Week in Seven Words #521

This covers the week of 1/12/20 - 1/18/20.

cheerless
Gray streets dusted with litter. A chain store here and there, lots of chain link fencing, and some windowless concrete walls.

convolution

I almost flub one part of the coding test by overthinking things, making the questions more complicated than they are. Instead of looking at the simplest explanation for what they mean, I interpret them as a set of trick questions. 

drowsy
A sleepy walk, early when it's still dark. It seems like the only other people outside are the ones walking their dogs before work.

interconnected

Reading a memoir, I notice that the author speaks of going it alone but at the same time keeps mentioning people – family, friends, mentors, colleagues – who helped out along the way. There was no "going it alone." Sure, there was hard work, individual effort. But the support, encouragement, and connections were ever present.

provisions
The basement food pantry has shelves of beans, canned meat, packets of tuna and pink salmon, canned vegetables and fruits, and plastic bags bulging with bread. Some of the bags are collecting moisture. Some of the bread is stale. A delivery of food arrives through a chute propped up under an opening high in the wall. Boxes of food tumble down the chute and skid across a long table.

tidewater
Waves of sadness come over me, pouring over and through me.

upchuck
A pleasant dinner followed by the unpleasantness of a stomach bug.

Week in Seven Words #452

aerial
I dream of popping out of an airplane to film it in the clouds, which are soaked in a deep orange sunset.

delicate
Her apartment is filled with light and has a fragile quality. She moves as if she's afraid to touch anything. A picture frame on the gleaming piano or the small blue vase on the coffee table can shatter easily.

dementia
She's convinced her 3-year-old grandson is at the synagogue. She keeps asking people if they've seen him. He must have run off somewhere. It doesn't matter that her nurse and some of the congregants gently explain that he isn't there – that the boy she's thinking of is an adult and not in town. She's certain he's run away and gotten lost. She insists that people look for him.

kavanah (כַּוָּנָה)
I feel pierced by the urgency of the prayers, and the melodies, and the moving, sobbing, joyful, singing voices.

numeracy
The middle-aged man who shares the elevator with me sees that I'm going to the seventh floor. "Seven's a lucky number," he says. "Hopefully," I say. To which he replies, "It's a prime number." So I point to his destination. "That's a multiple of seven," I say, because he's heading to floor 28. "So it is!" he replies.

swooping
That evening, there's a large moth in the synagogue. Mostly it hops and skips among the lights. Sometimes it dive-bombs people.

well-meaning
"They try to be so helpful," she says, sorting through the holiday care package, "but as a pre-diabetic, I can't eat a lot of the food here."

Week in Seven Words #302

capacities
It's possible to keep finding out fun things about people you've known all your life. Like how fiendishly good someone is at Connect Four.

carnival
Her dress makes me think of key lime pie and margaritas.

evidently
A "how to be happy" advice piece makes its rounds among people I know. It offers unelaborated suggestions like, "Don't be stressed!" and "Surround yourself with happy people!" Well, if we're all reading about how to be happy, we'll be surrounded for sure. We've definitely got a shot at this.

hit
He scrolls through online comments sections for an emotional charge: outrage, anger, confirmation of superiority.

scripted
Another rigged conversation, weighted in favor of the answers she wants.

stretch
I think the train is going to blow by the station. But it stops, with the sensation of a rubber band about to snap.

swirly
His thoughts travel like a paper airplane that drifts off-course and gets lodged in a ceiling fan.

Week in Seven Words #206 & 207

206

controlled
Sometimes the only way to avoid falling is to lower yourself to your knees, by choice, before finding firmer ground to stand on.

dictates
She does her best to convince me to go against my conscience, and she almost succeeds. But at the end, I do what I'll be able to live with.

gendered
Their rooms: a pink glow, a blue cove.

leached
Weary greeters, looking washed out under the fluorescent lights.

prickle
He's uncomfortable with being sensitive, so he hides it with a snotty attitude. She's also sensitive, but she cries when she needs to.

starved
At the head of every line is an elderly person who turns shopping into a social opportunity. Maybe it's the only time that day they'll talk to someone. They'll hold up the line if they need to, by dwelling on the finer points of their receipts and exploring the depths of pockets and bags to stall for time.

thermic
Wearing a winter coat indoors while I work.

207

bone-weary
The voice on the other end of the line is hoarse and quiet.

chalky
Her lips twist as she returns the chocolates. Beneath the foil, she found a stale crumble.

darken
Another light has winked out.

mess
Messy, dirty snow and painful cold.

storytellers
What happens to children whose personal voice has been pounded out of them? How do they regain the ability to tell stories about their lives with some sense of self-assurance?

tracks
They're brisk and efficient. Their mind is always on what they'll be doing next, and what they should be doing according to a magazine, a website, their friends and family and co-workers. They operate on a schedule that's daunting. There are few moments to stop and think; every pause prompts the appearance of a smartphone. And this is why, as friendly as we may be towards each other, we stop short of actual friendship. Sometimes I think it's like the express train vs. the local, occasionally making it to the station at the same time, but on different tracks. But that's an imperfect analogy.

wolfish
In the guise of helping others, they express an intense selfishness.

Worth Watching: Born Yesterday (1950)

Title: Born Yesterday
Director: George Cukor
Language: English
Rating: PG

In Born Yesterday, Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday) slowly emerges from the 'dumb blonde' persona she's buried herself under for years in order to get by in life. At the start of the movie, she's arrived in Washington, D.C. with her boyfriend, Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford), a crooked businessman who's trying to bribe his way to greater political influence. Brock was born in Jersey and is in the junk business, sort of a 1950s Tony Soprano.

Billie drifts through life with her mind turned off. She gets furs and jewels and verbal, and sometimes physical, abuse from Brock, who also uses her as an unwitting stooge for some of his deals. However, he finds that when they try to mingle in D.C. society, she comes across as too crass and ignorant. (So does he, but he thinks she's the only one who needs more polish.) His solution is to hire a journalist, Paul Verrall (William Holden), to teach her about culture and proper speech.

Paul gives Billie a lot of books, shows her historic sites in D.C., and talks to her like one human being to another. She starts to think for herself, and they fall in love.


I like that Billie isn't dumb; she just acts dumb. Once she becomes less ignorant and naive and learns to think for herself, she's a force to contend with. She's also still recognizably Billie, not some polished socialite (this isn't My Fair Lady). I also like that Paul isn't her 'white knight.' He doesn't charge in and rescue her or tell her what to do, other than to keep reading and thinking. She figures out what Brock is up to on her own and decides to leave on her own terms, while thinking of a plan for how to stop him; only then does she recruit Paul to be her accomplice.

Holden is a sweetheart as Paul, and Crawford plays Brock both as a comical ignoramus and as a genuine menace who only understands two kinds of power: money and physical force. But it's Holliday's performance that the movie rests on, and she holds it together. Like the movie as a whole, her performance is a skillful blend of comedy and drama, as seen in the way she can toss off a funny line and then, in a heartbeat, look lost and vulnerable. Not all performers, or movies, would handle these transitions well.

*The image links back to its source (Flixster Community).

Worth Watching: Like Stars on Earth (2007)

Title: Like Stars on Earth
Director: Aamir Khan
Language: Hindi
Rating: PG

From Wikipedia, Fair use

People who are markedly different are sometimes celebrated for the gifts they bring to the world. But most of the time, other people seem determined to crush them.

There's a Japanese proverb: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." Fit in, fall in line, and life will be easier for you; you'll find no understanding or accommodation from the rest of us.

Like Stars on Earth is set in a middle-class suburb in India and centers on Ishaan Awasthi (Darsheel Safary), a young boy who makes basic mistakes in math and writing, follows his drifting attention wherever it takes him, and also has abundant talent in art.

The movie has some colorful animated sequences, and one of them shows us his reasoning as he writes down 3 as the answer to 9 times 3 on an exam. Spaceships are involved.

His parents are distraught, though his mother is more sympathetic to him than his father, who sees his behavior simply in terms of disobedience. He has an older brother, also sympathetic to him, who's the model son: an excellent student, an athlete, the pride of the family. Ishaan, on the other hand, can't seem to get anything right, and no one understands him and why he has so much trouble at school.

Eventually he's sent to a different school, with stricter discipline, that's meant to straighten him out. There he lapses into depression, until a substitute art teacher (played by the movie's director, Aamir Khan) notices his plight and figures out how to reach him.

Some scenes are overly long, and there are times when you can feel the filmmakers shamelessly grabbing onto your heartstrings and refusing to let go. I still think it's a movie worth watching, and Darsheel Safary is an excellent (and adorable) young actor who inhabits the role of Ishaan. The movie becomes a celebration of different kinds of human expression, with a focus on the voice and art of a boy who has dyslexia. The hope is that people will pay sincere attention to and understand those who are often lazily dismissed as troublemakers, idiots, and freaks.

Week in Seven Words #146

antiseptic
The office park is a tidy warehouse for people, with a view from each window of asphalt and bare trees.

charge
I'm in the passenger seat a lot, watching the world coast by past the window. I can't remember the last time I was behind the wheel.

gathering
There's a meeting house feeling to the room, all of us in chairs along the white walls as people take turns sharing stories and thoughts.

liberation
Escaping from the depths on the back of Beethoven's 9th.

superstition
He doesn't understand that "1" isn't a difficult number to get when rolling a die, that you've got as much of a chance of landing on it as any of the other numbers. He insists that if he curls his fingers a certain way when he touches the die, he'll get it. Once he's made up his mind, he forgets about all the times the die doesn't land on 1 and remembers only when it does.

underhanded
On Hangman she cheats, uses her best friend's nickname.

uplifting
The trees catch the light in their leaves and throw it at you in a blaze.

Week in Seven Words #144

I had meant to post this earlier in the week, but better late than never...

crackle
The first time I step outside after the Frankenstorm, the air is cold and raw, like breathing ice crystals.

cramming
Early Sunday morning, the lines at the grocery store spill out the door.

howling
Flickering lights and rain lashing the windows, but thankfully no flooding. No long-term loss of power. Unlike other parts of the city and eastern coastline, which are unrecognizable now.

orbitofrontal
Young kids have a hard time focusing on multiple details. I see it during a game of Dominos where the child pays attention to one feature or number but overlooks another. Juggling details simultaneously is tough.

pococurante
I want to smack the people who go online to tell everyone that the coming storm is "hyped up" and that there's no need to evacuate or prepare for it in any way.

refuge
People clustered at the library looking for a warm place to read, sleep and use the Internet for the first time in a couple of days.

skewed
If they lose the first game, they tell me it isn't fair if I win the second one too. Even if the game is purely chance, a matter of how the dice land, they still want me to lose somehow, to appease their notion of fairness and make things right with the world.

Week in Seven Words #134

autopilot
The mind tends to make decisions based on familiarity and comfort. But this time I stop myself and ask, "Why?" - Why are we going for this problematic option that will cost more and give us a poorer return on our efforts?

aversion
When reading at the park on Saturday afternoons I'm used to seeing squirrels dart across the small paths by the lake. What I'm not prepared for are rats. Rats don't belong here. The first rat is a large one with a long tail dragging behind it. The second rat, which darts out a minute later, is smaller and might have been cute had it been in a cage at the pet store. Rats aren't 'park animals.' They're pests or pets (or lab specimens). Then I remember meeting with someone once in an old building in west Philly where our conversation kept getting interrupted by loud thumps from inside the walls. "The squirrels are lively today," she told me, and I guess any animal can be a pest if it violates the boundaries people have placed around it.

gears
After playing piano for half an hour I sit down again in front of the computer and forget how to type. For ten seconds or so my fingers can't settle on the keyboard and every movement I make with them feels alien. It's as if my brain is still in piano mode, wanting me to play chords and trills instead of typing (this is what a trill looks like on the keyboard: jkjkjkjkjkjkjkjkj). It takes a mental shift just to get started again.

intermixture
She plays hopscotch on a basketball court where her brother and his friend shoot hoops with a soccer ball.

oddballs
We're a pair of misfit Jews.

plenitude
More bookshelves!

yolky
We talk over runny eggs. At the table next to us a baby shrieks.

Week in Seven Words #108

banality
Online dating has been mostly a bore so far. When you meet people in person you experience them as the complex 3D creatures they are, and not as small photos supplemented with the same descriptions over and over - "intelligent, fun-loving, one-of-a-kind" - like personal ads in a Lake Wobegon newspaper.

fulcrum
Time has to be balanced in your mind so that you don't tip too much into the future or sink too frequently into the past.

indurated
In the night my thoughts are cold black diamonds.

reaching
I talk into the phone, knowing that he's there at the other end even though I can't hear him.

second-rate
Sometimes you look back on your week to find that one of your prominent memories involves a pitched battle with a backed-up toilet. Oh well.

slipping
When I'm feeling low about my writing I think of the words as weak magnets sliding down the front of a fridge.

sussing
At the library I spot a DVD Whisperer. He caresses their spines and speaks to each one - "Should I watch you tonight? Or you?" - then cocks his head and listens for the answer.

Week in Seven Words #72

edulcoration
After it's rained, the clean smell of trees, earth, and evergreen shrubs.

moppet
Two smudgy handprints on the door at knee level. A child has pressed up against the glass to look out and to try to push the door open; the handle is still out of reach.

nitty-gritty
Over an hour's worth of conversations with an insurance rep, a bank rep, and a customer service rep for a huge labyrinthine company. Not the best way to start the morning, but to my joy each person I speak to seems lucid and willing to help, and it could have dragged on longer.

pealing
Laughter is a kind of escape, a beautiful cloud of noise to sink into several seconds here and there while forgetting dignity, worries, and mostly everything else.

readjustment
No epiphanies; instead a painstaking process of discovery that could very well lead to failure. At least I'm learning; nothing's wasted, not time or brain cells, if I've learned something.

tormented
A bumblebee dying just inside the doors of a grocery store, only several feet away from the flowers in cellophane and the crates of fruit.

vertiginous
In the library the shelves are long, the aisles between them are narrow, and the books come in so many different colors and sizes, that I have trouble focusing my eyes. If I don't look mostly at the floor I get dizzy.

Week in Seven Words #60

inferences
It's not uncommon for them to arrive at the correct answer through incorrect reasoning. And some of them say as little as possible, wisely concealing their ignorance.

peripheral
It can be good to sit at the end of a table, with one or two people around you to talk to. It's less noisy, with less competition over who will speak next. There's also no need to go along with the main topics of conversation.

spool
I speak quickly, my voice tugged out of me by the hands of the clock.

sprinkler
Small blue cellophane bags full of goodies - hamentaschen, peppermint patties, apples, oranges, chocolates in foil - sprinkled among people I know.

submerse
Just one tip of the tri-cornered hamentaschen dipped in a cup of almond milk.

trigger
There's a bowl of candy at the center of the table. I like how, shortly after one person reaches for a piece, a few others follow suit and take candy as well. That first person seems to give them permission, to show them that it's acceptable to take seconds or even thirds.

whet
Listening to the words of the text I want to know more, to understand the language, the people, the deeper meaning.

Week in Seven Words #55

anterograde
He was a man with anterograde amnesia - he could encode no new episodic memories. He had some past memories to anchor him a little, give him a sense of identity. Otherwise he was adrift. He inhabited narrow parcels of time, probably no more than half a minute long (and often less), whatever his short term memory could hold. He did not remember people he had just met, or what he had just been saying or doing, or what others said and did to him. Every morning when he woke up he felt as if he was awakening after a long sleep, years-long. He would lean over to a diary at his bedside and write that he was finally awake. Then he would discover a previous entry documenting the same thing (that he had finally woken up!) and with a feeling of uneasy dismissal he would cross out that previous entry, thinking it impossible that he could have written such a thing. Most of his life felt like that - the recent seconds slipping, and then a sensation of waking up fresh to the world, not remembering why he was sitting on the couch (his couch?) or why there was a dinner plate in front of him.

floe
Less than two weeks ago the field was caked from end to end in snow and ice, brilliant in the sunshine, with a couple of benches bobbing around like rowboats on an arctic sea. This week the snow has crept away, uncovering dry brown grass. Boys and girls in sweatshirts, tee-shirts, and shorts rush out to play frisbee. Nearby some guys play volleyball barefoot on a sandy court; their big golden dog dashes around their bare legs.

halting
The words come with difficulty, over the phone or face-to-face, but once I find them and say them some relief comes to me; things haven't turned out badly or as awkwardly as I feared. I can even laugh.

observer
Several times this week I watch myself from a somewhat detached vantage point within my mind, like a master observing the workings of an automaton that she ostensibly controls. There I am speaking to one group of people, then to another, and there I am walking, one foot before the other, and listening patiently, and being in turn observed by others. And in response to a lot of what I see I think, "why"?

penmanship
Bad hand-writing makes for a sort of malleable identity. What's meant to be a 'G' looks like an 'S'; a lowercase i is more like a lowercase o. One person no longer exists on the roster, and several have wriggled out of order, out to explore new alphabetical territory.

venture
Diagrams on a board; illustrations dotted out on yellow notepad paper. We map out another attempt at overcoming a difficult problem.

zephyr
For the first time in months I sit outside on a bench and read. I don't get much reading done; the breeze tempts me to distraction.

Week in Seven Words #8

assortment
We're the ones who don't fit neatly anywhere. Off the main room with the bright lights and song and long tables, we're in the semi-dark, five or six of us, whoever wants to drift in and talk about anything, from holiday plans to obscure historical details, and whether it's possible to both be cynical and hold onto cherished ideals. We're in the side room with the books, leftover crackers, and the windows facing sunset; in key ways we're beautifully different from one another, but seeking similar things - the pleasure of good conversation, along with room to slouch and stretch out our legs.

budding
The darling buds of March. They're set, in shades of light pink, against backdrops of gray sky or drab brick; they're framed by windows, where they seem to be looking in with rapt attention. Some trees have already flowered open, but on others the buds hold tight to themselves as long as possible; I'm expecting them to be especially spectacular when they finally yield to the season.

pantomime
To help someone out with a project, I agree to be photographed carrying out a number of different actions - playing cards, getting chased, sipping from a cup, reclining in a chair. I also need to mimic angry and violent actions - punching and kicking. I find it difficult to act those out, because I keep cracking up; I don't look angry enough. Finally I manage it but even then it feels like a comic sort of anger, as if I'm a cartoon character with steam coming out of my ears.

signal
He wants me to give him a signal if he's getting to be too long-winded in front of the guests. The signals we discuss range from the relatively subtle - three taps to the side of my nose, a beseeching stare - to the more obvious, like throwing my head back and letting out a huge groan.

steeped
The short thin raincoat isn't enough against the downpour. The rain soaks into my jeans and sweatshirt sleeves. I wear the rain on my skin for hours, cool against my thighs and wrists and the slope of my shoulders.

terrace
A light dinner beneath a peach and gray sky; the breeze for the most part is mild and pleasant. I sit alone and eat slowly. I stop often to sip my root beer and lean back in my chair.

underestimated
Very young infants are often underestimated. But there's so much that they can do, and many things that they're primed to learn. They have certain cognitive structures in place. They can pick up contingencies about the properties of the world and its objects. As the weeks fly by after birth, they show an ability to reason (in their own elusive, nonverbal way) about events in the world. The glimpses we get into their minds reveal amazing processes.