What inspires you? What makes you want to create something new in life? What activity, sight or sound makes you feel more connected to self and spirit?

I love inspiration! There was a time when only spiritual topics and practices inspired me, and while they still do in some degree, I have found many other things not deemed officially spiritual in life that connects me to a deeper aspect of self, hence feeds and brings out spirit into my awareness.

Here are some things that inspire me; good music, a haunting powerful poem, a creative new novel, a well written biography of a dynamic person, a movie, a phone call from a friend, a well written or funny post on GR, solving a problem, being shown a new artist, musician or a new film director, visiting a new location, meeting a new person, visiting a familiar location and finding something new, realizing something new about my self, helping someone else without expecting anything in return, good long conversations with friends or family.

To get more specific to my tastes; a new novel by Haruki Murakami or Lama Surya das. A new font created by Suzana Licko, a new book designed by Chip Kidd, a new album by the White Stripes, Neil Young, Patti Smith or Tom Waits. A visit to the National Gallery of Art or to any smaller gallery featuring a new artist. A film made by Jim Jarmusch or any new dramas on HBO. Getting a new sketchbook that needs to be filled or a new journal to write in. Being able to hold the door for someone who has their hands full, giving my nephew drawing lessons. Getting a call from my boyhood friend Joe (Jayadeva). Spending the day with my wife, talking, shopping and watching a movie. Going into the most run down part of an urban city and taking photographs and being amazed at what comes out once you download and look at the photos. Early summer mornings when the sun is just rising and the birds are singing while you get to walk barefoot on grass full of dew! Laughing and making other people laugh! Giving complements and inspiring others.

So friends…what inspires you?

I envy you, Kalisurfer, that you're inspired by so many things. In my case, it's much less. At the moment, somebody might have noticed, the poetry of Rilke, and Ramayana again. And of course there's always music - all sorts, but when I am working on a photograph I often play Ry Cooder or Gillian Welch.
In photography I am at the moment inspired by sand. This picture here, made last week, is one such example of sand on a glass plate:

i am curious to see this new font that inspires you

Great question!

Art inspires me, especially images of powerful women or disenfranchised people taking their power back, or images of poverty or suffering that inspire me to do more to alleviate it. Music constantly inspires me, Ani DiFranco and John Lennon feed my drive to work for social justice and take responsibility to participate in our system of government and be informed. (There are legions of other songwriters who do the same.) Books inspire me, stories about people who make a difference in the world inspire me, books about spiritual journeys or triumph over illness or oppression inspire me. Poetry and quotes, song lyrics, prayers, all of these inspire me.

Building altars and seeing the altars that others build inspires me, sacred space in unexpected places inspires me, micro and macro temples inspire me.

The constant striving for beauty among poor people living in dire circumstances and grim surroundings inspires me. A single flower rising out of cracked concrete on an inner city street inspires me.

Laughing in the face of death inspires me, celebrating death as in Dias de los muertos inspires me.

The practical art works of my foremothers inspires me, the quilts and rugs and needlepoint, crocheting and knitting, all those arts that made houses into blessed homes.

Knowledge inspires me, I am happy that we are a species that asks questions and never gives up on the answers.

The continuing quest for civil rights inspires me. Those who have made it their business to push against the boundaries of society inspire me, whether in gay rights, women's suffrage, racial equality, or equal access for disabled people.

Random acts of kindness inspire me. Self sacrifice inspires me. Compassion inspires me. Love inspires me.

Discovering that those who have devoted their lives to spiritual pursuits sound more alike than different inspires me.

Nature inspires me.

Thoughtful or humorous posts here at GR inspire me.

Comedians inspire me. Science fiction with its exploration of a universe of possibilities inspires me to question, to wonder, to imagine. Spiritually themed shows such as Joan of Arcadia have inspired me.

My family and friends inspire me.

And when I am inspired, I write or draw or sing or make a collage or an altar, or I speak up about a social issue or I give money to a cause or I volunteer. Something to try to pass it on, to pay it forward. For we are all co-creators of the world and we all have a responsibility to create a better one.

I find inspiration in nature (also in photographs), babies and children, good books and good stories, old temples of all kinds, flowers in a vase, the Rolling stones with their unstoppable, vibrant energy.

a booming t-shot, a wedge into the green with backspin drawing towards the flag or sinking a long putt

I've been thinking quite a bit about this, and have come to the conclusion that I can't place the inspirational (by which I mean that elusive element in any given phenomenon that 'breathes into me' new life that moves my being towards co-creation) into this or that category; it seems to me that it is something that happens of itself - uninvited - and, that often shines through the most common and unexpected source.

I'm therefore a wee bit afraid to subject it to analysis, and prefer to leave it uncategorised, uncharacterised, unidentified, and undissected.

Maybe I'm taking the question too seriously...or, perhaps I'm desperately uninspired at the moment...

Nature. To regard nature -- meaning both to watch and to respect. Photography is my way of doing it these days, but when I had my little garden at Almvik, it was a source of inspiration. I believe making and tending that garden made me wiser and more balanced.

Music.

My work, the component of it that entails gently helping people reach a point where they discover something new about themselves and get "the bigger picture." Situations where the discovery is completely their own but I have had a part in it by making them feel safe and curious enough to explore.

There are some stimuli that give me goosebumps and take my breath away regardless of what I may think about them. Sometimes it's so unexpected it gets embarrassing. It's some verses, some scenes in movies, some situations. I don't really understand what they have in common. But it often seems to have to do with people (or any living entities) bridging over the distance between them and others, a drive to interconnectedness despite the risks, the fragility of existence.

Recently I had that feeling a week ago, as I was walking back home after work. This time of the year in Sweden is the time when schools close for summer and especially the young people who have just completed secondary education celebrate it in a very public way. They dress up, drink some beers and ride through town dancing, singing, screaming and whistling on rented flatbed trucks decorated with banners, green branches and balloons, with live orchestras or music blazing through loudspeakers. It had been going on for two weeks right outside of my workplace and we all had enough of the noise!

As I was walking, more flatbed trucks passed me by. One of them had a large blue-and-yellow Swedish flag and a smaller Assyrian banner on the side, a stylized eagle with outstretched wings on the red background. This hit me. Before I myself know why, I was close to crying. Some of the youth on the truck must have been refugees from Iraq, celebrating the school's end the Swedish way together with their Swedish class.

The town where I work takes more Iraqi refugees per year than the entire United States. Not because the town authorities want it, but because so many refugees from the area have been coming here for the last three decades. I have read somewhere this small town has become famous in Iraq. many have relatives there. People escaping from Iraq do not even always know in which country it is, but they know the town's name and this is where they want to be. Once they are granted asylum in Sweden, they are free to settle wherever they want, and they come here. It poses considerable economic and social problems and opinions are polarized. But somehow it had nothing to do with how I felt. It's as if I were hardwired for that sort of response.

There was an article in the New York Times about the refugees in "my" town, with a slide show:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/13/world/europe/13sweden.html

I like to feel fascinated. That can be through images, physical shapes, sounds, reasoning (like mathematical proofs), patterns, coincidences, entrainment, scents, touch. And these things do combine, and I seek out intense exposure. I am fascinated by wooden surfaces that occur in nature. I like to see them, and I very much like to touch them, caress them. When I stroke a wooden surface, the texture speaks to me. If it is very fine, I think it is silky, or even finer, liquid. If the surface has patterns like forms and stripes etc., I take them to be a mysterious script. I would devise an algorithm to translate the patterns into something else. Like sound, or instructions to manipulate an interface. When out in the forest I speak to the wood, the trees, the stones and the creeks. We have conversations. It is very relaxing and meditative. I can sit for long periods by a tree and touch a pleasant part of its surface, or by a sun-warmed rock, feeling its heat. I think to myself, "This is incredible, how can such a thing exist!"

It was some time in the late seventies, when I asked myself what I would like doing most with my life. My answer was to create something that would generate continuous overwhelming and totally absorbing fascination, primarily for myself. I didn't expect that others might be fascinated by the same things as I. At that time I got myself a developers kit of Motorola's 6800-series CPUs. I set up a circuit that could read the numbers calculated by my programmable TI calculator and feed the results of a recursive tangent function to a Yamaha analogue synth. Since the recursive function would never repeat exact patterns, but slight variations of initial patterns, endlessly growing into new ones, I had a device, listening to which, would fascinate me continuously. I somehow perceived something structured in this "music," and it kept me listening for long periods of time, forgetting msyelf. But then I met the Hare Krishnas, and for some reason I joined.

Later, in 1995, when I went to Moscow, I bought myself a HP calculator and took up my early obsession again. Since then I have been working on an off on a sound project. I just recently got myself a set of software synths: VirSyn Cantor 2.1, VirSyn Poseidon, Metasynth, and Native Instruments' Massive. I am now working an a project to convert Sanskrit texts into sound and image patterns. I hope I can present something, some time.

Apart from that wood textures and patterns are a great source of inspiration. I mainly photograph them, but I do a lot of wood carving too. In carving I do not try to give the wood a form I have in mind, but let the wood piece itself guide me, by touch and by looking at its shape, lines and colors. I like to document my wood adventures. So I do have a couple of documentations of a piece I find in nature: a burl on a tree trunk, me cutting out the burl, me cooking the specimen in a large pot to remove bark, progress in drying the piece, carving the piece, some ready or semi-ready shapes. I recently discovered a bog oak in the nearby marshes. This thing inspires me lots. It is quite incredible. First, two years ago, I just took photos. Then, when I found out it was a bog oak, and when I learned what such a thing is, I sawed off some bits and protrusions that looked especially powerful. Then I got a friend to help me cut off a larger chunk with a chain saw. Finally, me and a friend actually went there with a mighty tractor equipped with a hydraulic arm for wood transports, and we secured the entire bog oak. Now the challenge is to dry it slow enough so that the wood does not develop cracks.

I also find connecting with nature the most inspiring and expanding experience and throughout vaisnavism also - being by the wildness of the sea or under the light of the moon - it affects us physically, emotionally and spiritually - I've had more sense of God/Goddess and of the interconnectedness of life in the great outdoors than I've ever had within the four walls of a temple. All time melts away and we can escape from the suggested rationalism and control of mankind expressed in the urban landscapes.

Music and nature for me. I just got back from a camping music festival, so got both in one hit. Three days of music, two days of rain, torrential on the first day. Even though the site was muddified, the crew carried on, and the people still danced. There was a real anarchic mood, a good mood where people didn't need to be told to be nice, where people could just be, and that's great.

After the last Glastonbury I went to, which was a complete washout, I go to much smaller and more specialised events. Just come back from a Hawkwind festival, a great music event, complete with wedding! Now gotta wait for the next one. Still bit under influence, so I may not be making sense here, but I know what I mean.

I have found a lot of inspiration in movies, but there was something I saw on TV a couple of years ago that moved me to tears. It was the reunion of a Chinese dissident living in America with his daughter who hadn't seen for ten years. It was in the news. She was waiting for him at the aiport and the way his face and eyes lit up and the way he stroke her face with his hand were so touching, it was the most emotional and beautiful scene I have ever seen. It still gives me the shivers.

I like to smoke Ganja and then damn near anything is inspiring. Especially nature, especially semi deserted beaches, cool mountains, animals of all types, especially birds.

Gardening inspires me a lot, unfortunately due to the demons and their bogus laws I can't garden Ganja Mata.

My son inspires me. He is a miniature version of me. My wife inspires me, she's smart and sexy and likes me too.

I like to read ancient texts, look at old stuff in museums, visit old graveyards. I like to wander around India nosing around old temples, talking to people or avoiding people as is appropriate. I like cold beer on a hot day, and room temperature microbrews served in glassware appropriate for type and style of brew on less hot days.

I like wind, beautiful cloud formations, the Sun, the moon on a clear night. I like to scribble bad transcendental poetry on the backs of envelopes and napkins. I like the occasional peg of fine Bourbon and the occasional peg of cheap Bourbon.

I'm inspired (sometimes) by you all here at GR!

Yes, I’m a font junkie…I shoot up letterforms daily…it’s a disease that comes with being a graphic designer! A new font inspires thoughts of creative form, new space between characters and the possibility of a new way of presenting information, subtle as it may be to the human eye.

Typefaces, letterforms and fonts are the visual foundation in which our reading ability relies on. They are usually taken for granted and have a transparency once put into the printed page. There are thousands of typefaces that exist and most are built around the classical forms that established years ago when the printing presses were first established and spread throughout the world. Most people are familiar with Time Roman and Helvetica from using computer applications, but typefaces are constantly being created and improved upon. Letterforms have the social responsibility of being legible while still being creative to its roots in artistic expression.

The latest new inspirational font to enter my bloodstream is Malaga, created by Xavier Dupre for the Émigré font factory founded by Suzana Licko and Rudy Vanderlins.

The new font here is named Malaga, the designer bases his design on the mix of cultural images that came to him on travels to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in the east and France, Belgium and Spain in the west. This font’s heritage is influenced by Blackletter and Latin fonts based on the first Venetian antiquas to brush stroke typefaces. This font contains a lot of typographic detail in its differing weights and high contrast between the roundness and sharp corners of certain letterforms.

Here is a sample of some of its faces:

Click to view attachment

I really like the photo of sand on a glass plate! Do you backlight the glass and photograph from above? Your photo is actually something that inspires me to create something!!!

It reminds me of the contemporary paintings of Howard Hodgkin!

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You really started a nice thread here, Kali, look at all those fine reactions! Angrezi is right, the members are also inspiring.
Thanks for your kind reaction to my photo, yes, it was taken on a light box with paper to diffuse the light and a magenta filter (2' x 3') for the colour; I have a series of 12 now, some are also in light green.
And thanks for showing the Howard Hodgkin and the Malaga font, I am a bit of a font freak myself, I have a few hundred on my PC now, dont have the Malaga though, looks professional, available in TrueType or OpenType?

I am inspired by quiet contemplation - I can drop into a semi trance mode and let my mind wander, almost like waking dreaming. When in this state the answers come as do ideas.

I can do this disconnect almost anywhere, even when there are a lot of people around.

I don't know this film, but the one that chokes me is The Railway Children, 1970 film version. The scene where the girl Bobbie Waterbury is reunited with her father at the train station always makes me cry, in fact I cannot always watch it coz its so strong.

I get inspired when I feel like truly connecting with something, may it be people or whatever.

Kalisurfer's love of art inspired me to create more of my own.

I don't think you are taking the question too seriously, Aran. It could be that you have a sharp analytical mind that wouldn't leave any object undissected once you focused that faculty on it. Some patterns can only be seen with a gaze that's out of focus. Some kinds of wonders can only occur unexpected.

Someone (Pasteur?) said, "In the field of science, chance favors the prepared mind." I like to think that in some other fields, chance favors the unprepared mind.

I understand about the fonts i am on a quest to find the perfect font with the perfect letter shapes and amount of space between each letter it is a crying shame gmail for example expects you to write in too tightly close-together arial single space claustrophobia or a variety of other all wrong fonts!

good comment dhyana i like to think of that when i am overfocussing and it reminded me of some french writer's who i can't remember idea of the 'planneur' where insight comes from anti-concentration. How funny the word can be read as 'planner,' as in to plan, which kind of goes contra to what it means.

Yes, I find, to a large extent, that I experience more peace, inspiration, and joie de vivre in letting my (and other people's) mind(s) alone.

How do you like Verdana, Evakurvan? I have recently switched to Verdana for documentation and letters I write at work. Suddenly it feels like communicating with real people, gently, with feeling. Not like the dry official writing with Arial or Times New Roman. And it feels less like WORK.

Verdana is my favourite too

Is it not strange the effects of fonts Dhyana!

Verdana is ok but i could tell you reasons it isn't either.

my favourite writing format is the small verdana, i believe it is verdana 8, used to write posts on this board, within this sized white square to write them in. i have tried to duplicate this format from here elsewhere.

You can get loads (6800) of free fonts at GRsites, Font Freak Paradise, I spent many a happy hour there. But in email you can only use the standard fonts, the recipient has to have the same font as you do, I think, or he reads your text in his default font.

i love thunderstorms and heavy rain

my wife and i have a rain song we sing when it rains

"we love dah rains
we love dah rains
we really do
we really do
we love dah rains"

mrdanga and cartels optional

its about to pour and can hear the thunder

whenever it rains, i always go outside for a walk

or if am working outside, just keep on working and so much enjoy the earth and myself being wetted

we have a stream in the front of our house that becomes a torrent with heavy rains that is fun to watch

naturally this love is partially conditional, being a farmer myself and a property manager for other people, rain ensures a healthy lawn, crops and trees

whenever i hear someone bemoan a coming rain when i know it is so much needed by plants, i tell them, obviously you are not a farmer

I like comic sans, its a good font to use in literature aimed at people with learning difficulties, its easier to read, and like in Dhyana,s comment, it doesn't feel like work.

Thanks Softbrain, and I must say, I am really grooving on what inspires everyone here. In some strange way, hearing what inspires others seems to create a type of energy that feels real good, maybe I'm a Inspiration junkie as well as a font junkie? Look out Tony Robbins, the GR Inspiration team is out to get you!

The series of photos you took of your sand paintings sound really interesting, have you ever shown this work in galleries?

The font Malaga can be purchased from the Émigré Studio website:
Emigre Fonts

The font comes in both Open Type and True Type. There website has an interesting feature called Typetease, that lets you type in a word or sentence that can then be shown in the varying typefaces that they have in their studio .

Eva, are you a graphic designer by any chance? If you're searching for a font and don't know it's name, or you are looking for a font with a certain look, there is a great web site named Indentifont that allows a person to input any characteristics of a font they like or looking are for, and through their visual checklist, you keep narrowing down the type of font you are looking for until you hit the mark. You can also just type in the name of a font you like and it will show you what it looks like, or similar type families.

Here is the link:

Identifont

Something tells me that you probably like the movie "Singing In the Rain." There is something special to the air during and right after a rainfall, maybe its the positive ions or something, but everything seems fresh and alive which is catchy especially if one is not exactly feeling that way before it starts to pour down.

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Thanks for the link but I dont have a creditcard so I have to make do with free fonts

I am still working on that series of sand photos so I havent tried anything yet, but I hate making my rounds of the galleries though. Couple of years ago I tried to sell over the Internet but that didnt pan out at all. But maybe I'll try that again.

That beautiful piece by Babu made me realize how much I like the rain too (especially when I'm indoors, but not only; I got caught the other day downtown when a torrential rain came down and had to get back home on my bicycle and loved every minute of it).

That’s wonderful thing about things that inspires you, once shared, it seems to create a type of energy that’s a little contagious. I wonder if when we start uncovering what has meaning to us and start exploring it, if we are coming closer to the spirit inside us that empowers us to be unique creative individuals? Once in harmony with this spirit, we can more easily manifest things according to our desire and ability, eventually exploring further into the mysterious ability to manifest and create. It also seems very much like a spiritual experience bereft of theology and dogma, very experiential and vital.

Your process with wood and digitized music is a pretty fascinating read ePiTa. Your relationship to nature, especially trees and wood is amazing, very shamanic, actually makes me want to reconsider my experiences while in nature, with perhaps needing to connect a little deeper to the life that exists there. Both of your experimentations in working with wood and music contain this creative ability to not conform to an initial finalized ideal of what it should look or sound like, but is open to the randomness of exploration and following the inherent characteristics of the medium you are working with.

Thanks for sharing this, it is in itself very inspirational in terms of its exploration of the creative process and how it relates to your personal vision toward the mysterious beautiful nature of the world.

Ok I thought about this a little more here are my answers:

climatological data on ice
ice hazards and icebergs
offshore resource development
dense pack ice
Sunita Williams ( ahem)
historic climatological data on ice
Jean Harlow
analysis charts describing ice type
forecasts that project ice formation, drift, and breakup
human observations
Ice Skating
Cold blooded creatures esp Lizards
synthetic aperture radar
data
polar orbiting satellite
Ice Service
ice observations
marine transportation
the Canadian Ice Service
Ice-cream Sundaes
http://www.witchcrafthome.com/

Thanks

Also I like men and high heels ( i'm only human )

I am inspired in case of:
- sunny and hot weather. When most people think they will melt in the heat, that's when I begin to live again.
- watery and green places.
- tranquil and slow pace of time (as compared to being forced to be always active and run to and fro for different tasks - you can see I am a very lazy person).

I am inspired by:
- friends and loved ones;
- singing and drumming; bhajans, especially the more fast-paced ones;
- intricate and complex informations (...if I understand them);
- fires, flames, exposions and glow;
- colorfulness.

Wow, Jean Piaget! You are a real ice girl!

Wow, while being perched on top of layer of ice for months at a time, it is hard to imagine actually having the desire to eat ice cream sundaes? There must be extreme heat running through your veins in order to be such a master of all things ICE, or is it all those Jean Harlow films that thaw things out?

What is an Ice Service?

The following piece of art depicts the only type of ice service I know about…all glories and Hail Mary to the mother of the Ice Cream cone!

Click to view attachment

Chanahari, you are the polar opposite of Jean Piaget, all things hot and fiery for you and all things cold and icy for her. You two truly balance each other out here on the forum. I can see a home in India for you at some point.

All this love for fire but you never start flame wars....go figure.

I meant Men in High Heels.....Equality is inspiring....Ok High Heels are not inspiring..... Men have the "potential" to be ...... I've never seen any Jean Harlow films but I knew she died at 26 and is very well known thats quite impressive... I don't want to die young though

Other Inspiring things

Thai Green Curry.
Accumulations of floating ice
Overly Extreme Adulation Given or Recieved
Dark Nilas
Josephine Baker
Consolidated Pack Ice
Diffuse Ice Edge
Sunrise at the South Pole
the solar system
summer solstice
Mercury's seasons
Ice Sculpture
reading other peoples inspirations

Is there any particular thing that Josephine Baker inspires you to do?
Do you, for example, entertain people at the 'Ice Station' with crazy-dancing, clothed in little else other than bananas?!!

What !? No. Bananas are very difficult to get here over the past few weeks.
She was very good with children...

I had promised to post a pic of an interesting piece of driftwood that I found several years ago:



Other side:

kalisurfer no i am not a graphic designer just very detail-oriented when it comes to writing, use of specific pens, fonts, or colour backround of what i'm writing on. Thank you so much for this url just marvelous. As a graphic designer you probably know of this, but something i uncovered that has been of great aid to me is this software called 'eyedropper' where you graze a tile over any colour on your monitor and it will tell you the exact numerics which correspond to that colour so that you can reproduce that colour yourself exactly anywhere else.


dhyana strange it seems i have no answer to your verdana question on this forum when i am sure i answered it maybe i answered it in my sleep.. you don't really want to hear my thoughts on verdana... okay okay: If you can write verdana in a non-single spaced way it is okay though maybe a bit too square looking. But long chunks of verdana text single-spaced are just so squished together between each horizontal line of text and way too godforskakinly squarish like a robot i can't really have it. Also, though the font comes out a certain way on the monitor, printed it modifies into another look...

by the way the font on this forum when you read posts looks like Verdana 10 and i think it is very good, but notice it is NOT single-spaced and on a spacious green backround. Can any colour be less robot than green? Also i think some fonts look different based on if you are reading them in web layout view or another kind of view, (though i may be wrong i'm not sure, maybe kalisurfer knows?) - so this being a web forum in web layout view modifies the look subtly for the better if that is true.

Sounds like me! I have a pen obsession. If I go anywhere without a pen or two, I feel, well, as if I were not completely dressed. (Going for a walk around the lake without a pen is fine though.)
I test dozens of pens in a shop before buying one (if any). At work, I have a system with pens in four different colors in my calendar, each color has its own meaning. And instead of the general flashcards (or whatever those small pieces of paper are called) supplied by the employer, gray in color, I bought a stack of my own in all the colors of the rainbow. (I use them to write down for the patients the date of their next appointment.)






Really? I have to look next time I print out a letter...
Long chunks of text are my enemy regardless their font!
But I don't think verdana is perfect either, just perhaps the closest to what I would like on the menu... Georgia is kind of sweet, but so old-stylishly childish, like a font one would use for children's book of fairy tales. I wouldn't use it in letters at work, but I do use it in my notes sometimes because it makes me smile.

Our work official font is Optima

haha i do that too.
and it is so embarrassing to test pens for an hour and leave buying nothing.
i won't even go into a store if they sell pens in packages, only a store where they are exposed and you can test them, and i only know one such store!
to solve all this i have found one good brand of pen and settle on always only using and re-buying that one.


i have a different colour system on my calendar too involving pens of different colours and hi-lighters of different colours and each colour or style of writing instrument i use means something.

what is funny is this makes me sound super on point meanwhile for the past ten years i barely know what day it is.

i did this for school too pretty much since i first ever went to school and it is the only way i can learn! It got more and more complex as time went on with the legends, by university i had devised a system of different wingdings to place before each sentence, each with significance indicating something about that sentence. i would have my different writing instruments splayed out on the desk, and people seeing my many pens would want to take one to 'borrow a pen' not knowing it is all very methodical and crucial, and this would be a death blow to my system but i was always forced to say okay take it, cause what kind of weirdo ha 4 pens right there and will refuse to give you one.

also, partly because of this, i had such killer notes people would be waiting in lines to photocopy them to study off of. Truly i challenge anyone to come forth as a more expert note-taker than i lol.