RA’s Diary Entry: Comma faults

[Same disclaimer as before. ETA: for the real explanation, you’ll need to see the comments.]

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 2010

Dear Diary,

What a great Christmas! Let’s see. Plenty of wassail. Check! Got fed. Check! Spoiled the parents. Check! Did some other stuff I’m not recording for posterity in case anyone ever gets their hands on this. Check! I was even able to help out my favorite charities. Really chuffed about that.

And at the very last second, I spread some good cheer to the Army, too. They seem to have been quite excited, according to the initial poll sample produced by the skeleton crew at my agent’s office. Whew! Some of them were actually rather worried that I wasn’t going to come across, so they were doubly happy. I wrote something so convoluted this time that they’ll be able to natter on for weeks over what I could have meant. Probably some of them are rereading their annotated editions of “Critic as Artist” and getting ready to have a moderated reread. It’s lovely to be able to make them so happy with so little effort, and now they’ll be able to spend weeks thinking about Wilde instead of about me. Hopefully it will make it up to them for all the aggro over the way the Spooks 9 script ended. Hated to disappoint them, but a bloke can only play a certain number of roles at one time.

Once again, however, the publicist reports that that crazy woman, you know the one I mean — the one who thinks that if you can say it in five words, it’s probably worth saying in five thousand — has some stupid complaint. I admit, I’ve got used to her going on and she seems mostly harmless. Honestly, I thought that the message was so confusing that it would give her hours of pleasure to think about it. You’d think she’d be excited about getting to dust off her postgrad notes on Oscar Wilde, or write some obscure rubbish about my decision to quote Gilbert and not Ernest, or put together a daft egghead analysis of the possible uses of the double negative in the Indo-European languages. Instead, now she’s all in a dither about my punctuation and whether it makes me less attractive to her, and she actually got involved in a conversation about whether I punctuated the text incorrectly on purpose, and what that says about my sense of irony.

Wouldn’t she laugh if she knew what really happened with the apostrophes? Fortunately, I wrote that message in such a way that she will never, ever figure it out.

Nighty-night and Happy New Year in advance!

RA

p.s. Thanks for being so tolerant about me practicing my American here. Got to keep in shape on that. Not that it’ll be all that much use in New Zealand.

p.p.s. I think I’m getting better and better at making self-deprecating references to The Hobbit in my tag-lines. I wish I could make myself be immodest enough to say how thrilled I am about getting this role, even if I have to spend months slogging around in the muck with thirteen other smelly blokes. No, instead I have to worry about it, in public. Probably that’ll be the next post from that woman — how my statements about challenges and mountains to climb relate to pastoral language used to describe the mountain ranges of New Zealand in Dada-influenced poetry. Snore!

~ by Servetus on December 30, 2010.