Yes, strange but true.
I made that proud comment back aways about how I have escaped my heaps of paper by putting absolutely everything on an electronic storage device. (Like I know its horrible, if someone got my phone and actually figured out how stupid I am they could do some serious damage)
But there are unintended consequences.
The first sign I laughed about. You see, banking is amongst the things that had moved 100% online. Starting in Iceland (and I was happy) So, when I moved to Boston, I had to regress a bit.
I gave up being a stubborn mule and got a bank account with checks, and bought the stupid checks (and of course, now I have like a hundred when I will use 1 or 2 a month and therefore will have moved and be scratching out the address on them before I actually use them all. They have puppies and kittens on them though, so all good.) First check I write, I completely mess it up. I mean, its been 5 years! I'm supposed to remember how to fill out a stupid check (yes, as an adult one should be able to write a check, but of course me=adult is still under some question).
My roommate assured me it was salvagable by crossing out and initialing, and apparently it was. At the time I only had one check so I couldn't just rip it up. That little random descriptive bit is to assure you that I'm not stupid enough that I wouldn't just move on to the next check if there was one available.
Moving on, I also do not write at work. I have several pads of paper on my desk. I have a couple of pens, rollerball pens, I never use ballpoint pens. However, the paper mostly has doodles, and unintelligible scrawls, many with lines through them. These occasionally represent my thought processes. Aside from those pads there is no paper in my office. (There is a nice whiteboard, but the only thing on it is a fake greek mathematical equation my boss wrote on it) I gently mock my colleague for her paper accumulation skills, but clearly we are meant to balance one another out. She is also a frequent and adept user of pencils.
I had not touched a pencil in many, many years. I mean, like you wouldn't be out of this world to say I haven't touched a pencil in 10 years. Even earlier than that, for a year, I was actually forbidden from using pencils. They are ergonomically less than ideal, because they require more pressure from your hand to make the mark than a rollerball pen for example. (And I had severe tendonitis so I had doctors and therapists pointing these things out to me. They wanted me to write with a bunch weird gadgets, I just went with no writing, for a year. In theory I wasn't supposed to brush my hair or cut my food but I think I actually laughed at the doctor on that.)
So, why have I picked up a pencil? Why am I trying to write, and not with my preferred implement?
Music. I sing in a chorus. We have a score, you can't scrawl all over a score in pen, because the conductor might change his mind. (Also, pen marks really stand out, more than you need). So you're on the fly, trying to find some marking that in a week or two you will correctly interpret to mean whatever the conductor just asked you to do. I know there are accepted markings for most things, I don't know them all. So I have uneven little marks, illegible words, funky looking musical notations. I mean, I try to add a flag to a quarter note, to indicate we're cutting off short. But it doesn't look like a flag, it looks like a bedraggled leaf about to fall off a plant. So, I try to make up for this lameness by writing 'short' over the note, but no. You really can't read 'short'.
The one that really had me in trouble though, was the need to accentuate consonants. I mean.... I know of no shorthand. Maybe I could have underlined some of the consonants in question (in doing which I probably would have ended up crossing them out, thereby achieving the opposite effect of the desired one). But I valiantly attempted to write 'accentuate consonants' in the score. If you look at it, I'm pretty sure you can tell I was aiming for two 'words' because one is above the other one. Aside from that, nothing. But I guess two smears of pencil marking is now my sign for 'accentuate consonants'
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