soledad penadés

Two authors were discussing about their writing methods and specially, about the paper they used to write in. The first writer (let’s call him Phil) used to prepare himself ruled paper sheets, because -he argued- it was the only method to know exactly how the rules were spread across each sheet, so he could control the height between lines, the amount and exact tone of the ink used to print the rules, etc. The second writer (called Rube) used to prepare the ruled paper but he gave up quickly and decided to just buy ruled paper notebooks, so that he could concentrate on the actual writing instead of the rules alignment.

At the end, Phil’s home-made sheets were just quite messy and didn’t look as professional and serious as Rube’s one. Rube was always able to deliver the books on time, while Phil spent hours and hours improving his custom made method for drawing rules and making sure it was efficient and fast. Often the method failed and he had to restart from scratch.
No wonder Phil’s father was a very weird architect which believed in making his own bricks. He took it with lots of dedication and pride but was only able to finish a couple of buildings in his life. Going up the family tree, Phil’s grandfather was a mechanic which absolutely defended the need to build oneselves’ wheels and tyres and re-engineer their design with every new patron which came to his little workshop.

Phil thinks Rube is a pretentious arrogant guy trying to impress women in any of the multiple social acts which he can attend (as he’s got lots of free time thanks to just using conventional ruled paper when writing), and would like to be able to say this to the entire world but he’s just too busy drawing lines in order to do any actual work at the end.