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 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.