Chick

Here's something I often wonder about: if males are called "men" or "guys" (or "blokes" or "chaps" in England) then what can women be called?

Sometimes I use the word "chick" but that implies someone who's not the smartest on the planet. "Guy" doesn't imply anything negative or dumb or offensive, but "chick" seems to be frivolous. I don't want to say "woman" because it sounds so grown-up and serious, and "lady" reminds me of someone who's put on a lot of lipstick and is uptight. It's also outdated, though sometimes I hear people using that word. "Woman" is more standard, as "man" is. I wouldn't say, "I need to talk to that man over there." Yuck--it's so formal and stiff. But I often, or always, say, "I need to talk to that guy over there." There's nothing wrong about the sound or implication of that word.

So what should we say about women? Sometimes I say "girl" but that's really a word for someone much younger. "Chick" seems like it's meant to be a compromise between the young and old, but it's shallow.

So what's a good word?

Peart's pic

Someone just emailed me this pic. It was hard to leave NYC, but this was a nice welcome-back "present."

[Neil Peart: a great drummer]

Going to NYC

I'm going to New York City this weekend, so I doubt I'll be blogging until Monday when I get back. I have some opinions about that place, especially the people who call themselves "New Yorkers" soon after they move there. I haven't been there since 1999 or 2000, when I went there for a wedding. This weekend is also for a wedding, and I can't believe how much we're going to spend to stay there! It is incredibly expensive, and the taxes are high too. I love it, but it's definitely a city for rich people, so I can't visit that often. And it's too bad that Islamofascists want to blow it to bits.

Muse-ish inspiration

I'm making pretty good progress on a novel that may never get published, but whatever. I shouldn't put myself down like that, but I'm just being realistic. If I say, "I'm making good progress and I have a good feeling about what I'm writing, thus I'm going to be published because of this feeling," I'm being naive. I've felt good about what I've written before and about the possibility of getting published (even in a seemingly amateurish publication), but it didn't happen. So now, I just feel good about what I write, and if I later succeed, that's an extra.

What's helping me write this novel and a previous failure are types of muses that are both real and imaginary. Actually, a muse is a female, and mine isn't/aren't, but it doesn't matter. So I don't know if they would fall into the "muse" definition (which would really be a slightly altered version), or if they're just inspiration. But whatever they are, they keep me going. Now the only problem is that if things change in the external world, then I might slip and fall, so I'm trying to write as furiously and productively as I can, lest the "muse" or "inspiration" or "muse-ish inspiration" disappears.

Beyond Spanglish

Arrogant Polyglot was discussing the direction of language in the U.S., and when I said that there should be a unifying language, he said:

My prediction is that this unifying language will take the form of a new code, the result of several generations of increasing English-Spanish contact. Something so much more advanced than code switching or Spanglish.

I have never thought about that. Sort of like an advanced creole. I'm too tired to think more deeply about it, but it's quite linguistic. :)

3 AM

That's what time I have to wake up on Sunday: THREE IN THE MORNING. I have to start work at 5:00, and since the station is northwest of the airport, it takes me at least 40 minutes without traffic, and I cannot be late because no one else will be there until 8:00. So I will be absolutely alone for a few hours. I plan to drink lots of caffeine and watch the sun rise.

I'm going to leave around 3:45 to get there in plenty of time, or just in case I'm held up by bizarre Saturday night/Sunday morning incidents, such as drunken accidents or trains passing by.

That's right: active train crossings can really make me late. Last night I was at the station until 11, and I thought going home would be a breeze. But I got stuck at two railroad crossings--two times in a row, I had to sit in my car, waiting for very long freight trains to finish their slow crawl towards wherever they had to be late at night. I got home after midnight.

I usually get up very early on Sundays, but this is going to be weird: party-types will be coming home from a long night out when I leave my place to go to work, and the city and suburbs will be transformed into a kind of country road for me to roam. I wonder if even the airport is going to have any activity--I usually see a few planes taking off or landing, but that's during the day, when the world is functioning normally.

So, tomorrow for me will begin at 3 AM. Is that night or day?

Really 20k

In under a month, I have written 20,000 words of fiction. And those are original, unlike the Harvard liar who copied others' work.

A while ago, I was in a writing group, and some of the members criticized me for not reading fiction while writing fiction. I told them that I don't want to be influenced by someone else's style or words, and I still believe that. I want to get my cues from experiences and conversations and other people's lives, not what authors publish.

I'm sure I'm not alone in being disgusted that the publisher was too lazy to check that teenager's work to make sure it was truly her own. And of course, the rest of us are out here working earnestly and diligently to create original words, but the PIC (Publishing Industrial Complex) could care less.

Another example of L.I.F. (Life Isn't Fair)

[pre]eminent

I was reading something about an actor I've never heard of, and they said he has "a well-deserved reputation as a pre-eminent British Actor."

And then I wondered: what *is* preeminent anyway? Is it like "prehistoric"? Like, before there was eminence, there was a "pre" eminence?

When I looked it up, I saw that "eminent" and "pre-eminent" are synonyms, both meaning "widely known and esteemed."

So what's better: to say "She's an eminent painter" or "He's a pre-eminent sculptor"?

This is one of those questions that occasionally pops in my head which can be defined as "obsessively nerdy."

Retrospectively campy

Last summer, I complained about the loss of the Sci-Fi Channel on regular cable because I had been watching Stargate SG-1 for a while. Luckily, I was obsessed enough to tape all the reruns they played on Monday, so I would watch those throughout the week before they played the newest episodes on Fridays. Even though the series was getting weird and wacky, I still had to see it. And I saw all the episodes before they yanked the channel, so my "hard work" paid off.

Well, today I saw an episode on broadcast TV (they're a couple of seasons behind the Sci-Fi Channel), and thought, "Wow, that's a weird and campy show." I remember when I first saw the series--I thought it was odd and cartoony. But eventually, thanks to all those successive reruns on cable, I grew to like it until I couldn't go a week without ingesting it.

Now that I've been away from it for several months, I can better see the loopiness of it. Was I really that into it? Why? It's sort of like seeing someone you used to be infatuated with and wondering, "What did I ever see in them?"

The prof concurs

I wrote about my worry over the misuse of jealous and envious, and didn't even think of checking out the English error site. But Arrogant Polyglot checked it out, and I found this explanation:

Although these are often treated as synonyms, there is a difference. You are envious of what others have that you lack. Jealousy, on the other hand, involves wanting to hold on to what you do have. You can be jealous of your boyfriend’s attraction to other women, but you’re envious of your boyfriend’s CD collection.

Exactly! I'm so glad the prof who created that site concurs.

Hunderd

Okay, I'm going to be very nitpicky and uber-analytical about this, but it sort of bothers me: when people say "hunderd" instead of "hundred."

This is how it's spelled: h-u-n-d-r-e-d. And that's how I pronounce it, and am starting to think that others should too. It doesn't sound "good" when people say "hunderd." It's not a herd of hunds, it's a number!

Especially when I hear it in radio ads--the guy will give the phone number, as in "222-58 hundERD" and all I can focus on is his oddball pronunciation. I want to call the number to not order anything, but to complain and correct him.

Even the dictionary agrees with me: the audio file says that it's hunDRED! (Though they write that the pronunciation is h&n-dr&d AND -d&rd. I'm assuming the second notation is for that annoying pronunciation.)

I hope I haven't stepped on any toes, but I just had to share my indignation, especially when people pronounce it "derd" in the media!

DP OD

Okay, I have really OD'd on Depeche Mode. I've been listening to their best-of CD over and over again (someone loaned it to me before I went to the concert last year).

It's a two-disc set, but I've listened to the first disc a few times a day for the last few weeks. Late last week, as that first disc was wrapping up the last song, I was getting ready to play it again, when a voice said, "Don't do it." Well, it wasn't really a voice, but my own addicted mind, because I'd had enough! It was as if I'd eaten too much chocolate--sometimes too much of a good thing (or your favorite thing) can be bad--and can make you sick!

As I've said before, that music has helped me write. Today I listened to a few songs from the second disc, probably because I’ve been experiencing “withdrawal.” But I really can’t return to that first disc for a while.

Downtown

I work with people who live in suburbs that are located far from the city (as opposed to just outside the city limits). I've noticed that when they talk about people "living downtown", they don't mean people who live within the limits of this map, but *anywhere* in the city.

For instance, I was talking to someone, and they said they have a friend who lives "downtown." I assumed the person lived near The Loop (south of the river) or north of the river, but no further than Division Street. "No," they said, "they live in Wrigleyville." That's over 30 blocks north of Madison and State, which is where the address numbers start for north/south and east/west. That's not downtown. But I guess for people living way outside the city, anything that's not considered a suburb is downtown (though now that I think about it, there was one person who considered Oak Park, a suburb immediately west of the city, as "downtown").

So when I tell them that I live "downtown" I have to explain that I don't just live within the city limits. They often say, "Wow, you really *do* live downtown" (though I don't live in The Loop).

Jealous vs. envious

All right, I think the rules have changed, because I remember learning some time ago that "jealous" and "envious" have different meanings. The reason why I'm bringing this up is because I rarely hear people use the word "envious," instead using the word "jealous" for all kinds of covetous situations, such as in this sample statement:

I'm really jealous of her--she has such a nice house.

Shouldn't the correct word be "envious"? I think it should (according to how they used to be delineated). You're envious of what people achieve, have, do, etc. Jealousy means something else--it has to do with love and devotion. For instance:

I'm really jealous of her--she is going out with the guy I've fallen in love with.

The speaker is jealous because the guy she likes is with someone else--it's a heart issue.

I tried to seek out the answer online, but there are conflicting opinions. So I'm wondering if the English language is again in a state of flux with these words (as has happened many times throughout its development).

House site

Just when I was thinking of digitally converting my friend's vinyl from his spinning days in order to create a House Music podcast, someone told me about the Deep House Page. It has over a thousand mixes that you can download. I definitely want to explore it and burn some cd's. I need to, because I've been listening to Depeche Mode over and over again. For some reason, it's helping me write--I listen to it, and it helps set the mood, and I keep those sensations in mind when I'm writing about characters who don't represent me, but a part of me.

When I was writing another story, I kept listening to Coldplay because they had an international, mellow backpacker sound. I'm sure I'll return to those discs when I "return" to Thailand (in my mind) because I still want to publish a story that takes place there. For some reason, I haven't wanted to do a story that takes place in Japan, even though I know it a lot better than Thailand or Brazil. Maybe one day I will.

Art helps

I was stuck trying to write something, which got me quite down, so I took a break and went to the Art Institute. I was listening to a lecture (which I have to write about sometime--not the lecture, but the attitude of some of the lecturers and others who extract their importance from others' work), and needed to break away and look around. Then I came upon Pastoral Scene by Giovanni Piazzetta. I usually don't hang out in the 18th century Italian art galleries, but this painting helped to get me thinking about themes and what I want to accomplish in the story. I actually sat there for quite a while, looking at the picture and thinking about what it means and what direction I'm heading. I'm not saying that the problem is totally solved, but I'm not in despair anymore.

No cake

I was driving home and thinking about a challenging situation I've encountered, and the phrase "You can't have your cake and eat it too" came to mind. I know it means "You can't have it both ways," but I started to wonder what it really means (because it sounds odd) and how it came to be. You can't eat cake unless you have it, so of course you "can" have it, unless it's imaginary.

Then I discovered that "you can't have your cake" means "you can't keep it" because if you eat it, it will be gone. In other words, there will be no more cake to have because you ate it all up, so don't expect to be able to save any for future enjoyment.

Michael Quinion, a British language geek and media dude explains that the phrase was

...first written down in John Heywood’s A Dialogue Conteynyng Prouerbes and Epigrammes of 1562: “Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?”. John Keats quoted it as eat your cake and have it at the beginning of his poem On Fame in 1816; Franklin D Roosevelt borrowed it in that form for his State of the Union Address in 1940...

But I still want to have my cake and eat it too! (metaphorically speaking)

Dürer book

I was given a very cool book: Buntes Dürer-Büchlein, which was first published in 1940. This is very exciting: it has beautiful colored prints created by Albrecht Dürer in the 16th century.

The problem is that the introduction (which is quite long, considering it's a tiny book) is in German. Because I've had to translate French lately and maintain kanji-ridden Japanese, my German has become awful. So I have to get myself up to speed or ask someone to help me decipher the intro. And the font is in that annoying blocky style, as if they want to reflect Dürer's time.

Well, after I got the book and looked at the images, I went to the Art Institute to check out Dutch and German woodcuts from the 16th and 17th centuries (since they're similar and are in the same space). They only had a few of Dürer's, but it's better than nothing. And I'm lucky that I can walk down there easily :)

What I did notice, which I hadn't before, was that the Dutch woodcuts seemed like antecedents to Van Gogh's work. I'm sure he'd seen several of them, and was influenced by those and Japanese ones as well (I read his biography but I don't remember if he obsessed about Dutch woodcuts as much as Japanese ones).

So within that Dürer book is a perfect printed combination: foreign printed matter and art by a master.

Back to fiction

I've done such a post before, though I'm too lazy to look for it and provide a link. Actually, I've probably done a few posts like it--I forgot. But basically, I thought I'd given up writing fiction forever. Yes, I've said it before--I wanted to give up, didn't know what the point was, blah blah. But I *really* thought I was never going to do it again. I mean, what was the point? I could write into oblivion and no one could care less. I even took a chance and submitted an excerpt of something to a literary publication that's not even high-brow, and it didn't even get published in that! So I concluded that I suck, and there's no point in trying.

The last time I wrote anything was for Nanowrimo, which I "won" (proof above) and I had a great time. But then I got into the radio biz and have been doing so much there, I thought my creative output was satisfied.

But it wasn't. A week ago, after I'd finished doing an event, I really felt a need to quiet down, be alone, and write fiction again. Last year I was working on a chick lit book set in Chicago and Brazil, but I ran out of steam because of self-doubt, frustration, and feeling like a phony. My heart wasn't in it--I was just going through the motions to crank out a story, but I hated myself for being so fake. But now that 2006 has provided more interesting experiences, I felt that I could delve into some bizarre feelings I've had to provide another dimension to the chick lit story.

So yesterday I sat down for the first time in four months and wrote and wrote and wrote. And I did the same this morning, and will continue tonight. In fact, I'm motivated to get back into my writing routine, which used to be practically every day in the morning, in a cafe nearby. Now that I'm working in the 'burbs a few times a week, I've even found a cafe up there to go to. Even though I took what I thought would be a permanent break, I feel as if I'd never dropped the ball--I guess I was racking up insights and experiences that I can channel into fiction.

Okay, I might still not get an agent, but at this point, I can't help but write because I love doing it, and even a hundred rejections won't take that feeling away. :)

Well, if I do get tons of rejections, I hope I still feel that way. :(

Food up there

I was at a *really* "exciting" temp gig (I temp occasionally, though I'm going to stop after this month) and wasn't able to use the computer, and the only reading material I had was an old Wall Street Journal and some Japanese vocabulary I had saved for down time such as this. I had five hours to kill, since the phone I was supposed to answer hardly rang, so I wrote and stared out the window and thought and tried to motivate myself to study Japanese, even though I was feeling quite lazy.

And no one was around, so I sat in silence until some people showed up to take a break from a meeting they were having, and I heard someone tell his coworkers, "There's food up there," and when he left, other people told each other the same thing: "You know, there's food up there." It didn't matter what people were talking about, the most important thing seemed to be food--free food.

It wasn't like they were saying there's "good" food up there; just the fact that there was food was enough for a special announcement. As if people need more of a reason to indulge themselves and seek out as many opportunities to pig out. I was nicely surprised when they handed me a sandwich that was definitely outside my normal eating patterns, but they didn't give me a drink, even though someone else said, "There are drinks up there."

When things are really slow, it's amazing what you'll notice, even in a quiet, cold office downtown with windows that are so sound-proof, the buildings and traffic outside are just decorations.