For someone who has an extremely expensive higher education, I engage in a fair amount of magical thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with a bit of it in your every day life. We're tiny inhabitants on a small rock floating in the middle of nothing, so we occasionally need to feel in control. And if that means that Trot Nixon wears the same revolting hat all season long to maintain health, fitness and hitting ability ('cause he can't be doing it because it's pretty), well, who am I to judge?
When I was about eleventy billion pages into drafting my Senior Thesis in English (I capitalize it to make it seem important, you see), spring break rolled around and with it my long-awaited appointment to have my wisdom teeth removed. Now, while I won't claim that the thesis thus far was going really well (my advisor was patient, but I was pretty thick), I was worried. Removing my wisdom teeth frightened me as a change that could very badly alter my thesis-writing luck. What if wisdom teeth are also "ability-to-write-articulately-about-James-Joyce" teeth? That would have me up shit creek indeed.
As you may know, getting an appointment to see an oral surgeon to discuss wisdom teeth removal requires a six-month wait, and when you're staring a post-collegiate dearth of health insurance in the face, you don't have that kind of time. So, like any rational, proactive, educated person would do, I began referring to those impacted, achy little bastards as my "stupid teeth." If I rechristened them, they wouldn't cause my thesis any trouble, right?
Well, in the end my thesis turned out ok. My advisor was pleasantly surprised. However, in going over his comments, he turned to a page that ended in the middle of a sentence. The following page began on a fresh paragraph. He asked me what the end of that first thought was. I racked my brain. No idea. "Well," he said, "I suppose you'll just have to search your conscience and find out someday."
How could I do such a thing? Five months of work, five separate readings of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (do you know what happens to you if you read the hell sermon five times? You start to like it!), over a hundred drafted pages, and one fizzled thought. One idea-us interruptus. What to blame? The addled mind of an overextended college senior? Too much coffee? Too little sleep? Too many gummy bears for meals?
No! It's the teeth, I tell you! The teeth!
Today, I was posting an article to our website at work and came upon what appeared to be an incorrect possessive. "Ha-ha!" I thought. "I am an apostrophe maven! I punctuate like a champ (most of the time)!" But then I hesitated, fingers floating over the keyboard. "Wait. Do I need an s-apostrophe-s? S-apostrophe?" I began to panic. Sweat. I experienced an existential crisis. What the fuck is going on? Suddenly I'm Josh Bard facing a knuckler. Somewhere, my stickler license is being revoked.
I consulted the MLA, two priests, a rabbi, a medium conjuring William Strunk, and Seth (who consulted Google Battle). It was s-apostrophe (this, I later learned, is the house style for singular possessives, about which I have strong opinions... I may share them with you one day when we are both drunk and you can't get away). I recovered my confidence. But I knew right away where to assign the blame. My hair!
image from www.96th.ca
1 comment:
Now I feel bad about ripping of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man as a blog post title, especially since, um, I never read it.
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