I’m A Teacher… Whaddaya Want?!
Posted by seandavid010 on September 28, 2008
I discovered something amazing awhile ago… the typewriter. ”The typewriter?” you might ask, “But why use a typewriter? Isn’t a computer better?” I say nay.
This isn’t just any typewriter. It’s the legendary IBM Selectric III, the greatest electric typewriter ever produced, and a miracle of human achievement. This particular typewriter came to be in my posession by the most circuitous route imaginable. A few months ago, I had decided that writing exclusively on the computer wasn’t working for me. In fact, most everything I had written over the last couple of years was written mostly on post-it notes and then stuck in the pages of a Moleskine notebook. I needed a solution, but typing on the computer was bugging me. At times I almost felt like I wanted to push my hands through the screen so I could actually touch the words. Confused? So was I. Then it hit me. Typewriter.
I started looking around at garage sales, but nothing turned up. I looked on Craigslist all over Idaho for a decent typewriter, but found nothing. Utah was also a no-go. I was actually willing to drive 8 hours round-trip to pick up a 30-year-old typewriter. I needed help. Eventually I found one, but the only problem was that it was back in my home town, San Luis Obispo. I managed to talk my mother, (God bless her) into picking it up for me, and sending it out to Idaho with a friend of ours who was driving out to go to college. Jackpot. Two months after locating it, straining familial relationships to procure it, and talking a poor 18-year-old college bound girl to drive it 1000 miles, I finally had my typewriter sitting on my kitchen table. I plugged it in. Nothing happened.
Luckily I found an honest-to-God typewriter repairman in Idaho falls. (I know, I didn’t know they still existed either.) The guy was like a thousand years old, and told me he had been fixing these machines since he was a little kid running around his dad’s shop. Cool. After a couple of days and an undisclosed amount of money, I had a brand-new made-in-1982 IBM Selectric III Typewriter. It’s amazing. I write everything on it now. I create worksheets for my seniors, and I write journal entries. It’s a lovely machine, and it hums when you turn it on. It’s almost like it has a heartbeat, or like its singing to you.
Really, writing on a typewriter is so much more visceral than writing on a computer. You feel undeniably connected to the machine. I get the same feeling for my typewriter as I get for some of my mechanical watches, like maybe they have more soul than their modern counterparts, like there’s a little piece of that old man living inside my typewriter, just like there’s a piece of an old watchmaker living inside my timepiece.
