These moments are the hardest to say but the easiest to recognize. An instant where we connect from across the room, where we're not anything but people.
Below is a few riddles from my homenode. There have been eight so far, but I neglected to write all of them down and so you only get four here. They're actually pretty hard to create as the last one demonstrates. There is a flaw in it, which makes its answer wrong. A good riddle will only have one answer, an okay might have two or three, and a terrible one will be unsolvable or too solvable depending on how it's phrased.
Creating a riddle requires an interesting kind of backwards thinking. You create the answer and then set about creating word puzzles about them. The person (it's tempting to call them "victims") trying to solve the riddle has to do the exact same thing, but in reverse.
Answers at the bottom.
1.
Sparkling on the ground like a bag of gold
It is young and yet old
You'll find it down south where seldom it goes
In warmer climates when it prefers cold
2.
When I get to the floor
I dance around my partner
Around and here, around and there
Around and everywhere
I tiptoe on wires
I travel underground
Sometimes I'm found in the clouds!
3.
Ivory Towers in a line
Each supported from behind
Always forward, never back
Running along a single track
They say hello in passing
And often that's the last thing
4.
When it’s quick it’s something else
When it’s slow it’s in transition
You can wear it, but not on you
When you set it about with gaseous companions
It will fight the smallest wars for you.
As I write this I am twenty-three. When you read it, I will be twenty-four. Since my last birthday I have written twenty-three write-ups, a fairly nice number, and when I post this, it will be twenty-four write ups. I was adding up all the characters according to my write-up headers yesterday and found that I've typed some 99,504 letters in the course of the year for this website. That's a lot of letters and that's not including private messages and my chatterbox racket.
Twenty-three write-ups out of seventy-five. Most written in longhand before I typed them up. I don't know why I prefer writing in longhand, but I think it has little to do with the composition process and a lot more to do with a very selfish and silly egotistical reason. I love the way my handwriting looks. It looks like a drunkard's scrawl with exaggerated loops on the G's and Y's. My signature used to follow this drunken overly ornate style until I worked two years at JCPenny's optical shop. Every night I had to count up the change in the register and sign several sheets of paper promising Penny's and the folks who rented space out from Penny's for the shop that all the money was there.
This ruined my signature. It lost all the letters in my first name except one and the letters in my last name became a crushed little squiggle. I can't imagine how much a famous person's signature distorts when he signs stuff for fans. I bet J.K. Rowling and Stephen King's signatures were incredibly different before their fame (though I bet King's changed more, being much younger when he archived success).
When I was in high school I became very interested in writing and drugs and what effect drugs had on writing. The result of my experimentation is on this website as The Voyage of the Roofer Boonhurst, first written in a Roswell Military Institute notebook in handwriting that wanders around the pages unbound by such silly things as lines or margins. Most of it is legible with the exceptions of a night where I was coping with extreme allergies. I look seven or eight Benadryl and the resulting changes on my handwriting is... interesting. Letters seem to compress and expand at will and the sentences completely ignore other sentences as I apparently wrote over them again and again.
I don't remember anything from that night, except that the Cowboy Bebop movie was playing and that it had pretty butterflies in it.
The astonishing thing about handwriting, or mine at least, is how little it has changed. A few years back, I requested my personal information from Albuquerque Public Schools. They had in their possession a few WRAT standardized tests (Wide Range Achievement Test) and my handwriting at twelve is the same as it was at eight.
I have paper from even younger. Five and six. The letters are sloppier, but the sentences stay on the lines fairly well, as opposed to now where my letters a better, but my sentences tend to dip below the lines when I'm not paying attention (and I often don't when I'm writing dialogue as I write it extremely fast).
At some point a few years ago, I taught myself how to write in mirror. My handwriting doesn't change much in mirror except my G's and Y's tails typically underline the words they're attached to.
I used to know cursive too, but I've long since forgotten it. In high school nobody wrote in it, and if you did the teachers couldn't read it and made you do whatever assignment you had over again.
I've changed a lot, but my handwriting has changed little. It's amazing that all these different people could share their penmanship through the ages...
1. ʍousʇuǝıɔuɐ
2. suoɹʇɔǝ1ǝ/ʎʇıɔıɹʇɔǝ1ǝ
3. suʍɐd
4. ɹǝʌ1ıs
Birthday past \ / Birthday future