Week in Seven Words #536

This covers the week of 4/26/20 - 5/2/20.

beset

Pulses of weariness and despair.

breaks

Two brisk walks in one day. Lots of screen time in between.

flutters
A puddle filled with pink blossoms and shivering birds.

glassy

New construction all looks the same to me: sleek rectangles with large windows and little artistry.

insomnia

It's no use asking my brain why it's woken me up in the middle of the night. Maybe it wants me to admire the shadowy room, and the way the light creeps over the walls.

patrolling

A flock of police officers on bikes. Black masks are stretched over their mouths and noses. They're on the lookout for legal violations, which these days include picnics and outdoor birthday parties.

screens

She tells me that the schools aren't giving grades. Regardless of grades, are the students learning anything from their sessions of screen time? Debatable.

Week in Seven Words #527

This covers the week of 2/23/20 - 2/29/20.

convincingly

He's convinced that he's a loser, and he speaks to himself the way he wouldn't speak to anyone else. After years of such self-talk, the words are almost comforting. They've become something like a reliable truth, even though they aren't true.

dragged
She doesn't want to finish her homework, so she stretches out each question with pretend thinking, bathroom breaks, trips to refill her cup with water, and off-topic questions. 

drones

A row of old computers chuntering on through the same tasks, year after year, under different masters wielding different tools.

floaty
Her skirt floats around her as she dances, as if it's a flowing extension of her energy and grace.

gobbled

Mounds of laundry fed into the maw of a washing machine.

pent-up

Her dragon sculpture looks as if it will come alive at any moment, whipping its tail around and stretching its jaws open to unleash fire.

slogging

I force myself to finish something I'd rather not be doing and that I wish I wasn't doing alone.

Week in Seven Words #500

catch-all
She uses "heavy" to describe anything big or adult-like.

decoding
Even though he's more experienced with JavaScript than I am, he can still find it perplexing. Like why 2019 gets interpreted as a number even though it was typed as a string.

drenching
Right after we step into the store, the wind picks up, and the storm rushes through the streets like an overflowing river.

impatience
I'm caught up in a flurry of impatience with myself. But impatience is preferable to feeling undeserving and inadequate.

salesmanship
The salesman, crimped and white-toothed, hovers too much, but he does point me to something worth buying.

self-sufficient
An old woman walking with her spine perpendicular to her hips refuses help with her bags. She's holding one in each hand, and they seem to balance her.

warily
The doctor's office is tucked below street level. It looks grubby and shabby, and the air is thick with the tang of disinfectant.

Week in Seven Words #484

bug
At the lecture hall, the walls are a Pepto Bismol pink. I sip Diet Coke to try settling my stomach, before realizing that I probably won't be able to sit upright for two hours, not with this 24-hour bug churning in me.

laptop
A sleek gray rectangle with an impressive amount of power.

renovation
Wires have burst from the walls like intestines. It's a cold and dusty room.

screening
The rooms are in gray and white, the lights are bright, the professionals simulate kindness.

tossed
The birthday card spurts from his hand and splats on the table, where a newspaper will soon slink over it.

trips
Staying up late to look at models of RVs. I imagine fitting one out and just driving for months.

well-wisher
I wish them all well, while feeling out of place among them.

Week in Seven Words #391

artwork
The pond reflects a mosaic of leaves.

blink
If I'm not in front of them, do I exist to them? (Like an object permanence test, but for relationships.)

botheration
How much I've entrusted to computer systems I don't control, and the irritation and sometimes fear when they don't work for reasons poorly understood.

breather
She takes her break at a picnic table, a mason jar of flowers at her elbow, her clipboards laid aside.

foil
The water spreads across the harbor in overlapping sheets, the edges stained with sunlight.

plumping
They've brought what seems to be every kind of greasy, salty, sweet processed food to their picnic and the kind of folding chairs that cut your legs out from under you and make you give up on standing. We're in for a satisfying, sedentary stupor.

rarity
Coming across a small bookstore. Feeling wonder and a pang of worry, as if I'm in the presence of an endangered species.

Week in Seven Words #375

digits
Entering numbers into a form, carefully, on a laggard computer that decides at odd moments to step out for the computer equivalent of a coffee break.

drying
Thick sheets of rain sweep past the movie theater's marquee. The lobby is stuffy and has a dusty, buttery smell.

flustered
They like improv but are also afraid of it, because it's too unpredictable. They hold back, undermining the scene, for fear of saying something unacceptably weird.

mingled
There's a lot of reassurance to be found in a shared pizza and companionable silence.

speakeasy
It's a roaring 20s theme party, where the gals show off their gams in shimmery knee-length dresses that shiver as they dance.

tied
The interviewer acts like he's trying to corral a horse. He wants the rage of denial, the flare of indignation. Followed by inevitable submission.

unicorn
Sometimes, making them laugh is as simple as holding a staring contest with the head of a unicorn.

Week in Seven Words #334

chirruping
A waterfall of bird chatter in the hour before dawn.

creeds
Tracing threads in the development of a religion. A move towards greater compassion here, an intensifying disgust of women there. Scholars scrambling to tie together the disparate threads.

fuzz
He's straining to grow a beard, so he can look like a worthy substitute for a respected older teacher. As he lectures, he scratches his cheeks.

letdown
After struggling over whether or not to call him, I reach for the phone, only to have it ring as soon as I touch it. Our conversation doesn't go well.

malfunctioning
If only my laptop could talk back. It would freeze halfway through its request for me to stop cursing at it.

misdeed
I show up five minutes late to find the stage set for a courtroom scene. I'm the accused.

perfidious
We watch Chamber of Secrets together, and the part that upsets him most isn't the basilisk, but the teacher betraying the students and threatening to wipe out their minds with a spell.

Week in Seven Words #308

besieger
Before he finally gets locked out of his account, he tries one password after another, probing at his unresponsive memory. Each time, he's convinced that he's only off by one character.

binding
Through cracks in the window, the cold seeps in and curls around my hands and ankles.

braceleted
Around my wrists, they've placed interlocking plastic chains - some in pastels, others in night-glowing neon.

pellets
Cloudy bins of candies in toxic colors line the cold, bright aisles.

schnoz
His nose has puffed up like a sponge toy that expands in water.

shades
Dark-haired and silver-haired, they play a violin duet in the dim light.

unassured
"Don't worry, don't worry," he pleads. He doesn't know what else to do. He only wishes she'd relax, even as his frantic voice communicates the uselessness of such a wish.

Worth Watching: Desk Set (1957)

Title: Desk Set
Director: Walter Lang
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

Desk Set is a charming office romance featuring Bunny Watson (Katharine Hepburn), the head research librarian at a major TV network, and Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), an engineer whose giant computer might cost Bunny and her team of librarians their jobs.

One description I read of this movie claimed that Bunny and Richard clash dramatically, but I didn't find this to be true. The movie shows them slowly getting comfortable with each other and developing a mutual respect; both of them are quirky, middle-aged nerds, and their romance is gentle.


Bunny has a boyfriend at the beginning of the movie - one of the network executives, in fact (played by Gig Young) - but he desires her more for her dependability and usefulness and less for her personal qualities. Richard, on the other hand, just likes her as she is and respects her work. Given that Desk Set was filmed in the 1950s, I was surprised that the movie did a fairly decent job portraying a group of smart, hard-working women in the workplace who are friends and colleagues. These ladies are also very snappy dressers.


The only woman whose portrayal was off-the-mark was Richard's finicky lab assistant, who collapses into unnecessary and unrealistic hysterics at one point, because the filmmakers thought it would be funny.

I enjoyed the giant computer, EMERAC - really a sign of the times, how huge this computer was. And though computers have become much smaller, and more powerful and multifunctional, the concern raised in this movie is still relevant today: In what ways will computers take the place of people in the workplace? The movie's answer to that is rather sophisticated; it really takes into consideration the kinds of jobs people perform and the limitations of computers.

What else did I like? Bunny's friendship with her most senior employee, Peg (Joan Blondell), and their fun at an office holiday party.


I'm glad I came across Desk Set. It's low-key, lovely, with some well-written conversations and memorable scenes (including a rooftop lunch combined with a test of memory and logic). The screenplay was written by Nora Ephron's parents, Phoebe and Henry; I'm not that familiar with their work or with Nora's, but if you're a fan, that's another reason to check out this movie.

*All images link back to their sources (The Movie Projector and Glamamor).

Week in Seven Words #151 & #152

Week in Seven Words #151

affective
When the book I've worked on makes its way into the world I feel a nervous happiness.

kick
Short clips of improv comedy are like shots of an energy drink.

perpetual
The blink of the cursor measures time.

ploy
She tries to give me 'supercalifragalisticexpialidocious' as a mathematical solution. I am unmoved.

progress
Step 1: Recognizing a problem. Step 3: Doing something about it. Step 2: Inertia.

scattered
At the front of the line there's usually someone whose library card is lost among a hundred compartments in a purse or whose money is floating around in a bottomless coat pocket.

sheeted
The water is beaten down by the wind.

------------

Week in Seven Words #152

evacuation
He isn't toilet-trained but he's started to seek out privacy when nature calls. He tries to find a quiet spot in the house where he can stand or sit in his diaper, and if you approach him, he warns you off with a plaintive "No, no..." until he's done.

fluidity
I see the sculpture in the wan cloudy light of a winter afternoon, so I don't realize at first that it has color sliding through it - a pale lavender flowing like liquid through its metal veins.

impressionistic
The view from the window is one gray smear, like a Monet painting of London.

palimpsest
I like historical tours of downtown where you learn that criminals were hanged and traitors shot in the peaceful square where people now eat their lunches by the fountain and text each other.

pragmatically
His expectation of instantaneous results have given way to pragmatism; there's so much more work to do, so much farther to go.

prioritizing
I had a feeling she'd stop being angry with me, because she'd want to know how my date went.

shortcut
He's been asked to sort his toys neatly into drawers. But there are so many of them, and he'd rather be playing than organizing his room. So he labels one drawer the 'everything drawer' and piles as much stuff as possible into it. Unfortunately it doesn't pass inspection.

Week in Seven Words #105

coding
The online coding tutorial rewards you with a blue check mark on every exercise you successfully complete, and it's a good feeling to see one surface on the page, a sense of progress and mastery, even if you later realize that you have to go back to those old exercises because you've forgotten something important about the correct placement of semi-colons and the script you're trying to write isn't working anymore.

freeing
I like brainstorming on the train. The rocking motion seems to loosen things up in the mind.

impregnable
The blue doors on the school are like portals in a fortress, admitting no one. I expect that at any moment a sphinx will alight on the steps and demand an answer to a riddle in exchange for entrance.

marigold
The Shakespeare Garden is quietly alive in the winter sunlight. And on a plaque I find this passage from The Winter's Tale:
The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun
And with him rises weeping...
The marigold flowers are nowhere in sight; only the promise of them.

relaxed
Boats drifting by on the river. I don't need to know where they're going.

unruffled
Ducks and seagulls are scattered across the lake. When they take wing the water hardly stirs.

whimsies
Two of my favorite things are Thing 1 and Thing 2 from The Cat in the Hat.

Site with free programming lessons

I found what looks like an awesome site, Code Year, that will teach you computer programming by sending you a free lesson every Monday. The first few lessons of the year are up on the website for anyone (like me) who didn't discover this at the start of the year. I'm excited about this, because I was planning to develop my computer skills this year beyond what I know of Microsoft Office, a handful of statistics programs, and basic html.

Week in Seven Words #45

chapped
My knuckles crack open in the cold.

culmination
All eight candles are lit along with the presiding shamash; the light they give is defiant and cheerful.

fragment
A slender journal in Hebrew, and the story of a girl who lived decades ago and died young. She left a deep impression on her teacher, who wrote about her elevated spirit and discerning mind; this teacher wanted to preserve her writing and keep her memory alive. In her black and white photo she looks serious and severely lovely.

listing
The project drifts off course and onto some rocks. It groans, tilts, and waits in weary silence for intervention.

peepers
Their eyes appear on the screen as two blank white circles on a black square. The circles squeeze to nothing and spring to full circumference; they waver and blur and shift from side to side. They seem to belong to a cartoon character blinking out of a dark room.

tight-lipped
My front door won't admit me, and at first I'm not sure why.

twinkle
Snow drifts down in the late afternoon. It's the best time of day for it, knowing that there are warm places waiting for me at the end of the day's work.

Week in Seven Words #30

connection
She calls three times before her flight, clinging to a voice she loves.

cordial
Three women, a long afternoon lunch, and a breeze gliding between the balcony and the front door.

extraterrestrial
Flowers that seem ordinary and pretty during the day acquire a strange purple glow beneath the street lamps at night.

pinballs
My thoughts ping around every which way - bouncing off my cerebellum and zinging around my limbic system - and I make the mistake of talking in the midst of this scattered mental state. Meaningless pings and thunks come out of my mouth, and I hear myself and think, "Who is this ninny, and why does she have my voice?"

predatory
Every so often I get up and pace in a semi-circle in front of the computer; it stares blandly back at me, displaying the little graphs, text boxes, screen captures and clipart tableaux. I bend forward peering at it all with narrowed eyes and wondering what I should pounce on next.

riven
On the one hand I have a wrenching stomachache. On the other hand I bump into not one, but two people whom I haven't seen in a while. So I live in a split reality - a part of me is caught up in pleasant conversation, while another part is sobbing quietly to itself, wanting its hot tea and corner-of-the-couch and blanket.

tundra
There's a separate climate zone in the back of the fridge, where the temperatures have dipped and turned a yogurt cup into a popsicle, a handful of radishes into nuggets of ice, and the surface of the humous into a miniature ice-skating rink, smooth and crystalline.

Week in Seven Words #15

agitation
The sky is orange and gray, with a gleam of lightning now and then from behind the cloud cover. The wind is panting, and the trees tremble. The storm won't contain itself much longer.

capitalize
The difference between a lowercase and uppercase B stalls the programming code, though I hardly know this as I comb through the lines attempting to make sense of an ambiguous error message. It takes a friendly human, with friendly human eyes, to look through it twice and spot the difference.

disorientation
I've grown used to a certain way of walking to this place; I don't think much about the turns I need to make, the landmarks and houses I walk past. That changes twice. Once at night, when a friend suggests making a shortcut through an alley and a side street, and I find my steps faltering a little, as if I'm in a foreign neighborhood. And the second time is during the day, so even the accustomed route looks a little strange - in the sunshine details leap out that have lain hidden in the dark, and I need to stop and stare and remind myself that yes, this is the street.

escapades
I make recurring efforts to neaten the room. But as my attention turns elsewhere the tidiness dissolves, and the next time I stop at the doorway and take a hard assessing look I find that the books have leapfrogged over one another, the papers have waltzed around the floor, and the shirts have turned somersaults off their shelves and onto the chairs.

incongruent
The man has stretched his arms along the back of the bench; his legs are eased out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, and his spine is curved in a lazy C. His head is tipped back, his eyes probably full of sun and clouds, and I figure he's singing or maybe even talking softly to himself. I'm not prepared, when drawing within earshot, to hear the growls and foul words grinding out of his mouth.

magnify
The nightmare is both ridiculous and revealing; as I think about it afterwards, I realize how much weight I've placed on what seems to be a trivial detail, but is actually only one small part of a larger problem.

windup
At least the day is long, and the hours don't seem to hurry. We have lunch in a breezy room and talk there for a good while after. I savor the time without consciously forcing myself to do so. There's a lot I've learned from this small group of people, and many days I've had great fun being with them. I don't think it's sunk in yet, how I'll miss the frequency of our meetings.