Not all pauses are reflective

Punctuation and spellings are my bugbears. I throw commas around and hope that they will stick in places that require them and if there are one too many, well in these times of breathlessness, the extra pauses do help. 

I once explained to a friend who complained of too many extra punctuation marks that I spoke too fast and it helped slow me down. She probably imagines that I visualize the words on a mental blackboard before I speak them. When I expressed this notion to her she said "I just imagine that you are mental." 

Such are the friends I have! If you were to apply for the position (of a friend), I might let you circumvent the tedious route to my affections; which would require you to have an opinion (which matched with mine), be an excellent heckler while playing dumb charades, and be able to decipher my squiggles or see the island of Sri Lanka drawn and know in an instant that it stands for serendipity. Or an easier route would just be, to not call me mental.

My offspring have similar troubles with the written word. It bugs me though, that they are called 'offspring', why not 'springy' which they are in truth? They hardly ever sit still and keep oscillating between "I'm bored, I'm tired and I'm hungry" to "Let's run five rounds of the ground"- simply because the ground exists, and "I cannot eat a morsel of food, I'm so stuffed." because cunningly they have spied cabbage on the menu.

As it happens, in the city of the blind, my elder child is the one-eyed king. He probably decided to wax lyrical about poetry and asked his chief punching bag, "Have you heard of Keats?" And she responded, "Well, I know of parakeets." And true to form he said, "What are they?" I believe he thinks they are different paragraphs in poetry written by John Keats.

After I finished laughing at this exchange, I commented on how our domestic help consumed tobacco. At this, the younger one piped up "But it's so spicy!" 

I said, "not only that, it is harmful as well" 

"Then why do we keep it in the fridge?" Taken aback at this total non-sequitur, I wondered if the spouse had started a tobacco addiction which was competing with his midnight-snack addiction. The one-eyed king, who has a future as a cryptologist exclaimed, "She means tabasco sauce!" 

Our house, as you can understand, is one of those places where people talk in riddles and one has to rapidly navigate the tortuous turns in conversation. I'm hoping this counts towards steps taken in the day by Google Fit.

Meanwhile, when the English teacher complains that "Outweighs has been spelled as outways" I smile grimly and repeat to myself "Though shalt look in the mirror before cracking a smile". Hello, not because I am bad-looking, but because that could easily have been me.