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the latest waddle:

good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03

elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01

building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19

ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09

my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04


2002-01-29 ... 12:41 p.m.

Things That May Seem Boring or Pointless to You but That I Enjoy Quite a Bit:

Diagramming sentences. Shut up. It's fun.

Finding kindred grammar spirits. The author of this page neatly sums up all those irritating overly conservative grammar shibboleths that drive me bananas. I care about precise language (oh do I ever), but not to the point of hobbling our communications with outdated ruler-on-the-back-of-the-hand commandments.

When I can't decide when something is full of baloney or very profound, such as the link between what a word looks and sounds like and what the word means. This person has gotten a dissertation out of such weirdness. I've always had a strange relationship with the printed word. Consider a word like lonely, those two l's standing there so straight, so proud, and so far apart. So lonely. Consider how saying a word like coagulate forces you to make a coagulation sound with your mouth. Consider how very insane I am sometimes.

Thinking about Capgras syndrome and even better, Cotard syndrome. There is some evidence that neurological damage can precipitate both these disorders, which just gets me all fired up and excited about the mind-body problem all over again. Cotard syndrome is also called nihilistic delusional disorder. Don't you love that name? Well, don't you? Where are you going?

Enough of this. Give me big shoes.

For my birthday, which was oh, a month ago, my parents gave me a $100 gift card to spend on shoes at Nordstrom. (I know. They are empty-nesters and the excitement of not paying college tuition anymore has made them extravagant.) Nordstrom is just about the only place where I can buy shoes, because I have freakishly small freakishly narrow freak feet. Did I ever bitch about my shoe size here? It's horrible. I barely wear a 5, and then only if they lace up and I stick all kinds of inserts and things in them so the heel fits properly. The result is that the only shoes that fit me are Doc Martens and sneakers with Cookie Monster on the sides, and I have a serious lack of grown-up shoes. Nordstrom, though, with their strangely submissive ass-kissy customer service, has sometimes been successful in outfitting my freak feet, and I've been meaning to go and just throw myself on the shoe department's mercy, waving the gift card and shouting my shoe requirements ("Black! No heel! Freakishly small! No cartoon characters anywhere! Suitable for a moderately successful 30-year-old woman who wants people to take her semi-seriously in certain situations!"). But I have not had the time. Or, truthfully, the inclination. I need a personal shopper.

Buying shoes in a Store of Fanciness like Nordstrom is weird anyway, because it usually involves young underpaid retail-clerk men kneeling before you. Not that I don't get that every day of my LIFE, you understand. It's just that they are usually wearing dog collars and not holding out sensible low-heeled loafers for me to try on.

---mimi "ferae naturae" smartypants

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