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The Merits of Commitment - Long-winded: A Blog for People Who Read

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As a child, my writing utensil of choice was a mechanical pencil. Unlike your standard-issue Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2, these instruments never needed sharpening. Always precise, but beyond that: easily erased. The sloppy errors I made in my math homework, the absent-minded doodles I made on my homeroom desk, the words I wrote in notes to friends but regretted only seconds later. The eraser was the original Command + Z—offering us not only an escape hatch, but a way to rid the crime scene of any evidence whatsoever. As an adolescent, I discovered the beauty of pens. Of commitment. Of what it meant to think several moves ahead. To accept the consequences of my errors. The transition wasn’t an easy one. Initially, when I first switched to ink, I burned through reams of loose-leaf; my perfectionist tendencies wouldn’t allow me to submit papers or send letters with any visible errors. And for a short while, I was that girl—the neurotic one with a secret stash of Wite-Out® in her purse. Event

The Merits of Commitment - Long-winded: A Blog for People Who Read Long-winded 9 July 2011 The Merits of Commitment Alternately: The Trade-offs of Iteration As a child, my writing utensil of choice was a mechanical pencil. Unlike your standard-issue Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2, these instruments never needed sharpening. Always precise, but beyond that: easily erased. The sloppy errors I made in my math homework, the absent-minded doodles I made on my homeroom desk, the words I wrote in notes to friends but regretted only seconds later. The eraser was the original Command + Z-offering us not only a

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