LangBabies Per. 5

I love words. Good thing, I suppose, given my chosen and hard-fought-for occupation. Every time I sit down at a keyboard or have a pen poised over a blank sheet of paper, I feel overwhelmed with excitement, with possibility, with anticipation. With a few key strokes or swipes of a pen, you can find the right combination of words that can make someone LOVE you. Conversely, you can break a heart, manipulate a mind or sever an allegiance…all with those same strokes or swipes. Think about that. Legends are immortalized because of words. Nations go to war over words. Couples are united in matrimony with words. Hearts and lives are shattered due to words. The power they wield is, in a word, awesome. “Every time I come around the corner and see your car in the driveway I get sick to my stomach.” I sat on the couch during yet another face-off with my mother when she let fly with that condemnation, effectively shattering any sense of comfort and belonging I may have been clinging to at t...

I am a Robert Greene fan. <crickets....> ...someone from afar cries out, "who?!?" Well, then.  I guess this warrants further explanation. The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War  (I don't have the one he wrote with 50Cent) are all displayed prominently on my bookshelves, and the abuse each one of them has taken (bent pages, cracked spine, coffee spills/burns) would indicate that I've read them several times. So, you guessed it--Robert Greene is an author. Further, it comes as no surprise (well, to me I mean) that I am feeling a bit cynical this evening, and for that, I apologize; I think that my internal struggle with cynicism thanks to Greene may have influenced this week's intellectual proposition. I shall let you be the judge, however, as to whether or not this was a good or a bad thing. As many of you know, and if you didn't you do now, I am not that into "people." There are a select few I would ev...

So, I've been thinking.  Sometimes that happens.  And when it does random topics whirl through my mind like mini cyclones, and sometimes in order to make sense of these thoughts I will write them down.  In the chaos and the tumult that is my mind, the ability to stop time by capturing those thoughts and depositing them on a page  is invaluable to me, and so, here we are. The word "love" gets thrown around so much on a day-to-day basis, it's a wonder the letters haven't broken off and gotten lost forever. Or--have they? How often do you say you "love" something as silly as a pair of shoes or an ice cream flavor? I have many favorite novels and one of those is T he Secret Life of Bees .  It was remade into a movie with Queen Latifah.  Meh.  Anyway, set in the 60's at the start of the Civil Rights Movement, there is this matriarchal character in the story named August (think of the vocab word).  She is one of the so-named Calendar sisters in the ...