Welcome to the Jungle...

So...I am trying this blogging thing out...I don't know if it is more out of the need for catharsis or the need to be on a blogging bandwagon...either way I thought about it and decided to go for it.  I don't know what my ramblings may or may not be on nor do I know if they are even going to be grammatically correct.  My dad, the ex-English teacher would probably go crazy, I certainly didn't pick up his fantastic writing skills.  Which brings me to a tangent...

I had that last line originally posted in parenthesis...does that not mean that it was supposed to not be read due to the irrelevant nature of the comment?  I think I need to get back into my little brown handbook which I believe is in a bookshelf somewhere in my house.  I think I use parenthesis way too often in my emails...I am beginning to wonder if half of my emails even get read due to using so much parenthetic speaking.   Also, I just realized that I use ellipses far too often (dot dot dot).  That I am using them to replace commas or semi-colons.  My friggin writing is horrible.  That's why I look forward to trying to keep up with this blogging thing.  A book that I enjoyed reading was entitled Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss.  It talks about how we have lost our punctuation rules among other things.  Here is the authors take:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

So punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.

I suggest in this day of email...and the amount of writing that we do (notice in this sentence I used both ellipses and these awful parenthesis) that everyone pick up a copy of this book.  It will help us out tremendously, even if we choose not to abide by any of the proper grammar and punctuation rules.

Now back to my normal train of thought being that I remember the days of going to my dad's office when he was a guidance counselor in Medford MA.  His desk was littered with legal notepads with lines and lines of hand written notes and whatnot.  I used to be amazed at his ability to write, he was and is still so eloquent and to the point.  What was really cool was that he would write and write letters, grants and proposals and other things I didn't understand long hand, it was after all the 70's and early 80's and then give it off to a secretary to type up (parenthetically speaking of course, that is one of things I never got to enjoy in my work life was a secretary and the secretarial pool).  It would transform from this magical yellow legal pad to this typed document coming off the IBM typewriter with the round ball. Ahh, the good ol' days.

So, in the end, I think the Microsoft Word has been the death of us.  Spelling doesn't count any more either that's all taken care of with Word.  Also, grammar doesn't really count, although Word sometimes gets it wrong and we can always blame it on that.

Another small stream of consciousness regarding looking back at the 70's and 80's and actually watching my dad work:  Have you ever noticed that things that you pick up from your parents?  Not the stuff that is genetically inclined but the little things that are learned behaviors?  In my later years I find that my signature is almost 100% similar to his.  You can just change the middle initial and it is almost identical.  I tend to bite my pinky, the right one, when I am reading something intently over time like a book or long newspaper article.  I just find myself doing more and more of the things that he did 30 years ago.  I find it absolutely hilarious.  I doodle on my note pads and in the margins of the legal pads, and my desk is a mess.  My wife the other day said, "I didn't marry your dad..."  My response was, "well, I didn't marry your mom, so we are even!"  Why is it so bad that we are starting to act like our parents in our older age?  It was destined to be.  We at least already look like them.  Just remember 30 years from now when our kids are emulating what we are doing today to have patience with them as well.  Maybe I should remind my boys that what ever the don't like about me, they will be doing the same thing in 30 years.

That train of thought is off the tracks now.  Don't really know how I got to this point, well actually now that I think about it everything in life is connected.  I have been working for the last four years for a consulting company that works in the land of connection making and recalling what we know and connect it to the task at hand.  Maybe this is what this blog can become, one giant connection making pad for me to do a brain dump (more on this maybe in future posts).  If you are reading this, please post connections or thought provokers to get us started and maybe we can collaboratively develop a new way to blog or something.

I will stop now.  I need to get back to the grind.