flexagon: (racing-turtle)
...inspired by [livejournal.com profile] turtlefly14, who did one a while back. Dedicated to [livejournal.com profile] nevers.

I
I
am
now
tense,
inverted.
Over straining
hands my body, a wand of soft
willow, tries to mimic bone. Behind my gaze
joy kindles as balance catches; gravity will win, but not now, not yet.
flexagon: (Default)
On the train today I was pondering how the English language could really use two different words for two usages of the word "my". There's the possessive my (my purse, my bagel), and then there's the "associated with me" my (my company, my train, my husband) where I definitely don't own or control the thing in question. There are more, but these seem like the two that are most in need of separation.

I have no idea how my hypothetical language change would handle things that one partly owns or partly controls.

My cat: I own her under the law, but she also has legal rights to humane treatment, and I think of her as more than a possession.
My condo: I own half of it at most, and that's joint ownership with [livejournal.com profile] heisenbug involved, the bank owns the rest.

Is this even interesting? It seems kind of unactionable. There are ways to protest the use of a word, or the misuse, but there's not much people can practically do to promote a pair of new words to replace one word. :P Also, I love wordplay... I am exactly the kind of person who's interested enough in ideas about clarity of language (computer languages, Esperanto, even E-prime) but then goes home to do cryptic crosswords.

Maybe I'll do some constrained writing soon.
flexagon: (Default)
Sometimes I wonder out loud if I should be more ambitious, and the response is usually "silly [livejournal.com profile] flexagon, you ARE ambitious!".

Then I'm like "Oh yeah? Show me my goals then" and they're all "Look at all the stuff you do" and things devolve from there.

I think I've figured this out. I think I really only count it as ambition when there are long-term specific goals that assume/demand a lot of progress. For example, a plan to go to (and get through) med school is ambitious. Training to run a marathon, when one can currently only run 5 miles, is ambitious. Planning to get promoted in a year is ambitious, at a new job.

Stretching every day and working hard at stuff in one's current job description is just disciplined, not ambitious. (And I am disciplined, I won't fight you on that.) For the most part, I work on applying myself to things I can do, plus the next incremental step. Obviously that can take a person a long way, and the idea is to blink and look around every now and then to see where one is, and yet I would call no particular part of the process ambitious since it's all focused on the present and the immediate future.

Is my personal lexicon just way off from the way these words are used?

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