Random Thursday

1. I cannot stand the sound of people chewing.  I would rather listen to fingernails on chalkboards.

I live in a houseful of men.

I covet your prayers.

2. I came over to the computer to write a random thought, got stuck in a conversation about Mark Twain on Facebook and cannot, for the ever-loving life of me, remember my own randomness.

3. Oh.  I remember.  I was watching Stephano sing on American Idol and wondered if I was the only one who saw Joey Tribbiani when he closed his eyes and squished up his eyebrows.

4. I have this issue with grammar.  It haunts me.  It's so bad that I correct my own grammar when I'm talking to God.  I'm pretty sure He knows what I mean, even when when I dangle my participles or misplace my prepositions, but still.  I can't help myself.  Sometimes it's not even bad grammar, but just that perhaps a sentence might be worded in some better way.  When that happens, I play around with it, turning it this way and that until I like the way it sounds.

For the record: I'm quite sure that God appreciates proper grammar, as well as smoothly flowing, well-constructed sentences.

5. I often put up Facebook statuses without thinking.  Shocking.  Last week I was watching the Wonder Hub fold laundry and reached over to the computer to type:

Nothing is sexier than watching a man folding laundry.

More than forty-eight hours later I woke in the middle of the night thinking:

Watching him isn't sexy.  I should have typed, "There is nothing sexier than a man folding laundry."  Why would watching him be sexy?  That doesn't even make sense.  I should go back and change it.  I can't change it now, people have commented and I would lose their comments.  I can't believe I wrote it like that.  How dumb.

And so on.  It's an illness, I tell you.

I covet your prayers.

6.  I'm the Grammar Police in my family.  I believe it is my sworn duty to teach these people to speak correctly (I've mostly given up on teaching them to chew with their mouths closed.  Scratch that.  I can't.  Give up.  Even though it's surely hopeless.  But someday, I'll be able to show their wives this post and assure them that, for the love of all that is good and holy, I tried.).  A long time back, when someone would use poor grammar my automatic response would be, "No dinner for you!" in the style of Seinfeld's Soup Nazi.  It caught on, and the boys loved nothing more than to catch each other in crimes of grammar so that they could make the declaration.  The best for them was to catch the Wonder Hub.  When they were younger, it was a big thing.

Unfortunately, as tends to happen with brilliant ideas, overuse got the best of it.  It turns out that the Wonder Hub (in possession of a BA in English himself) loves nothing more than to get my goat by purposefully, repeatedly, unremorsefully using atrocious grammar.  Even though he fully knows that

It wounds me.

I covet your prayers.

7. For the record: I do not covet your house, wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, ass, nor any other thing that is yours.

Unless you have a housekeeper.  Then I must confess that I covet her.  Or him.  Or them.

Amen.