longhand – Treehouse Writers

Like many other people in the United States, I’ve been writing postcards to voters in other states as a way of doing something about the election. I’ll vote, of course, and I’m sending a little money here and there as well.

Given the number of postcards I can reasonably write and the amount of money I can afford to send, not to mention the value of my single vote, all those things only matter if a lot of other people do them as well.

But the stress of “the most important election of our lives” is weighing on me. I don’t call people, because I despise getting such calls and cannot bear to do that to others. Postcards I can do without having to talk to a stranger who doesn’t really want to talk with me.

In general, while I worry a lot and always vote – the last time I skipped an election was a runoff between a dishonest Democrat who was going to win anyway and a well-intentioned good-government Republican whose ideas on how to run a city were disastrous – I am not excited about electoral politics. I prefer to put my energy for change into building something that might grow into better systems. Co-ops, for example.

I came to that after being active in the antiwar movement back in the day when I realized that I preferred making things to protesting them. Not that I haven’t done a lot of protesting as well – it’s kind of like voting: you gotta do it from time to time.

Anyway, I’m trying to do my small part to fend off fascism – and yes, there is a right and wrong side in this election and not just in the presidential race. I don’t think the United States survives as a nation if we don’t stop this latest effort to create an authoritarian state.

And though I can think of reasonable arguments for the dismantling of the United States, it would be hell to live through that period and while I’m old, I’m not so old that I won’t have to.

Also, I’m pretty much in favor of getting a sane base in place and trying to fix the country’s problems from there. See above, where I mentioned I preferred building things to protests.

I mean, we already had a civil war over how the country should be governed. As someone who has read a bit of history, I contend that we wouldn’t be in this mess if we hadn’t abandoned Reconstruction after that nasty war. The Civil War Amendments to the Constitution gave us a way to build the country we ought to be, but we haven’t used them as well as we should. Continue reading “Meditating on the Writing of Postcards”…

I don’t usually read John McWhorter. Over the years, I’ve seen enough work by him to know I find him annoying, possibly because he strikes me as one of those people who have carved out a career as a contrarian.

But he had a column about whether kids should be taught cursive this week and, given his usual defense of the old-fashioned, I thought this might be one place where he and I aligned.

Nope. Turned out he thinks it’s great that kids aren’t learning cursive anymore. Our ongoing record of disagreement continues, because I do think learning cursive — or, as I call it, longhand — is useful.

Now I should tell you that the only subject I struggled with in elementary school was handwriting. That includes learning to print as well as learning to write longhand.

It’s not that I couldn’t recognize the letters — I was reading before I started school — nor that I didn’t know how to make them.

It’s that the way I made them was always messy. They were readable. They were “right.” But they didn’t look very good.

Longhand was no harder for me than printing, which is to say that I could easily do both, but never do either to my teachers’ satisfaction.

The end result? Judging by my handwriting, you’d assume I was destined to be a doctor. (I wonder if the old joke about doctors’ handwriting still applies in the modern world in which prescriptions are sent electronically.)

My handwriting has not improved with age. At one point in my life, I took an aptitude test in which I discovered that I had multiple aptitudes — an explanation for my multiplicity of interests — except in one area: fine motor coordination.

I test at 5 percentile on fine motor. The funny thing is, I kind of enjoyed the test for that. I was just very, very slow and clumsy at it.

I took typing in summer school when I was in high school and even though I was never a great typist — I am apparently not good at any skill where you are supposed to be very accurate with your fingers — I immediately starting typing everything.

Long before personal computers were a thing, I was writing on a typewriter rather than by hand. I should probably note that I was raised by journalists, and being able not just to type but to write directly on a keyboard was considered a basic skill.

I thought correcting typewriters were a gift of the gods and I got my first computer in 1983 (which is about to be 40 years ago). Typing on something where I could correct my errors and go back and revise without having to retype was the most wonderful thing I could imagine.

I compose almost everything I write by resting my fingers on a keyboard and thinking. (I do not like keyboards that are so responsive that you can’t touch a key without it registering.)

So why, you reasonably ask, do I think it’s good to learn longhand? Continue reading “I Did Not Write This in Longhand, But …”…