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9月22日 Gimmicky Crossword PuzzlesThe first time I encountered an unconventional crossword was in an in-flight magazine sometime last year. It frustrated then angered me when I realized that the writer expected me to use numbers in some of my answers. I don't often do crosswords so maybe this is actually a popular trend I'm not aware of, but I hate when crossword puzzle writers employ gimmicks. For example, who said it's okay to require more than one letter per box?? Though, I suppose having seen a similar gimmick before did help me figure out today's/yesterday's Sunday crossword theme and then ultimately solve the thing (likely with some wrong answers) for only the second time in my life. It's hard to see, but the theme was "Year-Round" and the abbreviations "Jan", "Feb", "Mar" and so on and so forth are roughly laid out in a circle. For example, see how I squeezed "Sep" into ONE box in the lower left quadrant to come up with "Joseph"?
(I'm not normally so messy. I did most of this on my lap during the drive home from Orcas Island.) 4月4日 PracticaEstoy muy entusiasmado sobre nuestro viaje! Nos vemos coger un vuelo para Atlanta mañana a las siete. Despues, nos vuelo proximo es de Atlanta para Madrid! Nos vemos llegar en Madrid el Domingo a las nueve. Despues de llegamos, nos vemos ir para nuestro hotel en la districto negocio de Madrid y dormiremos un poquito.
Sera Domingo pero en Madrid, muchos restaurantes estan abierto Domingo. Puesto que sera primero Domingo de mes, algunos lugares como tiendas grandes estan abierto tambien. Probablemente, nos vemos ir al centro, encontramos una de restaurantes en mi lista y comeremos almuerzo. Despues, visitaramos las plazas, los monumentos, los parques, y por supuesto, las tiendas hasta tenemos hambre o estamos cansado. Mi esposo estara occupado con negocio de Lunes (en la tarde) hasta Viernes, pero yo estare occupado con explorar la ciudad. Estara un aventura!
(Como otras lenguas, leer o prononciar español es mas facile de lo escribe! Tambien, como otras lenguas, el utilización de "ser" y "estar" es muy dificile. Yo utilizé muchos diccionarios por escribe este muy corto historia. Supe la mayor parte de los palabras, pero no supe el conjugación o la ortografía de todos! Ahora, comprendo y hablo español mejor de comprendo Portugués. En realidad, creo que hablo español mejor que hablo Frances porque ella este mas fresco en mi cabeza! Que pasaré en el momento de debo hablar con una persona en actualidad? No sé. Ah, si. Recordaré nada!) 8月30日 Bees AbuzzWith the Bumbershoot Spelling Bee fast approaching, the Season 1 champ and third-place finisher of Season 2 of the Seattle Spelling Bee creates buzz by providing a recap of the Season 2 finals for the Seattle Weekly, for which he is Calendar Editor: http://www.seattleweekly.com/2007-08-29/arts/buzzed-about.php. There's even brief mention of me as one who "seemed" to be a frontrunner. Ouch. That still smarts. :)
As a late/pity addition to the exhibition spelling bee at Bumbershoot, I really should be studying. There's time to redeem myself yet. This time, though, my studying will place more emphasis on Middle Eastern, Welsh, and Northern European languages. Words from those languages have been trickiest in the last few bees. "Hoydenish" is the only one of those words that Gavin mentions in his article, but trust me, there have been plenty more like that. 8月7日 Schooled at (and by) the Seattle Spelling BeeSpelling and vocabulary lesson from words I received at the spelling bee finals last night:
Round 1 - The first round is always taken from the 250 most commonly misspelled words in the English language:
medieval. of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or in the style of the Middle Ages.
Round 2 - Again, these were words I know:
tonsillitis. inflammation of a tonsil or the tonsils.
baccalaureate. a bachelor's degree; a religious service held at an educational institution, usually on the Sunday before commencement day
Round 3 - It gets tough in this round, but I correctly spelled a surprising number of OTHER people's words:
rangiferine. pertaining to or like reindeer; belonging to animal genus containing reindeer.
werowance. Native American word meaning tribal chief, leader, commander, or king, notably among the Powhatan confederacy of the Virginia coast and Chesapeake Bay region
kurgan. a circular burial mound constructed over a pit grave and often containing grave vessels, weapons, and the bodies of horses as well as a single human body; originally in use in the Russian Steppes but later spreading into eastern, central, and northern Europe in the third millennium B.C.
I got totally flustered and misspelled this as "werwawance". I should have at least gotten the "o" in the middle. Kurgan is a word that came to English via Turkish and Russian, two languages whose etymology I don't know. I guessed "kirgin" even though that ending felt all wrong.
Round 4 - I only get one word because it's my last strike:
logodaedaly. arbitrary or capricious coinage of words.
I quipped, "Sort of like what you're doing right now?" If I'd thought about it at all, I might have thought of "daedalus". But I didn't, and used the totally unlikly "logodetely" instead.
I wish I would have placed, but I think I at least tied for fourth. I can learn to live with that. :)
In better news, Peter won one of the mini-games between rounds and got a bunch of cool prizes in the process, including two tickets to Bumbershoot! 5月10日 Spelling My Way, If Not to Freedom Then At Least to Greatness*This past Monday, I realized that I've been taking the wrong approach to the Seattle Spelling Bee. Spelling is not like bowling. You cannot assume that the drunker you get, the better you'll automatically spell. The thing about bowling is that it's easy to screw up by overthinking; you really cannot overthink spelling.
Alcohol loosens up my form when I bowl so that I frequently go from an 80 or 90-something score in the first round to a 150 to 170-something score in the second round. I thought alcohol could help me achieve a similar "lucidity" with spelling. This, of course, was not something I ever considered in grades 3 through 12 when I participated in school spelling bees. It's something that came to me only after reading "Bee Season" and then learning about the Seattle Spelling Bee, an adult version with friendlier rules and booze to take the edge off.
So much for wishful thinking. Unlike little Eliza Naumann, I never achieved a state of Kabbalist transcendence. No, what I found was that booze gave me something more like brain fog. I tried nights with just bourbon and others with just beer. Bourbon got me comfortable on stage, but it seemed I could only ever draw a blank on words I'd never seen or heard before. I couldn't think clearly enough to rationalize my way to a correct spelling. Or so it seemed. More on that later. With beer, my head was a little clearer, but I felt slow and somehow more self-conscious. I don't know if I was worried about slurring, putting a beer belly on display, or potentially burping really loudly into the mic. Probably all three.
At the last bee, Peter started writing the words down. Sometimes he tried writing the words before the speller on stage had attempted them. Other times, he just waited until Josh gave the correct spelling. Occasionally, I'd lean over Peter's shoulder to make corrections to his list or I'd write down his words when he was up on stage, but I actually spent most of the time lost in thought. I sat there and visualized the words in my head, trying out different combinations of letters, thinking that this would prepare me to apply the same thoughtfulness onstage. It didn't.
Whenever it was my turn, I'd get up there and the booze and nerves would take over. Anything I'd studied or tried from my seat in the audience went right out the window. I'd just vocalize one letter and then make a stab at the next, giving no thought whatsoever to other possibilities. I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit it, but I feel I must: even when I was buying time with questions about the language of origin or the definition, I was usually a little too sauced to listen or actually process the information Josh and Ben gave me. When they finished talking, I'd nod, stare off into space or at my shoes, and then spell from my gut. My gut is apparently no good at spelling. It certainly doesn't have any divine forces feeding it words from the ether. No, it's only got me and all I'm feeding it is plain old booze and food.
This past Monday, when Peter grabbed some scrap paper and a pen, I decided I would write down the words too. It was like a mini-competition between me and Peter. Not much of a competition, though, seeing as to how he'd always check out my spelling of a word before writing anything down on his list... Just another one of his tricks. (That same night, Benjamin pointed out that Peter speeds up at the end of his words. It's one of his tricks, but not one that I'd noticed before. Then again, I guess I've already described in detail the myriad ways in which don't notice much when I'm otherwise busy using whiskey to temper my nerves and steel myself against ultimate spelling bee failure.) But back to writing the words down. Lo and behold. Actually SEEing words on paper got my brain in spelling bee mode so that I could actually VISUALIZE the ones I heard later!!! An overdue revelation, I know. But I wonder if this is why my studying for past bees hasn't worked out that well (besides the fact that I never get very far into the word lists). I've been reading the word lists on my laptop and I sure as hell haven't been cementing any of them into my brain by writing them down. And that got me to thinking. All spelling bees I'd ever participated in before had preliminary rounds on paper! It must just be that I need to practice-spell on paper first.
Anyway, the point of all this was to tell everyone that I won on Monday!!!
I was so caught up in the moment and completely disbelieving that I think I ran onstage and hugged both Josh and Benjamin. And then I think I told one of them that I'd never won anything before in my life. So not true, but it felt like it! Luckily, (I think it was) Benjamin asked, "Really??" because I was able to retract that statement. I've won lots of things, but nothing recently. And the last time I won a spelling bee was...yeesh, in the 12th grade. I felt inordinately AMAZING on Monday. You'd think I'd just won the lottery or something.
Victory felt great, but I did feel guilty at having won with easy words. If you look at previous winners, I think you'd agree that they all walked away having spelled much harder words. But then I remembered that's kind of how spelling bees work. Everyone else gets the words you know how to spell and you get all the made-up words. Monday night just happened to be the night when I got the words I know how to spell. Mostly. I did miss one: thelygenic. Luckily, I wasn't pressed into an additional round because it seemed like words suddenly got a lot harder after I last went up onstage... Ben and Josh saved my ass by calling it early!
* By the way, if you didn't catch my oblique reference in the title of this post, it was a reference to the movie "The Girl Who Spelled Freedom". Only the best. Movie. Ever. 11月7日 How I Blew My "Good Chances"So, I have the gay crush, but my husband gets the call-out. Makes sense, I know, what with him being the handsome and knowledgeable male spelling bee contestant, but it's still not fair.
I roped Peter and Beth into going to the Seattle Spelling Bee again last night. As I told Benjamin before the bee started, I'm a glutton for punishment. I was contestant #6 again. When I noticed that, I wondered if it was a good sign or a bad one. I didn't win or even place last time either... (It wasn't the same without Veronica, but we still had fun. There were fewer medical terms this time, but lots of words with French origins. I've gotta say that my love for the French has suffered a bit after hearing all those words with "French" spellings last night.)
Beth didn't compete this time, but she did participate by being a bit of a heckler towards the end of the night. Peter participated this time and did spectacularly! I got my ass sent home early. Naturally, I'll blame my laziness in not studying, the unfairness in the universe, but I also have a new excuse. In kid spelling bees, there are always qualifying rounds on paper. These are good for separating the wheat from the chaff, but they're also good for warming up the brain. It wouldn't make for a very entertaining or exciting competition, but if the Seattle Spelling Bee were on paper, I could demonstrate my real spelling prowess. First off, I probably would have noticed how ridiculous "plateaud" looks as compared to "plateaued". I'll never forgive myself for that one. I even kind of thought about it while Josh was giving me the definition, but what do you know... I get nervous on stage and all rational thought goes out the window.
As usual, there were many words given to other spellers that I would have loved to receive. Panettone, for example. (Thanks to the years I worked at Cost Plus, where we'd carry those loaves of bread for months on end in the fall and winter.) I also would have loved "talc," "amethyst" and "welterweight" (all words spelled by one of the eventual first place winners for the night). Someone's got the patron saint of spelling on his side, but if that were me, the victory wouldn't have been as sweet. There were a couple I would have confidently spelled completely wrong. Cattleya, for example. (I initially included it in the list of words I wish I had gotten, but then I thought, "Hey, better look this one up just to be sure and found it's NOT spelled how I thought. I'm dead sure it can be spelled "cattleiya". My dad's an orchid enthusiast and inspired me to look up the spelling on that one. I internalized the wrong spelling, I guess. At least I know "dendrobium".) Also, pyrite. Isn't there something spelled "pyrrhite"? Apparently not, but that spelling just feels right. There were, of course, countless other words I would have mispelled as badly as I did the ones I did receive.
My favorite words for the night were:
All words I'd like to start inserting into casual conversation. Peter got lots of words that were perfect for him, including "shandygaff." He's actually ordered shandies before. Gallimaufry, though, made me jump out of my seat when I heard the definition. I leaned over to Beth and said, "He can add that to his categories!" Peter is my spelling hero. He made it into the fourth round and tied for fifth place. He so impressed the judges with his knowledge of word origins and meanings that he even got a special mention in their results email! After last night, I feel a pretty serious obligation to study. Last month's departing words ("Come back. You have good chances!") were apparently said in all seriousness. There was much love for me on the stage last night for reasons I don't quite understand. Josh (sigh) actually thought I had a chance to take first place! Had I been a better person in a previous life, then maybe... There were a number of words that they used last night that I had studied the month before. Among them: aureity, bibelot, and escargotiere. Naturally, I didn't get those words nor would I have no matter how the stars aligned. I wouldn't have been asked to spell those words, not in a million years. All because I studied them. The universe just doesn't work that way. Nonetheless, I will study now. I will study because, if I study, Peter may study too and we can take him into the finals! We only have one more chance to try and make it. At least one member of this family's gonna get in! 10月3日 I'm a loser. L-O-S-E-R.Apparently, I'm not a good speller, just a lucky one.
Losey Moment #1 - Cyesis. Something about being pregnant. When breeders breed, there's cyesis. (I appreciated that use-it-in-a-sentence sentence.)
Losey Moment #2 - Treen. Made of wood. (I'm pretty sure this is a made-up word.)
Losey Moment #3 - Lambrequin. Stupid-ass French hat. (Ugh.)
I was participant #6 in tonight's edition of the Seattle Spelling Bee. And again, it was spelling bee defeat. Can you spell "defeat"? I went in there feeling oddly hopeful, even confident. There were plenty of words that other people misspelled that I knew, but I'm not ashamed to admit there were more of the ones that I would have gotten completely wrong. Blepharism and carrefour, I knew. Collocate? In the words of Gob Bluth, "C'mon!!" Gneiss? Yes, I added an extra "e" at the end, but at least was closer than most. Solstitial, though? Nonsense. It's sacrilegious that that would be spelled with anything other than a "c".
When I got dinged for the last time and had to turn in my paper plate, I must have looked as heartbroken as I felt because Benjamin and Josh, the adorable co-hosts of the Seattle Spelling Bee, said, "You should come back. You have good chances!" Good chances?? True or not, I'd like to come back. And next time (I always say this), I will study for real! Naturally, this time, I got asked none of the A or B words I'd managed to study. Where was abecedarian? I've seen that word twice in the last week. It was, like, FATED that it would be in the spelling bee. And that it would be my word. And that I'd wow the audience by spelling it without asking for the definition, the language of origin, without asking for anything.
Ugh. U-G-H. No, really, I mean it. Spelling, unlike bowling, is not one of those things you can improve upon with liquor. 8月24日 Miss Cleo at your service.I forgot to mention one other thing I loved about houseboat: a lot of rounds of Taboo. It's probably only like my favorite board game! Sometimes, I am really bad at it because I can't think clearly enough to give coherent clues or branch out with my guesses. Other times, I am really, really good at it. I mean scary good. Take, for example, when Mark gave me the following clue: "It's an animal." A half-second later, I guessed: "Panda bear." Scary, non?
Tina had a similar psychic moment when I gave her the clue, "She's an actress who was in...". As I reconsidered the name of the movie I was about to give her, she provided the right answer without further ado: "Meg Ryan." The Vu sisters will one day rule the world with their ability to read minds!
Some other hilarious Taboo moments on houseboat... When I gave Tina the following clue: "On houseboat, we've all been using this instead of linens when we go to bed." Tina: "Liquor!" The answer: sleeping bag. Or, when Peter tried to get Emily to guess what you might see on a sign at the taping of a TV show with a live audience and one of her answers was: "Make laughter!" Make laughter we did, but the answer was: applause. The best answers come when the person guessing doesn't think about what Hasbro would or would not include on a playing card. Tina seemed to have a lightbulb moment when she gave me the clue: "This is what Punky might have become if Henry hadn't adopted her." My answers were, successively: "An orphan?" "Homeless?" "A prostitute?" "Oh, two words? Uh...dirty slut!" The answer: Latchkey kid. Yes, I suppose that's a bit more family-friendly, but not nearly as interesting or accurate. Wasn't Punky pretty much a latchkey kid anyway? 6月22日 Muffin topI learned about muffin top (fat around the waist that hangs over the top of your pants) from Jenny, by way of Tina. But did you know about these?
I wanted very much to get a hold of the full list in the journal Dermatologic Surgery, but not badly enough to pay for the article titled "Lexicon of Areas Amenable to Liposuction." Yes, folks, these are all parts of the body that people are getting liposuctioned. People are also getting liposuction on their ankles, but there's no cute colloquialism for that just yet. To read more about these sick puppies: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/15/fashion/thursdaystyles/15skin.html?pagewanted=print. Oddly enough, the article mentions a woman who liposuctioned her muffin top, but they did not refer to it as such... 3月24日 I coulda been a contender!On the radio this morning, on "Weekday," they did their annual "Spelling Bee of the Air" to mark the occasion of the upcoming Scripps National Spelling Bee. Peter thought the girl they had at the studio with them was someone from the Kung Fu Kids program at our martial arts studio. It was not, but he sent me the link to the girl's profile on the spelling bee website to confirm. This got me thinking about my own spelling bee history.
My first spelling bee took place in the third grade and my last in the tenth. In my very first spelling bee, the teacher was obviously impressed because even after I had been declared the winner, she kept going with the words. The first one I didn't know how to spell was "neutral." I memorized the correct spelling when she gave it to me, but I don't think I learned the meaning of the word until much later. I won the school spelling bee that year and they put my name on the scrolling list of winners in the school district's television broadcast. They did it again the next year, as well.
The first time I lost a spelling bee was at my new elementary school. It was a fifth grade classroom competition. I'd like to say it didn't matter, but it was a qualifying round that cost me the chance to represent my school that year. I misspelled "thyme." Thyme's not a big ingredient in Vietnamese cooking and I'd never even known the word existed until then. Arthur Greenbaum (or was his name Arthur Butler, back then?) got a crack at it and spelled it right. I remember him being smug about it, but maybe what I remember is me being a sore loser.
I competed at the district level all through junior high, but only remember going to county twice. I swear that I would have gone on to state if my nerves hadn't overcome my ability to speak properly at that last county bee. The word that knocked me out of the running was a word that was too easy. I say "too easy" because if it had been any harder, I would have been more deliberate and wouldn't have screwed up like I did. When the proctor said "Your word is 'listener'," (yes, you read that right) I jumped right to the task and began spelling quickly, but clumsily. "Listener. L-I-S-T-E-R....." I froze. I pulled away from the microphone. I probably looked helplessly at the proctors. Then, when I knew for sure that the letter had already left my lips, I crumpled. This was not a bad dream. In a spelling bee, there's no taking anything back once you've spoken it aloud. It was too late. I had no choice but to continue. I was silent for a few moments. Then, already in tears, I finished it off, "E-R. Listener."
I wanted to die right there on stage. I could see the proctors and parents and everyone looking almost as pained for me as I did. The words in the written semi-finals at the beginning of the evening had all been ten times harder than "listener" and I had proven myself worthy in that round in order to get on stage.
When I left the stage and took my seat in the audience, strangers felt compelled to comfort me. Adults leaned over to pat my back and soothingly say, "We all know that was an accident...That's just terrible...I'm so sorry." I sobbed in as dignified a way as I could.
Even now, I would say it was probably the biggest disappointment of my entire life. To prove I wasn't a complete idiot, I picked up one of the pencils and pieces of paper that the organizers of the event had laid out for audience members to play along and proceeded with the rest of the spelling bee. I was crying and shaking, but that didn't stop me from writing out and subtly mouthing all the rest of the words that night. I was ready to make a big scene of crossing out my misspelled words, but after the "listener" debacle, I didn't mispell a single one. That's some cold comfort...
It's such a little thing and any normal person would have gotten over this by now, but I still feel sick to my stomach when I think about it.
I saw Spellbound a few years ago and couldn't stop shaking my head at how diligent and ultimately strong those kids were. I wasn't very into studying those long, boring wordlists, but I still took the pain of losing as hard as if I had studied day in and day out. I don't remember any of the kids from the documentary getting too upset.
Anyway, the regional spelling bee for King and Snohomish counties is happening this Sunday at Town Hall! The kid who wins here will go on to represent our area in the national spelling bee! It's sure to be a nail-biter. Who wants to go and play along?? 1月23日 The a, à, á, ã...-b-c’s of VietnamesePeter, my sincerest apologies to you for ever having given you a hard time about your robotic Vietnamese. After stepping back from the language and taking an outsider's point of view, I can see that it's damn near impossible to learn if you weren't raised with it.
To anyone who doesn't believe me, I dare you to make sense of all the basic linguistic instructions you have to master before you ever even learn a single phrase. I've taken linguistics and I speak Vietnamese and I still feel it's all a little too too much.
Exceedingly difficult, the vowel tones are arguably the thing foreigners complain about most when learning the language, but they are also rich in material for Vietnamese wordplay. You only have to modulate your tone ever so slightly to say something completely new (and potentially embarrassing). As an example, the many meanings derived from the letters M+A, as described on Wikipedia:
Piece of cake, right? So, let's move on to the lesson on consonants:
Simplified* pronunciation guide for Vietnamese consonants at the beginning of syllables Sounds are pronounced as in English except* for the following:
Note that the guide above does not apply to Vietnamese consonants at the end of syllables, especially for the more southern varieties of Vietnamese.* * emphases are all mine I think it's pretty much decided: my kids are going to learn Vietnamese before they learn any other language. If doing that doesn't make them more receptive to learning any other languages, nothing will. 1月17日 Faking itI really, really want to be multi-multi-lingual, but I'm too lazy to actually learn languages and am therefore forced to fake it. Sometimes I do it too well. Languages in which I'm capable of getting myself into dangerous territory with native speakers: Vietnamese, French, Portuguese, and, now, Spanish. After this trip to Cabo, in which I was the designated Spanish speaker (ha!), I know for a fact that faking language ability is all about confidence and a passable accent. I suspect that it also helps to have an appearance that's sufficiently ambiguous. What am I? Who are you to say? Besides, Chinese are everywhere!
As with many things, my obsession with languages stems from wanting to impress my parents. Borne perhaps out of his own language insecurities, my dad has always had very high regard for this Vietnamese chick who is supposedly fluent in seven languages. (She's also a successful lawyer, but that's another story.) So, from the time I was very young, I would prepare for my future lingual studies by reading aloud from shampoo bottles using a French accent, mimicking people on TV and in real life that had British accents, and singing all the songs I knew in foreign languages. The French songs came off my Disney Sing-A-Long tapes, but I also knew/know/relished "La Bamba" from grade school choir, courtesy of the Santa Ana school system.
I was always learning bits and pieces of Mexican Spanish from the school playground and from the kids (and their parents) in the neighborhood. Simple vocabulary and numbers, mostly. However, there are phrases I've heard so many times that I've memorized them, though I'm still not sure about their meaning. These are mostly cuss words, though there is one random phrase that comes to mind: Clara cu si. (Spelling?) It's said vibrantly and seems to mean something like, "But, of course!" I was hoping to employ pieces of childhood Spanish on this past trip in order to give myself some added credibility. Sadly, no situations arose in which I had to tell someone to shut up or holler at kids to come back inside the house.
Aside from something to cure my infamous inability to hear languages (meaning, I can't comprehend them when spoken by others), what would have helped me would have been more were skills in sentence construction. A decent vocabulary is no good if you can't put the pieces together. If you are teaching yourself a language, spend lots of time on verb conjugation and memorization only if you have lots of time. If you don't have lots of time, use a good phrasebook and build off it. Only with Portuguese did I actually begin at the beginning and try to learn verb conjugation, the alphabet, and all that. I was pretty much useless in Portugal and only slightly more useful in Brazil.
Now, my m.o. is to spend evenings in the hotel reading the phrasebook to get beyond the more common questions and phrases: "Where is the __?" and "I would like ___" and "Thank you very much." On this past trip, by dutifully studying the phrasebook, I was able to put together little gems like, "Do you know if Elvira's is closed only today or for the week?" and "Can you order food for me and deliver it at 7 tonight?"
Without the phrasebook, I'm toast. I get Portuguese, Spanish, and French all mixed up. If anyone ever wanted to create a new language that combined all three, it would be me. I found myself quite capable of putting together long and complicated strings when I was pulling nouns, adjectives, and verbs from all three.
As part of our grand scheme to buy a vacation/retirement home in a tropical setting, Peter and I plan to sign up for a Spanish class. I'm also ready to dust off my French tapes and textbooks from college so I can take a trip to Paris later this year. There's also been a pending business trip to Japan (date TBD) that I want to be prepared for as well. Aha! Now I remember why I bought that Kana A Day pad from the art museum gift shop... 1月17日 At the risk of sounding like a word nerd...I finally chose my MSN Spaces URL. It turned out to be a much more difficult decision than it ever needed to be and took me forever to decide and, yet, it doesn't meet any of the seemingly simple criteria I initially set out for choosing one:
Due to the recent rash of new MSN Spaces by those in my greater friend circle, I thought I was jumping on the bandwagon at one of its first stops. I thought, for sure, that it was early enough in the Beta for me to secure "chloe". From the horse's mouth, I find that the "Beta" designation is a "bit misleading" because MSN Spaces is available worldwide to "tens of millions of users already." [Huh.]
I thought it would be fun (if not necessarily funny) to have my personal Space be http://spaces.msn.com/members/members or http://spaces.msn.com/members/space or http://spaces.msn.com/members/com. I had no luck even with variations on those. I think it's pretty safe to say that MSN Spaces was launched first in Japan. It's also clear that my job as a tester has left me as bereft of creativity as the testers who appropriated all my other would-be URLs.
In my highly random search, I had to rule out words like "tale," "read," and "so." I feel like I've spent a sizeable chunk of my life spelling out my name. As a result, I get cranky and exasperated whenever I have to spell. (Spelling bees not included. I will gladly participate in any spelling bee to which I am invited and even those to which I am not invited.) In the end, it doesn't seem like such a bad thing that anyone who cannot spell will not be visiting my Space.
So. Why "omphaloskepsis"? Well, every so once in awhile, I search for "omphaloskepsis" on the Internet. The reason being that, during my freshman year of college, I found what I guess was an early example of a "blog". It was called "Omphaloskepsis" and I was fascinated by it. I spent hours reading one navel-gazer's thoughts. Titillating as it was, I had only recently been introduced to the Internet and, what with all the other pages to look at, I think I only ever stumbled across "Omphaloskepsis" once, maybe twice. I've never been able to find that site again. If this lunch hour entry is any indication, I will hardly be producing anything nearly as thought-provoking or even worth reading, but will usurp the name nonetheless. All because someone else didn't take it first... |
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