The other day as I worked in a kindergarten classroom I overheard the classroom teacher reading a book to the students. The book was a fairly generic children’s book teaching standard kindergarten vocabulary words such as muffler, jumper, and galoshes……wait, what??

These may have been standard kindergarten vocabulary words in the early 1900s when the teacher bought this book, but to my twenty-first century knowledge a muffler is a car part, a jumper is one who jumps, and galoshes have been extinct since our last President outlawed three-syllable words because he couldn’t pronounce them and his advisors suggested a simplified one-syllable term to replace it. And so it came to pass that in present-day Portland, we use words like scarf, dress, and boots. Thereby saving a total of four syllables, increasing the efficiency of a given conversational exchange as follows:

Yesterday: “You look dashing in your new matching jumper and muffler. Now run along and fetch your galoshes so you don’t catch cold in that tempestuous snowstorm.”

Today, after reading Troi’s revolutionary blog: “Put on your dress and scarf and boots and let’s get outta here.”

I move that we simplify the length and complexity of all of our words, thereby increasing the units of information that can be exchanged over a finite period of time. Imagine just how much information I could share in one of my lengthy (yet highly enjoyable!) voice mail messages if I weren’t constrained by multisyllabic words.

Think about it.

–Troi out

So here I am, wisely using my time at a recent work meeting to catch up on in-depth personal conversation with coworkers*, when the topic of facebook arose and a coworker divulged indignantly that a facebook friend had recently blocked her from posting comments on his wall. (For those of you readers unfamiliar with the concept of facebook, that is, people who are dead, almost dead, or who were born yesterday—-literally—-this is not a real wall and posting on it does not therefore constitute graffiti.) My coworker admitted mild surprise at being the recipient of this virtual barricade, considering she’d never written on his wall to begin with and that their relationship was completely cordial.

Which got me to wondering why somebody would have a facebook friend from whom they had no interest in hearing, even in the form of an innocuous wall greeting. I understand that not all of my facebook friends are those best friends for whom I would jump in front of an ice cream truck (not to save them, but to buy some ice cream) or with whom I hope to be buried (but not while alive). Yet doesn’t that facebook friend status imply some level of amicable, or at least merely tolerable, connection? If the thought of you writing a comment on my wall invokes a feeling of fear, panic, disgust, or sheer horror, and I have to go out of my way to block any possible contact you might hypothetically one day try to make, shouldn’t I perhaps not add you as a facebook friend to begin with??

But then it occurred to me that denying a friend request comes with its own set of complications. After all, everybody who’s anybody adds anybody and everybody. And just when you’ve clicked “ignore friend request” and begin to think you’re safe, you end up running into your friend’s brother’s wife’s dog’s nephew’s younger sister who you didn’t add because you’ve never met her and weren’t sure she actually existed, but here she is at Fred Meyer in the cereal aisle wondering why you ignored her friend request because she’s a very nice person really and what has she ever done to you??

And suddenly the lightbulb came on, and right after that I had a really good idea. Rather than adding facebook “friends,” we need to begin organizing our social connections and compartmentalizing them into two columns of contacts: Facebook “friends” and Facebook “foes.” People with whom we have some level of regular contact, and whom we like, love, or tolerate, will henceforth be esteemed as such in the “friends” column.

Facebook “foes,” on the other hand, are people whom you’ve never met (or you went to preschool with them, or they went to preschool with your friend’s brother’s wife’s dog’s nephew’s younger sister, or you were baptized in the same religious ceremony at the age of seven months), or people whom you dislike, cannot tolerate, and/or entirely despise. These people will be recognized as such in your “foes” column. Rather than a bright and shining profile pic, their profile box will be marred by a giant red X, and when all of your friends go to your page, they will instantly know who the cool people are, and who the rejects are. It will be just like junior high, except that in junior high I didn’t have the internet and couldn’t mark a big red X on people’s faces just because I didn’t like them. Not after that one time, when I got suspended from school for a week.**

Readers, I hope that you like my brainchild of differentiating facebook “friends” from facebook “foes” and perpetuating alienation and divisiveness among our online social connections. Please stay tuned for my next post: How to lose friends and alienate people at a rapid rate through blogging.

–Troi out

*If you are my supervisor, that sentence is entirely false.

**Just kidding. I like everybody. Except you.

Following my hysterical laughter upon hearing of John’s unfortunate experience, I found myself reflecting on incompetence in the food service industry, and I have come to the conclusion there are two kinds of incompetence: accidental incompetence, and willful incompetence.

The former, that of accidental incompetence, can best be exemplified by using the example of a novice Starbucks employee, who shall remain anonymous. (Okay, fine, it was me.) There is a minute possibility that I may have appeared incompetent my first few weeks on the job, due to a few minor faux pas. There was the time I re-used the pitcher that had previously been filled with coffee to fill it with black tea, without first rinsing said pitcher. Now, I didn’t see the problem considering I love the taste of coffee and assumed the coffee remnants left in the pitcher could only enhance the taste of the black tea; however, my supervisor thought otherwise. There was the time that I couldn’t scoop a pastry off the shelf and it crumbled on the floor; as did the second, third, and fourth pastries, until I was physically removed from the pastry premises. There were the failed attempts to add the espresso into my customer’s lattes, the successful act of spilling scalding coffee all over myself, the placing of all large bills from my cash transactions into somebody else’s cash box instead of my own; you know, the usual tiny mistakes.

Then there is willful incompetence. This is the employee who hears “Chocolate malted shake, NOT malted CRUNCH” and proceeds to pour cookie crunches into the shake while riddled with maniacal laughter. (John, the previous statement may have been embellished.) This willful incompetence could also be my coworker from Starbucks a few summers ago who, after serving a “half decaf venti sugar-free hazelnut no-foam 175 degree latte” to a customer, turned to me and whispered delightfully, “She got ALL DECAF because she was a B#$&@!!” Upon taking this customer’s order, I hadn’t been cognizant of the fact that she was a b#$%@, likely because I was so all-consumed by attempting to correctly punch in her order on the various screens on the register and was unable to look up and see the gesture that she was giving me. (I won’t tell you which fingers were used during this gesture, but I will tell you that it was not the thumbs-up.) At any rate, while I found my coworker’s actions amusing, I have to say that no matter how unpleasant a customer, if that customer is spending upwards of five bucks on a beverage, he or she should probably receive the beverage of request.

And John, you should have received your chocolate malted shake. But I’m glad you didn’t, because I’m sure I was not the only person whose day was brightened by your traumatic tale of malted misfortune.

–Troi out

I love the rain. I love the way it cleans the air, and how the fresh scent infuses me with a nearly euphoric feeling or at the least the genuine and pure warmth of peace. I don’t even mind the way it drenches my bangs so that they cover my eyes and blind me, or the aftermath in which each individual strand of hair manages to protrude proudly in a different direction and give others the impression I’m half-human and half-porcupine. I love the way that so many Portlanders, myself included, scoff at umbrellas and embrace the fervently falling drops, as if we’ve made our peace with the fact that taking cover eludes the windfall that makes Portland one of the most lush locales we have the good fortune to inhabit.

That’s not to say that my love affair with the rain carries on all ten—-it’s Portland, let’s be honest, eleven—-months of the year. Much like a new relationship, I find that my honeymoon period with the rain lasts approximately three months and twenty-three days, at which time I begin to become disenchanted with its adverse impact on my life. Take its direct effect on my fashion savvy. For example, while my closet proudly displays fourteen adorable jackets, only one actually repels the rain, and it’s the least adorable one of the bunch. Yet it’s the only one that gets worn during the months of September through July, leaving the others to feel dejected and abandoned. Not to mention that I can’t possibly be expected to walk six blocks to the gym when it’s raining, as the aforementioned bangs get in my aforementioned eyes, rendering me temporarily blinded by the elements (the elements being my unmanageable hair) and thus an unsafe street crosser who can’t look both ways. Or even straight ahead.

But let’s be honest; I didn’t actually have a sense of fashion to begin with, and I didn’t actually walk to the gym even when the weather was sunny. I’ve actually forgotten where my gym is, although I know for certain it’s six blocks in some direction from my place.

So the absolute delight induced by the rain far outweighs any unfavorable consequences it might inadvertently bestow in its glorious mist. And I’m excited it has returned for an extended visit. At least for the next three months and twenty-three days.

–Troi out

Over the last few weeks I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to capture these troublesome tyrants, attempting to smash them between my palms while jumping, springing, bouncing, and pouncing, and never doing a damn thing but entertaining the neighbors, who probably think I’m doing some sort of Native American rain dance. And I swear I hear the fruit flies chortle every time they evade my increasingly bruised hands. A few nights ago I actually succeeded in catching one, and I was so startled by the unexpected victory that I stared at my victim for nearly a full minute, wondering what people typically do once they’ve smashed a fly on their hands. Bury it? Hold a fruit fly funeral?

It really became quite a mystery to me how my flying foes came to inhabit my place of residence. After all, fruit flies are labeled as such because of their affinity for fruit, and being a person of total fruitlessness, I couldn’t fathom how they came to have such an affinity for me. Not only is my house devoid of all fresh fruit, but also such toxins as fresh vegetables literally flee in panic from the highly preserved contents of my refrigerator. They know they don’t stand a chance next to my BFF, processed cheese.

So what exactly are these flies wanting from me? A stable home life? Money? Fame? I pondered this question as I opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink to toss some trash into the garbage can and as my fan club of fruit flies swarmed out from beneath the cupboard to greet me, I saw the culprit glaring out at me from the array of discarded items: a banana peel.

How could I have forgotten that I consume 5/6 of a banana every day in my protein shake?? I plop nearly everything into that thing when I make it; rice milk, peanut butter, bee pollen, protein powder, yesterday’s leftovers, last week’s leftovers, a shot of whiskey, and the contents of my recycling bin; my protein shake is so dense it could feed a family of four for a week. And when I get home from work to make the shake I’m so hungry I could eat a family of four. For a week.

And it is precisely these banana peels that are luring these flying fiends into my abode. I could find a better way to dispose of the peel, but I figure the easier solution is to throw the whole peel into my protein shake along with the rest of my belongings.

Now that I have eliminated the source of my fruit flies (if only all problems were eliminated so easily—-but men are too big to smash between your fingers ), and I can type with both hands again, you can expect an increase in the number of blogs I’m able to post. Sorry about that.

–Troi out

I spent four post-college years tirelessly studying the field of speech and hearing sciences. Knowledge and memory of politics, world religions, important dates such as my best friend’s birthday, the name of my favorite breakfast cereal, and the Starfleet ranking of my favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation characters gradually seeped from my cortex as knowledge and memory of theories of language development, audiology and aural rehabilitation, fluency disorders, voice disorders, swallowing disorders, and articulation and phonological disorders took its place. I nearly lost the ability to have a normal conversation as I discarded my usual pleasantries in favor of a more analytical approach to interactions:

Starbucks barista: Can I take your order?
Me: Did you mean “MAY I take your order?” And I notice your initial rhotic /r/ sound in “order” appears to emerge from the retroflex lingual position rather than the more typical bunched position. And did you know that “I,” while being a vowel denoted by a single letter, is in fact a diphthong denoted by the international phonetic alphabet with two letters, and produced only in the presence of lingual movement?
Starbucks barista: [calling for security]

And today I discover to my dismay that all of this training is for naught, and that my time might well have been better spent remembering my friends’ birthdays and watching Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns. Because, as boingboing.net so eloquently pointed out to me, my human expertise in the field of speech-language pathology is simply no match for the technological expertise that analyzes the speech patterns of young children as well as information regarding children’s language environment and development. Which leaves me to simply twiddle my thumbs and eat bon bons while a computer objectively identifies the number of conversational turns a mom has with her baby (Mom: Ga ga! Baby: Ga ga ga! Computer: Congratulations! You have just completed one full conversational turn!) and the complexity of the sentence structures used by the parental figures (Mom: Stop chewing on mommy’s expensive jewelry! Computer: Congratulations! With the plethora of grammatical forms utilized in your conversational turn, including but not limited to present progressive -ing ending, possessive form, adjective, noun, and an imperative negation, your baby will be attending Harvard before his seventh birthday! As long as he stops eating jewelry!)

This technology, known as LENA, appears unnecessary, and I’ll tell you why. While it’s based on solid research that indicates the quantity of speech input and output experienced by a child between the ages of birth to three is correlated with that child’s IQ and vocabulary size, LENA (as per boingboing.net) “was developed to give parents useful information to help ensure they are providing the richest language environment possible to their children during the critical years between birth and age 4, before they enter school.”

The problem is that those parents who are both sufficiently concerned and financially equipped to purchase LENA are the parents who are already likely providing their child with an adequate environment of enriched language input and whose child is more likely to acquire the language necessary to reach their academic potential in the school environment. And were those parents to have concerns about their child’s language development, they could access the free early intervention services provided through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Part C, by which a simple screening could either validate or ease their concerns, and without the $200 price tag attached to LENA. On the other hand, those families who would most likely benefit from LENA, whose children may be at a higher risk for speech and language disorders, are those for whom LENA is likely a resource they cannot afford to access. Once again, a free screening by a real human who can identify areas of concern and connect the family with early intervention specialists who can support and advise the family in an environment conducive to family need, such as the home or daycare setting, is a more realistic and inclusive approach than LENA.

But to further prove my point, I think I’ll buy LENA anyway. She might be able to analyze speech patterns, but let’s watch her spend seven hours a day evaluating and treating speech and language disorders in young children while managing concomitant attentional and behavioral challenges. My guess is that I’ll still make a better speech pathologist than she does.

–Troi out

The enlightenment of a good friend (you know who you are) revealed to me that I had not plugged in the firewire cable, but instead a power plug. It was not any power plug. It was not even a plug that serves any sort of computer or videocamera purpose at all. It was in fact my cell phone charger that I was plugging into my camera.

It turns out that many people make this same mistake. Did you know that the recent number of lay-offs in high-end video production companies is because of the fact that employees are constantly trying to charge their cell phones with their firewire cables and using their cell phone chargers to attempt to import and export video footage? It turns out that there are an estimated 5,000 hours of unproductivity per year due to this very error. Production supervisors have yet to determine the cause of this confusion, due to the striking differences between these two separate entities, including their shape, size, and the fact that one plugs into the back of your computer while the other plugs into a wall outlet. And I have now been offered a hefty sum of money to go into these companies and train employees to distinguish between cell phone chargers and firewire cables. I have accepted the job, and I’m going to start with a variety of demonstrations of what not to do, such as showing employees what happens when they try to film footage with their computer and edit the footage on their cell phones.

Okay, well, approximately 100 percent of that last paragraph was false. I was trying to redeem myself but it appears there is no redemption for an error of this magnitude. Next thing you know I’ll be brushing my teeth with the car keys and sticking my toothbrush in the ignition. Is there no end to this lack of common sense?

There should be a moral here. I’m just not sure what it is.

–Troi out

I’m a chronic oscillator. Not a “circuit that produces an alternating output current of a certain frequency determined by the characteristics of the circuit components” (courtesy of dictionary.com), nor the fan kind that moves from side to side while blowing. Rather, I am an oscillator in that I “waver, as between conflicting opinions or courses of action; vacillate” (also courtesy of dictionary.com).

I oscillate regarding whether a relationship is worth it.

Imagine that you frequent a particular restaurant and you order a burger and while you immensely enjoy the experience of eating your burger, you wind up with food poisoning after. And imagine that you then continue to order the very same burger, and it perpetually produces the same miserable result. What sane person would repeatedly continue to place this order?

None! Because nobody who consistently experiences a gut-wrenchingly painful reaction to a specific event continues to infinitely invite that same gut-wrenchingly painful repercussion.

So why do we exempt ourselves from this most basic common-sense principle of operant conditioning in forging new romantic relationships? Why do we think our odds are better this time around?

And this is where I oscillate. The angel on my right shoulder (actually I envision her as a carton of Tillamook mint chocolate chip ice cream with wings, but don’t tell anybody, because that’s weird) says to release my reluctance and expose everything—-everything that is rated PG—-because to anticipate failure is already to have failed. And I listen to her, and I actually manage to entrust entirely my heart to somebody else.

Which gives the devil on my left shoulder (actually, I envision him as a corporate businessman wearing a red suit with the underdog suspended from the prongs of his pitchfork, but don’t tell anybody, because that’s weird) just cause to tap dance over the remaining shards of my heart, belting out his Dr. Evil laugh as he berates my lapse into unconditional love of another person and marks another tally on the Board of Failed Relationships (I’m actually the chairperson of that Board; they wanted somebody with extensive experience).

And I have to give him his due credit. Because he remembered that love given promises no returns, and I forgot.

So I oscillate from side to side like a rotating fan. Oh yeah, and I waver, as between conflicting opinions or courses of action (still courtesy of dictionary.com). Between on the one hand believing that the burger is worth the food poisoning—-for those less discerning members of my readership, I don’t actually eat burgers, so that’s a metaphor—-and on the other hand deciding to forgo all future trips to restaurants to permanently obviate potential food poisoning.

Give me one good reason to eat a burger.

–Troi out

We’ve all heard that New York is a scary place, the likes of which few—-and by few I mean 19,490,297 by a 2008 population estimate—-have dared to approach.  And we all know that scary places are best avoided entirely unless one is equipped with a sound guidebook.  Therefore, Readers, I have taken it upon myself to venture where few (19,490,297) have gone to explore this practically undiscovered territory (discovered by only 19,490,297 people), and pave the way for future explorers, like myself, to similarly experience this new land (discovered only recently in 1524 A.D.). My most stunning observations can be found exclusively here on this blog site, because they have not been deemed sufficiently stunning to make it into any of the tourist guidebooks. Which stuns me.

In my hometown of Portland, Oregon, there is one main train that runs east to west through the city and its suburbs, and a more recent one that goes north to south. This simple train is divided into three primary colors: the red line, the blue line, and the yellow line. This simple setup excludes nobody, not even a two year-old child who wanders outside and decides to head downtown to the Baby Gap, because even a toddler can identify primary colors. New York, on the other hand, has underground trains called “subways.” As you can imagine their very name causes mass chaos and confusion as it leads one (me) to believe there are sandwiches down there. But once you (I) accept that you won’t be purchasing your favorite cold cut trio on the subway, you’ll never find an actual sandwich shop, because you’ll get lost in an an overwhelming multitude of subway lines, ambiguously labeled with, not primary colors, but alphabet letters such as “A” and “E.” These New York subway lines are thus prejudiced against illiterate or preliterate persons—-toddlers searching for the Baby Gap being only one example—-and even against literate persons like myself who made it through the entire alphabet of subway lines without arriving at my attempted destination.

If you make it out of the alphabetized subway lines alive, you’ll find an unexpected odor waiting for you above ground. To describe its pungence: Imagine that the mouse residing in my friend’s apartment in New York mated with a skunk, and its offspring subsisted on a diet of asparagus and prune juice, and then defecated. That would have smelled better than the streets in my friend’s neighborhood.

Despite the befuddling subway lines and scented streets, there were several advantages to New York City that are unparalleled by Portland. Most notable was that in New York I possessed a superpower; that of invisibility. This was awesome, because I’ve always wanted to have my very own superpower. As I traversed congested sidewalks and attempted to dart passersby, I discovered that not a single New Yorker attempted to dart me. In fact some walked right into me, and yet neither their paced was slowed nor their progress deterred as they passed over my flailing body scrambling to upright itself in the midst of the crowd. And while my friend Ricardo declared that I was in fact still visible and that I was simply experiencing pedestrian propriety in typical New York fashion, I am fairly certain that he’s just jealous because he is not invisible, too.

Readers, I hope that these thoughts help you in preparing your first trip to New York. While I understand that New York might still sound daunting, I encourage you to read through my cubic zirconiums of wisdom as frequently as you’d like prior to plotting your own travels toward New York, and I think you’ll find New York to be a pungently pleasant vacation destination.*

–Troi out

*Troi believes that all states are created equally and she assures you that all inoffensive material found here reflects her opinion, whereas any potentially offensive material reflects the opinion of somebody else.

Today’s vocabulary lesson is inspired by my belief that a big vocabulary is a happy vocabulary. Not because I’m a speech pathologist (although I am), but because every time I argued with my ex-boyfriend, he felt the need to throw me off by using big words. At which point I’d have to pull out my pocket dictionary, look up the word, and by the time I had integrated it into my vocabulary sufficiently to formulate a response, I had forgotten the sentence in which the word had been used. Usually I would have forgotten the whole conversation. Readers, don’t let this happen to you. Study my vocabulary lessons carefully, and you’ll not only improve your debate skills, your increased vocabulary will actually increase your job pay, lower your body mass index, and end world hunger!*

*Other restrictions and considerations apply.

Today’s vocabulary word: Exanimate

To define this word, Readers, I looked it up in my trusty American Century Dictionary, which boasts “more than 60,000 Entries reflecting the English of Today” as well as “fully updated geographical and biographical entries” according to the cover. So when I tell you this I want you to understand the implications: The word exanimate is NOT to be found in my dictionary. I know what you’re thinking, “Troi, it’s under “e” and you just were unable to locate it do to your poor overall sense of direction” but no, I implore you not to fall prey to this sort of blame game. I may not be the brightest crayon in the box, but I know how to navigate my way around a dictionary and I assure you, exanimate is either not in my dictionary, or it’s written in invisible ink.

There is one other possibility for its absence. The word could have been removed due to the fact that the 60,000 entries reflecting the English of Today may have necessitated the removal of some more archaic terminology, thereby leaving room for today’s rapidly expanding vocabulary. Or at least, the rapid expansion of meanings for individual words. For example, I am currently blogging. I just finished talking on my cell phone which did not have enough bars to maintain reception. Life “sucks” but you can “google” ways to make yourself happier. I just read an interview in which Jessica Simpson called her sister’s body sick. I thought this was rude until I discovered that sick now means “cool.” (FYI: I’ve been told by a friend this is actually supposed to be spelled sic but apparently the interviewer was not aware of this, being like me, very very old and out of touch with modern pop culture lingo). My point being that surely the powers that be, the gods of the dictionary, if you will, have had to make some life-altering decisions to allow us a complete and modern dictionary, reflecting the English of Today, rather than the Exanimate Vocabulary of Yesterday.

So I know that you are dying to know what exanimate means now that I have riveted you with this fascinating expose. (Um, either that or you’re thinking to yourself “This girl is a moron! Of course I know what “exanimate” means! It was the first word I spoke as a toddler! I came out of my mother’s womb saying “Waaahh! Exanimate!!”) However, for those of you who are also desperate to discern the meaning of this term, I offer two invaluable suggestions. (And I mean invaluable in that they are not very valuable). First, you could try googling the term. I could have done this too, but then what would I have blogged about? If you, like I, choose not to google this word, then feel free to listen to my clever thoughts about what this word might mean. (Literally, feel free. I will not charge you for these pearls of wisdom, as long as you promise not to charge me for having lost five minutes of your life that you can never get back reading this blog.) Well, animate means in motion, or I think at least having the ability to be in motion. For example “That mouse is sure animate on his wheel!” Ex of course means no longer, as in “He is my ex-boyfriend” or “That was my ex-life before I had that gender reversal operation.” Therefore, it follows that exanimate must mean “once in motion but no longer so.” Here are some practice sentences for you:

“When my car broke down the other day, it became exanimate.” **

“My stomach is exanimate after having digested my latest meal.” **

“Boy, it sure is fun to be exanimate.” **

**The previous sentences are original sentences trademarked by Troi. In order to reproduce these sentences, royalties must be paid to the Troi Foundation, also known as the Foundation to Pay Back Troi’s Graduate School Loans. Each time you utter one of these sentences, several thousand dollars will be transferred from your bank account to Troi’s. Please use these sentences sparingly to maintain your minimum checking balance and avoid overdrawn charges.

Now that you have a better understanding of the way the English language works, and most certainly of this mysterious word “exanimate” you can go about your day knowing that you have just become a bit smarter. For the two of you who consistently read my blog, there is no need to thank me for imparting this wisdom, just knowing you sat there and took time out of your day to read this is thanks enough.

—-Troi out