despite all this

so recently i wrote to a friend about the power of positive thinking, and claiming the things about you which you cannot change and seeing them as assets instead of liabilities. flipping the script. rebranding yourself, as it were.

for instance: i collect crap. magazines, postcards, club flyers, stickers, etc. my mom calls this being a "pack rat." lately i have pushed back my shoulders lifted my chin and decided - declared - that i am not a pack rat.
i am an ARCHIVIST.

see? see how i flipped that?

similarly - i am not a dreamer; i am a VISIONARY .

i'm not a tease nor a flirt; i am a PHILOCALIST, an AMATEUR AMORIST and an ANTHROPHILE.

i like shoes and shiny purses and glittery jewelry not because i am shallow but because i am an AESTHETE and a CHRYSOPHILIST.

i write and take pictures and swing dance and want to start a punk band not because i'm flakey with an utter lack of focus but because i am a DILETTANTE (pre-18th c. def) with a JOIE DE VIVRE.

see how that works?

as you can tell i'm also a philologist.

corybantic

The Word of the Day for May 16 is:


corybantic \kor-ee-BAN-tik\ adjective

: like or in the spirit of a Corybant; especially : wild, frenzied

Example sentence:
From the sound of the first guitar chord, the mosh pit looked like a swarm of bees in a corybantic dance.

Did you know?
The big name in goddesses in Phrygia (Asia Minor) in the fifth century B.C. was Cybele (also called Cybebe or Agdistis), the "Great Mother of the Gods." According to Oriental and Greco-Roman mythology, she was the mother of it all: gods, humans, animals ... even nature itself. The Corybants were Cybele's attendants and priests, and they worshipped her with an unrestrained frenzy of wildly emotional processions, rites, and dances. "Corybantic," the adjective based on the name of Cybele's attendants, can be used to describe anything characterized by a similarly unrestrained abandon.

thank you, m-w.

my heart is stumsy

thursday: federico aubele at apt.





saturday: the rub at the brooklyn museum - little kids, old people, twentysomething white girls, black teenagers, everyone dancing to old school hip hop in a museum. best party i've been to in a while.





sunday: walking and brunch/lunch.



























when we were in L.A., we were discussing our love of words, especially words that don't exsist but should and portmanteau words, a la lewis carroll, where you smush two words together to make a new one, like brunch.

we were having this conversation in a gorgeous restaurant, and the bus boy came over to our table with bread and oil. he proceeded to spill the oil all over the table and a menu as he set it down. he went away and came back with a towel to wipe up the oil and rubbed too hard on the menu and ruined the plastic cover as well as the paper underneath.

"what is going on with this guy?" one of us asked.

"he's stumsy," jaime said.

and now stumsy's part of my lexicon, and ever so appropriate for how i feel about the fact that i have a crushing crush. my stumsy heart aches.

that was then this is now

saturday was about lying in the meadow, burning off any impurities accumulated during the week.

having my sister in town has been fantastic. the meadow is our old stomping grounds. there was a summer in the 90s that we spent every single day in the meadow. we knew the topography - frisbee players over there, burnout hippie kids here, serious tanners to the left. we were friends with all the meadow characters: the one-eyed beer man, cyko, johnjohn. we were there the day shoshonna came over and said she'd met jerry seinfeld over at the food hut. eric nies, the rudolph stoner kids, the guy with the dog named freedom.

that was then, this is now.

soaking up the sun i saw a meadow first - a threesome of twentysomethings quietly and disceetly doing coke.

hi, it's 89° and you're in broad daylight, i wanted to say. but i didn't.

after we'd had all the sun we could take we split up to reconvene at
temple bar for classy gin and tonics and complimentary popcorn. then it was QUICK! SKEDADDLE! to the liquor store before it closed - and we got there as the gates were coming down. "owen nearly rolled underneath indiana jones-style" my sister proclaimed. owen's thing is to pay for things with $2 bills, don't ask.

so we picked up gin, champagne and beer and headed over to hang with shane and his gf. lots of goodies in the apt, including an animatronic chimp whom my sister promptly fell in love with. you can take the girl out of vet school but you can't take the vet school out of the girl.

the situation at shane's deteriorated until we drunkly invaded mcdonald's at about 2am. what happened after that i don't know. but i woke up sunday with only a little time to get ready and bike to a bbq in the west village.

i tried not to drink for the first hour or so, and then decided hair of the dog is where it's at. drank cold-ass budweiser out of the can like what.

bbq convo turned to words that don't really exist but should.

par example:

booze poos (noun) the loose, nasty kind of crap you have after a night of drinking. (contributed by my sister)

marinoia (noun) the irrational suspicion/paranoia brought on by smoking copious amounts of pot. (contributed by owen)

cockstar (noun) a guy who is scorching hot in bed. (contributed in absentia by my girl james)

(for previous girlhattan bon mots, click here)


eventually, the sun was going down and we walked down charles lane past nicole kidman's apartment to the river. there was a salsa class happening, the river was shimmering, and we were quietly happy. owen handed me his iPod and he'd cued up some sweeping beethoven written after the composer'd gone deaf. emotional, epic, dramatic and the perfect fit. goosebumps!

i biked home after dark, budweiser seeping out through my pores. another gorgeous weekend in girlhattan.

and last night, the positive, amazing energy of manu chao in prospect park. hundreds of bodies dripping with sweat jumping up and down to the rockreggae vibes, singing in spanish, english and french - flags from colombia, cuba, morocco... pure happiness and love. about 12 encores. because the no one wanted it to end.

my gift to you:

manu chao - desaparecido

manu chao - clandestino

word up: the large and the small

i have a deep, undying love for the dictionary. at home i have merriam-webster and merriam-webster's collegiate. at work i generally use merriam-webster online, which is brilliant for several reasons. for starters: the new words they've added to the collegiate editon include teensploitation and pleather. what could be better?

wait. don't answer that. because i'll tell you what's better: having the m-w robot pronounce these words for you. if you're feeling snarky and superior, get it to say the word callipygian. feeling juvenile? click here.

the one word everyone should get to know, and not just because gawker uses it all the time, is schadenfreude. it's basically the god we all pray to these days. isn't that right, ashlee simpson?

in other news, hearts broke in my world today when it was reported that the incredibly talented peter dinklage got engaged. and neither to me, nor my sister. *sigh* i won't even get to see him in richard III, because it is freakin' sold out.