give my pinky over there a workout

Have been humming Tom Petty‘s Learning to Fly for the past few hours, but instead of ‘fly‘, I’ve been inserting the word ‘type‘ in my thoughts. Why?

Because I’m learning to type, of course. Well, relearning. I’m the sort who normally veers toward the things that come easily to him, and typing was never one of those things. I know where my fingers are supposed to go, but normally I revert to a very weird system of hunting and pecking.

That’s a nice euphemism for the way I conduct myself in romantic matters – hunting and pecking, but that’s a topic for another blogpost. This is about typing, dammit. Not typing as metaphor. Not describing my typing, or lack of proper typing, as an indication of not playing by the rules.

However, now that I think about it, that’s exactly what it is. When I was a child, it was explained to me, ‘Here’s where your hands go, and these fingers go to these keys.‘ What’d I do instead? I wanted to play music…not worry myself with boring typing.

I can play the natural, harmonic and melodic minor scales in all twelve keys, but get my fingers to stay in the right place while I’m typing? No thank you.

Before I moved across the country to go to college, I thought it’d be a good idea to revisit typing. I thought term papers would be coming at me at every turn, so I thought, ‘Now’s as good a time as any to get the typing thing sorted.‘ Did I, in fact, sort it? Well, judging by the fact that I’m still relearning to type, no. I didn’t stick with the typing until it stuck. Here I am again.

The piano I can play without looking down at my fingers, so why not the computer keyboard? To add insult to injury, I’m typing on a German keyboard. In addition to all the umlauts over on the far right-hand side, which are bound to give my pinky over there a workout, they’ve also switched the ‘z’ and the ‘y’ from what I was used to on the English keyboard.

Actually, I’ve lived here long enough that the prominence of the ‘z’ in the German language, as well as the virtual dearth of the need for the letter ‘y’, has become less and less of an issue. I suppose the switching of these two letters only truly bothers me when I’m forced to write on a Yankee keyboard again. Put a feather in my cap, and all that.

So, while the rest of you are out enjoying a beautiful summer’s evening, I’m sitting here with my fingers hovering in their proper placement. I don’t yet have the hand warmers that’re pictured above, but who knows…maybe by the time the winter comes, those’ll come in very handy. Heh heh, he said, ‘Handy.’

Or even better, maybe by then I’ll be such a master typist, that my voracious skills will keep me warm. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?