Eyewash

“The eyes are the windows to your soul.” —William Shakespeare

No, the windows are the eyes to your soul. I should know. I just washed mine, and my soul looks a lot brighter than it did yesterday.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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), pe...
Read more

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, ove...
Read more

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...
Read more