Life has been treating me awfully well lately. I am so thankful.
Happy thanksgiving, everyone!
brokering a truce with life
In 2006 The New York Times conducted a survey to identify the The Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years. The results, as selected by prominent writers, critics, editors and literary sages, are:
However, the respondents worry that such inquiry, “by feeding the deplorable modern mania for ranking, list-making and fabricated competition, would not only distract from the serious business of literature but, worse, subject it to damaging trivialization. To consecrate one work as the best - or even to establish a short list of near-bests - would be to risk the implication that no one need bother with the rest, and thus betray the cause of reading. The determination of literary merit, it was suggested, should properly be a matter of reasoned judgment and persuasive argument, not mass opinionizing. Criticism should not cede its prickly, qualitative prerogatives to the quantifying urges of sociology or market research.”
No worry, really, because I aim to read all 22 books in the list (of which, to my chagrin, I’ve read only 12 and ¼!) as well as all the winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and all the other outstanding pieces of literature that haven’t won a single award – even if takes an entire lifetime and even if it kills me.
I ask, “Hey, what do you want for dinner?”
He answers, “Whatever.”
Doesn’t it drive you crazy when you ask a question and you get “whatever” for an answer? It’s just so annoying. It’s very dismissive – like the person you are talking to doesn’t care enough about the question to dignify it with an answer other than "whatever". As a pronoun, it means “anything and everything that” but what it really means is, “I don’t care.”
The Urban Dictionary listed 36 different usages for and definitions of the word “whatever”. Here are some of them:
1. Used in an argument to admit that you are wrong without admitting it so the argument is over.
Man, whatever.
2. Uttered in a derisive and dismissive tone, in response to a confrontation or accusation which has been judged to be unimpressive, obnoxious, or disingenuous. Often used to dismiss someone when it is clear that rational discussion would be a waste of time and energy.
Don't tell me you believe in that "evolution" stuff! The Bible clearly states that the Earth is 6,000 years old!
Whatever, dude. Can you go bother someone else now please?
3. A polite and less vulgar alternative to "F*CK YOU".
Jack: "Wow, what happened to you? You look like hell today!"
Jill: "Whatever"
4. I don't care.
As in:
Boy: I am exhausted today. Looking forward to going home and doing nothing, hopefully you're up for the same?
Girl: Yeah, whatever.
5. Word all too often used to connote a feeling of apathy.
"They bombed a foreign nation without cable TV. Millions died."
"Whatever. They're making another Temptation Island." "Sweet."
Like almost everyone else, we went to the
It was such a fun day. There were vendors all around selling e-load, candles, fish balls, sweet corn, peanuts and all of the other street food you can imagine. We even got to splurge on dirty ice cream!
Mariflor came with her husband, Basil came without his ever famous mustache, and Jennifer and I came with our curls. There’s Avegail, a classmate from grade school to college, who leads a life of heroic endurance. How she struggles--and gracefully survives--as a single mother to her three kids humbles me. There’s Anne Marie who amazed me with how warm she really is. The air of distance that used to keep her closeted from the rest of us is gone. Vona, the batch’s beauty title holder, is as beautiful as ever. I wonder how she does it.
Here are our pictures (left picture, from left to right: Avegail, Mariflor, Jennifer, Anne Marie, Basil Oscar, me, and Vona).
And with Aileen two days after:
I clung to the shoulders of arguably the handsomest man I saw in Colombia, as we roared down the highway on his motorbike. Soaked in th...