I am luvin' this long Thanksgiving Holiday. Had a great time with family Thursday. And now the second of three days off in a row! Dean and I debated going to see "Twilight" last night, but resisted. I think True Blood is more our style. Tonight we might go see "Synecdoche, New York." I got a little more writing done on the Expedition series. One more day of work Monday, and then we are off to PV for a little beach vacation. I can hardly wait.

*

leisure sickness
overshare
cyberchondriac
selective ignorance
youthanasia

WOTY UPDATES It was the turn of the editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary to announce its candidates for its 2008 Word of the Year last week. The five words on the short list are "leisure sickness", in which some people are more likely to report feeling ill outside work hours; "overshare", to divulge too much personal information; "cyberchondriac", a hypochondriac who gets his medical information from the Internet; "selective ignorance", ignoring any distracting or irrelevant information; and "youthanasia", a word best known from the 2004 Megadeth lyric and the film of 2005, which I've never seen in the wild but which was said by Armand Limnander in the New York Times in April 2007 to refer to the "controversial practice of performing a battery of age-defying medical procedures to end lifeless skin and wrinkles; advocated by some as a last-resort measure to put the chronically youth-obsessed out of their misery". It's an eclectic and slightly strange bunch of words, but as the Editor in Chief, Michael Agnes, said, "The choice does not reflect an opinion that the term will eventually be found in the dictionary. In short, it's merely one that made us chuckle, think, reflect, or just shake our heads." Add your vote to those of the dictionary's editors and researchers via http://wwwords.org?WNWC.

*
(from today's Poetry Foundation)
A Hundred Bolts of Satin
By Kay Ryan

All you
have to lose
is one
connection
and the mind
uncouples
all the way back.
It seems
to have been
a train.
There seems
to have been
a track.
The things
that you
unpack
from the
abandoned cars
cannot sustain
life: a crate of
tractor axles,
for example,
a dozen dozen
clasp knives,
a hundred
bolts of satin—
perhaps you
specialized
more than
you imagined.

*