All My Exes Live in Texas

One afternoon whilst living in Texas (August 2006 through May 2007)  I had an uncomfortable incident at a local pool.

I finished my swim and was walking to the pool's ladder when a young teenager starting swimming toward me with a Texas-sized grin on his face. I stepped aside to let him pass, as I thought his smile was certainly not for me -- a perfect stranger. I was wrong, he swam right to me, outstretched his arms and gave me a big hug. 

My immediate next thought was also wrong, he was not in distress. I asked him if he was okay, and his smile grew brighter and, most surprisingly, his hug even tighter. I asked where is parents where and got the same double faceted response.  As I was trying to process what in the hell was going on, he just kept smiling and hugging me tighter. 

And, you know that thing where people who lose one sense have increased abilities in others, like blind people with enhanced hearing, this kid had that -- it felt like for every word he didn't utter, thestrength of his grip around me increased tenfold. 

I was really starting to worry because, as those of you who know me, I don't identify as a hugger. More importantly, I was half naked hugging a young teenage boy, also half naked, in a pool, in Texas. Like, none of these facts were good for me. 

Further, it was now apparent to me that this kid has some mental disability and could not talk. So whenever his parents stumble upon this scene of non-consensual man-boy hugging, they would clearly hear only a one-sided explanation.

With options and time running out, I ducked under the water, surprising him, slipped his grip and swam like holy hell to other side. I was happy to exchange the scratches on my back to avoid a lifetime of registering as a sex offender. 

Aphasia

the loss of a previously held ability to speak or understand spoken or written language, due to disease or injury of the brain.

Tobiko Theater

The cold front breaks away from the southeastern corner of Siberia and heads east toward the Sea of Japan where it sponges up moisture. The front, heavier now, continues east towards the largest island in the Japanese chain, Honshu, until it’s progress is stalled by the Japanese Alps in the Nagano prefecture. The mixture of the air’s temperature and water in and around the front cause snow to fall and, with the eastern side of the Hakuba Valley slightly higher than the western, the front’s western progress is stalled while the snowing continues. We step off the bus in Hakbua into the snow and head toward the ski lodge.

On our last night there the three of us eat dinner at a sushi restaurant, which is known for its omakase menu, colloquially referred to as the chef’s choice.  The fuller Japanese expression, omakase shimasu, translates as I trust the chef, which Jackson and I do while sitting at the sushi bar.

We explain to him, however, that trusting the chef really means trusting him and no matter what he places in front of us, we have to eat it otherwise we risk offending the chef. Jackson, a student of Japanese, agrees, but we’re a bit skeptical. 

Jackson is doing a great job and only a few pieces remain when he grabs for the tobiko (the flying fish roe) which is wrapped seaweed. This was the piece, my least favorite, which worried me the most. He deftly picks it up with his chopsticks and pops the tobiko into his mouth and begins to chew. His face contorts, eyes water, and mouth  opens. My wife and I exchange a knowing, parental look - we know these signs - he’s going to throw up the tobiko all over the sushi bar, chef, and other diners. As he starts to gag, however, out of his mouth slithers a six-inch inch, rolled up, piece of seaweed. 

I exhale, relief washing over me — ”Oh, thank god, he’s choking”
______

Oshibori - An oshibori (おしぼり or お絞り) or hot towel in English is a wet hand towel offered to customers in places such as restaurants or bars, and used to clean one's hands before eating (Wikipedia)

I have a problem

One of my most benign habits is that I buy a lot of Amazon Kindle books — current count 162 (!!!!) and the majority of them are unread. While this is clearly an unreasonable number of books, in my defense, I bought almost of all of them through Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deals, which sells books for about three dollars.

I typically buy the books through a link on Twitter or their daily emails. One day, I noticed that the links were always something like amazon.com, a series of numbers, the word obidos, and the book title. My curiosity was piqued so I googled obidos, learned it was a town in Brazil through which the fastest part of the Amazon flows, and was pretty impressed with the cleverness of Amazon programmers. With some more searching, I learned that Obidos was the name of Amazon’s original page rendering engine (I have no idea what that means; I read it here), and is also the name of one of their buildings in Seattle.

I just finished reading and enjoyed one of these books, Krakatoa by Simon Winchester (who wrote a favorite book of mine, The Professor and The Madman, which tells the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary).

As I was typing this, I wanted to see if it was defensible that I only bought these Kindle books because they were on sale. So I opened my Apple Books app, which, as far as I know doesn’t have daily book sales, and found an additional 130 books. Perhaps my habit is not so benign. I might have a problem.

Tsundoku (Japanese)

Acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them. From Wikipedia, and confirmed by my son who studies Japanese, the word combines elements of tsunde-oku (積んでおく, to pile things up ready for later and leave) and dokusho (読書, reading books).

h/t to Adam for the word.

The People in my Neighborhood

Word of the Week is intended for mature audiences only and is specifically designed to be read by adults and therefore may be unsuitable for children under 17. This program may contain one or more of the following: crude indecent language (L), explicit sexual activity (S), or graphic violence (V).

There are many things I love about living in an apartment, no snow to shovel, leaves to rake, or gutters to clean. The best part, however, is absorbing your neighbors' lives through the walls and windows. And, I think it's all fair game provided that you don't use any devices to help you hear or see.

I like to think of these as TV shows for which you develop your own narratives.  And you have to take the good with the bad - the newyleds across the way who refuse to lower their blinds - ACES.  The overweight sextiginarian who evacuates himself with the bathroom door open -- brutal.

Sometimes these shows can be dramas, like the older couple who lives next door, who recently relocated uptown from Chelsea. The regular yelling and sobbing that seeps into my apartment suggest, to me at least, that they moved here to get a fresh start but their problem wasn't their old neighborhood.

Other shows are late-night viewing only. A few years back I was in a friend's kitchen in the city talking on my phone when I noticed an amorous couple across the street. This couple, whom I determined to be conservationists and multitaskers, were in the shower together. Although the window was opaque, the three hands on the window made it clear exactly who was doing what to whom. 

Like all good art, these shows can also be very emotional. There's an old lady who lives across the way who is easily in her mid-nineties and stalks the hallway with her dog and without a bra (NB: this isn't the emotional part). The lights in her apartment typically come on around 6 am and are off around 10 pm. Around Thanksgiving her lights were off for a few weeks, and, when the darkness stretched through New Years, I grew worried that this show wasn't in hiatus but had been canceled.  In April, I learned it was only an extended hiatus and she's back to her old ways (one aspect of which I still don't like).

When I lived in Brooklyn, I heard a blood-curdling scream from my female neighbor at like 2 am (this was a big departure her boyfriend's usual screams that she ruined his life). When I woke the next morning, he was scrubbing the apartment, door open, with rubber gloves and bleach. Straight up Rear Window situation until she came back with breakfast (I was kinda disappointed, tbh, if only for the story).

By far the most uncomfortable show was when a "gentlemen" across the way was negotiating with his date. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when he lost the negotiation but I suspect it was while she was getting a drink of water in the kitchen and he disrobed on the couch - that was the end of that episode. 

Ucalegon, noun,  (plural Ucalegons) (dated) A neighbor whose house is on fire or has burned down.

Origin

From Latin Ucalegon, from Ancient Greek Οὐκαλέγων (Oukalegōn). He was one of the Elders of Troy, whose house was set on fire by the Achaeans when they sacked the city. He is one of Priam's friends in the Iliad (3.148) and the destruction of his house is referred to in the Aeneid (2.312).

Epicaricacy, Noun, (uncountable),  (rare) 

Rejoicing at or derivation of pleasure from the misfortunes of others. (This is the English word for schadenfreude) 

Usage notes

The word is mentioned in some early dictionaries, but there is little or no evidence of actual usage until it was picked up by various "interesting word" websites around the turn of the  twenty-first century.

Origin

From Ancient Greek ἐπί (epí, “upon”) + χαρά (khará, “joy”) + κακός (kakós, “evil”).

You are not alone

My weather app, Dark Sky, said it was 41 degrees outside but only felt like 35 when I was heading out for my predawn run in Central Park, so I stuffed my black knit gloves and a hat into my pockets in case I got cold. I entered the park on West 96th street, headed south to Columbus Circle, and while coming back north, I was listening to the Dear Evan Hansen soundtrack. When one of the show’s better songs, You Will Be Found, began to play, I sang along in sotto voce:

Have you ever felt like nobody was there?
Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?
Have you ever felt like you could disappear?
Like you could fall, and no one would hear?

And oh, someone will coming running
And I know, they'll take you home

Even when the dark comes crashing through
When you need a friend to carry you
And when you're broken on the ground
You will be found

So let the sun come streaming in
'Cause you'll reach up and you'll rise again
Lift your head and look around
You will be found
You will be found

At the same time, I got a bit of a chill, so while singing, I put on my hat and was putting on my gloves when a woman who was running only a few feet in front of me whipped around with a horrified look on her face and took off like a dart out of the park. I was utterly perplexed as to what caused her obvious fear, until I realized that, from her perspective, she saw some guy pulling on gloves while whispering to her in the predawn darkness “Have you ever felt like nobody was there? Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere? Have you ever felt like you could disappear? Like you could fall, and no one would hear?” and “when you are broken on the ground, you will be found.” This poor lady, here I was running along and, as I am want to do, signing show tunes and inadvertently threatening to kill her — I’d get the hell out of there too!!

tocsin (noun)

1: an alarm bell or the ringing of it

2: a warning signal