It's not me, it's the crowd!

I don't know when my love afair with the alphabet began. It certainly wasn't when I learned it, singing the tune of "Twinkle, twinkle little star" while my tounge twisted itself around the "L, M, N, O, P" transition (it always sounded like 3 letters rather than 5: "elm, noo, p"). It wasn't when I began reading aloud. I went through elementary school at the end of the phonetics movement. I would sound out the parts of word, and quite proudly exclaim a mispronounced version of the word (this continued into my adulthood--paradigm has always been "para-didge-em" when I read it silently, and I've never mastered whether it's in-TEG-grel or IN-te-gral). It certainly wasn't during handwriting class--I developed an adult (somewhat indecipherable) script rather quickly, much to my teachers' chagrin.
But, somewhere along the way I have developed respect and admiration for the Latin Alphabet. It really is quite beautiful. And a rather concise summation of our basic communication tools--26 letters is nothing compare to the hundreds of characters in other alphabets. Mostly, I've come to love how well it works as an organizational tool. I can always find the book I'm looking for, or the file, or the notecard. And so could anyone else who might want to.
So simple; so beautiful. *sigh*