On Happy Words

One of the things that makes me happiest is words.  Especially ones written down or oddly juxtaposed or particularly mellifluous or having a very specific meaning.  In light of this, a few word-based things that make me happy:

Word Origins: I am a sucker for etymologies, especially the shocking number of words (even really short ones) that have something to do with Latin, and the sense of joy I get out of seeing words that almost completely change in meaning from the Old English to present.  Hence: The Online Etymology Dictionary.

(And for words you think you know how to spell, say, or use, the ever-popular Dictionary.com with its wonderful Word of the Day and the unjustly overlooked Merriam-Webster Trend Watch, which keeps tracks of unusual spikes in word search frequency and links these spikes to media occurrances.)

Journals: I am also a sucker for really nice blank books, and for writing exercises.  I don't do nearly enough daily, recreational, non-project-related writing and it makes me a wee bit sad.  But perhaps over the summer I will practice using some of these ideas: Bernadette Mayer's collected suggestions for journaling,  dream journals (to enhance the super-awesome but probably spurious practice of lucid dreaming, where you can consciously control what you dream about and thus have awesome adventures every night -- except I'd probably lucid-dream about sitting quietly by the fire with a cup of tea and a book....)  And LISTS.  I love making lists of strange things.  Like these people.

Fictitious Band Names:  I love how strange words when put together can instantly make you think of the kind of band that pick such a weird phrase as a title.  Some of the ones I've come up with on my lonesome include Crafty Arachnid, Pink Bunny Suicide Zone, and It Pours Hot Water.  I'm also a fan of turning verbs or adjectives into plural nouns and tacking "the" in front of it -- both classic and cutting-edge.  So: The Shines, the Leaps, the Sketches, the Throws, the Trues, the Alls, the Zaps.  Could get super-meta and be called The Thes.

Also, one particularly memorable philosophy class yielded the following (all of which sound like pretenious shoegazing Canadian alt, to me, at least, maybe with a little socially-conscious riot grrrl thrown in.)
Beaver Soul
Lone Orca
Ugly Talentless Women
Come On Neanderthal

I really wish a few of these existed so I could be fans of them.

Finally, a word on fonts:  I hate and despise Helvetica, Arial and Courier.  For a long time I've preferred to stick to my sweet and responsive Times New Roman, but lately Georgia has been in the process of seducting seducing me with its pleasing old-timey chunkiness.  It's like the difference between a size 2 model dressed in ubermodern clothes, and the quirky pleasure of a full-figured specimen in a bustle.  For me, something as simple as paying attention to what fonts I prefer is helpful in the process of determining and owning my aesthetic tendancies.

Hugs and kisses, dahlinks.

On Negative Pleasures and Food

Things I like:

1) Food that's good for you being good: especially in the spring, there are times when nothing will satisfy one but mixed greens well-tossed in a balsamic vinaigrette with whole-wheat bread.  There are times a person craves a lovely slab of wild salmon, grilled with no other marinade than olive oil and black pepper.  There are times the yearning for sauteed cherry tomatoes from one's garden, or massive quantities of sweet raspberries, or a nice cup of black loose-leaf tea nearly overcomes one.

At these times we get the double delight of both enjoying what we want, and being able to smugly meditate upon all the good these omega-threes and antioxidants are doing our arteries.  This is why I like it when food that is good for you is made well enough that it tastes good too.

2) Making bad foods worse:
The corollary to this is that sometimes, instead of lovely tender mixed greens, one must contend with thick, slimy, chewy slabs of cafeteria spinach.  On days like these I look at the salad bar and think, "There's no way I'm gonna be able to get those nutrients down without a slathering of full-fat Thousand Island dressing."

In these cases, I allow questions of nutrition to outweigh questions of taste.  Ingesting sufficient Vitamin A is more important than avoiding saturated fats, artificial coloring, or disgusting food.  Some days you must simply forget about taste and eat the dang salad with gobbets of silky fat drizzled judiciously on top.

3) Not Being a Hipster:
Because sometimes I try to enjoy my divinely-given ability to express myself sartorially, because my musical tastes are growing both increasingly obscure, and, I fear, correspondingly pretentious, and because I use "I enjoy it ironically" as my excuse for all of my baser preferences (eg, Lady Gaga), I have recently worried I might be in danger of accidentally becoming hipster.

Now, as Cracked.com and LATFH (both of which will probably offend some of my readers) explain, no one wants to be a hipster.  Yet there seem to be so many of them.  Surely not all are deliberate hipsters?  Surely some were just well-meaning souls who were trapped by their own self-referential individualism?

Were my worries justified?  According to this quiz, and this one, no.  I am temporarily safe.

Should I ever find myself an accidental hipster, then, I can just say that I was into hipsters before they were big, or that, yeah, sure, I'm into hipsters for the irony.

Things I Don't Like vol. I

All right.  We knew this was coming.  Occasionally, instead of talking about stuff I like, I'm going to have to rant against things I don't like.  I'll try to keep this brief.

1) Leggings as pants/jeggings.  There's a classy way to wear leggings (under long shirts/short skirts).  Then there's wearing them to the gym, which, okay, I can kind of see that.  Then there's sweatshirt-leggings-uggs look that has been too justly abused elsewhere for me to feel justified in adding my own comments, beyond saying that I can't ever understand why someone would want to wake up in the morning and disguise their God-given charm and beauty by actively making themselves hideous.

Then there's jeggings. 

Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I have never seen jeggings worn well.  They always look tawdry.  Forget for a moment your concerns about how painfully unflattering they are on anyone who's not a size negative 2.  Neither is my revulsion a question of the immodesty of their clinging powers.  I'm all about skinny jeans.  Straight, super-skinny, drainpipe, sitting in a bathtub of hot water to get the second-skin fit.  Go for it, honey, you look fab.  But the jegging is, if I understand the term correctly, not quite a jean.  It's not denim, it's not even stretchy denim, it's some sort of elastic-cotton hybrid thing with maybe if you're lucky a zipper and a button.

Here's the problem: they try too hard, and fail too much, to look like they're "actually" jeans.  Instead it just sort of looks like an out-of-work Carnaval body-painter from Brazil got a bit tipsy and coated your legs with jeans-ish paint.

(If you click on that last link I apologize in advance for the damage to your retinas but sadly lack the funds to reimburse you for corrective surgery.)

Ladies: Don't do this to yourself.  Or to me.  Men: I know you're desperate to catch my eye (really, who wouldn't want to get with this?) but DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.

And for even more sartorial "EGADSWHATISTHAT," check out The Pajama Jean.

2) Microsoft Word.

Now, I love Microsoft Word in general.  It enables me to write stuff, and I love writing stuff.  I love the cornucopia of tools at my fingertips, I love the subtleties of the fonts, and I love the white expanse of paper with its gently blinking vertical line, inviting me to pour out my inmost thoughts to the comforting anonymity of my computer.  Some girls have diaries, I have Microsoft Word.

But sometimes it goes too far.

Early on I was vexed by Word's unsought commentary on my work.  We all remember the reign of the hated Clippy, who snidely questioned our abilities to compose business letters without his all-important help.  (Really, what sad soul decided that the best way to comfort and aid frustrated writers was with an anthropomorphized paper clip?  "Well, when I'm having trouble with my writing, I just talk to my favorite paper clip."  "Brilliant, Johnson!  We'll make you VP of Design for this!")  I had to train myself to ignore the red and green lines that showed a total insensitivity to what I was trying to accomplish.  (Sometimes a girl just wants to write "honour" instead of "honor."  Like, say, if she's quoting Claudius's speech from Hamlet.  Stupid Word.)  Worse, when I started writing fiction, my penchant for odd character names and burgeoning attempts at language construction meant I was spending an awful lot of time clicking the "Add to Dictionary" button. 
Now, sure, all this was tedious.  But what's really unforgivable is that Word is now commenting on my style.  It underlines things like "Passive Voice" and "Long Sentence."  Excuse me?  Excuse me?  What exactly is wrong with a long sentence?  How else am I supposed to express the idea of a subjectless action than by using the passive voice?  "Contractions."  Well, so what?  Maybe I'm writing a personal letter.  Maybe I'm experiementing with stream-of-consciousness.  Maybe I'm relating dialogue, you smug didactic software. 

And when you look at Word's suggestions for how you can make the little green line go away, you get eff-all in the way of help.  "Consider revising."  Well, I considered it, and rejected the idea, thanks.  So you can stop passing judgment on my stylistic choices.  No, really.  Stop.

Okay.  To cheer us all up here's Stephen Fry defending our right to use unorthodox English if we feel it's needed.  While I take offense to his implied attack on Lynne Truss, I do think it's very pretty.  And I will continue to boldly split my infinitives regardless of what Word or anyone else says.

Thank you, and good night.

On Sanctifying One's Misery

Watching the Bulldogs lose is causing me great pain.  So I am going to share something that elevates the pain to a higher level.

I have an intense affection for chant, the older the better, and as fond as I am of Gregorian, I recently got reintroduced by the author of the wonderful blog Skookum Veritas (y'all should follow it!) to Old Roman chant.  It makes me happy.  Thus:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFzgfCzfSQg -- freaking awesome.  And kind of jazzy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAxJbqTCr3M -- first half Latin second half Arabic all halves wonderful.

There are very few genres I can listen to while being productive, but Old Roman is one of them.  Additionally it is capable of embodying very well the sense of slow pulverizing mournfulness that fills one's soul when one's favorite basketball team loses horrifically to a man named Jimmer.

In Which I Apologize in Advance and Offer Placatory Gifts

So, being a creative-ish person, I'm trying to establish an aesthetic theory of sorts to guide my own explorations of art.  This flailing leads to many overblown, turgid, and self-indulgent rants, midnight musings, and self-indulgent panegyrics against (among others) Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Paul Sartre, and (depending on how contrary he's being; I turned red and white by turns while reading An Experiment in Criticism) C. S. Lewis.

I'm going to inflict none of this on you, my noble readers.  The purpose of this blog is, then, threefold:
1) To list out and identify things that I enjoy as an aid to the abovementioned efforts
2) To allow likeminded people to enjoy my exaltation of stuff they like, as well as maybe hooking them up with stuff they didn't know they liked, and
3) To give people joy as they laugh at my efforts at expressing my enthusiasms.

Please do give it a look, and feel free to be scathingly criticial, openly dismissive, or embarrassingly effusive, as the mood takes you.

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, then, I offer these first items of things that soothe my irate id's hunger for aesthetic gratification (see title):

This Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFDHUNtTS7k
Most reflective example of a song about a drunken one-night stand I've ever heard. And it's Irish!

This Statue: http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/aug2005/c_chulainn_small.jpg
Cuchulainn, a legendary Irish hero, dying.  He strapped himself to a post so that he would die upright like a proper warrior.  Because he's awesome like that.

This Brewpub: http://www.iceharbor.com/
They brew their own root beer; as a minor I grew quite familiar with it (it's good).  They also serve cheese fries that you would sell your cousin for.  Finally, they're located in what used to be a big industrial railroad building and their decor is fantastic; they really embraced the historicity of the building and made it rugged, gorgeous, and a little bit punky (and smelling gently of beer).  "Industrial chic," as I like to call it.  Not that you can tell from the website, but if you're ever in the neighborhood you should visit it.

Also, drinking is very, very Irish.