Dots and dashes

There's something about punctuation. I read a lot and most--almost all--these books have perfect punctuations. They are all punctuated, italicised, aligned and presented in the proper manner. I guess my eyes are used to properly proofread text. And that it why, I state in my defence, I'm so finicky about punctutation.

A page of print with incorrect punctuation, spellings or any kind of error seems to drive me crazy. My hands itch to grab it, edit it and throw it back from whence it sprang! And this is kind of inconvenient, especially when people ask me my opinion on anything they've written. This doesn't happen a lot but we generally swap stories in my creative writing class and you can imagine how disconcerting it must be for a budding--er--creative writer to be criticised on how many dots ideally go into an elipse--three--and how multiple exclamation marks are a huge no-no for writing. So, I am forced to keep my diplomatic silence and struggle to look beyong the mundane--the world of proper punctuation--and into the deeper plane, that of the actual matter written.

I guess I'm one of those rare indivuiduals who are not irritated overmuch with the Grammar and Spelling checker on Microsoft Word. Of course, I agree with most people regarding how irritating the message "Fragment. Consider revising." can be. I mean, sometimes you want it to be a bleeding fragment. But oh... I love auto-corrects which turn double hyphens into emdashes and single hypens into endashes. And replace-alls are so wonderful!

I'm sure I've just revealed what a lunatic I am from the above. I mean, who obsesses over puntuations? Who really gives a damn what the hell an emdash is? But again, I defend myself that everyone has a pet obsession and this is mine. Who doesn't? Let me see a show of hands? Wasn't there a guy who obsessed over his coins? Silas something? And what about... hmm... oh, yes! What about dogs who can't sleep or even lie down without circling the ground a couple of times? Never mind that the first was fictitious and the latter is an animal. It illustrates my point well enough. I'm not neurotic or kooky just because I believe that all your i's should be dotted and your t's crossed...literally!

If you're still not convinced, fine! I am a kook. But at least I'm a well-edited kook! Now how many people can claim that? Mwahahaha!

Time...

We humans have created a lot of traps for ourselves and we seem to revel in being caught in them. One of these traps is time. Man is the only animal which is obsessed with keeping track of and measuring time. All our lives are built around one kind of time table or the other. We have scedules that we feel we must meet or the world will come to an end.

Do we do this because we need to feel special or important? Man is at constant war with nature, no matter what ecologist and environmentalists try. It's not so much a struggle for space as it is for power. Man knows that nature is thousands of times more powerful than he is. He may be able to maim and conquer it today, but the inexorable hand of time will prove yet again that man is just a part of a whole that is still supremely controlled by nature.

Which comes back to time. By trying to control the little slice of time, man is able to delude himself that he has some control over the world at that point. But isn't this is just an illusion? No matter what, man's influence is only temporary, in the big picture. Sure, we've changed the face of the earth, but for how long? How soon is man going to kill himself off or end all life on earth? But no matter what man does, the earth itself will not change. Life will go on even after man is long gone and not even a memory of him remains. Nature will revive life even if the earth is just a toxic dump when man is through with it. At least cockroaches or some such resilient creature will remain.

But while man lives, I guss these illusions are necessary. After I'm done writing this, I'm going to look at my watch and make sure I have enough time to get ready to go out. I am going to be enslaved by the need to mark time as much as anyone else. That today is saturday and tomorrow is sunday is going to matter as much as ever.