Definitely Starting Over

I'm getting dumber, I can see it happening. I've been good at spelling since grade school. I remember one of the crushing defeats of my young life was losing a spelling bee because I reversed the "i" and the "e" in "receive." When I started college and got into the instant messaging thing, I was the guy who always spoke in complete sentences with perfect punctuation. My writing in the past year or two has been limited mostly to message boards, and I can see my vocabulary and spelling suffering for it. Not only do I use the word "definitely" more than Rain Man, but I almost always end up spelling it "definetely." Since I'm so used to just being able to spell words right, I'll sometimes spell a word wrong, spell-check will highlight it, I'll erase it and then misspell the word the exact same way again. Two or three times.

Fortunately, just about anything that you can type words into will spell-check for you lately, but unfortunately that little office paper clip can't salvage writing from just being terribly bland and painfully cliche. There was a time when I could read something that I wrote a week ago, even college term papers and the like, and I'd find it compelling. Maybe that was just weird vanity, but now I can barely finish a paragraph without wanting to break my keyboard. I used to be self-conscious about damn near everything except for my writing. So much for that.

I hope that I'm just rusty and once I find my groove I'll be able to write again. But realistically, I never really wrote that much back when I felt like my writing was good. So maybe I'm just fucked.

Only one way to find out.