Day 71

This morning, close-reading Cairn pointed out a funny typo on one of my previous entries. (Particularly as an editor), I'd like to say that this is a rare oversight on my part. But that's not even close to the truth. I'm a sloppy blogger. You could probably go through lots of my posts and find loads of errors; unfortunately, most are just plain wrong and not at all entertaining like, say, "auto-correct errors" on the iPhone which I sometimes leave on purpose, for giggles. 

Happy Valentine's Day!
This little Danmade monkey always has some love for me.

I have a theory on my sloppy blogging: I write this thing mostly at night when my brain is tired (excuses, excuses, yeah, yeah - but hear me out)... I find that when my brain is tired, it processes words in the most interesting ways. I think I wrote "downtown" instead of "downton" because, come on, how often do I write "downton"? (Um, never.) But I write downtown (which Pittsburgh Dad most certainly would pronounce "dahn tahn") sort of a lot ("let's just meet downtown..."). 

Similarly, when I'm tired, I find I struggle with homophones (think: to/too/two or there/their/they're). This is so fascinating because even though I write the wrong word, I always know the correct choice. It's like my brain just goes on autopilot and plucks whatever same-sounding word it finds first. I've asked my sister--a speech language pathologist--if sleep deprivation could cause this and she said that it's quite plausible. I think that this would make fascinating research for some grad student, don't you?

On a positive note, here's a cool bit on why you might think better when you're sleepy--or drunk.