The Washington Post recently reported that handwriting is declining. The quality of people’s penmanship is no longer what it used to be and schools are to blame.

You see, when teachers are forced to prepare kids for standardized state tests there is not enough time left for a lesson in the curliness of the q, or the stately rise of the capital A.

And I’m OK with that.

The worse everyone else’s handwriting gets, the better mine looks. Just like if you have one of 10 limited-edition cars, and eight of them are destroyed, yours goes up in value. So I applaud any efforts to make me look better, especially since my handwriting is so atrocious that at an early age my teachers recognized there was little hope for improvement.

No seriously. The day I read the Post article my mother, who has seen my handwriting all my life, had to ask me about something I had written. It was the word “apples.” After I explained that, she told me about my first grade teacher, Mrs. Omberg, who said of my penmanship, “It’s OK, that’s why they invented typewriters.”

Thank you, Mrs. Omberg.

Today it doesn’t really matter how eloquently you can compose script letters on paper. Not a bit. The majority of things that I write down are notes to myself. If I can read them, that’s all that matters.

There are times, however, that I have been in such a rush to get something down that even I couldn’t decipher what I wrote.

My last two years of undergrad I had a piece of paper in a desk drawer that I would pull out from time to time. On it was a list of things that I had to do over a few week period, with all of them crossed out, except one word in the bottom corner that was some sort of message to myself.

I kept the paper hoping that one day I could figure out what I had written. It was not at all important by that point since any event or deadline associated with the word had long since passed, but for my own edification I wanted to know what it said.

Maybe I should be a doctor.