Gel Pens

Oh gel pens. In order to be cool at my middle school, you had to have them. Every year during the annual back to school trip to buy notebooks and such, it was essential to also buy gel pens. Usually though, if you didn't go early enough, they were sold out. Yes reader, there was a pen so popular that it would sell out.

who wouldn't want these?

Now there were a few different kinds of gel pens. There were the regular, metallic and glitter. The glitter were shit because it was actual chunks of glitter that would make it hard to write, but in order to show you were really awesome you had to have metallic. Ironically they were also about a dollar more on a set of pens that were already pretty pricey at $6. 

I'm not gonna lie to you reader, my family was poor. We couldn't really afford to buy gel pens all the time so when I received money I would save it so I could buy them. They became so popular that teachers had to start saying we couldn't turn in assignments written with gel pens, which was fine by us, the real magic was in note writing. 

Oh yes, the lost art of note writing. We would line our gel pens up on our desks and write our bff (phonetically pronounced) all about what was going on in that long, lonely period where we were away from one another. If we were really ambitious that day we would write every word in a new color, but usually each paragraph was a new color. It takes me days on end and a little bit of team work to be able to write a paper but I was able to write two pages to my friends who I had just seen about an hour ago about everything that was happening with me. That takes some dedication, I tells ya. 

I was recently at Target and looked for some gel pens and didn't see them on the shelf. I hope that means they are simply sold out and the allure of the gel pen lives on. If not, I will be very sad to know that they are only sold at specialty shops (yes, I consider Staples to be special) because that means they know that only old people like me are going to buy them, because what 11 year old asks their mom to go to Staples?