mirage

\muh-RAHZH\

noun

1 : an illusion sometimes seen at sea, in the desert, or over hot pavement that looks like a pool of water or a mirror in which distant objects are seen inverted

2 : something illusory and unattainable like a mirage

I'm remembering the sticky, hot 90 degree summer days of my childhood, walking along the four-lane Route 34, destination: grocery store—the closest place with air conditioning and cold drinks. The forty minute walk was a straight shot west on this route, a diverse stretch of road traversing residential patches, the reservoir, the highway overpass, the commuter parking lot, a storage facility for tractors (at least I think I'm remembering this correctly), a hearty stretch of open-field farmland, and finally—commerce.

These walks often seemed a lot longer than 40 minutes, maybe because everything seems to take longer when you are young, but mostly because it was the same...stretch...of road...every...time. Because of the intersection with the highway, there were no other scenic routes to get to the shopping plaza that housed Klarides Supermarket (now Adams, with a forgettable stint of Stop & Shop [or was it Shop Rite?] in between), Carvel Ice Cream, and a Hallmark card store. And there was LITERALLY no where closer to go. Residential neighborhoods stretched for miles in every direction. Roads like Route 34 (aka Derby Avenue) were too busy to allow for bike riding, so walking that hideously long and drudging stretch was the only option to reach something other than a house.

I remember, after crossing over the highway bridge and passing the commuter lot, the trees would clear a bit opening up to more farmland, and I could see the road further into the distance. On particularly hot days, it was easy to spot the humidity rising up from the scolding pavement, rippling the images in the distance. At the age of 13 or 14, when I took most of these walks, I didn't yet understand the concept of heat creating a MIRAGE in the distance. I often told myself the optical illusion was the frontier of some sort of alternate reality—that if I walked fast enough, I might be able to reach this wavy edge of the universe and subsequently pass into another world.

I was most likely really dehydrated at the time. Those summers were hot.

fructuous

\FRUK-chuh-wus\

adjective

: fruitful

The latin fructus translates to: produced crops; fruit; profit; enjoyment; reward. It's interesting how the idea of fruit, a word normally associated with food, actually describes a positive or desired result. This has me wondering about the diversity among other food-related terminology:

vegetable : a dull, spiritless, and uninteresting person

meat : solid or substantial content; pith

juice : essence, strength, or vitality

milk : to extract; draw out

sauce : hard liquor

grain : the smallest possible amount of anything

fish : a new prison inmate

bread : sustenance, livelihood, and money

Okay—this experiment admittedly lacks a bit of the aforementioned FRUCTUOUS qualities, but alas. Today this is all I got.

navel-gazing

\NAY-vul-GAY-zing\

noun

: useless or excessive self-contemplation

All self-contemplation is as useless as it is valid. To better understand the self is to better understand everything else. One has only to apply their gained understanding.

NAVEL-GAZING is only useless if you fail to realize you are the same as everyone else. Once you do, it's liberating.

This blog is almost entirely self-contemplation, more specifically, a contemplation on the place where the self meets everything other. This intersection is what I am trying, forever, to understand. And this is universal—everyone stands at this intersection their whole life.

Is this blog useless? Only as useless as everything else. Really, one could argue it's all adding up to a whole lot of nothing.

But it's a sunny Tuesday morning, and today one wants to believe this means something. So, therefore, it does.

yeasty

\YEE-stee\

adjective

1 : of, relating to, or resembling yeast

2 a : immature, unsettled b : marked by change c : full of vitality d : frivolous

I was feeling a little disconnectedness between these two definitions; luckily the etymology elaborates on this a bit:

"...a number of extended, figurative senses of "yeasty" have surfaced, all of which play in some way or another on the excitable, chemical nature of fermentation, such as by connoting unsettled activity or significant change."

The root of the word comes from the Old English gist, gyst, and the Indo-European yes, meaning boil, foam, or bubble—hence the second definition.

I suppose I never thought of yeast as inciting so much change or movement or action, but this makes sense. That said, I admittedly feel a little uncomfortable referring to something as YEASTY, considering what the term means to most women. When I say or hear the word YEASTY, I immediately associate it with having or empathizing with one inflicted by the ever-pleasant vaginal candida (aka thrush).

I have endured three yeast infections in my life, all unpleasant, during none of which at any point would I have referred to myself, or my vagina, as "full of vitality." But this just adds to the diversity of the word YEASTY!

The definition could (should) expand even further to encompass contemporary reference to the yeast-inflicted ailment:

3 : of or relating to the physical symptoms of candidiasis: itching, burning, soreness, irritation, and (what many refer to as) curd-like discharge

M-W, take a hint and nod to the ladies, albeit the grossness.

elephantiasis

\el-uh-fun-TYE-uh-sis\

noun

1 : enlargement and thickening of tissues;specifically : the enormous enlargement of a limb or the scrotum caused by obstruction of lymphatics by filarial worms

2 : an undesirable usually enormous growth, enlargement, or overdevelopment

I could use this space to discuss the unruly growth of my breasts from ages 11-14, stopped only by a much anticipated breast reduction in 1995, but that's too easy. Nor am I particularly interested in talking about the specific aspects of elephantitis (proper definition: an infectious tropical disease that is a form of filaiasis caused by parasitic worms which are transmitted by mosquitoes and which causes swelling in the genitals or thighs). Although I would recommend screening The Elephant Man if you haven't yet had the pleasure.

Today I am interested in the ELEPHANTIASIS of thoughts.

When one is an anxious person like myself, thoughts can be menacing, daunting. Occasionally a thought will occur that seems harmless but ends up compounding like a rubber band ball and can potentially destroy an entire day. I suppose this can be categorized as somewhat obsessive-compulsive, a condition with which all members of my immediate family are plagued to varying extents. My strand doesn't reveal itself in repetitive hand-washing or door-locking as much as it does in getting stuck on a particular thought or idea—one that grows so large it casts a shadow over all of my actions.

Yes. I tend to overanalyze. These ELEPHANTIASIS-inflicted thoughts are often minute speculations of a single moment or a line of dialogue or a look, often in regard to someone of the opposite sex. For example, I recently had an interaction with someone (a boyfriend that is no more) via text messaging (a stellar venue for miscommunication, and a separate topic in its entirety). I will offer here the interaction in full (or as much as I can recall; the digital reminders have been erased). I normally would not implicate someone other than myself, but I'm using my good judgment to assume that a) the person in question is not at all even close to reading this blog, and b) he didn't really say anything particularly compromising; it was all fairly neutral.

This is about me anyway, not about him.

Me: I just heard a Pavement song in the Laughing Planet and it made me think of you. A lame excuse but I'm tired of waiting for a better one. How are you?

Him: Doing well. Was thinking of asking you to lend your voice to a new project if you can keep it light. Old country type stuff.

[keep it light?]

Me: I might want to lend. What do you mean keep it light...

Him: Light as in you and I.

Ahh. Keep it light.

See the growth? It goes on...

Me: I would love to say that I'm up to this challenge, to this "lightness." But I am no miracle worker. Glad to hear you are doing well.

This phrase—keep it light—has been in my head for days, nearly weeks now. What a thing to say! I have repeated this story many times, bouncing it off at least a dozen friends. It's become a joke—I find myself saying "keep it light" to those who may get half a laugh at my no-longer boyfriend's expense.

What this really comes down to is that I reached out and my ego was a little bruised. The main difference between myself and this man is that I constantly want to talk about things, figure them out, turn them around and around in my brain until they come even moderately close to making sense, while he just wants to "keep it light."

It is really sad knowing the phrase keep it light is now undeniably pigeonholed into this memory and will be forever associated with this fairly pathetic moment in my history. Such are the effects of my "undesirable overdevelopments." Thankfully this phrase doesn't really have much meaning outside of the urban dictionary where it is defined as follows:

keep it light

The act and/or intention of keeping and event or conversation non stressful, calm, and breezy.

#1
Todd: Hey man, what is the plan for tonight?
John: I don't know dude, lets just keep it light. I'm not down for nothing to* thick.
#2
Bill: What time is Jen going to get here?
Tom: At 6:00, but her cat died today, so make sure you keep it light.

*[sic]

hoity-toity

\hoy-tee-TOY-tee\

adjective

1: thoughtlessly silly or frivolous : flighty

2: marked by an air of assumed importance : highfalutin

Interestingly enough (well, to me anyway), I use the term HOITY-TOITY on a fairly regular basis. Most recently I used it to describe the buttfuck of an oral surgeon who removed my baby tooth (I promise this is the last time I will mention him). For me, the term is appropriate for one who is rich, snobby, arrogant, displays a blatant sense of entitlement or all of the above.

It's funny how descriptors like HOITY-TOITY seem to be on rotation. For example, HOITY-TOITY replaced my use of "better-than-thou" which most likely replaced the use of some other term I cannot recall. I have one friend who calls these types of people "suits," another who refers to them as "muckety-mucks," and another who describes them simply as "fancy."

And I have to admit, I did not realize highfalutin was actually a word. Albeit its designation as informal, the dictionary defines this term as such: pompous; bombastic; haughty; pretentious. I want to start using this word; perhaps it will usurp HOITY-TOITY's place in my vernacular.

On another note, I also want to bring back the phrase: I would shit twice and die, courtesy of Molly Ringwald's character in Sixteen Candles. One could even make it into a catchy acronym: STAD.

OMG I totes STAD.

[I'm so old.]

intoxicate

\in-TAHK-suh-kayt\

verb

1 : poison

2 a : to excite or stupefy by alcohol or a drug especially to the point where physical and mental control is markedly diminished b : to excite or elate to the point of enthusiasm or frenzy

When my older brothers were sixteen they got their first junker car in a series of many. One day (I was probably 8 or 9) I lingered nearby while my brother Heath poured coolant into the radiator.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's antifreeze," my brother said. I leaned in for a closer look. "Don't touch it—it's totally poisonous," he elbowed me out of the way.

When he finished he walked back into the house, leaving the car's hood open. A glowing drop of antifreeze hovered around the radiator's mouth. I stared at it. For an instant, my brain must have shut off—I reached out, ran my finger through the drop and shoved it into my mouth. And then I panicked.

I ran into the house screaming, "I'm going to die!" My grandma casually asked me what happened. I just kept screaming that I was going to die. She walked me into the kitchen and filled up a small glass of water while I spit into the sink.

"Here drink this," she said. I swallowed the water in one big gulp. "Feel better?" I nodded.

"See?" she said, "water cures everything."

*

This is one of those weird anecdotes that sticks out in my mind for many reasons:

1) I ate antifreeze. I don't remember the taste, but had I ingested a greater amount, I could have possible become INTOXICATED in the very traditional sense.

2) My grandmother didn't ask me why I thought I was going to die, she merely gave me a glass of water and then announced: water cures everything. This was not the first or last time she used this reasoning, although later in life, when I became more of a smart ass, I would retort: Oh yeah? Well what if I was drowning. Then what?

3) My faculties really did seem to shut off in that moment, as though there was no consciousness between eyeing the drop and the drop being in my mouth. I think about this lapse in brain activity often, usually when I'm in any position of height—in the window of a tall building, or on a bridge (frequently). These moments make me realize the very thin line between life and death. What if my brain were to shut off again—for just two seconds—I could find myself dropping from the Burnside bridge into the Willamette River.

And that would be that.

This may be pushing it, but lapsing into an absent state for a long enough period to reason jumping off a bridge is somewhat of an INTOXICATING thought. The kind of thought that makes me want to jump and squeak for a minute—so scary it is thrilling.