for what I have.
— Vintage fountain pens are great in theory, but do not make me as giddy as modern fountain pens in fun colors with feeds that don’t require virgin sacrifices to work properly.
— “Haul” posts generally make me squirm because as much as I love pens and paper and office supplies, I also feel guilty about my carbon footprint and plastic waste and gratuitous consumerism that exploits workers and the environment. Exactly, I’m a wet blanket and I think too much.
— I like learning and teaching self-defense as a way to write better fight scenes and train my body to do things other than sit and type fast or sit and read or basically be something other than a giant cat. I don’t really go for all the fear that goes along with self-defense training. By that I mean, I hear over and over about how scary the world is and how everyone needs a gun and how “you never know,” often from dudes over six feet tall who’ve managed to live through their most-likely-to-get-into-a-bar-fight years without needing to know how to fight off three people with knives. I mean, sure the news is scary, but statistically, the average adult is just not likely to end up in a John Wick situation or even a John McClane situation.
— I use both sides of my brain. I know it’s popular to be all “I’m left brained, I can’t draw” or “I’m right brained so I can’t do math,” but I want to be both. I love Excel and Photoshop. I like ArcMap and Scrivener. I like big abstract paintings and algebra.
— I quit paying attention to comics, manga, and anime because it seemed to require too much effort. There was entirely too much “fake geek girl” and judgement and I don’t have time to keep up with even the stuff I do like, much less all the stuff other people like so I’m not the outcast who likes the wrong thing. Y’all enjoy.
— Most crime fiction books outside the “noir” stuff offered up by small and indie presses bores me these days. I keep being told I need to read or thing or hearing hype and getting around to a thing, only to feel like I’m being bludgeoned by the thing. There are exceptions to this, yes. Will I tell you about them? Maybe in person. Because the books with the buzz or the recommendations are often really good books that just aren’t for me or aren’t finding me at the right time.
In the meantime, I added some tabs to my Hobonichi weekly section so it’ll be easier to navigate and I’m going to finish the GIS courses I’ve been working on, as well as the website I’ve been building.
In other words, I’ll be dorking out in my own way.
And you should, too. Don’t let other people tell you what you should and shouldn’t like. Don’t let other people mess with your passions or make you feel like you don’t belong. Be your own dork. Or geek. Or nerd. Or sparklewitch. (nod to Sabrina Barnett for that last one.)
