posted on April 28, 2010 at 9:42 pm by Khali
Pet peeve: when people use words that sound similar to the word they really mean. Eg. mutilate when they mean mutate. Means a totally different thing. Elevate and relegate. If I ask you what the hell you mean, don’t get mad at me! You’re the one who is too lazy to think of the right word or use one that has less syllables because you’re too busy trying to sound smart.
Also: double negatives. Saying it twice negates the negative dumbass! It doesn’t make it more negative. Example: I haven’t got none. Not only does it make you sound like a hayseed, it means the exact opposite of what you really mean. The worst? Irregardless.
Want a lesson in prefixes and suffixes?? Too bad.
The prefix ir- means “not” (Just like the prefixes in- il- and im-) i.e. Irresponsible literally means ‘not responsible’. Inconceivable, immature follow the same pattern. “Irregard” does not follow the same logic, nor would you ever find someone using it in normal speech because IT IS NOT A WORD. You’d probably hear disregard instead, since the prefix dis- actually means: the reverse of. Dystopia, disarm, disability, disfunction… you get the picture.
the suffix -less literally means ‘lack of’. Following that, harmless = lack of harm. Regardless = lack of regard.
irregardless = a double negative and should not even exist in your vocabulary.
Bottom line: If it comes out of George W.’s mouth on a regular basis then it probably shouldn’t be coming out of yours.
/rant
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment » | Tags: grammar nazi, rant, wordgeek
posted on April 26, 2010 at 6:47 pm by Khali
A migraine is like sheet lightening accompanied by a monstrous thunder. An aurora borealis pulsing with my heartbeat on the edges of my vision. Usually this crystalline halo is all I have to worry about, the thunder of pain is distant; an echo somewhere in the recesses of my head. It is never the same. An ice lance pulsing behind my eyes, or an army of fireants tromping over my scalp, making each individual hair follicle a focal point of fire. Or perhaps the deep resonant throb of taiko drums at the base of my skull, or elephantine tap dancers in my forehead, right behind my eyes.
Thankfully my threshold is high, so it’s rarely that this cacaphony of light and pain overwhelms me. For those who deal with these more often than I do: May the fireants sting the tap dancing elephants to oblivion and the halo be washed away by rain.
listening to Recovery - Kosheen
Posted in journal | No Comments » | Tags: anatomy of pain, life, my brain
posted on April 22, 2010 at 8:54 pm by Khali
How can I begin?
So many skin
of silence upon me
Not that they blunt me,
but I have become
accustomed to
walking like a pregnant woman
carrying something
alive yet remote.
My thoughts,
though less articulate
than image,
still have in them
something like a skeleton,
a durable beginning
waiting for
unpredicted flesh
and deliverence.
I would ask
you: learn as I learn
patience with mine
and your own silence.
~Pat Lowther
Posted in Poetry, Quotations | No Comments » | Tags: inspiration, quotes, things that make you go hrm, woosh
posted on April 12, 2010 at 7:49 pm by Khali
I was the youngest and weepiest of the family, frequently sent for naps due to fatigue, and thought to be sensitive, even a but sickly; perhaps this was because I showed undue interest in sissy stuff like knitting and dresses and stuffed bunnies. My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshamallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
Margaret Atwood [Negotiating with the Dead, 2002]
Posted in Quotations | No Comments » | Tags: inspiration
posted on April 11, 2010 at 9:35 am by Khali
Each one of us is a centre of life, a unique event inthe universe, and whatever our external relations to people and things may be, the absolute fact remains that we have to live our inner life alone even as we have to die our own death; no one can live our own inner life for us; and no one can go through our own death. In the infinite struggle of man to know this world and the universe around him, and also to know the mind that allows him to think, he comes before the simple fact that life is above thought… [Juan Mascaró - Introduction to The Upanishads: Penguin 1965]
Posted in Quotations, commonplace book | No Comments » | Tags: nescience, quotes, religiocuriosity, things that make you go hrm
posted on April 4, 2010 at 11:22 am by Khali
“What do you need to show me? I’ve already agreed to help you. Not that I had much choice,” Callum snarls as Sionna lead him down the corridor. He still feels queasy from travelling between.
“You have every choice,” Sionna says with her infuriatingly calm voice.
“Showing up in my kitchen in the middle of the night with your spooky doom and gloom is hardly giving me a choice,” he retorts.
“If you had told me to leave I would have had no choice but to leave you alone.”
“And just how do you propose I could have ignored the rest of it?”
“The dreams? The creatures haunting you? That would have been none of my concern if you had refused me. “
“That’s cold,” he mutters. The corridor is cold and the walls seem to seeps moisture, but it does not smell like water. It smells sickly sweet, and it unsettles Callums stomach further.
“Cold perhaps, but practical.”
“Practical.”
“As I said, we are fighting a war,” Sionna sighs and turns a corner. Light filters into the corridor but it is not the clean white light from the moon they left behind. Instead it is a strange blue light, slightly sickly and even oily – it makes his flesh crawl when it moves over his skin. Sionna pauses at a doorway and produces a key which she slides into a keyhole. The light seeps under the door, and between the pieces of frame. Callum rubs his hands over his arms absently, trying to ease the trembling that has spread from his gut.
The hinges scream as the door swings open and Callums eyes tear. The light fills the room and it takes several seconds for Callum to deduce that the light is coming from chains. There are thousands of them it seems, coming from every point in the room and converging in the center. Something hangs in the center and Callum squints into the sickly blue glare.
Sionna’s eyes glitter in the strange light cast by the chains that bind the woman; for it is a woman, wrapped like a fly in a spider’s web. Her head hangs forward, ropes of ebony hair catching the blue light as they fell almost to the floor.
“This is the one who is the heir to the Seelie throne.”
“Why is she chained this way?” Callum asks, his skin crawling with the energy in the room.
“She has been cursed; possessed by a demon of the dark vastness. This is the only way we can bind her soul to this world and control the creature. Sometimes she is lucid, but most times she is lost to us.”
“What’s her name?”
“Nieve,” Sionna whispers and the figure in the center of the chains raises her head. Callum is struck by her ghostly, terrible beauty.
“Sionna,” the woman whispers, her voice seeming to echo and be echoed by a thousand other voices. Callum shudders at the sound, but he cannot look away. “I can see you today,” she says.
“I am pleased,” Sionna answers, and looks away.
“Can you unbind me?” Nieve asks, her voice sibilant with thousands of other voices.
“You know we cannot, Lady.”
There is a pause, but Callum can still hear the voices whispering to each other in languages that he cannot understand.
“He will unbind me,” Nieve says, only Callum knows with every fiber of his being that it is not the lady speaking. His chest suddenly feels tight and before he realizes what’s happening Sionna is shoving him backwards into the corridor and slamming the door shut. “Fools!” the voices hiss from beyond the door, echoed by the eerie rattle of the thousand chains.
Callum takes a deep and shaky breath and looks down to see Sionna gazing up at him, pressing him to the wall, fingers digging into his arm.
“You are well?”
“Fine, I think,” he gasps. She pushes herself away from his body and he suddenly feels cold. “What happened?”
“What I feared,” she says. “The demon knows you.”
“Of course it does, you just introduced us,” Callum hisses back.
“Hardly. Nieve was lucid when we entered, but the demon took power so quickly. You felt it, did you not?”
“Yes,” Callum says, and cannot suppress a shudder.
“We must hurry,” Sionna says and starts back the way they came. Callum does not hesitate to follow her.
From behind them, Callum hears the Lady scream, echoed over and over again my a million echoing voices.
listening to: Glass Tiger - Don’t Forget Me
Posted in Fiction, Sidhe, Writing | No Comments » | Tags: an alternate reality, fragments, inspiration, magic, muse, surreal, Writing
