Light the corners of my mind

Anyone who has seen Memento knows that "memory can change the shape of a room; it can change the color of a car. And memories can be distorted. They're just an interpretation, they're not a record, and they're irrelevant if you have the facts." While I've known that to be true intellectually for quite some time, recently my own brain revealed its fickle nature.

For our honeymoon, J & I went to Ireland. J drove because at the time I couldn't opperate a manual transmission at all. At present I only do it under duress and it stresses me smooth out and I don't like it. But I can do it. But I digress. J did all the driving. Which means I was always in the passenger seat. Which is fine. J likes to drive and I like to take pictures out the windows of moving vehicles. A match made in heaven.

Recently, in talking with my cousin Buddy--and remind me to tell you about kilometers and milliliters in a bit--I realized 2 things. One--they don't drive on the other side of the road in Germany. I think I kind of knew that, but not really. So when Buddy comes here and drives my folks BMW (which stands for Bavarian Motor Works...does everyone in the world but me know this?) it's not really all that strange for him. He's driven speds with triple digits on the Autobahn, so I imagine the Texas speeders don't faze him one bit.

This is relevant in that it got me thinking about driving around Ireland and what I remember from our cross-country drive. After spending a weekend in a little B&B on the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland, we drove 6 or so hours to Donegal. We saw many rainbows and Ireland really is as green as you think it is. It's also got pretty blues and golds and spots that remind me a bit of northern California. We couldn't play the cow game because the Irish country side is just lousy with sheep instead of cows. Black faced sheep and white faced sheep and since it's very difficult to brand a woolly animal, they spray paint them instead, which led to the "one sheep, two sheep, red sheep, blue sheep" game instead.

So, I have fond memories of riding around the northern part of Ireland (and Northern Ireland, but those are two different things) while Jeremy drove the manual transmission Passat wagon or whatever it was. It was blue. I remember that much. Nothing unusual about my memories. They're all from the perspective of the passenger seat.

Only, the US passenger side. Which is the driver's side in Ireland. I know this. I remember frequently walking to the wrong side of the car and J teasing me that I was welcome to try and drive. I rememeber that. I know that I sat on the right side of the car--I mean, the correct side of the car, which in this case is the left. But all my memories have re-written themselves to show from the OTHER side. My brain says I turned my head to the right to look out my window, and I know that's not right. I know I looked left. If I did look right, it was to talk to J, but what I know to be true is in direct conflict with my actual memories. It's as though my brain just merged the Irish memories with all the other car memories and made everything match. They should stick out like a sore thumb because I only have that one trip where "shotgun" was on the left. But they don't. It's the only set of memories that I concretely know are wrong.

I wonder how many other memories are wrong. I know that the room I think of as the green room from the house on 1414D Washington St wasn't really green. It had green curtains and a green bedspread, so the light in there always seemed green, but the walls weren't painted green. I know that, but I don't remember the walls as white. Growing up we had a couch that my mother swears up and down was brown, but I thought it was grey. I mean, it was a varigated pattern of light colors that my mind read as grey. I suppose once upon a time it could have been brown, or maybe beige would be more accurate, but I don't remember it any other color than grey. Colors changing seems more natural a memory lapse than to completely change the interior of an automobile.

Unreliable brain.

OH! Kilometers. So, in talking with Buddy, I revealed that I say it kill-OM-eters. Buddy laughed at me. The inconsistency here is that all the other measurements aren't pronounced this way. It's centi-meter, not cent-IM-iter, milli-liter not mill-IL-ilter. But I've since vowed that I shall be consistent. I will say mill-IL-iter because it's way more fun than milli-liter. Try it! Kilo-meter may be boring and kill-OM-eter isn't that much more exciting, but cent-IM-iter and mill-IL-iter are a riot.

The Vocabulary of Motherhood-Bean Style

squnch, stage 1

mid-squnch

full-squnch

Squnchler: (n) One who squnches

Squnch: (v) To curl up like a pill bug, to snuggle down, or snuggle up to someone or something

Snerk: (n) A wet hiccuppy cry made by a fussy baby that signals the onset of true crying, discomfort, rage, or general dissatisfaction, yet is none of those things. A forewarning.

mid-snerk

Slug: (v) to swaddle the baby, thus turning her into a larva/slug-type thing.
(n) a swaddled baby, usually expressed with a descriptive modifier for the type of blanket used. ie: a giraffe slug

The giraffe slug

To "get a new booty": phrase used for diaper changes, implying the changing of a dirty butt into a clean butt

Tooter: (n) one who toots, not to be confused with a Tudor, like Henry VIII, or a tutor.

"Squiggle and worm": Spoonerism for wigggle and squirm, quite apt as this modle of baby moves in her sleep in an inchworm type fashion, typically coming to rest at a 90 degree angle from how she was laid down

Strangely this list is mostly s words. I would say that I spend the majority of my time saying b words though. Boob, boobies, booty, butt, bonk, bubbles, baby, bring me that thing from over there that I can't reach because I'm trapped beneath a baby.

That's baby talk in this house.

Adoption, but not the baby kind

You know that I love words. I like lots of words. Today, I have adopted 2 words:

aquabib* and prandicle**.

Spell check and Words with Friends don't recognize them, but the Oxford Dictionary does.

Want some fancy words of your own? Head over to Save the Words to adopt some gems!

*one who drinks water
**a small meal

I abuse grammar and punctuation to suit my whims

When it comes to good grammar, punctuation, and the like, I am an incredibly fickle beast. I'm a decent speller, though certain words seem to always give me trouble. For example: maintenance and sentence. I don't know what it is about the "ence" vs "ance" ending that gives me such fits, but it's a constant source of frustration. Also, guarantee. I guarantee that I have to think really hard to even come close to spelling that one right. I also want to point out that I've run "spell check" 4 times already in this post, and good for me, I got my trouble words right for once.

I don't really have a problem with most homophones in that I can pick the right one out of a line-up, although there is a story from my childhood that I retell quite frequently. It's about the day I came home from my first day of school in Texas and told my mother that I couldn't go back to school because my teachers were stupid. So, today's scenic detour takes us to New Braunfels, TX circa 1990. I was a bright, shiny 9 year old, just transferred from Navato, CA. It's January, and my first day in Language Arts, we were studying homophones. The teacher gives an example of words that sound alike but are spelled different (and for the life of me, it took forever before I could distinguish between those and homonyms or homographs, or whatever it is when the spelling is the same, but pronounced differently. I kept thinking of the example: read, reed, read and couldn't remember which was which). She wrote on the board READ (to read a book) and REED (some waterly plant thing) and then asked for other examples from the class. Things went really well at first. Students offered up BLUE and BLEW, RED and READ (thus cementing some of my homo-what? confusion which has nothing to do with sexual orientation). Then things started to get dicey. Someone raised their hand and offered... and in text this is much harder to do, because you'll see the error right away where as in real life, I was mystified until I saw it in writing. Oh, I digress. Here's what I heard:

"What about pin and pin?"

Me, thinking to myself as I am still The New Kid: um... what? Pin and pin? Is there another spelling for pin that I don't know? Does it mean something different? Am I going to learn a new vocabulary word?* Also, I didn't know "pin" had two syllables...

Teacher: Very good! (writes on the board PIN and PEN)

Me: um.... no

I was STUNNED. Shocked. I couldn't even believe what I was seeing. First, I understand that regional differences in pronunciation vary greatly, but in my head there was still "the right way to say words" and "everything else." So, of course, some other brave soul offered "tin" and "ten" up to be added to the list. So I sat quietly convinced that this class (not Texas in general, not even the town, just this class, this teacher) was too stupid for me to be a part of. Yeah, I was that kind of kid. And I went home and told my mother the story. I don't remember her response, but I do remember that I still had to go to school despite my reservations as to the intelligence of my teacher. Turns out there isn't a direct correlation between how you sound and how smart you are, despite popular culture and sterotypes. I did learn quite a lot in the Language Arts class after all. Like the fact that "proper" pronunciation** (as determined by... I guess Miriam Webster?) isn't required for a word to be considered a homophone. My dad even had a hard time with the names of my two best friends in highschool: Ginny and Jenny. To me, just like pin/pen, tin/ten there is a distinct difference. For him, not so much. And my dad is BRILLIANT, so... you know... there's that. Not that he couldn't tell the difference or couldn't pronounce the difference, it was just sort of a non-issue that there was a difference, you know? I'd say like the difference between the pink stuff & the blue stuff you put in your iced tea, but Dad was always a staunch supporter of the pink stuff, so that's not a good example. I can't think of a good example, but basically the two names were fungible in his head. Fungible is a word that he taught me, as is gesticulation. My dad is cool.

But I think I was talking about my own haphazard rules of grammar and punctuation.

• My principal crimes:
• Run-on sentences justified to myself by the over-use of commas
• Blatant disregard for the semi-colon
• Over use of ellipses
• Perpetuating the double hyphen as a legitimate tool--for example, like this!
• Misplaced modifiers and dangling prepositional phrases

Crimes I've been mostly cured of:

• Ending a sentence with a preposition-though I admit, that the question, "Do you want to go with?" sounds perfectly fine to me and always has... you know what I mean, right?
• Relying solely on spell check to catch my mistakes. I do actually try to proofread. I still make mistakes and then get 10 kinds of embarrassed that someone might think I MEANT to spell it that way and that sort of kills me a little inside, but then I fix it and get over it... mostly

I don't really have grammar pet peeves that I can think of at this exact moment so I'm going to go with the blanket assumption that I have none until such time as I see one and get all bent out of shape. Except homophones... those really get my bent out of shape...

*Smarty-pants side note--I ACED the vocabulary section of the "gifted and talented" assessment... what can I say, I like words. The spacial relations portion... well, that was less impressive

**also, I can't seem to spell this word right either. I've done it wrong both times--thanks Spell Check!

Visual Thinker

It should be no surprise that I like words. With as much as I talk, I'd better. Vocabulary has always been a fascinating subject to me. I was one of those kids who read the dictionary. Not for very long, because I'd get distracted thinking of how to use all those words.

However, I never really mastered the pronunciation key. I liked the look of the word, and sort of just let my brain fill in the sounds, which is unreliable at best. Hence, I will still often say "miss-chee-vee-ous" instead of mischievous. Same with grievous. I'm especially bad with names in novels. My love of reading will let me create fantastic worlds in my mind with the information on the page, and then leave me incomprehensible when trying to talk to other people about books that we've both read. The Wheel of Time series is perhaps the worst for me in that respect, because the outlandish names that my eyes sort of gloss over, make their impression and recognize and never really transmit a pronunciation to my brain. When I'm reading, I don't need the sounds of the words, just the look is enough to let my visual brain continue along. Then when I try to talk about characters, I realize that I don't actually know all the letters and in what order enough to form a pronunciation. I just sort of go with what I recognize from the page, and make up the rest. Hence "Moghedien" becomes "Mogidishu" and "Nynaeve" is "Nin...Nyn... Ninavee... Nynnyeve... you know, the cranky Wisdom."

All of that is to get around to the fact that my brain is always trying to put words to the things I see, and images to the things I read. Whether or not I know how to pronounce any of those words is another matter entirely.

I started thinking about this a couple of nights ago in the bath (where lots of good thinking happens) when I squeezed out some shampoo. It looked like a slug for about a quarter of a second before it spread out and looked more like shampoo again. So there I was, thinking about a graceful way to describe the pearly white slugness of my shampoo... for what purpose, I have no idea. I just was. It wasn't sluggish* in a revolting way, it was sluggish in a very neutral way. But why would I waste time and thoughts trying to describe something as fleeting and inconsequential as the shampoo I'd just squeezed? I don't know, but I realized then that I do this all the time.

The numbers means something, I'm sure of it.

This will be my 50th post.  Not bad for a girl who never thought she'd make it past week one.

In honor of this fact, I shall make you a list of 50 words that I like, mostly because they are fun to say.  Don't know a word?  Click it!

1. lackadaisical
2. rudimentary
3. interrobang
4. muffin
5. sophistry
6. balloon
7. idiosyncratic
8. hippopotamus
9. heffalump
10. humu humu nuku nuku āpua`a
11. jubilation
12. racketeering
13. bubble
14. eclectic
15. snickerdoodle
16. forensic
17. persnickety
18. flibbertigibbet
19. Jabberwocky
20. ramekin
21. fjord
22. obstreperous
23. cobbler
24. spasmodic
25. juice
26. brobdingnagian
27. pudding
28. llama
29. concoction
30. Fraggle
31. squiggle
32. diphthong
33. snort
34. aspirate
35. guacamole
36. flummox
37. flan
38. parapluie
39. woozy
40. flambé
41. escutcheon
42. mischievous
43. ecumenical
44. slink
45. ubiquitous
46. lascivious
47. Gesundheit
48. arugula
49. quibble
50. discombobulate

Lots of foods in there.  Maybe I should go get a sammich...

Period Space Space

After a recent conversation with my husband, I have confirmed two things that I've known about myself for quite some time:

I am stubborn.
I do not like to change comfortable things for arbitrary reasons.

I was taught to type with two spaces following a period.  Just like that.  I type that way because it is the way I learned to type, though my husband, a mere 3 years younger learned and was forced to use a single space to separate his sentences.  I didn't know the technical reasons behind it.  Mavis Beacon never told me, and I never asked.  MLA has changed in more ways than I care to think about since my days of term papers and essays, and since I'm not a formal writer, I... don't care.  This is just one more area where I agree with Allie Brosh: Double Space Forever! 

The double space may be "an artifact left over from manual-type and typewriters where characters could not be kerned to correct for the relatively tiny space a period takes up,"* but I work off of muscle memory and sheer determination, so stopping to delete an instinctive space just isn't going to happen until I'm forced to by the folks at MLA, Chicago Manual of Style, or the AP Stylebook.  They'll have to send their ninja-like assassins after me with a long list of crimes including: abuse of the dash, disregard for the semi-colon, defamation of the parentheses, ignoring natural sentence breaks in favor of dangerously long run-on sentences, and questionable grammatical constructs.  Until that time, I will continue to bend, twist, and abuse the English language to fit my own whims.  I will use the Oxford optional comma.  In fact, I will use commas as breath marks, because that's the way I talk.  It's a combination of stubbornness rooted in laziness fed to the fire of indignation over having to change something for no reason that seems valid to the publication in which I write.  Space isn't limited here at the Parade.  Space for all!  Space for spaces, and space for commas, and space for whatever I feel.

I herby denounce all other style guides and vow to write by the Bean Language Association Style Guide.  It goes like this--write like you talk.


That's it.  Oh, wait, an addendum:

(Because it wouldn't be a style guide if it hadn't been changed on the whim of the authors after sobering up or coming down off their soap-box)

Write like you think, or with as many of the things you remember from your schooling years as possible, but if you forget al the myriad rules of grammar and punctuation, don't beat yourself with wet noodles.  Learn the basics.  Understand homophones and how to work spell-check.  Then, go!  Be free!

The End
 
Gee, this sounds sort of revolutionary, or at least reactionary.  It's not.  I'm hardly unorthodox.  Clinging to old familiar traditions because the new way is functionally useless when applied to my life isn't very cutting edge or exciting.  It's not hip.  It's stodgy.  Ooooh... stodgy.  What a great word!  I'll be un-radical and stodgy about my type formatting, and as I told my hubby, MLA can go suck an egg.  In this one area, I don't particularly care what people think.  If the format and presentation of my round-abou, half-baked, hare-brained ideas is irritating to you, my condolences.  Now go away.  I have punctuation to use precariously.

*My Husband, 2010.  I'm not going to use MLA formatted footnotes to quote him either.  No bibliography or anything.