An Exclamatory Post

While I continue to obsess about my upcoming trip to Florida, everyday reality marches on. So all weekend I have been doing the work which requires squinting and reluctant wearing of drugstore reading glasses and sitting on nice soft surfaces - for instance, addressing fifty envelopes and rewriting a vendor application to stuff in those fifty envelopes along with a perky cover letter since I have taken the job of this year's vendor coordinator for the FRM Festival. Although I can behave slightly hysterically when I am talking to folks face to face - I have been known to giggle nervously and overemote and blather on with the best of 'em - I hate using exclamation points and appearing to overflow with perk when I write.

Let me tell you, those FRMF women love their exclamation points. So I have excised the majority of them as gently as possible from the existing application, and managed to type a single ! in the cover letter. I hope that this will fulfill the exclamatory requirements.

I realize that !!! is a matter of taste. My friend Srini would only write his name for years with three !!! on either side - !!!Srini!!! But Srini is kind of a hyperactive shouter type, even though you might not suspect this from an Indian with a Stanford degree. But I have found that perkiness can rear its bouncy little head where you might least suspect it.

Because I am a southern woman, I sometimes wonder how the mega-perk gene became absent from my genome. Like I say, it's not as if I can't muster some smiley nervous energy at times. But my daughter Anna and I often go out and the blondefaketanandpearlssororitygirl
SQUEAL - like a rebel yell for a Sweet Potato Queen convention - that squeal, it is rampant in our southern college town. It crawls up my spine and then does the kundalini Dixie dance inside my brain. And General Lee does not beckon me to join in. He raises his musket and threatens me with a migraine.

So I try to remain free of the personal !!! in most of my public life. I might jump on the bed in my bathrobe while singing a medley of Ramones Meets Rodgers and Hammerstein, but that's the private world that only the lucky(?) few personally know and try to love. Generally phlegmatic, but at least I'm not one of those Type A overachievers.

And exclamation marks are kind of Type A - bossy and demanding of your attention. So I hope that the lack thereof as demonstrated on the updated applications will not subliminally turn the vendor hopefuls into overly relaxed slackers who do not bother to mail in their apps until the last possible minute.

I envision a world with perfect and meaningful punctuation. Long live the humble period.

NTD