Family legend says that I taught myself to read by the time I was three and my parents would have to hide the newspaper from me because I would read about crimes and bad things that had happened and get scared. So they say, I don't remember. I don't remember a time when I didn't know how to read or write. I do remember being in kindergarten and having to do worksheets to learn how to print and thinking how stupid this was because I'd already knew it so I'd do the little worksheets and then be bored and doodle the letters into animals and get in trouble for doing that. I also remember in 1st grade being put in my own 'independent reading' group when it was time to learn to read. I'd been tested at reading at an 8th grade level so instead of having to sit with the other kids and read through the beginning reader textbooks, I got to go to the library (joy), alone (JOY OF JOYS) and pick out whatever book I wanted and sit and read it.

So,technically speaking, I was never taught how to read or write. Which leads to some very interesting things. I can not spell my way out of a paper bag, thank GOD for spellcheck. My handwriting is horrifically illegible, even to myself at times and I have absolute ZERO knowledge of proper grammar when writing. ZERO. My college English 111 class that I took last year was a nightmare. Who knew that when writing a college paper you had to follow form, it had to be written in a certain way, in a certain text, with a thesis, a topic sentence to begin each paragraph (ok, this I remembered from high school) and each paragraph had to transition well into the next. AND on top of all that you had to use proper punctuation.

I might, MIGHT have been able to handle all that and even learn a bit if my prof wasn't so MEAN about it. Mean and bitter. It's bad enough for me to have someone else actually read what I write but then I'd get these papers back that I'd worked so very hard on and poured so much of myself into and they were marked up with so much red ink that my own words were barely visible underneath.

It got to be almost a class joke, how ridiculous this teacher was. One of my fellow students showed me a paragraph in one of her papers. She told me that she had stayed after class for hours and worked on this paper with the prof. She wrote that paragraph EXACTLY the way the prof. had told her too. WORD FOR WORD, it was straight out of the profs own mouth. When the paper came back even that paragraph had not survived the red pen of doom.

It was a rude awakening for me. One, I never,ok, rarely, show my writing to other people. Two, the few times others have read what I wrote I'd gotten positive strokes. I mean, I had been blogging for years by the time I'd taken the class, had even had part-ownership in a website and wrote articles and reviews for it and had earned a little bit of money from it. Three, I love to read books about writing. All of the authors of my favorite 'how-to-write' books are unendingly positive in their approach towards getting people to write. So for me to run smack into someone who not only claimed to love to read and write themselves but then took such obvious pleasure in ripping others attempts at writing into shreds was scary and painful and that is putting it mildly.

I went from being a grownup woman with college age children of her own right straight back into being that little girl in pigtails crying every morning because she hated going to school so much. Pity, isn't it, how a class that was supposed to teach one how to write ended up making me lose all desire to write for well over a year.

So, if you read here and you are offended by mis-spellings,poor grammar, sentences that ramble on and on and on and on as well as an excessive use of commas, well, that's just too bad. :) Welcome to my goofy,messy, exuberant way of expressing myself. I may not be writing for you but I'm so glad you're here!