Looking through some of my old (VERY old) journals, I came across this spiral notebook I used in junior high school:
Inside, I found a note logging the kind of pen I was writing with, and that it was new to me:
I am writing with my new red eraser mate. That is exciting news, eh?
Was I being sarcastic about my excitement level, making a note of how NOT news-worthy my current pen was? Or perhaps I felt self-conscious about genuinely finding my new pen with the erasable gimmick noteworthy. Was I maybe just scribbling *anything* I could think of to fill up lines in my notebook that I had to turn it to my English teacher so she could check that I met my journaling quota?
It was our honors English teacher’s first year in front of a classroom, and she was full of ideas (which I continue to be grateful for and learn from all these decades later). One of her big ideas was to REQUIRE journaling. Every quarter we had to turn in a certain number of pages (which she claimed she only counted without reading/invading our privacy, but she definitely scanned what we wrote to make sure we weren’t cheating).
I don’t remember whether the gimmick of erasable ink impressed me at twelve years old, or if I even used it at all. I vaguely recall the Erasermate making the ink extra-smudgy (maybe it took longer to dry?) and that it did not erase cleanly / left messy traces.
In general, erasing left a bad taste in my mouth all through my school years. While I’m more comfortable with erasing via mechanical pencil these days, I still try to avoid it / prefer crossing things out to doing a messy never-thorough job of trying to eradicate mistakes.
Perhaps I really was excited about my new red Paper Mate on the day I recorded its usage, and had not yet tested its erasability.
Has anyone seen an EraserMate pen lately? In this century? Do people use them anymore? I see they still appear to be in production / are listed for sale here on PaperMate.com.
As far as “The Spiral” Mead notebook goes, those are for sure still around in pretty much the same format, though not specifically branded “The Spiral”, I don’t think.