Where Do I Begin?

So, I haven't blogged in a few days and this blog's title is a big reason why. I have a hard time figuring out how to start a post. And, you can't blame me, really. It wasn't like my high school English classes devoted a large segment of time to Blog Composition. So, I decided that maybe I should approach a blog intro in the same way I approach forms of communication that I do have experience using.

I could start my blog like a letter. Who am I kidding? I don't even remember the last non-electronic correspondence I constructed. I could start my blog like an e-mail. But, my e-mails generally have defined recipients and blogs don't exactly. I guess I could address my perceived potential audience, "Dear Grammys, small band of followers, hopefully none of my English teacher friends* and random person who hit "Next Blog" and landed here," but that gets a little too wordy and too formal for a blog.

So, I could start blogging in a slightly more casual way, maybe more like a phone conversation. If I took a cue from my daughters I would start like this:

Lily - "Hiya, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba" with head bobbing up and down like Pac-baby while holding any object, phone-like or not, up to her ear. Maybe not.

Evie - "Hello, this is John Capon? And want to know if you could help us get the bugs out so we don't scare Lillers. Ok. Bye." So she is talking to someone that doesn't exist and cutting them off before they have a chance to reply. That does seem a little more like blogging but still not exactly my style.

Now that this post requires a scroll-bar I think I am well past the stage of figuring out how to start my blog. On to my next dread: transitions. I remember one time in high school, my "honors" English class (which was a joke because almost anyone could join the class because we didn't want to hurt feelings) apparently didn't do such an honorable job with transitions and my teacher made us all rewrite our papers. It stuck with me for two reasons:
1) I had never even considered how one paragraph transitioned to the next when writing and remembered thinking that it was a novel idea to learn to do that well.
2) I thought it odd that she was very disturbed about our poor performance in a skill that we had never been taught - maybe she assumed that it had been covered in our previous 11 years of public school education. Perhaps she forgot that it was a public school education :) **
She did proceed to take some time to correct our dishonorable ways and it was actually quite a turning point for me when it came to how I perceived writing. I really did want to learn to write better, but the next year another teacher told me, in response to my request for a book that would help me better understand punctuation usage (especially commas), "It doesn't matter - do what you want," which probably explains why this sentence is constructed as it is.

I think it is safe to say we have arrived at the culmination of my composition shortfalls: the end. Since I did place two asterisks in the above sections, I think I will simply end with those because little annoys me more that abandoned asterisks - I have spent way too many precious moments of my short time on this planet scouring documents in vain for the match to a hastily-placed asterisk...

*I really do hope that my English teacher friends don't spend much time reading my posts, not because I fear the correction - actually I would love one of them to edit for me. Is there such a thing as a red e-pen? But, that would be a monumental task that I would not wish on any of them. Rather, it is more because I can imagine the pain they feel when they encounter a run-on sentence, passive voice, flagrant punctuation errors, incessant past-tense, usage issues (like "you" instead of "one" or "a person"), and so on because I know how I feel when people say "conversely" and it is nothing like a mathematical converse or how I cringed at the cell phone store when the salesman displayed his total failure to comprehend the concept of percentages. Oh, I haven't told that one yet? Here goes:
So I was at the cell phone store a while back and they were having an accessory sale where you, I mean, a person could get 10% off the first accessory, 15% off the second accessory and 25% the third accessory. The salesman was explaining the sale to another customer and commented at the end that if the person purchased three accessories they got a total of 50% off. I didn't know whether to cry, laugh, or attempt to save this young man from the error of his ways. I really wanted to ask him, "So, if you offered a fourth accessory for 50% off, would I get 100% off and then it would all be free?" I refrained. Barely. I wish my mother-in-law would have been with me. She would have caught it instantly, too, and shared my pain.
Anyway, I don't want to cause my English-skilled friends that kind of pain - ever.

** All kidding aside, I must say two things in fairness. It would be fair to my public school to give them credit where credit is due. I did have an outstanding education overall that I am truly thankful for- especially in the areas of math, science and self-esteem. Fortunately, my math teacher undid a lot of the incorrect self-esteem teaching that I think actually sets kids up for great disappointment in life when they hit the real world when he taught me that you should do something worth feeling good about if you want to feel good about what you do. Oh, Mr. G, where are your kind now?
And, secondly, it is fair to assert that something was lacking in the area of Language Arts. We went to whole language at some point during my career and that was damaging, to say the least. I really, really wish I had been instructed and corrected more. I am guessing most of my English teachers wished that as well. My brother went through the same school and teachers several years early and he is a fantastic writer so they must have done something right back then.
On an ironic side-note, (or is it really irony? - more pain probably being inflicted, huh?) my college English professor from the U of I moved to Williamsburg because she wanted her daughter to go to the same school I did so she would learn to write. Pretty cool extension to that side-note, when I took the GPBS Calc Club back to the 'Burg as a math teacher, I got to meet that daughter - in an advanced math class. She made a good move :)