Piazadorable OKCupidity
Apr. 24th, 2018 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraI’ve been flirting a bit on the Internet dating site with a retired software engineer. One of his jobs in the now long-forgotten 1970s was to compile word lists for then-fledgling spellcheckers. He salted those lists with fake words, in the nature of mapmaker marks, to prevent copying. He tells me that you can still identify a lexicon he worked on today if it gives you a meaning for the word “piazadorable.”
I find this absolutely delightful.
Clearly, I’ve wasted my life.
Clearly, I should have been a lexicographer.
Subverting the established order of things by interjecting phony words into the national discourse.
OKCupidity. Memeomania.
The list is practically endless.
###
In other news, I had intended to spend yesterday making money, but instead I futzed with the Eleanor Roosevelt ghost story (which is still awful), played endless rounds of Words With Friends and read halfway through the final J.K. Rowling-writing-as-Robert-Galbraith novel Career of Evil.
It’s odd. I love J.K. Rowling on general principles, but I was never able to make it through a single Harry Potter novel. They just seemed so pedestrian after the magical prisms hung in enchanted trees by authors like E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, and Philippa Pearce.
I do like the J.K. Rowling creation myth. How as a struggling single mother living on the dole, she scribbled her escapist fantasies on the backs of menus, envelopes, any scrap of paper she could get her hands on, thereby luring an entire generation of children back to the printed word! And launching a franchise behemoth.
And her detective novels for grownups are not bad. She’s clearly read Ruth Rendell.
But I do need to make some money because in May, when I am traveling, I will be spending money. Lots of money.
###
In the afternoon, I puttered off to the garden. The most enchanting spring afternoon in the entire history of enchanting spring afternoons.
I was alone except for the birds and the worms and the centipedes and a couple of white-tailed deer staring moodily and disconsolately in through the chain-link fence. The communal gardening shed has shovels and rakes and even Rototillers, but no trowels, so I ended up digging holes in the earth for my marigolds, basil, and tomatoes with my hands. I ruined my manicure, but it was such fun! Digging in the dirt! So visceral. So sensuous.
But I really should go out and buy my own trowel today. Another thing that – ugh! – costs money.
###
And I’ve decided to submit the Eleanor Roosevelt ghost story for critique. I am cringing in advance at all the negative comments it’s going to receive: It is too long; the voice it emerged in was this very arch, Edith Wharton-esque style with a lot of archaisms. When I ran out of plot ideas, the story petered out into this kind of Nancy Drew brio: I know, chums! Lets solve the mystery of The Possibly Pedophiliac Ghost of Oak Terrace! Ugh. Just ugh.
But maybe, maybe, maybe, there’s some way to rescue it.
I find this absolutely delightful.
Clearly, I’ve wasted my life.
Clearly, I should have been a lexicographer.
Subverting the established order of things by interjecting phony words into the national discourse.
OKCupidity. Memeomania.
The list is practically endless.
###
In other news, I had intended to spend yesterday making money, but instead I futzed with the Eleanor Roosevelt ghost story (which is still awful), played endless rounds of Words With Friends and read halfway through the final J.K. Rowling-writing-as-Robert-Galbraith novel Career of Evil.
It’s odd. I love J.K. Rowling on general principles, but I was never able to make it through a single Harry Potter novel. They just seemed so pedestrian after the magical prisms hung in enchanted trees by authors like E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, and Philippa Pearce.
I do like the J.K. Rowling creation myth. How as a struggling single mother living on the dole, she scribbled her escapist fantasies on the backs of menus, envelopes, any scrap of paper she could get her hands on, thereby luring an entire generation of children back to the printed word! And launching a franchise behemoth.
And her detective novels for grownups are not bad. She’s clearly read Ruth Rendell.
But I do need to make some money because in May, when I am traveling, I will be spending money. Lots of money.
###
In the afternoon, I puttered off to the garden. The most enchanting spring afternoon in the entire history of enchanting spring afternoons.
I was alone except for the birds and the worms and the centipedes and a couple of white-tailed deer staring moodily and disconsolately in through the chain-link fence. The communal gardening shed has shovels and rakes and even Rototillers, but no trowels, so I ended up digging holes in the earth for my marigolds, basil, and tomatoes with my hands. I ruined my manicure, but it was such fun! Digging in the dirt! So visceral. So sensuous.
But I really should go out and buy my own trowel today. Another thing that – ugh! – costs money.
###
And I’ve decided to submit the Eleanor Roosevelt ghost story for critique. I am cringing in advance at all the negative comments it’s going to receive: It is too long; the voice it emerged in was this very arch, Edith Wharton-esque style with a lot of archaisms. When I ran out of plot ideas, the story petered out into this kind of Nancy Drew brio: I know, chums! Lets solve the mystery of The Possibly Pedophiliac Ghost of Oak Terrace! Ugh. Just ugh.
But maybe, maybe, maybe, there’s some way to rescue it.
