Didn't quite graduate to gearhead

AVI has a post about gearheads, and what it brought to my mind was pens. My father liked fountain pens, and when I was in college I tried out a Parker 45, and liked it a lot. It was cheap, easy to write with, and had a nice balance--but the cartridge refills got to be a nuisance, and over the years something happened to the nib. Oh well; in the drawer with it. Replacements cost quite a bit more money than I cared to think about.

I inherited a few pens, and in the process began to learn about what the "hobby" is like now. Paper is a huge deal. Apparently. I found that some of the cheap paper was horrible (bleed-through or feathering all over the place), but almost everything else was fine. I tried one of the wonderful paper brands (Rhodia) and wasn't excited about the difference.

The inherited pens had problems, so I read around a bit and learned that cultures that did a lot of caligraphy had plentiful fountain pens--China and Japan in particular. After arguing with different medium nibs for a while I bought a 5-pack of cheap Jinhao 911 finepoints (and gave most of them away) and have been putting Quink on printer paper and ordinary spiral notebooks and other deprecated media without a regret. Not on checks, of course.

Probably I'm a philistine.