I made a Wordle!
In fact, I made two, but they didn’t make me feel any better about last night’s debate.
One word: nuculear.
Notice the prominence of "also."
Transcript here.
Sir Penguin
Hrm...erm hrm. Excellent form, soldiers.
I couldn’t resist. I love penguins. I love their stately air, especially the way Sir Nils waddles neatly between gravity and whimsy.
From Speigel Online, via Arts & Letters Daily
Freakish weather
Well, the Farmer’s Almanac totally called it.
April 2008Avg. Temperature: 49° (2° above avg.) Apr. 10-18: T-storms, warm, then cool Apr. 19-22: Sunny, seasonable Apr. 23-26: Rain to snow,then sunny, cool Apr. 27-30: T-storms, warm |
May 2008Avg. Temperature: 58° (avg.) May. 7-10: Sunny, seasonable May. 11-14: Showers, seasonable May. 15-20: Showers, then sunny, cool May. 21-25: Showers, seasonable May. 26-31: Scattered t-storms, very warm |
In case I hadn’t mentioned it before, although I like to think of my exile as metaphysical rootlessness and metaphorical dislocation, it is geographically in Chicago, a city for whom “freakish” could serve as a year-round epithet for Lake Michigan’s erratic microclimate, and where a weekend at the end of April spent putting away your winter things inevitably leads into another bout of gusting winds, bone-chilling rain, and near-freezing temperatures.
I would just like a little more spring — brisk air, vivid, vibrant colors, and the slow easy segue into warmth. Spring is Persphone’s season, the time when she returns from the underworld and is reunited with her mother, sunlight, fresh air, and flowers. It is strangely, sadly fitting that my exile should be in a city that doesn’t really get much springtime.
Recollection
Flipping through her scrapbooks and albums, I am shocked to see us smiling so much. It must have been another lifetime. Other people. I cannot imagine that there was a time when we smiled so much and so easily. Laughter was as comfortable and habitual as the furniture, a fixture we settled into without a second thought.
I am not exaggerating. I am not idealizing a time so longed for it has been forgotten. Our grief occurred in proportion to our joy then. For every crushing defeat there was another moment of impossible levity. The one sounded the depths of the other. They were inextricable — I would not have my roses without thorns — but balanced.
And now, suddenly, we smile less and less often, even just with each other — my best friend, the sister I never had — those smiles seem mustered and wistful. We are smiling to remind each other how to smile. We are smiling to assuage the realization that a shared past does not ensure a shared future. We are smiling to say goodbye.
Somehow laughter got away from us. But something less than grief — creeping resignation — is assuming its place. As though feeling has become too much, as though nothing can ameliorate this weary acceptance. We smiled wanly, and our paths diverged, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. Just stunned silence, and the memory of shared laughter, withering into something more than grief, and less than goodbye.
Descent and Emergence
So much is made of inauguration, of the statement of mission. I can offer nothing of the sort; I do not know my mission. Existence has been reduced to a series of shufflings between the world above and the world beneath; with each sickening descent I lose more hope, and with each blinding ascent it takes a little longer to get my bearings. Suffice it to say these are the musings of a goddess in the underworld who cannot remember what it was like to live in the sunlight, or to be divine.
