Penmanship

I have excellent penmanship. Wait, did I say excellent? I meant to say I have atrocious, offensively horrible, vomit-inducing penmanship. I have the sort of penmanship that can cause blindness in the elderly. In the wrong hands, my penmanship could be used as a biological weapon. Improper user of my penmanship (i.e. looking directly at it), can result in abnormal thumb growth, nausea, rectal bleeding, weight gain, baldness, armpit rash, and hangnails. I suppose the best way I can sum up what my penmanship looks like is to quote my wife, who once said, "It looks like a little kid got a hold of some crack!"

So why is my penmanship so bad? I am fairly certain I am not an illiterate. How could the public education system of the United States have failed me in this way? Well, I think the problem stemmed from my being forced to learn "Italics"

Ok, flashing back...

In 2nd grade, we learned the international font of check writing and signatures, or "cursive". It was a big deal for us 2nd graders. We totally felt like big shots, and we totally were. It was a simpler happier time, before the internet, or computers, or World of Warcraft, where one could take pride in his/her own writing style. I was very good at cursive handwriting. Hell, I was a white-hot ball of cursive handwriting perfection. I was a cursive titan. I called myself Cursimetheus.

Well, the life of Cursimetheus was short lived.

A few years later things got very bad. Just as I entered the 5th grade, the school "administrators" (used in the loosest possible way, maybe a more appropriate term would be fascists) decided to change the curriculum. They moved away from awesomeness that was cursive in order to move to a more aesthetically unpleasing form of writing. This new form was called "Italics." To this day, I have no idea why they decided this. Changing the required writing style in a school where children are still getting the hang of the previous style is cruel. It’s like they were intentionally dooming us to illegible handwriting for eternity.

But I digress…Italics is a cross between cursive and printing. The letters looked printed, but were hooked together and made to look "Fancy" (read "gay"). Here is an example:

There is not much wrong with this form of writing. It is legible and neat, but, as a result of an ultra-manly accident that happened in 1970 (I was born), I am severely allergic to all things that are fancy. I am not kidding, doilies give me wicked hives and I can’t even look at those frilly toothpicks without having a seizure. (You may ask how I keep my sandwiches together; well I use those plastic swords, since it is way manlier) As a result of this allergy, I had a hard time making the italics adjustment; No matter how much I protested, the school staff was unsympathetic. They forced me to submit by making me stand on a box with wires attached to me (nipples and crotch), telling me that I would be electrocuted if I wrote in cursive. I eventually submitted, and after a while, all seemed to be well. I adopted the italics style and was slowly on my way to becoming a fancy-lad.

After a few weeks, something went wrong.

Some say that I was a wild animal that had been caged too long.

What resulted from the forced submission was the written cacophony that is my handwriting today. My handwriting has elements of both styles of writing. Some letters are printed, and some are cursive. Sometimes I will use small capital printed letters, next to large cursive lower case letters. My signature has evolved to nothing more than a few squiggly lines, and I am no longer allowed to write checks in 49 out of the 50 states (thanks for understanding Nevada!) due to a bank-sanctioned financial mandate. The only good thing about this horrific meld of writing styles was that I totally forgot how to do the cursive “Z”, which is fine, since no one else seems to know what it looks like either.

So there you have it. Now you know. If for some reason, I am required to hand write you a letter, or post-it note, and your grandma sees it and goes blind while throwing up all over herself, remember, it is not my fault.