Eyebrows.

When I opened omnisend this morning I had 3 things in my brain. Igor Stravinsky, Ellen Langer talking about mindfulness and most pressingly this hilarious and charming tiktok by comedian Matty Haverty reacting to our Pen Type-B. And for whatever reason, when prompted to choose a subject line for the newsletter, the words hi-brow, low-brow and eyebrow came to mind.

I'm going to share things related to all 3 of those subjects, but have no intention of categorizing anything along a spectrum of hi or low or eye brow.

You're prob too late for father's day.

But you're not too late for your outdoor adventure flashlight.

Viral videos.

Pen Type-B has had a week of scrambled emotions. As you know, we make A and B at a multi-generation family run machine shop in Vermont. We've recently had a really hard time getting things made in the US. Not only at this US manufacturer, but others. In a meeting on Wednesday with the folks who run production, they shared that government projects always and legally take precedent over our stuff, fair. And because of being short staffed, they can't commit to any production timeline for our open POs. Which feels disorienting and difficult while trying to run anything that resembles a business. We're still unsure what to do with that information.

In the meantime, we're really enjoying these viral videos. Matty Haverty has the tiktok algorithm freewheeling over his reaction video to Pen Type-B. It has over 6.2M hearts, which seems like a mistake. We first saw it responded to on IG by jordan_the_stallion8. Whose appreciation for a good pen coupled with a good cardboard box we share.

As a side... some of you might be wondering, holy crap are you selling thousands of pens. Haha no (we don't have that many). Well I too have always been curious about how something like that effects a business. In a rough estimate, our sales are about 3x stronger than usual the past few days. And that is without doing anything really differently in response to these videos.

Igor + Ellen.

Late night by a fire upstate last weekend, one of my closest's friend's 14 year old kid got me totally hooked on Stravinsky. I know I'm 100+ years late to this. And after hyping it up so much I was was honestly like how could anything be THAT spectacular. Then we watched some clips from the rite of spring. It is THAT spectacular. I've been doing a bit of a dive into some more of his music, specifically piano works like Grande suite de l"histoire du soldat, and rag music. I'm super into how much this music pushes the piano as an instrument close to it's breaking or "wrongness", with so much passion and precision. It's rad.

Also rad, our friend Ari sent us the most recent freakonomics podcast with Ellen Langer, a scientist whose life's work is studying the oneness of mind + body. This work resonates with our family SO much right now. I specifically liked the part about paying attention, making a point to notice things. She doesn't quite put it this way, but she discusses the practice of looking at things in a resolution, or framing, not to serve our primal or getting stuff done instinct, but as a way to quiet the mind and to find pleasure in the present.

With love and hugs,

Che-Wei + Taylor

Unresolved.