My Job App Fail: An emo guide to properly using colons

For the record I have no idea how to properly use colons, or any grammatical artifice for that matter (I can barely write my name in cursive too! Just, in case, ya know, you wanted to know...nvm). So when I got an e-mail from a potential employer asking me to write a "fun" and "creative" piece on how to properly use a colon (it's a really funky education company), I really didn't know what to write.

Then, in a fit of feckless abandon as to my career futures I decided to write this; an epic piece of longing and love-torn angst (and proper grammar-use too!) that Stephanie Meyer herself could not have written better!

As surprising as it may seem, I didn't end up getting the job as there was "no perfect fit for [me] at this time".

Enjoy--

The wannabe-Goth/emo Field-Guide to proper use of colons or: How I haven’t learned to love anything because life is a giant, obdurate miasma of unyielding crippling darkness that consumes your soul and leaves you without friends or dates

It’s hard to be emo: you’re constantly under pressure from your stupid parents telling you to do stupid and cruel things like homework or to bathe once in a while. It’s even harder when you have to relate how hard and miserable, bleak and full of darkness your shell of a life has become to your anonymous friends online: You have to constantly heighten the sense of impending doom and drama that is about to enter your life as you retell how horrible it was when your father came in to the bathroom while you were exfoliating your inner sixth eye so as to shed the primitive mortal coil and commune with the gods of pain and super-duper sadness by making primitive gurgling sounds punctuated with screams of “MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE OR DEATH!”. But how could you ever relate such a tale to your fans on LiveJournal?

The easiest way to express your feelings in an almost sort of mystical Haiku form, using grandiose words you learned from that new movie “Vampires with nice hair who look sad: 2” like “quaffed” or “pouty”, is to use colons. Colons can be great for expressing your inner darkest emotions by creating compound sentences in your latest soul-rending blog post about the inevitable collapse of the American family because parents just “don’t understand”. Example: “Last night my stomach made the most beautiful pangs of sorrow I have ever heard: Forcing myself to swallow all of my crumpled pages ripped from my diary so I could feel my lingering words of regret and despair turned out to be such a good idea”.

If compound sentences aren’t your thing for relating the unfathomable depths of your cold and dark heart, then maybe you’d like to try writing a list of things you really, really don’t like in this world. Example: Sometimes, when I day-dream during Advanced Lit. class about getting my heart broken by the most cruelly beautiful girl who sits in front of me, Sasha, I think about the things I’ll never have in my life: happiness, a girlfriend, Sasha, jeans that fit normally, colorful clothing, ANY books by Shel Silverstein (because he is too happy), a soul.

Some of the most poignant and sad things in life are best experienced when sharing it with others, so, if you wanted to share your online friend’s, allcutethingswilldie, epic quote about the meaninglessness of suburban life, you should use a colon to introduce his/her/it’s quotation. Example: “My life is miserable but not as miserable as allcutethingswilldie: ‘Today, I had cold apple pie for dinner with terrible ice cream and an even more terrible root beer float; I hate my parents so much and if they were balloons I would pop them’. I’m so jealous”.

Now, armed with the knowledge of how to properly describe your sweet, sweet woe to your friends (even though friends are all fake and stupid) and family (though they wouldn’t listen anyway) you can go out into the wild, totally depressing world and share your disgust with the human race.

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Also, I can't believe I've never seen one of these before!