My husband and I were talking recently, and it turns out that I’ve missed my calling.
Instead of being a writer, I should have been a doctor. Not because I’d be great at medical procedures. I am so weak-stomached that I can’t even watch when I get my own blood taken. When my friends in advanced biology in high school were dissecting a fetal pig, I thought I would drop dead.
There’s no way I would have gotten through the medical school cadaver course. I would be a fantastic physician is for one reason only—my handwriting, especially when I’m rushed, can be absolutely atrocious. I mean, it’s so bad, that there may have been times when even I couldn’t read it.
But I admit to nothing.
This doesn’t run in my family. My Mom had the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen. Every letter she wrote seemed like it was pulled straight off of the cursive writing examples that lined the top of the chalkboards in all the classrooms when I was in elementary school.
When I asked her about it, she said that when she studied penmanship, the nuns were quite militant. Back then, they were allowed to hit children for, well, just about any infraction. She said that when she saw other kids get a smack for not having practiced their cursive, she was highly motivated to get hers just right.
She even won some kind of penmanship contest.
My Aunt Kathie, her youngest sister, has such beautiful handwriting that if it had its own soundtrack, it would be a choir singing.
Even my cousin Brian, who actually is a doctor, has near-perfect script. (But I think he just did it because he knew he wanted to be a doctor and needed the buck the stereotype. I think of myself as having taken his place in the illegible handwriting annals of the world—you know, just to keep things balanced.)
Recently, I was looking at a list I had written for work, and I just couldn’t read one of the words. So I decided to bring my husband into the fray. Here’s how that conversation went:
Me: Look at this. Any idea what this word could be?
Brad: You’re kidding me, right?
Me: It looks like it says “crab.” But that doesn’t make any sense.
(Note: while Maryland is known for steamed crabs, by fall, we’re usually all finished feasting on them even though the season technically runs through the very beginning of December. And it was a work-related list anyway, and there was no way that I was writing something about crabs.)
Brad: I don’t know what it says, but it doesn’t look like crabs to me.
Me: You know what it looks like? It looks like it says “boobs.”
Brad: Boobs?
Me: Yeah, I know. I wouldn’t have written “boobs” on my work list either.
Brad: Sorry, honey. I got nothin’.
I kept staring at my chicken-scratch, absolutely desperate to figure out what this word was that I had written to myself. Because it had to do with my business, I really needed to figure it out. After what seemed like hours—but was probably actually only 15 minutes or so—I got it! The word I had written was “evals.” Short for evaluations. Something that I was doing for an author regarding his writing.
This is another problem that I have—not only can I sometimes not decipher my own writing, but I also write in my own type of shorthand, and then when I can’t read that, I’m pretty much screwed. Because no one else knows what’s been going on in my brain. Which is probably a good thing…but I digress.
“Why don’t you type out your to-do lists like other people,” my husband asked me after the whole “crabs/boobs/evals” debacle.
“Because I like writing it out by hand. Then I finish a task, and I cross it off. It’s a great feeling,” I answered. And I just can’t get the same emotional gratification either with hitting “delete” or by using the strike through option in my word processing program.
There’s no flourish. There’s no sense of completion. There’s no satisfaction.
Then again, there’s no crabs/boobs/evals issues either.
For now, I’ll keep writing my lists on my pastel-colored paper in my own shorthand. Most times, I’ll know what I’ve written. Sometimes, I may not.
So if you ever get a card in the mail, and you can’t read the signature, it might just be from me. Especially if the signature looks like crabs/boobs or evals.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s turning the heat on, then off, then on, then off again, writes Wojo’s World® from Baltimore. She’s also the author of the award-winning humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box. You can connect with Wojo on Facebook or on Twitter.
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