Week in Seven Words #560

This covers the week of 10/11/20 - 10/17/20.

discoursing

I like how these three female figures from history are posed – around a table in a discussion that one can almost overhear.

flattening

Petulant people with paper-thin identities and a simplistic way of viewing the world try to dictate what others should read, write, and think about. 

glows

I admire the green-gold pattern of leaves in the autumn light. The light glowing gold on the grass.

pushing

Have I tried enough, or have I wilted too quickly at rejection?

ranging

Some of my favorite work assignments are the ones that teach me completely new things. Could be a topic in medicine, technology, or the environment. Could be a travel or tourism assignment, though those are scarcer in a pandemic year. Lately, many assignments have been about psychological problems, such as addiction, anxiety, and various effects of isolation.

scrambled

The class is disjointed and confusing. I catch at passing facts like pebbles tumbling on a stream bed, but I'm missing some of the bigger picture.

softening

It's been a while since we've spoken, and I'm touched by his kind words.

Week in Seven Words #524

This covers the week of 2/2/20 - 2/8/20.

cheerful

A girl riding on her dad's shoulders raises her pink mittens to a drizzly sky.

crunchy

The sunlight crackles on salt-encrusted streets.

eructation

The gutters are belching litter into a foul-smelling wind.

inert

She has no illusions about what she'll learn. She has little hope that she'll do better. The next few hours are just a way to pass the time.

limitations

They fall back on what sound like programmed responses. A "hm" in response to an observation. A tiny set of one-word answers to any questions you may have. Chunks of your own speech echoed at you. Their eyes drift to a wall, a window, and rest expressionlessly.

touches

She thinks of how to make every corner of her home more lovely. The flowers I come across while climbing the stairs make me smile.

withdraws

"I don't belong in school," she says. But where does she belong? She doesn't know. Maybe there's a quiet room somewhere with a door that locks, a pair of ear buds, and a phone.

Week in Seven Words #499

delightful
"I hope I never get tired of this stuff," she says, about cartoonish sculptures on the 14th Street platform of the A and C subway lines. She doesn't want to become jaded.

dining
We eat burgers in a lovely cellar-like restaurant, noisy but cozy.

immerses
She's demolishing a large bag of potato chips while watching a Korean soap opera on her phone.

learned
During the first half of the class, she acts as if she knows everything, and only gradually becomes more open to seeing new ways of solving problems. Others never develop that openness.

patience
The instructor acts as if he has clumsily assembled his patience out of plywood. With each question, each hand waving in the air, it splinters.

sofas
Some of the sofa cushions feel like taut air bubbles shifting under me. One of them, though, has just the right balance between staying firm and giving way.

upper-class
Two elegant, well-groomed dogs are crossing the plaza with a mincing walk, and I wonder if they're 18th century aristocrats who have been reincarnated as canines.

Week in Seven Words #487

alimentary
A narrow path takes us through a narrow park. I get the feeling that I'm in an alimentary canal, a digestive tract. There's enough food and shit scattered around to strengthen that impression.

anxiety
Anxiety is like clinging to a salt-caked rock miles from shore as cold waves slap you around.

chariness
A cat investigates the automatic doors. She's too small to open them on her own. When a human passes through, she sticks her head and some of her body into the gap but quickly pulls back as the doors close. Maybe she's afraid of being trapped in the building, an unfamiliar place that smells heavily of humans and disinfectants.

ditch
Decades later, she still behaves like an unloved little girl not getting enough attention from her parents.

gorge
She eats cake with popping, slurping noises.

indignity
She has tripped and is lying facedown with her face in her hands. What hurts her more than the bruising is the awareness of a crowd around her, staring.

rubber band
She walks away from the math problem and for a few minutes pretends it isn't lurking in her notebook. With a sigh, she returns to it. Solves it. Smiles.

Week in Seven Words #485

celebratory
We sit at our own table, each of us with a little heap of food, including shawarma. At one point, a man with a sonorous voice sings "Hatikvah," and that's the highlight of the evening.

charmer
He normally has little to say, but with so many ladies around, he becomes more lively and charming. He shares cheesy, non-threatening jokes and plays up how nice he is to his mom.

critique
The day is damp and unexpectedly cold. We meet at a pizzeria and sit at a sticky table, where I read through her writing. It's full of twisty, creative ideas and sparks of humor. But it needs more patience. She likes telling the reader everything upfront about a character's background and personality, when some things should be discovered more slowly.

irritation
Phone calls to three different offices to deal with an insurance claim rejected because of a paperwork error at a doctor's office.

planting
The eggplants go into the ground in bright green shoots. Each plant gets its own mound, where it's tucked in for the next stage of growth. One woman presses her fingers to her lips and caresses the leaves of the ones she has planted.

suckers
They hand out lollipops to struggling students. Your grades may have tanked, but at least you get to saturate your mouth with artificial cherry flavor.

yoga
Contorting into different positions. I'm not sure how this is supposed to be relaxing. Ow, my back.

Week in Seven Words #481

fed
The baby is replete with slices of banana. He reclines on his dad's lap and accepts the mushy offerings from his mom.

fuzziness
What does my health insurance plan cover? The customer service representatives don't always seem to know. They offer optimistic but uncertain responses.

glowing
A lumpy black tree - it glows with dark warmth like a coal.

nightfall
A peach gray sunset over the river. Blossoms imprinted on it like stars.

pleaser
They exclaim over a Portuguese water dog, which flutters at their attention and seeks their patting hands.

roughhouse
Two girls roughhousing. Shoves, handstands, shouts, laughter.

undermined
"I don't get it," she says. Then, as I explain, her eyes seek the ceiling, the surface of the desk, her phone, her nails. "I don't get it," she says.

Week in Seven Words #463

aquatics
They've booked a room next to an indoor swimming pool. During each pause in the lecture, we hear splashing and giggles.

bizarro
He murders time with an online game in which something that looks like a decapitated bunny head rolls around in tunnels.

congeniality
Mandarin cinnamon tea, a small high table, a conversation that flows for an hour.

learning
It hits me again how much isn't taught at school. Even basic academic knowledge. So much gets picked up at home or in other places, like an after school activity or visits to a library, a museum, or a park.

receiving
I try without success to show a gratifying level of excitement about a gift I have no use for. I wish I could have prepared for the moment somehow.

sparkle
We walk through cold streets where glowing, cheerful lights are strung. I carry a sparkling blue bag full of chocolates.

stash
The dog tries to investigate the inside of my mouth. A couple of hours earlier I ate beef, and she's wondering if there's more to my mouth than the scent. Maybe I'm holding back on her, hoarding meat in my cheek pouches.

Week in Seven Words #456

culinary
The kitchen is dingy, and the cook keeps her phone and keys on the counter among spatters of sauce and grease. But the soup is pretty good, and so is the chicken sandwich.

hardware
Framed by the window, the cluster of buildings and lights resembles a computer motherboard.

lockup
As with other high schools, the architecture for this one evokes a prison. It's a slab of gray with the windows barred.

processed
He doesn't read the book, just looks for answers on Quizlet, which his indifferent teacher will accept with an automatic checkmark.

rove
His mind is roaming an elsewhere. He's shifting in his seat, and soon he'll hurry out the door to walk off his restlessness.

sluggish
Buses slide out like tired slugs from the tunnel.

truth
"The truth will set you free" is how the expression goes, but this freedom, whatever it happens to be, generally isn't quick or guaranteed. What the truth does is show you some of the ways in which you're chained. From there, you need to figure out how to unchain yourself, if you even want to, and if you even can.

Week in Seven Words #423

blatant
What they hate the most about homelessness is its visibility.

commits
This evening, I don't have the presence of mind to focus during a public reading, but I don't want to stay at home and leave an obligation unfulfilled. So the words flow past me, as if I were a dull rock in a stream.

defiant
Two young children playing. The older one says, "Be the baby." To which the younger one replies, "Not a baby. I growed up."

front
He acts as if he doesn't take things seriously. But from behind his jokey, sardonic front, a grave concern will sometimes emerge about the world and his place in it.

hermetically
They haven't come to learn but to assert their own certainty.

indigestion
I'm advised to temporarily avoid chocolate, tomatoes, and tomato-based products, basically half my diet. (Just kidding. A fifth of my diet, tops.)

unburdened
Meeting a deadline, sending something off, the relaxation that follows, muscles unknitting.

Week in Seven Words #339

cross-cultural
She's an American dating an Israeli, and she doesn't know what to make of his parents. They aren't mean to her, in fact they seem to like her, they're just... I get it. They're thoroughly Israeli. I sit with her for a while and try to help her understand.

distance
Do I miss him? (Not really.) Should I? (Emotions aren't obligatory.)

encroach
By the bay there's a row of abandoned houses. Sand has crept in through the cracks in the boarded up windows. Each door has grown a wild beard of leaves.

facelift
There's a thick smell of paint in the corridor, and the light is cloudy with dust.

gratification
I'm not a beach person; when I take time off, I probably won't be sitting on a beach for hours. But I love the smell of sunscreen. I love the feel of sea water curling around my ankles.

inarguable
They're not looking to learn, just hoping to become more certain of what they think they already know.

rasping
She's hoarse, her throat sanded away by a weeks-long cold.

Week in Seven Words #278

aseptically
First impression of the school corridors: bulletin boards, artwork, and the reek of disinfectants.

deliberate
I pace in the rectangle of light from the doorway.

duration
"I'll stick around for an hour" becomes "I'll stay all night."

ill-considered
They tried to console him in his grief by telling him that other people have suffered too. But when does that approach work? Did they think other people's pain would ease his own, or that it would be a good idea to somehow shame him out of his sorrow?

ken
A powerful mental rush where I feel focused and thirsty for knowledge.

self-consciousness
The kids have been coached to repeat lines, hop on cue and wiggle around dancing when the teacher tells them to. They're old enough to start feeling embarrassed by the silliness, especially because it's orchestrated by adults and not spontaneous.

subtext
She says, "I'm worried." What she doesn't say is, "I need to control you." But those other words are there, whether she realizes it or not. I'm not going to pretend they aren't.

The Periodic Table: A Chemical Narrative Framework for Primo Levi's Life

That is what nature does: it draws the fern's grace from the putrefaction of the forest floor…

The Periodic Table, which I read for the Classics Club Challenge, is author Primo Levi's autobiography told in a series of elements (and translated into English by Raymond Rosenthal). Levi worked as an industrial chemist and survived a year in Auschwitz after being captured while fighting in the Italian resistance against the Nazis. Each chapter in his book centers on a different element and how it ties into some facet of his life.

I loved this unique, poetic approach to the elements. What an element symbolizes or what its association is with his life might be subtle. But it's the organizing principle of his life's narrative (at least the one he shares here) - sometimes because a memorable episode of his life involved the use of a given element, other times because someone or something reminded him of it and its properties.

There might be an important lesson from chemistry.

… one must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates, and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences…

But it isn't as if he spends the entirety of the text talking in chemistry-related terms. There's poetry too, and an exploration of philosophy and emotions. As when he's captured as a partisan.

During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and a I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly, and I felt time running through my fingers, escaping from my body minute by minute, like a hemorrhage that can no longer be stanched.

Or when he falls in love.

In a few hours we knew that we belonged to each other, not for one meeting but for life, as in fact has been the case. In a few hours I felt reborn and replete with new powers, washed clean and cured of a long sickness, finally ready to enter life with joy and vigor…

And the poetry and chemistry freely mix too, as during his stint at a mine analyzing the soil for the presence of certain elements, he compares the elusive nickel to a sprite darting out of reach "with long perked ears, always ready to flee from the blows of the investigating pickax, levying you with nothing to show for it."

The use of the elements lends a certain weight and permanence to his life's story; he's tying himself to the stuff of the Earth. At the same time, his forays into chemistry often mirror the messiness and transitory qualities of his life; it's not all about simple, tidy formulae, though it feels like a triumph when a formula turns out as expected. Throughout the book he unearths episodes of his life and examines them. What holds them together? He constructs a loose narrative framework of chemistry and poetry. And somehow his life's story can hang together on that. (Which raises other questions about what constitutes a narrative, and how does one find meaning in life? He found an approach unique to his own life.)

Week in Seven Words #216 & 217

216

helpless
No one knows who he is, only that he's fallen to the pavement and is sobbing so hard he can't speak.

needed
Garbage bags bulging with skirts, blouses and sweaters.

oasitic
Footsteps echo in the atrium, and faint voices, but all the sounds arrive as from a distance. Birds skim the vaulting glass. There's no breeze, but the trees rustle.

rigidity
He considers the model of masculinity people tried to make him live up to: No feelings, except for anger and physical appetites. No tenderness. An internal world made up of steel girders with huge blank spaces in between.

sapor
Knowledge is a treasure to them and a pleasure to all the senses. They taste new facts. They savor what they learn.

stricken
She looks perpetually stunned by the indifference and cruelty around her. The magnitude of it empties her eyes. She's left with a smile that creases her face but never reaches her eyes.

uninhibited
Actors try to banish their self-conscious impulses. They howl and prance in public. They pretend to be jaguars and squirrels.

217

body
I'm uncomfortable among people who are being cued to do the same thing at the same time: chant, scream, clap or stomp their feet. If they're a large crowd and look like they're really into it, this puts me on edge even more.

exhort
At her age, she's both exploring new opportunities and also warning younger people not to make the same mistakes she made. But they don't all agree with her on what is or isn't a mistake.

gall
She usually likes it when other people are worse off than she is. At the same time, she doesn't want to be uncaring. So she offers comfort and advice. Only there's a bitter satisfaction in her tone that make people turn away from her anyway.

nerves
Branches spasm in the wind.

persevere
Her first impulse is to say it's too difficult and to back off. But then she weighs the disappointment that might come from a failed attempt against the greater regret of never trying.

rumble
The ground is trembling with the trains passing beneath it.

sopping
The vestibule is soaked in the heavy smell of wet coats.

Educating Rita (1983): Worth watching for Caine and Walters, and for the questions it raises

Title: Educating Rita
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Language: English
Rating: PG

I like this movie mostly because of Michael Caine and Julie Walters, and what they bring to their characters. But the filmmakers could have taken more time to explore the way good books can change people and looked deeper into how people teach and discuss literature. (I would have also changed the soundtrack, which gets repetitive.)

But Michael Caine and Julie Walters working together make the movie worth watching.


As Dr. Frank Bryant, Caine is a charming mess. He's a literature professor, witty and fun to talk to, but also burned out. He's got drinking problems that are endangering his job. He seems to have reached the limits of himself, taken himself as far as he thinks he can go, and now that he sees that it's gotten him nowhere and that the view is crap, he's self-destructing.

Susan (who calls herself Rita at the start of the movie) is a hairdresser who isn't satisfied with her life. She's married to a simple guy and should be happy making babies and going to the pub after work. Instead, she wants to study literature. She signs up for a course in adult education that winds up getting her one-on-one tutelage from Frank. Walters plays Susan with a no-nonsense freshness that's wonderful to watch. Even as her character becomes more sophisticated in the course of the movie, she manages more or less to stay steady and keep her refreshing directness; she changes, but her level-headedness and self-awareness will hopefully keep her from becoming like Frank.

That's one of the things that worries Frank - that Susan will turn into him. He likes Susan, and her untutored, honest opinions on the books she reads. He's afraid that the more she studies, the more she'll become like him or like too many of his colleagues: disillusioned, mannered, pretentious, all genuine enthusiasm lost. He wants to spare her from that. And, though he won't admit it, he's also afraid she won't have a use for him anymore. Not only will she leave him behind; with her education, she might also come to see right through him and perceive his emptiness. On the one hand, he doesn't want her to be blindly enamored of him; he wants her to read his own poetry and recognize that it's crap. On the other hand, he likes that she respects him and turns to him.

For Susan, the challenge is to study and grow without exchanging one narrow life for another. She leaves behind her working class neighborhood, but what if she gets trapped in another kind of narrow life (albeit one with more social cachet)? She wants to study literature to expand her mind and her possibilities in life. The danger is that instead of growing, she'll be contorting herself; not just polishing the roughness off her accent, but also blunting her eagerness and genuineness.

How will she stay genuine through it all? (Through some combination of her own wisdom, Frank's insights, and what she understands from her readings?) This could have been better explored; I wanted to see more of Frank and Rita really studying literature together, not just sharing some excerpts from books. What is transforming about literature? Why did Frank lose touch with the written word and get sucked in too much by the surrounding culture of pettiness and sophistication? What are the limits of books and their effect on us? Books change you, but you also have to bring yourself to the books; you have to let the text speak to you. In some ways, it's similar to how you connect with people.

The movie ends with Frank and Rita about to explore new possibilities in life. I won't say what these are, only their story shows how it's possible to stagnate and lose touch with yourself anywhere. This deep personal dissatisfaction can't be soothed with addictions (drink, in Frank's case) or by going along passively with the life that other people plan out for you, which in Susan's case would've been to have kids and not think too much.

*Image links back to its source (TheFilmReview.com).

Week in Seven Words #180

bedeviled
Up on the hill, she sits on a rock, stares at the ground, and silently battles her demons.

exhalation
Night is the best time to slip out. The air is breathable, the sidewalks are mostly empty, and the world is softer and more muted.

leaden
I miss out on a chance to reconnect with her, because a phone call seems like too much effort at the time.

priority
He will fail in part because his parents don't care enough about his success.

pupils
All of the stuffed animals are wide-eyed. Some look gullible; others look stoned. A few have clearly peered into the heart of the universe and discovered the mysteries therein.

sinuous
Romeo and Juliet embrace in the twilight.

tick-tock
They toss the baseball in an arc back and forth; it hits their mitts with a clop. Clop, arc, clop... like a metronome, keeping time at sunset.

Week in Seven Words #177

curiosities
What do we learn in museums? Sometimes it's only 'oohs' and 'ahhs' and a fact or two. How many times do we really connect with what we're seeing - immerse ourselves in it?

discomposure
He flies around the souvenir shop like an agitated moth, landing on treasures and launching off them again. Finally, he clutches a prize to his chest, but keeps circling as he's told to put it down again.

flirtation
A butterfly lands on her shirt front, right on her breasts. She stares at it, eyebrows raised, until it flutters off. "Must be a boy," she says.

hives
Palatial buildings are home to the offices of petty bureaucrats.

jigsaw
The White House is beautiful, but in a strange way looks like a hollow 3D puzzle of itself.

morphemes
Fun word games give structure to the hours we spend on the road.

natation
Swimming through images captured by Hubble. Strolling in a warm, gray drizzle. Looking out from between low-hanging branches at the Tidal Basin and Jefferson's pale monument.

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).

Nonfiction Book of the Month: We've Got Issues

We've Got Issues by Judith Warner discusses different factors that account for the sorry state of mental health services for children and early intervention for learning disabilities in the U.S. There's much to debate in this book, but even if you disagree with some of the premises or feel that she needs to dig deeper into some of the issues, I think you'll find that her approach is refreshing, as she doesn't blindly demonize people, whether they be parents, psychiatrists, or teachers. She also points out flaws in much of how the media reports on children's mental health, including their misinterpretations of data and their use of children as mere symbols representing larger societal problems.

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 #153 and #154

Week in Seven Words #153

conveyor
The cineplex is shot through with escalators that go nowhere, dumping you into narrow corridors with dirty red carpets that smell of popcorn and detergent.

eavesdroppers
An alley at night - giggles and dinner party voices and quiet windows where people sit alone and listen to their neighbors making merry.

nova
Wine and the illusion of lasting friendship.

previewing
The thirty minutes of previews I sit through show me that two kinds of things will happen in movies this coming year: 1) people will have gun battles on space ships and crash on unfamiliar planets where they'll have gun battles with beasts while possibly being targeted by sinister conspirators in tight body suits 2) people will fight criminals and go on road trips while cracking jokes and suffering repeated bodily injury.

prey
She's stunned that the one good vegetarian restaurant left in the area has been converted to a meat place. She even goes so far as to ask the people who work there if it was worth it - if they're really making more money now.

unsparing
The lake in the park is like the mirror, cold and silver, in the Sylvia Plath poem.

viewpoint
He talks about how a famous rabbi didn't want to refer to hospitals by the usual Hebrew term of "be'it cholim" (which translates to "house of the sick"). He preferred instead to call it "be'it refuah," or "house of healing," because that would be more hopeful and encouraging to people.

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Week in Seven Words #154

competitive
They're experts at getting to the buffet table first and parking themselves there even after they've filled their plates, to ensure that they'll be the first to get seconds too.

concealed
To her, ignorance is a source of deepest shame. She bluffs, doesn't ask questions, and retreats behind nonsensical answers so she can keep hiding what she doesn't know.

impelled
I love how coincidence can seem like finely tuned machinery (maybe it is?), life steered along with delicate pulleys and conveyor belts. I hear the right words on a day I really needed to hear them. I show up unannounced, and arrive right on time.

phalanges
His finger, almost definitely broken, is puffed up with the skin tight like sausage casing. It's hard to look at it, even harder to hear the pained noises he makes when it gets touched.

reserves
Most of the time when I go to this synagogue's services on Saturdays I feel like my batteries are getting recharged. I want to work on carrying that feeling of connection and quiet contemplation into the rest of the week.

rewarded
No matter what comes of it, I'm happy the experience has made us closer than we have been in years.

vexatious
It has everything a customer service phone line should have: long wait times, an annoying automated voice, convoluted instructions, and operators who greet you brightly before hanging up.