Friday, August 24, 2007

Happiness is Warm Pencil Karma

I forget who is was who first introduced me to the concept of pen karma ( though I get the feeling it may have been the great sage Spaceman Jack Dee ) - roughly the idea goes that you are either in a good or bad karmic cycle with your relationship with biros. When it's good - they just COME to you. No matter what you do - you have a steady supply of pens on hand. Conversely, when you have bad pen karma nothing you do will stop you losing, misplacing or having your pens lost.

Being a teacher is GREAT for your positive pen karma. I am always picking up pens after a class - no matter what it be, or even if we've WRITTEN anything that lesson or not.

I've just been sorting through my secret cache of pens and checking which are worth keeping and which simply don't work or are beyond their prime, and I noticed an interesting thing - pretty much all the coloured pencils I've acquired through the turning of the wheels of fate are in the warm spectrum. Get a load of this colour breakdown :

Orange - 4
Red - 3
Brown - 4
Yellow - 3 ( well - one is more gold I guess )
White - 1
Green - 1
Blue - 1 ( but hopelessly smashed - had to be thrown away )

Weird eh ? I wonder why that is ? Maybe the warm tones are less noticeable on the carpet in the class rooms, or perhaps the warm spectrum colours are more expendable is the world of colouring in these days. I know from my own past that the 'blue' and 'black' were highly prized colours ( blues used for your steel armour and swords, black general shading and outlines ).

For those of you interested - the pens I've gathered so far this year number 27 :

Blue - 14
Black - 6
Red - 7

And that doesn't count the ones I've actively using in my pencil case. And NO - none of them are named ( okay - some of the pencils WERE and I just trimmed off the names with a craft knife, but those were only because they were bastards and I was simply doing the will of karma ).

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