I hit the pool tonight for the first time in a while. The pool was good – I think, after three years of attempting self drowning, that I’m finally developing a little bit of muscle memory. No attempted drowning at this return. Bilateral breathing was working well, and while I was painfully slow, at least I didn’t feel like I was drowning. 25 laps or so – just over 1K. Nothing earthshattering, but nothing to shake a stick at.
Jake got his first book report back from second grade. His teacher gigged him for leaving out a comma in a sentence that doesn’t need a comma. I’m pretty spun up about it – dangling prepositions aside, I care greatly about grammar and good writing. Even the greats who took liberties with the English language knew how to write properly before they bent it. Missy’s not so worked up about it, though she agrees the teacher’s wrong. In her defense, the rest of the comments on the paper were ones that Missy and I made to jake when he was writing, so the teacher’s up overall in our book. The comma, I think, was added just ’cause second graders generally don’t think about things like that.
My kid’s the exception. He’s smarter.
(Just like yours are).
((And, for the record, almost all of my parenting decisions are made out of a pathological fear of being “that parent”))
Anyway, I finally came up with an idea for a blog meme. I haven’t googled it, so I’m sure that it already exists, but for a brief moment let me think that i had an actual original thought, instead of reprocessing things that I read half awake and forget that I read. The theme is:
Literary Devices that you use in your blog. Here’s my favorite five:
- Run as a song. Pick your current favorite song. Dissect your run as an embodiment of the song. My favorite use of this personally was when I used jazz as a metaphor for trail running.
- Invoke old girlfriends. This one is more dangerous than I give it credit for. Luckily for me (a) None of my old girlfriends read my stuff; and (b) Missy didn’t go to high school with me
- Stuff as a solution. We know it’s not really. But stuff gives us something to blame for our failures besides ourself
- Dialogue. It’s as old as people trying to fill pages – enlisting someone as a literary foil to make the protagonist (and, in a blog it’s always one’s self) look handsome, erudite, and sexy.
- and finally The list of 5 things. Pick a topic. Make a list.
So, what did I leave out?