Have a bit of writers block these days. Or, at least, a new version of it.

It's not exactly like I can't think of anything to write or say, because I do. It's just that between all the writing I've been doing, my stupid temp job, and the spending of way too much time online (looking for jobs online of course), the whole upper part of my body is hurting all over. Carpal Tunnel and all that fun stuff. One of the hazards of trying to write in the computer age, I guess.

I used to be able to write by hand. I used to love it in fact- that feeling of pen to paper. To me, it made the writing seem almost like a physical thing. It was work, actual physical work. I wrote all of my college papers by hand even though I had a nifty, state of the art electronic typewriter. And a lot of my earlier stabs at writing were first written on a notebook. But a long time ago, I hopped on the word processing band-wagon and now everything I do is on a computer. Add to that the whole blogging thing, e-mail and message boards and you've got a lot of time typing away at a computer. Which is part of the reason why it hurts to type right now.

Last week, I tried to write by hand again. I went off to a coffee shop around the corner from me, one of the nicer one's in the neighborhood, with plenty of plants and paintings for sale and a whole bunch of other people who were trying to do the same thing as me. I just couldn’t do it, though. I'm so unused to writing by hand that it felt like too much work. It's like when I started playing softball again for the first time in years and couldn't throw as well as I used to or judge fly balls as well. Not to mention being all soar from using muscles I hadn't used in a long time. My hands cramped up, my handwriting fell apart, and I felt tired. I realized too that I actually prefer to write on a computer now. One of the benefits of being a kick-ass typist is that I can type as fast as my head moves and my head moves pretty fucking fast. When I write by hand, my head moves much faster than I write and since the two are never in psyche, I get completely frustrated by it all. My head is always a sentence or two ahead of my hand and it doesn't want to go back. Sometimes I go back and look at what I wrote and realize that in my haste to write what was going through my head at the moment, I'd leave out letters, words even.

So now I'm back to typing away, trying to be ever mindful of any achiness I feel, giving myself as long of a break as I feel I need. Not to mention going to the jacuzzi at the Y as much as possible to soak my aching muscles.

I wonder if Mark Twain had these types of problems?