Day 63: A perfect quote

A friend of mine, upon hearing of Tilly's loss, just sent me a fantastic quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay.  I thought I'd share:

The presence of that absence is everywhere.

Isn't that the perfect way to put it?

Day 62: An honest horse

I was mulling over a post I want to write about Disco (which will be forthcoming), when the phrase "an honest horse" came to mind.  She is an honest horse.  When people say that, I take it to mean that the horse they're talking about is out there, doing their best, and if they spook or don't do what you ask, it's not out of malice.  It's honest.  They were scared, or they didn't know what to do, or they were hurting.  It means that even if you have a bad ride, or (knock on wood) get hurt, it's not because the horse was trying to get you off or hurt you.

As that came to mind, I found myself thinking - I wish people were honest people, in that same sense.

And then came the very interesting thought: I actually think they usually are. 

Isn't that interesting?  To consider that, maybe, most people, when they do something hurtful - even really hurtful - are acting out of fear or ignorance or inability, rather than true malice.  I think that's interesting because it so often feels like malice, especially when it's a repeated behavior.  Especially when it's a really damaging behavior that we have no control over, and maybe can't even remove ourselves from the influence of. 

I'll be honest.  I know that I've hurt people.  (OK, that's a ridiculous way to say that - I'm human, of COURSE I've hurt people.)  But if I'm being straight with myself (instead of mean and self-judge-y and setting myself up to fail), it's usually an honest hurt.  It comes out of my own ignorance or fear or inability.  (Is this resonating with the hurt people hurt people thing from last week, or what?)

But (still being honest), when someone else hurts me - especially when, outwardly, it's actively directed at me and who I am and what I do - it feels like malice.  It doesn't feel like an honest action.  (I also feel that way when D's being particularly troublesome - it can feel personal.  But it's easier for me to step back and realize that it's not, in fact, personal when it's a horse instead of an adult human being.)

I think I need to think more about this.  It's a very unformed sort of thought.  But it feels both true and useful in some important way.

Day 61: The second arrow, Part 2

Another place where thinking about the second arrow has been interesting and helpful is in dealing with my health.  At the moment, that has to do with having an autoimmune arthritis. (Or two: I put it this way because my initial diagnosis was seronegative RA.  About seven or more months ago, I developed some patches of psoriasis, and my rheumatologist added psoriatic arthritis to the list - this is one potential course of the disease, to start with the arthritis and then move to psoriasis.  I thought we'd changed diagnoses, but my PCP pointed out that overlapping and multiple diagnoses are possible, and that that hasn't been ruled out.  At this stage, I find it easier to talk about autoimmune arthritis.)

The first arrow is pretty easy to notice.  On many days (not all), joint pain, sometimes fatigue, weakness in my hands.  Typing hurts.  Those things are uncomfortable or outright painful.

But then there's the second arrow.  That arrow takes the form of stories about how this is so awful and unfair; or about how it's only going to get worse; or about how frustrating and upsetting it is to not be able to open a jar, when I used to have the strongest hands in the house.  They own the future - and it's always the most negative future possible: I won't be able to ride any more; if swimming hurts, and walking hurts, how will I ever get any exercise?  And if I don't exercise, how will I sleep?  How will my clothes fit?  Those stories take me out of the present experience and into all kinds of things that haven't happened yet, and adds the misery of those things onto the discomfort and unhappiness of the current moment.  Worse yet, they linger, clinging to my attention even when the current discomfort wanes, or when other, happier things might have caught my attention, were it not so bound up in offering energy to the rantings of the second arrow.

Recently, the first arrow has had to do with the drugs that I'm on.  I'm experiencing what I believe to be some side effects from the big gun drug I take every week, and I'm preparing to go off that drug to see if a) the side effects abate, and b) we can find something that works without the side effects (and maybe even c) something that works better than this one to control inflammation and pain).  The side effects range from annoying to pretty darned uncomfortable.  But they're not (I'm assured) life-threatening in any way, and I'm mostly able to live with them.

The second arrow - boy howdy, are there second arrows around this one!  I shouldn't be on these drugs, I should be able to control this through diet/willpower/energy work/sleep/exercise.  My rheumatologist and cardiologist both think I'm nuts and are simply humoring me.  The last time I went off this particular drug, I had to live with a pretty unfun flare - I don't like pain, I'm back to work full time, how will I manage if I enter into a flare and have to spent six hours on my feet and run back and forth across campus twice a day?  What if I don't lose all the weight I gained on this drug and I'm just lazy and fat after all?  What if my clothes and rings never fit again?

Do you see how crazy my second arrows are?  Stories, fears, anticipation (or whatever the word is for negative anticipation - and why don't we have a word for that?  Dread isn't quite right, although it's close.  Maybe nonticipation?  Antiticipation?).  And those thoughts usually have the energy of a squirrel hyped up on amphetamines set loose in a nut store.  They don't quit.

The first arrow is what it is.  Pain happens to everyone.  People get sick who don't deserve it.   I'm part of everyone, and I'm not immune to life's ups and downs.  I'm not going to get out of this one without getting hit by those first arrows.  (Hell, I'm not going to get out of this one alive!)

But the second arrow?  That one I have some leverage over.  That one, I can look at and say, thank you for trying to keep me safe, but I've got this.  Not always, not every time.  But even sometimes is a good start.  There's a spaciousness in refusing the second arrow, in trying not to pre-own the (not yet happened, maybe never will happen) suffering of the future.  The first arrow is more than enough, thank you.  I'll stick with that.

Day 60: Mondays

Mondays, it turns out, are long days. I teach a three-hour class in the morning, and two more shorter classes in the afternoon. Six hours in front of students, three totally different topics. Yup - I am well aware that teaching grade or high school is kind of like that every day (except with more hormones). Y’all have my sincerest admiration.

Day 59: Interesting observation

So, it turns out that, when the weekend comes around, the absolute last thing I want to do is to look at a computer.  I'd assumed that weekdays were going to be the hard ones, in terms of making sure that I get a post written, but I'm thinking that (as demonstrated by yesterday's failure to post) weekends are going to be a larger challenge for me.  Something to mull over...

Day 57: More linguistic oddities

Just a few things that caught the magpie's attention over the last day or so, regarding English's strange spelling/pronunciation mismatch.  Here's the thing: a lot of the weirdnesses of English spelling and pronunciation can be explained by the fact that spelling got codified by the printing press before some significant changes in pronunciation took place (among them, the Great English Vowel Shift)(which always sounds like it's something truly awesome, but is really just a matter of vowels moving up the vowel space across the board). 

So, for example, "goose" used to be pronounced the way it looks, with a geminate (long) vowel sounding like the vowel in "hoe", and a final schwa (a sort of neutral sound).  Then that o sound moved up to become an u sound, and the final vowel was lost, and there we are.  (I'm oversimplifying.)

This is why the "break" in "breakfast" sounds different than the word by itself - because in the context of the word breakfast, it maintained its original vowel pronunciation, but it changed when it stood alone.

But there are some words that are spelled exactly the same but not pronounced at all the same, and I honestly don't know why.  So I give you just a few examples to ponder.

Why are "good" and "food" not pronounced the same?

And how about these three?  (Try saying the last one with the same vowel as the first two - you'll get a giggle.)

womb
tomb
bomb

Something to chew on.  

Day 56: Eff that!

So something that's been capturing my attention and curiosity quite a bit lately is the F word.  Fair warning, I am going to actually use the word and others like it in this post - as I say to my students, we need to be able to talk about linguistic data, even when those data involve words that are troubling and uncomfortable.  Of course, we also need to do that with care and tact, one part of which is this content warning.

So, fuck.  It's an interesting word.  (Please note: this is not an acronym meaning For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge or any other such thing. It's a nice solid word whose root dates back to Indo-European.) Among other things, it clearly meets what I tend to think of as the phonological trifecta for a good curse word: it begins with a fricative (voiceless is great, because it lets the speaker get a lovely good long hiss going), then a vowel (of course, every syllable has to have a vowel, so this isn't really a special feature or anything), and ends with a voiceless stop (for extra punch).  Go ahead and say it out loud (even if you're uncomfortable, it's worth giving this one a shot in the privacy of your own home), and you'll see what I mean.  The hissing start, the firm end - they make for great curse words.  Shit also fits this bill quite nicely.  (As does another very offensive curse word - another warning incoming here - cunt.) Words like "damn" aren't quite as satisfying, because they reverse the abrupt and lingering (not technical terms) sounds: it starts with what we call a stop (because the air is stopped in the mouth before being released), and ends with a nasal, which can be drawn out.  So damn is better for times when one wishes to express shock or awe:  daaaaaammmmmmmn, dude.

Another interesting thing about fuck, to me, is that it seems to be much more common than I remember it being when I was younger.  Now, this could be because I wasn't privy to adult conversations in which fuck was being used (in the same way that I wouldn't use it now in front of a small person).  But over the last decade or so, the range of contexts in which fuck is used seems to have expanded.  Places which I might have thought of as "damn" places are now, sometimes, spots where fuck shows up.  Often without an intervening shit stage.  It seems less illicit somehow.  I'd love to hear from readers who were born before me (I'm 1971) - was this word being used in adult conversations regularly in your experience?  In casual conversations?  Workplace conversations?

So, I'd say that now it wouldn't shock me to hear it in a hallway conversation at work (all right, in the interests of full honesty, it wouldn't shock me to find myself sometimes using it in hallway conversation, under the right contexts).  But it would take an awful lot for me to use it in a faculty meeting (although I have colleagues who certainly would, and I don't find myself being offended or shocked).  And I can't imagine myself using it in, say, an Academic Senate meeting, or in a meeting with my Dean or senior administrators.  (Again, that's not a hard and fast rule; I have heard others using it in some of those contexts.)

My daughters roll their eyes at the advice I give them about appropriate contexts of use.  They understand why I'm telling them that, and I know they're careful, but I also know that they think of it as an "old person thing",  in much the same way that they think about my advice about choosing easily concealed places for an eventual tattoo.  Yeah, yeah, we get it - some old fuddy-duddy might be upset by it; they know they need to heed that fact, but they think of it as on the way out.  So that in itself says something about the shifting naughtiness value of fuck.

What also interests me about it is the range of contexts where I hear it used on television.  In particular, it always strikes me as funny and anachronistic when I see shows filmed now but set in, say, the 70s, where everyone's dropping f-bombs left and right.  I'm thinking here of The Americans and Mindhunters, as just two examples.  It brings me back to my earlier question - were adults using fuck all over the place in the 70s, just not in front of me?  But then again, even now I don't hear people using it as frequently in real-world adult-only workplace conversations as I see on those shows.  I'm not sure what it's meant to convey or what purpose it serves. 

As I write this, though, I find myself wondering if it's to get those shows to appeal to a younger audience - an audience of people for whom fuck feels more on the scale of dammit.  In other words, by using the conversational style of the desired audience, even if its anachronistic, they hope to make the show feel relevant to them, or like something they can relate to?  I don't know, but it is an interesting trend to note. And it's pretty recent.  I often watch older shows (not even that much older, actually) like Castle or In Plain Sight (why yes, I do like police procedurals, why do you ask?) - and nary an f-bomb in sight!  Maybe it's a network/cable distinction?  That's an interesting thought, too.  But it still implies that audiences want/relate to/find relevant the use of fuck, such that producers will use it when allowed.  (Writing this, I'm realizing that explicit sex scenes fall under this explanation, too, although that's a post for another day, but can I just say that I don't give a - you guessed it - fuck if the characters are having sex? I'm not interested in seeing it!!)

What do you think?  Have you noticed the rise of the f word in the real world?  In your preferred fictional worlds?  And has it always been there and I missed it?