Tagged: puttingwordstogether

22
Apr
2019

I’LL TAKE IT ALL

A blog friend of mine posted this poem on Instagram last night and it struck me hard…it’s nearly exactly how I feel about spring and the coming of the green, even if the winter treated me well, or at least, not badly. Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white...

05
Apr
2019

WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT

I recently saw an article about common words and phrases that have racist origins and it really got me thinking about how language gets whitewashed (heh) with time. When I tried to find the article again so I could reference it more easily, it turns out that there are LOTS of articles online about such words and sayings. Many of them are so commonplace today with such a wide usage that it’s hard to believe they had an unpleasant beginning. One of my college roommates wrote not too long ago about a vivid memory she has of playing Euchre with...

18
Jan
2019

PUTTING WORDS TOGETHER

I’ve always been a reader. Since I can remember, I’ve read voraciously, first library books and then when I was older and could afford it, filling my little book cabinet and bookcases with books I loved and read and re-read until they were in tatters. I cut my reading teeth on Little Women and Little House on the Prairie and Heidi, on Edith Nesbit and Edward Eager and Madeleine L’Engle, and all the thousands of books that I could spend this entire post listing, but won’t. I can’t remember NOT reading, not wanting to read. I stayed up too late...

31
Oct
2018

CARPE DIEM AND DAMN THE TORPEDOES

I find it so inutterably hard to read the news these days. It feels overwhelming and awful and as if we are just buried in an unending heap of horrible that goes on and on. I know that it’s NOT all bad news, but the scary stuff so often outweighs the positive that I really struggle sometimes to find the good things. I read Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness a month or so ago and he talked quite a lot about how the human brain is wired to respond to bad news and drama and that we, as humans, tend to...

19
Sep
2018

IS THIS THING ON?

I used to live a lot more of my life online, in the blog world mostly, than I do now. Not surprising, since so very many people have stopped blogging for one reason or another. I find that weeks fly by and I don’t even think about it once, and when I do check my list of people to read I find it takes just a few minutes to scan through the time that has passed…maybe someone has posted something that takes longer than a minute to read, but it’s rare. And getting rarer, sadly.* It’s not exactly that I’m...

10
Jul
2018

REAPING THE WHORLWIND

Last week at work, while making the corrections to a case study layout, one of the markups was to change a section headline about fingerprint scanners which are used for security at a school, from “Making a whorl of difference” to “Making a world of difference”. Now, I had thought that headline was quite clever when I was first copying in the content, and it made me smile. But the request to change it set me off. What?! I fired off an email to the colleague in the US office who is responsible for the case studies to ask if...

24
Jan
2018

ADULT POINTS

My teammate brought in a half-eaten box of Aladdin chocolates today, one of the chocolate box staples that Swedes tend to grab off the grocery store shelves and give as a hostess gift. She brought it in because her family only eats the milk chocolate candies, which is approximately half of the box of 50 chocolates. “Oh yum!” I said, and made a beeline for my two favorites: dark chocolate with strawberry cream and dark chocolate with lime cream. “I love dark chocolate! Don’t you guys eat it at all?” She said she’s never learned to like it and neither...

21
Nov
2017

GHOST TOWNS

Wherever we go, the older we get, the more we are living in the past. Everything around us reminds us of it, whether we realize it or not. Every house you pass, every building, every street you drive down, or road you take is a path, a place, a memory of something from your former self, your former life. And when you live somewhere for a long time, it’s even more true. Every rock, fence, tree, garden, has a history imprinted upon you. That’s the house the twins lived in, Martin’s former best friends, when he was young. And that...

09
Sep
2017

SODDEN SATURDAY SPECULATIONS

It seems as though lately it’s always about to rain, raining, or wet from having just rained. It falls in sheets, in a steady frizzling drizzle, in bursts with the leaves turned sideways and inside-out, showing off their silver undersides. The ground is dark with water, rivulets run from every rooftop edge and corner. If waterdrops were diamonds, I’d be a rich woman…they’re hanging from every leaf and faded summer bloom. And yet, it’s a gentle (if annoying) constant patter of water against our lives. Nothing like the thundering gales that are battering other parts of the world. We have...

12
Jan
2017

WHERE AND WHY AND WHO

I’ve been very much enjoying the return of several “old” friends to Livejournal lately, as I just mentioned to one of them in a comment. She talked about returning to online journaling and why, and her thoughts about Facebook prompted me to think about how I feel about social media in general and Facebook specifically. I suspect many people feel the same way as I do: Facebook is not the place to share anything substantial. It was fun and trendy and rather like walking into a party where all the people you haven’t seen in awhile were gathering, in the...

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