dr seuss and the art of being un-bored

If only lectures were like this

When I'm not reading books about green knights that say things like 'bi bonnken', or books about people who don't have phones (that's the 18th century for you!), or books about rampaging Macedonians, I'm absorbing college life. And by absorbing I mean sleeping on the couch to the backdrop of Sky News.

All that aside, in my dozy states I've developed a sort of passion for Dr Seuss. First of all,  I'm a girl who understands the meaning of boredom. Well, I like to think I do. Seriously, after an hour in a lecture where the only word you understood was 'neutrally', boredom doesn't even come into it. Boredom is a dodgy pub that you passed 40 miles ago, and you're on the way to becoming an Actual Dead Person, killed by the boredom of your own degree.

Anyway. That has little to do with the supposed topic of this blog post, Mr Dr Seuss. Here is a man who made worlds that were so un-boring it was impossible to be, well, bored. Fluffy trees with fluffier creatures hanging out of them, trying to sleep. Foxes wearing soxes. Jungles of Nool. Landscapes that curved and held no straight lines. Boredom didn't come into it.

bored yet?

I know I am. That's why I thought it was time to recap on My Boring Week.
What happened this week, Shona?
Well, this week was very boring, blog. Let me explain.

Bit of an overstatement

life goals: part one

Right. Let’s get this thing started.
Life Goals:
1 getting it started (see above)
2 getting it done
3 getting it done without getting metaphorically/literally Smushed by something/one.

HOW TO ACHIEVE SAID ‘LIFE GOALS’:

1. Getting It Started.
A vital step in the process of doing Anything.
You see, I find that some people think they have it all sorted. They think they have, if you will, the Fox in the Bag. The course. The job. The girl. The guy. The praise. The glory.
These people are all wrong. You see, the key to having it all sorted, to having, excuse the gesture, the Book on the Shelf, is this: Doing by Undoing.
If you are like me, you have this proverbial Car in the Garage due to an overwhelming ability to be lazy and to also get it done.
Watch and learn...

punctuation lessons

... another Important Thing

Thought punctuation was all about the commas and apostrophes? Think again. As I discovered today, there is a whole other world of punctuation out there that I was horrifically unaware of. The shame! THE SHAME! Oh, it’s horrible, it’s horrible. Not knowing this kind of USEFUL information meant that I would be more suited to giving tours of Machu Piccu than ‘reading’ English. When I lived in those dark times of Not Knowing How To Put A Line Into My Essay, I would have been better at pointing out historical archaeological details about a place that I had never been to than sitting down reading something that had been written in the 1700s by some guy with five slaves and 300 acres. Without even considering the question, To Put In Inverted Commas or Not To Put In Inverted Commas, I was blind to the real study of English. The Real Stuff.

But, all jokes aside, seriously.
Seriously. One day in front of the television and I’d learn what the weather was like in Turin. One day in an English class and I learn that when you use the dash (‘The Hyphen’), you must leave a space either side so that the lecturer correcting your essay won’t have an actual stroke. It transforms this sentence of made-up words that my lecturer likes to pontificate with, from this

Neutrally explicified-

To this:

Neutrally explicified –

I know. Totally different, right?

the questionable land of punctuation marks