I will write better. I will write better. I will...

I always delight in hearing my boyfriend's story about how his handwriting was so atrocious in elementary school that a teacher made him stay in from recess and write "I will write better" over and over again on a piece of paper. Unfortunately, his printing has not gotten any better. I still find it atrocious today how he scribbles carelessly and squashes his letters and makes lowercase e's by drawing the curve first, then inserting a haphazard line.

I was also thinking about handwriting this weekend while we were up in NH for the wedding of one of my boyfriend's childhood friends. We were browsing through some of his old yearbooks, and as I read the "autographs" of girls in his class, it seemed exactly the same as the handwriting my friends and I used to have. I wondered - 'is handwriting trendy?' Are some types of handwriting "cool" at times, and others not? Was it "cool" to write in swirly, bubbly, big letters that conjured up images of giggly girls with braces? It might have been, because I remember striving to that effervescent handwriting... though I could never quite get it.

And now with all this texting and emailing, will kids not even regard handwriting as a form of communication anymore? What does the "cool" handwriting look like today? (And don't say: Times New Roman.)

This article doesn't really answer that question; it's more about how cursive is a silly way to teach kids to write. But it is what inspired this post, so check it out: here.

Two Kick Butt Articles Today

Today I am excited for two completely unrelated, yet awesome-beyond-belief articles. Let's start with the not-gross one:

Tetris gives you more brain
Oh joy of joys. Now I can justify to my boyfriend why I can't just watch TV - instead I have to break out the old school Game Boy Color that should probably be dead right now, and jam away to the hardest level of Tetris. I find infinite joy in getting the spaceship and the little dancing Russian men, and I've since made it my mission to get TWO Tetrises in every game I play. Think an average of 1 hour/night of Tetris will rot my brain? Au contraire... it will make my brain BETTER!

And the gross (but so true and not usually talked about) topic:

Tonsiliths.
Ever cough up a little foul-smelling white chunk and wonder what crawled into your throat and died? It's called a tonsilith, and it's basically debris that gets caught in your tonsil cavities, which acquires bacteria that makes it smell. The good news is that EVERYONE suffers from these, but hardly anyone knows what they are or what they're called. Well, a few weeks ago, I got curious and Googled "smelly white throat piece," and eventually came upon a wealth of tonsilith (or tonsil stone) literature. I felt like a great weight had lifted from my shoulders, and I was amused when the NYTimes did a piece on something I had just discovered. It was like they were inside my mind!

It's time to move on with my life now, but I hope you appreciated those articles and that tiny glimpse into some issues of my life (namely Tetris addiction and smelly white throat balls).

I'll leave you with another random but awesome link - the Eagles' Shawn Andrews performing a little ditty I like to call, "Getting my Michael Phelps On". Just skip to around 2:40, the rest is boring.