jiminy cricket!

     Hi ho, readers. I'm filing this brief update on the project to incorporate "awesome" into my options for expressing enthusiasm. You'll be disappointed to hear that I've had very limited success, having spoken the word only once since the last blogpost. Rummaging through the refrigerator, half listening to a story of Laura's derring do in some faculty meeting, I stuck it in among the other well-placed grunts, uh huhs, and mm-hmms. "That's...that's awesome, hon," I managed to muster, while wrestling with a giant cauliflower stuck in the lower bin. Later, cooking up the defeated cauliflower, I graded myself on choreography, the overall challenge of my routine, and whether or not I had stuck the landing on "awesome, hon." Meh. 7 point...2.
     I can do this. I know I can. But adding in a new conversational term is not as easy as breaking a verbal habit, with which I have had pronounced success. A few years ago, for example, I made the successful shift away from "Jesus Christ!", which I would tend to emit in a moment of sudden alarm: a near fall, a car veering into my lane, a wasp on my shirt. I'm not offended by "Jesus Christ!" myself, particularly as his might be a useful presence in a moment of need. But my mom always told me that the objectionable aspect of profanity is that it shows a lack of imagination. That was a harsh judgment for her.
     It sucks that I have such a shitty imagination.
     Though it took several months to replace "Jesus Christ!" with "Jiminy Cricket!", that project came with the advantage of an immediate correction, which I willed myself to deliver with as close to equal feeling as possible: "Je--I mean jiminy cricket!" 
     I am both proud and embarrassed to say that "jiminy cricket" is now my default alarum cry.
     You don't get that same practice with "awesome"-- that immediate correction, is what I'm saying. "Fantas-- I mean awesome!" That's just plain awkward.
     I should mention before closing this report that Marilyn's mention of the superb term "wicked pissah" took all the wind out of my sails. I am merely aiming for a term long in the everyday lexicon, something everyone and their uncle can say with ease and pizzazz. If I could master the timing, nail the delivery, and stick the landing of an authentic "wicked pissah," that would be awesome.
     Hm. 8.5.

it'll be awesome, man

As the youngest of four, I always appreciated that there were sibling sentries who would return from the front lines of adolescence and report back. Between birth order, being a Quaker, and being raised on a college campus, the language of the 60s came to me earlier than to most of my peers. I began to say "man" and "cool," for example, from about the age of 6, when Lee, at 13, brought it home from junior high school.
"Let's go climb that tree, man," I'd say.
"Time for my bath? Cool, man."
Even when you're young, you make decisions about which new words to start implementing yourself. At its very grooviest, groovy didn't work for me; I don't know why. And as for dude, which came along in the 1980s, well, I already had man, after all; there was no room for dude, man. Dude has never stopped sounding funny to me.
As time goes by, you judge words pretty harshly, using a template that seems darn close to arbitrary. Sometimes it's just that the word or term offends: I avoid what a douche, par example. But even the offensiveness thing is arbitrary: I've become immune to what an asshole, but still cringe at what a dick. 
Some of it is simple contrariness: 24/7. Nope; that nifty shortcut is not for me.
Sometimes it is this, I suppose: I make a judgment, based on nothing but faulty intuition, that a given word will have its day and then fade away. You don't want to start flinging about a new term only to find it is already passé. Alas, this happened for me with "my bad," a crinkle-your-nose funny term when you first hear it, and then suddenly very handy, more succinct, and friendlier than "I did not see your cart; I apologize for bumping it ever so lightly." But when I said "my bad" to T'ai one time, he stopped short, shook his head, and said, "No. Mom. Do not say that," conveying in no uncertain terms that I had missed when "my bad" had morphed from new-and-fun to decidedly uncool. Or at least something that you don't want your mom saying. And of course it's too late by then, because once you've added something to your vocabulary, there it is for the using, and you end up being that pleasant but awkward person who says a chipper "my bad!" to someone much cooler than you when you bump their shopping cart with yours.
All of this is to get to "awesome." I have resisted using awesome for a long time. Remember when it appeared? It was off-putting. Abrasive. Immature sounding. Overused. Like....like what. Like like. And you make a haughty resolution to yourself that you do not need this new word. There are plenty of ways to say the same thing, you tell yourself. And when everyone else is saying, "That thunderstorm last night was awesome!" you actually feel yourself resisting saying it too. Instead you chime in with, "Wasn't it amazing?" and you feel both righteous and ridiculous at the same time. Not because amazing or fabulous or terrific aren't terrific words, but because you know that in that moment, awesome would really nail the moment in a way that your po' ass righteous word choice doesn't. You know you are just being stubborn and want to keep being right about how long you've gone without joining the masses-of-lesser-will-and-poorer-judgment who say awesome, like, 24/7.
I would like to give myself permission to say awesome now and then. This blogpost is to nudge me toward the freedom to say something is awesome when it is. I am going to practice exercising that freedom, at first quite deliberately, until I really am free. When "that was awesome!" pops out of my mouth without judging myself, when I say it in a moment of unbridled enthusiasm...That moment, my friends -- that will be...so great wonderful really cool, man...what's the term I'm looking for?

it wasn't Mary Oliver

     Several people have written to ask, with distress in their hearts and fear in their font, if the crabby poet of yore was Mary Oliver. Please don't let it be Mary Oliver, some of the emails begged.
     No, no, my buttercups. When we are in search of true Light, the Universe answers with beauty, hope, and Mary Oliver. While we are all deeply worried about the current global showdown -- which, like all violent showdowns, no matter what, can come to no good, because there's something wrong with such showdowns in the first place -- the Universe is not intentionally messing with our heads, which would be the case if Mary Oliver were a jerk. Which she, by all reports, is not. She's just very quiet.
     Praise Be.