So it’s come to this…
I’m writing a letter to a friend in cursive right now, and I realize, it’s been at least five years since I’ve written anything longer than my signature in cursive, by hand (and now that I think of it, my signature’s degraded into a barely legible scribble that looks more like “Oin Zel” than “Darrin Bell”). I send dozens of e-mails per day, post in here and on other discussion forums nearly every day. I type over 60 words per minute.
But I’ve lost the ability to write in cursive without nearly having a nervous breakdown. In college, I could write longform as fast as I could type. I could make it through a whole day of final exams, filling up to four entire bluebooks without a sweat. After 5 years off, though, I’m finding it’s all alien to me. It looks like a seventh grader’s handwriting. I can’t keep the @#$% lines straight. Keeping the pen pressed against the paper to make tight little turns and scribbles is excruciatingly mind-numbing. It’s so @#$% slow compared to a keyboard. I can’t remember how to write an upper case “J”. I have a nearly irresistible urge to lift my pen from the paper after every letter, and IT’S DRIVING ME INSANE.
It’s so frustrating, I wish I could hit delete and just start over in print instead of cursive. I’ve come to realize in the last few minutes that I may have discovered the only humane means of torture. Make a person either type or write in all-uppercase print for five years, then make him write three paragraphs in cursive. He’ll tell you anything you want to know after the first paragraph.
I just had to release all the pent-up energy by typing this post. Now, back to the torture…