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The new debate.

I live in a northern state, where summer only lasts a month or two. Where I feel like a lizard come march, scurrying from sunbeam to sunbeam while the air is still cold. And, I mourn at the first site of falling leaves in early August.

I’ve heard living here puts me at high risk for vitamin D deficiency. We simply don’t get enough sun, they say. Or maybe it’s that we don’t get outside enough. Could be my high-carb diet doesn’t leave space enough for vitamin D to take root.

Whatever the reason, this article brings the vitamin D deficiency debate to the forefront. And, like the egg debate, no one can quite decide if it’s good or bad, if statistics are true or false, or whether or not we should run to the nearest Vitamin Shoppe.

I’m a pessimist when it comes to health and statistics or research on what I should eat or avoid. I live in the city. I’m not a self-sufficient farmer growing all my own in organic soil, raising free-range chickens or grass-fed cattle. I assume I’m ingesting all sorts of carcinogens that filter out all the good stuff.

I never know what to do when the current “breaking news” hits my screen. I read it, but unless I win the lottery soon or come into a large plot of land and the equipment to work it, I’m stuck. Stuck shopping at the large chain grocery stores that buy corporate farm products and factory processed meats and sell them at a discount that I can’t afford to ignore.

Sure, I can run out and buy a load of vitamin D. I hear it’s cheap right now. Maybe I should run out and buy in bulk, before the pharmeceutical companies hone in on the critical levels of deficiency. But, as soon as I get home and unpack my boxes of D, I’ll open my laptop and read another article about another study that suggests everyone got a little too excited the first time around.

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Put pen to paper, please.

I recently browsed onto this article at Time online by Claire Suddath about the dying art of handwriting. Claire Suddath writes that the take over of technology has caused schools to decrease the amount of good quality time teaching penmanship.

Learn to read, learn to keyboard, but don’t worry about learning to write a long letter. If you want to contact your Senator, just send an email. You don’t even need to master your own signature. Petitions are all online these days, too, and checks — archaic.

Still, with all the artists and writers in the world, handwriting must exist. Part of my writer-esque includes a life-long search for the perfect journal and the perfect pen. If I’m going to write out my worst insanity, I want it to look good on paper. And, I spend a significant amount of time analyzing calendars and mechanical pencils at the start of a new year, debating over the authority in a 0.7mm versus a 0.5mm pencil. I stare for hours at an aisle of sharpies in every color of the rainbow.

Writers and artists aren’t alone in their craft of handwriting. I can recognize an architect in a second from numbers and letters alone. My son received a birthday party invitation in the mail a few weeks ago. I expected childlike writing. But, when I opened it, I thought parent and architect. The numbers were drawn in one fluid movement and the “what, when and where” was spelled out in squared and angled capital letters. My hunch was confirmed when my son brought home his light saber party favor, made from a swim noodle, an exacto knife, and various colors of duct tape.

Even Claire Suddath acknowledges that handwriting is critical in certain professions. She mentions the thousands of deaths that occur because of doctors’ illegible writing on charts and scripts. I’m drawn to the fact that all doctors sign the same. No matter their name, the signature starts with a few rises and falls, then flatlines. Do they teach that in medical school?

“Handwriting” and “defunct” must never be in the same sentence. I pledge to write a “thinking of you” note to someone at least once a month. Maybe once a week. Because next thing you know, I’ll stumble onto an article about the demise of the US Postal Service.

I mean, I like evite invitations and e-cards. They’re cute. They keep the graphic artists in business. But, I look forward to the slam of the mail slot around 11am every day. My heart jumps when I see a small envelope, addressed to me, in my best friend’s or my dad’s handwriting. A little pen to paper can make my whole day.

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Where do you sit?

Last week, I picked up a copy of the Writer’s Digest yearbook issue on novel writing.

Inside is an excerpt, entitled Status Seekers and Storytellers from a book called Fire In Fiction by Donald Maass.

Status seekers: “those whose desire is to be published.”

Storytellers: “those whose passion is to spin stories.”

I read the definitions and how the career of each category of writer might play out. And I asked myself, which am I?

Last year, my desire to write (outside my journal) surfaced yet again. This time I couldn’t –wouldn’t– brush it off. I took a few classes with Ariel Gore and wrote several pieces of which I am proud. I submitted some of those stories out into the real world and received several no’s and one yes.

I keep writing, because I love to write. Like my husband loves to run. He never wins first place in the marathon, but he seaches online for the next race as often as I search online for another opportunity to submit. I’m almost forty. I figure, why not? And I think, what’s a story if no one reads it?

I’m not sure if that makes me a status seeker or a storyteller.

Where ever I sit on that continuum, Donald Maass’s words remind me not to get caught up in the publishing frenzy. They compel me to take it slow, focus on the craft.

Because, as Margaret Atwood says in Negotiating with the Dead, A Writer on Writing:

…Everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger. The latter takes a good deal more stamina and persistence.