Be Classy and save some cash with a fountain pen

Everyone knows you can buy a bag of pens for $2.00 on sale at Wal-Mart or Staples, so why should anyone bother to use anything but those?  I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head.  Those pens are often very low quality, they stop dispensing ink at random, often inconvenient times.  They are also quite wasteful, imagine how many resources are wasted manufacturing and transporting those pens from the factory where they are made to you.  You have the (most likely) coal power used to generate the electricity the factory uses, the ship carrying a container full of thousands of them across the ocean, belching pollution the whole way, the exhaust from the semi that hauled them to the store....all for a product you are going to use for a few weeks and then throw away to sit in a landfill and begin it's 10,000 year decomposition process.  There is an alternative, one that not only lessens the carbon footprint of your mindless doodling during lectures, but also looks cool and costs less over time than the disposable pens.  That alternative is the fountain pen.

What is a fountain pen?  It is a pen that contains it's own reservoir of ink, which flows through a the end of the pen, called the nib.  This sounds exactly like any other pen, but the ink flows freer than your normal ballpoint pen, and the pen itself looks approximately 117% fancier.


See, way cooler than a Bic

Like I was saying, the ink flows from a reservoir, either a cartridge one or from a bladder you manually fill within the pen itself.  The bladder pens are the cheaper way to go, so that is what we will focus on the rest of the way.

There are many different brands, with some luxury brands (Mont Blanc) being incredibly expensive, and in my opinion the height of stupidity...who the hell is dropping several thousand dollars on a pen?!?!?!?!?  That is slap across the face worthy levels of wasteful.  A quick browse on amazon shows many in the $12-$25 range, which is perfectly fine.  Personally, I have a Pilot MR, which I like a lot.

 Usually the pen comes with ink already in it, but when the time comes to refill, I recommend Noodler's Ink.  It is cheap, comes in a huge variety of colors, and is of very high quality. (http://noodlersink.com/ is their website, but you can buy their stuff straight from amazon)

The initial cash outlay for the pen and ink can get up there in price (~$50), but over time it is much cheaper than disposable pens, has a much lower environmental impact, and just looks way classier and makes even note taking feel special.