Tagged: puttingwordstogether

15
Jun
2007

THE DRESS OF THOUGHT, WITHOUT WHICH WE ARE NAKED*

I can’t imagine what I would do without words. Where would the poems go? Where would be the satisfaction of seeing my thoughts take shape before me in printed form, intangibles made solid and communicative? Into the sound of silence, the still and quiet spaces of speechlessness. How often do you stop and think about the words you use every day to express yourself? How often do you ponder word choices and regard with amazement the fact that you HAVE choices about the way you say things, the words you pluck from your braincase and plug into place in the...

07
Jun
2007

BETTER TO SEARCH THAN TO BE SEARCHED

For book group tonight, we read Marlo Morgan’s controversial novel Mutant Message Down Under. I have to say, that though parts of it were valid and interesting, overall I didn’t really like the book. It seemed implausible and simplistic in too many ways. We had a good discussion about the book, though those of us who sat mostly silent were the ones who obviously didn’t like it much, while those who talked a lot had apparently connected with it on a much different level. Anyway, the gist of the book is that a white American healthcare professional in her 50s...

23
May
2007

IT’S NOT HOW MUCH YOU GIVE THAT MATTERS, IT’S HOW MUCH YOU KEEP FOR YOURSELF

Call me selfish, if you will; I freely admit to it. The thought of something happening to my mother makes my blood run cold. It makes me feel like I might faint. It makes my heart miss a beat and then begin again, tha-dump. If something happened to my mother, it would mean losing a huge part of myself. I can’t imagine not having my mom to call and talk to whenever I want to, whenever I NEED to. It’s not just my mother I would lose, you see. It’s my past. My childhood. The memory of my birth, the...

12
May
2007

OUR LIFE IS WHAT OUR THOUGHTS MAKE IT*

Once in awhile I get an urge to either radically change my journal layout, shake up my flist/blogroll, purge things like crazy, even going so far as to entertain the idea of shelving the whole damn thing. Wipe it out. Start over, maybe. Most of the time that urge results in nothing so drastic. A new banner, instead. A perusal of my friends list and feeds which leads to 1 or 2 deletions and several almost-deletions before I pull back from the brink. I get the same urge in real life, as well. But because I am bound by family,...

31
Mar
2007

GOING OVER, GOING HOME

I remember the night before a trip there was always this breathless feeling of excitement in the pit of my stomach. We usually went on car trips, my dad packing the big station wagon the evening before, laying out blankets in the back and putting all the baggage around the edges so that we had a place (when we were still kids and mandatory seatbelt laws were still to come) to stretch out or play. Sometimes we would get started early in the morning, before the sun was up and the world was quiet, the air still chill, and our...

21
Feb
2007

THOSE WHO KNOW NOTHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES KNOW NOTHING OF THEIR OWN*

Translating isn’t that hard when you’re working with familiar or simple texts. I do it all the time at work (not to mention in my brain) and I do it on the fly at bedtime whenever one of the children brings me a Swedish book for a bedtime story. However, even when “fluent” in a second language and well-versed in word choice and use, turns of phrase and styling, translation work sounds a lot easier than it is. I handle a lot of translations during the course of my work every week. I don’t do them myself; we have an...

04
Feb
2007

GIVING TO AIRY NOTHING

Sometimes, especially when I’m in the middle of reading a book where the writing just blows me away, where every word seems so perfectly chosen and polished and dovetailed to a plumb with all the other words, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought to use it, in a way that is so fresh and so right that it nearly makes my hair stand on end, then I can’t imagine ever writing again myself. How could I? It’s not that I think that I have to write as perfectly as some of the writers I admire most, or even...

21
Nov
2006

WRITING IS THINKING WITH YOUR FINGERS

My days are sandwiched in darkness. Every morning shines a damp and lambent greeting from a rain-streaked windowpane. The street outside glows wetly, it brightens slowly with the cloud cover as the sun comes up and pales everything to a lighter shade. As I drive to work, quietly humming to the split-splat of water on the windshield and the swish-swish as the silver ribbons are wiped and renewed from the glass, the streetlights are just turning off. I’ve been barely taking 15 or at the most 20 minutes for lunch lately, it’s been so busy and with the clouds hunkered...

14
Nov
2006

HOW TO TURN YOUR FROWN UPSIDE DOWN

For some reason, my mood, never the best in the early morning when I stumble blearily and resentfully from bed 10 minutes after smacking the snooze button again, ended up on a rapidly declining downward spiral that escalated as the day wore on. Don’t ask ME how that metaphor works, but it was true. My bad mood went from bad to worse and by the end of the day, as big fat raindrops began smacking the glass of my window while my back was turned, I was pretty sure that I had metamorphosed, sprouted a snout and fangs, a wiry...

02
Sep
2006

DOORS THAT OPEN, DOORS THAT CLOSE

Good news, bad news: there’s always something happening, somewhere, to someone. Sometimes it hits closer to home than others, and sometimes it lets you live vicariously for a moment, re-living or anticipating or struck suddenly dumb by the awful and visceral realization that things can happen at any time, out of the blue, for reasons completely out of your control. 2 weeks ago, a friend got a job that might have been written expressly for her, and coming as it did after she had thrown caution to the winds and made a leap of faith to abandon her previous corporate...