Punctuation is Critical – Even in IMs

My ex likes to overreact. She likes to overreact to, well, just about everything. Here’s a snippet of conversation from a little while ago:

Me: yes, why wouldnt i? havent we already been over this?
Her: no we haven’t and if we have I don’t remember.
Me: way to contradict yourself
Her: what is your problem i didn’t do anything to you?

The problem lies in the last line.

Interpretation 1: This is a run-on sentence, consisting of both interrogative and declarative parts. The question mark is in the wrong place. It should be written, “what is your problem? I didn’t do anything to you,” expressing her frustration that I would point out a flaw in her reasoning, and then explaining that she did nothing to incite my obvious rage and anger towards her.

Zach misreads newspaper headlines

In the spirit of Raymond Chen, I’m going to go ahead and rip off one of his styles of blog posts.

This morning I saw an issue of the Colorado Catholic Herald sitting on the kitchen counter, and saw this front page headline:

“A Growing Disease: Number of people becoming Catholic is up sharply from 2008.”

Of course, what it actually said was “A Growing Diocese,” but I find my interpretation more fitting. I’m sure most of my fellow freethinkers would agree.

Amsterdam

My dad is going to Amsterdam on a business trip. When I was younger, he used to travel a lot for work, but realized that raising me was really the priority, so he took a different job for a significant paycut. But now, he’s been asked to go to Holland to do some stuff for whatever company it is that Oracle Corp. has just bought.

This is an excellent opportunity for me, as he’s offered to pay a very significant portion of the travel costs if I join him about a week into the trip, at which point the work-stuff will be done, and we’ll be free to just enjoy Europe. The problem is, my passport’s expired. The last time I went out of the country was in the 2nd grade, to South Korea with my mom to visit family.

At first, we weren’t counting on me being able to go, because nobody had the money to pay for it. But my grandma has just bought a new car, and gave her “old” one to my dad, which seriously relieved a lot of financial pressure. But again, my passport is expired. The only way to get one in less than 11 days is for my mom to go to Denver to expedite the process. Of course, she’s not willing to do this for nothing… She wants to tag along. Half of my excitement for this trip was getting a vacation from her.

I still want to go, of course, but half of my original excitement was the fact that I was going to have a good, long break from my mother. So much for that. *sigh*