Category Archives: wordplay

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Purity’s post

The root word for Katherine is pure, so Purity will write today’s post. Purity read about illeism in this BBC article: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230411-illeism-the-ancient-trick-to-help-you-think-more-wisely. Purity admits that it feels a bit embarrassing to write in the third person here on the blog, very egotistical, but that is not what the article is about. It is about writing that way in one’s journal. Purity has been trying it and it is interesting. It sets events at a distance and quiets and muffles the emotions related to events. How very curious.

Purity does not plan to keep writing this way on the blog nor does she plan to start speaking with a royal we. However, the United States appears to be in a state of chaotic stupidity and it is affecting everyone. Not just in the United States, but the rest of the world as well. Purity thinks of the United States as a teenage country, struggling with hormones, while the old countries stand back, watch and sigh. “At some point he will mature,” they say to each other. “Or destroy himself.” And yes, a male teenage country, stupid and boastful with testosterone. Purity thinks it will take the United States another 200 years to live down President #47 and his minions, if we survive.

At any rate, Purity hopes that the prompt of illeism might be more light hearted and be a new word to some people and tickle their fancies. Apparently our fancies mostly lie in our cats. Cats certainly seem to be experts in illeism. May you each feel as wonderful today as a cat when they own the world.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: illiesm.

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Unweighted

Words behind my back
damaging
hurtful
gossip and lies
I forgive
I wait

I wait

I wait, wait, weight

Weighted 13 years
For them to speak to me
Instead of about me
At last waiting makes me angry
I have forgiven
tried to connect
some of them say they love me
this is not love
waiting
weight of hurt and anger

And I let go
of the wait
of the weight

I forgive myself
I am free
I rise
I let them go
they are forgiven
but they may not enter my life
again
not ever

I forgive myself
I am free
I rise

unweighted

________________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompts: weight and chopper. My heart is what is chopped, and the abandoning friends and family wielded the choppers.

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Why mean?

Why do people do that smiling mean thing? Where they are teasing too close to the bone, meanly, with a smile. If you object, then you are labeled as someone who can’t take a joke or who has no sense of humor. How do people handle them? I put them on avoid and do not want to be around them. But really, what motivates them? Power? Humiliate others to feel better about themselves? What a very sad and pathetic way to go through one’s life.

This is related to me thinking about what people think about. I think about what motivates people a lot and why they do what they do. This, apparently, is NOT what most people think about. My curiosity about people dates back to being a very small child and being passed from household to household because my mother had tuberculosis. I decided that adults did not understand children and that they loved me but didn’t understand that babies should be kept and loved. My sister was born when I was three and I told people that she was MY baby. I was determined to take care of her. Alcohol continued to make the adults in my household unpredictable and sometimes dangerous, at least emotionally.

My mother could charm a room and all visitors, but sometimes she would talk about them after they left. My family tended to ignore me if I was reading, because I really did not listen if I was deep in a book. Books were an escape and a safe place. People would have to call me three times to get me out of one. But sometimes my brain would click me out and I would listen to the conversation. My mother would talk about people’s motivations and was often quite negative and not nice. Interesting, but not nice.

When I realized that most people don’t think about others’ motivations most of the time, I felt rather freed and enlightened. I promptly ran into not one, but two mean people, at different sites. I do not understand meanness. I worry that it will be in the White House soon, as well. And what, that meanness wants to annex part or all of two other countries? Is this fascist envy? That’s what I think. So there.

The photograph is Sol Duc in 2022.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: mean.

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Print or cursive?

My father’s father was a pressman and the head pressman when he was in Knoxville, Tennessee. This is back in the lead type times, when the type had to be set before printing the newspapers. Before they moved to Knoxville, they lived in Connecticut. My father said that my grandfather helped develop the four color process for the comics. My father would get the new comic books, Superman, straight off of my grandfather’s press. Too bad those were thrown out!

I started cursive in school in about fourth grade and I did not like it. I learned, but I thought it was ugly. My father knew how to write in italics. I liked italics much more and asked him to teach me. I adapted the capital letters to make them easier and then I wrote my papers in italics when we were not allowed to print. The teachers objected but I pointed out that we weren’t allowed to print in the papers, but it did not say, “No italics.” I imagine that some teachers found me difficult.

My cursive is still stuck in about fifth grade and I almost never use it.

Meanwhile fast forward. A law is passed in Washington State that prescriptions cannot be written in cursive. However, it does not say that we have to print. The same loophole. I usually printed prescriptions anyhow, so that the pharmacist could read it. I got compliments occasionally for printing in a legible way. I didn’t spell certain medicines correctly, but the pharmacists never seemed to care about that. Now it is all by fax and since Covid started, even the controlled substances go by fax.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: print.

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Chew on this

No, hummingbirds don’t chew as far as I know, but they sure are tough. I had an Anna’s hummingbird that would overwinter in Port Townsend, surviving even when it was snowing and got down to 17 degrees. The food would freeze and I would have this small fierce creature swooping over my head making a ticking sound to remind me to thaw the food out.

My daughter and friend started over the mountains last night but holed up in a motel partway. They said that the roads weren’t that awful but the lack of visibility was exhausting. It is hard to see where the road is in the teeth of the storm! I am glad they are safe and we will see what happens today!

I learned to take the food in at night, so it would be all ready in the morning.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: chew. (Choo choo! I wonder if the train is getting through!)

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Pick one, delete two

I went through my blog this morning, picked a month two years ago, and deleted a bunch of photographs and the accompanying posts. More room! It is not a very fast process.

I am thinking about the Ragtag Daily Prompt today, hamfatter. It makes me think of Miss Piggy first. Don’t we all have a little bit of ham in us if we are in the right situation? Even if it’s just a dream or a daydream. Hamfatter also brings up ham and my inlaws. My son and daughter-in-law and daughter were all home for my birthday earlier this year. We also stopped at my daughter-in-law’s house, to pick my son up. Her parents heard it was my birthday and gave me a ham. How surprising and kind!

Yesterday I ordered prints of photographs to send to them, almost all with their daughter. She told me not to print any of the climbing gym or of the pets that her mother dislikes. Got it! I tried to pick ones that they will enjoy. It is a start of holiday gifts.

I am still having disaster nightmares, last night about my house. My house is far away right now and apparently my brain is worrying. I dreamed that there were clean baby clothes folded and piled all over the place in the upstairs bathroom, even on the commode. I took them off it and discovered that it was backed up. Then the walls dissolved and I realized with horror that there was water flooding through them! Then I woke up. Not a fun dream and no, there are not clean baby clothes in the upstairs bathroom. I think it is a combination of being far away and the coming administrative change. In some states it is illegal for a physician to discuss abortion. Will vaccines be next? And the most abortions are the spontaneous ones, where the pregnancy ends and passes. We call that a miscarriage but it is also called a spontaneous abortion. I wonder if those are illegal too.

I dress a bit more formally for work then at home. Maybe there is a bit of hamfatter there, too, entering the role of doctor.

I took the photograph in 2007.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: hamfatter.

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Low fog

I took this on New Year’s Eve on a walk with my kids and old friends in Maryland. We fooled around in a park. I like the low fog hanging in the trees, always further away when we walked to it.

Seesaw, Margery Daw, Jackie shall have a new master
He shall have but a penny a day, because he can’t work any faster.

That is the version of an old nursery rhyme that I learned from my mother. There is more about it here.

I am going through and starting to delete old blog posts and photographs to make room for the new ones. Not one of my stronger talents!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: seesaw.

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Every four years

Out come the spooks
Gobbledegooks
While I escape on a walk

They yell and they lie
They try and they try
On the beach I elude all their squawks

I escaped the electioneering gobbledegook for a beach walk on Marrowstone Island, finding a large and lovely agate when the sun caught the edge of it. It glowed even though it was half buried.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: gobbledegook.

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A gas

I don’t think the bird is aghast. Me either, walking on the beach. There is so much to see.

What is this cloud bank behind the ship? And the ships are so big close up and so small on the water. Gast and ghast are both words, but don’t mean the opposite of aghast. The opposite is unfrightened, unfazed, relaxed.

The water is never what I would call warm, yet surfers and divers and swimmers are out there, with their extra skins.

There is always something to see.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: aghast.

In Rainshadow Chorale we are learning the Rachmaninoff Vespers, All-Night Vigil. It is gorgeous. This makes me think of angels.