measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Adaptability I�m sore, but I�m at work today. The knee is making me limp a bit�not in a pathetic sort of way, but just enough to make me feel like I�m hobbling. It�s stiff. The bruise is deep�sore as hell, but not showing through the skin that much� yet, anyway. But I do have a full range of motion with it, which is good. If it weren�t for the bruising, I�d be just fine. However, other aches and pains have come to the fore�starting with an odd annoying one in my right ring finger. I�m wondering if I jammed it yesterday when I fell without really realizing it (since it is on my right side�same as my bruised knee� and for that matter, my bad ankle), but I doubt it would have taken until this morning to feel stiff. Perhaps I slept on it wrong, or had my right hand under my head in a weird angle. In any case, my finger hurts like hell if I try to bend it. It�s not swollen or bruised, but it�s pretty non-functional right now. Which is one of the reasons I�m typing this entry in Word, rather than directly into DX like I usually do. I need the spellcheck this time around, thanks. Thankfully, my typing speed is fast enough that even with a bit of a slow down for the ring finger, I can type at a moderately comfortable space� I�m just not connecting as well with some of the keys and keep having to backspace. Writing, however, is absolute hell right now. I�m one of those kids who got the rubber triangle stuck on her pencils in grade school for holding the pencil wrong�rather than lean a pencil or pen on my middle finger as we were �supposed� to do to write, I leaned it on my ring finger to give me more stability. Even though they tried to fix the grasp, I never could unlearn and relearn it�my handwriting was absolutely horrible as a kid. We were graded on handwriting as a separate mark on our report cards in elementary school, and I always flunked it with the lowest �Needs Improvement� score that existed. That was partially because I had to keep using those damn rubber triangles on my pencils, which were too wide for my hands, and made me cramp up all the time while writing. The other reason was because we were required to write in cursive, which was just adding more torture to my already doomed writing hand. The irony was as soon as I got to junior high and away from the blasted triangle thing, my handwriting immediately changed. I didn�t have to write in cursive all the time�I could write in however fashion I wanted to, provided that it was legible. My handwriting became this weird mix of cursive and printing. It was further adjusted my junior year of high school when I took Russian. We had to learn how to write in Cyrillic cursive (just imagine a group of sophomores, juniors, and seniors using Kingergarteners� �traffic light� paper while learning letters�we did. It was amusing), and it threw off some of my handwriting in English. It made me drop MORE cursive letters from English and switch them to print (p�s, for example, which is is an R in Russian, and is written in such a way that it makes it look like I�m writing sloppily and not connecting the o on top of the tail). Now I connect all of my letters as like I was taught in Russian. My capital H�s are the ones I learned in Russian. I�m amazed at how my handwriting has changed, not by my trying to change it, but by simple adaptation due to things I�ve learned. And for the record, I don�t even remember how I�m supposed to write a capital Q in cursive anymore. I think it was some sort of demented 2. It makes me wonder how people who lose digits, either partially or completely, adapt. Each finger is so important for grasping, holding, lifting, etc. We learn how to do these things as children without really ever noticing how they work. Only when something goes wrong do we notice how each finger (or toe) affects the whole. My aunt lost her index finger up to the knuckle several years ago in a machine accident. I�ve never asked her because I felt so weird�but how do you relearn how to do things when you lose part of a limb? Adaptability is just so� understatedly weird� ~ Mel. 11:06 a.m. - 07 March 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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