I'm Not Impressive and That's Ok

Sometimes you put a lot of pressure on your robot buddy to get a blog post up because its a convenient distraction from doing your own. .... And then you realize The Management is going to have consequences for you if you don't at least TRY to get something up. From there its a downward spiral of self doubt, angry scribbles and remembering why you try to do anything in the first place.  But some time in the midst of the procrastination, and cursing, and actually doing my job, I have to confront the fact that trying to be clever usually results in insane ranting and miserable word-play, and that I really have no good ideas for a blog, and why, why, why did I start this? I have other things to do, for the love of christ!

Its at this point that I become exhausted by my own self-defeating efforts and the fact that I experience two feelings simultaneously (namely my base feeling of crankiness and anxiety that I might not be as witty as I think I am), and shut down completely. Once my brain resets itself, I ask myself, just who am I so concerned with impressing, anyway? Being impressive is a turn off, man.

Take for example, the worst offenders in the "trying to be impressive" courtroom. Bea mentioned the in her post, and we've all encountered them, even been them at one point in our lives (Don't deny it!). They're the Correctors. They are the people who habitually correct someone else's grammar or spelling, usually in a public forum.

 I have a hard time imaging what compels someone to do this. Now, granted, I have a hard time imaging what compels people to do all sorts of things, like buy Hello, Kitty sunglasses, or date men without beards, or have children. But Correctors bring out a whole different kind of wonderment. I can't imagine the sense of self-satisfaction that comes from being able to notice things so well is worth being thought of as such a dick.

The most common explanation I get for this behavior is that English, like some sort of scarifical virgin waiting to be led up the volcano needs a stodgy old British professor type to make sure it maintains its purity. I am, of course, speaking of language preservationist.

I don't think I have the faculties to know why they feel this way, but it puts people like me in an interesting position. And by people like me, I mean people who understand grammar. Coma splices aside,  I have a degree in Linguistics, and I can tell you what latinate structure got imposed on which germanic roots, and why, and what that did. And like Bea once pointed out, I know Latin, so everything I say is had more weight.

The funny thing that happens to me is that since I live in fear of being confronted by a Corrector, and I always editing things to keep them off my case. Take this for a neat little example: As I was typing an email, I wrote "The goal for Jesse and me...", paused, thought for a moment, then went to retype the sentence as "The goal for Jesse and I...." I did this because I knew "Jesse and me" would taken an informal, and even "incorrect". (Point in fact, "Jesse and me" is correct, needing the pronoun to be in an object case within the prepositional phrase. See? Latin.)

 The Correctors, in their attempts to preserve their fabricated notion of a correct English are now responsible for making ungrammatical English the formal English. (This is actually a fairly well documented issue within the Linguistic community. Its studied by Ph.D.'s even. A group a of people also very concerned with being impressive.)

At first, when I had the energy of youth, this sort of this made me irate. But now, I wrap this knowledge around myself, like a blanket of so many sour grapes, delighting in the cruel, cruel fact that a Corrector is very much the tool of his own destruction.

Emphasis on tool.

Fall.

and that's just the thing:

instinctively

in her little trundle heart

It was done gone wrong.

She was older now, but still young in her ways.

On cold fall days she could look at cold fall window displays

and she thought to herself:

"We are all passing."

and

"We have all passed."

It was cold, the day she fell.

Salem Gate

I drink tap water when I drink red wine

since the time I loved a man with hair so fine;

a malignant tumor withered him away

seems our last tomorrow was just yesterday.

a dead man lover was born my fate

he's my dirty tin man memory

Under Salem Gate.

MY ROBOT LOVER ‘N’ ME

Sometimes the world gives birth to robots. Sometimes people make themselves feel better by correcting other people’s grammar. Sometimes the people who think they are correcting other people’s grammar are wrong and I get to laugh at them. And sometimes you find another person who is actually a robot, too, who can be your robot lover and together you hop aboard the Tardis, scamper back and forth in time, and write each other old timey love letters along the way. And if your new time traveling robot companion likes bees as much as you do, all the more better. This blog documents the love affair between two such robots, who really just think the rest of the world has too many feelings. And, I mean, there was Catholic school, so we are cranky and have issues.

This post is sticking around until T gets her post up.