Going radial

And just like all other brilliant things that came into my life, this one came to me at random, while I was looking for something else.

I think I was looking for a bag. Now I have already forgotten exactly what bag I was looking for. For all I know, I could have been looking for a book, or sunblock, or RCA cables. Whatever it was, it led to me to Patrick Ng’s blog, and the gorgeous nostalgic photos and the travel concept drew me in, and I just browsed and browsed and kept on browsing. Little did I know that I was being sucked into an entirely new world of technology-tinted analog.

And then I saw the Chronodex, and I fell in love with the idea straight away.

How wonderful to have an actual clock to mark my appointments on! By shading certain times, I can see at a glance if my afternoon was already full, or how much time I have allotted for a particular task, or if I have reserved enough time to make calls and send out emails. By using different colors, I can see how much of my days are spent on meetings, editorial work, production work, research, and reading. By blocking off certain times, I can dedicate that time to doing the more important tasks that need my concentration. There are so many possibilities with this format, and it’s not restrictive like the usual linear planners.

It can also be used for mind-mapping. Apparently a lot of people from the creative fields find this radial system really to their liking, because it allows for a more visual representation of actual time. With the Chronodex cores, the day is not just a series of hours that pass us by, but an actual pocket of existence that we can all grasp, make sense of, appreciate, and optimize. The day can now be seen as a wonderful, pliable tool that can tell us where we are at any given moment, like a compass of sorts, but referring to time instead of location.

A compass for time. How strange an idea, but in an amazingly efficient way.

Another advantage of this system is that it comes in printable files, giving me the freedom to lay out the cores according to how I need them, on the paper and notebook that I prefer. Here you can see that I have them on a week-to-a-spread layout, with cores only for the weekdays and none for the weekends.

Some people have laid them out day-to-a-page, allowing them more space on the paper to write down notes, reminders, and lists. Some have printed the cores out on sticker paper, and just stick that on their existing planners as needed.

There is also a Chronodex stamp in the works. And apparently there is even an iPad app for it.

Now, a couple of weeks into this system, I am loving it even more. And as I find myself being able to do more things in less time, I shall move to a core-to-a-page format soon, because I need more space on the paper for listing down actual unexpected and unplanned accomplishments for the day. Yes, I now have those. The Chronodex has helped me use my time more productively, leaving me more time for play, which in turn leads me to more creative discoveries, which of course I need to note down, because memory is a tricky thing.

If you are looking for a new system of organizing your days, this could be something that’s worth looking into. It has certainly worked wonderfully for me.

[Image credits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Just a blog

I recently have had time to revisit my old blog posts, from five years back, and I’m quite amused by all the energy and time I have put in to make each blog post substantially grim and ponderous. I certainly thought blogging was a good way to practice writing, and I still think the same way now, but years ago, I must have felt that each blog post must be worthy of being quoted and noted and cited and reviewed. Such was the effort I put into each of them, and such was the gravity I have invested in them.

Which probably explains why I have not been able to keep it up for very long. Seriously, no one really blogs like that all the time. Even the most serious and celebrated writers that I admire tend to blog about less serious matters in less serious tones more often than I would care to admit. It was only little old me who tried to convince myself that every word that comes out of me and onto the page must resonate with magnitude, and must be worthy of intensive contemplation afterwards.

But then again, this is just a blog, and there are so many things to write about other than weighty and grave issues, and there are a million different ways to write about such things. Certainly it would benefit me to explore these many ways of writing and these myriad of topics to write about, topics that are fun, serious, weighty, flighty, frivolous, sad, annoying, hilarious, somber, silly, tentative, convoluted, open-ended. Because I don’t need to have all the answers, not right now, not for every blog post.

Many of you who have been reading my blog for sometime now may have noticed the new kind of blog posts I have been uploading since the beginning of 2013. Now I talk about things that I like, on top of keeping up with writing about matters and subjects that are important to me. After all, I still write so many more things other than blog posts, works that are longer, and for publication; I can be serious there.

It is quite liberating to finally be able to blog this way. By tweaking my own blogging standards a little bit, I get to share more of what I actually like, like fountain pens, inks, papers, notebooks, books, movies, physics, gadgets, people, family, love, moments, trips -- tangible and palpable things that need no abstractions. This new mix is something I like very much, and I hope you like it as well. And as my blog evolves yet again, I hope you continue to be with me as I try to make sense of things in this random, random universe.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Summer in my pocket

Ever since I was a child, I have always considered the first day of March to be the first day of summer. Even though school was not yet done for the academic school year, there was always an anticipation in the air, and the deeply comforting fact that school would always eventually end at some point in March, and then I would be free to get out of bed whenever I want, read whatever books I wanted that school did not require of me, and pretty much spend my days without planning anything beforehand.

I absolutely looked forward to summer every year when I was a child. For me summer was always this hot, dry, dusty pocket of time inside a year of on-again-off-again rains. And because in my grownup years I do not really get to experience it much anymore, because office work goes on and on consistently, every day, Mondays through Fridays, no matter the season, summer then attained a kind of mysticism for me. I have grown to love the rain, yes, but summer would always be that wonderful, magical time of year that was for children only. And each time summer comes, I would take a moment everyday to remember the child that I once was, growing up in the barrio, running around the great big lawn, climbing up the trees to stay in a branch and read a book, making paper dolls, picking petals off flowers and pasting them onto the pages of my notebooks.

Recently I have discovered a fountain pen ink that carries all of this wonderful nostalgia of summer: Diamine Kelly Green.

It’s a light and happy shade of green, and when used with good paper, especially one that is made for fountain pens, like the 85g cream Clairefontaine paper that is inside the Quo Vadis Habana, the shading properties of the ink is enhanced. I have loaded it inside a Lamy with a 1.5 italic nib so I can lay down more of this ink with every stroke, and it’s now my everyday pick-me-upper. Writing with this ink always makes me feel better about things, all the more if I am writing about the things that make me happy, like so:

This is one of my favorite everyday writing inks, because I like carrying a piece of summer with me.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

Other lives

As a writer, I find it necessary to wonder about the lives of others, and in so doing, furnish my own writer’s treasure chest of words and phrases with the plausible details that make up a believable story. But on top of that, I am also required to look inside my own life, open my own windows to my soul, and speak to the memories and the dreams that lie there, in the hope of getting a grip on what makes my own heart beat.

It isn’t easy. It is far easier to look at what little we know about the lives of others than to look inside our own dark abyss and grapple with the unknowns swimming inside those murky depths. To do this requires a deep-seated and ancient sensibility, which I don't have. So I look outwards, towards the lives of others, and make up stories in my head and in my drafts about them, plots of my own doing, inventions and fabrications that spice up my own reality.

Such has been my long-time habit as writer. I wonder about other lives, other worlds, in the quest to gather details that make up a good story. This comes easy for me, since I live my life fairly quietly, not too publicly, and with a propensity for taking down copious notes.

And perhaps this is how it will be for now. I will look less inside myself and more into the activities, concerns, troubles, affectations, and outward lives of others, as quietly as I can, as invisibly as I can, and store them all inside my writer’s treasure chest of words and details. Someday, I will open that chest.

[Image credits: 1, 2]

My vials

At one corner of my desk at the office there sits a test tube rack for forty test tubes. However, instead of holding test tubes, it holds ink vials, thirty-one in all. Each ink vial holds one color of fountain pen ink, and the vials are labeled with the brand and color of the ink they contain.

I decided to use this system so I can finally keep my original ink bottles in a cool, dark container where they should be stored, instead of sitting haphazardly at whatever surface was free on either of my desks at the office or at home, and sometimes even residing inside an assortment of bags.

One day I chanced upon this idea on The Fountain Pen Network, which we lovingly call The Nuthouse, and got myself this rack and forty ink vials.

Now my original ink bottles are all safe and sound in a cool, dark place, away from light and dust and the rest of the world, while this ink rack stands at my desk in the office, so all my inks are available to me in case I want to refill a fountain pen or want to write with my dip pens.

This is indeed a brilliant idea, although sometimes people who come to my desk tend to ask me why I am keeping blood samples. Then I have to tell them about the inks and the fountain pens and the paper, which makes me look just a little bit crazy. But then again, that’s a small price to pay for this convenience.

Morning, noon, and night

This year’s Valentine’s Day was low-key, but special. Mr. T just gave me one long-stemmed rose in the morning, another one at noon, and another one at night.

And then we went home early to have dinner at home and watch a romantic movie and a few episodes of our favorite funny TV show.

Simple, sweet, and real. Thank you, Mr. T, for always finding ways to make me happy.

[Image credit]

Old hobbies and old habits

When I was ten years old my grandmother, Bita, taught me how to do cross stitch. She gave me a pattern of a silhouette of a lady in a ball gown carrying a fan and standing beside a tall plant. The pattern required only one shade of embroidery floss, and it was fairly easy to do. All I needed to remember were: stitch only in one uniform direction, keep the thread tension even, and never to let the floss become twisted upon itself.

I have been doing cross stitch ever since, and over the years, I have learned and maintained a steady hand, and have nurtured an obsession about flosses laying flat against the fabric. I have learned to hold the work up to a light source at an angle, to check if the light reflects off the floss uniformly. Any stitch that reflects light differently will have to be redone. And for as long as I kept true to these rules, my work would be okay.

So far I have pretty much lived up to Bita’s standards. About a decade and a half ago I have graduated from stitching on basket weave and aida cloth, and have turned to stitching on linen, which other stitchers found more difficult. I didn’t; I just found it different. I chose linen because the designs tend to stand out more dramatically, and I chose patterns of elegant ladies and fairies draped in the most sumptuous fabrics and prints in the most gorgeous colors, with a profusion of wavy hair, and with beads and metallic threads and other wonderful embellishments.

Indeed, this was no longer the cross stitch of my childhood. This was spectacular, grown-up cross stitch that showed women brooding over the men they love, angels in a rich swathe of clouds and cloth bringing serenity to a troubled lover, half-naked fairies with voluptuous curves laughing under the moonlight. This was something we do not simply turn into pillowcases and tablecloths. This was art to be framed and displayed as they are.

But complicated though the designs were, the technique to be used in stitching them was just the same, and there are still those three same things to remember: stitch only in one uniform direction, keep the thread tension even, and never to let the floss become twisted upon itself.

Over the years I have kept up this hobby, but in a less persistent fashion. Sometimes I let a project go untouched for months on end. Sometimes I spend entire 48-hour stretches doing nothing but that project, stopping only to eat and nap. But more or less cross stitching has stayed in my life, and the compulsive orderliness of process and placement that went with it.

Bita herself no longer does cross stitch. Her eyes have become too weak, her hands are not so steady anymore, and her back can no longer endure her sitting up straight for more than fifteen minutes. But sometimes I wonder if she really has stopped doing cross stitch. Because for as long as I have known her, even up to know, she has maintained that compulsive orderliness on laying out her bed linens and her clothes each time, in how she places her slippers at the side of her bed, even in how she hangs the towels. Things have to be placed just so, to reflect a particular meticulous disposition, as if she was making sure her strands always lie flat and the stitches are always in one uniform direction. This is what she has taught me: it’s a good thing to have order.

Image credits: 1, 2, 3

Blogging, changing, and bearing witness

Blogging for me is a way to mark the quieter but no less significant moments and movements in my life. The traditional markers that we have are usually for the milestones, the popular, the public, the historical. Get married, and you’re the star of the week. Have a baby, and you are bombarded with well-wishers. Earn a degree, you get to be on the yearbook and in the march. Publish a book, and you’re in the promotional write-ups. Win an award, and you’re practically everywhere. Those things are rather hard to miss. But what about the things that happen to us without the benefit of a witness or any pomp and circumstance? Such as finishing reading a really difficult but essential book, or finally finding the last element to a work in progress that has long been missing, or even just successfully cleaning out one’s junk after a long, long time. It could be about finding an old memento and the memories they bring back. It could also be about something not so insular, such as meeting a long-lost friend, some thoughts on a movie, impressions of a visit to an art exhibit, taking a walk.

It’s natural to write about these things in our diary, since a diary is an attempt to catch the fleeting moment and make sense of things, and we all need that kind and level of introspection. But when we begin to blog about certain things that we usually keep in private in our diary, we are effectively making a declaration that our introspection is relevant to society, and that we feel that we have something to say that should be paid attention to. A blog can be a kind of drum roll, perhaps, or it can be a coin into the well of discourse, or simply an invitation for others to be witness to our life. It’s human nature to seek acknowledgement; it’s human nature to want to reach out.

Being a writer, I came into blogging late, and I began my blog without any plans or expectations whatsoever. I began it when the year 2005 was about to end, and I thought I would just wing it. After a couple of weeks worth of posts, I thought it might be fun to attempt to join my two great loves, writing and physics, in my blog. The former is a public love, and its presence in my life has defined how people have been perceiving me for years. The latter is a secret love, born a little later in me, but has nevertheless lived in me long enough for me to know that I would make sacrifices for it if need be. That lasted for a couple of months, as my readings in physics had to give way to the more mundane routine everyday things and issues. Now my blog has become a blog of love and reading and love of reading and about reading as a writer and about writing for love, and about tools for writing and my love for these, and my blog has become nothing like it was when it began.

This changeability, this ease of transformation, is any blog’s greatest strength. My blog will change again into something else, announcing moments, sounding my drum roll, inviting people to be witness to my life and to my attempts at making sense of things.

[Image credit]

Circle

Even when I was growing up in the midst of thirty or so cousins, I have always chosen to be alone, reading books, writing something or other, making paper dolls, tinkering with a craft. And I was fine. I grew up a loner by choice, and I have learned to guard my solitude by slowly developing a subtle set of habits that would naturally and instinctively make people stop approaching me when they get to a certain degree of proximity. As I grew older I also grew more and more introspective, and I remember some of my happiest moments to be when I would be sitting in my own warm, dark, limpid pool of thoughts as the world passed me by in multicolored windy frenzy. I grew more and more set in my ways in this murky, arcane wilderness that I nurtured, the people around me still there, but always just at the borderline that I have set for them.

I’m not sure if they noticed. If anyone noticed, I think they just decided to respect my reticent ways as a part of who I am. And I have been pretty consistent with it for most of my life. Friends, cousins, other relatives, classmates, cousins, siblings, officemates, long-ago boyfriends, they have always kept a genteel distance, leaving me free to wallow and revel in the privacy of having my own time and my own space and my own being. Even my very own son has learned to let me be, and we have learned to live in a state of cultured togetherness. And for the almost four decades that I have been alive, this has been so.

But then came T, and everything changed. Now I have more friends than ever, and noisy Friday nights, and talk of guns and movies and rock stars and New Wave and superheroes and dogs, sons and school and travel and mountains and boat rides, and I am not so reticent anymore. I have learned to reach out and talk to people, to call them up to ask how they are from time to time, and to share my opinions and stories with them. This is my circle now, and it's full of color, and it’s growing bigger and bigger, like my world, like my heart, like my life with T.

[Image credit]

Onion skin love (a review)

I have always loved onion skin. Its classic persona and its sheer age (it's been around for a very long time) truly appeals to me. And although some newer lightweight papers like the legendary and very elusive Tomoe River Paper seem to have more oomph, I say a classic becomes and remains a classic for a reason.

One evening I rummaged through my old paper stash and found two reams of what is labelled Superfine Onion Skin Paper.

The label on the pack says Transword Paper. I am assuming that is the name of the manufacturer. It is distributed by the Kyota Paper and Printing Corporation, and retailed by National Bookstore. I think I purchased this sometime in 2010.

This is US Letter size. One ream (500 sheets) cost 123.50 Philippine Pesos, which converts to roughly 3 US Dollars.

I have always used onion skin, mostly as carbon copies of my daily typewritten letters to my son, but I have never used a fountain pen on this particular paper before. So I decided to try using my fountain pens on it, and the results were quite nice.

As onion skin paper goes, this is very thin and light. This Superfine Onion Skin is relatively smooth to the touch, and has just the faintest hint of texture. It's not as smooth as Substance 24 paper, though.

The color is a little bit off-white. It is neither cream nor ivory. It is brighter than the ivory 85g Clairefontaine paper.

Here are some writing samples.

As you can see, there is no feathering on this paper! The ink actually does just tend to pool, which can be evident from the way the lines dry, but that's okay. More pooling means more enhanced shading.

However, despite the pooling, the shading is more subtle on this paper than on, say, the 85g Clairefontaine paper, but I can't expect too much from a paper that's labeled Substance 8!

Here is the back side of the paper. There is absolutely no bleed-through, which I like.

I like it, actually. In fact, I like it so much that I had a friend from a printing press make a perfect-bound notebook for me using this paper. Not too thick, or it will look like a Bible, and not too thin that it flops around. This little notebook contains about half a ream. It's covered in tagboard material.

Here is how the binding looks. It's done well.

And the pages lay flat when the notebook is opened, too. I suppose because the paper is so floppy, it will indeed tend to lie flat.

I cannot write properly without ruled paper so I will just use lined paper underneath the page as I write.

I had it cut down to 6.25 inches wide by 9.25 inches wide, the same size as my notebook of choice the Quo Vadis Habana A5, so that when I'm done writing on this volume, I can stand it up alongside the other volumes and the arrangement will look orderly.

Not bad! I need to get more of this paper.

Out with the old and the ineffective

And just as the idea of living in a New Year has propelled us to change certain things in our lives, so have I thrown out something I used to really love and taken great joy in, but which has now changed for the worse: the Moleskine.

I first turned to the Moleskine about less than a decade ago, enamored with its creamy, acid-free paper that was able to take even the wettest of my fountain pens and the most watery of my inks. I have used up quite a lot!

But these past months, all my inks heave feathered and bled through the formerly-awesome Moleskine paper, and I had no choice but to abandon it completely and to look for a replacement "forever notebook." I browsed through most of FPN and Googled notebook reviews like crazy, and trooped to the local brick-and-mortar store and purchased several notebooks off the shelves for serious testing with fountain pens. It did take time, and a whole lot of reasoning with myself, done mostly on the now-bad pages of the Moleskine I was writing on at the time, but eventually, as life goes, I found something else, which completely justified my decision to switch.

Enter the Quo Vadis.

I found the Quo Vadis Habana Smooth in a local store. That same store did have the Habana as well, but the Picasso and Matisse ones, instead of the classic black ones. So since I was just going to try it out first, I opted for the Habana Smooth, in A5 size (6.25 inches wide by 9.25 inches high).

The main difference between the Habana Smooth and the Habana is that the Habana Smooth has only 96 pages, and comes in soft covers without the elastic closure, and in different colors. Each pack has two Habana Smooth notebooks. Here I have them in (L-R) Iced Coffee, Purple, Red, Raspberry, and Watermelon.

From top to bottom, it's Watermelon, Purple, Red, Raspberry, and Iced Coffee.

The pack is sealed in clear shrink-wrap, and has a band. Here is the front of the band. It says 85g, referring to the paper.

The Habana line changed its paper sometime in 2011, from the white 90g Clairefontaine paper with the 7mm ruling, to the 85g ivory Clairefontaine paper with 5.5 mm ruling. Here is Brian Goulet's comparison video between the old and the new Habana papers.

The back of the band proudly proclaims Quo Vadis's Environmental Charter, which I truly appreciate.

The front cover of the notebook is quite plain, with an embossing of the Quo Vadis logo on the lower right corner. I like the classic elegance of this design.

The back cover bears the full Quo Vadis logo on the center bottom of the cover.

The embossings are done very neatly, and for me it's one proof of a high quality product.

Upon opening the notebook, there is a small accordion pamphlet that features all the notebooks and agendas manufactured by Quo Vadis.

And now for the best part: the paper!

Here is the 85g ivory Clairefontaine paper, with the 5.5 mm ruling composed of small gray dots. I think it's very understated and elegant, because once the page gets fully written on, the lines seem to just recede a little into the background, so they no longer intrude into the vision of the reader.

Now here is the ink test. I used all the ink I had! For those inks that were not loaded into pens at the moment, I used the Brause 361, also known as the Blue Pumpkin.

Here is the back of the page I wrote on. Note that there is no bleed-through, except for when I used Noodler's Borealis Black and De Atramentis Christmas 2012, both with the Blue Pumpkin.

There is definitely some ghosting, but I didn't mind that. I actually like ghosting to some degree, because it reminds me of onion skin paper, which I also love.

The inks did not feather on the paper, except for both Noodler's Borealis Black and De Atramentis Christmas 2012, which feathered like crazy.

As you can see, the paper is very, very good. It really shows off the properties of the fountain pen ink and the nib you use it with. I like how fountain pens write, especially the shading, and I always prefer paper that shows off shading, so that people will know I didn't use just any pen. The Habana paper achieves this for me perfectly. The paper is very smooth to write on, but is not too slippery. The ivory color shows off the ink colors very well.

All in all, I am very happy with the notebook. I go through one notebook every two to three weeks, and I like having a variety of cover colors to choose from. Eventually I will be moving to the Habana with the hardcover and the elastic closure, but for now, I just want to enjoy having colors, after years of sticking with just a black Moleskine.

I also like the larger size, because I can get more writing into a page, and it's easier to skim through when I'm looking for a particular keyword, compared with smaller notebooks which I need to flip through more just to find what I'm looking for.

I'm glad I found this notebook. I have already stocked up, as you can see. And then it will be on to the Habana A5, classic black. But for now, I am really enjoying the bright colors of the Habana Smooth.

Here they are once more, in the late afternoon sun. Pretty!

I can definitely see myself using this notebook for a very long time.