Just today, I noticed something weird about my right hand: It's more muscular than my left hand.
Being right-handed, this isn't really much of a surprise. I mean, my right arm always feels stronger, my right hand more dexterous (except on the guitar strings, of course). But I've been writing by hand quite a bit lately, which means that I've been massaging my right hand more than usual. It does hurt--I'm logging a minimum of two pages a day as I'm rereading Paradise Lost, to say nothing of drawing for a couple of hours during class periods--so the massaging isn't unusual. What took me off guard was the noticeable difference in the abductor pollicis brevis (the fleshy part of the palm closest to the thumb…at least, if I'm understanding the Google Images of the hand correctly) between my hands. My right hand is noticeably thicker, and it aches. Maybe part of the strangeness here is the idea of me having developed muscles. While I have enough to get around, I stopped playing quidditch years ago and, likewise, stopped exercising all together. The idea of muscle-mass acquisition is strange for me to consider at all. I just don't normally put on muscle. Of course, if building up muscle is off-brand for me, building it up on my writing hand tracks pretty much spot on. Part of why I think my hand is hurting--why I'm gaining more muscle there--is because I changed my handwriting. Normally, I write in an all-caps mode: I developed this back when I was in seventh- or eighth grade and I thought that I was going to be a comic book writer and artist. Because I made everything by hand back then (Photoshop was not a household name yet, and even if it were, I probably wouldn't have been allowed to experiment with it on the sole family computer), I recognized the fact that I would have to write all of the captions, speech-, and thought bubbles in ALL CAPS, just like the pros did. So I set about changing my handwriting--a process I've gone through a number of times throughout my life. I would write out, say, a homework assignment in the new handwriting, taking pains to go back and rewrite something when I slipped into my old style. As the years went on and my comic book writer/artist aspirations faded, I started loosening up my way of writing, allowing me to still write in all caps but with some shortcuts that give my writing a distinctive look. For example, I write "of" in cursive, and I use lower-case letters for most anything that starts with a "th". A sentence that I would write might look a bit like this: WITHOUT A DOUBT, the BEST WAY of WRITING IS IN the CONTINUAL PRACTICE of IT. Okay, it looks ridiculous in print, but when I've actually written, it isn't too bad. At least, I don't cringe when I see it. (I don't bother asking the students what they think, as the alternative is not something worth dealing with.) Still, it's the way I write, for good or ill. Because I purchased this new Moleskine+ Pen that I already linked above, I decided to switch to lower-case writing. This is less practiced and I don't have as much recent experience with it; however, I wanted to be able to easily transfer over the handwritten stuff to my computer as needed, in case I want to put what's in the pen onto the computer screen or essay post. Now, I use Microsoft Word* for my essay writing, so while I could import my all-caps writing into Word and then change it into a "Sentence case" version with a click o' the button, there would still be things that the program missed: Paradise Lost, for example, is capitalized in title case. Word, I daresay, wouldn't know the difference. My thinking was, if I'm going to be importing the text from my pen, I should write in such a way that simplifies what I'm importing--cut down on what I'll need to pretty up, as it were. Well, now that I've had the pen for almost a week--and used it every day, for multiple hours sometimes--I realize that I have made a mistake. Since I went ahead and switched my handwriting styles for my thoughts on Paradise Lost, I'm committed (in my mind, at least; there's nothing external that is forcing me to do this) to writing the whole section about Paradise Lost in the lower-case style. But it uses my muscles differently--in a way that I'm not as familiar or comfortable with. Result: My hand is bigger than it was, and it hurts. See, one of the ways that I cut down on hand-fatigue with my other reading journals was to write from the shoulder as much as I could. Since all-caps writing uses a lot more straight up and down lines--and requires slightly less precise movements (consider, for example, how "d" and "D" insist on different degrees of accuracy to make the swoops)--I can alleviate some of the pain in my hand by letting my shoulder take on some of the effort. The way I write my lower-case letters doesn't really allow this, which is why I have this issue. So, in a sense, I'm giving an update on how my new notebook is (I like it a lot) as well as giving you over a thousand words talking about my handwriting. Yeah…really high quality content up on stevendowdle.weebly.com today. --- * I know, I know, software as a service is madness and I shouldn't support those rotten practices that Microsoft money-grubs into existence. But…still. I need something more reliable--and off-line available--than Google Docs. This goes along with what I said in the Moleskine Pen essay: I'm spending more on the tools I use to write, not because others are inferior or won't suffice (I mean, I still use yWriter and that's free), but because it's part of how seriously I consider my craft. So while OpenOffice (or whatever its successor is) served for writing my earlier novels, I just prefer Word and its features over anything else out there. |
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July 2022
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