Penmanship Permutations

Every time a child reaches a milestone in his program with us, we try to celebrate his success. Though I am prodigious at giving high fives, most of our parents enjoy a more tangible accolade, i.e. fancy certificate on equally fancy paper. So after I had compiled a list of student's and their accomplishments, I turned to by co-worker and said, "Would you  mind writing these. My handwriting isn't really certificate-worthy." My boss' head appeared from around the corner and shouted, "Great idea, Courtney, your handwriting is TERRIBLE!

From the seminal moment my sixth grade teacher told us we were no longer required to write our papers in cursive, I was obsessed with handwriting. I used to pour over anything handwritten looking for a vowel shape I liked or a puncuation mark I wanted to emulate. My mom likes to remind me that I should have studied to be a doctor with handwriting like mine, but I haven't always been this way. So, here is the evolution of my handwriting, as seen in samplings from my old diaries/journals. Enjoy.

Check out those loopy letters!

So this archaic piece of prose introduces us to a theme that will remain consistent throughout our journey: my atrocious spelling. You would think that it gets better as I progress through my schooling, but no. If you could only see the plethora of red squiggly lines on my computer screen right now. At least I tried to sound words out phonetically, but because my FAVORITE actress when I was seven was Angela Lansbury (Not joking. Bedknobs and Broomsticks was the shit.), "can't" became "caunt" because I thought that was the proper way to say it. I have also always HATED writing in pencil. I'm fairly certain that sprung from my extreme hatred of math...but I digress.

Proof of that even 9 year olds can succumb to powerful CoC induced guilt.

So, the spelling improves only marginally, and yes, that IS a Hello Kitty diary. Though you should note that I misspelled my own sister's name and edited it later, because that's what I did as a nine year old: edited my own diary entries. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure the scratched out word is poop. Or turd. In my efforts to keep my diary's G-rating , I apparently felt my my insult crossed a line.

The Holy Grail of Misspellings

I, too, have no idea how I thought the sequence of letters "queasunin" when said aloud meant "question," but I'd like if I may,  blame it on the cursive. I HATED writing in cursive. It took me twice as long as writing in print; my teacher's insistences that it was "faster" because "your pen rarely leaves the paper" were phoney and ten year old Courtney knew it. I used to try to convince my parents I was dyslexia so they would think I was more creative. (Growing up in a theatre family does strange things to your psyche.) I often touted my horrendous spelling as proof of my "dyslexia" but the truth was just distractable. Because writing in cursive took so much time and concentration, I drifted off and lost track of the longer words when I was still in the middle of writing them. This is a habit I have still not kicked today and anyone that has had a conversation with me knows it.

I get fancy with the vowels.

Sixth grade, when we no longer had to write in cursive unless we wanted too, was the year I began to notice the subtle differences in handwriting between the haves and the have nots. I want to know. Were all the rich, popular girls in my middle and high school invited to a yearly penmanship workshop weekends before school? How did they all learn to write the same way? Maybe my schools were unique, but I noticed that same trend continue on into college so I know my schools weren't microcosms. Every edit that I made to my handwriting in my middle school years was to make it more like theirs: cumbersome, bubbly, and treacly.  Luckly, I grew out of that in time. An important trendto note that begins this year is my left-leaning slant. According to the experts (aka wikipedia), it's the rarest slant  and indicative of a stunted emotional growth and reclusiveness.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="Bubblicious"][/caption]

Why bubbles? Because all the cool kids were doing it.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="Now we're getting somewhere. "][/caption]

Ninth grade is the first year we can start to see inklings of my current spawn. Left leaning, swooshy flourishes as my pen leaves the paper, the slow evolution of a cursive and print hybrid, all classic indicators of Courtney-nese.

The bastard hybrid of cursive and print is fully formed by the time I leave high school.

Which brings us to today. So maybe it's not so flawless it could be made into a font, but it remains the only tangible piece of art I have created. I don't know that I will ever be able to fully acclimate into the online world. I still scribble notes on scraps of paper and jot stories ideas in my traveling pocket journal. No matter how insignificant or grand the task, I want a pencil and paper. I need to hear the drag of my pen and feel the indentations left in its wake. I need to see the callous writer's bump on my right middle finger and know it is a consequence of creation. So although I may not write many certificates in my life, I will always have a trail of paper following me wherever I go.