Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Mit Schlag

SAN DIEGO, California (AP) -- Dozens of dolphins and sea lions trained to detect and apprehend waterborne attackers could be sent on a mission to patrol a military base in Washington state, the U.S. Navy said Monday. I love it! My question is, has anyone bought the film rights?

In other news, I just finished my usual marathon Monday night tutoring shift, and I'm now eating dinner and feeling very loquacious. Among the things that are on my mind: there aren't very many authors I don't like, but I don't like Milan Kundera. Being in that man's head makes me depressed. It's like being trapped in the refrigerator of a ship headed to Antarctica, cold and getting colder.

I've been thinking about this blog and how much I wear my heart on my sleeve. Not because of any temporary emergences into googlability (though I should be careful not to mention the Ethicist by name again if I want to stay anonymous)--I don't think of myself as someone with Future Employers, at least not ones who would care if I sang too much karaoke in my youth. But these posts are a real-time record of what I'm thinking about--a drastically, even comically, incomplete record, but all the more authentic for being spontaneous and untainted by perspective. Plenty of reflection, but none in tranquility. It's sort of an experiment--what does life look like in stop-motion?--and implicit in that is the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing. It reminds me of the moon journal I was supposed to keep in sixth grade, except that I actually never do know what the moon is going to do next. I suppose someone had to pay attention to figure that one out too, once.

Hey, by the way, Emily (who is going to blog soon) and I were trying to think of a German suffix that means the feeling of dread you experience when you realize you have some horrifying relationship to whatever the suffix is appended to. For instance, the feeling of dread brought on by looking at what everyone else in your college class has been doing with their lives would be alumnireviewschlag. The feeling of dread brought on by catching yourself writing about your eagerness to commit previously unthinkable acts of electronic self-disclosure is myspacegenerationschlag. Schlag means whipped cream (at least in my family, and we had it on pudding cups). Does anyone know the real suffix?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're thinking of -schaft, usually translated -ship, as die Freundshaft: friendship.

Anonymous said...

Oh, as to the moon, when its lit circular limb (its edge, not the terminator line dividing light and dark on its surface) is on the right, that is, to the west, it's waxing. When that limb is on the other side (left, east) it's waning. Was that the question?

Anonymous said...

And also, for dread, mental eddies may be mixing der Schaden: hurt, injury, loss, from the combined word, die Schadenfreude: pleasure in others’ misfortunes, and der Schatten: shadow. Whipped cream is die Schlagsahne (schlagen: to whip) shortened to Schlag. But none of these is a suffix.