anywhereisbetter

For the better part of my adult life I’ve disliked my handwriting. It’s usually illegible even to me, and on the rare occasion that I take the time to write clearly, it’s ugly. I use only uppercase letters, leaving only the relative size of each letter to indicate that my understanding of capitalization while making everything I write look like it was meant to be shouted. Read my average handwritten grocery list, and you’d think I’m an incredibly angry shopper who thinks that “Tofu” and “Acorn Squash” are proper nouns. I fret to think of what a handwriting expert might have to say.

For years, I’ve been resigned to a life of illegible scrawlings. But several months back, I began to give it some serious thought. I started thinking about how incredibly inefficient it is to write in strictly uppercase, and the Taylorist in me began thinking about ways to reduce the amount of work that went into each letter. I decided that my uppercase E, requiring three strokes of the pen, was far inferior to the simple swoosh required by its lowercase counterpart. “A” followed, and soon I began to obsess over my wasteful ways. It might not seem like a big deal, but those extra strokes really add up. With every agonizing E and A I wrote, I cursed my bad habit of small caps. Before long, I knew I couldn’t go on this way. I had to make a change.

This is how my brain works.

Of course, you can’t just go on writing in all uppercase letters with lowercase A’s and E’s without looking like some kind of crazy person (the kind that that yearns for efficiency in his every mechanical motion, for instance). So I decided to go all the way, and for the past few months, I’ve begun to change my handwriting. And let me tell you, it’s not easy. I’d forgotten what a lowercase Q was supposed to look like, and I had to decide which technique I would use to write my lowercase D. And speaking of D, keeping that straight with the lowercase “B” isn’t easy for a guy who occasionally (err… often) still has trouble distinguishing left from right. But dyslexia be damned, I have vowed to be successful. I revel in the easy swoop of each lowercase E, and although my scrawlings look an awful lot like a third grader’s, it’s getting better. So what if I occasionally (often) revert to my old ways, making my notes look like a handwritten version of a ransom letter.

When I send you handwritten letters, you’ll be thankful for my efforts. Just you wait.