Via jo(e) and New Kid:

1. Grammatical pet peeve. (Must keep my pedantry in check here) Easy -- using "at" at the end of a sentence, or a variation thereof, especially at the end of a scholarly presentation: "Okay, yeah, so that's where I'm at with my research right now." But actually it bothers me anytime, anyplace. I know it's perfectly fine to use prepositions at the ends of sentences, and other ones don't bother me at all. It's just something about the superfluity of "where I'm at" when someone could say "where I am," plus I hate the way it sounds.

I also don't like it when people use pronouns in the nominative case in contexts when they should be used in the objective case. Ex.: "She went to the store with Jane and I." The pronoun at the end of the sentence is the object of the preposition "with," so the correct usage would be "She went to the store with Jane and me."

2. Household pet peeve. When people kick off their shoes and leave them in the living room. Same goes for clothes. Cluttered counters and other surfaces.

3. Arts & Entertainment pet peeve. Some of you are going to be horrified, but...the acting in old movies and TV shows -- I'm thinking mostly 1940s and 1950s, but a lot of movies before and since then, too. The way they talk always sounds the same to me, with the same prosody, cadence, inflection, etc. Watch any episode of The Twilight Zone; that's how everyone sounds to me.

4. Liturgical pet peeve. I don't know. I hear that at some churches, preachers use PowerPoint in their sermons. That's crossing some kind of line.

5. Wild card. It irritates me when people I hardly know and haven't seen in years comes up to me and says, "You don't remember me, do you?" It just seems kind of pitiful, like the person thinks I'm higher up on the social ladder than s/he and is implicitly admitting it, but compensating for it by ensuring that I end up looking like a jerk if I don't remember the person, which I almost always do, and even if I don't, I don't give the person the satisfaction of my groveling; I just shrug. Jeez. Just say, "Hey, I think I know you from somewhere," or better, "I don't know if you remember me, but we had so-n-so's class together."

Bonus (things I do that become other people's pet peeves): Jonathan hates the way I correct other people's grammar (which I have no idea I'm doing, by the way). He says that someone might make a grammatical mistake, and I repeat the statement with the correct usage. It's hard for me to think of an example, so I'll use jo(e)'s. If someone says, "There's lots of apples in that tree," I might say, "Yes, there sure are lots of apples in that tree."

Much of this last revision before sending my dissertation to the readers on the committee is consisting of frantic JSTOR and MLA International Bibliography searches to find, in response to "you need to cite a source here" comments, articles that support passing observations I made in my chapters based on common knowledge and my own personal experience and reflection.

Also: I'm thinking constantly about people who did a lot of writing, sometimes under adverse conditions. Sylvia Plath did a lot of writing, some of it with two small children (when applying for grants, she figured babysitting costs into the budget, according to an essay in my edition of The Bell Jar). Ernest Hemingway supposedly wrote The Sun Also Rises in six weeks, though that one is somewhat spurious. It inspires me, at any rate.

As seen at Debbie's, the last word meme. Last night I was revising until 4:00 a.m., and, while I'm sure I'll revise it later, the last word for now is "literacy." I'll try to do better than that. What do you think my last word should be?

Is it just me, or do Upton Sinclair and Uma Thurman bear a striking resemblance to one another? Seriously, are they related? I looked it up but didn't find anything to that effect.

Can you recommend a good moving company? I'm talking right now to Movex, so I'd be especially interested in hearing about experiences with them. Basically, we would like a self-service move, in which we load and unload the truck, and all they do is drive it. The Movex deal sounds okay, but they expect us to measure the amount of truck space we end up using, and I'm not sure I'd be so good at that, unless they have markers on the walls of the truck or something. They also expect us to build a bulkhead wall out of materials they provide so that our stuff is kept in a private compartment. Is this easier than it sounds? I wish we could just get our own truck.

revise...conclusion. I'll get started on that as soon as I get back from my yoga class tonight. But first, a couple of links:

Twinning is up, and it's due to a number of factors, including maternal age and assisted reproductive technology (ART). But, scarily, you may be more likely to have twins if you eat meat and dairy products, due to the hormones given to livestock:

By comparing the twinning rate of vegan women, who consume no animal products, with that of women who do eat animal products, Gary Steinman, MD, PhD, an attending physician at Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Medical Center in New Hyde Park, NY, found that the women who consume animal products, specifically dairy, are five times more likely to have twins. The study is published in the May 2006 issue of the Journal of Reproductive Medicine, available May 20.

Via the Union of Concerned Scientists newsletter.

Also, check out Ema's story of how very well New York City is fighting avian flu.

Speaking of Ema, I'll be interested to her her take on the new birth control bonanza(!), including "a yearlong oral contraceptive and a simpler version of a contraceptive implant" (one rod instead of six).

I got nothin'. Except some bullets!

• First, a serious bleg. We're moving out at the end of this month to relocate in North Carolina, and we've only lived in this house in Decatur, GA for two months. Our landlord is making us pay the rent until a new tenant is found, and we don't want to lose our deposit or pay rent on two houses, one of which is empty. If you know anyone who is moving to the Atlanta area soon and is looking for housing, please put them in touch with me: clancy.ratliff at gmail. The house is great, a reasonable rent for the Atlanta area, big yard.
• Just out of curiosity, can anyone think of any big public shaming media events surrounding fathers with their children? I'm not talking about the everyday public shaming that happens on Dr. Phil ("He won't get a job!"); I'm thinking along the lines of what happens to mothers fairly often, e.g., Britney with baby in lap. The only ones I can think of are the Michael Jackson baby-dangling incident and the Steve Irwin crocodile-feeding incident.
• I did my first Pilates class ever today, and I liked it a lot.
• Some of the comments in this thread are making me want to run and hide.

I recently read, for the first time if you can believe it, The Bell Jar. Of course I then demanded to know if Jonathan had a copy of Birthday Letters, which he then produced. One of the great things about being married to him is the instant gratification when it comes to book reading. He has far more books than I have, and if there's something I want, there's probably no need to go to the library to find it or order it from Amazon, because it's probably right there on one of the shelves. When we get set up in Greenville, we're going to integrate our books and put them in order according to LOC classification.

I'm about a third of the way through Birthday Letters now, and this poem is by far the finest one I've read so far. I keep reading it over and over again in awe:

The Shot

by Ted Hughes

Your worship needed a god.
Where it lacked one, it found one.
Ordinary jocks became gods --
Deified by your infatuation
That seemed to have been designed at birth for a god.
It was a god-seeker. A god-finder.
Your Daddy had been aiming you at God
When his death touched the trigger.
                    In that flash
You saw your whole life. You ricocheted
The length of your Alpha career
With the fury
Of a high-velocity bullet
That cannot shed one foot-pound
Of kinetic energy. The elect
More or less died on impact --
They were too mortal to take it. They were mind-stuff,
Provisional, speculative, mere auras.
Sound-barrier events along your flightpath.
But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex
And your Saturday night panics,
Under your hair done this way and done that way,
Behind what looked like rebounds
And the cascade of cries diminuendo,
You were undeflected.
You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,
Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect
As through ether. Even the cheek-scar,
Where you seemed to have side-swiped concrete,
Served as a rifling groove
To keep you true.
                    Till your real target
Hid behind me. Your Daddy,
The god with the smoking gun. For a long time
Vague as mist, I did not even know
I had been hit,
Or that you had gone clean through me --
To bury yourself at last in the heart of the god.

In my position, the right witchdoctor
Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,
Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,
Godless, happy, quieted.
                    I managed
A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.