The written word

I still know how to write cursive. It's one random and useless skill I picked up in elementary school that I still have in my head, along with other gems like long division or how to spell words without using spell check. I rarely use it. But this is because I go out of my way to avoid writing things on paper at all. My handwriting is abysmal. It sits on the page in tiny clusters, like a bundle of paranoid sticks cowering in the corner of the page. Letters are not of a consistent size, they bob and weave, or slowly slide off the edge of the page. Lined paper helps a little, but I crammed everything together without white space on the page. At the end of the year, the notebook would have 30 pages of an unrelenting barrage of scribbling in the front, and thirty blank pages that escaped the fury in the back.

This is why I like the computer. All the words I write come out clean, crisp, legible. Each one devoid of personality in and of itself as reading Times New Roman is wont to do. It's probably for the best that this happens. I'd rather that my words came across with clinical reassurance as opposed to the thought that they might have been written by a disturbed teenager. I don't need that negative energy. Times new roman is the double-blind; the great equalizer. All text becomes refreshingly similar, like fast food. It may not be a spectacle to behold but you know with certainty it will be adequate.

This must be why so many of the great philosophers and figures in history wrote letters to each other. Receiving a letter from Voltaire in a script that's flowing and a joy to behold must have made the experience that much better. I bet the thinkers with bad handwriting became lost to history because people didn't like receiving letters from them. As though the letters would be better, cleaner and more legible if the writer simply took more time. It might be an insult - how dare someone quickly slap together a letter and send it off in such haste, when I put forth so much effort into my letters?

Is it possible to just be bad at handwriting? Like how some people claim to be bad at math, so they don't get tasked with doing math-y things in groups. Maybe what I need is to write more, to get my hands used to the movements of cursive. You know, muscle memory. Then again, that's what I did in 3rd grade, and my handwriting sucked then too. The bad math person uses a calculator, I use times new roman.

And that's the joy of the computer. When I want to change the tone of my writing, I can do it on the fly. I can set the type in any font I choose, at any point without any need to re-do everything I've done. Of course, you lose the effect of immediacy. Something written in the moment of passion, anger, sadness carries with it that power, captured forever.