Tag Archives: humor

Hunkered Down

Posted on by
Reply

UPDATE: This is definitely a work in progress. My uke guru is suggested some changes. Thinking it might be fun to add one new verse a week for as long as COVID-19 hangs around. We’re talking epic. (Put this on YouTube for anyone having trouble streaming here.)

UPDATE: I’m going to record this again and change “Chinese Virus” to “Donald Trump’s Virus”

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain

Posted on by
  • Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
  • Opia: The ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
  • Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
  • Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
  • Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
  • Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
  • Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
  • Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
  • Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
  • Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
  • Vemödalen: The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
  • Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
  • Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
  • Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
  • Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
  • Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
  • Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone
  • Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
  • Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
  • Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
  • Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
  • Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
  • Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Would a bot ask you to show it your underpants?

Posted on by

Since retiring, I’m occasionally asked if I’d consider working part-time. Uh, no. But this afternoon I thought of a job that I might find interesting. If such a job exists. If some company/business/service was doing one of those “is it human or is it a bot?” things, that might be fun. Sort of a half-assed Turing Test kind of thing? But I’d want total freedom in my responses.

Q: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a…
Me: Did you think Ernest Borgnine was better in Airwolf or Escape from New York?

Yeah, I think I might do that for an hour a day. My friend David Brazeal had a similar gig for a while. He was the human behind the Barrel Bob Twitter account for the Missouri Department of Transportation. I think he lost the account when the suits couldn’t handle his insanely humorous tweets.