It’s not often that something truly revolutionary is added to the standard tally of school and office supplies. Despite the digital age, it’s all still the same stuff: No. 2 pencils, 3×5 index cards, yellow and pink highlighter pens, scented erasers from Japan.
But then came the marvelous introduction of pens that have erasable ink. Mind blown. This changes everything.
Oh, there have been pens that claimed to be erasable before, but we all know the sad truth of those. You could rub and scrub a hole into the paper trying to lift up a mistake. Not only did the erasing part not work, but the ink was extra leaky and prone to smearing. These new ones are pretty amazing. The heat created by rubbing the eraser over the markings renders the ink invisible. There’s only a faint ghosting left behind, similar to what you can see after pencil marks are erased.
(Love that, especially since it’s November and I’m still writing last year’s date on checks. Especially since its 2017 and I’m still writing checks.)
The other hip implement appearing in desk drawers and backpacks and pencil cases is an electric eraser. No, really. They’re to erasing what electric toothbrushes are to dental hygiene. Most are battery-powered, because plugging in is always a hassle. Some people swear by them, saying that the results are cleaner and the paper doesn’t get chewed up. But still. Doesn’t the concept of an eraser with a motor bring up all sorts of questions? Like, who needs that kind of power and precision? Draftsmen, sure. Graphic designers. Serious artists. But third-graders? I dunno.
This is an age of easily erasable words. There are messaging apps that destroy all posts in a matter of minutes. You can write promises in ink and erase them. You can draw up a mission statement and take an eraser with the precision of a jeweler’s Dremel to fix it or change it to anything you want. Nothing is written in stone, and if it is, the original meaning can always be debated.
That’s the strange perception of this moment in time. We hear leaders reinterpret their own statements, swear they didn’t say something we all heard, make promises that languish unfulfilled, and we let it go. Just let it go. We’ve become used to it, and we’re all so busy dealing with our own lives that we don’t have the time to chase down somebody who says he didn’t say something that he actually did. We accept that words can be wiped away without a trace, that promises are as invisible as the air into which they are uttered and words carry no more weight than the paper on which they’re written.
But that isn’t true. That’s just the current weird folly. In truth, words stay and people bear witness. Those amazing erasable pens have a little secret: Put the paper in the freezer and every word that had been rubbed away reappears, plain as day.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
