Nonsense Verse

8 things

At the prompting of my friend Paul I shall now take part in a meme, and only because it's Paul, and he's adorable and charming and British, and looks just about the same now as he did when he was 10 years old. (And here is where I ought to note that I'd love to reveal my 10-year-old self for all the Internets to see, if only my photographs and scanner weren't being held hostage in a climate-controlled storage facility in the Bronx. But I will say for the record that I look nothing like my 10-year-old self, which is probably unfortunate. I was damn cute back then.)

I shall also crib (partly, not entirely) from Paul's list of topics, because Paul's random choices are good enough for me. And no one said it was against the rules. But to make up for it, I'll go into a little more detail:

1. If my father hadn't decreed that my name was to be Jennifer, I would now probably answer to Megan or Emily, my mother's top choices.

2. The longest train journey I ever took was 24 hours from San Francisco to Seattle, in the summer of 1991. That was two or three hours longer than the ride was supposed to take. For some reason it was very slow going in the forested region between northern Oregon and southern Washington; we stopped and started in the middle of nowhere, sometimes in the darkness of a mountain tunnel. (To amuse myself I played that game where you try to hold your breath all the way through the tunnel — a potentially dodgy game, as it turned out.) I took the trip with my mother, who was along to help settle me in for a summer of dancing at the Pacific Northwest Ballet school. To kill time on the train, we played lots and lots of cards: posoy dos (Filipino poker), crazy eights, go fish, blackjack.

3. In terms of ice cream, I prefer cones to cups, and waffle cones to any other kind of cone (crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, and for goodness' sake, they hold so much ice cream!). I am equally enamored of the tartest limone gelato and the sinfully salty-sweet Chubby Hubby. I could eat a whole pint in one sitting, but then I'd hate myself for days and most likely refuse to go out in public.

4. I have arachnophobia, entomophobia and an irrational fear of driving (which is apparently a form of agoraphobia). I'm also mildly acrophobic, which is extremely annoying because I love hiking, and while I'm unstoppable in the "up" direction, this hang-up makes me not so great on the "down" side. (If only someone could retrieve me from a summit by helicopter, I'd be scaling mountains all the time.)

5. I can speak snippets of Spanish and French. I can count in German. I know how to say "cheers" in half a dozen languages; "delicious," "kiss" and "bottom" (as in buttocks, tush, booty) in Portuguese; and only one word of Tagalog: "salamat," which means thank you. I'm most often mistaken for a Spanish speaker, usually at restaurants or salsa clubs, and it is those times when I most rue the fact that (a) I didn't retain more from the Spanish I and II classes I took at community college, and (b) I didn't have the wherewithal to stay for extended periods in Puerto Vallarta or Mérida or Costa Rica or Tarragona when I happened to be passing through. C'est la vie.

6. For a few weeks in 1989 I had 14 very stubborn blisters on my feet — seven on the left, seven on the right — because of an ill-fitting pair of Schachtner pointe shoes. And yet I danced on, through many nights of pointe class and variations class and pas de deux. Then I switched to Blochs with a three-quarter sole (right), and my tootsies were saved.

7. I'm really tired of people asking me, upon first acquaintance, what I do for a living. I know it's a standard line of inquiry, but honestly, wouldn't you rather know something else? My favorite place to run away for a weekend, say? Or my favorite cocktail? And then, perhaps after that cocktail, my favorite author/composer/dessert/sexual position?* Wouldn't that be way more interesting?

8. I always thought I'd live in New York, at least for a little while. Now that I'm here, I am enjoying it — and yet, though I may be here for quite some time, I know it won't be forever. There are too many other enchanting places in the world.

So there! And now, I gather that it's my turn to tag someone. How about ... Aimee and John.

* I exaggerate here, but you get the gist.

Conversations one has at work

"So, we can't use 'knockers.'"

"'Knockers'? Which piece was that in?"

"[Blah, blah's.] Is it all right to just go with 'breasts'?"

"Breasts. Hm. How about 'gazungas'?"

"If you can tell me how to spell 'gazungas,' I'll ask."

On the L

After swing dancing I'm sweaty and disgusting and don't want anyone to look at me, and so on the L train across town, I'm focused intently on my reading. It's an essay by Chinua Achebe, for class, and on this night, I'm cheating. I'm not supposed to be reading it yet, but this packet of photocopied literature is the only thing I've got in my bag, and I have to keep my eyes focused on something, lest eye contact be made and an unwanted Interaction With Strange Someone commence. At Sixth Avenue a bunch of bodies file on. One presses up against the armrest to my right. Out of my peripheral vision I see it's a slender body with tight jeans. I keep reading, but it's hard to concentrate. I feel a hovering presence. I raise my eyes from the page for a quick second, then turn them back down, when the woman attached to the leg speaks.

"You don't mind if I read, do you?" I look up. She's pretty and blonde and drunk and Irish, unless she only sounds Irish because she's very drunk.

"Sure, go ahead," I say, thinking, Well, if you put it that way, I don't have much of an out, do I.

I read the next half of the page without really knowing what I've read. Union Square. Third Avenue. I hit the bottom of the page and want to turn it, to let my eyes skim over new words. But I don't know if the girl is ready. Just flipping it would be rude, right? Or would it be weirder to ask her, since, after all, we've only just met, and she has, after all, stuck her head into my business without any apparent thought as to my wishes. Mustn't grumble. One more stop and I'll be rid of her.

We approach First Avenue and I look up. "This is my stop."

"Is that for school?" she asks.

"Yeah."

"Well good luck with that," she says, and as I rise she adds, "Just don't believe everything you read!"

What a thing to say. The piece of text she would have read was not overtly political, nothing to be believed or disbelieved. ("I have always been fond of stories and intrigued by language — first Igbo, spoken with such eloquence by the old men of the village, and later English, which I began to learn at about the age of eight.") I look at her perplexedly. "I know." But I wonder: What would make her think I didn't? And this is the question that consumes me as I walk the final ten minutes home, and as I shower and change and sit and type and continue, now, to wonder. Whereas Irish, I'm sure, forgot me and Chinua Achebe as soon as I was out of her sight. "Don't believe everything you read." I guess in the end it need only be taken at face value — the sage if fuzzy advice of a nosy, drunken Irishwoman bound for Williamsburg.

I do hand it to the mightly caterpillar. I do.

Those friends who've been following the never-ending saga of my New York condo non-closing (to recap: why of course the building will be done in March — just kidding!; closing will happen by end of May — just kidding!; closing is scheduled for June 29 — just kidding!; we're postponing it a few days to July 2 — just kidding!; we've confirmed a closing date of July 27 — just kidding!; we're looking now at August 20 — just kidding!), and who have heard all about my provisional living arrangements (which were supposed to be for three months, tops, but have stretched to six+ months, and yes, my hosts are the Saintliest of Saints), may be amused by my Vanity Fair horoscope this month:

You've got to hand it to the mighty caterpillar. Now that your ruling planet has completed its passage through your solar 8th house, you should be feeling empathy for any creature that has to remain encased in a coffin-like shell it has already outgrown while waiting patiently for a sign that it is time to break out. Claustrophobia and a screaming case of death anxiety aside, you've got to be pretty damned happy that you can finally spread your wings and fly away.

Of course I don't really believe in such things, but applied to the Condo Non-Closing Hell, which has indeed resulted in claustrophobia and a screaming sense of anxiety of various kinds, this makes oh so much sense.

Meanwhile, in another case of the stars aligning strangely yet happily, I must give a shout-out to the Canadian artist Marc Bell, whose "Shrimpy and Paul and Friends" provided the inspiration for a blog-post title some months back ("The Goose Is Greedy"), and who I'm tickled to say wrote me a very brief but utterly delightful e-mail recently, in an Internet-style reach-out-and-touch-you moment. Hi, Marc! Verily this pitiful blog shall be forever and eternally grateful to thee and thine. Yay.

Virtuosity

In the two weeks I was in Europe I carried around one book: Rabbit Angstrom, the Everyman's Library edition of John Updike's great tetralogy. I'm currently in the middle of the third novel, and I'm trying to get through it as quickly as I can, before the fall school semester starts. But I had to interrupt my reading to share just one passage. There are many instances of virtuosity to be found throughout these books — which has made reading quickly even harder going, since so often I find myself wanting to go back and read again — but this may be the first sentence I read where I had to put the book down, step away from it, throw up my hands and just marvel: How did he do that?

First, back up a tad: sentence. Now look below — this indented bit looks awfully long, does it not? In fact, it's more than 200 words long, long enough to require numerous breaths, and mental pauses, to absorb all that's happening and how it links up so seamlessly with what has come before, not only within this single sentence but within the past 843 pages. I'm not often a fan of never-ending sentences; so few authors can pull them off gracefully, and even when they do, the reader is often left wondering, All right, that was lovely, but — was it necessary? Here, though, at this major turning point in the characters' lives, it works. Updike wraps us in the moment and reminds us of the inside jokes and the many years of joy and pain and bitterness, and shows us the beauty and tragedy of the passage of time, just as his overwhelmed protagonist must have experienced it. (For those who haven’t read the Rabbit books, a little primer: Harry, aka Rabbit, is our antihero; Nellie is Nelson, his son, whom we first met when he was a toddler; and Mim, Harry's sister, we've also watched age through Rabbit's eyes, from 19-year-old ingénue to — well, you'll get the picture. Read it slowly:

And outside, when it is done, the ring given, the vows taken in the shaky young voices under the towering Easter-colored window of Christ's space shot and the Lord's Prayer mumbled through and the pale couple turned from the requisite kiss (poor Nellie, couldn't he be just another inch taller?) to face as now legally and mystically one the little throng of their blood, their tribe, outside in the sickly afternoon, clouds having come with the breeze that flows toward evening, the ridiculous tears dried in long stains on Harry's face, then Mim comes into his arms again, a sisterly embrace, all sorts of family grief since the days he held her little hand implied, the future has come upon them darkly, his sole seed married, marriage that daily doom which she may never know; lean and crinkly in his arms she is getting to be a spinster, even a hooker can be a spinster, think of all she's had to swallow all these years, his baby sister, crying in imitation of his own tears, out here where the air quickly dries them, and the after-church smiles of the others flicker about them like butterflies born to live a day.

When in Rome...

Rome, originally uploaded by jenwahhh!.

...you might see something like this. More commentary and ruminations to come, post-jet-lag.

UPDATE: Check out what my pal Dan did to this photo. It's like a painting! Ah, Photoshop...

Rated PG-13 for crude language

I was flipping through the dictionary yesterday to look up the word "shoehorn," to determine whether it was one word or hyphenated when used as a verb (one word, according to Webster's New World College, Fourth Edition). And as my eyes skimmed the pages — set/settle, shaman/shard, shellfire/shield — one set of guidewords stopped my progress:

shinny/shitkicker

Of course Bad Words are in the dictionary (that's right, kids — go nuts!). But two little things surprised me. One was that the dictionary editors didn't mind "shitkicker" appearing in bold type atop the page. But I guess that makes sense when you assume the dictionary's point is not to dictate any kind of vocab-morality. (Having to police the "wraps" in a volume of 1,716 tissue-thin pages might also get tedious pretty darn fast, although then again, by nature, dictionary editors are probably more up to that task than most mortals.)

The second surprising thing popped out when I decided to take a detour from my "shoehorn" quest to learn a little bit about the roots of "shitkicker" — getting lost in a maze of etymological tangents being one of my more favorite pastimes. What I discovered was that while "shit" is labeled downright "vulgar," its partner "shitkicker" — a term of American origin meaning "a poor, rural person, especially one from the South or Southwest; rural or rustic; of or having to do with country music" (!) — gets a mere notation of "slang" (with "somewhat vulgar" tacked to the end of the definition, after the jump).

Fascinating. So does "shit" lose its power when attached to any kind of suffix? In the eyes of the dictionary, apparently so: "shitfaced," "shit list," "shitload" and "shit-eating grin" are all deemed "somewhat vulgar" as opposed to outright "vulgar," the warning to that effect appearing at the end, rather than at the conspicuous beginning, of each definition. Does the dictionary explain itself? Sort of. Here's what it says about the labels in the "Guide to the Dictionary" section at the front:

Slang: The word or meaning is not generally considered standard usage but is used, even by the best speakers and writers, in very informal situations or for creating special effects. People belonging to a certain group, such as teenagers or jazz musicians, often use a particular group of slang terms. [NV aside: There's so much to say about the examples chosen for that second sentence, I don't even know where to start.]

Vulgar: The word or meaning is regarded by many people as being too crude, coarse, or unrefined to be suitable for use in many social situations.

So, to recap: "shit," not acceptable in mixed company; "shitkicker," not standard, but hey, some of the best speakers and writers may beg to differ!

I don't know. If I were tossing back a few with a bunch of country music fans at Joe's Bar and said "shit"  (vulgar) because I fell off my barstool while getting a little too rambunctious over Willie Nelson singing "Crazy," my pals probably wouldn't be offended. But if I then reeled around and said, "Hey, stop teasing me you bunch o' worthless shitkickers!" (slang), I could see winding up with a pool cue to the head.

The moral of the story: As ever, it all depends on context.

And speaking of context, all this "shit" talk reminds me of a childhood tale:

One day, a little girl — she was 4 at the time, or maybe she was 7 — walked up to her mother with an important question. This little girl was very inquisitive about words, and she'd recently heard one that her friends had refused to define. And so she went to her mother, because that was always the best way to get to the bottom of such things.
"Mommy?" she said.
"Yes, dear," the mother replied.
"I have a question," the little girl said.
"O.K., go ahead."
"What does 'shit' mean?"
And the mother turned bright red and grabbed the little girl by the arm and said, "Who told you that word? Don't you ever use that word again!"
"O.K., Mommy," the girl said. She promised never to use the word, except that there was one problem — she still didn't know what it meant. And so, she solved the problem the second-best way she knew how: She went to the dictionary.

Epilogue: Her promise to cease using the word stuck for quite a few years. She slipped and used it only occasionally, usually in the context of tripping and falling down (and it's quite remarkable that she didn't use the term more often, come to think of it, because her tripping and falling was not exactly an unusual occurrence). Then, alas, she became involved in journalism — and the promise was rendered, as the dictionary might put it, Obs. And so, dear readers, we come full circle, to the post you just read today. The End.

x.o.x. to Joey Cheek

I already had a great big crush on Joey Cheek for his speed-skating prowess and his evident good-naturedness and his not-so-bad taste in music (as revealed by his iTunes Celebrity Playlist), and for introducing me (through said list) to the delectable sounds of Andrew Bird — and, O.K., for his super-cuteness. But now I have an even bigger crush on him because of what he's been doing with his time and semi-fame since his twin Olympic victories. As suggested by the above article, he's apparently not famous enough — yet — to get most people to pay attention, but perhaps that will change. (Yes, I have my optimistic pants on today.)

Editing: Better than sex?

This Salon article by Gary Kamiya will provide answers to those of you who've said to me, "O.K., you're an editor -- but what is it that you do?"

It not only demystifies the process, but also makes a fine argument in favor of editing in the age of blogs. Enjoy.

Quote of the day 07.19

From my Garner's Usage Tip of the Day:

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
-- Thomas Mann

So that's my problem. It's not that I'm not a writer, or can't write. It's that I'm a writer, and I'm just having a really hard time. (Soon to be the excuse of every kid who hasn't turned in that essay on time.)