CRITICAL MASS HYSTERIA! (1978-)

People comment on my handwriting. I’d forgotten how often they comment, since typing has become so much more prevalent in my life and most of us write freehand far less. My natural handwriting is tag-like, bold and all caps. Pursuant to my blog on 8.10.10, I received notes about it again. It got me thinking.

I remember being in grade school, where there was always emphasis on penmanship, which is completely different than writing. Penmanship is the nuance in your handwritten script, the way the ink pours uniquely out of a pen that you hold. Technically, it’s an art form. Writing, of course, is the presented content of your thoughts, both creative and literal. Both are uncompromisingly yours. But penmanship is distinctly and physically inimitable, it is a trait akin to the way your face looks; some may be similar, but nobody’s is exactly the same. In an epitomization of the definition, it is totally unique.

I also remember sitting in elementary class as a kid, and noticing others’ handwriting styles. Some were terrible, many were tolerable, few were pristine. The loose commonalities in girls’ handwriting were often these puffy and balloon-y bubble letters, and many used little hearts to dot the “i’s” in their names. When writing in cursive, all script is supposed to lean slightly right… but many of the guys wrote like their letters were going to fall over and sloppily collapse into themselves. And frequently, you could correlate a person’s style of handwriting to their personality: messy = scattered. Neat = collected. Unusual = expressive. Handwriting was yours to create, get better at, or not care about at all — and most people who didn’t care to get better at things like handwriting tended to have the same philosophy in other areas of their lives.

Secretly, I always wanted people to think I had cool handwriting, I wanted them to notice it. They certainly weren’t going to notice me out on the football field, ‘cause I wasn’t out there. So in my mind, writing was another representative, distinct feature I could own. Math, science, history… these things are far less interpretable than writing, and I wasn’t particularly good at any of them. I’ve always gravitated towards the interpretables. I didn’t even mind getting asked to write on a chalkboard in front of the class, while it was terrifying to others.   

Handwriting is one of my fondest dying expressive languages, like Latin or the Queen’s English. Nowadays, we’re all punching keys. We’re all Tahoma, or Verdana, or (my favorite) Helvetica. God forbid, some of us are Comic Sans. Point is, we’re all using similar stock to convey our thoughts visually, it all looks the same. And that’s cool — this isn’t a lamentation of the good old days, nor a call for all of us to vigilantly defend against the great homogenization of humanity in the digital age. It’s just the romantic part of me, thinking that a message of love, or condolence, or congratulation, or wartime longing from across an ocean means just a little more when it came out of an instrument that you touched, you manipulated, and you imprinted with your own personal identity. It stands to reason that it would mean more than something that was spit from an HP Officejet 6000 LaserPro along with your latest tax return.

Hopefully, we’ll always be attracted and committed to the things that make us human artistically. The interpretables. And if, in 100 years, pen and pencil have been entirely replaced by some kind of brainwave-reading, retina-scanning scribe program, I’ll trust that we can always commit to dreaming and creating with sincerity. Handwriting is certainly not the only commodity that makes us each uniquely human, but it’s definitely one of them. And every time one of these decidedly human commodities gets replaced by technology, it almost feels like we’ve lost another little endangered attribute of our species. Fortunately, technology can’t de-personalize human thought. Yet.  

Interestingly, I was at a friend’s house the other night, and she bet me ten bucks that I couldn’t sit down and write every letter in the alphabet using proper cursive like we were taught in grade school. She said there was no way I’d remember. I took the bet. She was right. It was the blasted “Q”. That sonofabitch always got me.

My Twitter here.