My Disparatedness
I would be speaking an atrocious lie if I claimed to fully understand how my mind works wholly, as some things still catch me off guard about myself. A lot of the times, these circumstances wherein I am baffled by my own brain has to do with writing, as the whole thing is, relative to everything else I've ever done, new. I started seriously writing when I was sixteen years of age, which is . . . well, distinctly after I thought I had established the entirety of my personality.
You know how teenagers are. Well, you do when you are no longer one, at least. You look back and nod sagely, comfortable in a complete understanding of how dumb it all was and how silly you were in many ways. I had this notion for the majority of my teenaged years that I knew myself perfectly, and that nobody else could really offer up an opinion about me that I did not know or had not considered and either disregarded or accepted. Secretly, I thought I was also the subtlest and slyest guy in the world, 'cause I thought there was no way anyone could possibly know me how I knew me. It's all kind of silly and typical for those formative years of prepuberty, puberty, and early post-puberty. You know: seeking to create one's own identity, crafted from the ashes of a carefree childhood—that whole drill.
Anywho, that's not what I wanted to talk (write?) about here. Writing as an exercise and a craft was just not something I thought to do in any kind of real capacity until after I had convinced myself I was done with figuring out who I was. I was an Artist and a Gamer and a Geek and a Punk and all these things, not a Writer. I used to write lyrics to imaginary songs, then I started writing poetry, and then I just started . . . writing. I had always been a prolific reader, and a raging fanboy of authors, poets, playwrights and so forth, so it kind fell very naturally in place that I began emulating them.
It changed me. It changed the way I think, the way I look at words. The way I read.
Today, I'm reading the newspost for Penny Arcade and I noticed something, which henceforth stuck in the forefront of my mind for as long as I was reading the post. After each hard stop—period, colon and semi-colon—Tycho puts two spaces, not just one. "Holy shit," I think, "I remember being told to do that by an English teacher in middle school and thinking it was just too much effort." But, Tycho does it? Who else does this, integrates this into their formatting?
I could not, in fact, not mind the gap, at this point. I just sort of stared at the gaping, empty spaces between each sentence. "How did I not see this beforE? Did it just start?" I went back all the way to five newsposts ago, and, yay, I didst behold the Truth: he's been doing it for a very long time. And, for whatever reason, I had just not noticed.
"When did these kinds of concerns become relevant enough in my life to present such a pressing response in my head? When did I decide I could not live without indenting the paragraphs of my posts? When did I decide to memorize the Alt+Code for the long dash, '—', which is alt+0151? Where does the medium dash, '–', even go? Why does it bother me constantly that the proper placement of punctuation when using quotation marks is ambivalent, do the quote marks go before or after periods, question marks, and the such, when that stop isn't actually part of the quote?" I'd just put the stops outside the quoted text, but it looks strange to me to do so. "God, I just tried to look up the Alt+Code for the closing single quote and double quote mark. When did this happen to me? At what point did these kind of thoughts ingrain themselves in my psyche?"
Inquiring minds (kind of) want to know—
[Editor's Note: I did notice, today, that Tycho's two spaces between hard stops aren't manual, insofar that it seems to be the way the text's coded to appear. So, maybe it did start recently, and the code affects all newsposts retroactively . . . I'll never know, now.]
You know how teenagers are. Well, you do when you are no longer one, at least. You look back and nod sagely, comfortable in a complete understanding of how dumb it all was and how silly you were in many ways. I had this notion for the majority of my teenaged years that I knew myself perfectly, and that nobody else could really offer up an opinion about me that I did not know or had not considered and either disregarded or accepted. Secretly, I thought I was also the subtlest and slyest guy in the world, 'cause I thought there was no way anyone could possibly know me how I knew me. It's all kind of silly and typical for those formative years of prepuberty, puberty, and early post-puberty. You know: seeking to create one's own identity, crafted from the ashes of a carefree childhood—that whole drill.
Anywho, that's not what I wanted to talk (write?) about here. Writing as an exercise and a craft was just not something I thought to do in any kind of real capacity until after I had convinced myself I was done with figuring out who I was. I was an Artist and a Gamer and a Geek and a Punk and all these things, not a Writer. I used to write lyrics to imaginary songs, then I started writing poetry, and then I just started . . . writing. I had always been a prolific reader, and a raging fanboy of authors, poets, playwrights and so forth, so it kind fell very naturally in place that I began emulating them.
It changed me. It changed the way I think, the way I look at words. The way I read.
Today, I'm reading the newspost for Penny Arcade and I noticed something, which henceforth stuck in the forefront of my mind for as long as I was reading the post. After each hard stop—period, colon and semi-colon—Tycho puts two spaces, not just one. "Holy shit," I think, "I remember being told to do that by an English teacher in middle school and thinking it was just too much effort." But, Tycho does it? Who else does this, integrates this into their formatting?
I could not, in fact, not mind the gap, at this point. I just sort of stared at the gaping, empty spaces between each sentence. "How did I not see this beforE? Did it just start?" I went back all the way to five newsposts ago, and, yay, I didst behold the Truth: he's been doing it for a very long time. And, for whatever reason, I had just not noticed.
"When did these kinds of concerns become relevant enough in my life to present such a pressing response in my head? When did I decide I could not live without indenting the paragraphs of my posts? When did I decide to memorize the Alt+Code for the long dash, '—', which is alt+0151? Where does the medium dash, '–', even go? Why does it bother me constantly that the proper placement of punctuation when using quotation marks is ambivalent, do the quote marks go before or after periods, question marks, and the such, when that stop isn't actually part of the quote?" I'd just put the stops outside the quoted text, but it looks strange to me to do so. "God, I just tried to look up the Alt+Code for the closing single quote and double quote mark. When did this happen to me? At what point did these kind of thoughts ingrain themselves in my psyche?"
Inquiring minds (kind of) want to know—
[Editor's Note: I did notice, today, that Tycho's two spaces between hard stops aren't manual, insofar that it seems to be the way the text's coded to appear. So, maybe it did start recently, and the code affects all newsposts retroactively . . . I'll never know, now.]
posted by c.Jay Wrong at
10:31 PM
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