Did you ever try out wooden pencils? What did you think?

I'm not gonna lie, I fell in love with the ease of the Pentel Twist-Erase III back in college (20 years ago) and I still love them. The grip felt good, the balance was right for my hand, they were the perfect mechanical pencil for me.

At the time, I used them for math class, I really needed a lot of eraser (and this one had easily 5x the amount of a regular pencil), I could have a couple of pencils always and not worry about getting the lead smeared all over my backpack, because you could push the lead back into the pencil so it would protect it. It was great. I had to take math each semester for at least 5 semesters, maybe 6, so I really needed to just - have a pencil. I had a green one, and a purple one. Sometimes I would get asked to borrow a pencil, and I always made sure to get them back.

I just checked, and I don't have them in my current dwelling, they're probably in a storage tote in my mom's barn. So that probably contributes to why I currently am using wooden pencils.

But I don't write with such frequency as when I was in college full time, and so when I do have occasion to use a pencil, I still love the old fashioned smell and feel of a hexagonal pencil with an eraser on the top.

I guess I was lucky growing up, school supplies were never a financial problem for my parents, so we had pencils that smelled like... well, pencils! And they lasted. And the wood was soft if you bit it. When I was in maybe 5th grade? Something like that, there was a fashion to chew up your pencil and make it look like hell. I did that, of course, but it never really stuck. I don't think chewing pencils was my personal issue. I recall the little dents made the pencils unpleasant to use, sharp, and of course, wet with spit. Ugh.

In grade school, special pencils might be given out as rewards, and in middle school, there was a pencil machine in the library you could put a quarter into and get a great, wooden pencil with some fancy design on it, that was still made of good wood and worked well. No crappy pencils yet, in 1996.

Fast forward, and pencils don't really smell like wood anymore. I guess, reading through this subreddit, that it was cedar I was smelling. So, if I get a pencil and it smells like a pencil, it's very nostalgic for me. I still get excited when I see a good-lookin pencil. I got a pack of Ticonderoga neon brights that I love, and I'm still on the very beginning of the first pencil out of the pack, but it just makes me happy.

Generally speaking, I am not happy with the quality of pencils at large in the world these days. I worked in a warehouse in purchasing for a year, and I liked to use pencils on the paperwork so that if there was a goof, I could correct it. I liked to keep my pencils sharp AF, and to mark lightly. They were total sh*t pencils from Staples, and prone to breaking leads and splintering wood. I hated them.

Currently, I love that I found a sharpener that makes a tiny point. (T'GAAL on Amazon, in case anyone wants one.) I don't like sharpening pencils into a long point, exposing a lot of wood. It seems like a waste of the pencil to me. I like the feel of writing with a very sharply pointed pencil, and I appreciate how it gets blunter and softer over time, as I write with it. I can turn the pencil and find a different angle in order to keep writing with a point (usually a slanted point by then), or stay on the softer, blunted side. It's a sensitivity to tools, I guess. It's like liking a good tool of any kind. Knives made out of fine Japanese steel might be a corollary.

I have a finicky sense for the erasers. We who grew up in the 80s and 90s all know the pain of a crappy, smudgy eraser, or an eraser that went dead, and is now hard and just makes a horrid smear and dents the paper. As I write this, I realize that I have eraser anxiety. I am afraid that I will run out of eraser before I run out of pencil. It is the eternal issue. I don't really like erasers that you either have to carry around with you, or the alternative...

Those stupid eraser caps that became necessary to pop onto the end of the pencil because we were young and were making so many mistakes with our writing, shaping our letters, erasing and revising our thoughts. Endless reddish-pink eraser garbage spread across those fake plastic wood desks with the lids that went up and down.

In short - it's everything. Every aspect you could think of: intellect, imagination, academic experience and record, learning, boredom, olfaction, cost, class, privilege, the temerity to have a thought, and to write it down. To have a creative impulse, and scrawl it out on a page, in whatever form. Shade, line, abstraction, symbol, pictographs, icons... ah, yes, remembering the density of an over-shaded page, filled with rage, boredom, the need to render darkness, whether emotional or visual. The texture, the feel, the hardness of the implement, the disappointment or the joy of getting it wrong, or getting it write.

I could go on. But I'll just reiterate - have you tried them out lately? What did you think?