Emoji (絵文字えもじ?, Japanese pronunciation: [emodʑi]) are the ideograms or smileys used in Japanese electronic messages and Web pages, the use of which is spreading outside Japan. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji literally means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji).
In the past couple of days, I've learned something new: All those grinning and frowning and angry little faces on the smart phones (the ones that we embed in our texts) are called Emoji.
If you're saying something potentially inflammatory and tack on a smiling face, or if you try to soften a remark with a Smiley, the message can be confusing: do I smile back or respond to the words?
That happened with two people this week. Once, I was the receiver, the other time the sender. In both cases, the message was incongruent with the smiley face. "Why did you send a smiley emoji when you said that?" my daughter asked me.
I had to look up the word. I was trying to use a pictogram to convey a lighter tone than my words did.
Then, as things happen, I received such a text from Mike--and had the exact same response: I wanted to understand the tone of the sender. I felt, as Day had felt, that he was saying one thing in words, another in the emoji: "Let's laugh"--even though the words didn't strike me as funny.
Maybe emoji are new forms of nervous laughter. Maybe they are our attempts to mimic face-to-face conversation on a tiny text screen. Either way, it's conversational shorthand that can undermine what we really mean.
Friday, June 5, 2015
Day Anna
My daughter, Day, was picked as Favorite Teacher at Falls Church High School this year!
And she was asked to be the speaker at the Baccalaureate ceremony on June 18th. "I hope you don't say, 'This is not an end; this is a beginning," I said--after congratulating her, knowing, of course, she's way too cool for that tired line.
She told me how she planned to tell the seniors that she sees them with double vision--as they were as freshmen and as they are now as graduating seniors. She' will remind them to question advice, even good advice.
Some qualities are baked in to the person!
When Day was little, she'd ask, "Which shoes should I wear, the blue or the yellow?"
"Yellow," I'd say--and then watch her, every time, put on the blue.
Her mama sees her with double vision, too--the child is right there in the Favorite Teacher!
And she was mentioned numerous times by seniors in the yearbook:
She told me how she planned to tell the seniors that she sees them with double vision--as they were as freshmen and as they are now as graduating seniors. She' will remind them to question advice, even good advice.
Some qualities are baked in to the person!
When Day was little, she'd ask, "Which shoes should I wear, the blue or the yellow?"
"Yellow," I'd say--and then watch her, every time, put on the blue.
Her mama sees her with double vision, too--the child is right there in the Favorite Teacher!
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Conversation
The poet David Whyte's speaking voice (along with his late-friend John O'Donahue's) goes with me on long road trips. When you listen to someone as often as I've listened to David Whyte, that person becomes part of your psyche and outlook. His books interest me less than his spoken meanderings on CDs, especially Clear Mind, Wild Heart. Sometimes a person comes into your life just when you need what they have to say--and this is the case, for me, with David Whyte.
Often he uses the word, conversation, to describe not just conversations between people, but the conversations we live. Whatever we do can be regarded as questions--and the questions are as important as answers.
His newest book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, reflects on the meaning of words, starting with Alone. I have only read the sample of the book on Amazon so far, but the idea of the book intrigues me as much as the actual book.
How often in a conversation with a kindred-spirit friend does the talk pivot around the different understandings of a single word? How often (among family members and friends) do we assume that we all share the same understanding of a word? Our understandings of words are built, a layer at a time, by our experiences--and then re-shaped as we encounter new people and places and ideas.
I've given my writing groups a challenge for June, and I'm doing it myself: Make a list of words and put one word on the top of each page of a small notebook. Going from one page to the next, write whatever comes up around that word.
Writing is, first of all, a conversation with ourselves. As we write one thing, then reconsider the words we set down, we keep going deeper and deeper into the cave of our own minds. At some point, we wind up saying something we didn't know we knew, or we surprise ourselves by the words that appear on the page. Maybe we say all the obvious things first (puppies are cute; bad things happen to good people; Paris is beautiful....)
But as we continue the conversation, new insight shows up that wouldn't have come up had we not pushed the pen across the blank page.
We can keep saying the same things over and over again, or we can push through the wall and find that what we always thought or believed about the subject is no longer what we think or believe to be true.
This happens, too, when we move our private conversations out into the larger world. When we attempt to publish it, when we read it to a group or send it as an email, we widen our conversation to include other people who may or may not get it or love it. But we so want to be seen and understood that we go back to the drawing board, as it were, over and over, until the conversation comes alive.
Reading a book in which the writer talks in his or her own real voice, without too much literary artifice, I feel I'm invited into a conversation.
Truth has many facets and nuances. Conversation keeps me from believing that my first draft is the whole truth. It cracks open places that were closed and takes me down paths I never would have discovered without the other person and exactly what she said, or asked.
Often he uses the word, conversation, to describe not just conversations between people, but the conversations we live. Whatever we do can be regarded as questions--and the questions are as important as answers.
His newest book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, reflects on the meaning of words, starting with Alone. I have only read the sample of the book on Amazon so far, but the idea of the book intrigues me as much as the actual book.
How often in a conversation with a kindred-spirit friend does the talk pivot around the different understandings of a single word? How often (among family members and friends) do we assume that we all share the same understanding of a word? Our understandings of words are built, a layer at a time, by our experiences--and then re-shaped as we encounter new people and places and ideas.
I've given my writing groups a challenge for June, and I'm doing it myself: Make a list of words and put one word on the top of each page of a small notebook. Going from one page to the next, write whatever comes up around that word.
Writing is, first of all, a conversation with ourselves. As we write one thing, then reconsider the words we set down, we keep going deeper and deeper into the cave of our own minds. At some point, we wind up saying something we didn't know we knew, or we surprise ourselves by the words that appear on the page. Maybe we say all the obvious things first (puppies are cute; bad things happen to good people; Paris is beautiful....)
But as we continue the conversation, new insight shows up that wouldn't have come up had we not pushed the pen across the blank page.
We can keep saying the same things over and over again, or we can push through the wall and find that what we always thought or believed about the subject is no longer what we think or believe to be true.
This happens, too, when we move our private conversations out into the larger world. When we attempt to publish it, when we read it to a group or send it as an email, we widen our conversation to include other people who may or may not get it or love it. But we so want to be seen and understood that we go back to the drawing board, as it were, over and over, until the conversation comes alive.
Reading a book in which the writer talks in his or her own real voice, without too much literary artifice, I feel I'm invited into a conversation.
Truth has many facets and nuances. Conversation keeps me from believing that my first draft is the whole truth. It cracks open places that were closed and takes me down paths I never would have discovered without the other person and exactly what she said, or asked.
Not Seeing What's Right In Front of Me
All week as I've been spending time with Elena, I've been thinking, "Linda, you don't see half the stuff around you!"
While Mike was still here, I walked up on the patio one day and there was a huge snake who'd made his way over from the demolition across the street. It was the first snake I'd seen since living in town--though I saw two huge rattlesnakes up close when we lived in Helotes.
I thought of the saying, "If it were a snake, it would have bitten you." Mike said, "Oh, it's a good snake. You want to keep him." He showed me that his head was skinny; that meant he wasn't poisonous.
I didn't want to keep him. I figured I'd probably step right on top of him one night in my bare feet and have heart palpitations as loud as the yell Mike heard when I saw the innocent old fellow. As it turned out, he died on his own a few hours later, and I wasn't sad to hear the news.
Elena squats down to look up close at insects. She tells me my hair is getting yellow and that I have a "big booty"--adding, "That's what we call 'em in Spanish." She wants to know the names of trees and flowers in my yard and Jan's and she stops on our walks to look at every blooming thing. She gazes at things my eyes pass over. (I gaze at her!) She points out things to look at that she sees and so often I say, "Oh, I missed it!"
So it was with that thought in mind that I began reading Pathways to Ancient Shelters by my friend, Mary Locke this morning. Here is a poem in the book:
Seeing Games
Dancing myself
into a trance is
not my culture.
Though tempted,
I am terrified of
that much surrender.
I would like to be a seer
but scarcely see what's
right in front of me.
I play vision mnemonics:
look at that snake, notice texture,
attend to light and shadow,
focus on form, line,
color, tone, context,
and movement, especially movement.
Still I miss so much.
"If it had bene a snake,
it would have bitten me."
Once it was a snake, a king snake,
and I did not see until I almost
stepped on it, even though
I was looking for snakes.
See and name: wickiup, circle, tipi rings,
Rio Grande vega covered with cane.
See and name: ancient images drawn
on the shelter in the canyon.
See and name: a stat but
not enough. I want more
even though I fear what might
be revealed and I dread
what might be asked of me.
While Mike was still here, I walked up on the patio one day and there was a huge snake who'd made his way over from the demolition across the street. It was the first snake I'd seen since living in town--though I saw two huge rattlesnakes up close when we lived in Helotes.
I thought of the saying, "If it were a snake, it would have bitten you." Mike said, "Oh, it's a good snake. You want to keep him." He showed me that his head was skinny; that meant he wasn't poisonous.
I didn't want to keep him. I figured I'd probably step right on top of him one night in my bare feet and have heart palpitations as loud as the yell Mike heard when I saw the innocent old fellow. As it turned out, he died on his own a few hours later, and I wasn't sad to hear the news.
Elena squats down to look up close at insects. She tells me my hair is getting yellow and that I have a "big booty"--adding, "That's what we call 'em in Spanish." She wants to know the names of trees and flowers in my yard and Jan's and she stops on our walks to look at every blooming thing. She gazes at things my eyes pass over. (I gaze at her!) She points out things to look at that she sees and so often I say, "Oh, I missed it!"
So it was with that thought in mind that I began reading Pathways to Ancient Shelters by my friend, Mary Locke this morning. Here is a poem in the book:
Seeing Games
Dancing myself
into a trance is
not my culture.
Though tempted,
I am terrified of
that much surrender.
I would like to be a seer
but scarcely see what's
right in front of me.
I play vision mnemonics:
look at that snake, notice texture,
attend to light and shadow,
focus on form, line,
color, tone, context,
and movement, especially movement.
Still I miss so much.
"If it had bene a snake,
it would have bitten me."
Once it was a snake, a king snake,
and I did not see until I almost
stepped on it, even though
I was looking for snakes.
See and name: wickiup, circle, tipi rings,
Rio Grande vega covered with cane.
See and name: ancient images drawn
on the shelter in the canyon.
See and name: a stat but
not enough. I want more
even though I fear what might
be revealed and I dread
what might be asked of me.
Postcard from a Decade Ago
"I think this is the town we stayed in.... And had drinks at the end on that long finger.....Nellie."
Such happy memories come whooshing back when I see this picture! I am remembering how Nellie and I walked through the villages of the Cinque Terre in Italy together--and am wishing we could go back there again!
Pathways to Ancient Shelters by Mary Locke Crofts
In the early Seventies, back when we were young, and mothers, and seekers, I met my friend Mary Locke Crofts. I liked her so much when we met at the Baptist church we were members of back then, but I was shy. When she called to ask me if I knew where she might find a Karistan rug, I didn't have a clue, but I knew I wanted her to be my friend.
We ate avocado and sprout sandwiches on thick homemade bread. We ate crackers and cheese on her porch. Our children, then 3, 5, and 7, played together. We talked about books and "Life's Rich Pageant"--as she calls it. She made the best chocolate pie I'd ever tasted. My years as a vegetarian skidded to an sudden halt when she made me a baloney sandwich on white bread.
At the end of my marriage--an end which dragged on and on and on--I was so depressed one day that I told her, "Don't come." She came anyway. We got into her car and drove (me silent, her talking) to the Guadalupe River. "Jump in!" she said. "No!" I said.
Mary Locke jumped in and I eased in slowly. Soon both our heads were under water, and my depression vanished in the cold river water. You could have heard our laughter way upriver, had you been there and listening. I will never forget that day--the day when she introduced me to Cold Water on the Head Therapy!
When I left my marriage of 28 years, I stayed at her house until she and I found me a house--the very one I'm living in now. I wept at her kitchen table. I slept in her daughter's bed. She and Tom fed me and loaned me furniture from the basement. She made me laugh--in spite of my intentions not to.
Over the years, we--and two other friends--started going on retreats together. We went to Colorado, we went to each other's homelands, we went to beaches and rivers and lakes. We have countless photographs of the four (sometimes three) of us laughing and standing in a row looking sassy.
When I started my master's degree (there being no female equivalent--mistress degree?) Mary Locke decided to join me. In our thirties, we studied literature together and wrote papers and sat in her car or mine after night classes and smoked and talked and figured things out.
When we were young, and mothers, and seekers, we used to talk on the phone almost every day. Or I'd stop by her house on my way home from my then-job, teaching English at Horace Mann Middle School. I thought then--and now--that nobody was/is funnier than she is. Smart funny.
Today I am turning off the phone so that I can spend the day reading a book she wrote--an outgrowth of her Ph.D. dissertation on rock art in the Pecos Valley: Pathways to Ancient Shelter: A Sojourn in Langtry, Texas.
I am loving this book already! Here are two stunning paragraphs from page 5:
Yet in the course of things, of course, the truest thing is change and change courses through both endings and beginnings, though beginnings, to me, do not seem as solid as endings. The joy of a good beginning does not hold a candle to the bone-piercing pain of an unwanted ending.
I was talking recently about the archaic people of the lower Pecos and their art with a man who said, "I can't stand the thought that it will end." I said, "Do you mean the world as we know it, or the environment, or you yourself?" He said, "I am pretty self-turned." So I assume he was thinking about his life in this place, all the beauty and mystery, and the fact that he must leave it, sooner or later. His wife told me he was going in for a heart test next week. Maybe he was thinking of his heart in a way he had not thought of it before--his very real heart in his very real body that will shockingly, incredibly stop and the rhythm it has maintained all these years end.
We are not young anymore, I guess--she past-70, me close enough--and we are now grandmothers. We were practically newlyweds when we found each other, and today is hers and Tom's 49th anniversary!
But we are seekers always. Reading this book on a Thursday in June, I'm feeling like she and I are sitting together by a river somewhere, talking. Her voice on the page is exactly like her voice in real life, and I am now following it into canyons where I've never been, looking at rock art, and wondering about the people who put it there.
We ate avocado and sprout sandwiches on thick homemade bread. We ate crackers and cheese on her porch. Our children, then 3, 5, and 7, played together. We talked about books and "Life's Rich Pageant"--as she calls it. She made the best chocolate pie I'd ever tasted. My years as a vegetarian skidded to an sudden halt when she made me a baloney sandwich on white bread.
At the end of my marriage--an end which dragged on and on and on--I was so depressed one day that I told her, "Don't come." She came anyway. We got into her car and drove (me silent, her talking) to the Guadalupe River. "Jump in!" she said. "No!" I said.
Mary Locke jumped in and I eased in slowly. Soon both our heads were under water, and my depression vanished in the cold river water. You could have heard our laughter way upriver, had you been there and listening. I will never forget that day--the day when she introduced me to Cold Water on the Head Therapy!
When I left my marriage of 28 years, I stayed at her house until she and I found me a house--the very one I'm living in now. I wept at her kitchen table. I slept in her daughter's bed. She and Tom fed me and loaned me furniture from the basement. She made me laugh--in spite of my intentions not to.
Over the years, we--and two other friends--started going on retreats together. We went to Colorado, we went to each other's homelands, we went to beaches and rivers and lakes. We have countless photographs of the four (sometimes three) of us laughing and standing in a row looking sassy.
When I started my master's degree (there being no female equivalent--mistress degree?) Mary Locke decided to join me. In our thirties, we studied literature together and wrote papers and sat in her car or mine after night classes and smoked and talked and figured things out.
When we were young, and mothers, and seekers, we used to talk on the phone almost every day. Or I'd stop by her house on my way home from my then-job, teaching English at Horace Mann Middle School. I thought then--and now--that nobody was/is funnier than she is. Smart funny.
Today I am turning off the phone so that I can spend the day reading a book she wrote--an outgrowth of her Ph.D. dissertation on rock art in the Pecos Valley: Pathways to Ancient Shelter: A Sojourn in Langtry, Texas.
I am loving this book already! Here are two stunning paragraphs from page 5:
Yet in the course of things, of course, the truest thing is change and change courses through both endings and beginnings, though beginnings, to me, do not seem as solid as endings. The joy of a good beginning does not hold a candle to the bone-piercing pain of an unwanted ending.
I was talking recently about the archaic people of the lower Pecos and their art with a man who said, "I can't stand the thought that it will end." I said, "Do you mean the world as we know it, or the environment, or you yourself?" He said, "I am pretty self-turned." So I assume he was thinking about his life in this place, all the beauty and mystery, and the fact that he must leave it, sooner or later. His wife told me he was going in for a heart test next week. Maybe he was thinking of his heart in a way he had not thought of it before--his very real heart in his very real body that will shockingly, incredibly stop and the rhythm it has maintained all these years end.
We are not young anymore, I guess--she past-70, me close enough--and we are now grandmothers. We were practically newlyweds when we found each other, and today is hers and Tom's 49th anniversary!
But we are seekers always. Reading this book on a Thursday in June, I'm feeling like she and I are sitting together by a river somewhere, talking. Her voice on the page is exactly like her voice in real life, and I am now following it into canyons where I've never been, looking at rock art, and wondering about the people who put it there.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Socializing
June is off to a great start: a leisurely lunch and conversation at Adalante, swimming at a friend's house with Elena, and having dinner tonight with my daughter-in-law, Bonnie, while Will is in Indiana.
After a swim at Janet's and a nap, Elena and I went to Petco to look at hamsters, gerbils, mice, fish, and all the rest. She fell in love with a chinchilla and said, "I'm going to ask my daddy to buy me him."
With a horse, a goat, three dogs, three chickens, and a cat, I doubt that Daddy is going to want to shell out $200 for a chinchilla, but when we went to dinner at Sushiana with her mom, Elena put four pennies in the wishing well and asked for a "Chinchilla for me and a mice for Nathan."
 |
| "Swimming is my most favorite thing," Elena said as we were leaving Janet's. "Can we come back here again?" She also got to see Janet's pet duck sitting on her nest of eggs! |
 |
| Wearing plastic purple high heels and shopping for a chinchilla |
  |
After a swim at Janet's and a nap, Elena and I went to Petco to look at hamsters, gerbils, mice, fish, and all the rest. She fell in love with a chinchilla and said, "I'm going to ask my daddy to buy me him."
With a horse, a goat, three dogs, three chickens, and a cat, I doubt that Daddy is going to want to shell out $200 for a chinchilla, but when we went to dinner at Sushiana with her mom, Elena put four pennies in the wishing well and asked for a "Chinchilla for me and a mice for Nathan."
Monday, June 1, 2015
Dinner date with myself
Using Collect, I took pictures of my solo dinner at Cappy's tonight:
The salad has roasted peaches, and the shrimp nachos are amazing.
I'd had a packed day and needed one of those meals that feed your soul, not just your tummy, and Cappy's (for me) does it right every time. They also have the best iced tea in town.
The salad has roasted peaches, and the shrimp nachos are amazing.
I'd had a packed day and needed one of those meals that feed your soul, not just your tummy, and Cappy's (for me) does it right every time. They also have the best iced tea in town.
Check out this cool APP
It's called Collect--and it's a great way to label your pictures and save them all in one place.
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