Thanks to Kat, I’m addicted to a word game called Prolific. I turned Minnie on to the game, and when she challenges me, I play pretty decently, but when I play the general public, I nearly always lose. It’s pissing me off!

At first, I thought it was because I didn’t know enough words. Then, when I started learning new words, I thought it was because I didn’t quite have the eyes to see them. Dyslexia, maybe? Lately, I do see them—usually right before or after the time has run out—so I know now that it’s mostly that I just type way too slowly for me to get everything I see in three minutes, let alone in 45 seconds for the extremely quick games. (The people who play those quick games are crazy!)

And I used to think I typed so fast.

H.E. always admires the way I type. He’ll watch in awe as I type on the computer without looking down. When we first met years and years ago in a chat room, he would marvel at how quickly I came back with comic one-liners, taking his own comic one-liners even further than he ever dreamed. Then he’d despair because he missed so much of what I wrote while he was typing, I was typing too fast for him to read.

This is because, as a typist, H.E. hunts and pecks.

…which sounds like something we do in bed, too. Sometimes. Maybe.

Mind you, he is very good at it. Hunt and peck typing, I mean, though he’s very good in bed, too. But on a good day, he can do 60 wpm using the hunt and peck method (on the keyboard), but the fact that he hunts and pecks at all (again, on the keyboard) makes it natural for him to admire my typing skills, no matter how fast I go (still on the keyboard—get your mind out of the gutter) … simply because I can type without looking at my fingers. Even if I typed a much slower 40 wpm, he’d still be impressed.

On a good day, I can type 90 wpm.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had many of those good days. The last time I was tested, I did 72 wpm, even counting for the errors, and that was after much practice typing a good long letter. So, until I came across Prolific, I felt pretty good about the way that I typed.

But typing for Prolific is altogether quite different. You end up typing very short words and hitting return after each one, and the way that I type? Error after error after error after error. The Delete key is my very best friend, always has been ever since the rise of the computer. It never used to be a problem because when I write my blog posts or when I respond to e-mail, I don’t have an egg timer hanging over me, so I can always go back a bit and make corrections. I type the way I talk; I blurt something incomprehensible five or six times before my brain catches up with my mouth and manage to communicate something that actually makes sense.

Similarly when playing Prolific, I could take a four-letter combination—A, E, L, and M—and think I’m typing mal, lam, lame, lea, male, ale, elm, meal, et cetera … but really, I’m typing lame, lame, lame, lame, lame because my fingers are forever caught in this rhythm that just can’t let me go!

Or, for some reason, I’ll see the E as a B, and I’ll type lamb. Or my fingers will go crazy on the keyboard, and I’ll type handicapped. Well … OK, not really, but my fingers will be off by one letter, or I’ll hit more than one letter when I meant to hit one.

But this handicap of mine isn’t good for me. It’s made me obsessive over the game until I can master it and win more often than I lose—or rather, until I can win a whole lot more often than I lose.

Right now, I’m 51% wins, 49% losses, but I used to be 63% wins, 37% losses … so here I am trying to get back to that or better.

And since everyone else in the world types faster than me and doesn’t have my mental retardation, it’ll probably be a long while before I can get there.

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