Hand Writing

I am a journalist, by trade. Actually, I do not feel much like a journalist; I am generally not nosy, and I don’t like to pry into peoples’ business, and to be quite honest, if someone were to divide the world into 2 categories, People Who Make the News and People Who Report the News, I would definitely rather be in the “Make” category.

However, I wanted to start today’s post with this sentence:

I am a journalist.

I like to ask the hard-hitting questions (not really, but, again, for the sake of today’s post ... let’s just say I do, OK?), like the one I asked just a few minutes ago when I stopped by Farm Fresh to buy some dishwashing liquid.

First of all, I should explain that Farm Fresh is a very small store centered around Farm Fresh milk, which is sold in glass bottles. Which is THE only kind of milk to drink, really. (Ask my friend Patti; she will agree.) Seriously. If anyone ever asks you what kind of milk you want, don’t bother saying, “Oh, only skim milk for me!” or “I prefer whole milk, if you have it.”

Say, “I’ll take whatever milk you have, as long as it’s out of a glass bottle.”

Anyway, I walk into Farm Fresh, and I know that because it is a small store, I can mill around and find my Ivory Liquid or whatever they have in less than 5 minutes, probably, but this is a beautiful day, and I really don’t feel like spending even 1 minute searching. As I enter the store, I spy a young man behind the counter, sort of leaning forward. He has somewhat hollow eyes, which look up at me as I walk into the store, and blondish hair.

“Do you have any dishwashing liquid?” I ask.

“Uhhhhhhh ... you mean, soap?”

See? Hard-hitting questions.

: )

On my drive home, I hear a KMOX radio announcer proclaiming that Hillary Clinton will not be the Democratic nominee for president in 2008. And that Arnold Schwarzenegger will not be elected president then, either.

I believe I agree with both points.

Though I have always had a bit of a something for ol’ Hills. Especially since she has a certain “family” quality about her. Plus, she always seemed so smart, especially in contrast to her hubby ... who also is supposed to be smart (I guess?), though apparently he wasn’t so smart about his, uhm, indiscretions ...

Anyhoo, bottom line: After this year’s election, Democrats are in “must-win” mode. They would never have the guts/balls to try to get a woman elected ... or would they??!

As for Ahnold: I do not want him as president. And it has nothing to do with him not being a natural-born U.S. citizen, one of the requirements for the position; matter of fact, I truly believe that many naturalized citizens have a far greater appreciation of the greatness of this country because they have lived elsewhere and know what it is like not to have the freedoms we have here.

We take things for granted here, sometimes. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s a little like when you have an ability, something you’ve always been able to do, sometimes without any extensive training: You just assume you’re always going to be able to do it. And you don’t even think about it all that much ... until someone brings it up and wants to make you do it their way, or asks you why you’re not doing it more often, or better, or whatever.

Like writing.

: )

My friend Matt has written an insightful piece on writing. Which includes some of the things I have actually thought about, regarding writing, and used to try to explain to various friends, most of whom are not writers, and to my students, who were taking writing classes but were definitely not writers, by any stretch of the imagination (most of them, anyway) ... some of them because they actually hated to write, but many of them because they had been told, or rather, taught, at a very young age, that they weren’t any good at it ... and so they had given up, or lost interest, and no longer cared. Or pretended not to.

Matt speaks of the process of writing, and how it is different now from what it was long ago. I don’t think about that, necessarily, all that often, other than, occasionally, to remind myself how much easier it is, technologically speaking, to write, in today’s world. And then I think of an essay by Frank McCourt in which he described his early days of writing, how he used pieces of wallpaper because he was very poor and could not afford to buy actual writing paper. And then, can you imagine writing entire novels, by hand? And when you think about it all: It really wasn’t that long ago, in the whole scheme of the world and what-not!

I have thought about this a lot, this whole writing process, because writing used to be something I did with a spiral notebook (college ruled, preferably) on my lap, a Paper Mate pen in my hand. And I would write passages and scenes, paragraphs and pages at a time, and I rarely seemed to finish anything, but I was always writing ... though, one time, in 5th grade, I really did fill an entire notebook (20 pages, I think, nothing outlandishly long) with an adventure story about me and some of my classmates.

And then, when I decided to become a journalist, I learned that you HAD to use a computer to write your story because deadlines couldn’t wait for you to write something out by hand and then type it into the computer. And just a few years before that, you would have HAD to have used a typewriter, but the times, they were a-changin’, and this was The Computer Age, finally and undeniably upon us.

So I learned to think and type and create and write, right there, with a keyboard and a computer screen in front of me. Over and over, until it became almost automatic, to the point that now, the thought of writing out something by hand sounds excruciatingly tedious ... in fact, my hands can’t even keep up with my thoughts, really, and the thought of not being able to delete a mistake, or copy ’n’ paste and rearrange, at will, seems torturous to me.

Though there is something, still, very sensual and romantic about a hand-written letter. I do like to write those, on very rare occasions.

: )

When I was a kid, my teachers told me that I wrote wrong.

I mean, my letters were right and everything, but I held my pencil incorrectly, they told me. Instead of holding it between the tips of my index finger and thumb, with my index finger bent at a nearly perfect right angle, I sort of scrunched my fingers around my pencil, almost as if I were making a fist:



I still write like this.

When I write by hand.

(And I just learned that it’s not easy to take a picture of yourself writing.)

: )