Episode #233: Am I Forever Destined To Be A Scribbler?

This was a silent friend that I'd met during my walk. He be chillin' and profilin' with the best of them. Fortunately, he has moved on, probably involuntarily, to a happier place.

The other day, I made a lighthearted Facebook post about the progress I was making with my "Hot Mess" series. I had plainly stated that I had cracked the 1,000 page mark and maybe I was a medieval scribe in a previous life. Which a lot of people found amusing.

The main reason(s) why people found it funny, was that:

1. All my original content is handwritten prior to computer transcription, as I find it much easier on my hands to print than it is to type (additionally all the other skills required to elevate one's game is fully on display when I do pen and paper);
2. Presently, the formula to produce one page + one paragraph of a Gdoc (my preferred OS) is two handwritten pages. This translates to 2,000 + pages, or in a smaller digestible chunk, 22-25 handwritten pages produce a 12-13 page chapter.
3. Finally, the fact that I managed to churn out 1,013 pages of text to begin with. I don't think anyone sets out with such a ludicrous goal of 1,000 pages on purpose.

So I got to thinking, was I an actual scribe some five hundred years ago and somehow got reborn 10x to what I am today: a person who writes like a medieval scribe? For those of you who do not know what a scribe is, a scribe is how copies of books/documents were made prior to the advent of the printing press. To whit:

1. A person, usually a man, who would be hunched over a desk or a table of some kind, with a quill and ink, and spend the next ten hours or so painfully transcribing/copying text from said book or document to another document or book {I do this, except not for ten hours, but three}
2. More often than not, they would use the natural light of the sun and maybe a candle or oil in the middle ages in order to complete their task {I use old fashioned incandescent light bulbs and if I tried natural light I would probably melt}.
3. They would probably develop bad posture {check}; cramped and gnarly hands {double check}; no social life {triple check} and an overinflated importance of self {golden sombrero here}.
4. Can't forget the absolutely crappy eyesight because spectacles weren't invented until the late 13th/early 14th century, and most certainly were meant for those who had money {well...I gots the crappy eyesight, so there's that}.
5. The occasional inhuman taskmaster {well...if I count myself, then yeah}.
6. Finally, being a medieval scribe was probably the modern day equivalent of "ya'll want fries with that?", aka hard work/little pay.

I think I pretty much meet the basic criteria for a medieval scribe, in that I can churn out the modern day equivalent of one quality page of work; I am quite the perfectionist, in that I have re-re-re-re written up to one half page of the same piece of work because it didn't meet my unbelievably high standards {seriously}; I actually sit hunched over a t.v. try with my face less than four inches from said parchment paper in order to see what I'm writing, gripping my pen so tight that the ink screams for mercy.

However, the one skill I probably don't share in common with a medieval scribe is the ability to write legibly. I mean, let's get real here. Their livelihood depended on their ability to write cleanly, legibly and smartly. I, on the other hand, do not. Let's break it down, shall we?

1. Cleanly: this is something that I have major issues with, in that I am the universal king of mistakes. I use, with great vigor, excessive amounts of liquid white out {I think I'm on bottle number four} and blank labels {packs of blank address labels that I trim down to fit on the notebook paper, and packs of blank file folder labels that I also trim down}, in order to fix my mistakes, because as you know, ink is where it's at.
2. Legibly: this is also something I have issues with, as I've managed to now print at the same speed that I used to write cursive. This has often led me to stare at, a few days later, certain words trying to ascertain just exactly what I'm looking at. Sometimes this requires me to re-read what I wrote leading up to the word as well as after the word.
3. Smartly: this is another issue I have, because why use five words to write a sentence when you can use eleven to describe the exact same thing in five. In fact, why use eleven when you could use sixteen?

Even with the glaringly obvious defects in my writing ability, I still think I got the chops to make it as a scribe. Sure, I may be slow, I may be sloppy and I may even question the validity of what I'm being told to copy, but I am dependable, spineless, worthless and weak. I lay around all day playing that, sick repulsive electric twanger...whoops, sorry, just channeled my inner Twisted Sister.

Anyways, what this post really boils down to is this: I managed to devote an entire blog post comparing myself to a medieval scribe, which if you think about, is a tiny bit similar to Jerry Seinfeld's show about nothing.

And I managed to prove to myself that I still got the ability to latch onto something extremely trivial and create something interesting for others to read.

Happy Monday!

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