Confessions of a nerd

I confess: I am a nerd. A word nerd, actually, and it is my professional job to use words and gather words and edit words and mix them up and add punctuation until something comprehensible comes out. Officially, I am a technical writer, but really I am a professional comma remover. I am your grammar NINJA, and I will hack your sentences and your dangling participles and steal all of your commas, and I will hold hostage all of your double negatives! I will take your apostrophes away if you are unworthy! Beware! those who cannot tell the difference between "it's" and "its" will be doomed to a life with no access to punctuation, or even running water.

That's why it's been pretty easy and fun for me to keep up with the blog -- the only reason I don't post is because I don't have time. If I had plenty of time, I'd happily bore everybody with my jaunty phrases and hokey anecdotes. And you would be FORCED to read along, ha ha ha, since Chris has given me a forum, and part of the Project is to keep up the blog. If I could lose weight as fast as I write, I'd be a size zero already.

Of course there is a catch to all this writing, and the truth is I write because it's so much easier for me to write than to speak, especially in a group. I much prefer to listen and observe. I also don't like joining groups, which is why one of the particular challenges for me is to attend the group meetings on Saturdays. I did have a lot of scheduling conflicts in the beginning due to my daughter's basketball games being on Saturdays, but that's over now. I really have no reason not to attend the meetings - I just can never think of much to say. And if I do, it tends to come out as garbled up nonsense because my mind works so much faster than my mouth. So I end up sounding incredibly stupid and inarticulate, like I was just released from a Remedial Speaking for Hermits seminar. "Hel-lo. I am Ter-ri. I like yo-ga. Thank. You."

I love listening to the group, though. It's amazing, the sense of community that has been building in just 10 short weeks. You can feel the energy flow throughout the room. It's unusual for me to be able to participate in that since I derive so much more energy from being alone. I do believe that people are inherently either introverted or extroverted, i.e., they get their energy from being alone, or from being with other people. I happen to be a person who finds it exhausting to be in a group setting -- it just wears me out psychologically because I tend to want to hear and observe and take in everything around me and the signals can get mixed up. It's sensory overload. When I'm alone again, I can slow my mind down and process the information.

So the next time you see me at a meeting, forgive me for being quiet. I'll be the one hiding in the corner, listening carefully, maybe taking notes. Careful - you might end up as a character in my book.