Learning to Type
 
Learning to type in high school seemed vaguely valuable. Our fingers hovered over the keyboards while our wrists arched in a perfect arabesque until our teacher signaled us to begin. Then we were workers in a train yard, coupling the alphabet with commas and the dreaded prime numbers.
 
I never reached the teacher’s goal of 75 error-free words in a minute. The noise of others’ industry ricocheted in my skull and semi-paralyzed me. But I learned enough to make my mom jealous.
 

Dementia for Sale
 
If you’re in the market for dementia, just stay home. And if you venture out, get mad at everyone.  
 
Researchers have found that people who deeply and positively engage with friends and family and strangers throughout life are less likely to develop dementia even if they have the genetic markers for the disease.
 
So basically, smiling is a brain vitamin.  

Testing New Friends
 
If you’re in the market for new friends, you can administer a simple compatibility test.
 
Yawn.
 
If your companion does not yawn, locate the exit. You might be with a psychopath.
 
Apparently contagious yawning is the norm for most mammals. But Baylor University researchers found that people with psychopathic tendencies (cold-hearted, no empathy) will be unaffected by a companion’s yawn.
 
In other words, friends don’t let friends yawn alone.
 

My Favorite Punctuation
 
Quotation marks are my favorite punctuation. It means I can break from owning what I write. It means I’m just repeating someone else’s words without the hulking mess of my own thoughts.  
 
But writers should never lead with a quote, one of my editors warned. Rarely are quotes beefy enough to prime a whole story. He said it’s a wimpy ploy.
 
So maybe my favorite is the apostrophe, the punctuation of ownership. Lora’s Subaru. Lora’s polka dot Dansko sneakers. Owning things is so much easier than owning words.   

When steno pads and typewriters and adding machines governed commerce, the Fox River Valley was the Silicon Valley of the paper industry. Lumberjacks herded fresh cut logs in its waterways. Beside the river, millworkers pulverized the timber into pulp as smooth as cake batter. As the pulp cooked, mill owners inhaled deeply its sulphur-scented effluence like it was money.
 
And now even with all the RAMs and Gigabytes and microchips pumped out by Silicon Valley, the Fox and its sister rivers still buoy a $654 billion paper industry. Look around your favorite coffee shop. Beside nearly every laptop, is a ragged spiral notebook or a perfect-bound journal. Even tech-savvy millennials still like to bundle their lumbering words and pictures onto sinewed rivers of ink.