dress up

halloween. spoookyyyyy. scary. cobwebs.

gonna dress up tonight. gonna go to a halloween party.

a little nervous. going with a friend to a friend's who i've met but she is formidable. last time i saw her, a gazillion yrs ago, she was pregnant, playing pool in overalls.

chewing gum that reminds me of gatorgum. remember that stuff. it was a fav. a real fav. so was stimrol. remember that stuff. that was good. did they stop making it on account of it was supposed to be for smokers and what with all the smoking bans, they figured the market was desaturating.

marathon is this weekend. that is definitely a favorite thing. a real favorite thing. it makes me cry. tears of joy. thrill of victory tears, though vicarious ones at that.

gonna wear some fish net stockings tonight with my costume. gonna use the word gonna all throughout this post. gonna use it even though it's ugly. remember that song by fishbone, 'u.g.l.y. you ain't got no alibi you're ugly'

gonna get back to work now.

by jorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

why talk of beauty? what could be more beautiful than those heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the slaughter. they did not stop to think, they died instead. then, shall the voice of liberty be mute?

that's all from a poem i once memorized.

and i was thinking, on account of my dislike of the 'impacted' about all this talk of socialism and how obama is a socialist and oooohhh - that's so scary! socialism!

i was reading the closed CNN or maybe a Fox caption at the gym while listening to npr on the ipod and there was some bit from the man who plays joe the plumber yammering about how this is a democracy and we don't want to turn socialist, goddamit! here's my american flag!

except that socialism, as you and i know, is an economic model, not a political one and you can be both democratic and socialist. it's fabulously complicated. too complicated for him to get right.

it makes me sad and angry that our public discourse is not even at elementary school level. it's like nursery skool or daycare.

i got to nap now and have some juice. not in that order.

fav thing, two

impacted.

oh. oh!

people say, quite a lot, 'the downturn has impacted people.'

i prefer my molars to be impacted (well, not really, but you get the point).

it does my heart ill to see such baloney. and such baloney is rampant.

my favorite things

actually, that headline is a lie. this is a post about some things i hate. specifically words.

here's one: brethren.

it's pompous (is pompous pompous? there must be a term for that, a word that represents what the word means)

last night while reading, I came across too many times the word brethren. sometimes writers use the word in jest (another word that rankles sometimes) and sometimes they use it in earnest. really, they should never use it. it's old-fashioned and stilted.

signage

once upon a time i woke up every working day at 2:30 am in order to get to my job that started an hour later writing news for the radio. one early morning, hours before dawn, someone used the word signage and my producer, a man embittered long before his age necessitated it, railed against it. i think now it might be in the dictionary. i am too lazy to check. but i don't know why people use it when the word signs will do. it makes me think the the state of being a sign has been pathologized. signage. it also looks dumb when you see it written.

if memory serves, and oh, how it serves, my older sister used to hate the word adolescence, around the time that she was one (kind of like is pompous pompous?). i don't know, never asked, if she didn't like the way the word sounds (i can kind of understand that, there's something muted and like a dull knife about its pronunciation) or what it stood for.

looks can kill

i am currently in the midwest, in wisconsin, and was watching some tv and i saw while watching some political item that sarah palin has had a makeover, wearing her hair down like rachel from friends, wearing high leather boots, generally restyled in haute. and then a campaign ad came on for mccain, and the picture of him in the ad must have been from at least 10 years ago, fewer wrinkles, less pinched. they are courting voters and trying to make themselves look all purty. but palin, in particular, horrifies me because she is sexying herself up to appeal to male voters, it is clear. and there is nothing wrong with having an attractive politician. there is something wrong when that politician has nothing to offer and she has not proven herself worthy of any real discourse on matters of importance. anyways, that's it. i spent today doing not much - writing a book review, then checking email, then playing monopoly, then playing mastermind, then helping my nephew with some music lesson stuff, then, finally, as the day waned i went outside. that is what this day off amounted to. it was grand.

oh! the topography of it all!

you know those dixon-ticonderoga pencils that we used to love as school children, but every now and then the green or red eraser would fall out (sometimes they bizarrely seemed to dry up and therefore fall out) and all you'd be left with at the end of the pencil was that circular copper eraser holder? imagine someone took that empty copper holder and tried to bore a hole into the roof of your mouth with it.

then pretend someone took a very thin tiny splinter of wood and pushed into the tip of your tongue so that you were always conscious of the tip of your tongue when you talked or ate or had a cup of tea. another way to describe that feeling is that there are small poppy seeds stuck into your tongues crevices and no matter what, you cannot dislodge them. you want nothing more than to squeeze out those foreign bodies. relief would be so sweet, you might cry on its account.

that is how i feel this day. this entire week. it is making eating not just a dreaded necessity but a painful one. i mistakenly had some hummus at lunch. the searing, pulsating sensation made me stamp my feet in time with my heartbeat. last night i thought some mexican chicken soup was in order. oh, how i cursed the heavens for my stupidity! henceforth apple sauce and my own chicken soup will be my steady diet.

i have a geographic tongue. it is a benign medical condition which makes your tongue seem planar (you can read about it). when combined with illness, it's like the topography of mars or the moon from a distance with peaks and valleys and whites and pinks and reds and rivers and oh! woe! it makes me not want to open my mouth at all in case i scare young children or adults i try to seduce.

this is how i feel this week. and that is merely the physical side of things.