Sentence Sensibility

I wish I could say that the title of this post was of my own invention but it is not. It is, however, the title of an article in the New York Times Magazine that addresses my current predicament AND is a play on words using the title of one of my favorite books/movies. The author of the article, Jaimie Epstein, has been thrust into the world of online happiness seeking due to a broken heart. She is, by her own description, a "literary person," and often the editor of the famous On Language column for the Times. This causes her great distress when she receives emails from prospective suitors with misspellings, bad grammar, and all sorts of other language faux pas. I am not quite as bothered by malapropriated author's names or sentences ending in prepositions but perhaps only because I am not a language expert and a notoriously bad speller.

Some of the things Jaimie and I have in common are: 1] the need for seemingly endless self examination with regard to our new online persona; 2] the use of parenthetical asides (like this one) when we want to interject otherwise invisible social cues for our readers; 3] the unavoidable judgment of the other online happiness seekers based on their ability/inability to complete a comprehensible sentence and 4] the need to make lists. Okay, I'm not sure about that last one but the first three are definitely true. (And just so ya know, I had to spellcheck at least 3 of the words in the previous sentence.)

It was nice to read about someone in the same proverbial boat who saw light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. I'm not sure if I see a light or just the glare of the windshield of the oncoming bus but a girl's gotta hope!