The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

mahpiohanzia

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:18:00 -0600

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.

xeno

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:36:00 -0600

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

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:22:00 -0600

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

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 09:23:00 -0600

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.

Zielschmerz

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:13:52 -0600

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

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 11:23:00 -0600

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 fling out into the dark, a message in a bottle that’s only just now washing up in the Earth’s atmosphere, an invitation to a party that already ended a million years ago.

slipcast

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:01:01 -0600

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.

trumspringa

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 16:06:00 -0500

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

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 02:40:00 -0500

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.

matte finish

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:54:00 -0500

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

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:43:00 -0500

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

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:14:11 -0500

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

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:18:27 -0500

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.

antematter

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:14:50 -0500

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.

flashover

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 16:49:00 -0500

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.

aoyaoia

Wed, 04 May 2011 18:28:49 -0500

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.

wytai

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:32:00 -0500

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

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 10:16:15 -0500

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.

goffish

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:00:00 -0500

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

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:11:46 -0600

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 lightbulb.