I knew how to write before I knew how to read. To impress my parents, I would write long “sentences” consisting entirely of random letters. By the time I learned that the letters were supposed to spell actual words, my printing was as good as anyone’s. But then, in third grade, came cursive.

I hated cursive. I hated the way the letters looked. I hated that I had to hold the paper on a slant. I hated that I had to finish an entire word before going back to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, instead of completing one letter at a time.

Mostly, I hated that I was terrible at cursive. It was the first thing in school I’d ever been bad at. My handwriting was supposed to improve with practice, but it never did. No matter how brilliant my prose was, it persisted in looking ugly on the page.

My fifth-grade teacher was a stickler for good handwriting. He announced at the beginning of the school year that as soon as each student’s cursive reached a certain level of proficiency, that student would get to join the B-Pen Club. Being a member of the club meant that you could write your assignments in ballpoint pen — like a grownup! — instead of pencil. But by the end of the year, I was the only member of the class who had not been admitted to the B-Pen Club. I had to resign myself to the shame of writing in pencil forever.

“Forever” lasted until the first week of seventh grade, when I handed in an essay to my social-studies teacher. “You’re in junior high school,” she said, horrified. “You can’t be writing in pencil! We write in pen here.”

So I started writing in pen, but doing so always felt illicit to me. I had no right to be using a pen, because I’d never earned membership in the B-Pen Club. It never occurred to me that the B-Pen Club was just something that my fifth-grade teacher had made up, and that no other teacher would be aware of its existence. It wasn’t until I was midway through high school that I realized that nobody even cared about what kind of writing we used anymore. I cautiously tried turning in a couple of assignments using printing rather than cursive, and no teacher said a word. I felt like I had broken out of prison without any of the guards noticing.

I wonder in how many ways we continue to confine ourselves to prison cells long after the prison has ceased to exist.

I remember spending the night of my fiftieth birthday in a hotel bar in Sacramento, listening to a world-class ragtime pianist. Knowing that music — particularly ragtime music — is always better with alcohol, I ordered a Maker’s Mark, neat. (This hotel didn’t have much of a whiskey selection.) When the server brought the drink to my table, I was dismayed to see that it was in a plastic cup.

“Can I get this in a glass?” I asked.

“No,” said the server. “At this hour we only serve in plastic.”

Understand that I grew up in New York, where people express themselves loudly when a service that they’re paying for is not to their satisfaction. I was always embarrassed when a parent or relative raised a stink in a store or restaurant, and as a result, I have always done the opposite: I present myself as tolerant, understanding, and reluctant to make a fuss. (One of the reasons I moved to California is that the culture here discourages east-coast-style confrontations.) But really — whiskey in a plastic cup?

It occurred to me that I was now fifty, and perhaps had the right to be a pain in the ass once in a while.

“I don’t care what you do at this hour,” I said to the server. “I want my drink in a real glass.”

The server quickly took my cup of whiskey back to the bar. The best way to describe how I felt at that moment is liberated — no longer a prisoner of my lifelong self-conception.

I hope it doesn’t ruin the story when I add that the server returned with the same plastic cup, and told me that there really were no glasses available. But at that point, it didn’t matter, because I knew that my inner New Yorker would be there when I needed him.