Greatest Hits
The Collected Best Bits of the Collected Foremania
Herein ye shall find a selection of selections from my newsletter. These are meant to be tantalizing morsels to make you salivate at the thought of ingesting more of what I mean to provide with this newsletter, now called The Collected Foremania. Click around and read some of what I’ve written for you, won’t you?
From Pamphlet 8: Brain
I just made that word up. "Malaportmanteau" is itself portmanteau that combines "malapropism" and "portmanteau." A portmanteau is a word that combines two things to make up a new word ("cheeseburger," for instance) while a malapropism is a word that is and sounds like another word, except used incorrectly and usually used humorously. Malapropisms are fertile ground for puns, so I love them and hate them.
From Pamphlet 9: The Moon
The story of Anna Anderson isn't spooky, it's just sad. She was hospitalized for a suicide attempt in 1922, and her claims to be Anastasia came after. Nobody who knew the real Anastasia was convinced that Anna was her. As early as 1927, the dead Tsarina's brother (Anastasia's uncle) funded an investigation that concluded that this Anastasia was actually a polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.
I, too, was almost kicked out of college. My freshman roommate brought a water balloon launcher, which was just a big slingshot that one person held on each side while the person in the middle pulled the water balloon back and let it fly. We took the screen out of our window and launched some watery artillery of our own. We were on the seventh floor of Bennett Tower, with a perfect angle to the main entrance, between Braxton and Brooke Towers, where the taxis let off the drunks. We made the mistake of doing this in the middle of the day, and some kids across the way in Braxton saw us, and fired an empty airsoft gun in our direction.
From Routines:
Géricault painted the Raft of the Medusa right after the actual event, and he did a ton of research, even going as far as viewing bodies of dead people to get the colors right and interviewing two of the survivors. Although the work has been interpreted as a contemporary critique of the people in charge (the wreck of the Medusa was likely the fault of the captain of the vessel, who was a political appointee and apparently incompetent), I’m more inclined to see it as the 19th century version of a True Crime podcast.
From Feelings:
Mood is a weird word that carries a morose weight -- simple, short, with the long double o. It's a word derived from Old English. Fittingly, it sounds like it oozed out of a bog. It's hard to associate the word "mood" with a positive feeling, and it's even harder to use it in the first person. How often does one say "I'm in a good mood?" Usually we use it to describe somebody else. Is this because it's easier to gauge another's state of feeling than it is our own? It feels that way.
From On Writing:
We are so often told to reach for our dreams. People accepting awards love to tell anybody watching to pursue their dreams, because they, too, were once watching an award show and some celebrity made some similar declaration. It might be true that nobody who never makes it ever did so by not trying. Effort is an assumed factor. Perhaps less assumed is privilege.
From Transitions:
One kind of transition is the root word for those who identify as trans. It is factually incorrect to assert that trans people didn’t exist before our current era. This is like a person living in 1770 saying that there was nothing to breathe when they were kids, because oxygen had not been discovered yet. It was always there. They just didn’t have a name for it.
From Death:
The concept of the revelation is integral to Abrahamic theology. Sometimes the revelations are personal, and God speaks directly to the stunned listener (the listener, I imagine, is always stunned; nobody receives a communique from the divine and thinks “yes, this is exactly what should be happening”). More often, they are second-hand: an Angel, a messenger, comes down to earth and speaks to them for God. Even more potent, and I think more effective, is the public revelation, a kind of celestial music festival where the main stage is, for example, a guy handing out commandments.
From Art:
I lurk on a few message boards for writerly types, and I see a lot of people asking questions about their magic systems, or the power levels of their characters, or what they should name their character’s sword. My advice to them all is the same: who cares? They’re almost always new writers who have never really tried anything before and, influenced by something they’ve watched or read, have lassoed their imaginations and are expressing themselves. This is good! I’m glad they chose to write. But unless there’s something meaty on those bones, it doesn’t matter.
From Introvert Olympics:
Masticate is verb that means “to chew” and I prefer it to the other metaphor for the activity, woolgathering, which sounds whimsical and harmless. Mastication is neither of those things. The activity is also more commonly known as “worrying” which is a word that also means “to chew.” It has teeth. When you do it right, it feels like gnawing on gristle, and it has about the same utility, which is to say, it’s pointless.
From Don’t Trust Your Hunches: Three Ways to Succeed as a Writer:
Every relationship comes with these wobbly orbits — a person can be your best friend for years and then move to a different neighborhood and you don’t hear from them for another few years, and then you move closer to them and suddenly they’re back in your life again, like nothing happened. They bring up something that happened during their time in the wilderness, when they weren’t thinking about you much (nor you them), and you question your own memory. Then you remember, oh, that’s when we weren’t really talking much, and then it becomes part of the sheaf of background info we carry in our mind for that person.
From The Loneliest Man in the World:
Who is the loneliest person? I can identify two answers to this question. It’s been asked in songs and poems, and there is a lovely, whimsical kind of children’s book quality to the earnest hyperbole of the statement. Kids are never hungry, they’re starving. Their room at night isn’t just scary, it’s the scariest place in the world. A child’s universe is such a small place, but it extends out into their imaginations. As we get older, we tear down those imaginary places and replace them with their real world versions. We lose the whimsy we had. I think that’s why escapism is popular, and often derided, but I think we miss the simplicity of a smaller orbit, where things make sense, and evil stepmothers get what’s coming to them, and the bad guy loses.
From Boltcutters, Love, Relationships, Me:
The easy ones pass through the sieve like sand, while the harder ones, the big rocks or cigarette butts or chunks of concrete bounce around on the top until you get sick of trying to get them to fit into your life and it’s not worth the struggle anymore.
Good luck finding someone who thinks you deserved a second chance. You got that chance. We’re on seventh and eighth chances now. If you’re not going to pass into our lives easily, then you’d better be worth it.
From What It’s Like to Have a Brain Tumor:
This very idea is abhorrent to some people, but it’s not to me. It’s tempting, as someone who has trouble imagining a future where he lives up to the dreams he had as a kid. I used to fantasize about going on Letterman. I still find myself retreating to those fantasies even now, long after his show is over, and imagining how witty and wonderful I would have been. I will never be Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, Neil Gaiman, or Terry Pratchett, but I can be Cancer Guy. That’s easy. I don’t have to live up to anything, I just have to get through Tuesday. What an accomplishment!
From The Human Body, a User’s Guide Part 1:
I was chatting with a pal who said she had bought a bathing suit online and I imagined myself being a woman and trying to buy a bathing suit and was laid low by the feelings that rushed over me.
It felt weighty and important, like picking your favorite color when you’re a kid, which is an important decision that one can never take lightly, except titanically more important than even that.
It made me think of having a body, specifically a body unlike the one I have, and it got me thinking about how unprepared I would be to engage with the world in a woman’s body.