Category: Grade Nine

I miss smoking so much.

If I could look into the future and see that I live to 85 — and that I die peacefully in my sleep of nothing more serious than being old — I would light up right this minute.

Conversely, if I could go back in time and visit myself at 14 or so, I’d kick myself in the ass and take away that pack of smokes (Benson & Hedges Menthol Lights in those days) in my pocket.

If I never started smoking I’d have nothing to miss.

And maybe I’d even be taller.

Q: What’s the worst thing you have to do each morning?

I’m not a morning person. The hardest part of any morning is getting out of bed. I’m fine after I get me feet on the floor. But getting there is hard. The snooze button is my friend and my enemy. A few pushes and I feel like I got away with something … but a few more and I’m late for work which throws my whole schedule off.

Q: What turned out to be the most useful course you ever took in school?

Not typing. I can’t type well at all. I never learned how to type properly and I doubt I ever will. I use only about half of my fingers and — except for the most common keys — I have to glance at the keyboard. This is not too much of a problem since when I type (at work and home) I’m thinking about what to write as I go, so I don’t need to speed type as I can’t speed think about what I’m writing anyway. I type about as fast as I write so it’s okay.

It is bad news, however, if I need to retype something. I avoid this as much as possible and use my scanner and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software as work around. A good typist could probably input a page a lot faster than it takes me to scan and read a page but this works for me.

Since I write things for a living (and do meet my deadlines) my lack of typing finesse is sometimes surprising to others. When I was diagnosed with RSI, my friend K. (who has seen me type) suggested I take in my computer keyboard to show the doctor my “crazy typing”!

How fast can I type? I was tested about fifteen years ago and I managed 32 words a minute.

Getting back to the question… 

I’m not sure what course was the most useful. I can think of many that I really enjoyed or were very interesting but not one that really stands out as the most useful.

Not family studies, since I can’t cook or sew very well. Not math since I dropped it as soon as I could. Probably it was the first writing course I took in university or maybe it was economics — which I almost failed — because it was enlightening to understand concepts like supply and demand and opportunity cost.