English

I received this as an email and found it rather amusing, so I thought that I should share it with you.

How To Write Good...

1. Avoid alliteration, always.

2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid cliches like the plague.

4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

5. One should never generalise.

6. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

7. Be more or less specific.

8. No sentence fragments.

9. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

10. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.

11. Always be sure to finish what

Reminiscences of the past

"I want to go back to believing in everything and knowing nothing at all." - Evanescence, Field of Innocence.

Evanescence always manages to capture my feelings of something or another, but this song is exactly how I feel about growing up. As a child, Santa and fairies were as real as the sun. But what I miss even more than the belief that something would take my teeth and leave money in its place is, strangely enough, fear. I loved that exhilarating feeling of being scared of, well, anything. I miss being scared of what was waiting in the darkness of night. I yearn for how gullible we all were. If someone mentioned ghosts, or monsters, we'd all end up sleeping in our parents' bed.

Then, once you were a bit older and a bit more skeptical about these things, but the ideas of The Boogey Man still bothered you, and despite your knowing it wasn't real, there was still a nagging, irrational fear. You were so excited and nervous all at once and you couldn't help but giggle.

I miss those feelings. Every time the sun went down was a new exhilarating adventure and all we ever wanted to do was grow up.

But now that we're older, we are scared of monsters of a different kind. As Jordyn Berner aptly put, "We stop looking for monsters under our bed when we realise they're inside of us."

As a child, I trusted the world and all the adventures that it had to hold. And while I still have huge dreams for my future, they're a bit more refined and realistic. I no longer want to become an astronaut, or the president of the United States. I don't expect to marry Prince Charming anymore. I miss the past and I'm terrified of the future. So, I guess it's time to embrace the present!

Running out...

Have you ever thought that every book that you've ever read is just a combination of 26 letters? And that every song you have ever listened to is a different combination of so many frequencies of notes? Every person that you've ever loved is a certain combination of atoms.

To me, this begs two very big questions. Firstly, how many more combinations can we make? Is there ever going to be a time when no more books can be written? Where all the ideas are going to be used up? The thought saddens me, because reading transports me to my own world. Reading is incredible. I wish I knew a way to convince non-readers to read, because the experience is truly magical. And I fear that as soon as writing becomes something of the past, so will reading. The same goes for music. We cannot carry on creating new combinations of notes if there are finite scales that we're working from.

Secondly, if everything can be done, how do we go about making an imprint on the Earth? Any job that we do cannot last forever, but we can only hope the legacy remains. As John Green says, "what's the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?"

Screaming kids at shops...

Today, whilst running some errands, I encountered a more than common scene, yet I'm sure it's one of the reasons mothers hate shopping.

In the middle of a stationary shop, a child, no younger than 3, demanded a packet of sweets from her mother. When she was refused, she picked up said packet and hurled it at her mother, whilst simultaneously throwing herself violently at the floor, shrieking at such a high pitch that if there were windows in the middle if the shopping mall, they would be shattered. She yelled at her mother, telling her that she 'hated mom' and she was going to 'run away.'

While this scene probably isn't unfamiliar to most of us, I'm sure that most of us still cringed on the mother's behalf when reading this story. And, I mean, shopping with kids is a nightmare. It really is.
I understand that it's difficult for mothers (and fathers) to keep their little tyrants on a leash (metaphorical, of course. Actual child leashes deserve their very own post.) it's difficult for people without children to be able to sympathize.

And yes, your child 'doesn't usually act this way' and I'm sure your baby boy who's banging his head against the tinned fruit is 'just playing up.' But if you cannot control your delightful offspring for the duration of your shop, please leave it at home?

Embarrassing stories...

So I, like everyone else, have had my fair share of cringe-worthy stories. And while they're positively, gut-wrenchingly awful for me, I suspect they'll provide great amusement  for you. So here are a few of the most recent.

Last year, after my History exam, I was messing around and writing poetry. But then the teacher invigilating decided that we had to hand in any rough work with our exams. So my half-arsed attempt at poetry was stapled to the back of my essay on the importance of indoctrination in the Second World War or something to that effect. Anyway, my history teacher told me that she enjoyed my poem and (being polite) would love to see more. So, after taking her seriously, my friend and I waited after history one day to show her these wretched poems. Cringeeee.

The other day, I went out with a guy friend of mine for brunch. He's a very funny guy so I'm usually practically crying after laughing so much when we spend time together. Anyway, at the end of our meal, he decided to tell me that I had something in my teeth. Which meant I had had my mouth open laughing with a piece of goodness-knows-what stuck in my teeth for who knows how long. After this, I battled getting it out! So I was sitting with a makeup mirror and toothpick trying to get half a berry from my smoothie out of my teeth. Awkward...

When I was in grade 6, I was sitting in science, learning about plant fertilization or something equally boring, and writing notes to my then best friend. I was saying how I thought that the boy behind me was quite cute and I liked him (you know,the twelve year old type of like) when the teacher noticed this note writing, and took it from us. He then continued to read this note aloud to the entire class,so not only the aforementioned boy knew, but all of his friends, all of my friends, and all the other girls and boys in the room, as well as my science teacher, knew that I "liked" this boy.

When I was about 5 or 6, my aunt had just broken up with her then boyfriend, and made me go around to men that she perceived as good looking, and tell them that 'if they think I'm cute, they should see my aunty.' If that in itself wasn't bad enough, the one night I decided to take matters into my own hands, and approach a potential uncle myself. I went up, did the whole line, only to look at his hand and spot a wedding ring.  Suffice it to say, he is most definitely not my uncle.

All of these are quite embarrassing, but I've saved the best for last. And this one most definitely takes the cake. When I was three, I went shopping with my mom. As only children can, I was very, very blunt and asked my mom why the "fat lady" was in her "pajamas" (I can only assume now that it was a track suit). My mom, horrified, pretended that I wasn't her child!

I hope these stories have brought a smile to some of your faces.