Pens?

I was on a shoot yesterday where I was background for a high school scene. I was pretending to do math with my prop notebook and my own pen. They moved our table out temporarily for a certain shot, and we were sent to holding until the next setup. When I came back to my table, my pen was gone, and someone had written some idiocy in the prop notebook. It was odd because it was done in graceful cursive. Beautifully penned banality- doesn't that just sum up L.A. perfectly?

The point of this story is that my pen was gone. That person stole my pen. MY pen. My FAVORITE pen!! My pilot G-2. The only pen that I like the way it writes. If you are the pen thief and you are reading this, please give me my pen back.

Many people could read this and be like, so what? If you are a server, though, you're much more likely to feel distraught about this. There are never enough pens! The ones you end up with always write crappy. Eventually you develop a system: there are the pens you let other people use, and there are YOUR pens. The one pen that only YOU are allowed to write with. If it goes missing, you will track it down before you shrug it off and figure you'll just find another pen. Working as a server gave me a total pen fetish. The one tool you really need for that job, and it is the hardest to hold on to. Give it to a customer to sign their visa slip- gone. Set it down by the computer- gone. Start with 20 pens, and you are still lucky to have a few left by the end of a busy night. So even now I'm super neurotic about my pens. I need to have more than one that I enjoy writing with. I need to know where they are. I have a separate pen I loan out to my fellow extras. All of this was realized yesterday after my favorite pen (the other one disappeared last week) was stolen. I was seriously upset about it and was suddenly 30% less invested in what was going on on set. Not saying this is normal or healthy. When everything is going wrong, we have little things we cling to. I guess a small portion of my sanity was attached to the pen that was pleasant to write with and made my handwriting look nice. So for Christmas, I would like 30 pilot G-2s so I can sort through them and come up with 10 that write perfeclty.

On that note, if everyone is always stealing pens (purposefully or not), why doesn't anyone ever have a pen? Where the eff are all of the pens? If we're constantly taking and having our pens taken, no one should ever have to buy a package of pens again. They should be circulating like currency. So where are they? Does anyone know? Does Stephanie Schwartz have all of the world's pens? Is there some crazy cat burglar for pens who goes home after each night of thievery and jumps into the piles and piles of pens kept in his walk-in safe? Do Bic and Papermate have people who go out and steal the pens so we'll keep buying them?

Should I post this and let the world see that I'm the kind of person who writes multiple paragraphs about my pen being stolen? Apparently so.

Every year, an average of 100 people choke to death on a ball point pen. This is allegedly an accident. I think not. "You want to take my pen, you son of a bitch? Here! How do you like my pen now!?"
I couldn't remember the number on this statistic, so I googled it. I typed in "people choke to death" and the first thing that popped up was this statistic.

< /banality>