Today is my very favorite holiday. I’ve sent out cards to all my family members and friends, hired a caterer and a band for my party, and even had t-shirts printed to wear all day long to mark the occasion because it’s really weird that I couldn’t find any festive shirts at the store. This is the one day a year on which English teachers can let their collective hair down and cut loose a little.

March 4th is National Grammar Day, twenty-four brief hours that are dedicated to the purest enjoyment of language. Or at least showing each other that we speak it better than the rest of the country.

First of all, we’re not an elitist group. You are free to celebrate the grammar of any language you choose, not just English. Just make sure you use it correctly. I happen to be partial to Italian because there are only about twenty-six grammar rules and they are all-encompassing and unchanging; there are also no pesky “sometimes” silent letters to trip you up. But by merit of my occupation I’ll have to select some other day to celebrate all things first-cousined to Latin.

My Grammar Day party is going to be the “it” place to be. English-language A-listers from all over will arrive via limousine and walk the red carpet that I set up in my driveway. While Joan Rivers will not be commentating from the sidelines in my yard, I will have six wardrobe changes throughout the evening.

We’ll start with drinks and mingling before getting down to the business of competition. Obviously there will be a spelling bee to break the ice, but I’m thinking that we should have an Alternate Spelling Bee, in which I call out your word and you have to give me all of the recognized alternate spellings. Then there’s the timed event, in which you have to turn around thirty sentences in thirty seconds so that they no longer end in a preposition. Good times!

On to the poetry. While there are literally both a national poetry competition and a short fiction writing competition to go along with National Grammar Day, my party has an added caveat: all of your entries must be about grammar and still be riveting.

I am cutting out the Sentence Diagramming Charades event after last year’s argument over whether the adverb should have gone above or below the line. Regrettably, alcohol consumption had gone up just before that event and it turned ugly. Feel free to drink in excess this year, I’ll make sure you have a safe ride home. Just don’t split an infinitive.

Shut up. I am not a nerd. I happen to get paid fairly well to have this much fun with words. Sadly, the love of grammar is not the nationwide phenomenon you might think. Between “text speak” and advertisers vying for our every dollar with catchy attempts to stand out (I will never use Yahoo again after they recently used the word “funnest” in an ad campaign, please everyone join the boycott), our language is crumbling at its loosely diagrammed foundation.

The interesting thing is I would venture that people today, especially young people, speak and write more than previous generations. With the advent of email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, Beebo, Scutterbutt, Digginit, Ploofenshout (okay, I’m starting to make some of these up as I go along), people actually create the spoken or written word more than they did before these applications made it so easy to get a message out. Unfortunately, they’re pooping in the grammar potty along the way, demolishing all things right in the world with every invented spelling of common words.

One aspect of teaching English that I’ve always despised is teaching Shakespeare. Excuse me while I duck under my desk to prevent being hit with random objects lobbed at me right now by other English teachers. But my young students hate it and Shakespeare himself isn’t too thrilled with how we teach it. Yes, the man was a genius and his work is timeless, but even he never intended for his plays to be read by anyone and yet, we force students to basically translate his works because language has changed so much in the four hundred-odd years since he wrote. Most of his audience and quite a number of his actors couldn’t read it, so why should a fifteen-year-old who actually has a copy of the state driver’s license exam book hidden inside his Julius Caesar text have to read it? Teach it as it was intended…by watching it! C’mon people, it’s a play! Why don’t we all just skip the next Matt Damon movie and buy copies of the script to enjoy at home???

I’m glad I got that tirade over with, because now I can tell you what I love about grammar. You think I’m going to tell you that the pure art of words flowing across a page is my entire reason for living, or that the English language is actually our history, a verbal family tree where different civilizations converged. Nope.

I love grammar because I’m better at it than you are.

What can I say? It’s my main skill, so don’t take this from me. I’m not an athlete with a Nike shoe deal or an Oscar-winning actress who could film a beet farm commercial and have people lined up to watch it. Forget dunking a basketball, something our society seems to find vitally important for some reason, I can’t even hit the rim with the ball. But if you need to form a coherent sentence, complete with descriptive modifiers and appropriate pauses, I’m your girl. More importantly, if you need it to sound really intelligent and not like you had the guy who sells tractor parts from the trunk of his car take dictation, give me a shout. But please don’t use ain’t when you call.

By the way, I intentionally placed three grammar errors in this post. Comment if you can find them and I will give you a gold star.

It is so rare that I feel sympathy for a ruthless, power-hungry dictator, but the sheer incompetence of our news agencies as a whole has made me sit back with a tiny corner of a tissue and shed a tear for the current leader of Libya.

No one knows how to spell this man’s name. The rabid misspelling of his name all over the news and the internet are probably keeping him up at night, which is actually really funny. It’s like the frustrated evil mastermind from the cartoons who never gets the credit for his well planned misdeeds. Sadly, this is the same leader whom President Reagan squared off with when I was a kid and so when the protests began recently I was kind of shocked to realize this isn’t that guy’s son. That’s probably bugging him, as well.

But in all seriousness, don’t we have anyone who knows how to spell Gadhafi? Or Kaddafi? Or Khadafhi? And can we please come to a consensus on whether his first name is Momar or Muammar? All of the major news networks employ dialect coaches (c’mon, did you really think Christiane Amanpour naturally sounds that sexy and exotic? They work with her, you know), people whose only job is to teach cute blond reporters how to pronounce “Azerbaijan” in case of an earthquake, so surely someone can spell this man’s name once and for all. Do we not have any journalists or government agents in the vicinity of Tripoli who can at least read and translate what is written on all those protest signs? Will the history books remember the day in 2011 when the oppressed citizens of Libya rose up against “That Guy?”

I am probably more sensitive to this issue than most people. My parents—god and their children love them—came up with the absolute weirdest children’s names of all time. I would love to be able to call you all personally and tell you this part is a joke, but my sister and I have four middle names each; that’s not the doozy…we both have one of the same middle names, as if my parents forgot they had already used that one. Then throw the last names I’ve had to contend with in there and I was doomed. I tried so hard to meet and marry a man named Smith but it just didn’t happen, at least not after the restraining order went into effect.

I met my non-Smith-named husband in college and we later moved to his hometown. For months after arriving here I had to answer the same idiotic question: “Are you related to Noah?” Never a last name, just Noah. Like I’m supposed to know they mean Noah-the-Possible-Relative, not Noah-of-the-Ark. I finally asked my mother-in-law, who replied, “Yes, but he’s on the crazy side of the family.” And that’s only horrible because you know those people are saying that about my side of the family.

One of the things I face as a high school teacher is students, mostly girls, who have it all planned out. They’re going to have a baby next year, name it such-and-such, get its eyebrows pierced in the delivery room, and dye its hair green or something. Yes, these are children who desperately need a puppy, but that’s beside the point. One of the worst instances of playing, “I Can See My Future From Here,” was the young girl who told us in a dreamy, faraway kind of voice that she and her boyfriend were going to have a little girl and she was going to name it Neveah because that’s heaven spelled backwards. My first thought was, “Why can’t you just name her heaven spelled forwards?” But my next out-loud comment, worried for this unborn child’s sanity, was, “You can’t do that to her. Nivea is a line of skin care products.” No amount of begging from her elderly English teacher could persuade this girl not to lasso her baby with such a dumb name. Finally, the student next to her burst into laughter: “If you have twins, you could name the other baby ProActiv!” Maybe that convinced her, I don’t know.

For all that I hope democracy wins out in the Middle East and the voice of the people is finally heard, I truly hope that Gaddafi/Kadafi/Kahadaphahi is remembered accurately for all time for the monstrous people-crusher that he is. And that we write it down correctly.

They don’t call it Sin City for nothing. When my husband earned a trip to Las Vegas for two and then decided to take me with him because his brother already had plans, I was concerned. I’d heard rumors about Vegas. The geriatric retiree-hounds who comprise the city’s Chamber of Commerce were the ones who came up with the, “What Happens In Vegas,” ad campaign. What chance did I have against the depravity?

I was determined to have fun in a sin-free way. I mapped out tour routes to the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam which my husband promptly shot down as the geekiest Vegas entertainment possible. The wildest and craziest item on my agenda was to swing by the Hard Rock Café and Hotel just long enough to add to my T-shirt collection. If things got out of hand, I might let myself have a third glass of wine. Don’t look down your nose at me, we were consenting adults.

After we arrived, I finally began to understand what all the movies were talking about. I knew there was a two hour time difference, so I brought my running clothes. That first morning I woke up at four am local time and headed out for a run. Vegas was still alive at that hour, but it was at death’s door. The lobby of one of the most expensive hotels on the strip was crawling with hookers. Not call girls, not escorts…hookers. Some of them had been working so long into the night that they were no longer wearing their shoes, instead they had the impossibly stilt-like heels looped through the straps of their purse-slash-overnight-bags.

I walked out through the front door and asked the valet where I should go for my run. I was completely prepared for him to smile reassuringly and say something ultra-touristy, like, “Anywhere along the strip will be fine for your sightseeing excursion.”

Instead, he sternly warned me, complete with ominously arm-waving-like gestures. “Stay on the left side of the strip and do not go more than five miles. Anywhere else and it gets pretty shady.”

If this was the safe part of Vegas, they must have been doing human body part farming in the other parts. Hapless tourists all over the city were at that very moment waking up from their nights of debauchery lying in bathtubs full of ice with a note tied to their wrists letting them know that they no longer had kidneys. Forget the drive-thru wedding chapels, this place had all-night blood plasma donation places and I don’t think they were paying off the donors with a cup of juice and an Oreo. I swear to you I actually ran past a sperm donation vending machine, thank god it was out of order.

I headed off in the direction I was told to and made sure to keep my eyes peeled. And I wish I hadn’t. I saw homeless people taking wallets off of drunk people who were peeing in the magical Bellagio fountains (I secretly clapped for the homeless people…stupid rampant pee-ers) and it all became clear to me. The National Language of Vegas is drunk. The National Pasttime is drunk. I swear to you the flag of Las Vegas is drunk. Everywhere I looked at any time of the day, there was drunk.

It’s like these people didn’t realize that this oasis resort city in the middle of the desert does, in fact, have running water. They bused it in years ago. It is not a requirement for hydration and survival to imbibe.

The only thing more in excess than alcohol was the prices. We paid $12 apiece for six inch sandwiches at Subway. Yes, we’re the only citizens of Earth who fly all the way to Las Vegas to eat fast food. Bottles of water were upwards of four dollars. The pair of flipflops I bought because my dress shoes were rubbing blisters cost more than the dress shoes that rubbed the blisters. We won’t talk about how much the band-aids to cover the blister set me back.

At the risk of sounding like the Mayor of Cowtown who turned up her country bumpkin nose at the lifestyle of the big city, it just wasn’t my kind of town. The billboards with full frontal nudity and the slot machines outside the arrival gates at the airport helped me figure that out.

There was one bonus to the trip: for the first time in my life I got to fly first class. I swear it’s not that long a story.

My husband, ever the devoted father that he is, booked us on separate flights. Yes, we vacationed by taking separate airplanes to and from our destination. It may have been a dampener, but his logic was sound: if one of our planes goes down, the children will still have one parent. I swear to you he looked me in the face and said those words. He completely missed the fact that we rode to the airport in the same car, travelling on one of the most statistically dangerous stretches of highway east of the Mississippi River. So I had a little fun with him.

“Hey, wouldn’t it be freakishly weird if the reason the plane crashes is because my plane smashed into yours in midair?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Or what about this, what if your plane lands on the runway, but then the air traffic controller is drunk (this is Vegas, after all) and he directs my plane to land on top of it?”

“Be quiet.”

“Oh my gosh, what if someone realizes before take-off that my plane has no landing gear and they don’t realize that your plane is still a working airplane and they take the wheels off your plane and put them on mine?”

“Go away now.”

This went on for days. I must tell you there was never a point where it stopped being funny. This trip ended three years ago and I’m still chuckling to myself over possible two-plane collision theories.

I absolutely refuse to believe that our tickets were luck of the draw and that he just happened to get a seat on the good airline and I got stuck in the thirty-eighth row of the suckiest airline available that doesn’t change planes in Poland. Not only did we have no snacks, no drinks, and no in-flight movie for this four-hour game of Get-To-Know-Your-Seatmate-Intimately, it was Las Vegas’s NASCAR weekend. Guess what that means? Pre-drunk. These people boarded the plane drunk, which I thought was illegal, and then proceeded to get drunker throughout the flight, which is amazing considering there was no beverage service.

So when the time came to bid adieu to the bright lights of the Fourth Circle of Hell, I approached the ticket counter at check-in and was asked the most amazing combination of words I’ve ever heard spoken in English: “Would you like to upgrade to first class?” For the measly cost of dinner for one and half a bottle of water in town, I could put those drunken disappointed race fans and would-be black jack pros several rows behind me, separated from me by an opaque curtain festooned with color-coordinating swirls just like the ones on the flight attendants’ shirts. I would be one of the beautiful people.

It was worth every dime. From the glorious vista of two thousand to twelve thousand feet I was able to see the entire Grand Canyon all at once. I saw the Hoover Dam, although from that height I completely don’t understand what all the fuss is about. More importantly, I had my own arm rest and the person next to me was not drunk. He must be from out of town.

My husband is a completely beige person. I’m not talking about his race or his favorite color palate, I mean in terms of his personality. Beige does not mean boring or uninteresting and I happen to love our beige walls, they’re very calming. Just like he can be very calming. But be warned, under the surface there is a splash of something else.

In order to make beige, say, in art class, you have to first make brown by mixing red, yellow, and white with a smidgeon of blue (I love the word smidgeon, it sounds like an exotic but cuddly pet). Once you’re happy with your brown you can add more white and pale, pale yellow to come up with the right shade of beige. Ditto cake icing, which for reasons I don’t have to tell you about I find myself making more than I make paint, although not usually in beige.

So my sweet beigest of husbands hangs out in this life, usually unruffled by the day-to-day crap that sends the rest of us reaching for the bottle. Firing people at work? He can always get a job at Walmart. Car exhaust is intensifying global warming? The animals will adapt to the flood waters by growing webbed feet. A crew of Chilean miners are trapped below ground? Hey, it’s good to get away sometimes.

However, don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that this man rarely gets animated by anything other than college football, and even then he watches it in another part of the house so the rest of us aren’t disturbed by his exuberance (I love that word, too). Lurking beneath the surface of his beige, that firey red is ready to pounce at an undisclosed time.

For all that he doesn’t seem to be bothered by much, at least out loud, he does love to plot revenge against people who have wronged him, usually me. Or the dog. He never intends to follow through with any of the revenge but it’s almost as if it is very healing for him to plan what he would do to get back at this person if he were the kind of person who would do that. This man is either slightly delusional or smarter than us all.

My husband’s favorite revenge is the Flaming Bag of Poo. When an incident occurs that cannot be ignored because it is just far too heinous (great word, especially when the prosecutor from My Cousin Vinny says it), my husband will draw a deep breath and announce with all the magnitude of Brando’s Don Corleone, “That man needs a flaming bag of poo.” He is referring, of course, to the childhood practice of setting a brown paper lunch sack filled only part-way with dog droppings on someone’s porch, lighting it on fire, ringing the door bell, and running away only far enough to be able to enjoy watching from the cover of shrubbery as the homeowner stomps on the small fire and ruins his favorite shoes.

Problem One: my husband doesn’t do anything on a small scale, so if he ever is going to place this burning poop bomb on someone’s front porch, it will be a brown paper grocery sack. And it will not contain a few dog droppings, it will be filled to the brim.

Problem Two: at this time my husband does not have anyone who has given a verbal or written commitment to be the poop donor. I’m afraid he may have to take on that role himself since I refuse to take part in pottying into a brown paper bag unless I find myself in a horribly unsafe third-world country without any facilities and even then, why am I keeping it in a bag? I also will not scar our children this way, so he will have to have outsiders who are willing to sign on to do this, without compensation I must say. Our dog is a fairly small poodle and we would have to switch to the highest-of-fiber brands of dog food and even then it would take months of saving up the poo. By the time we’ve kept a brown paper bag containing dog poop in our garage for a long enough time to fill the sack in order to exact revenge on someone else, whom have we really hurt?

Problem Three: my sweet beige husband will never, ever adhere to the running away part. That’s for cowards. If he’s going to do something to you, you’re going to know he did it because he’s going to stand there approximately three feet away from you, chatting with you while you stomp yourself knee deep in poop from various sources. There is a very short list of honorable things for which I would bail my husband out of jail—say, he saw a man beating his child and my husband punched him out, which he would do by the way—setting fire to literal crap for his own amusement is not one of those things.

Fortunately, over the years there have been very few times when my husband has announced that he needed to Flaming Bag of Poo someone. Usually it involves something that someone has done that isn’t necessarily illegal but that still reeks of inhumanity. When an elderly member of our church told a fairly shabbily-dressed visitor not to wear flip flops to church, my husband actually looked up the older man’s address (okay, I would have driven the getaway car for that one). When we heard that one area department store wanted to charge the Girl Scout troop a vendor fee for letting them sell cookies in the parking lot on a Saturday morning, those folks were in biohazardous danger. My favorite heroic pooing would still have to be the time the city took all of the swings off of the playground swing sets because teenagers liked to sit in them in the evenings and listen to music played through a car stereo. My husband actually started looking in the pantry for paper bags.

But now, there is an imminent poo on the horizon. The beautiful trees at the campus where my husband and I met were needlessly and horrifically assaulted. The Toomer’s Oaks of Auburn, just two simple magnificent trees that have shaded hundreds of thousands of college students in their one hundred thirty years, were taken out by a probably-drunken and, by all reports from family and friends unstable, redneck. My husband grabbed the newspaper and an extra roll of toilet paper and headed upstairs before I could stop him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I called through the locked bathroom door.

“Nothing,” he answered, his voice muffled by the sudden whirring of the bathroom exhaust fan.

“I know what you’re doing in there!” I shouted, pounding on the door. “Let the law handle it! This is not your fight! It’s not worth it!”

“Someone has to speak up for those trees!” he shouted back, unfolding the newspaper and settling in for apparently the evening.

“He’s in custody all ready, justice will be served!” I cried.

“Good! Then he’s not home to put out the fire! Maybe his whole house will go!” he answered, turning to the sports section. No, not the sports section. If anything could induce someone to fill a paper sack it’s the news from the athletic world. The steroid allegations alone are poop inspiration, let alone the names from the upcoming college football recruiting class and the amounts of the signing bonuses various NFL draft picks will receive. I cried silently into my dishtowel and left him to his terribly non-beige revenge.

It was a great January day. My supervisor called me to his office to tell me I was getting an intern. Intern-owner is a status reserved for the powerful people, people who are so great at their jobs and who are so busy with their work that other people actually submit their nicely-padded and glowing resumes to demonstrate why they would be perfect for the job, who arrive on interview day in freshly purchased interview suits, who offer bribes if they could just be chosen for the job. And they are willing to do this for free.

My first thought was, “She is so going to be my bitch.” My second through forty-third thoughts involved all of the ways this wretched unlucky person was going to make my life easier at the expense of her own sanity and physical health. She was going to follow me everywhere holding a notepad and taking tiny scampering little steps to keep up with my very powerful stomp. This person wasn’t just going to fetch coffee and dry cleaning, no, that’s for amateur intern supervisors. My intern was going to file my taxes, repaint whole rooms of my house, and somehow manage to get the root canal that I was supposed to have but it would still make my tooth better. I didn’t think that one through all the way, but it was a lot of fun to envision.

Then I met the intern. And she’s a great person, which did give me a little bit of a guilty feeling becaue I was still plotting all the ways my life would become awesome while simultaneously making her hate the concept of being alive. But then she handed me a book.

“What’s this?” I asked pleasantly. We were still in the honeymoon phase of this working partnership, meaning I’d known her for four minutes.

“It’s your book,” she answered, opening it to the table of contents and showing me all of the guidelines that were to be upheld for this program, as well as all of the requirements I would have to meet. My stomach roiled with the disappointment.

This manual contained the basic framework of a contract that said I couldn’t abuse this person. There were forms I had to fill out; I had to do paperwork! Even worse, I was going to have to not lose this book! The whole point of the intern was to make my life better, but instead I had more work to do!

Any dream of making this person do random chores was shattered. This manual was the Geneva Convention of internship. It detailed all the ways I had to pet and pamper this other human being. I was to be supportive and encouraging and teach her all kinds of things about my job so she could one day replace me. There were whole chapters on specific things I could not make her do, and trust me, some of the things on that list I never wanted her to do in the first place but it still stung to see it in print that I was forbidden to do that. Thanks a lot, Monica Lewinsky.

The intern has been here a month and overall, I’m unimpressed with her performance. I had to provide her with a desk and move my lava lamp so she could plug in her laptop. I caved in to the pressure and ugly looks from my co-workers and moved my bottles of flavored coffee creamers in the office fridge so there was room for her insulin. When we go to lunch, I have to drive so she can send overly-chatty text messages to some dialysis clinic somewhere. There goes my plan to make her give me a kidney if I ever need it.

I’m sure there are great working relationships out there where recent college graduates are forced to do mind-numbing and humiliating tasks as a stepping stone to beginning their careers. Maybe that only exists in the movies, like Santa Claus and gorgeous international spies (the good-guy kind) on cruise ships who need a pre-makeover soccer mom to be their cover girlfriends for the duration of the voyage.

I just hope someday the reality of how incompetent my intern is hits her full in the face. Maybe she’ll go on to a career in this field, be given her own intern, and will use that opportunity to get it right and ruin some young person’s life. One can only hope we are exacting change for the future.

I’ve been lucky enough to live in several different countries around the world, which has afforded me the opportunity to do some truly wonderful things. I’ve been to operas at La Fenice in Venice, I was in Jerusalem one year for Passover, I’ve watched awestruck as rainbow-clad women performed the Nine Drum Dance. I’ve seen the Pope so many times we’re practically on a first-name basis.

So when I gave up my jet-setting lifestyle to settle down in a tiny Alabama town, it became harder than I was prepared for to get my cultural fix. Fortunately, our town has several businesses who get together annually to endow a series of performances at the local high school auditorium.

Years ago I took a good friend kayaking on Lake Wedowee, only she wasn’t sure she could paddle solo at her advanced age so she was content to sit on the front of my kayak while I very slowly made my way around the lake. She commented cheerfully that she had always wanted to go for a gondola ride on the Grand Lagoon overlooking the Adriatic, but that a kayak ride on Lake Wedowee would just have to do. At the time I admired her attitude and the ability to see the good that was right in front her.

And I’m really trying to keep that in mind. Our season tickets to this year’s performances included headline act Vince Gill, which replaced the Garfunkel-sans-Simon concert that was cancelled due to a pigeon infestation in the ceiling tiles of the auditorium. We will also get to see the touring company of a small Russian ballet company interpreting selections from Romeo and Juliet, a Chinese-take on Riverdance, and a concert featuring major works of Brahms.

The first performance we attended was the Brahms. I got dressed up in my finest, dropped our lovelies off at the babysitter’s, and met my husband/date for a pre-concert evening of fine dining at Ruby Tuesday. I had the buffalo shrimp.

We made our way to the high school parking lot, opting to forgo the valet parking since I’m not sure it was actually a valet, it may have just been a car thief who wore a borrowed dinner jacket. We presented our tickets to some junior members of the student council and were directed to our seats by the assistant football coach. The lights dimmed, the patrons settled their whispered conversations, and the curtains rose.

And there were the first swirling notes of the Opole Philharmonic of Poland.

And it was good. It wasn’t breathtaking, or awe-inspiring, and it certainly didn’t bring the crowd to its feet, mostly because it’s really hard to give a standing ovation in bleachers. But when it’s all you’ve got available, peruse the concert program that was Xeroxed on the office copier and hum along to the music to yourself.

It’s easy to look down your nose at the concert or the intermission refreshments provided by Girl Scout troop 1283. And admittedly not many performances at the Met begin with the Pledge of Allegiance. But to these performers, this will always be the time of their lives when they travelled with the philharmonic and held the prestigious position of first chair violinist, professionally, no less.

But at the end of the day, it was just a group of musicians out of Poland who probably all had day jobs as hospital orderlies when they weren’t touring. And it made me a little sad for the opportunities I took for granted while living abroad.

Then something amazing happened to me last week. Someone out there on the Internet accidentally Googled something or other that took them to my website and this wonderful stranger proceeded to translate it. Into Hrvatski. I had to search online just to find out which indigenous peoples even speak Hrvatski. They live in Croatia, apparently. I’m picturing Peggy from the Capital One commercials.

All of a sudden, literally overnight, I went from being a small-town writer blogging to myself and my five subscribers to being a writer with an international following. Like the third chair cellist-by-day, janitor-by-night, I’m no longer a teacher who writes a little on the side. I’m a world-renowned blogger. And when the money catches up with the fame, I fully intend to purchase a waterfront resort home on Lake Wedowee.

I went to my first-ever club meeting of geocachers at our local buffet-style restaurant and was awed and amazed. This monthly meeting was for like-minded hobbyists from several surrounding counties and it was easy to see that they were a warm, welcoming bunch of people who share a common interest.

Unfortunately, that common interest is complete and total nerdhood.

If you don’t already know, geocaching is actually this very cool outdoorsy activity in which you use a GPS device and global coordinates to locate tiny little boxes that have been hidden by fellow geocachers. There are literally over a million of these little boxes spread around the world. It’s like hide-and-seek for people who have no friends willing to come look for them when they hide.

Sometimes, the hidden boxes contain really amazing things like keys to a brand-new Jeep vehicle. Usually they just contain a piece of paper for you to sign as written proof that you have no life. Bring your own pen.

According to The Idiot’s Guide to Geocaching, which is a galactically redundant title, there is an amazing history to the sport (I’m sorry, many geocachers want to see this activity turned into an Olympic event, so I’m required as a member of the brethren to refer to it as a sport). It actually started just over ten years ago as a conspiracy theorist’s drinking game:

“Hey, Bob, you know how NASA has all these satellites all around the world and the government is using them to take pictures of our DNA?” (slurp)

“No, they can’t really do that, Dave.” (slurp)

“Sure they can, Bob. It’s what they do. They’re videotaping us right now. Those satellites can see through walls and zoom in so far they can see the hairs in your nose.” (slurp)

“Why would they do that? The government’s too busy trying to find Osama Bin Laden to care how long my nose hairs are. ‘Sides, they can’t see through walls.” (slurp)

“They just want to know where you are at all times. Forget the census bureau, they don’t even need them people anymore. They can count us from the satellite pictures.” (slurp)

“I don’t think so, Dave. I think you’ve been reading stuff on the Internet again.” (slurp)

“I’ll prove it. I’m going to go hide this beer somewhere in a national forest. Then I’m going to come back and tell you just the coordinates, and if you can find it without using any technology I will give up my subscription to Roswell Weekly. If you can’t find it, you owe me a cold one.” (siiiiiiiiiiip)

“You’re on, Dave.” (sluuuuuurrrrrrp)

And so the sport of geocaching was born. I have to admit, it is kind of a fun thing to do on a weekend hike or a camping trip. My family loves to go camping and just sitting in the woods throwing rocks at trees gets old after that fourth rock. Geocaching gives us something to do while we’re out in nature. I’ve also stopped in at parking lots on my way home because I happen to have read that there’s a microscopic container hidden in a light pole somewhere on the property. I’ve taken picnic outings with the kiddies to a scenic overlook because I got an email update that a new container had been hidden in some pine tree within a 500 yard radius of that spot.

But I don’t hold a 300-candle power headlamp to these people at the buffet. First of all, we were required to sign in with a our caching team names, so we all had on stickers that said things like, ‘Hello, My Name is Sledgehampster.” We walked around the room (the term is mingling to us non-socially inept people) and recognized one another by our team names, swapping stories about being caught by muggles (people who think we’re idiots) while hunting for an elusive find (plastic Rubbermade container filled with Happy Meal toys).

After we had all helped ourselves to the cholesterol buffet, the meeting got down to business. We had a riveting guest speaker on the importance of checking your flashlight occasionally to make sure the batteries work, we had a roll call of new caches that had been hidden in the last week, commemorative gold spray painted ammo cans were distributed to those in attendance who had reached 1000 lifetime finds, then the drawing for door prizes took place before we adjourned.

If that restaurant meeting room had erupted in flames at any point during the night, trapping us all inside and leaving us in ashes, the cool factor of the human race would have gone up by four percent instantly. Sorry, the truth hurts.

And I am not ashamed. I have learned to embrace my inner social outcast because nerds tend to be much more interesting people in the long run. I have attended Star Trek conventions, driven for hours to visit the Cast Iron Cookware Museum, and waited in line overnight for tickets to the Tron movie (the first one, folks, not the mass-appeal 3D one). There’s nothing wrong with quirky interests between consenting adults as long as no one gets hurt. Like the really gorgeous young lady that three acne-inflicted nerds paid to accompany them to the Las Vega Hilton’s Star Trek themed casino. I admit it, she was in hell.

So whenever you’re ready to get off your high-horse and embrace the less popular crowd, just say the word. I’ll strap on my hip waders, fire up the GPS, and hide a beer in the woods for you.

NOTE: if you are at all interested in drinking the kool-aid and becoming one of us, go to http://www.geocaching.com. I swear this isn’t made up.

I do not consider myself an English snob, despite my extensive accolades as an English teacher and general smart person. When faced with a situation that warrants I can ya’ll with the best of them. Part of what I try to instill in my students is not that any colloquial spoken form is ever wrong but that there are appropriate and inappropriate times for the different formalities of speech.

For example, ain’t should never rear its ignorant head at a job interview, a wedding toast, or a eulogy. Referring to a male counterpart as bro’ is perfectly acceptable on a basketball court but not in a sales meeting. Thou shalt not ever use euphemisms to refer to one’s genitalia or the genitalia of others at any time in a speech before Congress.

There’s a time and a place for all words. Knowing that is important.

So part of the hardship of being an English teacher is trying to convince my students not to start their essays with the words, “Hey teach whas up? Not much heya.” It’s also shocking how often I have to explain that a number 3 cannot be used in place of the letter e in your writing and that just because e e cummings made a career out of never capitalizing anything doesn’t mean you are allowed to.

This is the portion of the rant and rave in which I blame current technology. It’s not just a cultural phenomen, just like every generation has had to endure from the demographic below them. I can blame the actual physical requirement of using the telephone to communicate with people without actually speaking. It’s easy to see why capitalization is falling out of favor with society because you have to press that pesky tiny SHIFT key on the itty-bitty phone in order to capitalize, but the 3 to represent the backwards e actually requires extra effort and tiny button pushing, so what gives?

But the worst by far is the pathological need to acronymize everything. We see LOL and LMAO everywhere these days, including on elementary school Valentine’s Day cards. BTW has wormed its idiotic way into inter-office memos and TTYL is a standard closing which people have even begun to speak by way of parting. If only the moron-go-round could stop there.

There are now whole pornographic and scandalous acronyms, letters standing in the place of terms our grandmothers never thought of. Suffice it to say, if anyone calls you a BBW you have every right to be incensed. If you are possibly dating a BBF, don’t be in a hurry to pick out china patterns. Even more surprising, if your friend admits to being a XDSM, be supportive but don’t loan him any of your clothes. If you blindly ignore my sage advice, I am prepared to ROFLMAO at you.

There are protests raging in Egypt. The Koreas are balking at their nuclear arms talks. Thailand and Cambodia still aren’t playing nice. A government minister of something or other was shot down in Sudan. The citizens of Bangladesh are beginning to grow dissatisfied at being God’s own whipping boys. The world is in chaos.

Do you know who you never hear from? Liechtenstein.

I had to Google Liechtenstein to even find out where it was, mostly because the only map I have to look at is a laminated place mat one of my children won in a geography bee and Liechtenstein wasn’t on there. It’s wedged between Switzerland and Austria and the citizenry likes you not knowing that. I’ve driven between Switzerland and Austria and trust me, there is no “Welcome To Liechtenstein, Ya’ll!” sign on the interstate. Autobahn. Whatever.

It’s horrible that when you try to Google Liechtenstein the Wikipedia page about this tiny country is actually the third entry down, the first two being pages about American pop artist Roy Liechtenstein. It was pretty hard to Google it because all these years I’ve been spelling it wrong. I admit that I haven’t spelled it that many times over the years, or even thought of it for that matter, but when I did think of it I was leaving out the first “e.” Learn something new every day.

But my Googling was not fruitless, because I now know all kinds of fascinating information about their country. They are still ruled by a prince, but in 2003 they adopted a new constitution that built a parliamentary system. They actually had quite a significant role in both of the world wars, the larger role being a truly romantic story about how the ruling prince abdicated to his much-younger nephew in 1938 when Hitler was on the rise. His reason for leaving? The princess, his wife, was Jewish. Even though the country was too small to have a Nazi Party, which right there makes it my kind of town, there were some sympathizers in the country who felt that she alone was the bulk of the country’s Jewish Problem.

After the wars, there was actually quite a scuffle because Czechoslovakia (which I think I’m still spelling wrong) and Poland both wanted to take control of Liechtenstein. Their reason was very clear: they were both under the mistaken impression that Liechtenstein was part of Germany and they really wanted to punish those Nazis. That’s like me getting back at Wyoming by taking control of Billings, Montana. Once that was all resolved with their own laminated place mat map of the world, there was still the matter of asylum. Liechtenstein had granted refuge to 501 Russian soldiers who had mistakenly sided with the Germans against their own country and were now afraid to go home. Since the national motto of Liechtenstein is, “Leave me alone,” the country took them in. Unfortunately, adding 501 people to the population of the country proved to be financially impossible and Argentina had to take those guys off their hands. I truly wish that part was a joke.

But Liechtenstein still has a proud standing in Europe. The national language is German but their currency is the Swiss franc. They trade with Europe but are actually not part of the Union. Their main industry seems to be winter sports tourism which gives them the second highest domestic gross income per person in the entire world. Take that, Bangladesh.

For a country that has a population of just over 35,000, which is less than the town I live in, there are 73,700 international companies who claim Liechtenstein as their headquarters. The US government has already written a huge report that was paid for by our tax dollars to declare that the country’s bank might be corrupt. Didn’t see that coming. But don’t think it’s all money laundering and off-snow accounts. The country is the world’s largest producer of not only sausage casings but also false teeth, both of which are vital and legitimate industries.

But these are also a highly intellectual and cultural people. When the royal family was bankrupt following one war or another, they simply pulled an old Da Vinci painting out of the basement, sold it at auction, and restored the entire country’s wealth. I think they also have a few unreleased Beatle’s recordings and Harper Lee’s unpublished second novel in their vault, just in case of an economic downturn.

The best thing I learned about the country on Wikipedia is that they have a national anthem. It’s only one minute and three seconds long and the first eleven seconds are just a drum roll. And no lie, it’s “My Country Tis of Thee.” Well, I’m sure they changed the words, like Elton John does every time a national figure dies and he needs a tribute song. Of course, we can’t be smug about that since that song used to be “God Save the King and/or Queen” and we stole it from the British.

I’ve now decided that the best job in the whole world is US Ambassador to Liechtenstein. Hopefully, with enough campaign contributions to whichever wahoo runs for office next, the job can be mine. Skiing, schmoozing, a little bit of turning the other way when other countries set up corporations there, and I’ll be gold. Plus, I can already hum along intelligibly to the national anthem.