Why I should never check my personal email from work:
First of all, I'm leaving a trail of who I am, where I've
been, and what they can subpoena me for if push comes to shove.
Second of all, checking my email makes me giggle.
I made a HUGE grammatical/spelling booboo on the blog the
other day, and only one person pointed it out to me via my personal email
account. (You, sir, are my hero,
heretofore dubbed as My Hero.) When I saw what I had done (after My Hero saw
what I had done, after you all saw what I had done), I nearly peed myself
laughing because the word I misspelled and wrote an entire blog entry about was
completely wrong. Okay, not completely,
but pretty well messed up.
Now, let me be honest.
I made an even bigger booboo recently in front of a jury of my peers at
a grad class and had the same exact reaction I had when My Hero brought this to
my attention. I had about ten seconds of
absolute horror strike me, then I busted a spleen cracking up over at my
gaffe. Let me tell you the most recent
error, and then I'll share with you the other.
The correct word for the gliding vowel sound is not
"dipthong." It is
DIPHTHONG. I know this. I knew it then and I don't know why I forgot,
conveniently or otherwise, and totally screwed it up. Maybe it's because I've had no heat here for
the last six weeks as my furnace died (resurrected mere hours ago… finally) and
I am suffering the ill-effects of extended hypothermia to the cranium. I tried retracing my mental steps, just the
same. Maybe I wanted dip sum, which is
Chinese food. Wait. No, that's dim sum. Maybe I'm just a dipstick. Maybe I'm a dip-shit. Perhaps I'm just full of shit and I'm a
dip. That must be it: I was stuck
without a dipstick in a pile of dip-shit eating dim sum in my dippy thong while
practicing diphthongs.
No matter. My Hero
sent me an endearing email, apologizing for pointing out my tremendous dip-shit
blunder. But remember, kids - That's why
I enlisted AND entrusted you all as my "readers" -- that's
writer-speak for "free copy editors."
You people, my unsuspecting cherubs, are my unpaid proofreaders. And I love you all for that.
Now that I have managed a quasi-defeated-politician-sized
apology and DIPHTHONGS, let me tell you about my other, even more embarrassing
blunder.
I took a poetry grad class last spring. Let me assure you, I had the best undergrad
professor in the history of poetics to teach me all about poetry's finer and
no-so-fine nuances. I know how to write
poetry until it comes out of not just my ears but yours and that of your
progeny for generations to come. But I
walked into that class playing dumb.
After all, to assume that one is more intelligent than the professor is
a really bad way to start, but to actually prove it is a really bad way to finish.
Every week I dutifully followed the directives he gave
us. He told us to write sonnets, I wrote
them down to the nth letter of the poetic code, including only using certain
rhymes in case he really did know more than I did. The following class, no one had written a
sonnet … but me. Did I fuck up? Had I not listened? Did I doze off during the note-taking time? Nope.
Everyone else wrote about angst or sex or lace doilies or old haunts,
just like they always did every single week.
And their poems really were pretty cool.
Too. Mine weren't bad,
either. I started to suspect, though,
that my playing dumb ploy wasn't working; either this guy could tell from my
writing that I really did know what I was doing already, or this guy sincerely
was dumber than a stump.
Neither thought made me feel especially warm nor fuzzy.
Finally, after weeks of him tearing my work apart with not
much constructive criticism in return, I'd had enough. I went to my job and I opened up the Internet
and my Smartboard. The Smartboard is
like an interactive electronic white board.
I googled the Scholastic website - you know the one: You used to get Scholastic
book orders in school, and you could get cheap-ass books for like fifty cents,
and then the cheap-ass books would get delivered to school, and your teacher
handed the cheap-ass books to you, and you got all, "YAY, MY FUCKING
CHEAP-ASS BOOKS ARE HERE, DIPSHITS!"
Yup. That Scholastic website.
On the Scholastic site there is a game that is a poetry generator. It's like a slot
machine. You press the button, the slots spin around, and you can press each one to make it stop. I played with this a few times on the giant
Smartboard until I came up with a crapload of words even a dipstick could turn
into poetry. Then I did what any asswipe
idiot shitfuck student can do and produced free-verse
poetry.
It was gawd-awful.
But I typed it up and handed it in, anyway. I … was … done.
And it got the biggest rave reviews of anything I had
submitted all semester.
Mother-freakin-fucker. A damn game.
A kids' game. An Internet ploy to
sell cheap-ass books to cheap-ass people (like me) in a cheap-ass world. I should've just done that every week and
gotten an A instead of the goddamned make-believe B+ I ended up with when it
was all over.
But that's not the kicker.
The kicker was that when I combined some of the words, I didn't account
for spelling. At all. My poem was about a bear deep in the woods,
but not just any bear. A grisly
one. That's right. Not a grizzly bear. A
GRISLY BEAR.
There it was, folks.
There was that ten-second span of absolute horror. I misspelled the simplest of words, mixing up
two terms I knew well, and I was about to make a complete and total dip-shit
asshole out of myself in a grad class by making a fourth grade (at best)
spelling mistake right there in front of my fellow grad students and the
professor, who at that moment must have felt like Prince Pompous of Poetry,
poised to point out my imperfections.
It wasn't until we were deep into work-shopping the piece
that people told me how impressed they were by my description of the bear as grisly and not grizzly.
What a wonderful play on words!
What a clever double-entendre! I
was touted as a genius, a metaphorical artist, and Queen of the Class for evening. I had written something truly AMAZING. It was everyone's FAVORITE poem I had ever
written!
Scholastic. Smartboard.
Game. To boot, I had used the
wrong grizzly. My poor Grizzly Bear had gone all
zombies-are-the-new-black grisly on
me. My stupid poem wasn't even about the
stupid thing it was supposed to be about in the first stupid place. Still, "It
… was … the … best … poem … ever."
A joke-turned-blunder so perfectly executed, I almost pissed
myself laughing.
I guess it just goes to show that sometimes when you mess
shit up, it's a bad thing, like mistaking a dip-thong for a diphthong when you
actually and truly do know the difference, and not catching it before you make
a blog post about it. Like I'm SNL's Emily
Litella (however it's spelled - what's another mistake at this point - never
mind). Sometimes when you mess shit up, though,
it's a great thing. It's like winning
the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.
It also goes to show you that there are a lot more
dip-thongs in my profession than I care to admit because it means that I'm most
certainly one of them. And for some
strange reason, this thought does make
me feel all warm and fuzzy, so warm and fuzzy, in fact, that I might have to
write a poem about it:
Whenever I type in a bind,
My blog seems to have its own mind.
Then, oops, I misspell,
And my post? Shot to
Hell.
It's always a grisly
find.
