I always had a hankering' to learn to write left handed. I never could manage it. My right-hand writing was terrible for many years. Eventually I mastered a very nice mostly block capitals method of printing that I could do fairly rapid.
When I used to write long-hand a hard day's writing would leave the joints in my right hand aching—in misery. I always wished that I could simply switch hands. No dice.
Then when I started corresponding heavily online, I was using a keyboard quite a bit and I had a
deep-seated reluctance to learn Touch-Typing.
Many years ago I'd come across a reference to one-handed typing techniques.
I looked one up, but I only took the first couple lessons.
I settled into a two-finger "
Hunt-and-Peck" though there is damned little hunting anymore, since I know very well where the keys are.
And I type left-handed. The rate seems to be just fast enough for the words on the page to keep up with my plotting or phrase turning.
A couple stories. I'm sure I've told these online before.
How many folks have read Castaneda?
Once Castaneda said that people should make realistic resolutions that they knew that they could keep.
Don Juan told him:
"Your resolutions injure the spirit."#1} When I was a boy, many of my peers used to brag about being ambidextrous—not me, I was too honest.
They'd grab a pencil in their left hand and scrawl some illegible scribbling and say:
"See!"
Boy what a grand and glorious thing it would be to be able to actually write legibly left handed.
One day I was seized with an inspiration so grand that it startled me with its grandiloquence.
I asked my mother if I would work really hard and apply myself diligently if she would set me up some lessons and help me remember to practice writing left-handed every day until I'd mastered it.
"You can barely read your right-handed writing. Why not devote the same amount of time to mastering right-handed writing?"I hadn't read Castaneda as a seven year old. Don't think that he was in print yet.
"Your resolutions injure the spirit you bitter kibitzing old woman!"Exactly what bragging Rights would being able to write legibly get me with my peers? Kids don't give a shit if another kid writes legibly or not. I sure as
Hell didn't give a shit about my unlegible handwriting.
Story
#2} Every time it was time to sign up for a new semester in High School, my father tried to get me to take typing. He even tried to get me to agree to go to Summer School to take typing.
I always refused.
I remember he ferreted a photo of Dave Draper—a bodybuilder that I admired—sitting in front of a typewriter.
He mystified me by saying:
"See, he can type. (No, he was photographed sitting in front of a typewriter…) and he's no sissy…"
WTF???Now in my Freshman year at college I had to turn in a typed English term paper—and it could have a few erasures. I two-finger typed for about three all-nighters in a row, threw in the towel and got a professional typist to do it for me. It was the best $20 that I ever spent. Wish I had went that route from the start.
Over thirty years later, in rehearsing all my failures and shortcomings over the years…
He makes this absolutely astonishing statement:
"I
TRIED to get you to learn to type, but you always said that it was for sissies and that it was a completely worthless ability. Surely after what happened to you in College, you'll be man enough to admit that I was Right and you were Wrong."
I spent three sleepless nights and spent $20 to have a paper typed
ONCE in 2.5 years of College.
I never said that Typing was effeminate. (Although that explained the Draper photo after all those years…)
I never said that it was worthless.
I Carefully Explained
Every Semester that a High School Typing class was far more
Drudgery than I was willing to volunteer for.
Whereas you can at least
hope that most High School Classes will conclude ten or fifteen minutes before the hour, the modular self-paced nature of typing means that you will work nonstop from bell to bell.
And some people had no talent for it and they had to sweat their asses off to get a "
C".
I never minded "
C"s, but Damned if I wanted to sweat my ass off for one.
It just made me wonder
why he never truly heard what I said to him.And he's been dead almost ten years now and I miss him…
But even today the thought of learning standard touch-typing will make me mad enough to spit.
…..RVM45