Portable Stationery

Recently I came across this thread: What’s in your pencil case? Obviously, if you’re a postcard enthusiast who likes to travel, you want to make sure that you have all your essential writing utensils with you. The minimalist, of course, will just say that one pen is enough, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to make the back of a postcard visually interesting, you’ll need more than that.

Before the pandemic, I had a packed pencil case similar to the ones in that thread, but during the pandemic when I was trying to organize stuff at home, I decided to take everything out of the pencil case I had been using. However, whenever traveling becomes feasible again, I’ll repack a pencil case with what I consider essential postcard and journaling items:

• A 0.7 mm black gel pen (with at least one backup),
• A 0.5 mm black gel pen 
• A fine or extra fine black ballpoint pen
• A fine black sharpie
• An extra fine black sharpie
• Four 0.4 mm Stabilo pens of various colors, or equivalent
• A mechanical pencil
• A pair of scissors
• A ruler
• A couple rolls of washi tape (encompassing several themes)
• A roll of clear tape
• A variety of stickers
• Around 10-20 postcards with various themes
• A set of page flags
• Some envelopes
• Some postage stamps (if traveling within the US)

The trick is to try to pack as much of this stuff as one can in the smallest amount of space. I think I still have a ways to go to perfect that particular art.

Accents

I recently watched this on Youtube: Why Americans Including Asian Americans Have Issues with Foreign Accents. I agree that there are Americans who have some strange antipathy against people who don’t have standard accents, but this is also true in many parts of the world where certain accents have implications of ethnic groups, class, and socio-economic backgrounds. This just seems particularly prevalent in the US because, well, people are so vocal about it and it’s the most readily apparent because the US has many immigrants.

Perhaps other people have never noticed accents until they’ve ventured outside of their insular enclaves, but I’ve always been acutely aware of accents. It’s probably because I’m a child of immigrants–English is not my parents’ first language and even as a child, I’ve seen them discriminated against because they didn’t sound like a native speaker. (There have been times when I was a kid that I had to answer the phone because whatever crazy adult on the other end couldn’t handle my parents’ accents.) Technically English was not my first language either, but I learned it early enough that I mostly have “no accent” (or perhaps more accurately, the standard accent). If people do detect an accent in my speech, they would label it as Canadian.

I don’t really understand people who work themselves up into a frenzy because not everyone has a standard accent. Accents are an indication of someone’s background but it doesn’t indicate the true character of a person. I suspect some people use it as an excuse to divide the population into us and them because they are too lazy and too small-minded to try to get to know a new person. Unfortunately such people are still very pervasive in society and that’s why there are many who struggle to get rid of their own accents in order to get a job that would have been a no-brainer otherwise.

A Tentative Idea for Camp NaNo

With the April session of Camp NaNoWriMo just around the corner, this is basically the prime time for planning out some ideas for a new writing project. Unlike the November version, the April and July challenges are more relaxed and half the time, I don’t finish the challenge (I’m old school and keep my goals at 50,000 words–so even if I reach 25,000 and “fail”, I may have still written more than others who win with smaller goals.) I primarily use this time to test out ideas.

My thought was to play around with a written form that is usually not thought of as a straightforward storytelling device. Specifically, I want to tell interconnected short stories through entries in a fictional museum catalog. The museum and the artifacts within will be fictional. Through a curator’s voice, I want to hint that there’s something odd going on aside from the boring work of researchers and archivists through the stories and myths behind the objects on display.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been doing some pre-writing, trying to figure out what kind of narrative voice to take. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but I’m veering towards “apparently neutral yet deeply unsettling”. I have also been trying to get a firm visual in my head of the museum–I haven’t decided yet on whether to set it in some kind of historical palace or a modern building, but I definitely want to convey a sense of vastness, sort of like Borges’ The Library of Babel. 

And as for the artifacts populating the museum? I think they will come from all sorts of fictional times and eras and places and cultures. But mostly they will be MacGuffins, only serving as entryways into something else altogether.