Prepositions

I have an intense and unexplainable phobia of prepositions. After I got over my fear of the dark, I suppose I have no real phobias, so my mind makes up silly ones like this one and the fear of paperwork.

I have worked pretty hard on my language ever since I can remember, but when it comes to prepositions I just have to work harder. I must shed not only my sweat and blood, but also copious amounts of tears and snot to appease the Grammar Nazi in me.

I find prepositions forever playing hard to get, and so I'm forever struggling to figure out which ones lend countenance to my sentences. Okay, maybe "forever" exaggerates my desperation by a little bit, but hopefully by now you know what I mean. 

Choosing my prepositions is a strategy game to/ for me, which is why I don't play Chess or solve the Rubik's cube (Whoop!). I have enough grammatical challenges to last me a lifetime; hence no patience for numerical ones (another one of my you-know-who/ which type of phobias).

So, I have had trouble figuring out if I am on/ in the bus, or if I am in/ on the train. The interwebs tell me that all four phrases are used. Yet, it turns out I can only be in the car and never on it, unless I'm strapped to its roof, bonnet or boot.

Also, I never know if I should be disappointed in/ by/ with someone, and if I should compare things to/ with/ against each other. My mind boggles when asked to make such sentences; it chooses a preposition, constructs a sentence around it, edits it about 500 times, and after about half an hour, voila, a sensible sentence! If I pick the same sentence up the following day, there's a very high chance I'll redo the whole.

I've tried training my mind to be less frivolous but that seems to work as much as I'm able to squish lemons by sheer willpower. I gave up quite prematurely, because what is life without allowing yourself some time to stop and stare?

I've found a solution for the time being. Google has emerged as a life saver. My maximum usage of this overabused search engine is to check best fitting prepositions, I'm not even joking. I look up meanings, pronunciations, conversions of all sorts, and do a bit of research as well, but not as much as I look up prepositioning and phrasing.

Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through all this. At other times I wonder why I put you through all this.

- P for Prepositions (My A to Z Challenge)