jeg var…

Remember that time before you went to college and had the enthusiasm beaten out of you with a big ol’ stick? I was going to double major in math and physics, and I was looking forward to utter crap humanities classes. I also had given myself “lots” of work for the last few dregs of high school. Ha ha.

On the other hand, I’ve been frustrated lately by what I perceive as a gradual decline in the size of my working vocabulary. There are so many times, now, that I sit racking my skull for a word that I know is out there, the word that is a particularly apt and lively way of expressing something subtle, and after about five minutes and a visit to the invariably useless thesaurus.com, I settle for some Californian combination of “like” “really” and “dude.” I don’t remember having this problem back in the halcyon days when I was voted “largest vocabulary” of my graduating class. Maybe this is a sign of higher standards on my part, but I’m inclined to blame two years without serious literary influences. Now all of a sudden I’m feeling nostalgic and starving for eloquence, so I’m going to plumb the depths of old emails for a portrait of the blogger as a young(er) woman.

Thursday, April 15, 2020
My life-as-movie today has been nothing but one big voiceover; and not even an at-self voiceover, where you gain useful insights into the character & motivations of the protagonist, but a Disney voiceover from “The Life of Timmy Tapeworm”:
Wow! this traffic jam in the hallways reminds me of the time I was clinging mindlessly to the duodenum of an obnoxiously yappy French poodle who had just eaten a bowl of cheap generic dry dog food pellets…
*fade to flashback*

Sunday, May 23, 2020
I’m really in a pencil sort of mood. Typing is too transient, too easy, really, I type so much faster than I write, almost faster than I can think at times, and pen is just too dark
and permanent and thick with the greasy odor of all the old, fermenting emotional garbage leaking out of the words on the page…. Pencil is light, probing without being abstract and intellectual, allowing most of the panoply of journalling insights to fall on the page without losing too much of their lustre.

Panoply! I haven’t used that word in ages! Panoply, cognizant, slithering, solace, pathos, bathos, garrulous… I miss tasting words as they fall from my fingertips, little tangy drops from the specialty speechshop. Maybe it’s time to go hunting for James Joyce.

On a totally unrelated note, someone has gone and installed a piece of shit “enhancement” to Internet Explorer that slows everything down while advertising some bite-sized banana republic of a portal site. I can’t figure out how to make the damned thing go away - I’d normally just nuke any and all references to it on the hard drive, but I don’t have the requisite access permissions. Any suggestions?