You know how, in kindergarten, you draw stick figures and then you move on? Well, I didn’t. Sure, I can stick figure with the best. But that’s about the absolute limit of my drawing ability. I’m what you might call an art retard.

And it’s not just that I can’t draw. I can’t paint either, can’t sketch, draft or doodle. I see pictures vividly in my mind’s eye, and yet, somehow, by the time they make their way to the page or canvas, the dimensions are so far off as to make whatever I produce look like the work of a drunk, crack-addled six-year old.

It’s not for lack of trying either. At several points past, I’ve set out on stints of daily drawing practice, in the hopes that I’d eventually improve. I didnít.

In other spheres of my life, I have an excellent sense of spatial relationships – I can load up a car trunk well enough to go pro. And my sense of composition is elsewhere strong as well – I’ve even occasionally managed to get my photography into gallery showings. But holding pen, brush or pencil, I lose it all completely. My brain says one thing, my hand does another, unintentionally hilarious results ensue.

So, frankly, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that my handwriting is similarly atrocious. Not just so bad that other people can’t tell what I’ve written, but so bad that, a few hours after writing, I can rarely even decipher the scribbles myself.

And this is printing I’m talking about; I gave up cursive five or six days after I supposedly picked it up. Illegible as my print might be, it looks like fine calligraphy against my best attempts at script.

So, for years, even in birthday cards and personal notes, I’ve resorted to my third grade printing technique, uneven letters jumbled up against each other, precariously swaying from vertical to near-horizontal tilt.

Until, that is, today, when I decided I’ve had enough. Today, when I decided that, if I’m going to start feigning adulthood, I need to master some writing to match.

Scoff if you must, but I’m pretty sure it’s important. Until I get this cursive thing down, for example, fatherhood is strictly out of the question; sick notes penned in my usual hand wouldn’t excuse my future progeny – they’d get the poor kids sent straight to an afternoon of detention for forging notes, and for doing it poorly to boot.

So, cursive practice it is. A few minutes each day, in spare moments between more pressing tasks, the quick brown fox will be jumping over the lazy dog. Again and again and again, until I hit flowery cursive that justifies the purchase of manuscript, quill and India ink. Or, at least, until my handwriting is not so atrocious as to jeopardize the afternoon freedom of my hypothetical unborn children.