Typecast

My daughter, Sophia, is in the seventh grade this year. That means she is beginning to take what I like to refer to as "classes that don't matter so much."

And no, Sophia, one of those classes isn't math or English.

As one goes through the realms of higher education, you start to take a lot of classes that don't matter very much.

I took a couple myself.

The most infamous was psychology, where we got to watch a movie about two baby monkeys. Baby monkey No. 1 was stuck in a cage with a bottle and a blanket. Baby monkey No. 2 had the bottle, but all it had to snuggle up to was the hard metal cage.

Baby monkey No. 2, of course, developed severe emotional problems.

We were supposed to analyze this.

Why, pray tell, did poor little baby monkey No. 2 pull all its hair out and gnaw on its arm, while baby monkey No. 1 had a normal monkey childhood and grew up to be a great ape?

My response was, why would anyone do this to baby monkey No. 2? A pig? Sure. But a cute little monkey? C'mon.

I got kicked out of class for calling the teacher a baboon.

The teacher, and I am not making this up, went on to be a school administrator.

Sophia's first worthless class is one they call keyboarding. How do I know this is worthless?

Because I'm perfectly content typing this column every week with two fingers and single thumb.

I use the thumb to hit the space bar. The two fingers are used to bang away mercilessly at the keyboard. I keep my head down and my tongue between my teeth, like jumping into the end zone.

It's fourth down and, baby, I'm going for it.

That's right, folks, every single story with my name on it, and a few that do not, were typed with two fingers and a thumb.

Every one of them.

It's the sort of thing that would have Mrs. Dunn, my daughter's keyboarding teacher, reaching for the purple acid-reflux pills.

So when Soph came home with a big fat D in keyboarding, I hugged her and said something encouraging, like, "A D? Welcome to the club, honey. Now you can spell "the" wrong just like me."

One of the hazards of writing with two fingers is that simple words come hard. My hard word is "the." I always flop the "h" and the "e" so it comes out "teh" as in, would you like a spot of "teh?"

Thank God for the good old spell checker. It catches all my "tehs" and it also catches quite a few others as well, like "siad" and "freind" and "q-w-e-r-t-y."

Why did they put the "q" way over there anyway? I have a tough time reaching it with that one finger, Mrs. Dunn.

Hvae a good week.