I am interested (greatly) in serif typefaces. They wear little hats and coats; they are delightful to me. They are fancy and dressed for the occasion. They are pleasing to the eye. I like how they look on the page. The fact that all social medias and applications nowadays are sans-serif makes me strangely nostalgic in a passive way; a river of the past flows through me. This is easily remedied. Frankly, ridiculously so. There are extensions that allow for the patching of these things, replacing one font with another. But that's what they are– patches. So I sit with the sans-serif socials and stand it; there is a stamina required for my fascination. That's fine.

My mother, while I was growing up, was a graphic designer. (In all honesty, she is still a graphic designer. She is just unemployed about it. She emails newspapers and magazines to tell them of their mistakes.) What was in vogue at the time she had her apparel company were sans-serif typefaces. There are very few designs of hers from that period that do not sport a sans-serif typeface. (Bubble letters in particular; that style was very popular in kids apparel in the early to mid 2000s.)

We talk about the pizza clock, in my family. My mother was hired, before I am born, to design a clock for a local pizzeria (that looks like a pizza, I suppose?). This consumes her to the point of obsession, so she never finishes the clock.

"You're doing a pizza clock," I'll say with a sigh, rising from the chair next to her desk. She'll've spent twenty minutes showing me two marginally different colors or typefaces or shapes or layers, and I'll get bored and watch her spiral into that deep dark place that only graphic designers go when they genuinely can see the stark difference between a blue-grey and a grey-blue.

"I'm not," she'll protest. She's wrong, but I'll allow her that, every time. My mother is always right, anyway.

Sans-serif typefaces, in some typography sources, are referred to with the antiquated usage of the word grotesque; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) proposes that the original usage of this word comes from the Italian grottesco, meaning ‘of a cave', first used to describe paintings excavated from collpased Roman ruins. The word starts its life with the definition of ‘an adjective meaning fantastical and fancy', but later it will take on a pejorative meaning. The OED posits that serif is a backformation of sanserif; the lack being used to describe the presence of.

I can imagine in my mind the grotesque. The sans-serif, being novel and new and grotesque, and looking down on the antiquated serif. Or perhaps a grotesque monster, maybe a dragon with fiery breath, being defeated by a serif knight with a serif sword.

I joke that I did not dress myself until high school, and it's not entirely untrue. I didn't pick my own clothing out, certainly, until high school. I don't remember distinctly the first time I shopped for myself, picked out my clothes for myself. I do remember some of the articles of clothing: a crop top with white, brown and yellow stripes made of piqué fabric with an attached sunflower patch; a few baseball tees (one specifically I remember with yellow sleeves); a short, pink, pleated skirt with a cupcake pattern and an elastic waistband; a pair of red pumps. It was like a hurricane of tween clothes threw up on me, when I started dressing myself. The impression I always got from my mother is that I had a developmental delay, and this meant that I was disinterested in dressing myself, let alone picking my own clothing. I would have gone to school in my slept-in pajamas if anyone would've let me. In this way, my mother was fixing me.

My mother is always fixing me. She gets this from her mother, who I assume gets it from her mother, who I was too young when she died to really remember in this way. This is their way of showing love; pointing out your fly down and fixing your hair or licking her finger and wiping that schmutz off your face. They obsess over appearance. I had an epiphany some time in middle school to this caliber, that other people perceive me, but this has not become motivating until recently. My mother's fixing did not work, really. Or maybe it, too, is delayed.

Maybe my serif knight is not a knight, but a vigilante, going against the grain. But frankly I like the romantic image of a knight much more. They are truly sworn to something.

"I think it's almost done," my mother will say.

"Do you mean that?" I'll say. "I liked the other font better."

She'll make a face. "Really?"

"Yeah," and then quickly, as if I am realizing, "But this is fine, too."

I like to think myself distinctively not a fixer, as if this is a way I can rebel against my upbringing, against my blood. A marching line of daughters who fix, surrounded by those who push buttons. (I also like to imagine this is why my mother married my father, who is a pusher and not a fixer.) But the truth is, I do fix. I can't help it. When friends come to me with their woes, I have the very annoying habit of trying to logic them to death about it. I try to adopt the policy of, "what is it that you need from me," but I cannot help it sometimes. It is like watching the self-fulfilling prophecy unfurl. I know the magic steps to prevent my loved ones from coming to harm. I can fight the dragon for you, if you ask, if you ask me I will fight the dragon for you, I will, just give me the phone number, I'll call.

"What about the other font did you like better?"

"Ma, it's fine. As is," I'll placate. I won't know why I do it, not in the moment, but I will speculate later that it is to avoid causing my mom any distress.

On a base level, I cringe at this part of myself. It's not that I don't want to be like my mom. I love my mom. Really. But I also know what it's like to be logic-ed at and patched up and fixed at. It is the source of much tension between me and my mother. I feel like a hypocrite when I try to fix or advise. I don't want to hurt people. Ultimately I just don't want to hurt anyone, at all. (Maybe this is why I suffer through sans-serif websites when I don't have to? Let's psychologize that.)

i use times new roman with a new enthusiasm