That Croesus wants to capriciously inviscate my face?

Part I: Her Fast-Luck Oil and Her Magic Stones

(The following is purposefully vituperative.) 

I had a good Vietnam day today. I think it has something to do with my propinquity to the pretty parts of Ho Chi Minh. When I spend my time in eastern Phu Nhuan and eastern district 7, my mood is automatically ameliorated. I also spent a large amount of time in the workplace discalced, which is a recent goal of mine for my career as a whole. Is that too hoydenish? At least my feet aren’t papilionaceous! I’ve been worried that that’s too overpowering a quality of mine, that it’s pernicious to my quote-unquote attractiveness. That my hoydenism is perceived as too gauche. I’m not at all cognoscitive when it comes to this situation. I wish I were clairsentient. Once in a while, I have a flash of gnosis, but it’s always too ephemeral and fugacious. If it’s anathema to my happiness, shouldn’t that give me a strong predilection for change? Maybe I should do some more noctiviganting in district 7 on Charlie’s scooter to discover some aphorisms about myself. Too bad I’m not usafructuary to it. Maybe it’s because I suffer from a slight case of hypobulia. But change is ineluctable, hypobulia or not. At least I’m not a bobadil or a harridan—I mean, right? And if I’m conscious of it, my voice is pretty damn mellisonant, if you ask me. Please don’t inveigh; I would find that to be a peccadillo. However, you may inveigh my tumultuary way (check out that pulchritudinous meter!) of stringing these iterative verbages together. 

Part II: The Return of Bobbejaan

You either found the above completely unremarkable (save perhaps its logic or validity), amusing and clever, or highly pretentious and obnoxious. If the latter, I do believe you’re just jealous of my command of the English language—and that includes AAVE. I mean, c’mon! I got all those words into ONE loosely connected paragraph! Not too shabby! Feel free to leave me a comment if you’re overcome with uncontrollable emotion, whichever pole it may lie on. 

I’m about 5 hours into the spelling bee (clearly). I finished part 1 of 4 at 55% accuracy and I think that’s a large enough sample that I needn’t do any more math. My computer is having serious troubles downloading it, so I may have to settle for only the first half (8 hours). Life is full of constant disappointments, you know? BUT—they used the word ‘bobbejaan’ again this year; closure is had!

Life is exactly like the spelling bee and exactly not like the spelling bee simultaneously. All the pretty girls are one by one dropping off, like synchronized healthy lemmings, leaving the crippled, blind ones stuck in some tree about a mile away from the fatal cliff, not realizing how much they should relish life. Also, the spelling bee is entirely based on luck. Who wants to be the kid that has to spell 'mycetophagous' and who wants to slap the kid that gets the word ‘motif’ or ‘alchemy’? All these kids have read Harry Potter! And why did they give the Indian girl ‘masala’?

Riverside Casino and Golf Resort once gave me $30.

I really need to work on my French spelling patterns. I’m abysmal. You’d think I’d be good at it! Unless it’s food. Duh. I’m solid at Latin and pretty solid in Greek and my German could be plenty worse, but mon francais est terrible. I think it’s because Dr. Bailey pronounces all the French words anglicized and I then change my spelling of them accordingly, knowing they’re French and spelling it using French phonetics. Knowledge isn’t always power, kids.  What’s more, Dr. Bailey has a wide-brimmed glass of red wine to sip during the kids’ ponderings. Could be that. 

Also: (as if you wanted to know more about my spelling habits), I’m super hit or miss. I can’t spell vinaigrette, but tokomak? No fucking problem. Khong fucking sao. Bildungsroman? Consider it done.

This is a people shooting hat...I shoot people in this hat.

I LOVE ROOT WORDS. How cool is it to hear the word ‘terraqueous’ and know EXACTLY how to spell it and EXACTLY what it means (…give or take) without any explanation?! SO COOOOOL! I still remember the first time I ran across the word 'acephalous'. My kid better be an awesome speller. He or she is going to know how to spell ‘omelette’, if I’ve anything to do with it. I started teaching my E6s prefixes and their minds were blown. I also went into a savant-like explanation of the word 'hook', in every sense, alone and phrasal. The white board was beautiful.


Part III: This next part is me reining it back in, actually.

Another also: there’s a dog outside my window that has recently graduated from begging to not be beaten again to pleading for the culprit to stop gnawing slowly through his hind legs. And in my summer school class, that rooster cockafucking(the only things cooler than prefixes are infixes)doodledoos all the way till 11:30. If you don't care about infixes (don't knock it till you've tried it, yo.), skip the next three pictures.

Then I should've said 'cockadoodlefuckingdoos'...DID YOU EVEN NOTICE?

WAIT WAIT THIS IS INTERESTING:

SOOO COOOOOL! No? Just me?

This is Cantonese. I wonder if Lezgian has infixes...

 

 

 

 

                                        

If anyone wants to know what I did in college, I'm now referring them to my blog. This is the exact format of every day that was my life, only half the information was blanked out and we had to fill 'er in using solely our desperation and will to live.

Man, English sucks. I used to defend it because its idiosyncrasies are abounding (a product of its bastardization, which is super neat) but now that I know that Tagalog has innermorpheme infixes, Cantonese has 'devil' as an infix, and Esperanto's 'learn-ed' words are harder to pronounce than their layman's counterparts, I give up. Lingua franca, my ass.

< /geekout >

xoxo,

J

PS - It's almost 1 AM and the dog is nowhere to be heard.

My Annual Trip to ESPN.com

SPOILER ALERT: If you are a product of the late 80s and early 90s, the following may haunt you for what could possibly be days (the love you remember feeling as a child is about to be dispelled and replaced with a wrenching fear of the xylophone setting on any standard keyboard):

Halt. I am Reptar.

I mean, is this guy right or is this guy rhight?

I miss the Dodge Street Hy-Vee. I don't know what it is about that place. I think it was the lighting and the pre-packaged sushi. It definitely wasn't the fact that they carded you for grenadine. I'd like to be kidding, but I'm not. About my lamentations, not the grenadine, though both are true. Grocery shopping isn't pleasant in Vietnam. Short women run their carts into you like you're some sort of white-demon magnet and the cereal selection is seriously lacking. If I had to list my havens in Waterloo, Iowa (home excluded), Wal-Mart at 3 AM would most likely make it into the top 5 and sturdily rests in the top 10. If I had a billion dollars, I would buy my own space and turn it into a grocery store that dished out non-expiring Special K coupons and didn't allow talking or bubble violations. Then I would run for mayor and the scholarly breakfast easters, agoraphobic, mime, and deaf/mute communities would be MINE. If items were being discontinued, there would be a bright neon sign that said, "BUY THIS NOW BEFORE IT EXISTS ONLY IN YOUR HIPPOCAMPUS AND SELECT SPECIALTY RETAILERS ON THE WEST COAST". Except for on the orange peelers (are those a thing?), if they ever face extinction, just to be ironic.


I've always thought about leaving Vietnam and riding a motorbike to my next stop, preferably in Europe. Then, I realize that that's crazy and I'm completely a-okay with my unaccomplished life:

Keiichi “Kei” Iwasak's route taken on his bike. 37 countries and 28,000 miles. 160 Yen in his pocket (or $2).  He has since been robbed by pirates (PIRATES) and arrested in India, nearly died after being attacked by a rabid dog in Tibet, and narrowly escaped marriage in Nepal. He makes his living by doing magic on the street.

Compared to that guy, I suck. You probably suck, too, though. In my defense.

11 HOURS TILL THE SPELLING BEE 11 HOURS TILL THE SPELLING BEE 11 HOURS TILL THE SPELLING BEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MY FAVORITE TIME OF YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously, guys. I'm going to sit down with my notebook and pause the video after each word, take my guess, and calculate my average. When it's too depressing, I'm going to start thinking about how I'm betting looking and have more friends than all these twelve-year-olds, though this paragraph begs to differ. My favorite contestant last year was this guy:

There are more benefits to wearing footie pajamas to school, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, though it's anathema to my chafing condition.

The word he went out on was 'bobbejaan'. If you ever sneak into ESPN's archives and find the footage from last year's bee, his number is 253. It's priceless, not on YouTube, and you won't regret it. ...God's going to give me an ugly, dumb kid to teach me a lesson, isn't He? 

In other news, I was sitting in a cafe the other day when I remembered how beautiful I used to think that spot was; I had stopped noticing. I love traveling, but does living somewhere 'foreign' take away the beauty and novelty of it all? Does the brevity of a situation determine its beauty? Can that be said about life? Are things only appreciated if they are brief and fleeting? If we lived for a longer amount of time, how would that change things?

It's also weird how happiness is completely subjective and random, you know? I got a package and a letter the other day, and I was about glowing. If we wanted, sadness could elicit the same response. Nothing is stopping us but us. I mean, it helps if you have Special K with Red Berries in the fridge and chai powder in your cupboard, but you get it. Do you know how obnoxious it is to heat up 2 oz of water without having a microwave? I'ma have to wait until my velleities to make an iced chai graduate to legitimate yearnings.

 My maid also works at a bakery and just brought us ENGLISH MUFFINS. Since I a) have a maid and b) have English muffins, here's something to make you feel better about your life:

Source: The University of Texas / The Texas Tribune

 That worked, right?

 My three least favorite books in the world are 'Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry', 'Heart of Darkness', and Twilight #4. I felt like this post was lacking a conclusion.


xoxo