Pen Porn
Some people have embarrassing addictions. Porn. Gambling. Shoes. Well here's my deep, dark secret....

I have a thing for office supplies. (The first step is admitting you have a problem.)

Hello, my name is Decca and I'm a pen addict.

I have no idea where this comes from, but I love office supplies. I am constantly on the lookout for the perfect pen. And here's where Husband and I differ. For him it has to be black ink, fine point. Me, I'm a blue ink girl, medium point. I can't stop the search for the One. The pen that feels perfect in my hand. Is great for both writing and doodling. With just the right color of blue. I have no idea how many pens I've bought, only to be disappointed when it turned out they skipped, smudged, or just never called me again.

But this craving isn't limited to pens. Nope, I love all-things office supply related. Brightly-colored file folders. Staplers. Paper clips. Highlighters. (Oh man do I love the highlighters. Of course I haven't had need of a highlighter since grad school, but those neon colors just get me every time.) Binder clips, God's gift to the terminally disorganized. It's like Office Depot is my Nordstrom.

Occasionally this compulsion takes an international twist. This happened after Husband and I discovered the superiority of Japanese supplies. There's a Japanese store we've been to that sells everything from J-pop CDs to an orgasmic assortment of pens and notebooks. Shopping for notebooks there is like buying crack. The soft covers. The thick pages. The photos of tiny bunnies, sexy anime characters, or the phrase "stop me before I buy another fucking Japanese notebook I'll never get around to using" in Kanji.

You'd think with all these tools I'd have the most organized home office ever. And you'd be wrong. I don't actually use all of these, I just have them. The binder clips see more action keeping cereal packages closed than keeping our tax paperwork together. The highlighters sit mockingly in an old coffee cup on the desk, taunting me to highlight something...anything...just to give them a workout. The pens get a bit more work, writing checks, grocery lists, memo reminders. But I still don't do justice to their quality. The porn-soft leather notebooks sit in piles, waiting to be used....but I've only used about 1/17th of the last notebook I bought and I'm not ready to give that one up yet.

The one thing that gives me comfort is that I'm not alone in my weirdness. Husband has the same addiction. I can't get him out of the Japanese store without at least pens. Yesterday he spent about five minutes looking all over the house for his perfect baseball-scorekeeping pencil. There were pens and pencils in abundance, but he had to have this specific pencil or else the baseball-scorekeeping would be sub-optimum. Freak. You'd never catch me doing something that obsessive.