Microthoughts

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Whoa, I wore fishnet stockings for the first time in my life, and let me say it is kind of awesome to have a crisscross pattern of warmth and cold breeze on your legs on a brisk fall day. Also, they don’t look as slutty as I thought.

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More searches that have led people to this blog:

“how to clean up dingleberries”

“dog dingleberry photos”

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I’ve come up with a name for an everyday urban phenomenon: the panhandler Doppler effect. (Note: this only applies to the minority of panhandlers who are dicks.) The sound changes depending on your relative position. Approaching him, you hear, “Hey sweetie, can I talk to you for a minute?” Passing, it’s: “Hello? Hello! I’m talking to you!” As you get farther away, the anger volume increases: “Thanks a lot, you dumb bitch!” At this point, sexism and judgments based on your presumed class amp up as well.

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The other day I saw a lost dog poster that was most affecting because of its simplicity. It obeyed that rule of every high school creative writing class, “Show, don’t tell.”

Margo
3-year-old Black Lab mix
Chipped canine tooth
Wiggly butt

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For someone who is highly attentive to the subtleties of language for two reasons: one, because she is a lover of poetry and multiple shades of meaning; and two, because she is extremely wary of hurting others’ feelings, so always chooses her words carefully, for this person learning a second language is an interesting experiment. Because she’s so desperate to grasp even the first layer, that of literal meaning, and because she has no idea how she sounds or what she’s implying, a kind of liberation takes place.

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Speaking of which, I was on the WordReference forums yesterday, where people ask and answer questions about usage, syntax and expressions in English and Spanish. A native Spanish speaker was asking for help understanding an English sentence he had come across. The sentence was, “I put the cute in execute.” I’ve had English on my tongue for 25 years, and…what??

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