Tonight at work I had the distinct pleasure of meeting a very well-spoken woman.

I discovered this fact about her as I was ringing up some dog paraphernalia she was purchasing. She informed me that the dogs on the cards and ornaments she was buying were called Westies. “I have a Westie at home,” she said, “and she’s very aunry.”

I stopped and stared.

“What did you just say?”

“She’s very aunry.”

I still remember the day I discovered the controversy surrounding the word ‘ornery’. I must have been only nine or ten, sitting hunched over my little Performa, furiously tapping away at some undoubtedly eloquent prose.

That’s when it happened: I tried to call someone or something in whatever I was writing ‘aunry.’ I was usually good at spelling, but for some reason I could not call to mind the spelling of this word. I suddenly realized that I had never actually seen it in print. I knew exactly what it meant—stubborn, willful, unpleasant—because I had been called ‘aunry’ by somebody at least once every day for the first seven years of my existence—but I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to spell it.

I figured I would be able to sound it out phonetically. I tried ‘aunry’, ‘onry’, ‘aunrie’, ‘onrie’, each attempt looking more ridiculous than the one before. After several minutes of quiet consternation, I finally asked my mom, the resident expert on the English language, how it was spelled.

“ORNERY?” I exclaimed, sounding out the strange syllables after she showed me the word in the dictionary. How could a word pronounced ‘aunry’ be spelled ‘ORNERY’? This did not make any sense to my ten-year-old brain.

But growing older (and hopefully wiser) means coming to terms with the fact that your own family’s idiosyncrasies are not the only way to do things. Alternatively, it means coming to terms with the fact that everyone in the world except your family does things wrong. I chose the latter route.

Ever since that fateful discovery I have refused to succumb to my friends’ insidious suggestion that ‘ornery’ might actually be pronounced just like it is spelled. I am not sure where my family picked up ‘aunry’—I can only assume it is southern in origin—but now that I have grown up with it I WILL NOT BE TURNED.

So you can imagine my joy this evening, while standing behind the cash register of the anonymous retail location employing me, when that wonderful woman up and said “AUNRY.” Oh, that wonderful woman, and her wonderful, aunry, aunry Westie. I felt like I was facing a long lost relative. Stars danced in front of my eyes, somewhere a band of fiddles struck up, and I reached across the counter and embraced her as I squealed, “Auntie May, you’ve come HOME!”

Just kidding. Actually, I just kind of stood there staring at her until we both felt awkward and then I finally sputtered “You… you say that word right!”

She laughed politely, then turned equally politely away from the counter and started looking at more merchandise, obviously unwilling to acknowledge the fact that there was any other way to say that word. My kind of woman.

I reluctantly continued ringing up and bagging her merchandise, all notions of bringing her back to the farm to bake pies with us slowly slipping from my mind.

But I will always remember her—the woman who proved once and for all how the word ‘ornery’ is correctly pronounced. And don’t any of you try to tell me any different.

My long-time friend Hope made me this lovely garment for Christmas:

Freakin’ Sweet.

(A Christmas post is a’comin. In the meantime, Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope that Santa brought you exactly what you wanted, or if he didn’t that you take this opportunity to build some good, solid character out of the whole experience.)

1. My hair was doing that thing again. I threw it into a ponytail approximately 0.5 seconds before I had to be in my car driving to work, took one look at the way that it was coiling and flipping all around itself like some kind of mad snake and said, “All right, hair. You win this round.”
2. I poured super glue all over my hands in such a way that for the greater part of the evening my palms felt like sandpaper. I was actually on the phone when it happened… and in my fidgety way I happened to pick up a tube of super glue which happened to be slightly unscrewed and happened to spill out all over my hands and my apron and the floor while I mouthed silent terror at it. Now the patches of dried glue are finally starting to wear off, but it makes typing a little awkward.
3. I forgot to brush my teeth this morning. That’s bad enough—it meant that I had bad breath today. But you know what’s worse? Brace yourself—I didn’t brush them last night, either! How could such a travesty happen to a human being, you ask? The answer is too complicated. Suffice to say, that was enough to elevate my breath from bad to super-gosh-awful bad. I’m sure the customers appreciated that.
4. I am getting a cold. This is probably the optimum thing I could wish to happen, ever! Especially during Christmas break. But it led to the rather unintentionally funny side effect of my not being able to talk for the first half of today. I just tried, and… not much came out. I managed to interact with customers, but it probably sounded like I was standing on the other side of the room. Inside an aquarium.
5. But only for the first half of the day. Because, later, as I was standing in the back room drinking from my mug of warm tea, a funny thing happened. I discovered that the reason I could not talk was not actually because of my sore throat, but because a GIANT WAD of PHLEGM had wedged itself in my throat—a fact that I only discovered as I SWALLOWED said giant wad of phlegm. Which inevitably led me to the realization that there is nothing quite like the feeling of having just swallowed a giant wad of phlegm that you did not even know was in your throat. And, yes, you are welcome for that mental image.

So, basically, this afternoon I was a messy-haired, super-glue-handed, bad-breathed, mute, phlegmy-throated employee. sigh

I can’t wait for the Google searches on that one.

Today I sat in a Eugene coffee shop, hunched over my copy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, scribbling furiously in the margins.

I really enjoy studying and reading in coffee shops. Somehow the environment is just busy enough to be stimulating without being too busy—it envelopes you in its bustling, warm environment, and because there is so much noise, your ears don’t tend to pick out specific, distracting threads of speech. But sometimes someone else’s conversation will become just a little too loud or a little too interesting.

This happened today.

I don’t try to eavesdrop. And I don’t think it’s a respectful thing to do, on the whole. But when two college girls seat themselves on the quiet end of the coffee shop and start gabbing in unavoidably loud voices, they don’t leave you much choice.

Despite the volume of these two girls’ conversation, however, I did not listen to them—at first. I was concentrating very hard on my reading. But you know that little tape recorder in the back of your head? The one that kind of “hears” things when you don’t really hear them, when your mind is elsewhere, and then plays them back to you when the world slides back into focus?

Well. My little mental tape recorder slowly began to recognize a, ah, pattern in the speech of these two young ladies. They both had a bit of that… certain something in their speech. I will call it “Valley Girl Speak.”

Now, I don’t have anything against individuals who are valley-girl-ish. It’s just that, as a concept, it is rather easy to laugh at. Observe:

I decided to try a little experiment. I identified three key phrases that one girl in particular used repeatedly. Then, for a mere two or three minutes, I left one ear open as I continued to read, and casually recorded a tick mark in the margin of my book any time she said one of these phrases.

And, I don’t bring this up to humiliate or point the finger at anyone, or with any kind of hostility—let it just be known, for history’s sake, that in those two or three minutes, that poor girl used the word “Like” Twenty-seven times.

“Oh my gawd!” and “That’s SOOOO funny!” tied for second and third with a mere Six times each. Practically nothing.

Also, the phrases “Oh my gawd, like, so…,” “That’s like a little like…,” and “That’s SOOO funny… when did he text you that?” were each uttered at least once.

I actually had to bury my mouth in my arm to prevent myself from laughing around the sixth time that she said “That’s SOOO funny!”

But really… TWENTY-SEVEN times?

That takes skill.

Today a friend of mine told me about how she used to be terrified of “the Joker” from Batman, and how her older brother used to hide behind the shower curtain and jump out when she walked into the bathroom, yelling, “The Joker’s got you!” Naturally, this did not make my friend very happy.

Last night, another friend told me about the time her brother and his friend, who were babysitting her and her sister, convinced them that there was a man outside waiting to KIDNAP them. Great babysitters, those.

I think I got pretty lucky in the older sibling department. The worst thing my brother ever did was indoctrinate me with his fallacious beliefs that clear Christmas lights and gravy are evil.

What about you? Any sibling horror stories?

(P.S. I do not really mean to suggest that brothers who torment their younger sisters are not good brothers; both of the friends I mentioned adore their big brothers. Just so you know. )

So. This afternoon we had our little Thanksgiving lunch/dinner, in which we all devoured turkey and stuffing and gravy and cranberry sauce and rolls (and some of them had mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes and green beans as well). It was lovely. I anticipate that the second act, called “eating leftovers instead of spending money on lunch” will be equally as lovely.

AND I even did big, important, helpful things, like stirring the gravy and washing a few dishes!

Perhaps I am not a complete domestic failure after all.

This morning before work, I shuffled into the kitchen and set some water for my coffee on the stove. Then I shuffled into the hallway, grabbed a box of Wheaties from the pantry, and shuffled back into the kitchen to pour myself some cereal.

It was a brand new, never-before-opened box of Wheaties. As I prepared to break the seal, my sleepy eyes happened to focus on these words, written on the small tab in the middle of the box top: “To Open, Slide Finger Under Arrows to Left And Right.”

This gave me pause.

Now, I realize that American consumers are becoming dumber. Or, at least, that the companies who offer us products to consume believe we are. So I honestly was not all that bothered by the fact that Wheaties felt compelled to tell me how to rip one piece of cardboard off of another piece of cardboard. The thing that really bothered me—that left me standing there puzzling for a full three seconds before actually pouring my cereal—was why they stopped there.

The thing is, opening the box top has never been the problem for me. Anyone who has been alive for more than four or five years knows that opening the bag is the really challenging part of a new box of cereal.

Maybe I am alone in this, but I just find it kind of disturbing that in this age of “do not insert knife into child”-type labels, Wheaties couldn’t take the time to give us poor bewildered cereal-eaters a little direction when it came to opening that darned plastic bag. It wouldn’t have to be anything fancy—a simple “To Open, USE SCISSORS” would probably suffice. Anything to alleviate those few frantic moments of tugging and grunting and teeth-gnashing and swearing at that stupid welded-together plastic.

After I had given this weighty topic its due consideration (and after I had finally managed to open the plastic bag), I poured myself some cereal.

Then, after stuffing the bag back down into the box, I closed the box top. And that’s when I noticed these words: “TO CLOSE, PUSH TAB UNDER HERE.”

…

I’m just saying…

In addition to a number of habits, I seem to have picked up a set of accouterments for productivity this quarter:

Now, whenever I am studying or writing or doing basically any kind of work that has to do with paper, I feel incomplete without my lovely colored pens and my iPod and my reading glasses. Shallow, I know, but these items actually make me feel more like studying. I liken their effect to that an actor feels when he puts on a costume and becomes that character. I put in my earbuds and put on my glasses and I am studious.

Which, incidentally, is what I should get back to being right now. Cheers.

• Thinking
• Walking
• Talking
• Living out of my backpack
• Drinking coffee
• Wearing reading glasses
• Still periodically behaving like a five year old

And… heck! The quarter’s not even quite over. Who knows what might happen in the next two-ish weeks.

Who decided that it was a good idea for me to walk out of the house today wearing a bright purple sweater, a bright turquoise cardigan, and bright red shoes?

Whoever she is, I should fire her.

Also, the person who decided that it was a good idea to just fall asleep last night without first getting ready for bed and then was so rushed this morning that she left on the exact same pants—and MAKEUP—that she was wearing yesterday?

She should be fired too. For making me look and feel like a hobo. All day.

(P.S. I don’t think I should be allowed to write blog entries when I am tired and snarky. )