If I had a dollar for every time I read over my blog posts and found a glaringly obvious punctuation disaster, I would have enough money to buy some pretty cool stuff.
See that comma I just did? I’m not so sure I put that in the right place. I’m wondering if I could have written that whole opening sentence without any punctuation at all. Why can’t I tell?
What happened to me?
I went to school. I did pretty good in English. B+ Average… Can anyone recommend a book? Fuck-wit’s Guide to Punctuation perhaps?
I suppose I could be a lot worse…
Today is monday and the birds outside my window are chirping merrily in the late morning haze. I am sitting at the messiest desk on the Southeastern Seaboard, pondering my lunch and churning out poorly punctuated dross.
For a while now I’ve been thinking about writing/posting an insanely self-indulgent account of my romantic history.
Perfectly obnoxious, I know, but… HOLY SHIT! BERNIE MADOFF JUST GOT 150 YEARS! His lawyers thought he should only get 12! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Where was I? Oh yeah, the girlfriend chronicles. So I thought since we get site visits in the high four figures each day- Some of those visits have got to be ex-girlfriends. Right? Am I kidding myself? No. They Google me for sure.
So anyway, I thought I’d use this platform to clarify a few things and also HONOR those wonderful ladies who, like human turnstiles, ushered me through the various chapters of my life thus far.
I’ll start with my earliest memory of a girlfriend- Joanne Crocker.
Joanne came to my primary (elementary) school when I was 7. She and her family had moved halfway around the world to escape the inconceivable horrors of war-torn 80′s Belfast. She had dreamy blue eyes, a band of freckles across her nose, and an accent.
As she stood at the front of the class and nervously introduced herself the other children giggled, but for me it was love at first sight. She was so profoundly different, so strange, so foreign…
I made friends with her immediately and she told me nightmarish tales of kneecappings and bombs blowing up cars on her street.
Of course I didn’t believe her, how could something as horrible as the IRA exist? She was just trying to impress me. Years later I realized she was telling the truth- She had seen a teenage boy have his kneecaps shot out.
We ‘went out’ on and off for most of primary school. She’d invite me over to her house and we’d just sit in her room and talk for hours about… I can’t remember… Then we sort of had a vague relationship during the first or second year of high school, but a weird thing happened one night at the movies- I felt her up. I’d never kissed a girl and had no idea what I was meant to do, so, with my arm around shoulders, I massaged her right breast for about 90 minutes. I didn’t know! I thought she was into it! I thought it would lead to making-out, but it didn’t! Horrible, horrible memory. I still feel gross about it.
The following day at school her friends told me she didn’t want to speak to me ever again. I was crushed and deeply shamed. I felt like a predator.
So, Joanne, if you’re reading this, and I know you are, I just want to say sorry for what happened at The Karate Kid Part II.
Next week: German exchange student Jennifer Sanders!
