observations and collective nouns

This weekend was largely spent working and marveling at the four or five violent storms that rolled through the region during Sunday (two tornadoes even touched down in Maryland, but neither were in my county). On Saturday I played hooky, though, so I could wile away some time in the modern art and folk art wings at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. While there, I saw this:

Electronic Superhighway, by Nam June Paik

Afterwards I sat outside the museum for a while, soaking in the beautiful day, and during this time a hockey game (the Washington Capitals versus the Philadelphia Flyers) ended over at the Verizon Center, and suddenly there was this rising tide of movement and chaos and noise as fans in their red jerseys spilled through the streets, screaming, banging their noisemaking sticks (what are those things called, anyway?), honking, and chanting “Let’s go Caps!” as they returned to their cars and the Metro. I felt like an anthropologist studying an exotic culture in a far-flung place. Because these? Are not my people. Being nonathletic and reclusive, I’m so hopelessly disconnected from the sporting world and the kind of enthusiasm and group camaraderie it ignites in its fans, it’s truly like watching Pygmy mating rituals.

...so I just sat and watched them roll by, photographing them stealthily like a creepy voyeur.

After staring at the passers-by for a while, I killed some time in H&M and West Elm, resisting the urge to pull imaginary money out of thin air so I could buy all this stuff I don’t need but totally want, and on the way there I noticed a Scottish flag inexplicably and delightfully dangling from some random office building.

My next stop was the Grand Hyatt, where Angela is staying while in town on business. Her digs there are quite fancy, and her suite contained a huge jacuzzi tub (with a flatscreen TV across from it!) that had me foaming at the mouth with envy.

Management delivered a complimentary tray of Mediterranean hors d’oeuvres, and, not having eaten since breakfast, I shamelessly shoveled hummus and sun-dried tomatoes into my maw like I was on the cusp of starvation. Dignity? What is this dignity of which you speak?

We headed over to Arlington to pick up our pal Eleazar, but there was a roadblock near the Pentagon that threw us off-course, and by the time we finally got to his place and pulled into the Lost Dog Café, it was already pushing 7pm. Since Angela had an early day on Sunday, things had to end early for us—right after dinner, really. So I returned Eleazar to his apartment and Angela to her hotel, and then began the loooong ride back to my condo in the sticks.

Anyway, to veer into completely different waters, recently I was thinking about one of the many peculiar aspects of the English language—collective nouns. Most people know about swarms of bees, schools of fish, murders of crows, decks of cards, hosts of angels, and quivers of arrows. But what about other animals and objects? What are their collective nouns? I researched the subject a bit and found interesting results. With animals in particular, it seems there are often numerous words used to describe a plural of a particular animal. For example, a group of crows is also called an alibi of crows, a storytelling of crows, and a hoover of crows. You can have a corps of giraffes, a herd of giraffes, or tower of giraffes. Some collective nouns are fairly dull, but others are delightfully eccentric. Who on earth created these nouns? Someone who was smoking crack, apparently. Here are the ones I love the most:

shrewdness of apes
blush of boys
wake of buzzards
flock of camels
postern of candidates
spoonful of caribou
cartload of chimpanzees
trades union of chinchillas
drunken ship of cobblers
quiver of cobras
rag of colts
cover of coots
congregation of crocodiles
piteousness of doves
aerie of eagles
mob of emus
business of ferrets
giggle of girls
implausibility of gnus
tribe of goats
charm of goldfinches
glint of goldfish
skein of goslings
leash of greyhounds
covey of grouse
morning of hammers
horde of hamsters
husk of hares
kettle of hawks
prickle of hedgehogs
siege of herons
crash of hippopotami
bloat of hippopotami
smack of jellyfish
neverthriving of jugglers
flight of locks (as in canal locks)
tidings of magpies
stud of mares
richness of martens
superfluity of nuns
parliament of owls
ostentation of peacocks
huddle of penguins
parcel of penguins
rookery of penguins
nest of pheasants
drove of pigs
wing of plovers
string of ponies
coterie of prairie dogs
bevy of quail
bury of rabbits
gaze of raccoons
mischief of rats
rhumba of rattlesnakes
storytelling of ravens
unkindness of ravens
crash of rhinoceri
disworship of Scots
harem of seals
shiver of sharks
hurtle of sheep
bed of snakes
scurry of squirrels
murmuration of starlings
faggot of sticks
muster of storks
knot of toads
blessing of unicorns
prudence of vicars
generation of vipers
descent of woodpeckers
zeal of zebras


song heard most recently before posting:
Breaking Up the Girl—Garbage

miscellany

The Pope is in town today, and since I’m a recovering Catholic (I can’t really say ex-Catholic because it’s not like I was officially excommunicated), you won’t see me lining up along the PopeMobile route to wave at him, nor attending the mass he’s conducting at Nationals Stadium tomorrow. John Paul II had a certain amount of charisma—almost an aura of rock star quality (or at least as much rock star quality as you can possess when you’re wearing a gigantic white hat)—that may have led me down to the PopeMobile route, despite not agreeing with his policies. But Benedict XVI? Not so much. Still, I hope the visit goes smoothly, protestors and all. At least he’ll have lovely spring weather for the occasion.

This is making me realize that after 10½ years of living in the greater DC area, I still haven’t visited the Basilica downtown. It’s the largest Catholic church in North America—one that I’ve passed who knows how many times while on the Metro—and I’ve never been there. Huh. I should work on changing that, because it looks like a truly beautiful building.

This is one of those bipolar days when I need to crank the heat and wear a winter coat in the morning and by afternoon I’m in short sleeves with all the windows in my car rolled down. And the cherry blossoms outside my office, which grace us with a week or so of delicate, incandescent fire, have begun that annual war where green and pink engage in rigorous hand-to-hand combat for control of the trees, with green winning in the end.

It’s also the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre. April is the cruelest month indeed. Stuffed with memories of Virginia Tech, Waco, Oklahoma City, and Columbine, it has become a peculiar month that simultaneously straddles beginnings (the proverbial rebirth of spring) and endings.

In that vein, yesterday marked 17 years since my much-adored grandmother passed away. I think that with a lot of deaths, the full extent of what has been lost is only realized years later. With my grandmother, it’s sinking in now—nearly two decades later—just how many things she never lived long enough to see. She was around to see my sister graduate from high school but missed the rest of her grandkids’ high school graduations and all of our college graduations. She didn’t get to see two of her grandkids get married and have kids. She didn’t get to see my aunt happily retire to her dream home or see my mom develop a stable new life after a chaotic divorce. If you believe in a traditional religious afterlife, it’s easy to say, “My loved one is up in heaven and is watching everything that’s happening, even if s/he can’t be here to experience it.” But when you don’t believe in an afterlife? That sense of loss gets no easy resolution.


song heard most recently before posting:
The Walk—Imogen Heap

40 years

Quite astoundingly, today marks a whopping 40 years since Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. And equality-wise, how far have we come since then? Some progress has been made, to be sure, but we still have a long way to go. Not just in terms of chipping away the barriers between blacks and whites but also between different religions (or lack thereof; there is still a tremendous amount of prejudice against atheists), nationalities, and ethnicities. I’ll never understand why equality is such a foreign concept to so many people. I’m not looking for a bland utopia—just a level playing field.



song heard most recently before posting:
Ruhe Sanft—W.A. Mozart

white trash weekend

Today is one of those days when I want to take my commute out back and shoot it (it’s drizzly, so 270 is a parking lot and I got to work a half-hour late). I’d like to take my car out back and shoot that as well, as it’s been giving me nothing but grief lately. Over the past two weeks I pumped $2000 into it (a large part of which went into the exhaust) and yet it still failed emissions testing last week. And it still rides like shit. And the check engine light is still on. It’s like this angry little orange eye that glares at me accusingly from the dashboard, acting as though I’m a neglectful car owner or some such nonsense.

I ended up unexpectedly going home to Lebanon this weekend. I learned on Friday morning that Saturday was when a group of us were supposed to have a You Can’t Do That On Television marathon. My old friend Kelly (with whom I’ve recently reconnected on Facebook) somehow managed to snag the entire series on DVD (it was basically a bootleg copy culled from old videotapes), and we were going to sit around and watch the whole shebang. This was going to be awesome, because good god did I obsess over that show back in junior high. Due to some miscommunication, though, I didn’t realize our gathering was supposed to be this weekend, and I couldn’t postpone it because our old friend Kendra was going to be in town for this, and Kendra rarely gets back to Lebanon since she lives several hours away. The only thing on my weekend agenda was working on freelancing, and I was happy to kick it (and my hermit lifestyle) to the curb for a bit.

So on Friday night a group of us went to this sleazy dive bar in Lebanon that attracts drunken scumbags and has white trash karaoke every weekend (and as an added touch of class, they also aired the STD Power Hour on a corner TV: Rock of Love and Flavor of Love). It was great fun, especially since it involved lots of bad karaoke, messy drunkenness, crotch-grabbing, splits, scumbag mating rituals, and the like (none of which was done by me—sorry!), but the downside was the smoke. I’m allergic to cigarette smoke and it doesn’t take long for it turn me into a heaving mess. And now that all Maryland bars and restaurants are smoke-free, I’m especially sensitive to smoke because I’m just not used to it anymore. Breathing through my mouth on Friday night (like some half-evolved beast) helped to keep the worst of the nausea at bay, but my eyes were really burning and my stomach started flipping a bit toward the end.

Shawn, Brad, and I were the only people who drank no alcohol at all, so getting everyone home required some careful maneuvering, but we did succeed in the end. I only got to bed at 3:30am and didn’t get much sleep, which means I felt like crap on Saturday, and the YCDTOTV marathon never took place because we couldn’t get in touch with Kendra and Missy had to sleep off her hangover. However, I did go to Kelly’s house for an hour or so to watch two YCDTOTV episodes, which was really cool. In the afternoon we met up with a buncha friends—a clusterfuck of lesbians and freaks, if you will—and piled in two cars to drive to the roller derby in Lancaster. Missy’s parents met us there as well. It was just as fun as the last derby tournament I attended (in November 2007) and I managed to avoid getting rammed in the teeth by a wayward roller skate while sitting on the same floor where the competition was taking place.

After the derby we went bowling in Lancaster. I’ve only gone bowling, like, twice in my life, so my performance was less than stellar and I lost the first round by a landslide. By the second round I was so angry at losing, I began slamming the ball into the lane, and that did the trick—I bowled two strikes in a row. Basically I swooped in at the last minute and won the round by an impressive lead (and yes, I did resort to using bumpers toward the end, and yes, that’s a form of cheating, but who cares? That old adage about cheaters never prospering is bullshit). My favorite part of bowling was eying the trash around us and also ogling the hot guy bowling next to us. Messy brown hair? Check. Geek-chic glasses? Check. Tall and lanky? Check. Too socially inept to even make eye contact with him, much less say anything? Check.

Also, while bowling we gave ourselves roller derby names, and that’s what appeared on the scorekeeping monitor. Kendra = Ginger Ninja, Travis = Ash Tre (since he can’t quit the cigarettes), Missy = Mennonitemare, Shawn = Shawniqua, me = Jenocide, Ang = Angel of Death, Kelly = Special K, Kelley = BGK (Big Gay Kel), Deana = Deanasaur.

On the way home Kendra got a flat right as we were passing through Mount Gretna. Pitch-black woods surrounded us on all sides, and changing the tire was difficult for Travis because he had virtually no light (only a tiny penlight that Ang was carrying and the light spilling out of the open doors). We had to get out of the car (in case someone hit it when it was on the shoulder) and it was insanely cold for March, so we shivered violently while we stood uselessly on the roadside. Travis was able to change the tire but it took ages because Kendra drives a VW, and, as I learned firsthand last autumn, VWs have those anti-theft tires that are a bitch to change.

So we stood there on the shoulder, teeth clacking together from the cold, and a cop showed up. Then a second cop showed up. They gave us lots of light, which was a help, and chatted with us. They turned out to be amazingly cool. They asked us how we knew each other and where we were from, and we were like, “Well, Travis is from Arkansas, and he and Kendra met while living in Seattle, which is why this car has Washington tags, but they live in Virginia Beach now, and Jen lives in the DC area, and everyone else lives in Lebanon, and most of us met in junior high, but Shawn and Ang are cousins, etc, etc.” Ang mentioned that we had just come from the roller derby and they were so interested in it. They looked at the program and this season’s schedule, asked lots of questions, and were excited when we told them that the girls wear tank tops and shorty shorts. Since Shawn works for the city, they asked if he knew various Lebanon cops, and I piped in, “My uncle used to be the chief of police—Bernard Reilly” and they gushed about how great a guy and a great cop he was and how he died way too soon, and it was so nice because it reminded me about how highly respected he was and how cool a guy he was.

In the middle of this adventure Missy’s car sailed right past us, with everyone inside cackling madly because they thought they were seeing a drug bust. They saw two cop cars, a car with its trunk and all of its doors open, and they saw someone crouched on the ground (that would be Travis, looking for the part of the tire-changing kit that accidentally fell when getting pulled from the trunk), and so they thought they were witnessing some huge drug bust. No, it was only us!

I had to get up early on Sunday morning so I could stop at Wal-Mart (the Lebanon Wal-Mart is apparently and unfortunately the only place left on earth that still sells the cereal to which I’m addicted—Eggo Cinnamon Toast cereal) before meeting up with Papa for breakfast at 9am. Then I headed home and planned to do as much freelancing as possible, but not a lot got done in the end. I had a nice long phone conversation with Heather and then Mom stopped by for a visit and took me out to dinner before heading home to PA, and I was just so freaking exhausted from lack of sleep, I could barely focus on work. Plus I started falling ill with something, and that sure didn’t help my ability to quickly churn out work. My badass immune system is valiantly trying to fight it off, and it may win in the end, but for now I’m really dragging. I ended up going to bed by 10pm the past two nights, which is something that never happens. C’mon, immune system...don’t let me down, girl!


song heard most recently before posting:
Evermore—Neil Diamond