I’d send it to the suffering people in Haiti along with enough food, supplies, strong men, heavy equipment, and medical personnel to save everyone. Right now.
If there is anything small thing you can think to do, please do it. If you’re like me, the devastation seems too large to imagine. Our pockets are small but there are many of us.
Go hug those you love and give anything you can. And pray.
The holiday break is officially over in the morning and I’ve misplaced my work ethic. Maybe I left it in my other purse.
Coming off of the end-of-semester madness, I rode an adrenaline-tide clear into Christmas Day. There are crossed-off lists to prove this, although I was so thorough I threw them away afterward. Something happened Christmas day that made my metabolism, my forward motion, my internal combustion, go dead still. It wasn’t gradual. I’m telling you, at 10:30 a.m. on Christmas Day, I exhaled and tuned into a slug.
That was fine for a day, so I let it continue. The next morning I woke up at 8:20 or so, completely horrified. I never set an alarm (not that I normally need one) and slept without waking for nine hours. Those who know me best understand the seriousness of such a thing. I’m a five-hour sleeper, the one who drives everyone crazy by staying up at all hours and rising in time to make coffee at five. I’ve spent my whole life tiptoeing around while others sleep.
It scared me, sleeping all those hours. Whatever had switched off the day before took over my body, and now I’ve spent the past two weeks moseying through my days, slug-like, instead of strangling every single minute for a few more seconds. It’s been lovely, really, but it’s over tomorrow.
I just can’t wrap my head around it. On Thursday there will be rooms full of students, and I’ve a sneaking suspicion they’ll all be much more sluggy than I am. My job is to bounce into those rooms and get their internal clocks moving again, start the cogs and wheels and such humming. They’ve been staring blankly at television or computer screens for four weeks now, the academic legions of WE will need to wind our own rusty clocks first and in a hurry.
When I taught high school and enjoyed Christmas breaks that lasted, oh, an hour and a half, this never happened. The thing is, I’m not sure if I want to complain about it too much since the slug that I’ve become is fairly comfortable and reclining.
Too much leisure is worse than too little. Time to make a cup of coffee and dropkick myself back into living. Don’t worry, I’ll be quiet.
P.S. – In my quest for threaded commenting – something WordPress does that Blogger doesn’t – I installed a commenting system called Intense Debate. Nice, but not as easy to use or pretty as I’d hoped. I guess I’ll hold out until Blogger adds threaded commenting, which I’m sure they will. I’ve asked nicely and all.
The downside is that in uninstalling my experiment, I lost a few comments. Please forgive me.
Finally, a cause I can get behind. Somebody hand me a Sharpie and some poster board because I feel like wearing a peasant blouse and having a sit-in. Where did I pack those Gloria Steinem aviators?
Wayne State University has it’s academic fist in the air to save our language. No, no, no, this isn’t about non-native speakers or official languages or anything whatever to do with immigration, so don’t turn away. This is about saving the wispy, many-layered, pungent, specific bibelots of our language that are disappearing faster than we can tweet.
Their site is called Word Warriors, and they’re saving the language one word at a time:
“In early 2009 Wayne State University launched this Web site to retrieve some of the English language’s most expressive words from the dank closet of neglect, in hopes of boosting their chances of a return to conversation and narrative. Some of these words once were part of the common speech (it was hard to be a writer in the late 19th century, for instance, without “indefatigable”); others have capered in and out of the language like harlequins, dazzling and then just as suddenly departing; others — the wonderful “numinous,” for one — may never have been heard every day or even every year. Some, like “galoshes,” just went into hiding for no apparent reason.
But no matter why especially marvelous words have disappeared from everyday use, we believe the following selection that we and visitors to this site have made still deserves to be exercised freely in prose, poetry, song and story. Otherwise, we simply aren’t painting our speech with a full palette.”
The the Word Warriors’ 2010 List of “sadly underused or overlooked but eminently useful words that should be brought back to enrich our language” includes delights as bamboozle, mendacity, festoon, and scuttle. My brothers and sisters, there’s not a Southern writer living who could write a check without using at least two of these. These words falling into disuse is a sad first step leading inevitably to everyone grunting and pointing in 140 characters or less.
Here are a few more on the endangered list: conniption, dastardly, fetching, peccadillo, skedaddle, and zaftig. Can you imagine losing these words?
Luckily, you can participate by suggesting words that need rescue. Nominate a word on the Word Warriors site, then go out into the world and give these beauties a workout. Wave them like Old Glory before all the Southern lawyers die and take these with them to the hereafter.
We shall overcome.
(Image via Artworld Salon)
I’ve just run around the house making all my faucets drippy to save the pipes. Forget global warming, folks, there’s a serious rend in the fabric of the earth’s karma going on here. Single digits and temperatures that start with a minus sign in Arkansas? This is the land of bubbling-tar streets and heatstroke. It’s meteorological terrorism.
Worse yet, I can’t find my coat. Honestly, I only wear one a week or so out of every year, and it’s always an all-weather, trenchy-thing at that. I’ve located the liner – those are always zipped out and discarded anyway – right where I left it in the hall coat-closet. In my house, that’s a little room where we hang graduation regalia and old prom dresses. I may have to go out in the world tomorrow morning wearing all my sweaters at once and looking like the homeless fellow who hangs out in front of the shoe repair store on VanRonkle Street.*
All this weather ridiculousness would be forgiven if it would simply snow. At least I’d have good reason to stay indoors and have no need of a missing trench coat. The smattering of surprise snow we had the other day lasted about half an hour. Now it’s colder than Anchorage, Alaska around here and there’s nary a residual flake.
I’ll make another trip around the house checking drips and closets and such before calling it a night. Wish me luck, and pray for snow.
* Don’t worry about our friend on VanRonkle. I have it on good authority that he’s enjoying the warm comforts of several Christian homes during this weather. We take care of our own down here.
I‘m waiting on the snow. If it means staying up half the night, fine. I know those of you who live in the Snowy North may be shaking your heads, but down here snow’s a brief luxury. Just the merest Weather Channel mention of it makes me feel like a little girl again. I may need to start right now digging in the hall closet to find a coat.
In fact, it might be time to do a little snow-dance just for good measure. I don’t know. Last time I did that we were locked in a solid block of ice for a week and giant tree limbs fell, breaking like chandeliers all over Davis Street. I might have danced too emphatically.
Cross your frosty fingers for me, and don’t you dare do the math on the date under the photo.
It’s called Spring Cleaning for a reason, but those of us who teach know the long holiday break is really the best time to pare down and clean out. A little extra time on my hands, the New Year a blink away, my birthday just after, and past that the beginning of another semester – so many beginnings need a fresh decor.
Besides, I just finished a massive online design job for someone else, and it made me want to fiddle with my own small space. So, a little-black-dress blog makeover. It was great fun to make and infinitely cheaper than redoing my living room.
My inspiration was this picture of Coco Chanel. Such a powerfully creative woman who, bless her heart, definitely needed to eat a sandwich now and then. Starvation aside, she’s impeccable. I don’t know a living woman who can sit at that angle without a few biscuits creeping out of the dough, Spanx or no Spanx.
I’ve just begun my New Year’s Resolutions. The first three are “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” I should probably take that to heart and stop worrying about the list.
My celebration tonight will be simple. Em is glamming up in her own little black dress for an evening at the Peabody with her gentleman friend. The Perfect Grandson and I will be home having a “pawty” – we’ll play with cars and watch Robots at least twice. I figure we’ll ring in the new year around 7:30 tonight with a little apple juice. There will be years and years when he’s too cool to spend New Year’s Eve with his MiMi, so I’m taking our “pawties” when I can get them.
I want to wish a happy New Year to everyone. My hope is that all of us are healthy, happy, and writing during 2010.
I‘ve been sitting here staring at Huffington Post’s photo slideshow. It’s called “12 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade” and it’s funny in that way that makes you laugh and shake your head just before you cry.
Many of these took me by surprise – I guess I’m such a geezer that I missed out on some kind of sea-change. Yes, I received a Googlewave invitation about a month ago, and no I haven’t clicked on the link yet. You can’t expect much from a gal who collects manual typewriters anyway, so that should give me a pass.
Just so you’ll be In The Know, here are the twelve things that are suddenly obsolete in the past ten years:
1. classified ads in newspapers
2. dial-up internet
3. encyclopedias
4. CDs
5. landline phones
6. film and film cameras
7. Yellow Pages and address books
8. catalogs
9. fax machines
10. wires
11. calling people on a phone
12. hand-written letters
Are you kidding me? I still have (or do) at least nine things from that list. To be honest, the daily business of our university would come to a halt if the fax machine went down, so it’s not just me.
I started thinking a bit on the whole idea and it only gets worse. I have a whole gaggle of obsolete skills – many of which cost me good tuition money to learn. I can take shorthand, queue up records for radio, edit sound tape with a cutter and – um – tape. I can drive a stick-shift. I can operate both a film projector and a slide projector, and – stand back – I know how to lay out an entire newspaper using wax, Exacto knives, and a light board.
None of these skills mean anything anymore, but I can understand that. It’s been quite a few years since technology shoved it’s wide shoulders to the front of the line. I always hated shorthand anyway. That’s not the problem.
The problem is speed. My music has gone from record, to reel-to-reel, to 8-track, to cassette, to CD, to digital in an instant. I’ve bought The White Album six times. If we can lose landline phones and speaking to another voice over them in only ten years, what’s next?
Some of these may pass by without much notice, but there are at least two generations of Southern women who’ll have to die before the hand-written thank you note does. Just sayin’.
Santa came and paper flew. We’ve been dodging power-hits from the T-Ball set-up for two days now. We’ve built and trashed a few dozen block buildings, put together puzzles, colored with fat crayons so frantically that we’ve got to make another ticky-tack run tomorrow so we can show these beauties off properly.
And there are vehicles – trucks, cars, fire engines, tractors – all with appropriate sounds. The ladies in the house are finding all this varoom varoom business a tad mysterious, but it seems mighty important to The Perfect Grandson. He speaks “race car” more fluently than we do.
It snowed here for Christmas, although only for about half an hour and only between midnight and one o’clock. It didn’t stick and it didn’t stay, but I saw it blowing sideways at the streetlamps and it was a lovely gift. It rained for a week before the snow, devastating and stranding most of the state in floodwaters that have only just today begun to recede.
We had love and food and presents and family. With the flooding and events more dreadful, there are others who did not, so I’m grateful. There are always little miracles even in the worst of times.
The Perfect Grandson swears he saw a reindeer in our front yard.
“Sugar, where did you see the deer?”
“Wight dere.” He pointed at the postcard of grass that is our front yard.
“What was he doing out there?”
“Eatin gwass. Wet’s go, MiMi. I fina deer.”
We bundled up against the cold and searched for it high and low. We live in the middle of town, but it’s not unlikely there was a confused deer wandering the streets. Around here, things like that can happen. But what he saw was no deer – The Perfect Grandson says he saw a reindeer. And I believe him.
The last essay (for now) is graded. National Novel Writing Month is a sweet flicker in the rear-view mirror. Final exams begin on Tuesday. Somebody pour me a drink.
My brains are scrambled and my eyesight is shot. I’ve eaten unhealthy food from bags out of machines for too long and haven’t had a minute to attend to this poor blog. I’ve got four days to regroup and come out swinging, all my faculties in place and such.
I’m having a little sushi tomorrow and a long walk. I might even scare some of the dust off of this desk and become human again. That’s the plan, anyway.
Oh, I have so many stories to tell you guys. You just don’t know.
I‘m never so inarticulate as I am in the final days of NaNoWriMo. All my words are used up. Near the end, characters and scenes take up all the room in my brain, jettisoning important functions like remembering to take out the trash or the words to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
I wrote the final scene last night. Not the last scene, but the one I’d been saving as a word count present for the end. Writing out of order makes me happy and provides an interesting jigsaw-puzzle-rewrite.
My God. Rewrite. I’ll think about that tomorrow.
At any rate, I finished the scene, checked the word count, copied and pasted that bad-boy into the NaNo verifier, and TA-DA: 52,596. It’s a funny thing, finishing this 50k challenge. When it’s over you want to go tell everyone you know that you’ve climbed the mountain, seen the future, won the lottery, invented Velcro. It’s an incredible feeling.
But you’ve used up all your words and can’t say anything coherent. The characters in your head begin giving each other awkward, blank looks. It’s that wobbly moment at the end of a carnival ride when you have to remember how to unfasten the belt and rediscover your land-legs. You begin thinking in second-person and have no idea why.
As a favor to everyone, I’m going to find a cup of coffee and take the day to reorient.
No Telling 