Thursday, October 17, 2013

Writing in Cursive

I read something a celebrity said the other day lamenting the lack of children learning or using cursive nowadays. I learned cursive during months of tortuous exercises involving strange, angular pens and pulpy, newsprint paper covered with esoteric lines. Every paper I turned in third grade through eighth grade had to be written in cursive, but in ninth that requirement was dropped and I returned to printing in blocky, illegible, all-caps type once again. Then today, when I read this note about cursive, I got out a piece of paper and attempted to write my name in cursive for the first time in at least a decade. It took a few moments, but muscle memory returned and when I was done I was looking at my exact eight-grade signature, as if I'd just opened a junior high notebook from my parents' attic. It was bizarre beyond compare; I felt as if someone had just told me I was possessed. Try it. It's terrifying.

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