Dear Brackets,

We've been having this love affair for months now, and while I don't want it to end, we both know it has to.

You started as a quirk, and you've become a crutch.  Emphasis turned obnoxious.  And it took the blunt words of Dr. Amorose to nail this home: Oh, and could you please learn to use hyphens and to distinguish between parentheses and brackets?  These little problems get really annoying.  Thanks, Tom.  No, don't worry about that cracking; it's just my heart.

I know this is hard, but I sincerely hope we can still be friends.  You really are important in my life, but I think we need to see other people.  Nano is coming up, and I can't be devoting all of my time to you.  Semicolons, quotation marks, and the occasional parentheses are begging for some attention and they have the grammatically correct upper hand.

Please know that I'll always love you.

Yours,

Anna