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Four-letter words with five letters

In my adult life, I’ve mostly followed, without examination, the rule that four-letter words were the “bad” ones and should be eschewed. But I’ve begun to realize that five-letter words, at least when you’re making mini crosswords, can be villains too.  A year or so ago, I started constructing 5X5 crosswords for a friend who was recovering from heart surgery and, I presumed, needed entertainment as she convalesced. I solved the Wordle and used that word as the anchor each day. I have a couple of cruciverbalist apps that suggest five-letter candidates to fill gaps.  But lately I’ve found myself wallowing in unacceptable suggestions, ones that would fail the so-called breakfast test of crossword construction, words or names people can’t face before their first cup of coffee. For example: Adolf, bimbo, boner, bowel, dildo, enema, farts, feces, gonad, G-spot, hymen, kegel, labia, mucus, Nazis, ozena (disease of the nose in which the bony ridges and mucous membranes waste away), penis, pube
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Definitely not for sissies

 Getting old. Not since my teens have I felt such angst. At my age, though, I suppose it’s called agita. And whereas people care about adolescent angst and write novels exploring it, old-age agita is a bore for everyone, including the sufferer. There’s the stress of doctor’s appointments and tests, which fill your calendar, as workdays and social events once did, and any of them may foretell the cause of your death. There’s the lost word or name that signals dementia. There’s the anguish over friends who have died and the sorely missed opportunities to be with them. There’s the horrifying knowledge that if you compliment a baby or dog on the street, the owner of that baby or dog receives your words with dread, fearing you may prolong the encounter. There’s the even more horrifying sense that when you talk to your children, whom you love beyond measure and desperately want to connect with, they subtly steel themselves for your inevitably irrelevant or trite or tedious or, worse, overdra
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Lethologica

***** leth·o·log·i·ca / ˌ lēTHə ˈ läjəkə/ noun RARE the inability to remember a particular word or name ***** The dictionary got it wrong. Lethologica is NOT rare—at least not in my personal experience. Meaning I personally experience it daily, hourly. It means that every single night when I watch the NBC Nightly News, I struggle to remember the name of its war correspondent before he’s identified. There, I just googled it. It’s Richard Engel. And I think he’s going to have serious PTSD. He’s been on the news every night for years reporting on grotesque carnage in wars all over the world. It means I lie awake at night trying to figure out what a Kirby is. I finally decide it’s a kind of clementine and drift off to sleep. When I get up in the morning, it doesn’t seem quite right though, so I google it. A Kirby is one of those dwarf cucumbers. I’ve eaten a million of them. It means that for the life of me, I cannot recall the name of a friend’s stepson, so until the child’s name comes ou
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Working blues

You may be able to quit going to the office when you retire, but the toxicity of work lasts long after the paychecks stop. Last night I dreamed I had to copyedit an eight-page paper for Vladimir Putin. He was sitting at a long table lined with uniformed men. As I leaned over his right shoulder to show him the manuscript, I noticed he was wearing a hearing aid held in place with an American dime. But the most vivid thing was the nauseating deja vu that overwhelmed me—the humiliation of being forced into fawning servility, which infused my working days as a female copy editor and reporter in an old-school corporation with a set-in-stone hierarchy. And there’s something about behaving like a no-good, scum-sucking, nose-picking, boot-licking, sniveling, groveling, worthless hunk of slime* that does something to your self-confidence. *Thanks, Al Yankovich
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Tragic transformed by magic

For the past 10 days, I’ve awakened to my own mad mutterings of a number—“one hundred twenty-five thousand”—repeated over and over. And all night long, that number has intruded in my dreams, and all day long, formed the backdrop to errands, walks, conversations. That’s a roundup of the figure on a bill that dropped into my MyChart account late last month for an emergency ablation for palpitations in August: “Amount Due on 11/28/21: $124,323.06.” When I saw the bill, I repalpitated on the spot.  Trouble is, the billing company is a separate entity from the Manhattan emergency room where I was treated, and further, the number on the bill is for a call center, which is itself separate from the billing company, which is in Boston, so there was no one I could actually talk to about the bill. When I made a second call to the call center to see if my inquiry could be expedited because I was afraid the trauma of owing that sum was going to send me back into a-fib, and that I would be afraid to
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Intro to retirement

People have been asking me how I like retirement. Honestly, it sucks so far. But I think that’s circumstantial, and it might get better. First I had my flutter with mortality. Then two close friends had health crises—a severe pneumonia and a serious heart procedure. The trouble with health crises in the seventh decade is that they take place at an age when people often die. And people do die from pneumonia and heart disease. It seems as if we’re old enough that we shouldn’t care so much about death—but it’s actually terrifying to be continually confronted with the possibility.
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Old lady gets a flutter

The trouble with hypochondria is that your wildest fears are confirmed randomly and just frequently enough to keep your anxiety going. In animal studies, this so-called intermittent reinforcement—rewards at irregular intervals—is powerfully addictive. I’m addicted to hypochondria as a result of the fact that occasionally a condition I’ve worried about actually turns out to be real. I fight this hypochondria, but truthfully I’d like to move into my doctor’s office so that she could monitor me continuously throughout the day. I try to be brave and soldier on against my crazy fears. But sometimes this backfires.   A few weeks ago, I felt a peculiar flutter in the left side of my chest. My chest often flutters—anxiety, panic attacks, a sloppy tricuspid—but this time I happened to be wearing my daughter’s Apple Watch. She had bought it on a whim a year ago and then gave it to me so I could count steps. It didn’t work for counting steps, but I was still hopeful I could find some use for it,
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