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	For now, however, I'm sticking with parallels from another subject. I reckoned it was easier to look at topics and match styles rather than exact talking points.
      The first was On Collections and Addictions, an essay that proves my poetics professor and I may share some more connective tissue than initially thought. Like me, he started collecting from a young age after being enamored by the sound once the vinyl LP began to spin. Like me, he's amassed a collection almost unwieldy to lug around. Like me, he too fell into the online buying trap hard. But the difference lies in the craft, something my thesis professor pointed out as she walked through my past work on Drivetribe. Compared to my work on die-cast cars, Aguila's essay was tighter-knit, with greater sophistication and optimization that doesn't lose any enthusiasm for collecting records; it wasn't clinical.
	The second is Jose Dalisay Jr's immense back catalog of blog entries about pens. Ranging from general musings to item hunts, features, and previews of events that introduced a whole new group of people to me on Facebook. Of note is his 15 March 2021 entry, My Strange Romance. It's a peek into an established writer and literary authority as a nerd, a fellow obsessive who enjoys a hobby as both respite and as expression, with homely, laid-back yet densely packed and informative prose. Dalisay reads easy at first, but his verve affects and triggers a curiosity, first as a burst of envy that leads to a thirst for more, before sticker shock brings a prospecting pen collector back to earth. Yet his Penman column is meant to be a comfortable and transparent vertical to follow, more a lounge read than anything academic. Not that I can't steal elements of the style.