muses quiz

You scored as Calliope.

You are Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. You like writing, gold, and reading super long books. You are usually quite intuitive and reserved.

ha, ha, they said “reserved”!

ok, yeah, sometimes. just never in the right ways. in the ways that makes me afraid to ask important question & learn things i’d really like to know. NEVER the ways that keep me from putting my big fat foot in my big fat mouth & hurtin’ folks by accident.

i have to reinterpret “gold,” too. no, the grad-student hyper-textual-analysis function is never disabled, so don’t bother trying. they got that from my saying “mostly true” to the “all that glitters” question, which i think they’re reading backwards anyway, but even if they weren’t:

the point isn’t “gold is good” (especially where gold = $), the point is that goldness represents goodness, spark, positivity (i say “golden” when ideas rock; smart-asses around me answer “chartreuse?”), & that everything that glitters–whether it’s “the real thing” or not, whatever “thing” might be having its authenticity cast into doubt at any particular moment–is part of the goldness, the goodness, the spark. all sparks, even the littlest ones, help start & keep-burning those fires, those lights we all need to cup our hands around to let them grow & then keep on fanning ’til they burn the bad shit DOWN.

regional englishes meme:

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

15% Yankee

10% Dixie

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

this thing is impossible to read on my page; i hope it works better on other peoples’. whose bad idea was it to set the text to default to the user’s settings when that puts it on backgrounds that might entirely white it out, anyway?

qotd

quote of the day, for t, who knows it’s always been so much about (created in, given wings by, lived in hopes of someday finding) the language:

fading rapidly are the days when the spoken word satisfied a yearning for insights into whatever there was to know about the world, where words carefully chosen and artfully expressed carried us beyond the mundane demands of getting through another day. –tom walsh

i don’t believe in killing time.

instructions

please don’t:
congratulate yourself on how much easier you’ve made my life now that you’ve taken something precious from me you’ve already made quite clear was never mine enough that i’d have had grounds to complain

smile at me while you’re doing it, waiting for gratitude

expect me to say anything at all once candor has been thoroughly disqualified

lock me out for guessing wrong again about something too small to have warranted a question

project your limitations onto me

presume there’s anything i can’t or wouldn’t do for you

interpret interest as attack

read yourself into anything or everything i say; for fuck’s sake, if i were going to talk trash about you, i’d be a hell of a lot more specific &; far less complementary

pontificate about the lofty ethics of free space & then tell me what to do with (what it took me far too long to see was never) mine.

ask me what i think about another goddamn thing you don’t want an answer to

assume that because i’m still here i want any part of this

assume that because i’m still here you know anything about me

assume that because i’m not arguing you’re right

---

for a brief while, i entertained the hope that you were why i’d come this way, not because the things i brought with me weren’t love enough, but because there’s been so little reason here for me to even breathe, let alone extend a hand, and i thought perhaps you wanted one. i’m starting to suspect instead that you’re here to teach me the silence i should have learned a long, long time ago.

q ot d, for metalmonkey,

The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps – We must step up the stairs.
– Vance Havner

go, baby, go!

another of the sort

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long
distance lover and proudly say
I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond, I know
she’s used up all her words
so I slowly whisper I love you,
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

(he’s got no idea where this one’s from)

thought-full

“reading cannot be separated from thinking. reading is a thought-full activity.” (from frank smith, understanding reading, 20)

sometimes scholarship reminds me of winnie-the-pooh.

(xp to c&a)

a terminological distinction

mistakes are illogical, un-patterned, instances of mis-doing something we already know how to do, have done correctly before, and will do so again. transposing the “n” and the “d” when typing “and” “adn” is a mistake. errors (err = wander) are logical, purposeful attempts at doing something we suspect or believe we know how to do. using commas to denote “pauses” as if writing were speaking simply recorded on the page is a pattern of error.

right now, i have a vague & fuzzy sense that sometime in the next 15 hours or so that’s going to say something really profound about my personal life. or my career. or your personal life. or what you really did with the car keys you can’t find. if it’s earth-shattering, do let me know.

(but on the silly side, b/c i do still have one, and i’ve been mis-using it lately (quite deliberately, so it’s neither a mistake nor an error) to infect the computers of high school kids, esheep!)

quote of the day:

In order to discover new lands, one must be willing to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. — Anonymous

i’m on that like a ninja today too.

it was snowing, and it was going to snow–wallace stevens

chaos reigns. no, really. you have no idea. but a non-sequiturial thanks goes out to mzxgiant for reminding me of when i used to perform sparkly stunts of synchronized swimming in the stuff. i can do this, these next twelve hours. somehow.

(p.s. rumhann, wtf?)

too many latinate variations on a too-small theme

(cross-posted to c&a)

abdicate, abnegate, abrogate

synonyms, for the most part, do not annoy me. we have them for several reasons: because english has acquired words with similar meanings from multiple languages, or because words initially meaning different things have been used, metaphorically or otherwise, in ways that have caused one or more of their meanings to slide together until they’re predominantly interchangeable. we tend to like having lots of words. i’m especially fond of them when i’m writing, because i notice the rhythm of phrases and sentences, i notice when consonance and assonance is working and should be emphasized, or is detracting and ought to be avoided, and having other handy words that mean close-enough-to the same thing but sound different makes more play possible. when, as in this case, though, you have a set that are almost entirely homonymous, sharing the same meter, beginning-sound, ending-sound, emphasis, and most of their spelling, the purpose of maintaining all three of them begins to elude me.

this ramble sponsored by louise rosenblatt’s use of “abnegate,” my geeky obsession with & thoroughly naïve knowledge of linguistics & etymology, dictionary.com, &, of course, the letter “a.”