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How’s your penmanship? Mine sucks! But it hasn’t always been that way. Back in grammar school when we used fountain pens and ink blotters, I consistently received A-pluses in penmanship on my report card. I changed all that - it was around 1968 – my high school freshman year. I could take two city buses or a city bus and an elevated train to school. I was reading one of those interior ads on a city bus. I don’t recall exactly what the ad was for – maybe some handwriting analysis service – I don’t know. But that was the inspiration for my ingenious scheme. The great value of harnessing a goofy imagination is the importance of entertaining oneself. Since the freedom of information act, numerous files have been declassified about my double-life. On family road trips I was a secret agent in the backseat of my dad’s red and black Oldsmobile Super 88 – wearing my dad’s fedora and ‘smoking’ a pretzel rod on one side of my mouth. Yeah, I was cool – even back then. Several times we flew to Nova Scotia to see my grandpa – and when I say we flew – I’m including myself in the flight crew – since I could copilot the aircraft with the multipurpose device that some passengers used as a dinner tray. Alas - - we’ve gone too far in the way-back machine…recalibrating the space-time continuum to a 1968 city bus we're back to me viewing an ad about handwriting. My scheme was not as diabolical as the Norman Bates character in the film Psycho at the end of the movie Norman sits in a jail cell – aware of a fly landing on him – we hear his internal voice saying he’ll leave the fly alone – to convince others he wouldn’t even hurt a fly…There was something in the city bus handwriting ad about if you printed or wrote in cursive – it would reveal something about your personality. I decided to thwart anyone’s efforts to analyze me by adopting a combination print-cursive handwriting style. It was hard to affect the style at first – like chewing gum and reading – but I stayed with it. Lay teachers and Brothers in high school were a lot more tolerant of oddball students who seem to have a penmanship problem. The downside was I might get a lower grade on something because they couldn’t translate the print-cursive-hieroglyphics of my essay…some teachers tried slow torture techniques (more agonizing on them than me) …instead of grammar school nuns making me write something over – some high school teachers would ask me to read my essay or book report to them. I feel bad about that now. Here they were – teachers who cared enough to find out what I was saying – and I enjoyed the extra attention and felt like I was getting away with something. Shame on me. I am truly sorry, all you teachers out there - past and present who really do care and love to teach. In college I was a fine arts major – so hey – penmanship schmenmanship (autocorrect take that! )– have you ever been able to make out the signature of an artist? I rest my case. When I got involved in security technology I felt I had to whip my handwriting into shape. Making technical notes for installation documentation or simply an end-user ‘manual’ – I forced myself to print neatly and became so anal about it I used a ruler or a makeshift straightedge to keep all the letters straight across – whether or not there were actually printed guidelines on the paper. This got to be a lot of work – if you consider doubling back on lower case letters like j, g, y that go below the bottom guideline. Rather than move my straightedge away when making a j or y I would only write the top portion – so my j looks like an i or my y looks like a v - until I’m done with the whole line of words – then I remove the straightedge and go back and add the lower part of the j or y…Sometimes I’d miss one which would yield weird instructions like “remove iumper 5” instead of “remove jumper 5”, or “vellow wire goes to terminal 25” instead of “yellow wire goes to terminal 25”. Fortunately, in later years with laptops and word processors common in the work place my whacked-out handwriting was put to rest. But still – If there is some form I have to fill out by hand – say at a doctor’s office, I have to get a credit card or magazine to serve as a straightedge for my print-cursive ‘format’. Old habits are hard to break. Computers have me spoiled – with autocorrect and online dictionaries. I enjoy writing, and the hours will just fly by. I got Penworks’ latest book From the Porch to the Page: A Guidebook for the Writing Life | Charlene L. Edge (charleneedge.com), and she has a chapter that encourages one to write by hand instead of typing. So I started doing that with a few of my writing projects. It’s a fresh and stimulating experience. I’m going at it freehand (no straightedge ) and trying to keep it all cursive without cursing. I try not to get hung up on the correct spelling of a word – and sometimes don’t even bother correcting a mistake - the flow is exhilarating. Reminds me of driving a 1974 Ford Econoline Van 3-speed-manual at 90 mph on a country road – it feels like driving a boat. It’s difficult to control the quick movement of ideas. I’m thinking of the Forrest Gump Breaking Leg Braces scene...I’m breaking out of confining habits – moving faster – though not as fast or graceful as Forrest Gump. ~ ~ ~ ~ So, what’s your feelings about handwriting? Do you like to write things down – or prefer to use a computer or some other device?