And there it was, the frightening moment when I became my mother.
It started out pleasantly enough. I got a birthday present in the mail today from my mom. She had informed me that my presents would be arriving piecemeal, so I've been checking my mail everyday with excitement. My birthday is on Sunday, by the way. Wheee, for me.
Anyway, my mom purchased 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' for me. It's a book all about the demise of punctuation in both the U.K. and the U.S.
Oh my lord, I love it. I haven't laughed so hard since a kid at the Library of the Underworld asked me to change a $100 dollar bill. And that's when I knew I had become my mother. A woman who corrects e-mails.
Three times today, I found myself correcting the atrocious grammar of some of the village children. Just because they don't get a proper education at the local public school doesn't mean they can get away with saying things like:
"What's with them DVDs?" or
"I ain't got it."
*Shudder*
I've also been guilty of correcting punctuation at the Library of the Underworld. The ILL-Lady of Doom seems to have a grasp on neither correct grammar nor punctuation.
I laughed myself silly when I read her sign asking us to fight the urge to make "duel copies", and I found the bottle of white-out and a black pen to correct her "This belong's over their" sign, which almost gave me a seizure.
Let's not even talk about her constant abuse of apostrophes. If apostrophes were a people, she would be in front of the U.N. for committing a genocide on them. Seriously.
Ugh. So, I've become my mother. As far as I can tell, it is a bit like becoming a vampire. The changes are inevitable, slow and painful. Next, I will begin cleaning on a regular basis, using really, really big words instead of just really big ones, listening to dead, white composers, watching nothing but PBS, and I will begin a campaign of terror involving my next door neighbors and their SUV with the testicles hanging from the hitchpost.
Right. It all goes down hill from here.
