If you were born before 1980, it’s likely you are writing in code.
That’s right. Cryptic code.
We have a young houseguest staying with us. She’s nineteen. I literally have t-shirts older than she. Needless to say, having her with us has been an education, on both sides.
The other day, she watched with fascination as I sat down with pen and paper and slowly, over the course of the day, wrote a letter, by hand.
The fact that my correspondent and I had never met didn’t seem to faze her–in this day of social media, it’s commonplace. Nor was the idea of sending a letter by snail mail particularly foreign; presumably she’s sent a bill payment or a birthday card in her lifetime. She was curious about the slowness of the process, that it took several sessions at the desk to complete a single letter, but that wasn’t the big issue.
No, what really puzzled her was something much more basic. Continue Reading »
During our last trip to Bath, we stopped in at Same-Same but Different, a little bistro on Bartlett Street. It had a distinctly Parisian feel to it, but with an English twist–sidewalk tables and chairs, but wicker and steel, not wrought iron; creaky floors of dark wood, but well-lit from lamps and windows; a laid-back, unhurried tempo, but with attentive service.
It’s happened to us all. That moment when a word–a perfectly innocuous, everyday word–suddenly looks weird.
If you don’t have one, you need one. In fact, you need several.
Writers aren’t like normal people.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 