I don’t know WHO could pinch a person at work in this cynical harassment-ridden world, but there must be someone, and I must be on my guard. This morning in my bleary haze, I was only aware enough to plop on the teakettle for my pre-measured coffee and press ‘refresh’ on the weather forecast. How was I to know it was St. Patrick’s Day? How was I to know, as I snuggled into a cream sweater, that I was committing the second or third transgression against Irish-American tradition of my young life?

If you see a pincher, tell them I went that way. points

The lady in the next cube forgets people’s names, but never says ‘whats-her-name’. Instead, she says, ‘whats-her-nose.’ I find this whimsical and eccentric.

Update: At 2:36 pm, neighbor said “whats-her-toes.” Variation duly noted.

Being as I am a language sponge, it is no surprise when I find myself adopting new words and phrases, or using more often words of whose existence I have recently been reminded. Before having an Australian boss, for example, I was never known to say, ‘no worries,’ which is now an integral part of my vocabulary. After watching Buffy Season Three for the first time there was a spike in my use of ‘wicked’ as ‘neat’, and after rewatching it I fear it stuck (although I’ve managed to keep use of ‘five by five’ down to consciously controlled levels.)

However, sometimes words and phrases just percolate up into one’s consciousness. Some phrases that occur and recur to me I try to exorcise or harness by using them in fiction…some are merely nonsense. Ah, but words…words I have little control over. They bubble up unseen from crevices in my mind, dislodged by who knows what secret stirrings. I seem at any given time to have one or two words that are inserted, smurf-fashion, wherever a sound is needed or I don’t know what to say. This can be confusing for others, especially when the nonsense word of the moment is a real word, such as, for example, ‘pickle.’ ‘Pickle’ had a long stay, as did ‘picketty’ (picked up from [Katrina Van Tassel is introduced singing, ‘The Picketty Witch, the Picketty Witch, who’s got a kiss for the Picketty Witch?’|text|Tim Burton’s lovely ‘Sleepy Hollow,’]), which I still utter rhythmically when I’m trying to concentrate. The current reigning champion is ‘schmrr,’ which has the advantage of being unmistakably meaningless. These words shift over time, and while I can exert pressure by conscious usage, I am not truly in control.

From time to time, however, non-nonsense words bubble up from the darkness. The latest monster to force itself upon an unwilling brain-surface is a term of endearment. A horribly saccharine, pink, fluffy term of endearment: ‘pookie.’

When I complain of my plight to sister sledge, she will only say that ‘pookie’ is perfectly nice and I should keep it. However, I’m afraid that if I don’t extirpate it, I’ll find myself calling lots of people ‘pookie’ who I really, really shouldn’t. It’s a disease. Next thing I know I’ll be a 60-year-old woman with a big purple necklace calling girls I don’t know ‘sweetheart.’ For the moment, I’m coping with my pookie-urges by channeling them towards appropriate targets. Apparently sister sledge digs the pookie, and as far as I know, Qubit doesn’t care what I call her, so long as the scritches keep coming.

This morning I got dressed and put on my Republicans for Voldemort T-shirt. Now, as I do every time I wear this T-shirt, I fought down a certain fear of confrontation, as well as a guilty feeling that I was being hypocritical (since I try to combat the tendency towards hyperbolic partisan politics in my country), largely by squashing my doubts with the ‘but it’s so funny’ battleaxe.

Of course, then I ended up going downtown. The first car I was behind in town was a big ol’ red pickup truck, complete with a beflanneled grandpa; with a bumper sticker that read “Bush is a Moron (and you know it)”.

The next car’s sticker ran, “Frodo has failed; Bush has the Ring.” The next had the old standard, “Mission NOTHING Accomplished,” and the next had gone for the simple elegance of a circle and strike-through over the letter ‘W’.

I don’t think I should have worried.

Breaking news story with exclusive interviews by Felicity!

“I just don’t understand it,” says experienced undercover gossip reporter Zenobia Michaels with a sigh. “I really thought this was my moment to shine. Right now there’s a lull in the Jen/Brad story – though with a reconciliation threatening, it could end any minute! – and the country is ravenous for a new celebrity storm to watch. And what could be stormier than the cheating God of Thunder and his harridan wife?” Zenobia’s exquisitely researched exposé was turned down by ‘People’ last week, and its subsequent publication in a lesser-known gossip rag has yielded no ripples, internet pick-ups or interest whatsoever. “That was juicy stuff I got. Verbatim arguments, details of recent indiscretions…and it was hard to get, too! Do you know what you have to do to get to be a cupbearer on Mount Olympus? I don’t get it. How much more drama do they want?”

It isn’t the drama, says gossip sociologist Dr. Kiva Procnow. “What the public wants is blood in the water. It doesn’t matter that Zeus and Hera’s arguments are significantly more interesting, dramatic and violent than, say, the tiff Gwyneth [Paltrow] and Chris [No wonder she kept her own name. I mean, Gwyneth Martinofcoldplay? Can you see THAT on a movie poster?|text|[Martinofcoldplay]] had in a restaurant two days ago. Zeus and Hera have been together for millennia, and they’ve been having this kind of feud all that time. They’re never going to break up, and the public knows it. It’s like Whitney [Houston] and Bobby [Brown]. They’re fighting? What else is new! Now if Zeus were admitted to the hospital for hitting the ambrosia too hard, or if there were a public brawl, maybe that would make headlines…”

”She said WHAT?” responded Michaels. “By the strong ships of the Achaeans. What kind of ‘brawl’ are they going to have? Lightning bolt versus peacock? And don’t even get me started on that Paltrow/Martinofcoldplay thing. That’s luck, pure luck, and classic exaggeration and inference. My story is the result of years of research and undercover work, and I lose my place in the sun because the public would rather believe an actress and a rock star are on the rocks than know a couple of gods are.”

”It’s not just the age and freshness of the story,” continued Dr. Procnow. “It’s the inclusion of the new baby with the funny name. That was really all that was lacking in the Jen/Brad story, but it was supplied by the speculation on fertility and differences over starting a family. Zeus and Hera’s children are grown. It doesn’t add to the pathos. Now, if Hera were pregnant…especially considering the juicy child abuse scandal from the birth of Hephaestus…”

Zenobia sighs at the quote. ”I can’t just make things up, you know. Everything in my story is verifiably true, even the fantastic parts. He really did turn Teri Hatcher into a manatee.” She grinds out a cigarette and adjusts her chiton. “By Horkos, if I had made it up I would have said Angelina Jolie.”

Having just happened to experience several very annoying but trivial occurrences this morning, I found myself making a list:

• People dialing my number randomly on their non-keyguarded mobile so I have to sit through 10 minutes of someone’s rambling profane conversation with his girlfriend on my voicemail
• Me putting my keys in odd places (beside my bed? WHY?) especially the day after passing up a good, cheap row of keyhooks at the store
• Me forgetting to take my medicine. I know there are three or four medicines involved here, but you can do it, brain!
• People who mark every e-mail high urgency. “Thanks for doing this!” URGENT!

This strikes me as a very petulant list to make, so I have obliged myself to counterbalance it:

• Nudges (what they call caramel macchiatos at the coffee shop here), especially when the chatty guy makes pictures of robots and so forth with the caramel on top (Nudge purchase imminent!)
• Remembering to make my lunch AND remembering to bring it to work
• Nice weather that lasts all weekend when it wasn’t supposed to do so
• Paychecks that auto-deposit Thursday morning when they aren’t obliged to do so until Friday afternoon

What is irking or tickling my two readers?

It’s my 24th birthday today. I believe the traditions at this juncture are (A) to bemoan one’s increased decrepitude, (B) to note the increased perceived speed of time, (C) to gloat over one’s presents, or (D) to whine that one hasn’t accomplished enough in one’s lifetime.

So to better facilitate my chosen method, (D), I’d like to note the following.

By the age of 24:

• Mozart had composed 10 operas and had an eleventh commissioned
• Virginia Woolf wrote for the Times Literary Supplement
• Victoria was Queen of England and Empress of India
• Pompey the Great had fought in several wars and begun his first string of unbroken victories
• Victor Hugo had had two novels published

However, in assembling this list, it has not escaped my notice that my father is very nice, I haven’t had a nervous breakdown, I am not the leader of an oppressive colonialist force, I have never killed anyone, and, God willing, I will never be a politician, even in the noble cause of Revolution. So maybe I’m not doing so badly….

I would hesitate to name any punctuation mark more abused than the hyphen. Whilst the apostrophe, perhaps, is more widely, obviously, and painfully misused, the hyphen maintains its primacy in the department of pervasive subtle confusion. For while it is fairly simple to tell someone the apostrophe’s proper usage, and the explanation touches only on one or two of the eccentricities of our mother tongue, one finds oneself almost at a loss to explain in words what is wrong with someone’s hyphenation, or lack thereof. The hyphen is a magic symbol, able to transform nouns into adverbs and effortlessly merge two words into a chimaera. Its absence or misuse pulls subtly at the meaning of sentences, snatches clarity away, delays the mind, but does not leap up and trill ‘look at me, I’m wrooooooong!’ like so many erring punctuation marks do. Or at least they do to me, and apparently to Tycho.

I had very little formal training in punctuation. The only classes I can recall in it were a brief series of lessons on colons and semicolons and why we must never again confuse the two thank you very much in eighth grade. I very much wonder whether anyone gets formal training in punctuation these days, because my professional life seems often to consist of picking hyphens out of words and nestling them in between other ones.

Today I compiled several passages and blurbs written by several different people, and had to restandardize English in deciding which words were truly compound and which deserved hyphens. I can tell my new foes are going to be ‘on site’, ‘on-site’, and ‘onsite’; just as at my first permanent job they were ‘off topic’, ‘off-topic’, and ‘offtopic’. For some reason the same person will oscillate between these isoforms, let alone three or six different people! At my last job, every time I proofread a scientific paper I just about broke even on hyphens; pull about 13 out, plunk about 15 in. I would creep into the scientist’s offices and ask them detailed questions about their procedures and findings to determine the correct grammatical relationship of one biochemical word to another; and I would explain to them brightly why you really shouldn’t put a hyphen between an adverb and the verb it modifies.

My freshman year in high school I drew a picture of the three great gods of the Hindu pantheon. Brahma created, Shiva destroyed, and between, Lord Narayana, the great Vishnu, ‘maintaining and ordering’ creation. Long was I stymied, for how does a mediocre artist portray the act of ‘maintaining and ordering’ in a 3″×4″ space? Finally I drew him passing his hand over a jumble of lines, all the same length but jumbled in angle and distribution, crossing and leaning on each other in chaos. Where his blue hand had been, the lines appeared in tidy ranks, lined up like iron molecules in igneous rock. Sometimes, when I am up to my frontal lobes in hyphens, I remember that picture and feel that organizing short lines is my cosmic function!

Today I’d like to gush about my sister, known hereabouts as sister sledge. In honor of this great gushiness, I have made today Unofficial National Sister Day.

My sister is, was, and always shall be, an individual. In her earliest photos, you can already see a pert, elfin face with a stubborn little chin. This is the child who, when told she was contrary, spat back, “I am NOT!” This is the girl who cut her hair not out of deviltry or curiosity, but because it was getting in her eyes during class (she asked to be excused to the bathroom and took her safety scissors.) She cut her bangs, straight across, to approximately one half inch. When we had to invent our own characters for the class-ending play at Ladybug Theatre drama camp, amid a sea of queens, fairy queens, and princesses, she wanted to be a French waiter (I wanted to be a bunny who could fly.) This was the teenager who told her impatient family, waiting for her to get out of the car on a family trip, that she was “savoring the inertia.”

We have been together for 24 years next Friday. We were pals from the start, maybe from the first time she sat carefully on the couch to hold the chubby, fussy, black-haired little me. Our relationship has weathered my peeing on her floor, at two years old; my ripping Darth Vader’s cloak, at seven; my throwing a phone book at her, at eleven; her insisting on watching the Blazer game during an all-new Star Trek: the Next Generation episode at age 12 or so; her banishing me from her room entirely and ineffectually several times when she was 13 through 16; and any number of the normal tiffs and spats. We were bickering pots of anger throughout her early teenagerhood, and then we made a startling discovery. We went on a family vacation to England, and made a solemn pact to get along “for Dad’s sake.” It wasn’t hard, and it was far, far more fun than fighting. We have been the best of friends ever since.

Obviously, I have been through a rough patch lately. My entire life fell apart, and with it much of my sense of my self, value, and place in the world—as well as my job and putative self-sufficiency. My sister has been not only the most understanding and supportive listener I could ask for, not only the most generous helper and organizer I could dream of, but an inspiration to me. She has been through similar thorn-thickets on the trail of life, and has emerged stronger, more determined, more self-aware and confident, more aware of and committed to her inner light. It’s ironic, because she has the audacity to call me a ‘role model,’ because I turn out nonsensical fiction for my website and so forth… but she is far more deserving of the phrase. She never stops searching for insight, reaching for self-betterment and exploring the world’s possibilities. I love you, sisser. You’ve walked beside me all through life, even when our paths were far apart, and I could not ask for a better fellow traveler.

Well, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get to the music review I was planning on writing up and blogging today… So much to do, now that I’m rejoining the workforce on Monday! Wheeeeeee!

I feel all growed up.

P.S. In more comprehensible words, I got a long-term temp contract at Nike, where I’ve been dying to work, and they loooooove to hire temps to perm. Wheeee again!