(I don’t know why all my blog posts end up being about pens.)
For the longest time, my favorite pen has been the Pilot G2 pen series. And I’m not saying that suddenly its position has been challenged, but there is another pen that’s come startling close. It’s a ridiculously cheap-in-price pen from the Dutch stationary company, HEMA. Unfortunately, on further investigation, it is impossible to get products from this company in the US because they don’t ship here. I received mine in a Christmas present from my friend who lives in the Netherlands, along with a few notebooks and some sticky notes. For the type of person I am, it was the best gift.
I have been using this pen steadily for about two weeks and the logo is almost completely worn from the surface. There are only a few black specks left that hint at there being something there. I can trace the life and homes of this pen very simply and easily. Moving back from my house, the pen then inhabited hers, and further back from there, it resided in a physical shop at _____, picked up in its package and touched by who knows how many people who decided not to buy it. Or perhaps it lay in the back, stored in boxes until it was needed to fill an order. Before it came to the store, it was probably packaged and shipped from the one distribution warehouse I could find online, in Utrecht, Netherlands.
My friend either picked the pen up at a store, or ordered it online. It is interesting to think about this online shopping space as something that isn’t physical but isn’t quite not-physical either. We talked in one class about “the cloud” and the physical storage farms that exist somewhere we can’t see them, and that these farms give us the illusion that the information we store online is intangible, invisible until we call it up. But there is something physical about the spaces we inhabit online. Online shopping is particular is a liminal space like this. Shopping is such a physical sport, except when one is able to do it all online. So maybe my friend bought these online and then had them shipped to her. Maybe she touched them, transferred her fingerprints onto the surfaces, and then packaged them up for me.
Many people touched the pens on their way to my hands. I have been using the black one almost exclusively since I got it and the ink has almost run out. To me, the pen has been a faithful companion while drafting my Honors thesis, while outlining the many research projects that I have to do for classes, while comparing graduate programs and mapping out my future. To me, the pen has been much more to me than it was to anyone to had touched it before. It was handled by people who wanted to sell it, touched and packaged by my friend to make me feel good, and then it ended up in my hands, helping me craft ideas and plan out my future.
The Materials of History, Thought, and Art 
I love how you glorify and analyze a very common, everyday object in this post, and how you explain your appreciation for it despite its cheapness. I feel like we could interpret the fact that the pen’s HEMA logo is already unrecognizable, after two weeks of constant use, in different ways: either it simply speaks to how much you like and use the pen, or it reveals to how cheaply the pen was made, or—most likely—it’s a combination of both! The fact that this pen, an object that could easily be overlooked, takes center stage in your writing here, I believe, makes this post a unique take on the assignment.
In addition to your reflections on the pen, I found your ideas about the Internet’s “cloud”—and navigating the Internet in general—quite interesting. I remember when we spoke about the abstract intangibility of the Internet in class and how it compares to the storage farms internet companies would rather we not think about, and I like how you extend that discussion to the nonphysical experience of online shopping. I find it even more intriguing that when you look up the pens online, you can find them on the HEMA website, but that due to the fact that they don’t ship the US, the online shopping experience is even more detached from you because you’re then looking at items that are in fact even less “real” than they would be on the site of a company that ships here.