Don't Use Big Words!

"In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vainloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendre's, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent.

In other words: talk plainly, briefly, naturally, sensibly, truthfully, purely. Keep from 'slang;' don't put on airs; say what you mean; mean what you say...and don't use big words!"

Author unknown.

My mother found this fine example of doublespeak from an already old book in Shorey's Used Bookstore, downtown Seattle, when she worked there in the early 1970's. I have often wondered what sort of dementia possessed the author to extrapolate so extemporaneously on the subject of the white man's forked tongue. But let me tell you this: nothing worked better in getting me "A" grades in Psych classes then using the opposite of the author's advice when writing a term paper. If the Professor's couldn't understand what I was saying, but it seemed to make sense, how then could they objectively grade my paper? I used a quote once from Dr. Carl Gustav Jung's Collected Works that ran a half a page long in typed letters that was a full paragraph written as a single sentence! I must have that old college research paper saved somewhere in a box in the attic or basement. With my plans on returning to psychology studies in the New Year, it might be time to dig up those old term papers, dust off my copies of Jung's Collected Works, and brush up on my psychological terminology. As my mother says: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance; baffle them with bullsh*t!" I pity my poor Professors, they don't stand a chance!

28 Days

28 Days! No, not the movie, ME! Sunday, August 26th is the start of my 28th day of sobriety. Not that the movie isn't relevant, it does have something to do with this day, but I used it intentionally to purposely mislead you dear reader. I would have more time under my belt, but just after midnight, at 12:10am on Sunday, July 29th, I had an irresistable urge to go out on a binge! Fortunately for me I only had the small change in my pocket, but it was enough to go to the corner gas station and buy a 24 ouncer of Anhauser Busch Natural Ice, my then favorite beer. Knowing full well that I shouldn't, I walked down the street anyways, trying to shunt the still small voice of my conscience and knowing that the beer would soon do that for me! Plagued with guilt and misgivings and dogged by my own shadow, I walked back to my mother's apartment where I had spent much of the evening working on her computer. I sat down to the computer desk and wiggled the mouse to bring the screen back on and illuminate the dark living room with the warm, comfortable glow of the monitor. I set the beer down next to the mousepad and reentered my password, logged onto my gmail account, and stared at the beer! I wrestled with my conscience and that unopened beer for two hours while surfing the internet intemitten with furtive glances at the sweat droplets forming on the can as the beer inside warmed to room temperature. Finally I gave into temptation and cracked that damn beer open to take a swig...and then another, and another. I got nearly a third of it down my gullet when I began to hear the voice of my alcohol counselor's words come back to haunt me when I remembered she spoke of some people failing UA tests: "Only you can control what goes into your body[the urine analysis just tells the story of what you did]." I could imagine hearing my buddies at the AA hall telling me; "the best way to avoid that second drink is to not take the first one!" Knowing the end of the month drew near and that UA's happen unexpectedly after the beginning of the next, I gathered up my senses and went into the kitchen and poured the rest of that warm beer down the sink. That Friday the 3rd the entire group in counseling got tested, and with new advances in testing, alcohol can be detected up to 90 hours after imbibing. I passed! So far, 28 days is my record for going without a beer in the last 6 years of coming home from work with a six pack and sitting down to my computer to surf or watch a DVD. Last October 28th is when I started that record and made it all the way through Thanksgiving festivities without a drink. Detoxing was horrible! I couldn't get to sleep at nights without my beloved beer and I had insomnia for 4 days without sleep before I crashed. What got me through those first 28 days was buying and watching this movie for 28 days straight! So that is what the movie has to do with this blog posting. I plan on watching the movie once again this Sunday as a reminder that I did it once and can do better--one day at a time!

Get A Life!

When someone tries to insult me with that worn out expression, I politely ask: "Where can I get one?" Someone please tell me what store or shopping mall I can go to to purchase such a thing? I've been laid off from two jobs now this year, both from lack of business. I can't even collect unemployment insurance due to the fact that I haven't worked enough hours this year! So I haven't posted recently because all my internet time and free hours in the day have been spent searching for work. Thanks to excellent recommendations from both my foster brother Tom(who I have been getting some work from in his construction business), and my best friendly friend Li, I now have a job. What a relief! I have been living on credit cards and need this job to repay what I now owe. I obtained the job through a temp agency and the job is temp to permanent hire. Parenting Press is a Children's books publishing warehouse distribution center located near Northgate Mall(maybe I can go shopping for a life on my lunch break), and I will be working in the Shipping and Receiving department starting monday, August 20th, part time to start. I'm trying to get a life going with my many excursions into the college world of higher education. I've tried a quarter of Electronics, a quarter of IT classes, and even tried a quarter of Graphics, my old major and current profession. None of these particularly appealed to me. I had a dual major at Western Washington University when I attended so many years ago and I took a lot of Psychology courses thinking it might help me get into advertising. I ended up taking more psych classes then printing classes because the tech classes were always full. Now I am going to try the University of Phoneix Online in this coming New Year, to see if I can finish my psych degree. They are the only online University with psych classes that are close to what I need to finish my major. I always got A grades in psych classes, and as Mario says; it's not about the major, just the piece of paper! I agree, as I probably wouldn't do anything with a psych degree anyway, except end up as an underpaid Human Resources manager or an over worked Social Worker, but to have that piece of paper is all important. It seems I've changed my mind so many times about jobs, cars, education, and girlfriends, that I ought to be able to look inward at my mind and see what is going on in the dark recesses of my brain. So you're probably wondering who the new girl is, and what happend to Jane. Jane turned out to be an internet theif and con artist. Purporting to be an orphan with an inheritence and studying overseas, she wanted her estate lawyer to be able to send me her money to safeguard it from Nigerian Banks. Yeah, right, like she just wanted to know my account info and screw me royally. I knew this for sure when she claimed her lawyer's estate bank would need my social security number to transfer funds. B*llsh*t! I wasn't born again yesterday(sorry about the poor attempt at Christian humor)! So I deleted her and blocked her from emailing me. But I forgot to delete the website profile I had met her through. One day I woke up to email from Ekaterina(now you know her name). She is a Registered Nurse from Omsk, Russia and told me about a new program in Russia called Work and Travel. She had applied for it, and wrote to me because she had heard about the many world class hospital's and medical center's here in the Seattle area, and she wanted to have a friend in this city to show her around and help her get aquainted with life in America. She already has her HB-1 work Visa for medical professionals and is coming to Seattle under her own power, so I agreed to play host and be her guide for the year her Visa is good. Yes, she is interested in romance too, but wants friendship and help adjusting first and foremost. She has a job lined up and plans to stay in a Nurses hostel until she can get a place of her own. It would be nice to meet her in person and get to know her better first, before getting involved in all that messy romance stuff that always screws my head up. Heads up! She's in Moscow already and going through her English language equivilency and Nursing exams for her visa and exit interview and she might be here at SeaTac late next week! Okay, so that was fast! And maybe I don't know what I am doing and ought to have my head examined, but I'm already doing that with Community Psychiatric Clinic--the program that is helping me get into the Univeristy of Phoneix. UoP insists upon their students to have work or be involved in some sort of professional organization that relates to their studies before they will accept a new applicant, and CPC qualifies with them. I'm getting my financial aid awards transfered, so paying for studies is still not a problem, just finding the time and being dedicated to studies online will be my greatest challenge. My alcohol rehabilitation classes will be finished by then, and with my new job being just part time I figure I can do it. I am taking a speed reading and study class to learn how to learn again and prepare myself for this, so who knows...maybe I am getting a life!