Editing The Pen Addict 318/transcript (section)

== Introduction ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Hello, and welcome to episode 318 of The Pen Addict podcast. I'm your host, Brad Dowdy. And with me, once again, is not Myke Hurley. I don't know when he's coming back, if he's coming back, but that's okay, because my lineup of guests have been all stars and I have another all star with me today. And that's Les Herger. Thank you for joining me today, Les. I really appreciate it.

'''Les Herger:''' Well, no problem. It's my pleasure.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, and for those of you who don't know, and I'll let Les expand on these topics as we go through the show, she writes at the Comfortable Shoes Studio blog and is one of the three hosts of the RSVP podcast, which I'm a huge fan of. I'll have to admit, I'm like two episodes behind, maybe, but I always catch up at some point. So I appreciate the work that y'all do on that podcast. It's a great job. You, Dee, and Lenore do.

'''Les Herger:''' Oh, thank you.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' As I like to start with new guests to the show, I think most of our listeners like to get a good background for how you just started in stationary period, because what we do now is weird to begin with. So how did that happen? We talk about pens and pencils on the internet. Like, it's weird to say that out loud, but how did the weirdness start? You know, did it start like back when you were a kid, you know, as you were older? How did your love of stationary come about?

'''Les Herger:''' Really early. I was a really active kid, and there were three of us at home, and one of the ways that my parents would keep us busy was basically to throw a pad of paper, crayons, or pencils at me specifically. My brother's less so, but that would keep me occupied for hours on end. So, yeah, when I was in high school, I got a refillable stainless steel Pentel pen that I used for all of my art classes, and that was back in the 90s.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I don't like, I can't even picture what that would be. That's kind of cool.

'''Les Herger:''' It felt really fancy, and I know it was only like, you know, it was like a $5 pen. Right. But, you know, all of my friends wanted it, and one of my friends actually ended up stealing it. And she admitted, like, we got together for beers not long ago, and she actually admitted, she's like, yeah, I lied. I totally stole your pen on purpose. And I guess she used it all through college, so. Oh, my God. But, yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' When you're a kid, that's like a $100 pen at that age when you're in high school. That's a big-time pen, yeah, especially like in the 90s and stuff. Yeah. That's awesome. So was it, I'm assuming it was probably like a rollerball pen, you know, that was refillable or a ballpoint, something like that. Was that the style of pens that you kind of gravitated towards in high school? Like if you were just writing stuff, not, we'll talk about, you know, how you got more into the art and some of the tools that you used for that. But just from a writing perspective, were those the types of things you were using?

'''Les Herger:''' Yeah. I went for rollerballs. The Precise V, those were like the pen at my high school. Everyone wanted those Precise V, you know, the V5 pens.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know people, like, cared about what they were writing with if they showed up with one of those in class.

'''Les Herger:''' Yeah. Yeah. Those were like the fancy ones. But the Pentel, the stainless steel pen, it was a rollerball and it had this, like, it was very strange. Like it was the entire front end of the pen unscrewed and that's, you know, that disposed. And then it was like a whole new cartridge. It was just like, you know, these, the cap and then the main body of the pen that was, you know, you kept. But I've never been able to find them online.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, that's crazy. That'd be cool to kind of, like, research and find that one thing. My fancy pen when I was in high school, I'm a little bit older than you. Well, maybe a lot a bit older. In the 80s was like the Parker Vector. It had like a metal barrel rollerball. And they still make those today. Like you can still find them. But for some reason I saw, I don't know if you follow a blog called My Supply Room, a gentleman named George. He just posts like all this random huge collection that he has. And he posted this camo Parker Vector. And like all the memories came rushing back to me. Like I had this weird little camo pen that I used, you know, when I was in ninth grade going, oh, my gosh, that's it. Like I can't believe that thing still exists. And how many memories it brought back too. Like, you know, that stuff's important when we were kids, seeing how important it is to us now that we're adults.

'''Les Herger:''' Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just so fascinating to like look back at all of those things. And like, I mean, when I got together with the pen thief, like we had like this long discussion about how cool that pen was.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. And it's always interesting when you get the pen people around, the non-pen people, you can always rope them in, right? Like she stole that pen, but she probably never became like a pen person like you or I did. But she can still like have this conversation about this pen. And it was part of her, you know, growing up and going through school and had some experiences. And that's one of the things that I love about stationery. So how did this turn into a blog? How did you decide, well, I'm going to start writing about the things I use and sharing that on the internet?

'''Les Herger:''' So that, that, that, do we have time for this? Yes, we do. So I actually started blogging in, oh man, it was early days. It was like 2002, late 2002, early 2003. And initially my blog had nothing to do with art, nothing to do with stationery. I was writing about my breakup and the antics of my ex.