The lost art of the hand's job

Thank god the world of cyberspace is all in type because my handwriting stinks. I swear my 5 years old writes nicer than I do. I loathe my handwriting.  Always have.  I've tried to fix it to no avail.  it still looks awful. 

I received a christmas card from our neighbor when I dropped off my daughter for her piano lesson. The handwriting on the front was superb. I always notice handwriting only because my own is so poor. My mother has good writing, my sister has good writing. Obviously it's a learned skill and not genetic.  I did a quick search today while Paige was playing with some friends on impriving your handwriting.  I discovered that I'm a finger writer.  I do "draw" letters with my fingers, my hand cramps up often, and I always have to keep lifting my hand to cross a page.  I need to learn to write with my arm as the range of motion. I am an "artist" and I draw using my arm muscles so why wouldn't this translate into my handwriting? Largely because of how I was taught in grammar school. Anyway, I found a site that was useful in explaining this and then I also downloaded a pdf of The Palmer Method (long used "back in the day" to teach handwriting).

http://www.paperpenalia.com/handwriting.html>
http://www.iampeth.com/ADOBE_PDFs/Palmer%20Method%201935.pdf

So I'm talking to Rachel as I'm checking this out and she scoffs at me about why I think it's necessary to write anyway? She never writes, everything is on the computer. I'm just so silly trying to actually write things down on paper.  How moronic and prehistoric of me.  So I tell her that I write all the live long day. With my children showing Paige how to spell words, letters to teaches and friend's parents, correspondence, in my new paper planner (side note: I have switched back to the stone age of a paper planner, it is soooo much better than when I was solely using my computer and phone or pda. See http://www.busybodybook.com/  thanks to my buddy Meg for the tip!  http://www.disorder2order.com/)

Anyway, Rachel actually suggested to me that I type my notes and print them out. Can you imagine? Having to type notes and print them to people? My god, that would be so much more effort and I think totally non-personal. Wouldn't you think you got a note from some whack-job mom if it was printed out from the computer? I would.

So obviously in Rachel's children-free world the art of handwriting is being taken over by e-mails and texts. I know this, when I worked it was all electronic. I rarely had to expose my coworkers to my horrible writing.  I'm not so out of touch.  I'm up to date on all my technology.  although i don't have my iphone yet, dammit.   Now I more often send an e-mail to friends or play date moms than call. But the occasion often calls for thank-you notes and little asides in school bags to be passed on. It's something I will never be able to avoid.

I'll let Rachel defend herself if she needs to but I think that handwriting is still important and a hand written note is always better than a typed one.   I swear I will have nice handwriting some day and when I do I'm sending rachel a nice, long letter saying "I told you so".  Love ya rach!