Ode

I love binder clips.  There is nothing about binder clips that I do not love.  Binder clips are the greatest thing.  Nothing makes me happier than clipping a bunch of paper together with a binder clip.  I love holding piles of exams together with binder clips.  And I love holding piles of JSTOR printouts together with binder clips.  Most of all, I love using a binder clip to hold down the loose end of my clipboard so that my papers don’t get all mussed up in my bag.  I love really big binder clips, because they are AWESOME and can hold SO MANY things.  I love tiny little binder clips because they are just that much better than a boring old paperclip, and are totally cute in the way that things that are normally big are when they are small.

Even the disadvantages of binder clips aren’t really disadvantages.  Yes, sometimes they can be kind of tough to squeeze open.  This is not a problem:  this is excercise for your fingers, a body part that I feel often gets forgotten in conventional fitness regimes.  And yes, sometimes you can get your fingers caught in them and they kind of pinch, but, as my esteemed roommate pointed out, there is something sort of unquantifiably fun about getting your finger stuck in a binder clip.  It’s true.  It’s not annoying.  It’s kind of weirdly amusing.

I will confess that I accumulate binder clips.  They are like pens:  the sort of thing you don’t really need to buy for yourself because they usually just appear when needed (although I must admit that I usually do buy my own pens, but that’s because of my predilection for writing in purple ink).  So I have a vast collection – they live on my desk, clipped to each other in a glorious chain of binder clippy wonderousness.

Last night, I announced that binder clips were probably the one thing in the world that I can say that I love, one hundred percent, unconditionally, with no hesitation whatsoever.

“Why aren’t more people like binder clips?” asked Sam.

“Because people are jerks.  But binder clips will never let you down.”