L’esprit d’escalier: The feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when you think of all the things you should have said. Translated it means “the spirit of the staircase.” French
Waldeinsamkeit: The feeling of being alone in the woods. German
Meraki: Doing something with soul, creativity, or love. Greek
Forelsket: The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love. Norwegian
Gigil: The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute. Filipino
Pochemuchka: A person who asks a lot of questions. Russian
Pena ajena: The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation. Mexican Spanish
Cualacino: The mark left on a table by a cold glass. Italian
Ilunga: A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time. Tshiluba, Congo
Monday, November 1, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Just waited half an hour at the library to get a computer which happened to be next to an extremely smelly street person reading a newspaper. I can't stand it. Will have to come back later . . .
Days have passed and I had to add that, a week ago, it happened again. But this time it was a guy with uncontrollable flatulence. He cleared the entire table within five minutes of the time he sat down. There must be something (other than him) in the air this month . . .
Days have passed and I had to add that, a week ago, it happened again. But this time it was a guy with uncontrollable flatulence. He cleared the entire table within five minutes of the time he sat down. There must be something (other than him) in the air this month . . .
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Dud Dud Dud
The following blog posted on tabarnhart.net describes -- better than I can at the moment -- the biggest thing that bothers me about ex-Trailblazer-candidate-for-Governor, Chris Dudley (other than the fact that he has never run for - or served in - any public office at any time and his first shot is the governorship, his seeming aversion to any sort of public debate, and -- at the one debate he took part in -- the incredible statement that this was his "first election!" Not debate. Not race. Not campaign. No, apparently in his mind he has already been elected).
--
Dudley: Burning Down the House
in Willamette Week, Nigel “Pulitzerman” Jaquiss reports that Chris Dudley took a tax exemption on a house he let the Lake Oswego Fire Dept burn for a training exercise. The thought was nice — the Fire Dept needs the chance to practice skills under relatively controlled but realistic conditions — but the exemption was probably not legal. However, at the time, his accountant believed it was, so even if Duds is forced to repay the money, and he claimed over $140,000 for the $350,000 house, the issue isn’t whether he broke the law.
--
Dudley: Burning Down the House
in Willamette Week, Nigel “Pulitzerman” Jaquiss reports that Chris Dudley took a tax exemption on a house he let the Lake Oswego Fire Dept burn for a training exercise. The thought was nice — the Fire Dept needs the chance to practice skills under relatively controlled but realistic conditions — but the exemption was probably not legal. However, at the time, his accountant believed it was, so even if Duds is forced to repay the money, and he claimed over $140,000 for the $350,000 house, the issue isn’t whether he broke the law.
The issue is how much Chris Dudley puts his own wealth at the forefront of all he does. From moving to Camas to save a few bucks on taxes to working in the wealth industry to destroying an entire house for the tax savings, Dudley is about his vast and growing wealth. And as his comments on the minimum wage revealed so starkly, he not only has no idea what working- and middle-class Oregonians lives are like, he has no desire to gain that understanding. Remember: He did not speak up for minimum wage workers. He said it made no sense to earn a “high” minimum wage and get tips.
$17,000 a year, plus tips, makes no sense to Chris Dudley. Burning down a house to enhance his own wealth does.
--
Having lived in the Portland metropolitan area for most of my life, and having attended Marylhurst University, I came to appreciate the beauty of many of the old homes and grounds in Lake Oswego. It's become a common practice for home buyers to swoop into Lake O, snap up old property and promptly tear it down to erect a McMansion. Nothing, mind you, wrong with the old house. The house Dudley "generously" allowed the fire department to torch was simply not his cup of tea. That sort of perspective is so out of the realm of most struggling Oregonians today that the idea that a person who embraces it -- who cannot have the slightest idea of what it is like to make ends meet from day to day -- may be our governor, makes my blood run cold.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The Ghost Kitten
It's only 1:14 pm and already this has been a very strange day in a high holidays, week-off, down-time away from the craziness at work period. Imagine that while you were listening to NPR, your hand strayed to the dial and you suddenly found yourself listening to something in a foreign language with a loud, screechy back beat.
The first person I saw on my way to St. Honore Bakery for life-affirming coffee and an almond croissant was the nameless yuppie albino guy with the buzz cut and the big butt. If I don't describe him in very flattering terms, it is because he's one of the few neighbors who won't speak to people who live in apartments east of NW 27th and throws paper and trash on the ground as he walks along babbling to his friends. To his credit, he doesn't seem to be a chronic cell phone or bluetooth abuser and I haven't seen him set foot on a Segway although it may only be a matter of time. This gentleman was walking along in front of me with an umbrella stuffed into the back of his pants. OK, if you don't want to carry your umbrella in your hand maybe you think stuffing it down the back of your pants solves the problem. But no, neighbor, it does not when it makes a large butt look even bigger, when you keep fiddling with it and when people behind you have a view that would mortify you if you were able to see it yourself.
A mere block further along I was horrified to see a tiny kitten, perhaps five-weeks-old, bounce out into the middle of 25th. Cars were coming from both directions and I thought, "you are going to be a kitten pancake." Amazingly, the little waif, who was in mid-road, managed to avoid both cars while being buffeted by the turbulence produced and deposited under a car parked on the east side of the street.
I dashed over, knelt on the sidewalk and looked underneath. No kitten. Calling, "Kitty, kitty" and making mama cat noises, I checked the front and the back of the car and then the bushes on the other side of the walk for good measure. No kitten! This morsel was too small to leap up into the undercarriage of the car so where did he go? All the way to the corner, I kept looking back to see if he would put in an appearance and . . . no kitten.
Turning onto Thurman, I was treated to the sight of an otherwise seemingly normal 20-something eating a cookie and walking toward me wearing only the bottoms of blue plaid pajamas.
A block later, my purchase of a paper at Food Front was interrupted by a loud, crazy guy standing in the doorway yelling that the management needed to call the cops on the Equal Rights canvassers because they were Nazis and had put a swasika on the window. Curious eyes turned to the window which was completely blank. The guy railed for a minute or so and then left.
Which brings me to a story that I read in the Oregonian after finally sitting down to my coffee at St. Honore. This front page article titled, "Use of illegal drugs up 9 percent, study finds" notes that Ecstasy and meth use increased by double digits in 2009. Washington sez, "The rate of illegal drug use rose last year to the highest level in nearly a decade, fueled by a sharp increase in marijuana use . . ."
A clueless cog in the governmental bureaucracy machine, Gil Kerlikowske, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, seems primarily outraged by the rise in weed use which he blames on "eroding attitudes" and a growing number of states approving medicinal marijuana.
Apparently Mr. Kerlikowske hasn't considered that we're in a deep recession and that many people are severely depressed, broke and out of work. Maybe it hasn't entered his mind that the market for medical marijuana has grown since we live in an MS and Parkinson's belt, we have an large aging population of baby boomers with associated aches and pains plus a bumper crop of various injured and tramatized veterans of our country's various wars, preemptive attacks and occupations.
Perhaps Mr. Kerlikowske doesn't see what I see on the street. Some of it isn't as weirdly harmless as a ghost kitten or a guy with no fashion sense. Some of it makes you want to cry. People who once had enough to live on, who have no family, whose social and government support networks have evaporated. People who could steal but, instead, try to make it by picking bottles and precycling things out of dumpsters. A few days ago I watched a guy on a bike approach the smoking bench outside the building where I work. He deftly upended the butt pail into a newspaper, carefully folded it up, stuffed it into his pack and rode off on an old bike. I flashed on the stories of German aristocrats picking the butts of American GIs out of the gutters in postwar Berlin. If these people can scrape together enough to occasionally self-medicate because they can't afford a counselor of a pharmaceutical company's overpriced antidepressants who can blame them?
Apparently self-righteous people like Mr. Kerlikowske. These same people, it seems, agreed with Mr. Obama that poverty includes people who make a quarter of a million dollars.
It's all a matter of perspective and today, I ask these questions because I need to write them down.
The first person I saw on my way to St. Honore Bakery for life-affirming coffee and an almond croissant was the nameless yuppie albino guy with the buzz cut and the big butt. If I don't describe him in very flattering terms, it is because he's one of the few neighbors who won't speak to people who live in apartments east of NW 27th and throws paper and trash on the ground as he walks along babbling to his friends. To his credit, he doesn't seem to be a chronic cell phone or bluetooth abuser and I haven't seen him set foot on a Segway although it may only be a matter of time. This gentleman was walking along in front of me with an umbrella stuffed into the back of his pants. OK, if you don't want to carry your umbrella in your hand maybe you think stuffing it down the back of your pants solves the problem. But no, neighbor, it does not when it makes a large butt look even bigger, when you keep fiddling with it and when people behind you have a view that would mortify you if you were able to see it yourself.
A mere block further along I was horrified to see a tiny kitten, perhaps five-weeks-old, bounce out into the middle of 25th. Cars were coming from both directions and I thought, "you are going to be a kitten pancake." Amazingly, the little waif, who was in mid-road, managed to avoid both cars while being buffeted by the turbulence produced and deposited under a car parked on the east side of the street.
I dashed over, knelt on the sidewalk and looked underneath. No kitten. Calling, "Kitty, kitty" and making mama cat noises, I checked the front and the back of the car and then the bushes on the other side of the walk for good measure. No kitten! This morsel was too small to leap up into the undercarriage of the car so where did he go? All the way to the corner, I kept looking back to see if he would put in an appearance and . . . no kitten.
Turning onto Thurman, I was treated to the sight of an otherwise seemingly normal 20-something eating a cookie and walking toward me wearing only the bottoms of blue plaid pajamas.
A block later, my purchase of a paper at Food Front was interrupted by a loud, crazy guy standing in the doorway yelling that the management needed to call the cops on the Equal Rights canvassers because they were Nazis and had put a swasika on the window. Curious eyes turned to the window which was completely blank. The guy railed for a minute or so and then left.
Which brings me to a story that I read in the Oregonian after finally sitting down to my coffee at St. Honore. This front page article titled, "Use of illegal drugs up 9 percent, study finds" notes that Ecstasy and meth use increased by double digits in 2009. Washington sez, "The rate of illegal drug use rose last year to the highest level in nearly a decade, fueled by a sharp increase in marijuana use . . ."
A clueless cog in the governmental bureaucracy machine, Gil Kerlikowske, the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, seems primarily outraged by the rise in weed use which he blames on "eroding attitudes" and a growing number of states approving medicinal marijuana.
Apparently Mr. Kerlikowske hasn't considered that we're in a deep recession and that many people are severely depressed, broke and out of work. Maybe it hasn't entered his mind that the market for medical marijuana has grown since we live in an MS and Parkinson's belt, we have an large aging population of baby boomers with associated aches and pains plus a bumper crop of various injured and tramatized veterans of our country's various wars, preemptive attacks and occupations.
Perhaps Mr. Kerlikowske doesn't see what I see on the street. Some of it isn't as weirdly harmless as a ghost kitten or a guy with no fashion sense. Some of it makes you want to cry. People who once had enough to live on, who have no family, whose social and government support networks have evaporated. People who could steal but, instead, try to make it by picking bottles and precycling things out of dumpsters. A few days ago I watched a guy on a bike approach the smoking bench outside the building where I work. He deftly upended the butt pail into a newspaper, carefully folded it up, stuffed it into his pack and rode off on an old bike. I flashed on the stories of German aristocrats picking the butts of American GIs out of the gutters in postwar Berlin. If these people can scrape together enough to occasionally self-medicate because they can't afford a counselor of a pharmaceutical company's overpriced antidepressants who can blame them?
Apparently self-righteous people like Mr. Kerlikowske. These same people, it seems, agreed with Mr. Obama that poverty includes people who make a quarter of a million dollars.
It's all a matter of perspective and today, I ask these questions because I need to write them down.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Stoppard me if you've heard this one
Playwrite Sir Tom Stoppard (73) recently told the president of the London Library: "I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely. [It] would be a good way to go. You go when you are in a good frame of mind and you are doing something pleasant and interesting. A lot of people would say, 'I would rather have a heart attack at the height of sexual passion.' On the whole, I would prefer to be killed by a bookcase."
Monday, August 30, 2010
I think you're sauceome
Go right now and visit the wonderful, true, heartfelt, hardass world of Sarah Becan!
I think you're sauceome
Many more cartoons, recipes, etc. just click the buttons.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
There's only one way we want to die . . .
. . spontaneous combustion. The unexplained phenomenon of being so guilty and happy; so obsessed, so driven, and so fanatical that you just burst into flames for no apparent reason. On the street. At work. Hopefully, for me, in an airport. And if we work together, it could happen to us all at once when we're out somewhere causing trouble. It's a beautiful death, dramatic, scary, internally cleansing, and all you leave for the rest of the world to see is a really good pair of shoes. I have a lot of books on spontaneous combustion, or "fire from heaven" as it has been called, and all the pictures of the lucky dead are the same. Ashes. Shoes. Ashes. Shoes. So it all boils down to a religious lesson. Be prepared. Always wear stylish shoes. They won't be comfortable. They shouldn't be. It hurts to be this pure.
-- John Waters, Role Models, 2010
-- John Waters, Role Models, 2010
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