Word of the Day 2009

For Christmas last year, I was given a 2009 "Word of the Day" calendar. Here are the ones I saved. The words I loved, the ones I want to use, the brilliant fibers that I wish to weave into narratives and conversations that will only benefit from their effervescent presence.

Wednesday, December 30
coup de grace
(n.) A deathblow or death shot administered to end the suffering of one mortally wounded; a decisive finishing blow, act, or event

Wednesday, October 14
fulcrum
(n.) the support about which a lever turns; the one that supplies capability for action

Tuesday, October 6
multifarious
(adj) having or occurring in great variety; diverse

Saturday, September 19
fruition
(n.) the pleasurable use or possession; enjoyment; the state of bearing fruit; a realization or accomplishment

Wednesday, August 19
omphalos
(n.) a central point; hub or focal point

Tuesday, August 11
avoirdupois
(n.) weight or heaviness; especially personal weight

Wednesday, July 22
kangaroo court
(n.) a court or an illegal self-appointed tribunal characterized by irresponsible, perverted, or irregular procedures

Monday, June 22
rhadamanthine
(adj.) rigorously strict or just

Sunday, June 14
confrere
(n.) a colleague or comrade

Sunday, November 15
divagate
(v.) to wander or stray from a course or subject; diverge or digress

Thursday, September 10
syncretism
(n.) the combination of different forms of belief or practice; the fusions of two or more originally different inflectional forms

Friday, December 18
nimiety
(n.) excess or redundancy

Thursday, November 12
sprachgefuhl
(n.) an intuitive sense of what is linguistically appropriate

Most Disturbing Film. Ever.

I totally thought Coraline was a kid's movie.

Nightmares.

Dreams

Sept 19
Dream- hit on the head. Unconscious. TRYING TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THINGS.

Sept 20
Dream- pregnant with twins and about to give birth; unmarried and single
Analysis from online dream dictionary: Often represents new growth in your life. Your creation or creative potential is trying to get your attention. New event about to take place, a new creation or rebirth of yourself.


Sept 29
Dream- got a new job working for a political event planner. Dominant theme- dogs. Weird.

You Must Somehow Work On That

Do not expend too much courage or time to clarify your position to others. I know your career is difficult and I anticipated your complaint and knew it would come. Now that it has come, I cannot reassure you.
I can only advise you to think seriously about this: Are not all careers the same, filled with demands and people filled with animosity toward the individual, at the same time absorbing the hatred of those who have silently and sullenly adapted to dull duty?
The situation that you are now obligated to tolerate is not burdened any heavier with conventions, prejudices, and errors than any other situation. If there are some who outwardly give the impression of granting more freedom, know that there really exists none that is related to the important things that make up real life.
The individual person who senses his aloneness, and only he, is like a thing subject to the deep laws, the cosmic laws.
If a person goes out into the dawn or gazes out into the evening filled with happenings, if he senses what happens there, then all situations fall away from him as from someone dead, even though he stands in the midst of life.
You must realize that you would have felt the same way in any existing career now.
[...] It is the same everywhere, but that is not a reason for fear or sadness.
If there seems to be no communication between you and the people around you, try to draw close to those things that will not ever leave you.
The nights are still there and the winds that roam through the trees and over many lands.
Amidst things and among animals are happenings in which you can participate.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters To A Young Poet: The Possibility of Being"

Happy Weekend!

It's been a three-mimosa brunch over here, and I'm about to go get a pedicure with Whack. However it is you're spending your weekend, I give you this gift to swift enjoyment:

Watch and learn.

You're welcome.

As We Are

(Canada, August 2001.)

We don't see things as they are.
We see things as we are.

-Anais Nin

Had The Service Actually Been Bad...

...I would have understood. This was unparalleled inexplicable...made all the more puzzling by the fact that they:
a) changed their order multiple times, to which I politely acquiesced;
b) left a 15% tip
and
c) snuck out the back door.

I'm too tired to be offended.
PS: I should submit this shit.

"Haiti" and What We Can Learn From Katrina

(photo- Katyn Monument, Harbor East, Baltimore. May 2008.)

"Choosing the humanistic approach to other people’s misery brings certain obligations. The first is humanitarian: the generous response of ordinary Americans, along with the quick dispatch of troops and supplies by the U.S. government, met this responsibility, though it couldn’t answer the overwhelming needs of people in Haiti. But beyond rescue and relief lies the harder task of figuring out what the United States and other countries can and ought to do for Haiti over the long term, and what Haiti is capable of doing for itself." - "Suffering," George Packer, The New Yorker, Jan 25 2010

This March, I am headed to New Orleans for a week to volunteer for a Habitat project that's building a community of homes along a devastated stretch of land by the river. The decision process in my choosing to embark on this mission came in equal parts sudden and prolonged.

The prolonged aspect was this: for the past several years, I've been at odds with myself and my place in this world. I've waxed poetical on this blog (often injecting narcissistic ruins and self-deprecating moments of doubt) about the process and, from a standpoint although not quite yet fully outside of it but clearly on the other side of something, I realized that all of this soul-searching and circular thinking was yielding....nothing. Was it wasted? Certainly not. Was it necessary? Of course. Was it productive? Depends on how you measure. But was it moving forward? Not anymore.

The realization that inaction is a form of action was no longer working culminated in a moment where I realized how very small I am, how very large the world is, and how very interconnected we are. All of this rationalizing and theorizing brought me to the idea that I should take all of this excess "I don't know what to do with myself" energy and put it to good use. And so, I decided to volunteer, to do something big, to plan and execute some sort of project that would, in some way, directly help others.

Whenever you commit yourself to something, it seems that doors open. Within the week of my decision to attempt to find some outlet for this newly-found goal, an email found its way to me via various outlets seeking volunteers for a Habitat trip to New Orleans. I met with the organizer of the trip a week later and signed the paperwork.

Once I started doing research, I became more and more fully committed to the idea of the RHINO project (Rebuilding Hope In New Orleans.) The thing with great world crises (think Katrina, the tsunami, etc.) is that there is a great momentum at the onset to help. Media outlets are on the scene, showing us graphic images of people in desperate need. We reach out to our fellow human beings, we give everything we are able, and we rush in to help in the moment of crisis.

But this is problematic because, like anything with a great initial momentum, at some point it falters if not fueled. And the state of New Orleans and the destruction of Katrina are still dire and present. However one might argue about the initial lack of help and response, it was certainly on the nation's radar through much of 2005-2006 and initiatives to help gradually snowballed as the tense political scene danced around trying to downplay the damage while putting as much emphasis as possible on the supposed outpouring of help.

But now, so many years later, is when the desperation reaches its apex. Funds are running dry and being redirected towards newer, more vogue causes. When people think to donate money, time, or other resources, Katrina is slowly but surely falling off the map. And the consequences? The levies, which were so far below code before the hurricanes, would not be able to withstand another hit. Not because people "shouldn't be living in lowland areas near rivers," as it's been argued, but because the need for stringent rebuilding procedures and uncorrupted contractors, and local politicians with an eye on the future of New Orleans as a thriving and healthy city as opposed to one hand in the pocket all require long-term help and care. Once the immediate sick and injured have been tended to, once all of the victims have a bed to sleep in and meals to count on, that's where the real work starts.

It will be the same with Haiti. One of the world's poorest countries cannot come back from devastation like this without long-term planning and continuing efforts. Five, six, seven years from now when the dead have been buried, what will we be doing to assist? How can we help pull this country up from the rubble, invest in it, and rebuild it so that it actually stands a chance of surviving anything else the universe might throw at it?

Buzz words and catch phrases and celebrity involvement put crises in vogue. Jennifer Lopez answers phones at a donations center while Wyclef Jean tearfully begs for donations for his home country. They get involved, but where will they be when the bigger questions need to be answered? When corrupt politicians and a history of desperate poverty prove to be the true ruin of Haiti?

And so, I pack up my jeans with the holes in the knees and hope that they'll have a hammer on-site (because you can't fly with jack shit these days, even in checked luggage) and I'm heading down to NOLA to put my money where my mouth is, five years after the initial fact. And five years from now, maybe I'll find some initiative in Haiti to join.

Hope and help aren't just about initial reactions. It's about long-term dedication. It's about a commitment to being there, long after the dust has literally and figuratively settled.

Things I Am Currently Adoring

1. Up in the Air. How very apt, expressive, and bittersweetly not surprising. I was OK with the non-surprises, however, because the writing was perfectly in tune. There wasn't a wrong note in the dialogue.

2. Avatar. Because I've been meaning to watch Pocahontas again. No, but seriously- it's worth the press it's getting for sheer spectacle. The story is predictable, the dialogue lame, but call me a sucker for a show pony when it comes to graphics and imaginative animation.

3. Going to see The Lovely Bones tomorrow night with Whack, Jackal and Nickle. I'm intrigued by what I've seen on previews so far, because it's quite an intellectual and imaginative separation from what I pictured while reading the book. As an avid fan of watching films made from books, I feel this could only work in its favor. Everyone knows that the film will never be the book (no matter how many times the Harry Potter or Twilight empires attempt), and I am fully supportive of the two being able to stand alone as substantial artistic pieces. I don't mind if the movie isn't like the book, or vice versa, if they're both compelling works.
4. My new Neti pot. I've long been a promoter of homeopathic means of healing and so, this winter, I'm putting my money where my nasal passages are and attempting to ward off the inevitable sinus infection that comes around every winter for me. The constant flux of temperature and humidity in February and March never fails to leave me without at least two weeks of complete misery, usually culminating in having to go to the doctor and weep for antibiotics, and this year I'm starting early in hopes of dodging it. We'll see. My first experience was weirdly satisfying and somehow quite cleansing, although this could be placebo effect of proactivity which a lot of homeopathy sometimes seems to be. And in order to make the whole thing sound more appealing, I can start saying that I've begun a practice of Jala-neti, which sounds so much more worldly and disciplined.


5. Reading. Unless I'm on vacation in the summer, I always read more in winter. It's cold, the blaring noise of the TV bothers me after awhile, and all I want to do is hunker down under a blanket with a good Malbec and demolish a pile of books. Currently reading/finishing: The Dive from Clausen's Pier and Revolutionary Road, and then about to start Waiter Rant and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Children

We were such children, then. Even more so than we are now.
We sat on a bench in the courtyard next to a dorm where only juniors and seniors lived, and we felt important. As though our very proximity to maturity would somehow elicit understanding and unlock answers.
We were drinking Zima then. That or Boone's Farm. Whatever we could con an upperclassmen into buying for us from the gas station out on Route 13. We dropped candy into our bottles; Skittles, Jolly Ranchers, anything that would turn the liquid some obnoxiously bright color and leave our tongues stained with red, purple, or green. At the end of each bottle, the lump of melted candy would rattle around if it hadn't dissipated altogether. It never occurred to us to wonder that whatever chemical reaction was taking place between the malt liqour and the candy might be having a similar effect on us.
The end of her cigarette left light trails in the air like fireflies. I can't remember specifically what we were talking about, only that it felt terribly important at the time and that I would have told her anything. After a few years, we would get into an argument over something one of us thought the other had said and never speak again. We didn't know enough then to know that some friendships are transitory; that not every person with whom you find a connection in college will be in your life forever. At the time, we were still fixated on ensuring that these were the best moments of our lives and, as such, that we were somehow forging lifelong bonds and connections.
I remember now- we were discussing whether or not she should break up with her boyfriend who went to a different school. It was still in the first semester of freshman year, when we thought long-distance relationships were possible. They'd been high school sweethearts. Life still seemed so small but, day by day, we were cracking it open further and further and discovering that the depths and heights were unfathomable. High school boyfriends didn't fit into this ever-expanding world.
We were sitting close enough between the dorms that she had her portable telephone in her lap, waiting for him to call. Through experimentation, we'd discovered that this bench was still close enough to her open window that she could get reception. This was in the days before cell phones, when proximity to a landline was still a vital cog in the social machinery. Especially for long-distance college relationships.
If we sat on this bench, we were halfway between her room and the upperclass dorm. Still within telephone distance of her high school sweetheart but close enough to the future to be straddling both worlds.
It was still warm then, early fall, and humid. It was always humid because the ocean thumped less than thirty miles away and, on the other side of the things, the vast bay created a pocket of moisture-laden air that settled over our small college town and never seemed to dissapate. Our skin felt cool and damp, the bottles chilling our hands, the smoke from her cigarette hanging in the last of the summer swelter in the dark of the evening.
Everything seemed so important. The bricks, the wood of the bench, the shoes I was wearing. Everything seemed vital and necessary.
"Should I break up with him?" she asked. It was a rhetorical question. She wouldn't. And then, one day, years later, she would. And, in the process, discover a pull to women. But, for the time being, it was the most important matter on our plates, and we attacked the problem with a vengeance. We sat on the bench, determined to hammer it out, drinking our way through the six pack of cheap malt liquor and shaking our heads as though this problem hefted with it the weight of the world.