This time next week, I will be headed to school for my second day of Professional Development for the new school year. Then, the darlings arrive on Friday. [Warning: enter Wal-Mart at your own risk after 2:45 that afternoon.]

For the past few years, the school year in my parish has started on a Friday. Befuddling, until I realized this allowed families the opportunity to storm stores for school supplies. Parents of students younger than high school age have been roaming school supply aisles for weeks now. In our little chin of the woods (I’d say neck, but we’re just not that substantial), most of the local stores have a bin with copies of supply lists for area schools. But most high school students wait until they meet their teachers before they purchase their supplies because we high school teachers are a bizarre bunch, and we have our own preferences. My supply list seems idiosyncratic, but I promise it’s for reasons they’ll come to understand later.

The PTA at one of the schools my kids attended had a brilliant fundraising idea, and I’m surprised more schools–especially elementary ones–don’t adopt this. They sold pre-packaged supplies by grade levels. The price was comparable to what the supplies would cost in stores, but when you factored in the “no whining, no schlepping around and/or boomeranging around stores to find the supplies, time lost searching for parking space, time spent waiting in line, dinner out because you spent the entire day choosing between the 3-subject and 5-subject…” –no contest. Plus, the first day of school, they placed the supplies in your child’s teacher’s classroom. Even I was willing to forego my fixation with school supply shopping so I could support the PTA.

Now, though, I shop for school supplies…for me.

This post will likely assure my candidacy as founding citizen of the Kingdom of Nerdville, but I’m going to confess I miss shopping for school supplies for my kids. When all five of them were in school, my office closet burped out binders, folders, looseleaf, pens. . .One of our amusing family stories is the day we bought twenty packs of looseleaf (500 pages in a pack) at Office Depot because each pack was only nine cents (um, what happened to the cents sign on the keyboard?). We evenly split between college and wide-rule; for those of us in Nerdville, the absence of one or the other can be paralyzing depending on preference.[After Katrina, we donated what was left. And judging by the bricks of it still in the closet, I wondered how little writing took place over those years of school.]

Pens. Oh, be still my beating heart when I discovered the Pilot G-6 Retractable Gel Ink Rollerball .7mm. Fat body, fine point. [Not me. The pen.] The problem is the pens cost almost $30 a dozen, and they’re hard to find sold individually. I discovered this pen the same way I discover all great pens. My students. The first week of school, I’ll wander around the classroom as they write. They think I’m assessing their focus (which, of course, I am), but I’m actually engaged in the Great Pen Hunt. To their credit, my students are quite generous in allowing me the “scribble test” with their pens, which any pen freak knows is the ultimate test because appearances can be deceiving. And how disappointing when that happens. Like marrying someone beautiful only to discover she’s one sandwich shy of a picnic.

Also crucial is that the finish of the paper and the pen’s point complement one another. Sometimes the paper is porous and using a gel pen is like trying to write on a wet sponge. Sometimes the paper is so satin sheened, the pen scratches across the surface like an etching tool. And if you’ve ever been in a tomb-silent classroom and attempted to concentrate while the kid next to you scribbles furiously, like so many mice skateing across cardboard…it’s deafening. Not having the right pen can be cataclysmic. I’ve lost as many as five minutes of my own precious journaling time searching for THE pen. If I have to coax the pen across the page, my brain grows impatient and my thoughts crash into one another on their output assembly line. If the pen slips across like falling on a banana peel, well, that’s equally infuriating. My thoughts fall out of my brain like marbles down a slide.(I was going to say lemmings off of a cliff, but then I discovered their propensity for suicide is fiction, and in White Wilderness, Disney transported them to a cliff and herded them into the water)

My new find this year is Poly expanding file pockets. Actually, it’s not about the file pockets. I’ve been buying those for years to keep the papers from each class hour organized. The cheap thrill is that, finally, they’re tear-and water-resistant. Now I shouldn’t have to purchase new ones every nine weeks; of course, they cost more, but that’s no surprise.

Some women are wooed by flowers, perfume, candy, jewelry. Me? A twelve-pack of G-6 pens, and I’m yours baby. (Note: Though I wouldn’t turn down the flowers, perfume, etc. as extras).

So, that’s the latest from Nerdville.