My Pen

It has been awhile since I wrote my last blog entry. Things have been fairly stressful here. 

I've been putting together my sample portfolio to hand to various firms in the city. It was going well, printed out all the documents easily at a FedEX, but I ran into a wall when I was compiling all my resume handouts. A friend who I gave a copy of my sample portfolio to showed her producer (famous music producer here in Japan) my portfolio and he was less than overwhelmed. He cited that it would be a good piece for Europe but not Japan. I was fairly upset by this news as I figured my portfolio was fairly out of the box, but I guess here in Japan they want far left when it comes to design. This sort of irritates me in that yes a theoretical portfolio can show you have conceptual ideas, but can you execute them? I guess my more European portfolio was more designed to show two sides of the coin, while I have talents as a designer, I can also execute these designs in the end.

Well, we'll see what happens with this all. It might go well and I land a job, or it might not and I start my next phase of things. 

But besides that new I bought a pen. Doesn't sound overly exciting but here in Japan pens are taken serious as then show a dimension of your personality. After scouring Tokyu Hands through the thousands of pens they have for sale, I finally found one (well I found others, but upwards of $150, I chose the $10). 

Its a nice pen, it comes close to the aspects I am looking for in a writing piece. It has replaceable ceramic roller cartridges  so I can use it for years. I chose the 0.7mm roller, which is great for writing and doing very bold sketches, but less than idea for finer writing. I might purchase another pen shell and get a finer roller. The rollers are cheap at about $3, but I have yet to see how long the pen ink lasts. They seem robust for holding ink

Simple, stainless steal body with rounded tips. Black rubber grip. Ideally I wanted an ultra simplistic version and this was the best I could do for the price. The more expensive pen i wanted was all pure one shape, no bumps or details.