The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light

  Songs of the Hour: Moby Porcelain, some Mazzy Star

I fell asleep last night with words marching through my head in unit formation. Apprehensive, apprehended, prehensile, comprehensive, reprehensible... I woke up this morning and they were still there, but in a single helix spinning like pinwheels, hinged on "prehen". Just… spinning. Glowing blue times-new-roman twirling in closed-eye darkness. What do these words have in common? To grab, maybe. To hold.  I think about this sort of thing constantly, in the background, and ultimately I'm never certain. Obsessive? Perhaps. I got so obsessed with "hap" I actually bothered to look it up. Hap. Hapless. Happy. Happenstance. Mishap. Haphazard. It happens to mean luck, fortune, or chance. Oh. Of course it does. It's obvious now. That makes sense.

 

I had to know.

   

 It's one of the things I love about Japanese (and subsequently Chinese) [sequence, consequence, subsequent, sequel… nevermind. Inconsequential].  You have a kanji character that has a meaning, and probably several different ways to pronounce it, but the meaning is modified by the other characters in the word. Just like the Greek, Latin and German roots of English words are modified by the prefixes and suffixes around them. But there are only so many pre/suf-fixes in English. In Japanese, everything revolves around combinations [evolve, revolve, revolution, volume, convolute, volatile, volunteer]. The combination of meanings is crucial [I'm resisting the power of "crux"].  

   

 My personality professor implied to me an email, kindly, that I was obsessive. As obsessive as he was in college. I had written something about seeing cross-disciplinary patterns in the things I learned. How history, science, art, math and literature are all interdependent through time.  I take it for granted how obvious this is, but he took the opportunity to imply obsessive tendencies [tend, pretend, attend, tender, tendon, intension, intensive, detention]. I suspect we're both right. Ultimately, a lot of what I see is science shaping paradigm and how it manifests in all the other areas, but the power of metaphors shaping science is also pervasive. It's in the terminology. Stem cells. String Theory. Metaphor is the very foundation of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. The solar system as a model for the atom. And working the other way, damn near anything can be put on a graph. These metaphors aren't always accurate, but the dominant use of them, to me, is wholly indicative of the way humans think.

   

I'm not exactly sure what it is that I would say I'm obsessed with. I could argue that it's metaphor. But that's not quite right, it's something beneath metaphor. It's the concept beneath, one thing representing another. Or perhaps, as with the linguistics, it's simply a matter of what things mean outside of their symbols. What words mean. How we communicate. How phrases like "You don't have to rub my nose in it" come to common use. Obviously, it comes from house-training puppies. But when you say it or hear it, are you thinking about puppies? Probably not. It's a concept of blatantly reminding one of one's mistake. But how often do you say "stop reminding me of, and punishing me for, my mistake"? As I "cut" and "paste" this post from Word to Friendster and Myspace, will I give the terminology, and its implications about how the species conceptualizes, a second thought? Should I?

   

 
Perhaps I'm just trapped in a cycle of deductive and inductive reasoning. Deducing core meanings and applying them in generalizations to humanity at large in an effort to better understand. Perhaps I'm thinking about twenty separate things at once and getting them all muddled up together. Roots and meaning and metaphor and human processing. I'm obsessed with gesture. What your fidgeting during a particular conversations indicates about you. I'm obsessed with the power of a peculiar glance. I'm obsessed with Wing Biddlebaum's hands. I'm obsessed with your word choice, and what it implies about your values and schemas. I'm obsessed with the analysis of implications. And currently, I'm contemplating what that obsession indicates about me [Indicate, predicate, predict, indict, verdict, vindicate, syndicate, dictator, contradict, addict, benediction]. Ok. Enough.

 

 

 

Joss went fishing with my dad this week, and we took some time to clean before they left. I put hundreds of dollars worth of toys in a box labeled "free toys" on the curb and hauled everything else to the trash. It was a lot to get rid of. Ten years worth of accumulation of buzz lightyear dolls and happy meal toys. I was surprised Joss was willing to let it all go, keeping mostly just transformers and magic kits and little kid-science things. "On Turning Ten" is haunting me as I write this. Four days away. Jeesus.

   

I had my dad's truck while they were out of town, so I took the opportunity to put a few things in storage. I looked at all my mom's expensive antique porcelain dolls, her life-size Raggedy Anne and Andy dolls (orphans, just like my brother and I, that's why she liked them—they represented the two of us), the 3 foot stuffed Little Orphan Annie (same principle), and a fuck-ton of silly antiques that have crowded an already overpacked house. The antique butter churn, the glass-top wagon-wheel-on-a-barrel table, the four-hundred pound wrought iron safe, wrought iron sewing bench, the antique "ice-box"  full of Joss' books and art supplies. 85% of our furniture is antique, and half of it so old I'm scared to put a glass of water on it lest it crumble. Secretly, I hate it. Every bit of it. I always have.

   

I started thinking about what these things indicated about my mom. It paints an easy portrait of a woman from a small town who grew up poor and when she came into her own, wanted to populate her home with expensive things. She was a romantic in her way, antiques heralding back to an idealized past of privilege and class, traditional family values and gender roles in her choice of dolls and the zillion cross-stitched pictures on the wall—half of which she actually did, the other half paid for, and paid to add my mom's initials to the bottom where she humbly took credit for the masterpieces of my and my brother's stitched in portraits. She was insanely sentimental. Little poetry books "From a Mother to her Daughter" full of fluffy monosyllabic iambic pentameter are stuffed into every antique drawer beside permutations of "Chicken Soup for (some poor bastard's) Soul". Taking it all in, I think the person she wanted to be was the type of woman you can only find in "Touched by an Angel" reruns or old country novels about rural southern gentry.  

      

It doesn't say as much about who she was, as it does about who she wanted to be. But that's definitely worth knowing, maybe even moreso. Isn't that how we'd all rather be remembered?
 

 

I don't know if this analysis was a result of my usual obsession, or an afterthought related to one of Marco's posts, but it's lengthy and detailed and I'm going to spare you the rest because I love you all and it's probably awkward to read about. And for the love of the gods, this is long. Well, Amanda, be careful what you wish for. J You've got 3 weeks worth of gibberish to pilfer through.

Outside of my incessantly churning head, I've spent a couple more weeks playing spades and looking at grad schools. I had one job interview, with those who Didn't Call Back probably due to my unnecessary honesty, and one interview for an unpaid research assistant position next semester that went pretty well I think. I'll know next week. The rest of my time has been spent with the baby biscuit, and seasons 1 and 2 of Battlestar Galactica, the commentary on which will just have to wait. Because I love you. And you've been listening to me too long already.
 

 

Love.