kiya

Latum

That which cannot be carried
Weights
Waits
Wears down the flesh of will
For a season,
Another season,
A knife-edge infinity of endurance.

(It cannot be "tuli"
The problem is in the progressive.)

Lo, these many years ago I went to a summer camp, and in that summer camp I studied Latin.

I lived in the dorm that contained the dining hall for the camp (which was located between two wings of residential spaces) and thus in the morning would come bouncing down the stairs to the double doors (of course now my brain wants to say πύλαι and that is the WRONG SUMMER CLASS, thank you brain for reiterating the punchline before I'm done with the story) to go in and hunt food.

These were opaque doors with little portholes that were positioned for college students, not younger kids, and thus it was tricky to see the other side of them.

So one morning, I came down the stairs, I approached the πύλαι, and it opened abruptly as one of my classmates came out, nearly clocking me in the face.

They were very apologetic.

I, meanwhile, had a massive language glitch, and after about fifteen seconds of 'words do not work at all', spluttered out, "Ianua mala me oppugnat!"*

This got me deemed weird but kind of talented, I guess? We learned past tense that day, so I think it was "Ianua mala me oppugnavit" that made it onto the class t-shirt...

Language runs in weird channels.

( * )

Anyway this story brought to you by making dinner, cutting onions, and muttering "Cepa mala me oppugnat."

( If I called this an LJ-Cut would it hurt its feelings because I'm categorising it? )


The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. -- Mark Twain

(This rant brought to you by a conversation the other day with oneironaut in which he asked if there was a "labels" stock rant yet, and "Why define? Just be!" posted as an answer to a "What's the difference between..." question on FetLife.)

So, a bunch of people on rasfc were discussing, in the usual newsgroup-disorganised way, the whole "Can God make a rock so large He can't lift it" notion. As it happens, arawen and I touched on that in a conversation about two weeks ago (I think we got there from 'tired of dealing with people who think that one's faith can be refuted by reference to a god that is completely irrelevant to it'), and he made a comment I found amusing about the physics of the question.

So, in fairly normal way, I posted a comment to that effect into the thread, identifying arawen as my boyfriend because, inane as that word is, it adequately contexts who I was talking with, within social norms of identification, for purposes of continuing conversation.

Though apparently, the matter was quite notable to someone, who has proceeded to interrogate me at length about why I referred to my boyfriend, whether this meant there was some sort of weird philosophical disputation involved with teinedreugan, why I felt the need to not anonymise my relationship into functional nonexistence, or some other such stuff. It's gotten increasingly bizarre. (The latest bizarrity is about whether using such a specific identifier is too much information and who's to judge such a thing -- which leaves me with a sort of wicked, trollish impulse to use accurate words that properly describe the relationship, the ones that I don't use because people find them alarming. I have not responded to this, as he has indicated that he does not want to talk with me about it, or for that matter brooksmoses, he just wants to make little snide pot shots in the hope that someone will agree with him somewhere, I guess.)

And this is all because the fellow knows I'm married and not monogamous, and thus there must be some Profound Deep Reason for me to mention my boyfriend, other than, y'know, it being normal to refer to one's partners in conversation as such, at least on my home planet. It was apparently this mention that led the fellow to claim my bafflement at the question of why I had not consulted teinedreugan (about his opinions of snarky dismissals of asinine philosophical masturbation attempting to refute a god none of us has any personal interest in) was disingenuous. (That was a godawful sentence. Oh well. I'll parentheticalise a chunk for clarity.)

Apparently, just treating a partner as a partner is remarkable, bizarre, a marked case worthy of comment, to at least some people -- it seems that most of the rest of the thread thinks he's the person who's making no damn sense, which is reassuring for a change. It was suggested that it would be superior to refer to him as a friend, to avoid raising the possibility of some sort of profound philosophical war about the nature of irrelevant deities, but even if I didn't find that to be an offensive suggestion, I am really not comfortable with the notion that I'm responsible for controlling someone else's deranged imagination. Herd your own invisible pink unicorns, please.


Also, in the context of this the synchronisity of this post amuses the hell out of me.

A bunch of threads of stuff are conspiring to make me ponder again. Funny how threads in various places wind up talking about the same sorts of things. And some of this is why I think I was pointing at something political in rasfc yesterday, not that it seems to have helped. Also, very lengthy and not entirely linear babble.

A quote from the Principia:

DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.

( Male, like female, is an idea about sex. )

(Can't get no worse.)

225 words, and I'm leaving off in the middle of a dramatic motion rather than in the middle of a dramatic pause, which should make it easier to pick up the momentum again.

Other notes:

Feeling slightly less angstpuppyish after talking a little bit with brooksmoses this afternoon. Stupid damn distance.

The sentence "Whatever you do, be sure not to click on the first link Google gives you when searching for 'Say it with penis'." is much more menacing than the actual results of the search.

Prodding www.dictionary.com, feeling frustrated by the equation of "commitment" with "monogamy" again. . . .

1. the trait of sincere and steadfast fixity of purpose; "a man of energy and commitment"
   
2. the act of binding yourself (intellectually or emotionally) to a course of action; "his long commitment to public service"; "they felt no loyalty to a losing team" [syn: allegiance, loyalty, dedication]
   
3. an engagement by contract involving financial obligation; "his business commitments took him to London"
   
4. a message that makes a pledge [syn: dedication]
   
5. the official act of consigning a person to a prison (or mental hospital)

There's a sarcastic comment somewhere in the vicinity of #5, there.

There's something vaguely secure-making about teinedreugan playing video games again, if only because I can watch the carnage over his shoulder. Bizarrely bonding experiences.

This will be a rant. I suspect that people who consider themselves part of "fandom" should probably read it only under advisement that I'm fed up with fandom and shouting mad.
( So I unsubscribed from rasseff )