Crapsticks!

      It seems I'm getting clumsier with age-- or just plain sloppier.   In my haste to submit some material today, I wound up not noticing a few blunders in my writing that now have me smacking my increasingly-addled head in frustration.   It reinforces my thinking, though, that writing on a computer-- and using the horrible MS Word-- encourages sloppiness. One's eyes wax over, and the text becomes a glare; the absence of those annoying Word underlinings lulls one into glossing over boo-boos, especially when Said Programme so often underlines an sentences that require more than ten words.   But, alas, because I was rushing toward a deadline, I didn't notice the mistakes until after I'd sent the material off, which will of course make me look somewhere between incompetent and careless-- though hopefully not "incurious," as so many say of a certain someone else prominently stuck between being incompetent and careless. MS Word, for all its virtues, reminds me of the stereotypical mother-in-law, hovering constantly over one's shoulder, correcting anything it can find, with or without reason, with or without sense.   (And don't even get me started on that infernal "Clippy," a character most deserving of a good Itchy-and-Scratchying.)   I can't, however, blame computers for everything.   I find that with age, and with so much of what we do now being computer-related, I want to be able to hold text in my hands, to have it real, tangible, ON PAPER.   There's something about the digital world that will always feel ephemeral, vague: it works like a visual form of the incantation, the ease and comfort of that white, white screen that seems to put to sleep one's critical sensibilities.   The errors that I'd spot on paper I tend not to notice right away on a computer screen, the brain always about two steps ahead of itself.   Sometimes, I really do miss the days of pounding out material on a real typewriter or scrawling things out meticulously. (Those of you that remember typewriters-- and I mean remember using them-- should also recall how tentatively one approached writing for fear of having to do it all over again.)   Oh, don't get me wrong; I'm not being as nostalgic or as Luddite as you may be thinking; I'd surely prefer to keep the technology we have now than return to the labour-intensive alternatives.   But sometimes I miss the discipline those forms required.   It reminds me, too, that for every comfort we gain, we tend to lose something in self-control.   It is, in fact, the very basis of decadence.   Oh, the double-gyre of progress, by which we lose as we receive.