armed and dangerous

For the past couple of weeks, while I've been getting used to a new school and a new schedule and surrendering routinely to the tyranny of the urgent, a stack of Legal Writing III briefs has been gathering dust in my room.

I sat down today to grade them and suddenly my procrastinatory stumbling block became painfully apparent:

I didn't have a good red pen.

This has bothered me as I've graded my high school writing workshop papers. The only red pen at my disposal has been one of the erasable ones my mom likes to use, which -- while it makes a gracious concession to a teacher's own fallibility -- just doesn't look mean or authoritative enough for a law school professor (this teacher is already too concerned with her own professorial fallibility and doesn't need the added discouragement of a wimpy pen).

So I abandoned the briefs once more for a trip to Staples and the writing utensil aisle.

About fifteen minutes and $11 later, I emerged the owner of 9 or 10 new tools of writing (only half of them red pens).

The damage could've been much, much worse. There are a lot of good things on that aisle. It was almost as bad as the used bookstore at the library, but not quite, because the temptations on the aisle at Staples had the helpful deterrence of being shamelessly full-price.