When you write enough words, you start to develop an interesting relationship with the task of typing. By that I mean, there are a few words and phrases that you hate typing and others that you greatly enjoy. I am writing this particular blog post because I just spent a half hour writing more than 1,000 words about humidifiers and I hate typing that word.
I don’t have a personal aversion to humidity or to the act of humidification, but the word itself is a pain in the butt to write. I can write it 200 times and the odds are that I’ll spell it wrong 199 of those times. The problem is all those ‘I’s. There are three of them in succession and my fingers flat out suck at alternating like that. It’s like a mental overload for the letter I and always manage to skip at least one of them, sometimes putting them back to back and every now and then writing four or five ‘I’s in a single sentence.
Humidifier is not the only word I hate of course. Any word with successive vowels are a pain to write. Today, I kept trying and failing to write “cartridge” in an article and the other day I got caught up on “illicit” which is pretty much the same problem as humidifier but with two ‘L’s tossed in for good measure.
You might be wondering at this point if this blog post has a point, and to that I would say “maybe”. It depends on how many words you write each day.
Here’s what I mean. If you write three or four pages of content a day as part of another, larger job, then one really annoying word that is hard to type will be just that – an annoyance. If you write 15-20 pages of content a day like I do, then you may start to feel actual anger at the words you have the most trouble writing. This is clearly illogical. Words are words and the real problem is in my head, not in the computer. For me, it becomes a symptom of sitting at the computer for entirely too long.
When I start to feel annoyed at an intangible part of my job, I know it means one of three things:
* I’m hungry
* I need to get up and walk around
*I’m getting sick
Since the latter is usually accompanied by exhaustion, tissue shortages and general crankiness I can rule it out most of the time. So, the real message of this post (in as roundabout way as I can manage) is that every now and then you need to get up and walk around.
No, it doesn’t alleviate the annoyance that typing “humidifier” causes me, but it does keep me from yelling at my computer screen or knocking over piles of papers (to be fair, they are stacked very high). For the record, I AM feeling perturbed at how often I just wrote “humidifier” in this post – damn, there it is again…
