This is all very frustrating.

I wasn't the greatest student.  I was a fairly normal boy student in elementary school. Supposedly blessed with a high I.Q., I couldn't spell I.Q.  I still remember the third grade class where I made a 100 on the Friday spelling test.  I had studied very hard for that test. Not at the admonitions of my parents or teachers; I did it all myself.  I remember studying hard for that fifteenth word test. And I surprised myself when I made a 100. It was Friday the Thirteenth. Ever since then I have considered Friday the Thirteenth to be lucky for me.  Luck, not study.  Thus I stayed a fairly normal boy student.

Secondary learning wasn't much better. I didn't do well.  My interpretation of "The Bear" by William Faulkner was publicly rejected in senior English class.  And now I can remember the title and the author. Who does that? Shouldn't that be all forgotten by now?

Revelation came to me at the very end of senior year as the students were passing around their yearbooks for signatures and salutations.  One of my classmates spent an entire page writing glowing, flowing, blowing garbage using flowery language that said nothing until the final line: "And this is how I was able to make "A's" in English for the past three years."  Yikes! What she wrote was crap! And she made A's?

In college I continued to be terrible in English, flunking all the time. I flunked my first course at the University of Houston in the Summer of 1967 weeks after graduating from High School.

But what frustrates me so is that it seems that today I am only one of few who know how to write in English.  Oh, I know that this little smudge isn't perfect. But it is a damn sight better than what I see people write today.  My wife has a sign: "I am silently correcting your grammar." I don't correct people's grammar, I just try to write properly. Try to get verbs to agree and the like. Use proper punctuation. Thank goodness for spell check.  How do people misspell words when they have spell check running?

I really don't get it.  How is it that I can write, roughly square with the rules, and so few others can?

That is frustrating.  But what is really frustrating is politics.  And I actually know something about politics.