Golfing Newbie Shows Potential

I've discovered a sport where you get to drive carts, carry clubs and whack the heck out of little white, dimpled balls over a vast expanse of land that is riddled with little holes. It's called golf.

Incidentally, that is also my newest adjective that I have managed to acquire -- golfer. You can add that adjective to the rather large list of adjectives that currently describe me.

I have been playing long enough, though, to know which end of the club you use to hit the ball. Also, the balls are supposed to be aimed at the little holes scattered randomly around the grounds.

It seems one of the most important rules of the game of golf is that you don't hit just any white, dimpled balls you find laying around. Somehow, you have to be able to differentiate your white, dimpled ball from all the others scattered around the landscape. You can only hit your own white, dimpled ball. This adds a serious degree of difficulty to the game.

The good news, though, is that I am destined to be a great golfer. My reasoning behind this revelation is rock solid.

To the best of my knowledge, all the greatest golfers have a signature move or gesture that sets them apart from the rest of the pack of wannabe greats.

I already have a signature move -- my swing! While it has not yet been compared with, say, Tiger Woods or Andre Agassi, it has attracted a bit of attention from my golf partner and other fellow golfers.

I call my signature swing 'the Mongo' for it's strength and ferocity. My golf partner and friend simply calls it unique. I overheard some golfers playing through one day refer to someone as a "seizure with a stick." I hope whoever they were talking about is okay.

On top of all that, I've been known to hit that little white, dimpled ball nearly 100 yards off the tee with my biggest club. Now that is impressive!

As you can see, my game shows a lot of promise and potential. My partner says I can only go up from here!

I am a little worried, though, since I simply don't know if I will have time to write once I join the pro circuit.

Technical Genius Turns Teacher Assistant

As a kid, I was a technological wonder and a genius.

Allow me to explain. I wrote a program that featured a little green space ship. The ship lifted off from the bottom of the screen and disappeared out the top. It even had a puff of smoke. I also designed and programmed a video game that I called 'chaos.' It involved a green dot. The dot moved in a seemingly random path around the screen for an infinite amount of time. In hindsight, I should have named it "screensaver" and made millions.

Somewhere between that programming child prodigy and the current 44 year-old teacher's assistant, something changed.

Sure I know how to navigate my school and personal email. I even have a rudimentary knowledge of MS PowerPoint and MS Excel and can utilize them, too. There's no word processing package that I can't handle. But this whole Twitter thing has thrown me for a loop!

In an attempt to tap my inner nerd, I researched Twitter. After some exhaustive research, here are my findings.

Twitter is a proper noun and the name of a popular social networking site. Tweet can be used as a noun or a verb, as well as the occasional adjective. The verb 'Tweet' can be conjugated. I will tweet. I am tweeting. I have tweeted.

And the past tense of tweet is tweeted, not twit. While it is not a 'bad word,' per se, you still don't want to be called or considered one.

Interestingly enough, I now have a Twitter account (@phillip_haworth for those interested). While I am slowly struggling and learning, I seem to be stuck on the wrong side of the learning curve!

My family has gone a little overboard with the new, improved tech-savvy me. They keep making suggestions of other online advertising avenues for my blog, but they sound like nonsense!

Pinterest, for example, sounds like the bad guy's name out of a horror movie. Also, MySpace doesn't have a space. I'm an English major. There should be a space between the 'y' and the 'S.' I couldn't begin to tell you how heavy an Instagram is. And I've finally gotten the hang of Google, so what's this Google Plus mess they're telling me about?!