Institutions vs. Institutionalized Strengthiness

I got a new job, which I am very excited about. It is as Job Coach for people with disabilities, for a great, passionate, very cool organization, whose values mesh up with mine very well. I had applied for a similar position with a different organization previously - and, I don't know, something, or, truly, a few somethings just weren't right as I went through parts of the interview process. And neither my passion nor my political or intellectual position on issues related to the job mattered at that place: it was to be a Job and nothing more. After having worked in many, many restaurants and seen the kind of ardor, dedication, and self-sacrifice routinely demanded of even those on the lowest rungs of the kitchen ladder, it was quite disturbing to find that, in a position where human psyches and human hearts would be affected as much by my approach as by my execution of the position, neither actually mattered. I still knew that I would rock at the job and be a great asset for the individuals I would support if hired, so I waited to see if I was called to the final level of interviews. But I wasn't, and I felt it was all to the best.

So now, I am excited. I met one woman I'm going to work with, T. She lived, for thirty years, in one of those horrific institutions we imagine don't exist anymore, only recently having been placed into community living. She was so great at her job in the institution's sheltered workshop that she earned about four times what she was 'supposed to' every month. Now, she has her own home that she decorated in her own style, a social life, hobbies and interests she can pursue, assistants who help her out with things she can't do for herself, and she is soon to get a job at a department store, where I will liaise between her and the company, and work to help her understand her responsibilities and succeed at her position.

The day I met her, my new boss and one of T.'s supported-living assistants were with us as we walked around the mall, but a major point of the trip was to see if T. and I would be a good match, so I hung back by her and tried to let her and her curiosity about the new person lead the interaction. After soliciting compliments on her new shoes, T.'s first real question to me was what I thought a person should do when someone is harassing or being mean to him or her. I asked her what she thought someone should do, and she said she would just ignore them, that some people just do mean things and you have to accept that and try not to let it bother you.

Alright, it's a simple truth. Fine. Ignore mean people and your day goes smoother. But being harassed or made fun of in the way T. meant it, in the way she has experienced much of her life, simply because she looks and acts as she does, is not something most of us have to contend with. Nor are our experiences with it so much a part of how we view the world, and our place within it, that we would want to bring it up with someone we had just met. It's not pressing for us. Being rejected in some fashion multiple times a day is simply not a risk most of us face.

But then, neither is that sort of open, heartfelt communication something most of us are willing to risk. Many of our disabilities are such that they keep us bound up inside our own perspectives, our own minds, in a functional isolation paralleling T.'s decades-long real isolation, but in our case masked by an abundance of superficial relations. We can't bear the risk of being truly ourselves and truly vulnerable with others, so we frequently fail to achieve true communion with them. We refuse, even after much time with a person, to lay our fears and weaknesses bare to even a fraction of the extent to which T. was willing to do unreservedly from the very start. We close those parts of ourselves off - the weak and the small and the yearning and the sad parts - that people with obvious disabilities are more often unable to hide. We are just as weak, and just as dependent on other people and community, as 'they' are, but out of our own fears of rejection we steadfastly refuse to present that side of ourselves to others.

Blowin' in the Wind

I was finally brave enough to tackle the wine cabinet redo, and I don't know what to think. I do know I did as best I could. As you can see in the 'after' pictures, the cabinet is covered in nice marquetry veneers. I say 'nice' because it looks nice and took some time to do, but also because the piece is old so the depth of the veneer exceeds that of paper.

However.

I have a deep-seated and possibly pathological desire to be polite, commingled with a distaste for shopping. These two tendencies taken together (and so far, I haven't been able to take them apart) mean that I sometimes encounter great difficulties when trying to buy things. I don't go into stores to browse: I go in stores to get the one, or three, or six things I know in advance I want or need to get from the store. If it turns out they do not have the items, I leave. I am not, in other words, tempted to buy a bathtub because there are no more pruning shears, nor a new lampshade because the store ran out of my brand of stockings. I recently went to a lot of antique stores looking for a particular type of settee, and one with upholstery I would not have to change immediately, as well. The settee still eludes me, but I did not turn to dining sets or hall stands to anesthetize my feelings of setteelessness.

Still, though.

The situation is different when in response to an advertisement for an item I go to someone's house. I cannot contemplate the horror of a day spent going to several strangers' houses to look at various single items. If you place an ad and I call you, it means that I want to come your house, buy the item, and take it away, assuming the photos and description are more or less accurate. However, once I am there those conditions shift. I realize I am in your house and in that house I am passing judgment on an item you own. Yes, I am not a guest; yes, this is, despite the surroundings, a business transaction -- but I don't want to be mean. Rude. And I don't want to have got your hopes up for nothing.

Moreover.

By this point, as well, I have driven, at great risk to myself and other travelers, to wherever it is that you have your house and your possibly-unattractive-in-person piece of furniture. Perhaps, as was the case with the wine cabinet, I did so in the dark and was in the process nearly driven into a cow pasture at the urging of a less-than-inerrant GPS. At some point -- and almost four-wheeling in a farmyard is as solid a point as any other -- it is simply the case that I am 'all in': I am going to buy that hideous piece of Bombay Company MDF loathsomeness photographed through Vaseline and described as 'gorgeous settee 1880s Victorian Eastlake must see xlnt cond' no matter how much it hurts to do so, for to do otherwise would make me look like a fool for having driven so far for nothing. At least to myself it would make me look like a fool. And since, as you all know, I'm a) the only one who has to live with me and b) not one to suffer fools gladly, I can't afford that sort of rancor between me.

But still also I don't want to hurt your feelings.

So, prior to looking at the wine cabinet in person, I asked what were those 'designs' on the front in the two faraway photos, and what were they made of. The very nice lady said she thought one was a flower, and the other, well, she couldn't quite tell. She was happy enough to send me photos of them, but they were huge and I was as ignorant as her as to how to scale them down for viewing from within this solar system, at least on a then-dying computer with about three programs left on it. Fair enough, I thought, the rest of it looks quite sexy, and I've never been out to that village (but I bet they have livestock nearby!).

In short, the cabinet was unusable in its state at the time. The Seventies were a challenging period, I realize: so much change, tumult, and uncertainty, as though all the moorings were coming loose everywhere, equally, fully. Fashion, popular music, design, and graphic art reflected the confusion. By the middle of the decade, 'hippie look' design was mainstream in clothing as well as home decor. Housewives sewed granny dresses and quilted skirts, découpaged and scalloped-edged everything in sight, and stuck cork embellishments on anything not actively running away from them.

Such was my cabinet's fate.

This unlucky chump had been the victim of the Seventies hat trick of cork, scalloped edges, and the ubiquitous mushroom-as-decorative-motif. The mushroom, moreover, and the 'flower,' which turned out to be a leaf, appeared to be products of a Ladies' Intro to Metalwork class. Plucking the metallic flora merely solved the glare problem; there was still the issue of the incongruous texture, shape, depth and appearance of the cork appliqués, which were painted in shades ranging from black, brown, and 'natural' to metallic gold.

I first thought of taking the hacksaw to it, and getting the depth of the appliqués to a sliver, over which I would simply paste something more in line with the original lines and look of the piece. They would still protrude a bit, but not two inches and, more importantly, not hideously. Then, positioning the tool first one way and then another, I realized there was no way that attack would be possible as the plane of the front is interrupted by molding at the top and base. I could have someone else do it, of course, someone who knew about these things, someone with expertise, but that would be cheating.

Now, I don't receive much child support from my exhusband, so it is a good thing he came in handy on a Christmas visit when he stuck his penknife a bit under one of the cork bits and emboldened me terrifically by his revelation that the adhesive was loose and elastic, as well as by his prediction that removing the grisly duo would be simple and quick. Still, he is an exhusband, and it took me a few more weeks before I grew the confidence to begin to test what I still considered to be no more than a hypothesis about the state of my glue.

My glue, it turned out, was quite healthy.

Accordingly, I slathered both doors with copious amounts of oil in hopes of loosening it and the cork ovals without damaging the veneer unduly. The scheme largely succeeded, and no veneer ripped off, but once the cork was removed it turned out that the final embellishment to the ovals, the dark brown paint around the outermost edge, was applied after they had already been glued on. Additionally, although I hadn't damaged the veneer, there were in fact gouges in it which appeared to have been what precipitated the 1970s modifications. I sanded enough to even out most of the surface, but there would have been no way to get below the absorbed paint and the deeper gouges.


So, I decided on two-tone gold leaf under stain in a geometric pattern that echoed the existing geometric pattern. Yes, it is not original, but not much about this cabinet was by the point of making that decision. I know it is not more authentic, and I am not sure it is much better, but I am absolutely certain it is not as bad.

Dear Vista,

Although we have not been together a long time, I feel I need to be honest and tell you our relationship is in trouble. I have been patient and faithful thus far, but it has been hard. I know you will not be surprised to hear me repeat that I have nothing but fond feelings for your predecessor, XP, and remember quite happily the years we shared together. As you are well aware, we did not end the relationship voluntarily, quickly, or easily; our bonds were severed due to the death of the perishable body he inhabited, and we both tried as long as we could to stay together despite ever-increasing odds.

I admit I was lonely by the time I met you. In the last weeks of XP's life I could only be with him one or two hours at a time; in his last days, our precious time together narrowed to minutes. His congenitally poor ventilation system weakened and whined until he could no longer even feebly cough out the cat hair, the incense dust, the errant biscotti crumbs and minute Egyptian-glass debris -- the cruel, cruel insults of this too-material world of which he never wished to be a part yet heroically tried to surmount.



I didn't expect a replacement, Vista. There is no room in my heart for another XP, let alone Win 95. We all have our great romances, our soulmates, and I did not demand that you be one of them. Still, I am not the sort who looks for 'NSA' relationships. I had hoped at least you would treat me with respect, that you would honor my very meager requests of you. Have I loaded you with unwieldy programs, failed to conscientiously monitor CPU usage, clogged Startup with needless tasks, or been other than extremely cautious and considerate in every possible way?

No, I have not. And I don't ignore you and certainly don't ask more of you than you should be able and willing to give. Moreover, I support you in your personal growth and well-being: I actively encourage your agility and physical fitness by running every manner of scan on your behalf every day. I have you inoculated six ways to Tuesday -- and I don't even do any questionable things for which that should be necessary. I just do it because I value you and want you to stick around. And yet you behave as though I am taking you for granted, you passive-aggressive, self-righteous, opaque, whorish, game-playing varlet!

So let me say this to you now, Vista: XP was a Mensch. He did what he had to do and he never complained. He was sufficiently confident in himself such that this confidence was readily extended to others. XP never whiningly asked me if I was absolutely SURE I wanted to open a program or change settings; he knew that I was a big girl and trusted my decisions. XP didn't have to use Apple widgets or garish 3-D to win my affections. He didn't have to advertise his 'snipping tool' to let me know it was there. He was understated; he knew I was smart enough to feel around and find it if I needed it, just as I would with his registry once we were intimate enough. He earned my loyalty not by trickery and flash, but by participating fully in the relationship and always keeping up his end of the bargain.

Vista, I'm sorry it has to end this way, but I have given you more than enough chances. Day after day you abandon me yet again just when I need you most, and recoil back into yourself, as distant as though we had never met. I know I was rash, I know I was bereft and lonely and I turned unthinkingly to the first OS I saw. But, Vista, it's been months and you still don't want me to touch your registry keys. You continue to try to keep me out of everything. There is no Us, and the way you are, I don't think there ever will be. Maybe it's my fault and not yours; maybe you were never expecting to be in a relationship in which something was expected of you, in which you would have to be 'on' so much of the time, where you would really have to be part of a team and not be able just to shut down and be alone whenever you felt like it.

I just know I feel misled. Dirty. Used. Yes, I had heard some things about you, but maybe I thought you would be different with me -- after all, I ask so little compared to other people. Maybe I thought I could change you -- but unlike 95, 98, or XP, you refuse to change and grow. You are like a bitter and stubborn, yet somehow unnervingly cocky, old man, Vista, and I wish I had never come to know you.

Angrily,
Me

Silence, Exile, and Cunning

I have aborted many posts and left several others unfinished. This situation is not unlike having a (semiliterate) monkey sitting on my shoulder and intermittently offering up his idiosyncratic editorial suggestions by means of shrieks, cackles, head-batting, and hair-pulling. It is of course absurd, as it is all in my head. Or at least the concern about the monkey is in my head; he is really there. It is simply a matter, therefore, of figuring out how not to notice the shrieks and jabs, and of getting on with a proper rant if that is what I wish to do - whether I fear an articulation of my frustration with domestic distributors of tonka bean absolutes will be taken not as frustration with domestic distributors of tonka bean absolutes but rather Existential Angst, or not.

Here, then, ladies and gentlemen (and those of you who fall wildly outside the bounds of either category), in an attempt to rid myself its spell, is an explanation of the basis for my recent silence:

You all no doubt remember the exboyfriend: he of the pitying emails; the (misinformedly, but no matter) disparaging or condescending remarks; the absurd nostalgic reminiscences; the inapt, sesquipedalian, purported compliments gleaned through a reckless and foolhardy combination of thesaurus, ignorance, and overconfidence. If you don't, I do, so fret not.

As stated in an earlier post, he brought it to my attention that not only was he in his reading imbuing my posts with a grave, tragic, and positively Dickensian tone or subtext or metatext that they in no way had while still in my cute little brain or on my even cuter little screen, but also scrutinizing the timestamps of the posts for Clues as to my (grave, tragic) state of mind! Now, I admit to getting a cheap kick out of every flight under the radar I can manage, and the cheaper the flight, the headier the kick, so I had already earned some Skybus miles by changing the timestamp to that of various locales when the fancy struck.

But, dear friends, allow me to say that I really hadn't thought anyone would ever look at that. Really. Sure, there was some amount of 'ambiguation' in there, but that was more than balanced by the sheer girlish fun of being able to click on 'Vanuatu.' Not to mention 'Moosejaw.' When is it not fun to click on Moosejaw? And when, in addition, was the last time you, or anyone in your circle, anyone you can think of, noticed the time a posting was posted on any blog? I have read thousands upon thousands of blog entries on topics from politics to perfume to push-up bras to peacock husbandry, and never once did I notice at what time of day the writer lambasted Bush or Clinton or the dumbed-down Shalimar.

So, we have that problem: the Internet isn't private, so I don't care if the exboyfriend or my mother or former husband reads it. What troubles me is that there is an ex-something giving it a close, and erroneous, reading. Now, I don't write this in any way like a diary. I may be short on editing, which is a similarity between the two, but if I had a diary, I would never write about either Brigitte Bardot or John Calvin in it. Really. You can trust me on that, as well. That being the case, I don't feel ill that someone out of the past is getting an uninvited and unwelcome view into the depths of my psyche -- because the depths of my psyche are never on here, if I even have any depths in that psyche at all.

It is, rather, that everyone else can read it and 'get' it somehow: laugh along with me, or snort knowingly and superciliously, disagree, and then write me a vitriol-laden missive declaring the merits of lobster-buggering, muscle shirts, and Chinese knockoffs of 'Tuscan' furniture -- all the while knowing quite well that I was drying my fingernail polish, not slitting my wrists, while writing my half of the preposterous argument. The only person who doesn't is, regrettably, someone whom I regret dating. I was speaking with a friend at length last night about this, because it is making me angry that I am able to be angered by it, and from that conversation I think that last sentence is the crux of it. Perhaps.

Why? Because I got over it. I was sad, cried a bit, felt a loss, missed the endearing text messages for a while -- and then didn't. That, gentle reader, should be the end of the story. It was the end of the story, for heaven's sake. Normally, with whatever sort of loss, you feel it, you embrace it, you experience it for as long as it takes, and then you do something else: the Reckoning. Logic steps in and you evaluate everything. You get dispassionate, objective, and forward-looking.

Let's say you just got fired from a great job. The pay was super, you loved the people you worked with, and it was a not-terrible commute. Obviously, that's quite a loss. But after the late-night crying jags, or the whiskey- or pound-cake binges, or whatever serves the purpose in your case, have done their job, you realize you always hated the lighting, that you were never truly challenged, that the color scheme kept you on edge all day, that you are well-rid of Paul and his incessant nose-clearing, and that the benefits package was dismal at best.

And I think once a sane person gets to that stage, not only can he no longer find the former object of affection as charming as before, but he can, moreover, muster only a modicum of interest in the comings and goings and overall emotional state of the ex. A consequence of this reality in my case was that I had no feelings whatsoever about the exboyfriend reading the blog, except the same vague hope as with anyone else that he might find bits of it amusing.

Then came the emails after the gloriously apathetic hiatus. And then came my terse responses. And then came proof of their lack of efficacy.

All of that was enough to make me regret yet more having been involved with this person. That regret was pushed to at least the third power by the tooth-grittingly noxious email iteration of purportedly flattering attributes gleaned from abusing a thesaurus. Then, my dears, after the late-night Scrabble dig (again, erroneous, but, as is the case with so much, the things we don't know about are often freakishly coextensive with the things we don't know about), came one more accursed Benediction. And that, although I did write a direct, clear, terse, and explicit email in response, shut me up and shut me down, as far as the blog was concerned.

But why? Because, look (alright, fine, I will get personal), we broke up because he is in some substantive ways disturbingly immature. Somewhere past the point at which I stopped thinking of him and being capable of wishing him either ill or well, he gave birth to a new self that felt the need to wish Peace upon me at every turn. I am well aware that peace is a good thing, and I have friends who close utterly everything with 'peace,' but they are typing it while wearing Birkenstocks and/or a black tab-collar shirt. In other words, they wish everybody peace, and they simply cannot help themselves. There are many more problems with his use of the word in this context than I can go into in an already-too-long blog entry, but another one involves an equally unnerving religious association, and that is that when I read it, I cannot help thinking, not of a normal guy offering normal well-wishes, but of a whole congregation of Methodists or Presbyterians shaking hands at the end of service while in unison reciting 'Peace be with you,' 'And also with you.' It is appropriate then, most particularly so if heartfelt, but the idea of shaking hands with a boyfriend, lover, or husband, before going to sleep, or upon meeting for a date, or as we leave for work, and uttering that -- well, it makes me grimace every time. And I cannot wrest this image from my mind.


Gratuituous Pretty Thing, because this is tooooo long:

(MMMMM, sparkly...)

(Yet filled with REAL HUMAN HAIR!)

Nor can I forget the condescending tone in which he first began to wish me Peace. The later versions may have been less wordy and less patently offensive, but they are still no less incongruous nor less unnecessary, unwarranted, or unwanted. For there are two problems: one is the very easy 'We Were Done and I Was Done with the Getting-Done Part so I Am Done with Difficult Feelings about You and thus Well-Stocked on Peace, Thanks All the Same' and the other is that, for all my overblown rhetoric and ability to conjure verbal storms over a chipped nail or newly-wobbly heel, I simply have had a sufficient number of sufficiently harrowing experiences to have vast, vast reserves of equanimity upon which to draw: I do not need anyone, even if he is not an exboyfriend, munificently to bestow it upon me in order to dwell in it, because I have seen things that are serious, and therefore I can tell when things are not.

However, it does get a bit more prickly once we consider the fact that he is an exboyfriend. And he is an exboyfriend whom I am no longer with for various reasons, none of which reflect well on him. And, as stated earlier, I was many months ago past the point where rekindling glowy feelings was possible: I remain in the 'objective' phase that, once having been attained, sticks with one forever. Things, therefore, that might have seemed nice at the time cannot help but be tinged with the overall regret about the whole thing. For lack of a better word, the whole thing seems decidedly icky (apologies to everyone), and knowing what I know of him now I cannot but see that him doing the things that the 'old' him I cared for was doing at the time.

And that him, and my difficult feelings about that him, was the reason I said No and left. And for that him unctuously to wish me 'peace' as though he were my priest, or as though such a damaged psyche had any to spare to be tossing around to others, is offensive in the extreme. Additionally, as you already know, I have a position or two as regards decorum, and such an act is indecorous as could be. If you willfully and deliberately hurt someone, apologies can sometimes be great, can make a difference under the right circumstances. Some things, such as murder, are patently too horrific for an apology to serve any purpose, but for many other things they can be welcome and utile. But to disrupt someone's peace by being a cad, and then, months after she has regained her usual tranquil state to wish her 'peace' once again repeatedly and condescendingly, is rude, base, puerile, and noxious.

So, I do hope I did this with enough lack of detail not to be horrible myself, but at the same time with enough vigour to have it serve as the necessary-and-sufficient catharsis that will allow me to begin once again prating on about inane and insubstantial things with a level of ardour, passion, and confidence equalling that of Margaret Thatcher's hairdressers for the last forty years.

'If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.'

And if Mr. Amis is right, then the following, though it violates several of my personal rules of conduct, has a point and a justification for having been written. Also, God willing, enough of this sort of thing and the monkey will find a new home. I just pray he does not take the neighbor's cat with him -- although he can have the 'pet chaise' as a sop if that will help speed the move.

Right, then: the Reckoning. As I said, once one gets past that, does the necessary math, weighs all variables accurately, and accepts due responsibility for whatever share of idiocy and misjudgment is his own, then the final stage of dealing with the loss is complete, dispassion has been achieved, and forgetting has commenced. And the harsher, or more honest and complete, the accounting, the quicker and more effortless is the business of getting on with things. Additionally, as I intimated earlier, having previously experienced and addressed genuine grief, loss, and tumult in one's life gives one invaluable perspective as to the actual magnitude of loss on future occasions.

Love, I will forever maintain, is transformative. Its positive effects racinate into all other areas of our lives. When we are in love, we see the world differently, and we walk differently in it. With regard solely to the object of this Love, however, one of its effects is a loss of objectivity, a willingness always to focus on the good, an abundance of forgiveness and an overflowing empathy. And I believe all that is necessary, salutary, and good; without it one couldn't arrive at, or maintain, genuine Love. Without it there would be no substantive difference between romantic committed relationships and pleasant casual friendships.

But when there is a fissure in the emotion, when something big enough has transpired to rend that beautiful gauzy veil, then the Lover can most definitely address the situation, and the other person, with the same logic and dispassion as he can any other individual or set of circumstances. This, too, I think, is necessary and constructive: if one's spouse has gambled away all the retirement funds, being able to acknowledge that and to take steps to address that and the relationship as it now is cannot but be preferable to blithely ignoring what is clearly a grave reality.

It is a bit nasty and embarrassing, though, even if it only transpires within the privacy of one's head. One's judgment, or even sanity, can be called into question as one reflects upon the various things glossed over in deference to the continuance of the Love-state.

And this is the part where I violate my ethics in hopes that doing so will banish the monkey.

When I got to that point, after a bit of crying and missing having someone to do special things for, I then had to endure feeling like an idiot on a number of counts. That, my dears, hurts more than anything. I do strongly believe we should all be idiots in love, or 'childlike' if that makes you feel better about things, but at the point where it seems as though the idiocy was 'for nothing,' one is necessarily inclined a bit more toward self-flagellation than is normally the case. In some sense -- if there was Love, at any rate, or at least one believed there to be -- one has to find the relationship to have been senseless and inherently flawed in order to be able enthusiastically or even calmly to accept its demise. The practical problem with this is that by devaluing or fully invalidating the relationship, one does the same to one's investment of time, ardour, kindness, openness, and boundless empathy.

And by God does that sting. The specifics of the thing stick in the mouth like ammonia from Dutch licorice (Hello, Andy!). One has to address the horror of multiple versions of 'I was in love with someone who __________!' The things that leave the most enduring bad tastes vary from person to person, clearly, but that is, for some of us, at least, the worst stage of the grieving.

In other words, I might be able get on just fine knowing that I accidentally dated a bank robber or married a serial philanderer. You might well be able to integrate seamlessly having been briefly engaged to an expert on artificial bovine insemination into your self-concept, or never regret for a moment the dalliance with the writer of how-to Morris Dancing books. But you may well experience a lasting difficulty with rectifying your posture after coming to terms with the psychic scars of having plighted your troth to a Scientologist, Nikken distributor, or collector of porcelain cat figurines.

This is where it really gets tawdry. And, again, I apologize, but it's all to a good cause.

In my case, the following. And let me preface it all by admitting that I believed myself to be 'in love.' I said those words, I felt that glowy feeling, I had caritas and agape and eros and the rest radiating ceaselessly from my ever-dilated pupils. My voice was soft, my gestures were kind, my thoughts were noble, and my emotions true. So it's me, not him, that was the problem.

So.

1) A thesaurus is not a dictionary. A synonym relationship is neither an equal sign nor a copula. I myself have never owned nor sought recourse to a thesaurus, and I freely admit my relationship to words has never been typical. Still, however, even if we postulate they might possibly have their place, sometimes and for some people, thesauruses are extremely limited in their usefulness and MUST, as any sixth-grade teacher or history professor despairingly red-lining term papers will insist, be used with extreme caution, if not outright fear.

Why? See above. But also because not only does one not get an actual denotation, as with a dictionary, one does not get context. 'Blue' or 'tawdry' can 'mean,' according to a thesaurus, 'dirty,' but the neighbor's cat, although he sometimes comes in with sticks and burrs stuck to his coat, never returns from his tours looking either of the above.

Sometimes the words in a thesaurus entry can indeed be said to be part of the same cognitive category. Fiery, hot, steamy, sultry, sweltering, feverish. Fine. But none of those words equals the other. I didn't just pull a sultry loaf of pumpernickel out of the oven. I know I didn't. And the sixth-grade teacher in me bristles at this sort of thing every time. Thesaurus abuse doesn't make anyone sound smarter; reading, and absorbing the content, and noting grammatical nuances one wishes to remember, do.

2) Nor does mispronouncing fancy words help one's case when trying to impress others with one's erudition. (And we are leaving to the side for the moment the issue of why anyone should wish to do that.) (But stick around: there's always tomorrow.) (Which I think, in terms of my dating of these posts, is actually yesterday.) Again, the dictionary can be a great resource. Good dictionaries, as well, can assist with some of the clarificatory context issues that thesauruses can't, and thus demonstrate the sorts of things that, unlike pumpernickel, can at times accurately be described as 'sultry,' for example.

On this note, I sometimes used to refer to my last apartment as 'the seraglio' jokingly in print. It had a great many pillows, a low bed, little furniture, many textures and prints, and even a narghile a friend had given me in acknowledgment of my deranged decorating 'style.' Not everything said in print is worth saying aloud and vice versa, and when speaking I called the same residence 'my apartment.' This habit was cemented into law when the exboyfriend insisted on using the former label when speaking, and pronouncing it in such a way as to make every sinew in me twitch in pain.

I don't correct people. Especially as regards language. My idiolect is my own, and my reading and study have been far broader than most people's, so I know I use words many other people don't. Sometimes they are in the active-use pile from one discipline or language, and because they are there, they might come into my head for quite different contexts than originally learned. But just as I can't be expected to discourse rationally about mathematics, I don't expect anyone to have precisely my reading, educational, or cross-cultural background.

However.

It is always ill-advised to use a word you don't understand or to say a word you don't know how to pronounce. This is trickier in English than any other language, because we have adopted words from so very many different languages, and there is no consistency as to the level to which we have Anglicized the various adoptees. To avoid buffoonery one must have knowledge, not merely confidence, on one's side. Seraglio in English cleaves to its Italianate past, as does intaglio. One doesn't sound well traveled or educated by summoning a waiter with 'garkin!' nor by describing the day's events as having been largely 'comb ill fought.' At the same time, it is past the bounds of both common sense and decency to subject a dear friend to snapshots of one's vacation in 'Paree.'

I am not perfect, but when I want to say something was ghastly, and I can't quite come to quite the right word to describe the precise way in which it was as ghastly as it was, I am more than happy to stick with what is at hand and describe the various ways in which the ghastliness manifested itself. The fact is, context often determines whether the same word will be pejorative or praising, and no thesaurus can give that insight. Even 'tepid' can be a good thing under certain circumstances, and 'righteous' can be downright slanderous.

The point is, I cared about someone who engaged in this sort of behavior. It's not as though I was deaf or illiterate while we were dating, but I chose not to focus on the less appealing aspects of his personality. Then, once graver unappealing characteristics emerged and I divested myself of the thing, all those nasty bits came to the forefront of my consciousness. At that point, I did what math I could manage, figured there must have been some rationale not immediately perceptible that would ultimately vindicate my unswerving belief in my own sanity, and went on with things. A bit less trusting of my powers of discernment, perhaps, but confident in my ability to hone them should it appear necessary that I do so.

But then the thesaurus came out again and, having already gone through the dispassionate charts-and-diagrams phase, I no longer had the willpower or motivation not to look with wide-open eyes. Or to be other than horrified by what I saw. Consequently, I had to revisit the self-flagellation stage, but with no vestigial gauzy glow at all. No, now it was 'I was in love with someone who _________ and whom I have unwittingly given license to continue to do it!' Why, in other words, would he have thought I found it charming then, and (of far more consequence and spine-chilling potential) in what way am I complicit in his assuming I will still find it charming now? And why, oh why, oh why, is he noting the timestamp?

As you know from numerous posts, I am hung up on the idea of adulthood. And I think the greater part of embracing adulthood consists in accepting responsibility. Indeed, welcoming, cherishing, that responsibility. It is a harder course, yes, but far more rewarding. (Also tremendously less annoying to others.) So at this stage it is of no consequence to me that the thing is over, or why it is over: that pugnacious primate pulling at my hair is ME, demanding of myself that I please explain to me why I did whatever it was that I did to make him feel that flirting with me, reminiscing to me, and attempting to charm me with stolen, inapposite adjectives or insult me with inaccurate barbs is polite, permissible, quirkily winsome, or anything other than base and futile.