The Saga of my Norfolk Pine

Happy Easter, everyone!

Back before Christmas, my sister found a small, potted Norfolk Pine lying on the side of the street. It had been cast out with the rest of someone's garbage. Feeling bad for it, my sister took it with her, gave it to me, and it ended up in my bedroom. I continually watered it, hopeful for its survival because it had not yet turned brown and fallen apart, like so many past Christmas trees.

Nothing happened. It stayed green, but there was no new growth (that I could see) and it was still as brittle as... well, a dried-up Norfolk Pine.

Today I decided to do some emergency plant CPR. I put it into a much larger pot (the roots has gotten bound up in their small space), surrounded it with nice rich potting soil, and pruned off the dead parts. It was at this point that I discovered that some jackass had spray-painted it green, hence the lack of brown I had been watching for. Not good.

What hope am I clinging to, then? Well, some of the branches near the very bottom seemed soft and still pliable. The upper ones literally shattered when I cut them. We'll have to see. I'd really like this cast-aside tree to survive and possibly flourish. Here's hoping for the best.

Anyone got any ideas for a name for my Norfolk Pine? Of course, that would involve someone actually reading my blog (not likely) and then going ahead and replying to this post (less likely). I'll just sit here and pet my pine tree. Actually, that's a bad idea, because it tends to break when you touch it. We're pulling for ya, buddy!

I would post some pictures of him, but I suck at taking digital camera pictures and the ones I took ended up blurry as hell. Screw digital cameras. Give me a nice black-and-white Minolta any day. Cameras are supposed to give a nice, satisfying "cuh-chik!" when you use them, not a "beep." All right, I'm done.

Something that drives me bonkers, Part I

So I'm sitting here at work, eating tuna and Matzoh and wondering what I should post a blog about. My mind went from topic to topic (Lemons vs. Limes*, "Favorite" Movie vs. "Best" Movie**, Beautiful Actresses My Age Who Should and Might Actually Marry Me if They Only Knew I Existed***) when I finally decided to do what I usually do: complain. I'm good at it. Ask me about my Best Buy rant sometime.

But I'm not just going to complain. I'm going to complain with a purpose. I have the utmost hope that people will understand where I am coming from and do their very best to change, not for me, but for the good of the land, to quote Tenacious D.

Today I will complain about the usage of a certain word. Duck and cover; here comes the English graduate in me (hey, he's gotta be used for something).

"Breath" and "Breathe"

This is very simple. "Breath" rhymes with "death" and is a noun. A "breath" is what one takes into their lungs or mumbles under, or maybe offends people with after eating something particularly nasty. "Breathe" rhymes with "seethe" and is a verb. To "breathe" is to inhale and exhale.

You don't know how many times I've read the sentence "I can't breath." Yikes. How do you feel when you read the sentences "I can't coffee", "I can't paperclip", or "I can't Emancipation Proclamation"? You should feel as though your innermost soul has been offended. Mine does. You can't even do stuff like that in creative writing, where grammar rules can be broken with wild abandon. So please, for the sake of my innermost soul and the world itself, use "breath" as a noun and "breathe" as a verb. The "e" on the end changes the vowel sound from a short "eh" to a long "ee".

That's it. I know; not particularly witty, but something I've been meaning to get off my chest. I promise the next entry will be more entertaining.

...this is kind of a lame blog entry, isn't it? Here - for reading all the way to the end, you get to know that 8675309 (as in the song) is a prime number, xenon burns green, if a flatworm is taught to run a maze, ground up, and fed to another flatworm, that flatworm will be able to run the maze on the first try, and "stewardesses" is the longest word you can type with one hand on a normal keyboard.

So it's not a total loss.



* limes
** Run Lola Run & The Shawshank Redemption, respecively
*** Thora Birch

Meaningful Crap?

Some words on the title.

Back in my Freshman year of college, a poetry class had me create a chapbook of poems. I titled it "Meaningful Crap", because anything more witty would have been, well, meaningful crap. I thought it was punchy, humorous, and a fair representation of what lay within.

Last year, I bought a nice harcover notebook to keep every poem and short story and flash fiction I had ever written in (I got halfway through, messed up a page in pen, and kind of gave up - makes me wonder about the longevity of this webpage). It was titled "Meaningful Crap: The Book", because it was a step up from the chapbook before it. Adding a colon and redundant description to any title makes it seem cooler and more important.

Now the blog. This is my first attempt at anything like this, so naturally (after an exhaustive 2 minute attempt to think of something incredibly witty), I continued my tradition of positive self-esteem and titled it as you see above. It implies an evolution of sorts; my writing is changing as I grow older and the presentation is following along with it, but still there is a connection to my past that can never be severed without losing the one thing that makes me who I am.

Or, in other words, meaningful crap.

...I think it's meaningful, anyway. You'll probably think it's crap.

We're both winners! *high fives the montitor*