I Heart Grammar

for any myopic readers the caption says 'my cat likes it when you pull on it'[incriminating apostrophe]s whiskers

I appreciate it's bizarrely early on a Sunday morning to be blogging, however, this is pure, unadulterated evidence of the strange turn my life has taken in the last three weeks.

Side affects of academia include:
- waking up minutes before the un-student alarm time of 7.30am goes off
- becoming blogging-dependent

A combination of these things results in early Sunday blogs. I've always been a morning person (a phrase that has an incredibly loud sub-text of 'BEING UNCOOL'; however a recent admission by a member of my facebook community, posted at around 6am, brought all of us out of the woodwork and now I'm safe in the comfort I'm not the only one), however, the guilt/need that comes with the assessment period requires near-imminent work-starting after waking.

I had two revelations yesterday which have affected this somewhat:
- working in the library with a group of friends transforms it from the fear-ridden brown 70s hell hole into a light and near-'fun' communal working experience.
- Mozilla FireFox has changed my life.

The latter isn't quite so relevant. However, this new 'library love', arriving six days before I hand in 18,000 words and say cheerio to BA academia, has stopped me from falling out of bed and into the publications of Palaniuk, Rushdie and Brennan; as I've got a fun 'communal working experience' waiting for me a couple of hours down the line.

I can't, however, quite kick the habit. Hence the need to post really very drivelly blogs on a Sunday morning instead of:
- rolling around in bed
- making pancakes
- getting quietly angry at T4 presenters.

In other slightly more interesting news, another discovery I made yesterday is that there is a lady called Joan who emails Radio 4 every time they make a grammatical mistake. The presenters on the Today Show were being fairly rude about her, and although all the deep science of grammar she used to explain their discrepancies did go somewhat over my head. However, my heart still skipped a beat: as a modern-day pedant, such dedication to grammatical correctness is nothing but a brave if admittedly futile martyrdom to the cause. Furthermore, that Joan shares the name of my beloved bike is even more exciting. My English teacher (still stuck in the fifties and used to give us regular tests in the subject) would have been proud. Or maybe it is her...under a pseudonym...

Hearing from another grammatically-inspired soul I started searching www.threadless.com, a tee shirt website that some of my boy mates are religiously devoted to, for grammatical tee shirts. Admittedly a dodgy strategy, after I was deeply disappointed for a good two days after a Thesaurus-Dictionary cartoon number was sold out. However, what this search led me to was a whole cyber world of other young grammar pedants relishing in the world of geekily amusing tee shirts and critiquing the cute, but grammatically incorrect ones. The comments produced on the above design are numerous, but I think this beautifully concise one sums it up: 'I like design, I dislike grammar issues'.