I Write The Things That No One Reads

I've been thinking lately about writing. I like to think that I'm a writer, I guess, so I should know a thing or two about writing. Maybe? 

I realized the other day that I began writing way back when strictly on paper with an extra sharp Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencil (Let's face it, they take the cake with those super soft erasers that won't rip your paper when you're furiously erasing half a math test in the 5th grade when you realize you've been using the wrong formulas for circles) and only for school stuff. I want to say with confidence that I am pretty sure the first paper I ever wrote on a computer was a report on hurricanes for 5th grade English. Before that, every single thing I wrote was written by hand.

I can picture so clearly the time one of my teachers assigned my class to write 100-word essays on something probably really stupid and I had to count the words on this piece of college-ruled notebook paper as I went. It seemed like too many words at the time. 100 words was an infinity. It was the dictionary. It was a Charles Dicken's novel. Now, that's like two or three sentences if I'm trying to be really fancy and have a strange need to write everything in really drawn out language like most of the sentences in this blog. Maybe a small paragraph if I'm feeling super lazy and unmotivated. Today, I just have to look down at the bottom of Microsoft Word to see how many words I've written.

Sadly, I don't write on paper with an actual writing utensil as much anymore as I would like to say. There's still something awesome about hearing the grinding of pencil lead on a sheet of lined notebook paper as you suddenly get hit with inspiration or finally figure out the perfect way to state whatever kind of bullshit you've been unscrambling in your mind.  I do most of my writing on the computer now.  It's fast and it causes way fewer hand cramps at the end of an hour of writing, ya know?

At the beginning of 2013, I decided I wanted to keep a composition notebook style journal over the course of the year. So, that worked out just fine for January, but when February hit, I lost all ability to write anything with my hands. So, now I have a month of random journal entries about boobs and school and my inability to not be nervous about everything that happens in my life and a few half-finished entries that took me 2 weeks to write. But, for some reason, I've kept up with this blog for almost four months or so. I don't know what logic is anymore.

Writing, while something that not everyone seems to like or be good at even if they try and try and try and be okay at it, is something I'm kind of pretty sure doesn't have to be done in any certain way, but it's just strange to think about how my methods of writing have change over time as technology changed. Like, when was the last time I turned in a handwritten assignment that was actually graded? I don't know!

Like, are there writers who write by hand and think they are just better than all the writers who write on
computers and typewriters? Probably. Pretentious writers. 

And then there's me. I write on all the platforms, but no one ever reads it.