righting just isn't quite write.

today's post is an attempt to get the ol' mind churning and spinning. one way i'm trying to spur this is via all lower case letters. susie posted recently about just writing what comes to mind, and sometimes that works for me, but other times i have to plan. in advance. like days. i either write what comes to mind, and then i save it for the appropriate moment, or i write down ideas and then try to (unsuccessfully) focus on them. then there are the times when i post twice in a day b/c something great or momentous or stupid came to mind, but then i'm stuck the next day with nothing to post about except which type of bra i'm wearing or how many pieces of toast i had for breakfast (today= two).

i was never good at writing; i hated most of english class, especially in lower school. classified as "language arts class," i dutifully learned about commas, underlining of titles, and the proper use of pronouns. there was even the test on all 52 or so prepositions. "the bird flies above the cloud. the bird flies around the cloud. the bird flies behind the cloud..." if you missed a preposition, you had to retake the test. total and utter humiliation. but even worse was learning cursive. my handwriting sucked. big time. it looked like a boy's handwriting but put in a blender and spewed out at random intervals. all my girl friends had big, loopy handwriting that looked all cute and swirly. mine was indecisive. certain letters were wide, others were long, some leaned to the right, others to the left. some letters i continued to write in print while others were connected. and it wasn't that i was dumb; c'mon, i was one of the only girls on the math olympiad-type team in 4th grade, plus i wore glasses in the pool: proof of nerd-dom. the whole point of passing the cursive test was to transition from pencil to erasable pen. throughout the final trimester of 5th grade, you noticed first all the girls using their new, bright blue pens with rubbery erasers, then most of the boys, then all of the boys, and who is left all alone to potentially suffer from lead poisoning and #2 boredom? me.

writing just didn't come naturally, at least not all the adjective usage and requirements of big words and connecting sentences. combine this with my fear of turning in papers that many times were commented on as "indecipherable" thanks to my habit of substituting print m's for cursive n's which then made my m's and n's pretty much the same letter by sight. then i tried using print n's to make up for this, but then they looked like my cursive r's. thankfully, though, by the time 7th grade came along, the keyboard replaced my defunct pencil, and clarisworks came with a useful thesaurus. i wrote papers in high school that seemed to be satisfactory, and my college papers, while never quite reaching the required number of pages, seemed to get my point across well enough to garner a's and b's. maybe it's the urge for succintness that's causing my problem. i don't like to go on and on and on and on about something that could easily be said in a sentence or two. or perhaps a paragraph. topics like why we are a divided nation or global warming (yes, it exists. stop trying to deny it, bush & co.) definitely deserve multiple paragraphs or pages of discussion, but the little dribble that emanates from my brain and ends up on a random web page within the vast space of the internet? it's just doesn't come naturally yet.