Revealing and Revelling

I love jigsaw puzzles, jenga, and sudoku. My favorite game growing up was picture hunt . . . you know the one where they show you two pictures and you have to spot the differences? I had all 4 Where's Waldo books that came out in the 1990s. To this day I can look at any of them and point out where that little candy cane man is, AND I can find his dropped items. It literally took me 3 seconds to look at the department store picture above and find Wally next to the table with the boots. Seriously, I'm that good! (Nothing really to be proud of, it's mainly due to a self-entertaining childhood and many late nights up in bed with my flashlight just trying to find... that ... last... little... set of ...glasses.. YES! There they ARE!!!)

I should have known what I'd become later in life.

Now I'm one of those people that prides myself at finding things others look over. It's an intrinsic quality that I'll never be able to kick. I notice the extras in movies. I catch spelling mistakes. I remember weird quirks people have and things they want for their birthdays. I've come to terms with it and I'm currently assessing how I can best use it to my advantage.

So you can imagine my delight when I was reading an article in the New York Times and saw the word canceled. "What?!", I thought, a typo in a such a prestigious newspaper??... followed by a few mental "tshch" and "pshtcha"s. I hastily opened an new web broswer window to double check my discovery on dictionary.com only to find that cancelled is the British form of the word and the modern day English word is correctly, to my dismay, Canceled. I guess both being right is better than me being wrong!

Hmph.

I comfort myself in the fact that the English language is one of the hardest languages to learn. Mainly because there are so many exceptions and special instances, ... neighbors and weigh ... or how past tense is sometimes the same as future tense - read (I read a book) is spelled the same as read (I am going to read a book). The problem goes further, once you get to learn it all, they change it on you.

Take for example, the double space. I was taught in grammar school that you're only supposed to use one space after periods, and that the old double space standard was a remnant from the old typewriter days. I despise the double space. I work with people that double space and just to spite them, I go back and erase every little extra space. It's tedious and time-consuming but the effects are similar to scrubbing the grout on your kitchen tile floor. In the end, gleaming in all its glory.

Ok, so I'm an extremist with a hint of perfectionism. What can I say? Old habits die hard and I learned at a very young age to spot the differences and find the missing pieces. So I suggest you take a long hard look at the board games you loved as a kid and determine what they say about you. I bet it's something good. :)