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.