I opened my thesaurus to the word “quash” and actually said out loud, “oooh quash!” What a great word! It’s like the lazy person’s way of saying “squash” – who needs that pesky extra letter when you can just leave it off? And bonus – it means the same thing! Unless you’re talking about the vegetable… wait, is a squash a vegetable? You’ve gotta be careful about that sort of thing. You remember what happened with the avocado, right? (Click the link for a story.)
There are so many great words associated with quash too! Words like crush, hush up, overthrow, quell, rescind, and squelch. The word “squelch” always makes me think of walking in the pouring rain when I’ve forgotten my umbrella. It’s the feeling my feet get when they’re sodden inside my shoes and socks. There’s a feeling I’d rather quash.
It starts with a speck, a mere morsel, an element of thought in the vast space that is the universe of the mind. It’s a whiff, a spore at first – hardly a niggle like the frustratingly fading emotion that was a dream that’s just out of reach. A word on the tip of the tongue that can’t be read, even if it’s stuck out agonizingly far enough to see with eyes crossed, brows twisted to the point that even the scalp strains to pluck it off.
But then it begins to grow. Like a jigsaw puzzle made of sky on which the clouds roll in, the wind giving direction. Hues of gray and white and silver – yes! Is that a silver lining?
Bigger and bigger it fills the spaces until all else is blotted out… bits and pieces get lost in the shuffle of what is this and what is that. Hearing strains inward instead of out and nothing nothing nothing else begins to matter but that which started as a speck and has now grown, fills life and limb and thought and sky in the most amazing double rainbow!
As in packin’ it in. I’ve decided, pretty much, that I’m not going to. So this is what’s up with my blog:
I’ve spent the better part of this week contemplating the idea of going private for a month. At first I thought it would be the ideal solution to staying away, but then I started thinking about SoCS, and One-Liner Wednesday, and the fact that I don’t want to take a break from either. I think I’ve come up with a compromise.
I’ll post twice a week for the month of May. Once will be One-Liner Wednesday, which is pretty easy for me as far as the amount of work that goes into it. The second time will be the SoCS prompt. I won’t participate but I will spend the week reading other people’s entries. That way I’m not trying to cram in all the hours, happy as those hours are when I’m stress free (haha), that it takes to reply to comments and post. I will try to get caught up on my comments from older posts however. Anything that I absolutely must write during the time I’m “away” I’ll save as a draft and publish in June.
Anyway, I’ll give it a whirl for the first week of May at least – that’s the best I can promise – and as long as I don’t find myself being drawn back in, I’ll continue that way until June.
I was just thinking about how this post really didn’t have much to do with the word “pack” until I looked at the synonyms in my thesaurus. As a verb, “pack” can be used to mean burden and overload. As much as I don’t want to say my blog has become a burden, the importance of the other things I need to do off-screen have pushed this place lower on my list of things-to-do than ever before. And it’s causing an overload in the stress department. I hope I can finish out April…
Thanks to all for putting up with my waffling for the past little while. I’ll try to make my posts more upbeat for the remainder of the month – it is after all in my nature to be optimistic.
Once upon a time there was a girl who spent most of her time alone. She lived with her parents; their best friends–a childless couple–lived next door. On weekends there were parties. Parties with all adults. The girl would go to the parties until an acceptable time which was bedtime and then she would go upstairs and read in her room, or colour, or play with her dolls. Occasionally one of the adults would come and say hello, but for the most part she spent her time making up stories in her head. In her imagination she had a life with many friends of her own. They would have parties most weekends and they would laugh and have serious discussions.
The girl didn’t mind being alone because even when she was with people, she would usually observe, listen, and let her imagination wander. She was a little jealous of her friends–her real friends–who had siblings, but she couldn’t really picture what it would be like never to be alone.
As she grew up she found that she liked people well enough. In high school she had a wonderful group of friends with whom she used to party. They’d sometimes skip school and drive to Niagara Falls just for fun.
But what comes around…
Now the girl is older and has a family of her own. She still has one of her old high school friends who she sees every day. She sits in her room and reads and imagines worlds in which people have parties with lots of friends, but now she has a computer on which she records her imaginings full of colourful adventures and happy endings. Stories that begin with “Once upon a time.”
It’s so much fun to be silly sometimes, isn’t it? Daft. I love the word, “daft.” It’s the third synonym of the list in my thesaurus. It conjures the image of Daffy Duck with his aweththome liththp and having his head blown upside down by a shotgun. It’s incomprehensible to me how they can sensor Bugs Bunny, and yet when I read it here it sorta makes sense.
But I didn’t grow up violent because I watched Loony Toons. The coyote never made me want to mail-order in a few sticks of TNT to blow up a bird. (I used to feel so sorry for the coyote. Especially when he put up that tiny umbrella just before a gigantic boulder landed on him.) I’m glad some of those old shows still exist though.
I often write absurd scenes, like the one on my fiction blog last night: click it. You know you want to. But I’m trying to think of the last time I actually did something silly when I was alone. Like skipping down the sidewalk instead of walking. Mostly I do these things with Alex. My neighbours must think I’m crazy sometimes, dancing in my kitchen or screaming back at him for fun. I know I get some strange looks when I make faces at him as we stroll through the mall. But these are my real pleasures in life. Being a kid again. Or at least acting like one. It’s very freeing.
Merciful is how I strive to live my life. When I consider the synonyms: Compassionate, forgiving, generous, kind and sympathetic among others, it just makes sense to me to try to be these things.
I’m not a Christian of any particular kind. I’m not even sure I believe in God, though I’m not adverse to the idea that there is more than we can see in the universe that is plain to our mortal senses. I don’t believe in the concept of karma as it relates to an eye for an eye. I believe in existence. I believe that it’s something we all have, whether we’re of this race or that, whether we’re human, animal, insect or herb. We are all equal in the fact that we live – we, all of us, affect one another in at least some small way. I also believe that we have choices in this life in how we exist. The sick can be happy – the healthy miserable. We can make the best of what we have to deal with, no matter what it is. Or we can dwell on that which is not ideal.
But what can we do for each other? If we all strove to ease one another’s existence, how wonderful would the world be? Yes, there would still be challenges; existence cannot be free of pain. Sometimes a smile, a helping hand, or a compassionate ear for someone who needs to talk things out can make all the difference.
I don’t need a God to tell me these things. I don’t need a proscribed belief system at all. I just need to be and to recognize that so does everyone else. Equally.
I am but a lowly member of society. Lower than a proletariat – I’m not even working-class. I’ve been judged for the way I look, the way I dress… or at least I suppose that is why I was judged. I resemble a plebe.
It was about 21 years ago. I’d just moved into my own house, miles away from where my mother was trying to sell hers so that she could be closer to me. Since I was already in the area, I was shopping around new subdivisions for her. For a while we were considering sharing a home–a big one–so I went to my local bank manager to see what I could get pre-approved for. He gave me a number and so out I went.
I walked into one sales office and was looking over floor plans. There were two sales people, a man and a woman; both smiled at me and let me look, which was fine I supposed. Then a couple walked in. Both sales people pounced. Now here was a sale!! I waited patiently for the other potential customers to leave and then finally I guess the sales lady got tired of seeing me there (or assumed if she didn’t talk to me I’d never leave – I might even scare away real buyers!) and came over to ask if she could help me.
“This one,” I said, pointing.
“Yes, that’s a very nice house. The second largest.” She smiled, humoring me.
“I’m thinking about buying one. Can I see your lot layout?”
She stared at me.
“I’ve been pre-approved for $250,000…”
Never seen anyone move so fast in my life.
I took the information and left. I didn’t go back.
Among the synonyms for lowly, are average, dutiful, humble, modest, and unpretentious.
There are also these: common, inferior, poor, submissive, and unassuming. Ah, how ironic.
Today has once again proven the theory that impermanence is something we can count on. In case you missed it, Doobster–he of proper grammar, eloquent blogging, Oxford comma insisting, and badge-maker extraordinaire–has gone private. His final post said pretty much nothing except that he’s taking a break and that he may or may not be back. He also said that there are things in his life that need his undivided attention.
I have to say his words hit close to home. I spend an awful lot of time here in front of my screen. The fact that real life demands more of my time on a daily basis is evident in that I have only just enough time to post. I’m behind on my comments, and I have little opportunity to visit the posts that are pinged back to my prompts, let alone all of the other blogs I really want to visit.
And so after the April A-Z challenge is finished I’m considering doing the same, perhaps just for a month. I need to get my novel finished – I haven’t touched it in weeks and before that it was weeks and before that… If I ever want to get it finished, if I ever want to sell my mother’s condo which has been sitting empty for over a year (and I’m still paying the mortgage on it), if I ever want to move forward I need to stop stagnating here. Yes, I realize that I’m keeping in practice – I’ll probably keep my fiction blog going for that purpose. It takes up minutes of my day rather than hours.
I sincerely hope that Doobster returns, but I can understand fully where he’s coming from. WordPress isn’t the be-all and end-all of life. At least it shouldn’t be.
I’ll keep you up to date with my decision. I promise not to just disappear.
Well that worked out well. I don’t think I need to take a picture of my thesaurus this week to prove that “journalist” is in fact the second-last word on the left-hand page that I turned to… you trust me, right?
Honesty in journalism is something that’s apparently hard to come by these days. I don’t often listen to or read the news. I wish I had less going on in my life that I had the luxury to put other people’s and countries’ business closer to the top of my priority list, but it just ain’t happenin’. My mother was recently diagnosed with ‘mixed dementia’ which includes a touch of Alzheimer’s, and though I haven’t even properly researched what that means, I have been led to understand that the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease is attitude. Let’s just say she hasn’t been easy to deal with these past few years and it seems to be getting worse by the day. While she hasn’t displayed any of the outbursts you sometimes hear about, nor has she gone wandering (thank goodness) but I’m finding myself agreeing to being the stupid one (her term) more often than not to avoid arguments. I really do need to learn more about this disease.
So where was I? Oh yes, journalists. I can’t imagine myself as a journalist. I can’t interview someone to save my life, and I’m afraid that any reporting I did would end up more speculation and fiction than actual true story. I tend toward writing fiction – my imagination is probably one of the most prevalent parts of my personality.
Let’s see what synonyms we have here: hack. Yeah, that’d be me. Chronicler. Sounds painful. Oh Oh OH! Periodicalist! I like that word, though my spell check doesn’t. Let’s try using it in a sentence.
The periodicalist was found guilty of dangling participles. His sentence; to be reviewed…
Impermanence: what better way to explain life? It’s a wonder that the word impermanent even exists; nothing is permanent. Unless you’re talking about a hairdo of course. Hair spray only goes so far so if you want it to stay that way, you’re gonna need a perm.
But I digress. As I do. One of the synonyms for impermanent is “ephemeral.” It’s a word that’s stuck with me since the summer before I first went to high school. A group of people got together to do a stage production of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and somehow I got involved. We didn’t have a script, we just adapted the book. Quite brilliant for a bunch of high school kids when I think back.
Anyway, there was a line in the book, and in our play, that went, “That which is in danger of speedy disappearance,” as an explanation of what the word ephemeral means. The line was delivered to (not by) a boy named Charlie who later became a friend. We hung out together all through high school. He was in the foster care system and sometimes moved from place to place – for a while he lived at my house. He was the youngest of, if I remember correctly, four. All of his sisters had left home and had their own lives. His mother was schizophrenic.
After high school, Charlie went out on his own. He moved to Toronto and had several different jobs. Then we heard he’d been living in a tent. It came out later that he was schizophrenic, like his mother. He hung himself to death before his thirty-fifth birthday.
Charlie always struck me as someone who was ephemeral. From his frequent moves between foster parents, and his very upbringing, leaving his home and his sisters who were all unable to care for him, to finally his departure from life.
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