One Word

Sometimes I like to reflect on a single word and explore all its nuances and connotations in relation to my current experiences. These posts are along that vein.

Home

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Freshman year of college made me overly conscious of the word “home.” I consciously said I was going back to my dorm, or my room. When I did say “home” by mistake, my friends looked at me, puzzled.

“I don’t mean home home,” I said.  We used repetition for emphasis, as if we were gossiping about who like liked who else in eighth grade.  As the year went on, I slipped into using the word more and more often.  Now, in my third year of undergrad, my friends and I know when someone means “home” vs. “home home.”  There’s a subtle difference that truly collegiate ears can hear.  But it still strikes me sometimes that I now have three “homes.”  I have to wonder if it cheapens the word.

I had been through a phase like that before, when my dad finally bought a house after the divorce. I was determined not to bestow the term “home” on his bachelor pad, angry as I still was. But after a while I admitted that Dad’s house was just as much a home base for me as Mom’s, particularly as college loomed and I was clinging with white knuckles to everything familiar in the face of having to go away to a huge campus (by my sheltered standards, anyway) where the only people I knew were the ones I never really liked in high school.  “Home” was suddenly akin to “haven,” and it stayed defined that way for the first half of my college career, particularly since I found myself having to move once a semester for a year and a half for various unforeseeable reasons.

But now, as a new transition rears its head like the Cave of Wonders bursting out of the desert, I find myself thinking more about “home” as something I am about to create than something preexisting.  In a way, this is sad.  I love being able to return to the places where I grew up and revisit the life I used to have.  However, since Bird took over my room (I had the bigger one all through high school) as soon as I went to college, I haven’t actually gone home to the room of my adolescence for almost three years now.  Instead, I’m arranging the apartment the Commodore and I share, making it suit us both, and spending pretty much all my free time either here or over at one of my friends’ apartments.  I’m enjoying our little nest (and I love not having to move again until at least graduation!).  But even this is temporary by nature; I’m not even living here full-time, since I go home for breaks.  (Not that I’ll be home for the summer – I have an internship three hours away.)

The Southern Belle and I were discussing our plans for the summer, and she brought up a good point.  She told me that although she looks forward to returning to the South, it’s not because she wants to see the people and places she left behind, but rather because she is excited to see how she as an adult fits into that space.  It’s about her, not her past.

I agree.  “Home” is shifting from “origin point” and “haven” to “where we fit/belong in the world” – and that might not be the places we grew up anymore.  I’ll always love going home to my parents, but soon my “home home” will change.

Part of me wants the glamour of city life, living in some brick apartment building with plenty of character and becoming a regular at the coffee shop down the street, walking to work or taking the subway in flats and changing into my heels in the elevator.  Part of me wants the quiet of suburban or even secluded country life, where I can putter in the yard and make a house a comfortable place for me and my family to spend our days, not having to venture too far into society if I don’t feel like it, having a view of something other than concrete.

Surprisingly, only a very tiny part of me wants to run back to the “wispy peach” room at my mom’s house and the “papyrus green” one at my dad’s.  It sounds more exciting to me right now to have the agency to create my own home – furnished, of course, with the beloved, familiar, castoff furniture we’ve been saving in the basement for years.  And for once, I’m okay with the uncertainty.

Housing

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any shelter, lodging, or dwelling place
the act of one who houses or puts under shelter

I’ve been frantically thinking, texting, and talking a lot about housing lately.  An internship for this upcoming summer would only work out if I could find a place to live for the duration of the internship – within a week.  I work best in specifics, so I don’t think it helped that the vague term “housing” could mean “any” place I could find to live.

“I would live under a bridge to make this internship work,” I joked to several people – and I half meant it, too.  This was my dream internship: an editorial position with a small company close to home that had connections to the larger publishing industry.  The interview process was nerve-wracking precisely because I wanted it so much, and I was so happy when I got the job, that to have it rescinded because I couldn’t find a distant cousin willing to let me live in their attic for the summer didn’t bear thinking of.  It frustrated me that I had too many options, rather than not enough, because it meant I had to investigate more of them, and choose from several, and investigation and choosing took time.

Eventually it worked out that I’ll be staying with the Engineer’s grandparents, for which I am exceedingly grateful.  I grew up in a home with a mother who is, as the Southern Belle put it, “an honorary Southern lady,” so I know the depth of true hospitality.  Housing someone is not just allowing them to sleep under your roof.  It is protecting, sheltering, providing a haven.  It’s appropriate that the word can be both a verb and a noun.  I will be housed.  I have found housing.  And someday, I hope, I can house and shelter and protect guests of my own.

Lent

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1. simple past tense and past participle of lend
2. (in the Christian religion) an annual season of fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter, beginning on Ash Wednesday and lasting 40 weekdays to Easter, observed by Roman Catholic, Anglican, and certain other churches.

I grew up hearing a lot about what I should give up for Lent.  (By the way, guys, I’m Catholic.)  There were the traditional years where chocolate hypothetically never touched my lips.  When I got older and my mom introduced the idea of giving something to God instead of giving something up, I said a few rosaries before bed.  Lent was the technically-40-days-but-feels-like-forever season before Easter, when my parochial classmates and I had to sit through weekly Stations of the Cross and go to extra all-school Masses and I looked longingly at the Easter dress hanging in my closet that I couldn’t wear yet.

Meanwhile, I heard another version of the word, uncapitalized this time, in the old-fashioned books we read.  The people in them talked about having “lent” someone a book, or a cup of sugar, or a carriage.  Like “dreamt,” it seemed so much more romantic than saying you loaned something to someone.  So, naturally, I tried to use such vocabulary whenever I could.  (I probably sounded pretentious to my third grade classmates, but then again I could spell “pretentious” and they didn’t know what it meant, so they just called me a nerd instead.)

And yet I never connected these two meanings in my head, the capital L and the lower case, until recently.  The term for the liturgical season originally came from an Old English term lencten, which literally meant the lengthening of the daylight hours.  This is the part of the year when the days oh-so-gradually begin to stretch themselves out like cats elongating their spines in the sun, digging their claws in for summer.  (And yes, when I was younger, the Lenten season seemed to lengthen itself just to torment me.)  But, ideally, isn’t this time of preparation for Easter meant to help us stretch our spiritual muscles a little bit?  The idea of lengthening, to me, now calls to mind the idea of reaching out toward God, lending Him something precious to me and, having lent Him the time I used to spend on that Very Important Thing, perhaps realizing that the hours were always meant to be devoted to Him anyway.  It’s not really lending God anything, because I already believe that everything is His.  So maybe Lent is about stripping away the arrogance that leads me to believe that I am doing Him a favor.  Maybe it’s about realizing it’s He Who is doing the lending here.

Tired

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1. exhausted, as by exertion; fatigued or sleepy
2. weary or bored

When did this become our default setting?

It seems that nearly every time someone follows the polite convention of asking another someone how they are, the answer ends up being, “Tired.” Or some less blunt variation: “Oh, I’m okay. Tired.” “Pretty good. Tired.” “Great! But also tired.”
Is there something in the water here that makes it impossible to get enough sleep? Is coffee not actually all we need to function? (Just kidding. #CoffeeIsLife) Are we all just lagging in our efforts to maintain the breakneck speed of college life?
Heyyy…wait a minute…

Someone told me last week to take a moment and see how my body felt when I tried to push away a negative thought – not my mental discomfort, just my body. Weirdly enough, it takes physical energy to put up a roadblock for distracting/insecure/negative/angry/inappropriate thoughts, so I can only imagine how physically draining my homework load must be. Not only carrying around the textbooks (I pulled something in my elbow this week picking up my backpack!), but carrying around the mental load of an ever-shifting To Do List takes its toll.
Add this to the fact that we are going going going 12+ hours a day, then have to go home and do homework, and yeah, we’re going to be tired.

Bird read somewhere that the average high-school student these days has the anxiety level of an average mental patient from the 1950s.  She told me this in the same phone conversation where she informed me that she had done homework for more hours than she slept the previous night.  I remember being tired all the time in high school too, and how I thought being able to focus on the things I’m passionate about in college would make me at least a little less exhausted.  But now we’re expected to be adults while still adhering to school standards, making huge life decisions (Shall I become one of Those People with an Advanced Degree?  What if I Graduate Early?  What if there’s a Major Upheaval in my life in the next few years?) in between classes and completing job and internship applications in the little time we have left over from homework.

I love school.  School is what I am good at.  I value my education highly.  But I also think it says something, not necessarily a good something, that the default State of Being for my friends and I is “tired.”  I can’t help looking forward to a time in my life when someone can ask how I am and I can say, “Good, thanks” and leave it at that.

List

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a series of names or other items written or printed together in a meaningful grouping or sequence so as to constitute a record

I am a very happy writing nerd today.

As part of the Visiting Writers Series at my university, two editors from well-known literary reviews are putting on a week-long, one credit workshop on editing and publishing.  It meets for three hours in the evenings, so I was initially a tad concerned about this loss of such a large chunk of homework time (not to mention dinnertime!).  Still, I thought, when else in my life will I get this kind of opportunity, to spend so much time in a relatively small and intimate group receiving direct feedback and advice from a successful editor and writer?

So I went last night, our first meeting, and we worked with lists.

As evidenced in previous posts, I organize my life several times a day, usually centering around lists.  I list the meals I need to take time to eat, the homework I need to do, the extracurricular projects I need to complete, the friends and family I need to call.  Listing things, for me, is already powerful in that it corrals my thoughts and lends them sequence, categorization, order.

In the workshop, we extended this philosophy to creative nonfiction, producing lists under thematic headings.  We began our sentences with “I remember,” listing memories that may not have come in order but nevertheless hung together coherently by virtue of their status as List.  We scribbled down things we hate, love, or are embarrassed by.  We listed aloud the nuances that distinguish memoir from essay.

Many of us lauded the catharsis of writing this way, of simply letting the thoughts stream out and trusting that the format of List would make them somehow One Thing.  For me, particularly when writing I Remembers, the experience was both aching and freeing.

In one of my other classes, Shakespeare Before 1600, “list” tends to have another definition.  The Bard uses it to mean “wish” or “desire,” as his characters tell one another, “Do what you list.”  Sometimes the lists are even a physical place, referring to the barriers of the tiltyard where noblemen jousted and wore their ladies’ favors on their lances.

These associations bring new depth to our modern understanding of “list.”  To create order out of a jumble of tasks and thoughts, to explain and group discrete ideas, one must take into account one’s own desires, as well as the desires of others.  Occasionally, one must also be aggressive and run at the list head-on, barreling through it and emerging victorious with a series of unhorsed opponents lying prone on the ground.  (I speak metaphorically of course, although if anyone knows how to joust, please let me know in the comments because that is awesome.)  We “list” things to discover “what we list” and what is worth “going to the lists” for.

Choose and/or Combine:

Sequence.

Wish.

Combat.

Definitive

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  1. most reliable or complete, as of a text, author, criticism, study, or the like
  2. having its fixed and final form

I’ve been noticing this word a lot lately, particularly on Pinterest and Buzzfeed.  It seems like nearly every post involves a “definitive” ranking or roll call of some pop culture reference.  But by definition, every list cannot be definitive.  There are too many other people waiting in the wings of the Internet to rank the Pretty Little Liars’ season 1-infinity outfits, or the best animated Disney films (ALL OF THEM) or the things all 90s kids remember.

Some of these lists I might be willing to believe, considering the source.  Oh My Disney, for instance, might have a reasonable claim on being the “most reliable” place to find a list of the Disney princes’ hairstyles.  But they fail the second definition in that these lists, however authoritative the source, will never be in their “fixed and final form.”  Just try Googling “definitive ranking of” and finish the phrase with your own favorite fandom/fruit/fish family.  See how many results turn up.

definitive

124,000 search results in 0.36 seconds.  Nice work, Google.  But do these really deserve the title “definitive?”  Most can probably be dismissed out of hand because of their purely opinionated basis, with little or no authority to back them up, and the rest – well, as long as someone else comes out with their own “Definitive Ranking” next week, none of these will ever be the “final and fixed form” of the list.

Which begs the question, why are we so fond of this word on the Internet?  If the fluidity of our medium means that in the next hour someone else with more authority can come along and write their own post about the subject, why do we grasp at the title of “definitive” for ourselves?  The very place we publish these things undermines our credibility.

I tried to think of places I use or hear this word in my everyday life.  I realized that I, too, want to create something “most reliable and complete,” hopefully in a “final and fixed form.”  For several years, I’ve told anyone who would listen that I want to write the definitive work on the Arabian Nights.  That obsession is worthy of its own post(s), but now that I think about it…can I really claim for myself that my eventual tome will be the definitive work?  Or is it something that others will have to decide about my work later?

How does one dare claim this word?  It’s just daunting.  And yet, I applaud those who put forth their opinions and personal research with this brave word attached – as repetitive as it is to see so many supposedly definitive lists on Pinterest.

Immersion

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My creative nonfiction professor has instructed us to immerse ourselves in a subculture somewhere in our little university town and write 4-5 pages about it by next Tuesday. We are reading In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s compelling nonfiction novel (a genre assignment many are still uncomfortable with) about a violent quadruple murder in Kansas, told in riveting – but to some people, questionable – detail. Capote moved into the little town where it all happened and spent months exhaustively investigating the crime. This book ruined his life, our professor tells us. He never quite recovered from the experience of immersing himself in the murders.

And this is the guy you want us to imitate? I can’t help thinking.

I chose to immerse myself in my roommate’s work at the daily newspaper on campus.  The newsroom swallows up hours of her life, yet I have very little idea of what she actually does there, and despite fending off multiple suggestions/hints/nudges that I should come work there too, I’m curious and perhaps willing to look a little closer.

What does “immersion” mean, anyway?  I’ve most commonly heard the word attached to study abroad programs that promise you’ll return fluent in another language thanks to the miracles of “language immersion.”  When I’ve found my subculture, must I eat/sleep/breathe it?  Should I attempt to dive straight in, or am I allowed to observe for a little while?  Should I ignore all other concerns, even if those around me are doing homework or browsing Pinterest?

The infinitive, the command “to immerse,” calls to mind that moment of slipping underwater, taking a deep breath and letting the surface close over me and saturate my scalp, tendrils of hair drifting indifferently upwards and outwards while I float, suspended, between planes.  There’s something to the word that connotes downward movement into some substance or place, while also allowing me to be weightless.  I don’t know how that works, exactly; but it makes me think of dipping my head underwater, and it makes me thirsty.

Immersing oneself in water carries significant symbolic weight, too.  Going down into water often represents baptism, or at least some kind of vital change in a person or character’s life.  Capote had certainly changed by the time he came up for air from the little town in Kansas.  Ideally, an experience that results in a truly good creative nonfiction piece will probably change the writer somehow.  But, so far, we have not discussed what we’re supposed to do when we do finally break through the surface again and withdraw ourselves from the subculture.  We have not talked about what that will do to us.  We are supposed to be leaping off the docks here.

That’s the thing about “immersion.”  It sounds timeless, yet permanent.  To completely go into something, after all, is quite an undertaking.  And once you are there, suspended between those planes, with the dappled light and all your sensory information shifting in new and interesting ways…the word seems to suggest you might want to stay.

Emphasis

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Emphasis: special stress laid upon, or importance attached to, anything

I like to overthink single words sometimes, particularly when one keeps following me around in my everyday life. As the new semester gets underway and I introduce myself over and over in all my new classes, I find myself confronting the word “emphasis.” It crops up as professors describe what we will emphasize this semester in our coursework, in the rules they would like to emphasize most, in my own descriptions of myself as I say I am an English major with an emphasis in creative writing.

I’ve often wondered why there is no Creative Writing major, why it must remain a subset of English. We can’t simply major in English; the university requires us to eventually choose one of four emphases. For all intents and purposes, when choosing classes or giving someone the short answer to what we study, we are in fact Creative Writing, Rhetoric, English Education, or Literary Studies Majors. But the language we use (and of course language is vital to us English Emphases Majors) divides us based on which part of English studies we choose as our focus. The language surrounding these courses of study is actually a bit of a mouthful (just imagine capitalizing all that on my diploma: English With an Emphasis in Creative Writing) but they’ve never bothered to change it.

My professors, for their part, have “just wanted to emphasize” so many stipulations and contexts and phrasings that they undermine the weight they desire to lend those things. Not everything can actually be that important; emphasizing every other thing, particularly when three other professors are doing the same thing in all my other introductory lectures, actually ends up losing meaning.

The word even keeps popping up in conversations with my friends about grad school and all the importance placed on the prestige of what we do after graduation. With all this Capital-Letters-Implied EMPHASIS on Advanced Degrees and Networking and Impressive Job Offers and Financial Success, anything less than that is dramatically disappointing…but the funny thing is, I get the feeling that actually attaining All! The! Things! would simply be meeting expectations. We’re expected to excel. We’re expected to outshine. So when we do, these accomplishments that had so much “emphasis” are suddenly just par for the course. Rather like the word itself, they have lost their original weight.

Like many overused words, then, I suppose I should be more intentional about using emphasis in my own life.  As the definition states, emphasis should be special, particular, discerning – not just tossed about willy-nilly.