KT's Blog

Thoughts by Kristin when you're not following her on Twitter.

December 1, 2008

Who Has the Office-Supply Spice of Life?

I asked my sweetie the other night what his favorite office supply is.

“Calipers,” he answered without hesitation. “That is one thing I have on all of my desks.”

Even if he weren’t a mechanical engineer, I bet he’d still pick calipers. He was this close to also majoring in history, and he cooks and bakes almost every day while listening to music or to Terry Gross. He does not talk politics at the office unless he feels like being the odd one out—both in his beliefs and his advocacy work. But he does like to be precise.

Despite being in almost all ways more like me than his cubicle mate, he is such an engineer, in that he likes to be on time, if not early. He doesn’t just hang a picture on the wall and then accept its crookedness as out-of-the-box living, he measures and subtracts—and measures and subtracts again, to make sure—and laments the evaporating water in his level. He used some sort of engineering software to design a star with equal-sized points that he then transferred onto felt and sewed for our Christmas tree topper this year.

Remember that one scene from the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World in which prissy Whitley tells finding-herself Denise that a cluttered desk indicates a cluttered mind, and Denise responds by asking what, then, Whitley’s empty desk means? What office walls will placate the cubicle drones, how can we feng shui our conference room—the joke is hardly new anymore, but I had to think about it again when my sweetie pulled his calipers out of his holster. Usually the best I can do with my desk is a clean workspace with a towering and slightly disheveled pile of to-file papers, but my desk always seems to fit the room best in such a way that it is not in the far corner and my back is to the door. Usually I sacrifice the practicality of a binder clip with the loosey-gooseyness of something purchased at a shop more design-forward than office-supply.

Is it too much to equate favorite office supplies—my sweetie with (unhesitatingly) his calipers, me with (currently) my spiral paper clips—with personality and work-aptitude, with our Myers-Briggs, whether we cross right over left or left over right, the way the creases swoop and meander across our palms?

Is it too much to wonder if universal happiness could be found in rubber bands—wholly practical, totally bendable and twistable and unbendable, eventually de-elasticked: nothing is permanent?

Yes, it is possibly off the mark. Probably; likely. Considering this post with metaphorical calipers, reluctantly.

In:

Kristin Thiel is the fiction editor for WritersDojo.org, as well as a fiction writer, editor, and reviewer. Learn more.

Nancy Flynn

December 2

... and was marveling at all the...stuff? tchotchkes? mementoes? I've gathered—and keep—around me on my writing desk. No calipers but now I'm wondering what a Kodak beaker full of unfilled fountain pens and two ice blue fountain pen inkwells from the turn of the 20th century say about my Myers-Briggs score? INFP? INFJ? I long ago ascertained that I'm one of those people on the cusp of extrovert and introvert who sidles most of the time to the quiet and observant side of I...On my desk, I also have a feather. It's metal. I found it in a funky shop in Fairbanks, Alaska, and keep it strewn with smoothly polished blue-white oyster shells gathered from what I call the Black Rock beach over near Newport on the Oregon coast. I also have a Laotian Buddha given to me by dear friend Mario, an extra in the Castro crowd scenes in the Gus Van Sant movie, Milk. And an Italian calendar that features a stylized Firenze duomo for its January art. And not one but three pitchers of assorted favorite and less-than-favorite pens. My grandfather's clock—not a Grandfather clock but an art-deco stylized alarm from somewhere around 1938, the year our house was built—anchors the desk corner. And a dictionary. Not online but the real thing. The rest of my far-too-voluminous collection of office supplies sleeps, safely hidden inside a cherry wood desk drawer. I'm almost afraid to slide it open, to be forced to perform an exigesis on the what-all that's in there and what it says about the deep, dark, personality-revealing sides of myself...I know there's dental floss. And a skinny bracelet made from Teaberry's gum wrappers, circa 1968...money before Ireland was in the E.U. The 100,000 high mileage club medallion from my 1984 Volvo GLE. A pewter book mark in the shape of a lotus. Paper clips, anyone?

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