I am very carefully learning how to type the right way.

It involves a lot of auto-correct.

Apparently, those little nubs on the F and J keys are to let me know where my index fingers should be positioned at all times. They are “home keys.” And, get this, I should be using all five fingers on each hand to type, including my pinkies, because they all have a role.

Now, this concept at once annoys and intrigues me – the former because I already type more than 80 WPM without all this high-fallutin’ home key nonsense, the latter because I could obviously be typing faster if I would use more that four of my fingers at a time. My current method involves a sort of halfway touch-typing with my dexterous right hand while my left effectively hunts and pecks with a single finger. As a result, not only am I noticeably slower on left-hand-heavy words, but almost all of my mistakes are on the left.

Some concepts of proper typing, however, are eluding me. For example, am I to believe “pop” is really pinky-ring-pinky? Are those tiny, secondary fingers really expected to do all that heavy lifting so quickly? Pop, pop-culture, popular, populist, pop-up …

I suppose typing is just one more thing to add to the “Shoulda learned to do it right in the first place list,” along with guitar playing, singing, sit-ups, and tying a tie.

But, hey, I did just touch-type that whole paragraph with no errors and my eyes closed, so maybe I’m on to something. Or, at least I can do more daydreaming on the job.