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Blog - February 2006 |
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This page stores my blog entry from February 2006. The entry is from February 27.
Writing in Cursive is a Dying Skill / Insane Kid Scare / GNR Mood: Need Similar Bands / Future Plans Monday, February 27, 2006 I am an artifact from an old era. In reality, I won't be an artifact until I get many years older. This age of electronic communications has eliminated a rather old form of communication: handwriting. How many schools out there actually teach penmanship? Do students these days know any cursive outside of signing their name? ATM cards are commonplace, and with online bill pay, the need for checks and checking accounts has been nearly all but eliminated. I realized that my greatest personal achievement in the self-edification realm was re-teaching myself to write in cursive. Throughout university, I had to resort to printing and printing-like scrawls (really a combination of cursive and printing; I was too lazy to lift up my pencil between letters). I simply couldn't write in cursive fast enough. My earliest memory of learing to write in cursive came in second grade. We learned by writing on the graded paper that had a dashed line between two solid lines. The middle line gave us a guide as to how far up we should write the lower parts of letters (e.g. the hump in the "h"). I stayed true to my male genes and did horribly with penmanship. I did get gradually better, but that would have been equivalent to saying that China was a step closer to democracy. After a few years, penmanship became de-emphasized. Hand-written papers gave way to typed papers, gradually from typewriters to computers. By high school, it was expected that we would type our papers. I didn't have any need of it, and all sense of a need to practice it or even remember it disappeared. Around four or five years ago, I found a need to write a couple of thank-you notes to family members of a friend of mine. In following proper etiquette and my sense of how things should be, I decided I'd hand-write them. For the life of me, I could not remember how to write all of the letters. On top of that, my brain seriously hurt while I tried to write. It was the weirdest frontal lobe pain that I have ever felt. After many different sheets of screw-ups, I finished those letters and mailed them off. I worked on my cursive for some time, writing letters to people to help myself get a little more fluid with it. Now, nearly four years removed from that day, I find myself to be pretty fluent again. I still have that occasional hitch, but I write much more effortlessly. Whenever that need to write a letter comes around again, I'll be ready for it. And, despite having many things that I would consider to be my best achievement from the past year, I would consider re-learning cursive to be my greatest for self edification. ***** Nothing is scarier to a well-dressed man than being terrorized by a little kid smothered in ice cream. The feeling of terror as the kid careens around the corner without looking and not having the time to dodge aside. The careful look and sudden deft move that avoids certain disaster. I experienced this at an all-you-can-eat restaurant. ***** My musical moods change monthly, sometimes weekly. One mood that appears and frustrates me is when I get into a Guns N' Roses mood. I do love GNR, and I love some of the off-shoot bands as well (e.g. Velvet Revolver and Neurotic Outsiders). GNR made some of the best albums in rock, and, besides the ultra-popular songs, I listen to and love nearly every track they created. There really hasn't been a popular hard rock band since them that has put out albums that are so consistently good. Unfortunately, that's where I have a problem: once I'm through listening to all my GNR albums and the band's offshoots, I don't have anything else in that range to continue and help satisfy that mood. My goal now is to try to find other bands and albums that I can get that would be in the same vein as Guns N' Roses. I want something that's not a GNR offshoot (though I will continue to get Velvet Revolver albums). Alice In Chains might help. I do have "Jar of Flies" and have always been tempted to get their regular albums. Outside of them, I simply cannot think of any roughly equivalent bands. GNR just seemed to capture it in such a way that really connected with me. It probably also helped that GNR was one of the first "current" rock bands I liked when I started to listen to my own rock music back in high school. The empty void and longing that I feel for wanting more GNR will always be there. I think that deep longing shows just how much I loved GNR and how much their music means to me. ***** I think I will spend my time over the next month re-structuring my site and unveil what will be its 10th Anniversary Edition. I don't expect it to really be all that much different (think "Windows ME" compared to "Windows 98 Second Edition"), but I hope to streamline things a little and make it easier for me to add new posts to my blog. Maybe, if I design it correctly, I can keep a better blog and write more often with less hassle. Recipes will be my friend. I'm getting a little tired and drained in trying to think of meal ideas each week. I pick one thing for lunch and one thing for dinner, and that's getting a bit harder to determine as each week passes. Hopefully I can find some good, inexpensive ideas that will help me out. I have anniversary plans to concoct, work anniversary in a couple of months, and thoughts to boil down with respect to how to spend various sources of money for a loveseat, stereo, computer stuff, and a few other ideas that have floated through my mind. Hopefully whatever decision I make will be the correct one. |
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