Ramblin'

I tellya, it's been a weird week--especially with this chestburster* acting up. Since the Light As A Feather, Stiff As A Board Scan results came back "fuck if we know," I am indeed going to a gastroenterologist next to see if they have a better idea. Till then, Waldo continues to restlessly chew on my liver.

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OGYAFEland is my latest conlang project. And for once, I'm trying to make a language family by starting with the prototype language--which is way easier than starting with the modern language and going backwards. (Though I did manage to fake it pretty well with Rredŕa--I gave them a good earthy start, for aliens, and the Spacefuture Terms are often derivatives, compounds, or straight-up borrowings--you know, like languages do.) I've had a particular idea for a new language for some time now, and I'm excited to see if it works out.

Also, the morphophonemic system I'm working on means I can play with a really simple and completely superfluous method of word derivation using polyhedral dice. I could always sit down and just come up with words, but I've noticed that when I do that my synesthesia comes up with the same letters for specific meanings in each conlang, so that I usually wind up with some combination of p, n, r, and e for a word meaning "leaves" because those are the green letters, or the red/orange f, d, g, and o for fire words.** Randomizing it with the dice makes it easier to avoid that, and at this point, for this project, a word generator would not work.

Not to mention, I can finally justify buying polyhedral dice when I have never been a tabletop gamer. What? They're fun!

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So one day in September I decided the hell with it, I should go to grad school, so I took the GRE.*** Somehow a bunch of grad schools found out about this, and dammit my inbox is flooded with academic spam invitations to various schools. At this point it's so obnoxious I am starting to seriously consider midwifery school again.

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I was supposed to work yesterday. Unfortunately, somewhere between my house and the freeway, my front right tire went, and I quote, "splort." I am not car savvy, so I was in the turn lane for the freeway ramp trying to figure out why my car felt weird when a lady began honking wildly from a couple lanes over.

"Your tire is completely flat!" she yelled. "DON'T GET ON THE FREEWAY."

"That explains a lot," I said. "Thank you, good citizen!"

So instead of getting onto the ramp and therefore winding up with Car Problems On The Freeway, I pulled a U-turn and wound up with Car Problems In The High School Parking Lot--a much better option. I hung out there till Dad and a tiny AAA lady came to my rescue. Could've been a lot worse--although I am not looking forward to finding out how much new tires are going to cost.

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The latest in Having A Body Is Weird: Did you know you can get charley horses in your eardrum? This time it was Mom who got to learn the hard way. Dude, having a body. It's weird.


*I named it Waldo. Although when I talk to it (who doesn't talk to their chestburster?), I generally address it as "you bastard."

**And don't get me started on how this this is related more to the letter than to the sound--that is a great source of irritation. On the other hand, synesthesia has its own ideas about what an onomatopoeia is, too--not just the colors, but the idea of what, say, a bottle sounds like in essence. It's not just similarly-colored things that wind up with false cognates across my disparate conlangs.

***My party trick is standardized tests. I have never needed to study for them and still have trouble remembering that other people do. This seems to really annoy people, but to be honest, for all their pomp and circumstance, standardized tests measure some very specific useless skills. I just happen to use the gravitas people assign them to my advantage.