<p>When I was a kid in elementary and middle school, my dad would pay be $20 or so to run off blueprints or print and bind presentation books for him at work and I loved it. <em>Loved</em> it. I would prowl through his office supply closet at work and just enjoy all of the different pens and pencils and erasers and notepads that he kept in stock. Binder clips. The comb binder. The giant stapler. The boxes and reams and sheaves of paper. The well-tuned whir of the plotter. Even the rank scent of ammonia from the blueprint machine.</p>
<p>I must have been a very easy child to shop for, because I mostly just loved paper. Paper and pens and rulers. I <em>really</em> loved rulers.</p>
<p>So one day one of my parents, I forgot which, bought me a pad of staff paper, and by then I was already well into playing the saxophone, and I started ‘composing’. It wasn’t really that, of course. It was mostly writing down embellished versions of my warm-ups and exercises and calling them original compositions. Art may all be derivative, but this stretches that definition quite a bit.</p>
<p>And you know, it’s weird. I never really did much composing on staff paper. It was one of those things where, as much as I loved the paper and the feeling of using it, I could rarely bring myself to use it for writing music.</p>
<p>Some of it was technical: I did try on several occasions to write on staff paper, but that was too abstract an exercise. I’d wind up writing garbage because I was thinking so much about the intervals that I’d forget about the range, or I’d try to keep the range in mind and forget about the melody. Sometimes, I’d just spend all my time thinking about my handwriting and how to be most efficient about getting notes down on paper that I would never actually write any music. We spend a lot of time learning how to write words by hand, and we develop a style over the years, but the same is not true of writing sheet music, and so I spent a few days trying to do just that.</p>
<p>A lot of the time, though, my manuscript paper suffered the same fate as all the countless blank books I have sitting, unused, in my room. It’s hard for me to justify marking something in some irrevocable way unless that marking is to be final. A piece of paper is fine. It’s whatever. And to that end, my manuscript paper notepads were more likely to see use for homework or notes or whatever. But a book? A book has to be cohesive in some way. I can’t use a book of lined or dotted paper for jotting down notes because that’s not a cohesive use. And since I can’t write long stuff by hand for whatever reason, I wind up getting all these books and never using them.</p>
<p>I must have been a very easy child to shop for because I love paper and pens am content refining my knowledge further and further on them without ever putting them to use.</p>
<p>Never helped me write any, though, music or words.</p>
