I Bought a Fountain Pen

As a child, I absolutely hated using fountain pens. I'm left-handed and quite impatient (at least, at the time), so writing involved a lot of hand cramps, ink smudges all over the paper, and stains on the side of my hand. On the days that you were particularly unlucky, one of the ink cartridges would sponaneously erupt in your pen holder, turning all contents blue. To make matters worse: my handwriting is also quite terrible, so the end could never quite justify the means for me either.

If I recall correctly, we learned to write in pencil in first grade of elementary, and were instructed to use fountain pens in all subsequent grades. Throughout this time, my parents had me experiment with all kinds of "beginner friendly" fountain pens, such as the STABILO EASY and the iconic LAMY abc. Unfortunately, my frustrations stuck, and after graduating to highschool I started using standard ballpoint pens as quickly as possible. Since then, I've always used whatever ballpoint pen I could find.

For some reason though, I keep bumping into people proclaiming how nice their fountain pens are. Initially, I figured this was some sort of "stationery chauvinism", but after reading post after post on the joys of fountain pens, I couldn't keep ignoring them. I finally caved after reading a post from Kev Quirk, in which he describes buying a pen with a left-handed nib.

Left-handed!? I never knew there was a difference! Could this be the solution to my endless ink-stained agony? (Or, perhaps I had simply purged that memory from my mind, as it seems my childhood pens were also left-handed).

Either way, I am now the increasingly proud owner of my very own LAMY safari. And it's fun! After fiddling around to get the ink to flow through the nib at first, I am now using it more and more. To demonstrate, here's some lorem ipsum:

Top: the LAMY safari. Bottom: some random ballpoint I used before. Whole page: terrible handwriting. If you happen to be a graphologist, feel free to let me know which psychological analysis you can derive from this photograph.

Is the fountain pen a straight upgrade? Not quite, as I find I cannot write super-fast yet, out of fear of ink blotches. While being forced to write slowly is probably good for journaling, it's a nuisance when trying to take meeting notes. Only one solution: find myself a nice ballpoint pen, next. :-)