RRREOW.NET

When I was in high school I used to have a geography teacher who would ask the class for our undivided attention. I never understood this. Surely, I thought, he must want everyone’s attention, not just a few of us.

Collectively our attention was always very divided because he was one of those crap teachers. You know, one of those people who fancies themselves a bit of a public speaker but fails to deliver. Even my mum thought he was awful and thought he had no real reason to be in front of a classroom. He used to add these weird pauses in his sentences. I don’t know… maybe… to add… dramatic tension… At every pause he would look around the class expectantly, probably thinking we were hanging on to his every word.  In fact, we definitely weren’t.

A big pet peeve of mine is people who use the word ‘whom’ inappropriately.  There are rules for using a word like that.  Why do people think they can just replace any old ‘who’ they like with ‘whom’ and it will be correct?

At school we used to get taught, if you aren’t sure what something means then don’t use it.  Using big words of which you have no idea what they mean paradoxically makes you sound stupid, not intelligent.

Aah the dangers of the English language…  I wonder if it would be possible to write a post only using words that have three syllables or more.

You may wonder why after over a year’s apparent absence from the interwebz I started blogging again. Or you may not, but for arguments sake let’s assume you do. I finished university, worked in a few jobs (I guess climbing the career ladder as they say, seeing as I went from 16k to 30k a year within a year *giggle* it still amazes me) then happily quit everything to work with Andrew on our own business. I think I’m one of those people who is reasonably good at everything they do (although my inferiority complex prevents me from thinking so), but that doesn’t mean I necessarily enjoy it. The other day I was thinking to myself, ‘is there anything I actually like doing that I am also marginally better at than some other things?’. The answer I came up with was writing.

A year ago I did an autobiographical creative writing module at university. Something I enjoyed a lot, since it conveniently circumnavigates the problem that most writers have: inspiration. I don’t need to be inspired to write about things that actually happened to me. And as this blog and my previous internet ‘history’ proves, I simply love talking about myself. This blog exists for me to flex my writing muscles and prepare myself for perhaps writing something bigger and more ambitious in the future.

This brings me to something that I have inappropriately called the chicken & Eggers paradigm. Inappropriately because this following problem is not really about ‘what came first’, but since I came up with the phrase I really need to use it however badly I am mangling English grammar in the process. Anyway, it’s about the following, do I:

1. Write a chronological ‘this is what happened on this day’ type of account of my life full of hyperboles of very painful situations that are supposed to shock you (Watch as audience stifles a yawn)

2. Write a highly eclectic mix of anecdotes that have some semblance of a timeline somewhere if you really look for it, but it doesn’t matter anyway because my wit will keep you reading regardless and you will read about highly painful occurances softened by a large dose of humour (because it’s just really funny when people die, you see). Kind of like what Dave Eggers does

The problem with 1. is that it’s just wrong when attempted by someone ‘under 70 and not Irish’ (I’m paraphrasing Eggers here). The types of autobiographies that were written en masse post-Angela’s Ashes about child abuse is what someone at a book store I once worked at called ‘kid-hit-lit’. Don’t laugh, it’s inappropriate. The problem with 2. is that Dave Eggers already did it. So basically I’m screwed.

I wonder if I am the only person who starts doing something, gets distracted, and then completely forgets about the first thing. Earlier I was checking one of my favourite websites, taking a little break from work as you do, when the phone rang. ‘GoodafternoonthisisIrishowcanIhelp?’ Blabla, business, blabla. After that I went completely into work mode and only remembered about an hour later that I was taking a break.

I do the same thing with laundry. We just got back from a holiday to Cyprus yesterday and so there were several loads of laundry to do. The first two were fine. I did well. The laundry neither spent 3 days abandoned in the washer nor did I forget to hang it up (no.. I never do that either.. *twitchy eye*). The third load proved more problematic. I took it out, put it in a plastic bag to transport it from the kitchen to the bedroom, threw the bag onto the bed (where I had put the laundry rack) and.. went off to do something else. I don’t even remember what. Most of the time the “something else”s that I do involve sitting at my desk and doing something at my computer, so I should probably make this big sign that says LAUNDRY. Then again, I don’t do laundry that often so it’s a bit of a waste.

That brings me to my next point by the way. Ever noticed how laundry can tangle itself into the weirdest.. entanglements? (Come on, you can’t expect me to be eloquent in my first post, eloquence comes later, after incompetence) Like those puzzle games that require you to somehow separate a ring from a bit of string when said ring and bit of string insist on remaining the best of friends and really don’t want to leave each other. After taking the third load of laundry out of the aforementioned plastic bag I encountered a bra. No wait, it was two. They were trying to cleverly fool me into thinking they were one, but they didn’t fool me, because what woman has four boobs? This is a point where I could go off on a splendid tangent discussing the merits of having four boobs, but I won’t. Doing laundry is exciting that way, spending 5 minutes to disentangle some garments.

So I ask you, what was the high point of your day?