Serious introspective blog posting OMG barf

Today's snapshot: down by the Museum Campus. Again with the damn lake. You may see a lot of it this month. Mmmm. Pretty sunrise.

So, I made a dumb mistake in class today. Really dumb, truth be told. It was a simple transposition of masculine and feminine, which ends up changing the meaning of the word in question. And it was a little thing, but I felt like a total idiot.

I am ashamed of what I do. I feel like a poser. Like a fraud. I feel guilty for teaching students a language which isn't my native language. There are millions upon millions of native speakers out there, right now, probably much more knowledgeable than I. Where does this guera get off trying to pretend she knows more than she does?

Whenever someone presses me to talk to a native speaker, or even to a second-generation speaker, I always feel like an idiot. Like I'm going to sound stupid. Like I won't know enough. Like my vocabulary won't be as large, or I'll sound too "textbook" and not "natural" enough. I feel like they're always going to laugh at me. How can I ever be good enough?

I go out of my way to avoid the maintenance crew at work. I'm afraid they'll all make fun of my accent. Last weekend, at a birthday party, I purposely snubbed someone's abuelita because I didn't want her to think I was trying to be something that I'm not. It's gotten to the point that I feel like I look dumber for avoiding speaking than I would for just coming out and talking.

This is a very distilled version of something that's been bothering me for months, but it's all I can manage tonight. I think it all goes back to self-confidence. I have none. I feel like an idiot, and I wish I could just like who I am, cool or uncool. I need to embrace my inner white girl, in all her geekdom. I'm just not quite there yet.

Continued

Well, picking up where I left off yesterday:

8. foul - not in the sense of a foul ball, but in the sense of, dear God, what is that foul smell? Kind of like vile. Just so expressive.

9. effulgent - just cause I like the way it sounds. You could say shiny, but where's the fun in that?

10. preparedness - and you have to say it with the emphasis on the ED: prepare-ed-ness. I use this one all the time on my students.

11. fluidity - I don't much care for "fluids" in the sense of bodily fluids, but I like "fluidity" in the sense of grace of movement.

12. anathema - when I was younger, I thought it was "an athema," and I could never figure out what an "athema" was. Silly. It's not a particularly pleasant word, but I like the sound of it.

13. fuck - far and away my favorite word, and one that I use far more than I should. It's so multifaceted, and so expressive of so many things. It can be used in so many ways. Just perfect, really.

So, that's it. I could expand this to a list of more like 50, but that's a slippery slope. I was an English major in college, and Husband is forever mocking my word choice. I love words. I always have.

Bear is still sick, and today was just like the day from hell. Very uncool. I am zapped. I think maybe because it was pitch black at 5:00 tonight? That's a serious downer. Oh, well. Tomorrow is another day. ::said in best Scarlett O'Hara voice::


**ETA**

-visceral
-vulgar

13

Always one of my favorite numbers, mostly because most people are "afraid" of it, which I think is stupid.

Anyway, this meme, taken from a variety of places, even though I haven't been tagged, just because I like it, and also because I haven't left the house all day (sick Bear), ergo no commuting pictures.

13 Bloody Good Words, Without Which The World Would Not Be Nearly As Nice A Place To Live (in no particular order):

1. defenestrate - I love the fact that there's a whole separate word just for throwing someone out a window. Because you couldn't just say "He got thrown out a window." Well, you could. But it sounds so much cooler to say "He was defenstrated." Oh, yeah.

2. vile - so very descriptive. I love the way it sounds when you say it. Very emphatic.

3. frumious - a la Lewis Carroll, of course. A made-up word on his part, but one to which co-workers and I have given a case-specific meaning. A "frumious bandersnatch," in the Jabberwocky sense, is some sort of terrible beast. However, given the way that "bandersnatch" sounds very similar to something nasty you could call a woman of a particular temperament, we've co-opted "frumious" as a code word for "bitchy."

4. undulate - once upon a time I had a director who would always yell at us for crossing behind the backstage curtain. If you weren't careful, the curtain would very gently wave, and the audience could tell you were back there, which pissed her off to no end. And she would always catch us doing it during rehearsal and call out "The curtain is undulating!" I love the sound of "undulate."

5. fizzle - I like the onomotopoetic aspect of it, and also its variety of uses. Just cool.

6. existential - whenever I was having a hard time back in high school or college, I always used "existential crisis" as my explanation. It seems so... elemental.

7. wrath - so much better than plain old anger. I mean, come on.

8. um...


Well, this one may have to be continued tomorrow. I'm seriously brain dead, and the turning back of the clock only means that Tank is going to wake up at 5 instead of 6. Yay.

So quiet it's eerie

So this morning, when I got up and headed out the door, earlier than God, on my way to work, in the frosty cold pitch-blackness that is the Midwest before the sun comes up (I could see my breath, people), I was struck by how very quiet it was on my street at that moment. It's not a particularly busy street at the best of times, but there are always dogs barking and TVs blaring and cars on the next road over and the general white noise of the neighborhood.

But not this morning. As I stood there, keys in hand, ready to open my car door, I stopped and listened for a minute. And I heard (I'm not even shitting you here) the sound of leaves falling. It was so quiet and still that I could actually hear the leaves detaching themselves from the trees and rustling slowly to the ground. I stood and watched a few in the streetlight. One landed on the neighbor's car. Another drifted out into the street. I'm sure it's been ground into dust by now under the weight of a thousand tires. But for just a moment this morning, I stood and listened as it died and drifted away.

On the road. Again.

So, hey, it's November already. I'm going to try that whole posting everyday thing again. Last year I didn't manage so well. This year I'm doing much better, thank you very much. I may or may not be talking about Teh Crazy this month. It's my anniversary, after all. A whole year since the worst week of my life. Things are better in some ways, not as good in others. Life is like that.

But now we've moved, and I have a new job, and boy, is it far away from where we're *temporarily* staying until our old house sells and we can make a more permanent move. I drive an hour and a half to work each way, morning and evening. It's a really pretty drive, though, and I don't really mind it except for when I'm super-tired. In fact, most days I wish I had a camera with me in the car, because I see some awesome stuff.

So my goal this year for NaBloPoMo is to post a picture a day from my commute, and some sort of little blurb about the picture or the commute or the day or... whatever.

I would give a gold star to the person who could identify where I'm at just from looking at this picture. In fact, that right there is Lake Michigan, which is pretty much my constant commuting companion. I follow it from home to work and back home, skirting the shoreline from south to north and back again, every day. I love the water - it's never the same from one minute to the next. It's constantly changing - it reflects its moods just like a person. Some days the wind whips it into a fury; some days it's so flat you can see a reflection on it. Its colors change from moment to moment - sometimes I like to think up Crayola names for the colors of the water, like olive drab, peacock blue, silver lining, etc. Whatever. I like water.

Anyway, this picture is just off of Lake Shore Drive, right around Fullerton (nobody cares about that unless you're actually from Chicago, but just in case...). If I had turned around 180 degrees I could have shot the cars flying past and the high-rise condos in the background. I like this shot better. It's so peaceful - how many people can really say that they found inner peace during their morning commute?