playing with myself

A few hours into my mini-vacation and I think I've stumbled across a truth. My soul mate has only been away from me for 7 hours now but I miss her achingly already. She'll be celebrating an early x-mas with her family and then coming back here in 2 days to celebrate with my family. It'll be our first x-mas together in our 2 year relationship. But right now sitting at home I miss her. And I've never dealt with silences well.

At the same time I just now realized that this occasional apart-ness may be an essential part of any healthy long-term, living-together relationship. There is some basic part of me that requires a small set of totally unfocused time with myself. Indeed now that I think back upon my almost 2 score years I have always needed this in one form or another of dead time. During my hermit years I took this tendency far too far; indulged too much in myself you could say. These days the most I can stand it is a few times a year for a day or two. Yet these rarer-over-time interludes are needed for some basic reason. A time to shutdown and retool well-used parts of the shop; refocus the instincts, is my best guess. Anyways, I'm well provisioned with beer, diet pepsi, chocolate, chips, good books, movies, web access, and unlimited tunes, so all is good with the world. I'll survive until my love returns.

and for those who came to this article wholly looking for some other, perhaps more explicit topic...you've bitten an illusory bait I'm sorry to say. Don't worry, I'll throw you back when I've done with you... :-)

call out to all word warriors

Via the excellent Shifted Librarian: feed the hungry (via the U.N.) by playing this simple (and fun!) online vocabulary game - there are NO strings attached:

• FreeRice
  

Almost 5 trillion grains of rice have been donated in the month and a half since this was launched. I got up to 850 grains myself (and vocab level 42) in only a few minutes time.

If you go to the Totals page and click the link from there, you can see that the U.S. is almost dead last (ahead of only Greece of the 23 countries listed) in the percentage of our income that is donated as international aid. We are a truly greedy, sad excuse for a nation...

Go do your part, my fellow word warriors and join the fray...