Awesome things I overheard on campus

I have a dirty little hobby. I like to walk behind people, maybe a little too closely, on my way to class and listen to what they have to say. I know, I know, I’m terrible, but hey, if you’re going to say something on a campus full of people, you should know a stranger is gonna hear it.

Today, I was walking behind a girl who was on the phone. (To my defense, she was talking just a little too loudly, anyway.) She was tall, shapely, dark hair, walked with confidence. What caught my attention was her laugh. It was crystal clear. And then she said,

“Yeah, I had fun last night. I love that thing you did with my boobs…….yep. That. It was too cool.”

Seriously? You’re gonna talk about that here? Yikes. I don’t know if the conversation was real or staged, but either way, she wants the world to know about her boobs.

The LikeLikeLike Girl cracked me up. I was behind her and some guy last week. Every single sentence had at least three ‘likes’ in it.

“Like Jamie and I were like going to the HPER building to like work out, and like, oh my gosh, we saw this girl in the ugliest shorts. They were like blue and like…..shiny….”

Even the guy she was walking with seemed to have a hard time focusing on what she was saying. I saw him smirk, and I even think I saw him ticking off ‘likes’ on his fingers. A glance at me and he and I shared, like, a moment of, like, understanding.

And my personal favorite:

“Oh my GOD, I f#cking love Institute!!!”

True story.

She had just walked out of the Institute building as I was walking by. She and her friend were giddy, talking fast, walking slow and just as I got within earshot, she proclaims her f#cking love of Institute. Too funny.

Grammar

I love grammar. I know I probably just lost half of my audience after making that statement, but bear with me. We’re all dorks about something. We know way more than a normal human being should about a particular topic and have become a total nerd in that area. Some people are into Star Trek, creating the quintessential nerd, the Trekkie, but we all do it. Those around me are Jeep nerds, bike dorks, farm geeks…..and on and on. I am a word nerd. I love word origins, grammar, comma splices, dangling modifiers, oh my goodness, the list just goes on….

So when I signed up for the Elements of Grammar course at USU, I thought I’d be a kid in a candy shop. Daily doses of subject-verb agreement, visions of prepositional phrases, rounds with peers about comma splices and simple or complex sentence structures. But alas, this was not how the first two weeks of class unraveled.

The first day of class was the usual welcome to class, handing out the syllabus, blah, blah, blah. The first assignment was determining subjects and verbs. Easy.

The NEXT class period, however, was a disaster.

You’d think that the first week of a college grammar class full of English majors would be pretty much heartburn free. Again…alas. A simple assignment of labeling pronouns, nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives and prepositions turned in to a frustrating, painful debate. These English majors, these lovers of the language, could do nothing but say hateful things about the language they were planning on spending the rest of their lives using. They plan to sell their ability to know their stuff about writing, but can only complain about the simple mechanics.

Talk about heartbreaking.

Even after explaining the reasoning behind a word being an adjective instead of a pronoun, several students would say things such as “That’s just dumb” or “Why should I care?”

Why should you care about grammar? Because it matters.

When I see a bridge, or a building, or a car, or something that bunches of engineers spent hours pouring over, getting the calculations just right, I don’t think to myself, “wow, a lot of math went in to that.” I think, “Beautiful.” But imagine seeing a bridge where someone didn’t care about the math…It would fall, it wouldn’t line up with the road, it’d be too short, and it’d be UGLY. The same goes with English. If someone doesn’t care, it’s ugly. Think of how many times that applies in life….

If someone doesn’t care, it’s ugly.

My New Blog!

I know, I know, everyone has a blog. And I’ve been against having my own blog, just for the sake of being different, or maybe for the sake of clinging on to my old ways, but times are a’changin. I’ve always thought blogs were best for people with kids, who need to share pictures, or those who have moved away from the ones they are close with and need a way to mass-communicate with many. But, as a writer, I feel like I need to be actively writing every day. So why not use a blog where others may potentially read what I have to write.

Besides, I like to bitch. And, I’ve been told, I bitch in a sarcastic, potentially amusing fashion. So…..why not use this platform to get a few things off my chest AND amuse a few fans at the same time?

And with that, here’s my blog. Read if you want, enjoy if you wish, comment if you like, and know that this is mostly for me.

Thanks.