February 2012
0 posts
mahpiohanzia
n. the disappointment of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the ballast of your own weight and ignited the fuel tank of unfulfilled desires you’ve been storing up since before you were born.
January 2012
4 posts
xeno
n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.
moledro
n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.
the bends
n. frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should, even something you’ve worked for years to attain, which prompts you to plug in various thought combinations to try for anything more than static emotional blankness, as if your heart had been accidentally demagnetized by a surge of expectations.
December 2011
2 posts
Zielschmerz
n. the exhilarating dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you created in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could, only to break in case of emergency.
degrassé
adj. entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the universe, experienced in a jolt of recognition that the night sky is not just a wallpaper but a deeply foreign ocean whose currents are steadily carrying off all other castaways, who share our predicament but are already well out of earshot—worlds and stars who would’ve been lost entirely except for the scrap of light they were able to...
November 2011
1 post
slipcast
n. the default expression that your face automatically reverts to when idle—amused, melancholic, pissed off—which occurs when a strong emotion gets buried and forgotten in the psychological laundry of everyday life, leaving you wearing an unintentional vibe of pink or blue or gray, or in rare cases, a tie-dye of sheer madness.
September 2011
2 posts
trumspringa
n. the temptation to step off your career track and become a shepherd in the mountains, following your flock between pastures with a sheepdog and a rifle, watching storms at dusk from the doorway of a small cabin, just the kind of hypnotic diversion that allows your thoughts to make a break for it and wander back to their cubicles in the city.
ambedo
n. a kind of melacholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life, a mood whose only known cure is the vuvuzela.
August 2011
4 posts
matte finish
n. an expression found in photos of people who have since died—bittersweet, vulnerable, faintly distracted—an illusion that occurs when a one-off snapshot suddenly becomes a glimpse of someone as vivid and alive as they’ll ever be, like the flash of color that sometimes appears just after the sun sets.
lapyear
n. the age at which you become older than your parents were when you were born, which signals that your leg of the relay race has already begun, having coasted in their slipstream as they tackled the mountain stages of life, leaving you strong, energetic and deeply mortified by their loud yellow jerseys.
karmapol
n. the imaginary committee of elders that keeps a running log of your mistakes, steadily building their case that you’re secretly a fraud, a coward, a doofus and a douche, and who would’ve successfully revoked your good fortune years ago had they not been hampered by bitter squabblings over grammar and spelling.
ecidivism
n. the habit of closing a browser tab to go do something else, only to absentmindedly return to the website you just left, which is your brain’s way of stress-testing your attention span under a synthetic and highly experimental blend of ones and zeroes, mostly zeroes.
July 2011
1 post
1 tag
antematter
n. the dream versions of things in your life, which appear totally foreign but are still somehow yours—your anteschool, your antefriends, your antehome—all part of a parallel world whose gravitational pull raises your life’s emotional stakes, increasing the chances you’ll end up betting everything you have.
June 2011
1 post
flashover
n. the moment a conversation becomes real and alive, which occurs when a spark of trust shorts out the delicate circuits you keep insulated under layers of irony, momentarily grounding the static emotional charge you’ve built up through decades of friction with the world.
May 2011
1 post
aoyaoia
n. a musical flavor found in electric guitar solos that compels you to snarl, squint and bend your spine like a longbow being drawn back to fire a warning shot to your distant ancestors, so they may know that your domestication will not go unavenged.
April 2011
2 posts
wytai
acronym [“when you think about it”] a feature of modern society that suddenly strikes you as absurd and grotesque—from zoos and milk-drinking to organ transplants, life insurance and fiction—part of the faint background noise of absurdity that reverberates from the moment our ancestors first crawled out of the slime but could not for the life of them remember what they got up to do.
aimonomia
n. fear that learning the name of something—a bird, a constellation, an attractive stranger—will somehow ruin it, transforming a lucky discovery into a conceptual husk pinned in a glass case, which leaves one less mystery to flutter around your head, trying to get in.
March 2011
2 posts
goffish
adj. exhausted by politeness, which wraps gifts of honesty in ceremonial bows, fluffy gestures and paper-thin phrases that protect the recipient from figuring out how you really feel about trust, status, intimacy and their new mustache.
ellipsism
n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline—the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the sum of the final payout of every investment ever made in the future—which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a...
February 2011
2 posts
apomakrysmenophobia
n. fear that your connections with people are ultimately shallow, that although your relationships feel congenial at the time, an audit of your life would produce an emotional safety deposit box of low-interest holdings and uninvested windfall profits, which will indicate you were never really at risk of joy, sacrifice or loss.
hiybbprqag
n. the feeling that everything has already been done, that the experiment of human culture long ago filled its petri dish and now just feeds on itself, endlessly crossbreeding old clichés into a radioactive ooze of sadness.
January 2011
2 posts
waldosia
n. [Brit. wallesia] a condition characterized by scanning faces in a crowd looking for a specific person who would have no reason to be there, which is your brain’s way of checking to see whether they’re still in your life, subconsciously patting its emotional pockets before it leaves for the day.
jalopia
n. fatigue with the laborious maintenance of having a body, a piñata of meat that’s incompatible with the Legoland rationality of the modern world, which was built for beings whose indestructible parts lock onto the Earth with a satisfying ‘click,’ whose emotions are standardized, whose mistakes are best measured in parts per million.
December 2010
3 posts
backmasking
n. the instinctive tendency to see someone as you knew them in their youth, a burned-in image of grass-stained knees, graffitied backpacks or handfuls of birthday cake superimposed on an adult with a degree, an illusion formed when someone opens the door to your emotional darkroom while the memory is still developing.
adomania
n. the crushing sense that the future is arriving ahead of schedule, that all those years with fanciful names like “2012” are bursting from their hypothetical cages into the arena of the present, furiously bucking the grip of your expectations while you lean and slip in your saddle, one hand reaching for reins, the other waving up high like a schoolkid who finally knows the answer to the question.
sluffing
n. the practice of smiling and nodding when you have absolutely no idea what someone just said, a method of smoothing over built-in glitches in conversation, an archaic medium that marries the bandwidth of a planetarium with the fidelity of a tin can telephone, for which we compensate by wrapping the Earth with fiberoptic cables until it looks like a gigantic ball of twine.
November 2010
2 posts
the unsharp mask
n. the tendency for online social networks to magnify unexpected personality traits of people you know, a side effect of compressing raw persona into a low-res digital format which can randomly brighten outer glow, sharpen comic edges, darken shadows or add motion blur to everyday life, much like the polarizing lens filters of alcohol, politics or youth.
the kinda blues
n. the sad awareness that the unfolding plot of your life feels new and profound but is not unique, just one of a few dozen possible riffs on the same chord progression, while the tunes reverberating from the jukebox in your chest are all covers of old standards from the Great Emotional Songbook, which is 98% identical to that of the chimpanzee.
October 2010
3 posts
faze-out
n. a mood totally out of sync with everyone else around you, from Friday night pensiveness to heart-to-heart snark, which is a symptom of emotional jet lag—caused by an inflamed suspicion of togetherness in an age of faceless anonymity—a condition whose only known cure is to perform the zombie dance from Thriller while openly weeping, which would effectively crash and reboot the collective vibe.
swish fulfillment
n. the feeling of delicate luck after casually tossing something across the room and hitting your target so crisply and perfectly that you feel no desire to even attempt another shot, which is a more compelling argument for the concept of monogamous love than anything sung to a guitar.
nementia
n. the post-distraction effort to recall the reason why you’re feeling particularly anxious or angry or excited, in which you retrace your sequence of thoughts like a kid wandering across the neighborhood gathering the string of a downed kite, which was likely lost in a romantic storm or devoured by that huge carnivorous tree that is Things Your Parents Have Said.
September 2010
2 posts
harvest chill
n. wistful foreboding at the first signs of autumn, as yellow leaves appear scattered on the ground like Post-Its leading you on a treasure hunt toward the realization that your slow slide into oblivion has already begun, steadily gathering speed on your way down to the end of the ride while the next generation waits at the top for their turn, a sobering reminder that it’s never too early to...
August 2010
8 posts
deep cut
n. an emotion you haven’t felt in years that you might have forgotten about completely if your emotional playlist hadn’t been left on shuffle—a feeling whose opening riff tugs on all your other neurons like a dog on a leash waiting for you to open the door.
furosha
n. the eerie tranquillity of fast-moving clouds, who pass through your patch of sky like a wind-weary drifter stepping into your entryway to warm up for a minute, ruffling the ice from his beard before he nods his gratitude, closes his ragged coat and youthful eyes and turns back into the air.
the hesitation waltz
n. the act of deciding whether to give a departing acquaintance a hug or a handshake, calculated by measuring your relative orbits, how long it takes your signals to bounce back, and the proximity of a close friend who just gave them a hug, whose massive gravitational force could slingshot you into a long-distance wave.
seophoria
n. the satisfaction of lists, a series of bullet points being fired into the air as if to celebrate victory against the complexity of a universe that bombards us with five exabytes of data that would paralyze us if we didn’t connect random dots into constellations of dippers, hunters, and sexy ways to please your man.
lethobenthos
n. the habit of forgetting how important someone is to you until you see them again in person, making you wish your day would begin with a “previously on” recap of your life’s various plot arcs, and end with “to be continued…” after those will-they-won’t-they cliffhanger episodes that air just before the show goes back into months of repeats.
alimento mori
n. the insomnia-borne jolt of awareness that you will die, that these passing years aren’t just scenes from a dress rehearsal, rounds of an ongoing game or chapters in a story you’ll be telling later, but are footprints being lapped by the steadily gathering tide of an unfathomable abyss, which still wouldn’t wash out the aftertaste of all those baskets of Buffalo wings you devoured...
1 tag
vonlenska
n. the emotional punch of lyrics written in foreign languages, each of which comes bundled with its own distinct mood—the elegant disappointment of French, the poetic jocularity of Portuguese, the tipsy brashness of Russian—just a few of the dozens of dialects you’d need to learn in order to fully answer the question, “Wassup?”
Funkenzwangsvorstellung
n. the instinctive trance of a campfire in the dark, spending hours roasting and watching as it settles and sinks into the ground like a heap of shipwrecks whose sailors raise their flickering sails trying to signal that the prevailing winds of your life are about to shift, that the edge of the Earth is real and looming just a few years ahead, and that your marshmallow is on fire.
July 2010
3 posts
la cuna
n. a twinge of sadness that there’s no frontier left, that as the last explorer trudged with his armies toward a blank spot on the map, he didn’t suddenly remember his daughter’s upcoming piano recital and turn for home, leaving a new continent unexplored so we could set its mists and mountains aside as a strategic reserve of mystery, if only to answer more of our...
laughtershock
n. an embarrassing memory from middle school that slips back into your head from out of nowhere, a fault line in the crust of passing years—whose ever-thickening strata warp and buckle between the pressures of this week and a mantle of forgotten things two thousand miles deep—which is part of a theory on the evolution of the self known as cafeteria plate tectonics.
anti-aliasing
n. -soc. psych. curiosity about the real flesh-and-blood people behind internet usernames, whose vivid individuality suggests that when our parents were tracing their fingers along our nameless faces looking for some hint of who we were to become, they really should have gone with Mr Cookieface, Unicornpuncher, Dutchess Von Whatever, or Wookiegasm.
June 2010
5 posts
dream fever
n. the intense heat on the skin of a sleeping person, a radioactive byproduct of an idle mind humming with secret delusions which then vaporize when plunged into the cooling bath of reality, thus preventing a meltdown that could endanger those close by, who tolerate the risk because it gives them energy.
1 tag
the Lazenby effect
n. the tendency for the day after a really good day to be an utterly shitty one, a karmic circuit breaker that recalibrates your capacity to savor subsequent success, a periodic whipcrack that twists your flatlining trajectory into a heartbeat curve that leaves you shaken, not stirred.
lalalalia
n. the realization while talking to yourself that someone else is within earshot, which leads you to crossfade into mumbled singing, an auditory sleight of hand that distracts the audience from the exposed platform under your persona while you prepare to saw your confidence in half.
rialtoscuro
n. disorientation when you step outside a movie theater into unexpected darkness, a twinge of jet lag from two hours of escapist fun which only diverts you from making the sequel to your youth—an old cult classic with wild shifts in tone, dropped subplots, major characters that appear out of nowhere only to vanish without explanation, and an ambiguous ending—but this time, it’s personal.
1 tag
Knight Rider syndrome
n. disillusionment upon rewatching a beloved pop-culture touchstone of your youth and having to confront its hand-puppet characterization, magnetic-poetry dialogue, jury-rigged plots and undisguised pandering to its audience, all of which—by the power of Grayskull—makes you wonder what else in your mental fridge is past its expiration date.