I didn’t hear the sound over the car’s motor, but I can imagine it went something like this.

“Crrrrr-uuuunch.”

They must have fallen out of my purse when unloading from a family trip to the cottage. When I nipped out for some onions later in the day, I must have run them down.

One lens is smashed to bits, the frame bent to oblivion. The other is relatively unscathed – for what it’s worth.

These babies had three corrections – long, medium, short distance (yes, I’m a complicated typist) – and a further grind so the transition from correction to correction would not make me feel seasick.

All of this = $800 worth of eye wear.

Crushed under the tire of a car.

Argh. And now I can’t see properly. Double Argh.

So now the question is: are the Typist’s glasses half empty or half  full?

You tell me.

It gives pause for thought. What, exactly, does a typist do?

The name of this blog came about in response to the dreaded cocktail party question:

And what do you do?

Um, erm, ahhhhh????

My resume is a dog’s breakfast. I’ve done so many things that don’t fall neatly under one professional designation or umbrella term. Other than “typist.”

So I would reply, “I’m a typist.”

“You mean you do data input work?” they would say.

“No, not data input work. I’m a typist.”

When I got “the look” I quickly rallied back with ” a very gifted typist.”

Not sure if it put them at ease, but it gave me a comeback, at least.

But on the question of what does a typist do, I’m at a loss.

Other than to say the obvious: a typist types.

What do you think a typist does?

So I put out a call for lyrics for Blood on the Keyboard.

The Tartan Taxidermist – also known as Tonardo – responded. Doc sent some lyrics too.

Today being VD, I thought I’d post them.

Here are Tartan Taxidermist’s lyrics

Blood on the Keyboard:

In the dark of night
Your love is thrown away
So be careful of knives
In the light of day

Accusations are hard to make
When you can’t point finger
But the blood on your keyboard
Shows the pain still lingers

Leave your screams of agony
Leave your need to eviscerate
You need warm arms around you
And in love to commiserate

Accusations are hard to make
When you can’t point finger
But the blood on your keyboard
Shows the pain still lingers

And here are Doc’s:

Blood on the Keyboard

(in slow bluesy, smoky voice)
Blood on the tracks,
Blood on the keyboard.

Blood on the tracks,
Blood on the keyboard.

I can’t reach my cocktails and snacks,
You gotta he’p me Oh Lord!

(blues guitar solo followed by two verses that compare the pain of your finger with the broken hearts of the world and poverty in Africa)

Thanks guys.

Happy VD everyone.

The change has nothing to do with the war in Iraq, the mafia of neo-cons or the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

It has to do with the pain bomblets going off in my upper back. Too much typing and too much right-hand mousing are to blame.

So in addition to incorporating new typist stretches and new typist sitting postures, I’ve given up right-hand mousing and switched to the left.

True, it’s a little awkward and it requires more thought, especially when right-clicking and left-clicking. It’s a bit like learning to drive on the other side of the road.

But I did learn to drive on the other side. And I will learn to mouse on the other side.

So what does that make me? A Bimousual? A Mousepaw? Ambimousedrous? Bad at mouse puns?

And almost as exciting as The Police concert is the “Early Typewriters” exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). For any typist, this would be a must-do event, but for a gifted typist, it is absolutely mandatory. (I’m already anticipating the bragging rights this will give me at the next regional typists meeting.)

The trip will also involve a bloggie get-together featuring the lovely Tanya Espanya and Jacy. After our first meeting in June, we’ve managed to convince ourselves that we are not creepy-internet-axe-murderer types. Now we realize that we’re just creepy internet types without axes and it’s perfectly acceptable to socialize together.

Other activities will include meals in Chinatown, visits to second hand shops near Chinatown and Vietnamese iced coffee in Chinatown.

I will also brunch with my lovely, gorgeous and side-splittingly funny brother Anne Boone, as he is known here.

All suggestions welcome on food and other distractions in Toronto.

But when it comes to admin tasks, the opposite is true. Admin induces a despondencythat borders on coma.

Filing HST returns, as I am doing today, induces deep depression.

Because of this, I avoid admin activities as long as possible. I save it all up until the last minute and do it all at once.

And it hurts. It hurts a lot. The reason? Typists type. They are not hard-wired to do admin.

Part of the problem is my rule-following nature. I would never want to get in trouble with the government and so I am compelled to do my HST returns in a timely and orderly manner.

But the pain. Oh, the pain.

Help. Me. Someone.

Now.

It’s true. She’s a lovely girl from Wales now living in a mill conversion in the south of France.

I attended her wedding in Shropshire a few years ago. It was held on a medieval estate with bride, groom and guests dressed in full Victorian period costume. A stunning sight to behold. Ossy didn’t show.

But one guest – and I won’t say who, other than to indicate that she was a fairly gifted typist – got her periods mixed up and showed up in Elizabethan (the first) costume, proving that one can show up at these things looking so three-centuries ago.

Fashion crimes were forgiven by bride and groom who lived happily ever after.

Elizabethan typist went on to greatness.

Hemingway started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. Before the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman’s journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Some of the best prose ever written came through the keystrokes of a trusty typewriter. You can almost hear the clickety clack of the writer in the garret tapping away on the old manual typewriter. Those days are gone now and typist and typewriter have been pushed aside by the word processor.

But at GT, we still believe that the typist and the typewriter are things of dignity that should be remembered and respected. So each week we will salute one such pair – typist and typewriter. This week our typist is Hunter S. Thompson who used the IBM Selectric (Red).

Thompson is best known as a proponent of “new journalism”, a form of writing that engages the subjectivity of its author and often includes fictional elements to dramatize real occurrences. Among numerous examples of his eccentric and daredevil approach towards writing, he became the first reporter to infiltrate the Hell’s Angels. He rode with them for a year, an experience that led to his being savagely beaten up.

Thompson produced a stream of outrageous books, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), which was made into a film starring Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro in 1998; and Generations of Swine (1988). At the end of the 1980s he contributed a weekly column to the San Francisco Examiner. He has also worked as a writer for the television series Nash Bridges (in 1996), starring Don Johnson.