My new creative input device of choice arrived a few days ago. The unboxing was frantic. After hurriedly discarding the first layer of cardboard shell, I tore into the second. The packing materials weren't making it easy.

"Open, damn you! Too. Many. Boxes!"

Finally. There it was. Covered in cellophane, styrofoam, and other earth-threating materials. The monetary investment wasn't the only regrettable accompaniment to this guilty pleasure. It's petroleum produced silhouette was beautiful. "I can just devote more time to pro bono charity work to, er, offset it," I thought.

I setup my workspace to accomodate it's 20 plus inches of horizontal width. I plugged it into the DVI port on the back of my work PC and installed the requisite software.

"Hurry. Up."

I started to make my first strokes. "What's this? Lag? Horrible, terrible, noticeable lag between my stylus and the cursor?"

"Surely, this must be some sort of mistake!," I thought. "Perhaps I need to turn off pointer precision or some other archaic inclusion in my operating system? Where is the setting to un-fuck this thing?!"

No setting was to be found. My Nintendo DS running a homebrew, pressure sensitive drawing app named Colors was more responsive, or perhaps more instinctively easy to pick up on, than the new cornerstone of my workflow. Despair! Two thousand plus dollars down the toilet! Sixteen percent restocking fees! Shame and ridicule from my peers! Clearly the end days were near.

I decided to persevere. I started to notice a trend. My instinct was to focus on the cursor and not the tip of the stylus. I'd conditioned myself to watch the screen cursor with steely dedication when drawing with my old Intuos3 9"x12" tablet. Having taught myself to draw with it, I feared that drawing with a direct input device such as this was more of a hurdle for me than most. I had to rewire my focus. The damn cursor was throwing me off.

"Be the pen, Ray. Be the pen."

Doing my best to ignore the cursor, I trudged forward. I'd have to forcibly separate myself from the old tablet. I had to ween myself away from it and the habits I'd cultivated. I spent all day and night drawing with the new device, doing my best to achieve a zen-like calm.

Drawing was getting easier. The lag became almost entirely unnoticeable. Soon, I was hitting lines on my first attempt that would've taken a half dozen with my old tablet. The weight of buyer's remorse was lifting off my shoulders.

By the next morning, not only was I used to the way it worked, but my work-flow was orders of magnitude faster with it. My accuracy was much improved. Drawing was effortless. Maybe most importantly, creating with it was far more fun than with my old tablet.

The Cintiq 20WSX was at home on my desk and I couldn't imagine working without it. Down with tablets! Up with, er, Cintiqs!