The Little Ballpoint Pen Spring that Could
Creative thinking, problem solving, and using ballpoint pens to fix the curtain rod.
I cannibalized six ballpoint pens to fix the curtain rod.
I haven’t sorted out how to spin straw into gold. That’s the question I was sitting with last week when I left you. But I am glad you are here.
I went to the lawyer’s office this week. I wore a black fleece jacket despite the warmth of the day and sat sweating through the short meeting. I committed to a roofing company. I met with a talkative insulation guy with a mesh vest and a flashy orchid shirt. When he took the ladder to the garage stairs and closed the door, I said to my mom, “Please don’t let him fall.” Seconds later, after hearing the raining of tar and gravel on his head when he pushed open the crawl space cover, there was a clatter and a tumble and a crash. The door was closed, a Schrödinger's Cat moment. He both had and hadn’t fallen down the stairs. When I called out to see if he was okay, he said the ladder had slid out from under him.
The next insulation guy that came decided to position his ladder differently. He left the door open, and I stood watching as he teetered on the top rung with black, shiny, pointed toe shoes that made no sense climbing to the top of a ladder balanced in a stairwell. He didn’t fall, but he did break the light switch cover with the ladder. He also told me I have to replace all the ceiling bulbs. Then he grabbed my guitar, kneeled in the floor, played something Spanish and amazing, and told us he is the least musical person in his family. (Turns out the house has zero insulation and has never ever had insulation. We never knew.)
I met with another roofer, too, and I should have met with more. At least I did two. The friendly chatter is exhausting. I hate having to choose. I hate having to tell someone no. I hate all of this. I’m digging a hole I never wanted.
Those are contours. Today’s post is about a few ballpoint pens and a small household fix.
I have my head in the sand big time tonight.
Thank you for reading.
Amy
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I don’t know how to spin straw into gold, but I am the sort who fixes things. Well, I don’t really fix them. I find workarounds.
I didn’t always know this about myself. Maybe I just took it for granted, assumed, like so many things, that everyone does this. But every time I surprise myself with a duct tape and spit solution that seems to get the job done, I realize that not everyone approaches problems this way. Maybe not everyone needs to find a way to make something work without calling someone or ordering something. Maybe outside factors drove me to this place where saving a few pennies encouraged creative problem solving. Maybe. But I still feel a bit of satisfaction when a creative fix works.
Generally, no one else is nearly as impressed, but I take my small wins where I find them.
Big things…. I can’t fix. I’m at a loss. Unless a helicopter can just pick me up and transport me somewhere safe, I have no clue how to get out of the potential mess I’m in. My catastrophizing self is in overdrive.
But small things….small things are puzzles.
Small things offer points of focus, challenges to solve.
Are you a Rubik’s Cube person?
Do you have a Tetris mentality, watching the blocks fall, rotating them so that they drop neatly into place?
This week’s fix involves a bunch of cheap ballpoint pens. These ballpoint pens have hung around, tucked here and there in myriad pen cups, for twenty years. They were swag from a project M worked on at Hewlett-Packard in the early years after we moved to San Francisco.
We ended up with a lot of these ballpoint pens with their odd triangular barrels in translucent candy colors, orange and pink and lime. I think there were purple ones, too. Cooltown, they say.
These pens are basic ballpoint pens. They are serviceable. They will work to make a note.
My problem with these pens is that they come unscrewed. They unwind themselves. When I think of them, I always have the sense that they have to constantly be tightened, screwed back together at the tip.
Like many things, these pens have been kept just in case. They are stuck here and there around the house because you never know when you will need a pen.
(Surely I am not alone in this. I sometimes feel that I am surrounded by hundreds of pens and pencils, but when I need to jot something down, there is nothing to write with.)
The Cooltown pens are there in a pinch. Although their numbers have dwindled, they feel like part of the fabric of the house. It’s odd to think that of a handful of penny-plastic pens, but somehow they are a part of the space, enmeshed in the timeline.
These pens are a marker of a point in time, a high point after a career change that resulted in both of us leaving academia. The pens are crappy. They come unscrewed of their own accord. But every time I run across them, I tend to leave them where they are. When using what you have is a requirement and a mindset, you leave things in place, just in case.
Last week, the pens came in handy.
The Curtains Fell Apart
A few weeks ago, in my hopscotch attempts to deal with the house, I bought a bottle of Goo Gone. Part of me is living in the “how do I get out” world, and part of me is wanting, desperately, to keep things together until I can see more clearly. There is a vastness and an abstractness that is overwhelming. I say big sentences to myself, sentences I never thought I would say with any real weight, and I lose my breath. I am not prepared for change.
My responses right now are nonsensical. Buy glue. Buy Goo Gone.
How do I get out? How do I keep things together in the short term, for a year, for five, for ten, until I can get out?
Both of these mental spaces require some clearing, some reclaiming, and some cleaning, but at the granular level, where my nose is to the ground at eye-level with the gritty reality, my “what’s next” approach right now is often a series of seemingly disconnected micro steps.
Most of the things nipping at my heels are big and abstract, but the dust on the curtains is concrete. It is right here. Right now. I can do something about this. The grime on the kitchen window sill is concrete.
I have it within me to just look the other way.
I have it within me to just look, see, and still turn away.
This is my tendency. I am a flamingo in the worst ways.
But right now, I can do small things.
I am trusting that small things add up.
So Much Slid Away
I had talked about the kitchen windowsill in the final days, before they were final days. I was talking about ordinary things, household things. In the hospital or at home, we talked about normal things—the breaking of the vacuum, my concern about the insurance renewal, the UC student worker strike, the news. We talked about all the things still not in place, still not done, all the things falling apart.
We had talked, all year, for the last few years, for the last five, about trying to solve some of the big problems, about chipping away at the pile of neglect, a pile we couldn’t afford to fix. We would agree to make a list and sort things out. But we were endlessly caught in a loop of moving between illness and periods of holding our breath during a span of health. In the last year, we moved back and forth in these spaces, again and again, with whiplash speed. At the same time, all of life became a process of shuffling along.
A few weeks ago, I looked at the windowsill and, instead of ignoring it, I thought, “I can do something about this.”
I put a sunny yellow tea pot in a donation box and threw away pots of dead herbs. I wiped up dried succulent leaves that had dropped, shriveled and crunchy to the touch, I pulled hairy stems from the containers. I tried to clean up the pile of grossness left by an ant trap that spilled years ago, a reminder of the slope of the house. Even Goo Gone didn’t break it all down. I couldn’t get all of the residue off, but it’s better.
I took down the kitchen curtain, a valance I had forgotten we made, a dark black fabric with some kind of rooster print. All those years ago, I guess we did have a rooster theme in mind when we moved in (before the turn of the century), sunny and optimistic, when we picked the kitchen cabinets and the countertop.
I should have taken a photo of the curtain before I took it down.
I didn’t know it wouldn’t hang again.
In the wash, it fell apart. The roosters, specifically, disintegrated. There was no final cock-a-doodle-doo. When the curtain came out of the wash, there were giant fraying holes, circular gaps where the chickens had simply fallen off the surface of the fabric.
This created a new problem, something I hadn’t counted on. I needed a new curtain.
The dominos are everywhere right now, little traps of sequence that trigger unexpectedly, a Rube Goldberg machine with no purpose.
I really liked the curtain-less window. It felt fresh and open, but the morning sun is simply too much. At certain points, it is blinding. Even with a curtain, that window contributes to the growing heat in the house.
Over the next few days, I spent too much time trying to pick a replacement. Nothing looked good. Everything looked cheap, which was both a requirement and a hurdle. I wanted nice, thick, opaque, lined fabric like I had. I doubted anything I found would really block the light. Even the one that said it was lined didn’t inspire confidence. A comment on another one that I was considering made mention of it being shiny, as if that was a good thing.
While I mulled, I measured and discovered the window is an odd size.
I would need two of whatever I found.
I continued to enjoy the open panes of the window, an unfettered view.
On Prime Day, one of the curtains I had in my cart had a small discount. It wasn’t the one I was leaning toward, but I ordered two and figured they would be good enough.
It’s just a pair of curtains.
When they arrived, I unpacked them, decided, indeed, they are “okay,” a print moderately resembling William Morris flowers, a print that somewhat feels like the house I know. (A week later, I’m admitting I really hate them. But it doesn’t change this story.)
I dragged a chair into the kitchen to stand on, retrieved the tension rod from where I’d stashed it, threaded the curtains onto the rod, put one end against one side of the window framing, and tried to position the other end against the other side.
But there was nothing to hold it in place.
It took me a bit to realize that something was wrong with the rod. It took a bit more to realize that there was no spring.
And then we remembered.
Mom and I both remembered at some point walking in and seeing a spring in the kitchen floor in front of the dishwasher and not knowing what it was. (It must have fallen out when we took the curtains down to wash.)
We clearly remembered seeing the spring on the floor, but neither of us had any memory of what happened to it.
Not knowing what it was, did I throw it out? Did I stick it in a drawer? I really think I absentmindedly stuck it somewhere, but maybe I really did throw it out.
We looked.
No luck.
I looked at ordering a replacement rod for curtains I hadn’t wanted to replace anyway.
The slippery slope is at my heels.
So, I tried to figure it out.
Could I solve this?
I don’t know anything about tension rods, but clearly I needed a spring.
Would simply putting a spring in solve the problem?
Could I just order a spring?
Could I solve this?
Ballpoint pens have springs. At least some of them do. The cheap Cooltown pens have springs.
I fished around in a mug full of pens and pulled out a Cooltown pen. Stubbornly (and ironically), it wouldn’t unscrew. A pair of pliers solved that. I separated it and retrieved the small spring and dropped it into the curtain rod opening.
It was obviously too small.
I didn’t think, “this won’t work.”
Instead, I dismantled three more pens and taped them together, two by two, to make a unit and dropped that into the rod. I thought that might work. I got back up on the chair and stretched out the rod to see if it would reach and hold.
The makeshift spring still wasn’t quite thick enough to hold the tension.
I dismantled two more pens, moving on to some other random ballpoints in the cup, and thickened the makeshift coil, making it triangular.
I dropped my DIY spring into the rod, and it worked. I had to finagle the screw a few times to get it in the right place (which didn’t make sense at the time but now I realize is probably related to the difference in my makeshift spring and the length of the original spring).
The curtains are up.
And those six pens were put to good use.
I think the engineering spirit is alive and well in most of us—especially in writers and artists.
We do turn straw into gold.
Not all problems require ordering something. Sometimes, yes, but not always. I find simple satisfaction in solving problems with what I have and in finding ways to make do.
I’m afraid this isn’t going to get me very far in this coming year. But in these last two months, there have been some tiny wins and some moments of innovation that highlight who I am and who I’ve become.
I am burying my head a lot, but sometimes I rally. Sometimes I play hopscotch and tackle a this or a that.
Are you a creative problem solver, too? I think many of us are. I really appreciate people who think this way and who can find ways to circumvent, patch, bandaid, or even stabilize problems in the short term.
Creative thinking doesn’t just mean being able to cleverly make use of color, ink, and glue. Creative thinking is an approach do the everyday.
Creative thinking is an approach to living.
Creative thinking is an approach to surviving.
Creative thinking is a feel-good way to tackle the small things.
“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads — at least that's where I imagine it — there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Photos from the Week
It just really wasn’t a photo week.
Weekly Bits and Pieces
Made It?
Thank you for reading.
Do you find creative ways to fix things?
While writing today’s post, the words “Can you fix it? Yes I can!” came to mind. We were a big Bob the Builder family. I pulled up the theme song. Now that’s a throwback!
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When I heard the raining of pellets from the roof, I was terrified it might be mammoth rodent droppings to match the basement problems. I am somewhat relieved that it seemed to genuinely have been tar and gravel falling in.
I should probably spend time in coming months cleaning out the various cups and jars of pens. It will give me something to do.
I’m a diehard fountain pen user, but I explored drawing with ballpoint at one time. I liked Bic. If I’m going to use a ballpoint, I still prefer Bic.
"I’m digging a hole I never wanted." Oh, how many times I've been there! Kudos for figuring out the springs needed for the curtain rod, and yes, I love finding creative ways to fix things. "Let's figure this out" is one of my go-to's in many situations. Getting back to digging an unwanted hole, I've finally figured out how to keep those holes at bay: mise en place, borrowed from the French, "everything in its place". It's taken me years to live this way, and the biggest challenge was slowing down enough to take care of the tiny details as soon as I realize they're there. I still have times when my mind can jump and hop about, I lose my focus, then forget or push aside that tiny thing, which comes back to remind or taunt me later. But mise en place is muscle memory now, and keeps my head clear (for the most part) and my environment (mostlyl) tidy. Great post, btw. I appreciate your honesty.
Glue and Goo Gone! I love the idea of unsticking some things so that new things can come together❤️