Day 252
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
I shut the lid on the mailbox and realized I had become my father.
At least regarding my handwriting. I had just mailed a support letter for a friend that's doing missionary work aboard, and when filling out the form I had used meticulously-penned capital letters. My father does the same thing--he uses only capital letters, using a slightly larger letter for what would normally be capitalized. It effectively looks like machine wrote it, which he likes.
He and I would bicker about our writing styles. Dad would say his way was very legible and therefore very sensible. I would say my way looked cool. I stopped using cursive years ago, and--weird story--I completely re-invented how I print in the transition from middle- to high-school. All I did in my spare time in 8th and 9th grade was listen to the Smashing Pumpkin's Siamese Dream album. All of the text on the album was in this neat-o font (Lansbury, I think), and I remember slowly turning my average-12-year-old handwriting into something overly quirky. Embarrassing example: my team lost a speed-math game we played in Advanced Algebra in 8th grade because it took me forever to write out all of the words and numbers. At least it looked cool, with all of the ornate hooks on "H"s and the loop-arc-y "a" you often see in typeface.
I still do this to a degree, though the need to put pen on paper quickly often supersedes any desire to make my handwriting elaborate. Which is why I think I unconsciously drifted to writing in all-caps for addresses on envelopes and official forms--I can do it swiftly WHILE adopting that machine-like visual sense my dad championed about a decade ago.
Thanks to an uncommon streak of observantness (is that a word?), I've noticed that several friends have handwriting that's an awful lot like their parents'. I think this is really cool. I just hope that if--when--I start using cursive again, it'll look something like my mom's beautiful handwriting. I can only hope.
posted, with grace and poise, by Jason @ 5/15/2007 10:59:00 PM,
1 Comments:
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At 11:06 AM,
Jason said...
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Is it bad to go back to your post 12 hours later and re-post it just to fix a hyphen error?
