On March

I'm glad it's March. March is the month of change. 

March is when the dark and cold winter gives way to the spring, the season of promise and hope. It's when the frost melts and the sun breaks through and the whole world, it seems, is renewed, refreshed, revived. 

Sometimes the transition is beautifully blissful: one day it's cloudy and the next it's bright, one day it's icy and the next, buds are popping up out of nowhere and suddenly there are blossoms on the flowers, on the bushes, on the trees. And it stays that way. That's the kind of March that everyone loves. 

Sometimes, though, the transition from winter to spring is bumpy. Sometimes there are thunderstorms and rain and battering winds. Sometimes, you'll get a week of beautiful weather and then, all of a sudden, you're hit with a bout of dreary, depressing days with no sunlight. 


But it's okay, because if you wait it out, spring will come, and summer will follow. 


"The Night is mother of the Day,
The Winter of the Spring,
And ever upon old Decay
The greenest mosses cling."
(John Greenleaf Whittier)

On Time

I'm fascinated by February 29th. Leap Day. 

I love it because it's so special, so unique. After all, it only comes once every four years. I've always wondered -- what would it be like to have February 29th as your birthday?

It fills in a gap that the other 365 days can't make up for, restores those extra six hours that are lost every year. It sets the calendar right...until the next year rolls around, and our keeping of time gets behind again. 

Whenever a February 29th comes by, it feels like a present, like I'm being given an extra twenty-four hours to catch up on life. It reminds me that time is important, that we don't know when the clock will run out for us, that we have to attack every second, treasure every minute, take advantage of every hour, seize every day. That we need to treat time as though it is precious, because it is.  

Are you going to Carpe Diem today? 

On Dust

My family is currently in the process of fixing up our house. It had been pretty much destroyed by a fire before we bought it a few months ago (and the parts that weren't ruined were fairly ugly), so the whole place needed to be gutted and rebuilt on the inside. It's not finished yet, but as for the months' worth of work already completed, most of it was done by my dad, who can do nearly anything as long as he's got his extensive collection of tools nearby.  

Anyway, a couple weeks ago, he was removing the flooring in the foyer so we could replace it with tiles. Don't ask me what tool he was using, because I don't know--some sort of device that cuts the floor up, maybe--I just know that the process required the production of dust. Lots and lots of dust.

So he surrounded the area with sheets of plastic curtains, to protect the rest of the house from the dust, and pulled on his face mask, and got to work.

In the meantime, I'm upstairs in my room with the door shut, doing school and trying to drown out the noise of whatever Dad's doing by turning up the radio. And then ten or so minutes go by, and my mom comes in, letting in air that is curiously shaded gray as she opens the door. She's all distressed, and says, "Clog your doorknob-hole, and make sure your door is shut all the way! Don't leave your room! There's a leak!"

(My doorknob-hole was pretty much what it sounds like: the empty hole in my door where my doorknob should have been. This was waaaay back last month, when we still didn't have doorknobs, but none of us minded much because it was exponentially better than the brief stage when we didn't have doors.)

So I get a pair of socks and clog my doorknob-hole, and then, you know, open the door even though Mom told me not to, because, come on, I really wanted to know what was happening. And as soon as I open the door, a wave of grime hits my eyes and my nose and my mouth, tearing up my eyes and blocking my airways and coating my tongue, so I jump back in my room and shut the door and go straight for the bottle of water on my bedside table.

It takes a long time for the dust to fully settle, and many rounds of vacuuming before the house is reasonably clean again. My parents' room's door had been left open, and every surface was covered with a blanket of gray.

My dad hadn't sealed up his work site tightly enough, and hadn't spotted the leak until it was too late. My mom, my siblings, and I had been in rooms with shut doors, oblivious to what was going on outside.

Dust. It hides in the air, taking refuge in plain sight. It fills up the nooks and crannies. It goes unnoticed, building up slowly, gradually, until one day you realize that you're surrounded by dust, that you've been breathing it in all along, unsuspecting. All of a sudden it hits you, how it's filling you up more and more with every breath, how dusty you are, how dusty your life is. How hard it will be to clean up the mess--because with every motion, with every step you take to attack it, the air and wind lift the dust from the surfaces and carry it to somewhere else, lying in wait to attack you again.

You have to be on your guard against dust. It's better to never let it in, rather than struggle to drive an unmanageable amount of it out. It's better to get rid of it bit by bit, day by day, rather than risk suffocating in it by letting it build up.

Are you guarding yourself against your dust?

On Quirkiness

If you're fortunate enough to live on planet Earth, I recommend you stop reading this for a second and look around at your world. (If you don't live on planet Earth, you can ask a friend who does to look around for you.) Once you've examined the bustling cities, the small towns, the farmlands, the little villages, the ocean ports, the mountains and valleys and plains and everything else, you'll see beauty and tragedy and everything in between. You'll find a striking collage of unique people, diverse locations, odd customs. There is a lot of sameness -- a lot of the "norm" -- but every individual person, place, and custom has its own style, its own mark, its own quirk.


You can call me Allebasi, and one of my quirks is a love of fonts and handwriting. I hold that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they write. Is it an all-caps scrawl, or steady and curvy? A large and bold print, or a minuscule script?  Shaky or solid? Fancy or plain? If it's fancy, then is it full of over-the-top flourishes, like the person is trying too hard, or is it subtle and artistically balanced?


Although the title may lead you to believe otherwise, the theme of this blog is not fonts. (That would get old fast, even for me.) Maybe you've noticed that this title is not The World of Fonts, but rather The World in Fonts. Fonts are not the focus; they are a lens used to focus on the quirkiness of the world. They're an efficient device for this, because they're so much like the world, its inhabitants, their homes and customs. Diverse, numerous, one for everything imaginable. Quirky. 


I chose the title The World in Fonts because it's quirky. I like quirkiness.


I hope you do too.