They say kids today don't know how to right cursive, mainly because of the computer. Children are taught in third grade how to write the special elegant style, but they use the skill less and less as they grow older. Is this bad? Is this tragic? Is this progress? I'm not sure. Let me tell you my own tale.

I was never good at cursive handwriting. I moved to a different town between second and third grade. At my old school, I was supposed to learn cursive handwriting in third grade. At the new school, the kids learned cursive in second grade. The third grade teacher gave me a booklet and told me to learn. I did, sort of. Not really. Okay, I sucked at it.

I didn't understand why we learned one way of writing with straight lines and round circles, only to learn a loopy, shwooshie girlie way a couple of years later. I wasn't that good at printing in the first place, and I never really excelled at cursive writing at all. I finished the booklet I received and never attempted to improve on it. What was I going to do, become a calligraphy kid?

Teachers would complain about my handwriting for the rest of my grammar school years. None of them cared that much about it (and neither did I), but they did complain. By the time, I got to high school, teachers told me to type my papers as much as possible, and I did.

You would think I would have taken a typing class or two, but no, I didn't. I hunt and peck on the keyboard just about as wild as my loops for my cursive L's and P's. No one can tell, of course, except for my lousy spelling and grammar every now and again. I usually cover it up by saying it was intentional. Sometimes, that's actually tru.

Nothing ever inspired me to learn how to write cursive better. I actually gave up the practice all together by the age of ten. I have a chicken scratch type of printing that resembles my oldest brother's more than anything, and his writing is less than desirable as well. Maybe it's in the Jungle genes.

I won't say much about my signature other than I give doctors a run for their money for illegibility. It's basically practiced scribble.

This is my tragic handwriting tale, and I don't feel that bad about it.

But let's get back to the point. Is this bad? This lack of cursive writing? I don't think so. I am thirty-five, I have a college education, I can read and write (or type), and no one thinks any better or worse for my lack of cursive writing skills.

But the kids today know how to type with their thumbs on little tiny keyboards. I have never embraced the new technology. No cell phone, no pagers (remember those?) no blackberry, no twitter. I have a land line touch tone phone and an e-mail address. I don't text. Excuse me, txt. And no, I don't write in cursive, but hey, neither do the kids.

There will come a day when we discover that most kids don't know how to spell words due to texting. Will this be a tragedy? I don't know. Do we really care about the rules anymore? Did we ever care about the rules? Will we ever care about the rules?

Cursive handwriting? Is that important? Does anyone remember shorthand that secretaries used to do? That was really weird, wasn't it? Now, I don't know anyone who can write in shorthand. Secretaries or otherwise. It's just not important. Was it ever?

Now, little Bobby and little Susie have the same difficulty I had in my youth. They don't know how to write in cursive. What a shame! Let us weep for the youth of America. They can't read, they can't write, and they can't do arithmetic. What are we good at?

We don't want to be astronauts anymore (we can't get back to the moon). We don't want to be engineers (those Asians are better than us). We don't want to be inventors (we want things given to us). Now, we don't want to write cursive either (so what's the freaking point).

We want to be important. We want to be celebrities. We want to be paid attention to, and let's face it, cursive handwriting is not the way to get it.

Goodbye, cursive. I sucked at it, and so do the kids of today. Somehow, we all still get by with our substandard ways. We are getting better at video games!

It would be a shame if we actually cared.

Chris Jungle types worse than you think.