Nothing Beats a Cristal Bic
Not up for debate.
Ms. Jackson1 was my first grade teacher at Alma Easom Elementary.
She was a lovely, kind, and encouraging teacher. Aside from these general positive feelings and shadows of memories I can dig up from way back in first grade, there are 2 very specific things I remember about her.
She wore a lot of polkadot dresses.
She would roll her pen up and down between her hands - placed palm to palm in a sort of prayer position. Since she wore rings, the pen would *click click click* as it rolled up and down. I loved that sound. It was meditative. Like if thinking produced an external sound.2 The only pen she ever used was a Cristal Bic.
Aside from Ms. Jackson using this pen to make a sound I still to this day associate with meditative thought - it is also just the PERFECT PEN.3
Not too thick, not too thin.
Extremely dependable.
Light, but weighty enough in your hand that when you put the cap on the end that it feels stable.
Easy to control.
The medium black produces a sharp, fine line - but not so fine that it carves into the paper or looks wispy and weak.
Transparent, so no need to guess if you’re out of ink.
The only major con is that it’s plastic and, therefore, not great for the environment.4
I love this pen.
Do I love this pen enough to get this box of 500 and have them forever in case they ever stop making them?5
Who’s to say… Maybe yes6, maybe no…
*absolutely no promises on timing of the reveal
Much more pleasant that the booting up or crrssshahhshs that was to come a few years later from dial up internet
I will not debate this. Anything else, I’m open to… this though… I just feel exceptionally closed minded on.
They created a refillable metal version in 2021, but it’s silver and silver isn’t really my thing. Also, I don’t trust the weight, pliability, or sound-making ability of it. It’s also not readily available in the US. Yes, I look into this stuff maybe too much.
Billy once told me he really loved this one particular generic floss that his dentist gave him in the little party favor bag dentists give you after a biannual cleaning. After extensive research, I found out I couldn’t buy said floss in any retail stores. So, obviously, I found a dental wholesaler and bought 144 packs of floss at 18 yards a pack for $36 (shout out to chai and double chai). Billy has said he thinks we’ll never need to buy floss again since we have 7,776 feet of it (also, that’s less than half a penny a foot - don’t pay retail!), but if we assume about a foot of usage with each flossing and 2 flossing sessions a day it would take about 10 1/2 years to run out. We’re about 5 years from purchase date and are not even close to halfway through so either Billy isn’t flossing as much as he claims he is or, more likely, my assumption of 1 foot per flossing session was too much. So armed with this information, you may think “maybe yes” would be a better bet, but I just don’t think I have anywhere to put 500 pens unless I blow up a kiddie pool and swim in them like Scrooge McDuck swims in gold and I don’t have a kiddie pool.
footnote #6