I heart OMD

Last week I was thinking about swear words, particularly those that are uttered during an instant of urgent pain (whether physical or emotional).

If we lived in the land before swear words, how would we express the impact of a dropped hammer on our toes? It's visceral. It would be, to my imagination, like screaming bloody murder at the top of your lungs for quite some time and possibly grabbing the nearest living thing around the neck or punching it. (Which might cause the second party to issue a similar response; moral = dropping a hammer in a crowded room could cause WWIII [although I suppose since we're in the land before swear words, it would be WWI].)

So nowadays, when we confront a sudden and desperate pain, we take a split second to register that hurting others is bad and yell F*************!!!!!! or some appropriate variation. This may be indelicate to the ears of those nearby, but one or two swear words usually serves to encapsulate the trauma of the moment and allow the sufferer to gracefully move on to the next step (checking for blood or whatever) without having to bruise his vocal folds or the neck of his friend.

I think the bottom line here is that swear words are actually a mark of refinement.

Unrelatedly, 45 minutes ago I was thinking about one of the differences between life now and life in memory. Now vs. memory is looking at the same thing from a different perspective. (So is now vs. memory vs. the future, in a weird way.) And sometimes looking at something from multiple perspectives reveals that an element crucial to one view is quite unnecessary to another.

Specifically, I was thinking about how I feel now, which is anxious about how I am perceived, how I am performing, how I will perform, how I will be perceived, blah, blah, blah.

I think about it in the shower, I think about it while I am at work, I think about it while people are perceiving me and I am judging my own performance to be wanting, I think about it while I'm watching Dancing with the Stars. It is like the most boring thing to think about. And yet.

So I was walking outside and the air is crisp and nice. And I saw myself (from the inside) walking and it was just me, walking, just like I would walk to Erin Killoran's house when I was 6 to see if she wanted to roller skate and walk through Manhattan when I was 22 to work at Vanity Fair wearing khakis from Old Navy (!). And suddenly I got a perspective on my anxiety. I mean, I already knew, with my brain, that such perseverations were largely a waste of time, but so do smokers know that they're killing their lungs, right? (Maybe human behavior as a whole can be reduced to a study of the right hand not knowing that the left hand is cutting off the nose to spite the face, but I digress.)

Anyway, I saw myself walking, forever, and thought about how I probably had various anxieties circling in my brain when I was 6, 22, etc., but that they didn't matter, and don't matter. At each point in my life, I am whole and beautiful. And I am walking the earth for a short time. I can be whole or I can deny what I have been given and wrap myself around the axle.

Love, D