Spaciousness

Sometimes it feels as though the world isn't nearly spacious enough- that we seem to keep creating more and more out of nothing until what was once unobtrusive and contained is now overwhelming us, and we find ourselves drowning in our own conceptions. The real issue is that there is no way to turn something back into nothing, for once an object or an idea has been born, while it's light may be doused, nothing can fully erase the shadows that linger where is once occupied time. It is not only our petty materials that overcrowd our world, but our superfluous thoughts as well. We live as though answers are like gems to collect, and waste our days away filling the innocent air with difficult questions- questions that cloud our horizons and lay heavy on our hearts, when the answer to the biggest question of all is to simply stop asking. If only we could clear away our worrying thought- filter out the unnecessary  like sand from water and toss it to the side- how much lighter our lives would be. Were the world more spacious, were there room to stretch our arms and run our fingertips through the clean air, then maybe we could find some purpose. Were we not paralyzed in a thick mud that kept us from seeing light from dark, up from down, that left us floundering uselessly in limbo, maybe we would be able to find direction. Without all of our clutter, with space for our mind to think and feel and run, we would find that discerning direction is easier with room to breathe, and that the path there is much more blissful.

Chumminess

Chumminess! Is this word not adorable? Just saying it makes me want to hug a woodland creature or play chubby bunny. My British subconscious is squealing with joy right now for "chumminess", as you may have guessed, does, in fact come from the word "chum" and is defined by answers.com as "the quality of affording easy familiarity and sociability". I wonder if the British actually use this word, or some variation of it, for the noun can also be altered from "chum" to "chuminess", "chummily", "chummier" and "chummiest" (which, incidentally, if sung in the correct order sound eerily similar to "The Littlest Elf"'s theme song from "A Series of Unfortunate Events"). I can just see the little top-hatted, pot-bellied men now, holding their eyeglasses in one hand and their protruding stomachs in the other, greeting each other- "Ello thare Arther owld chum. 'Ow ahre yew this mawning?" "Quite well my friend. And yawself? Yew aulways ware the chummiest li'le mahn." "Owe yaw're tew coined Arther, yawr chumminess is fawr superior tew moine." Arther seems to be the only man's name I can imagine being said in a British accent, is that strange? That, and something that sounds like "delirious slack"...

Consignee

When I say the word "consignee" to myself, I think of cocktails. The way it rings in my head, the resounding tones resemble words like "concierge", "core competencies", "connoisseur" and other big shiny corporate terms. Or maybe it's just really hollow in there. Nonetheless, I was therefore pleased to find out that this word was created not by the french or the business class, but that the origin of the "ee" at the end of the word was conceived by the same group of simpletons who decided that putting "ee" at the end of any word was an easy way to get out of having to remember more words than necessary. Yes, that fancy word "consignee" comes from the same family as "abductee", "dedicatee", and, arguably, "pwnee". I've always found the concept of the "ee" rather sneaky. I feel as though I'm conning the English language whenever I employ it. Example: "It is now time to present your gifts to their... oh, shit, what's the word?... giftEE, my friends. Please locate your giftEE and gift them now." And then of course you always run the risk of misplacing the accentuation, so that it sound as though you are just fond of an object in a motherly way. One misconstrued emphasis and suddenly it is not the recipitents of the gifts that you are refferring to, but rather the giftys. "Please locate your gifty now." There are some words, I must point out, that it seems ridicullous to ever consider turning into an "ee" word. Such as "banishee". First of all, who the hell uses the word banish in the first place? The only place I can recall having heard it is in Romeo and Juliet, and I can't imagine Prince Esculas reffering to Romeo as his "young banishee". Also, "biographee"? Was anyone aware that was a word? It is the subject of a biography, which, in my opinion, should be a "biographyee". Luckily, no one was dumb enough to recommend the word "autobiographee". I suppose they decided "author" would suffice. Unfortunately, "friskee" is not a word, although I can see some comically awkward situations arising from miscomunications during a police frisk if it were. A consignee, should you like to know, is "the person to whom a shipment is being delivered in a contract of carriage whether by land, sea, or air". The method of transportation is apparently vital to the definition. Therefore if the shipment is delivered by some other route other than land, sea, or air, the recipiant cannot be referred to as a consignee. Like, for instance, teleportation.

A blog that isn't about bursa

When I first got my randomly-generated word for today I was concerned. Not because I knew what the word was, or thought it would be difficult to write about, but because, yet again, I had no clue what the word meant. I generally accept myself to be pretty well-versed in my vocabulary, but the "uncommon" level of my random-word generator has been continually leaving me stumped. I was about to consider it a personal failure that I wasn't familiar with any of these words when I googled it and realized why. " A bursa is a small, fluid-filled sac lined by synovial membrane with an inner capillary layer of slimy fluid (similar in consistency to that of a raw egg white)." Um, ew? Maybe I wasn't so far off yesterday when I dubbed this generator "obscure skin diseases that will make your stomach turn to look at". Maybe I was just being too specific. I am going to formally change my description of this level of the word generator to "obscure, nasty things about your body that you didn't really want to know about... or hear compared to breakfast food". Or maybe "things that would be awkward to find in your boyfriend's search history." I'm beginning to think the creators of this word generator and just trying to mess with me. Kudos to them for making me title two successive posts after sickening bodily anomalies. Maybe some day I will be blessed with a nice word like "religiosity" or "cinnabar". Damn, cinnabar? I just got those words out of the random word generator as well. With words like "cinnabar" in that generator, how do I keep getting stuck with "bursa" and "seborrhea"? I want to write about cinnabars, that sounds delicious. I wonder what it means. I wonder if they have cinnaminibars as well...

Seborrhea

The first word that popped up on my handy dandy random word generator this evening was "Seborrhea". I had no clue what this word meant, but in an effort to expand my vocabulary and potentially make for an interesting blog, I googled the word. That was a mistake. The search yielded 241,000 results, but the thing that really caught my eye, the thing that made me silently scream "Great Scott!" inside, the thing that caused me to instinctively flinch back and squint my eyes in protection was the series of images in which people displayed a disgusting and uncomfortable rash-like disease in various parts of their bodies. What was this?! I set the random word generator to "uncommon", not "obscure skin diseases that will make your stomach turn to look at" (although I'm sure there is a generator for that somewhere in this infinite internet of ours). As a side note, I have always felt bad for those individuals who provide examples of diseases in photographs- they always have this awful, defeated look on their face- and rightfully so. I mean how do they get looped into getting those pictures taken in the first place? "I'm sorry Bill, it seems you have a chronic disfiguring skin condition. You will have to live with it your entire life, people will probably give you funny looks, and, I'm not going to lie, it will most likely effect your sex life. Do you mind if we take a picture of you for old housewives to look at so they can self-diagnose their kids?" Behind those pitiful expressions they're probably thinking "My God, this is the worst news I've ever recieved in my life." or perhaps "I'm going to switch to that doctor across town that doesn't employ a medical photographer." And then there are the people who don't have chronic conditions and, bless their souls, get cured. "Hey, aren't you that girl that was in the medical textbook? Yeah yeah, I didn't recognize you at first without the eczema all over your face That was some quality modeling there..." But anyway, back to seborrhea, even after the frightening images that conjured up depressing thoughts of lonely, scarred, and flat out violated people, I decided to still give Seborrhea a chance as the random word for this blog, clicked on an about.com link, and began to read. "Have you noticed red or flaking skin around your nose or in your eyebrows?" the site inquired of me. Um, maybe when I have a cold? "How about in your scalp- especially over your forehead or ears? If you answer yes, you may have something called seborrheic dermatitis or seborrhea." Nope. That's all I can take. I am NOT writing a blog on seborrhea. An hour later, I realize I have just successfully written an entire blog on just the subject. I'm not sure if that's an accomplishment, or a cry for help.

Random Word Generators

Have you ever come across a random word generator? Probably not, for while they are described as "random", they do know their place, and don't commonly pop up just anywhere in a Google search.  They do, however, pop up occasionally on creative writing websites, and if you have enough extra time and lack of social activities as me to be browsing these sites, you may at one time have found yourself unconsciously wasting the minutes of your life away, giddily pressing a "generate!" button in anticipation of a new absurd word. Unfortunately, these words are not absurd at all, they're quite ordinary actually, which is why I sometimes question my own sanity when, after receiving the words "lid", "juggle", "phone book", and "aluminum", I still find myself impatient to discover what my next word will be. I call this the bubble wrap phenomenon- the repetition of a particular act that continually results in the same dull outcome in the belief that the next time something more satisfactory will occur. I have also found this phenomenon to apply to bad relationships, dieting, and watching the movie "Napoleon Dynamite". I am quite certain that the first time I came across a random word generator, my reaction was simply, "What in Gods name would require anyone to have any business with a random word generator?" (If you can imagine my subconscious asking that in a British accent, it would add to the authenticity of this reenactment, for my subconscious often asks questions of itself in the British tongue). But honestly, have we grown so dependent upon machinery that we now have electronic devices to randomly offer words up to us? A hundred years ago we would of gotten up off of our lazy bums, walked over to the shelf, and picked up the bell and rang for the butler to read us random words ourselves! Regardless of how needlessly modern this new invention is, it still has room for improvement. Namely, the "random household items" aspect. These random generators think far too much about "knife", "cutting board", and "spatula", which only fuels my creeping suspicion that Martha Stewart and her band of "Better Homes and Gardens" subscribers have an eerily large amount of control over society. But alas, one site, watchout4snakes.com, has taken random word generating to soaring new heights and created the "Random Word Generator (Plus)", which allows you to choose the complexity of your randomly-generated words, ranging in randomosity from "very common" to "obscure". The name of this site alone leads to me trust their knowledge of random. And bring my cat inside for the night. I've decided to use this site to generate ideas for my blogs, so I don't end up writing the same things all the time. And so I do not for God's sake, start writing about my day. So, be ready for some- ohmylordmymomfoundbubblewrap

Creativity

I wanted to start this note out with a definition of creativity. In my mind, I had come up with "Creativity: the often imitated..." and then something about how people strive for and struggle over creativity but can't really obtain it unless they are born with it. Unfortunatly, this definition was never quite hammered out due to a nagging, intrusive, and admittedly immature section of my brain that got distracted by the shiny phrase "often imitated" and ran off with it so that all that I could hear was a booming Robin Williams' voice in my head introducing "the ever-impressive, looooong contaaaaaaiiined, often-imitated, but never duplicated, duplicated, duplicated, duplicated, duplicated, duplicated... CREATIVITY!" This is what happens when you hang on to your childhood for too long. Nonetheless, this definition of creativity may just be the best one we have to date (and yes, I'm aware that the actual phrase ends in "genie of the lamp"). To me, creativity is all of these things; impressive, contained, imitated but never duplicated. There's just something about people who posses creativity that makes our jaws drop and our eyes sparkle. They make us want to become bigger and better, to stand on top of the world as they do and show off our dazzling talents. To be the object of awe. To feel important. As I said, some people are born with it, but that gets me to thinking, the rest of us- what are we? The audience? Aladdin, watching the Genie show off his magic? Then I remember; Aladdin- he was a diamond in the rut. Now I'm thinking that maybe that nagging, intrusive, immature part of my brain that infallibly brings up Disney movies is on to something. Maybe behind that adorable monkey's screech and that princess's arabian bikini-type thing was... no, a real, truthful, honest-to-goodness life lesson? Nah. The only real life-lesson I learned from Aladdin is never assume the bird you're shoving crackers into isn't plotting to murder you and wed your daughter to your royal vizier behind your back. But my point about the creativity thing is this; while we may not all have shiny happy sparkly talents that we can show off to our friends like new silly bands, we all do have some creativity in us. I mean, who said nailing a chem problem on your first try wasn't a creative talent? Or being a good friend? You see, it's not about watching that person show off their gorilla silly band and wishing you had one just as cool. Hell, it's about turning to the kid next to you and convincing him your rubber band is a cyclops with one really big eye. From mars. That eats lava. So here's to all the rubber band kids out there- may you find your own creative talents and run with them. May you be the diamond in the rut. Wait, what am I saying, that phrase doesn't apply here at all.

Speaking of creative people, you all should check out my very own Genie of the Lens, Andrea Faus. She has some pretty amazing pictures, leave lots of comments so she knows just how awesome she is!!>>> http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrea-faus