Rosemary colored glasses...

I’m writing this blog on a Friday on a power point slide to avoid detection. I’m not sure how well this will work considering my project manager loves to walk over and exclaim, before he’s even SEEN my screen, “Look at all those words!! The words!! They’re Invading!!” He has figured out, and I'm sure he's not the first, that I’m a big fan of them.

Lately, I’ve become an even bigger fan of words. I crave them. Simple words. Clarifying words. Words that make the world seem a little brighter, a little easier, a little more clear. I love when they pop up on my screen and tell me things I need to see...

Speaking of pop-ups. My ex texted me yesterday. We haven’t spoken in years but eating rosemary pine nut ice cream managed to draw enough nostalgia out of her to prompt a text telling me exactly that. “My heaven is your hell.” After three years. She’s still thinking about all the ways she can hurt me.

At first I couldn't believe her. I’m not invincible. I can’t field a text about ice cream while the bigger picture looms above it all. Is she engaged yet? Is she getting married? Does she love him because he’s not me? Does she want to be married? And then it hit me. Do I really care what she has to say about all this? Years ago, these questions would hang in the air like freshly washed sheets, obscuring everything visual and audible by their opaque flapping, driving me INSANE.

We used to fight. Debate, really. I would debate. She would cry. I didn’t understand how to fight without words. I didn’t understand that sometimes you had to forget about those pesky little things before you could solve anything. At the end of the day she was never motivated by an intention to hurt me. How you avoid hurting a massively insecure, newly graduated (read: drifting), jealous butch lesbian dating someone they know they don’t know how to keep is BEYOND me. I was going to fail. That was the first most difficult relationship of my life. Characterized, as I’ve learned is typical, by questions that evade answers.

PREAMBLE: I don’t know how to keep you. But I know I want you. And it’s hard. I’m tired. You know so much yet you struggle with the things that you don't need to say.

Silence.

INQUISITION: What makes your chest hurt? What makes you cry? What makes you happy?

Silence.

FOLLOW-UP: You make my chest hurt. You make me cry. You make me happy.

Silence.

*insert quitting jobs, moving, getting a 'divorce' here*

Three years, hardly a word between us, and she's still amused by the things I hate. Pretty amazing how indelible the stamp on the soul between human beings. And if you've ever wondered how things end smoothly between lesbians, that's basically a verbatim, distilled, sterile, calm, a-theatric, painless, micro-account of the actual 4 months it took to break up. So multiply that by a billion and add 400 pounds of explosives and you've got the end of my relationship with rosemary ice cream. (thank. GOD.) Maybe I really am invincible?

Seething Syntax

A response to the overly composed culture of corporate America and strategy consulting:

Language should accessible, words should be informative (and on the occasion, audibly descriptive), sentences shouldn't have to be complete and sometimes, yes, verbs are for pansies.

Come to think of it, all my favorite words are multi-taskers. They beg for hyphens, they crave modification, they toss nouns around the room in a fit of ani-verb-osity. In fact, all my favorite words are short. Oft they sport a lone set of sound, beg through teeth, and leave apt ort as they birl a tongue in the mouth of a fraud. Or was that just my short-on-time, dense-in-density attempt to construct a single-syllabic sentence? The word of the day (AWAD) has never been so timely in their thematic selections...

Without further ado, I impore you to think about the words that you love - the words that you love to use... They aren't fancy. They aren't ethereal. They aren't 'birl' and 'ort' - they're definite. They define 'things' in a very real, very concrete way. Because, and here's the pithy bit at the end of the drivel - we all just want to be understood. Things are things. And nothing more. So eff those effers who effed up the effing corporate lexicon for the rest of us. Take your ort and birl it. We can all shift-F7. Some of us just chose to do so ironically. While blogging.