Guilty As Charged

From a phone conversation yesterday: “[Our mutual friend] told me about your conversation. Glen, only you would think to mock someone who had just tried to kill themselves.” In my defense, I was quite funny (and the humor was well-received: the psych wards of hospitals are such dreary places).

I need the word for…

While lying abed this morning, a question popped into my mind: “You know how sometimes things go sour abruptly and you have this detached sense of watching your life collapse in slow motion? What’s the family-friendly word for that?”

There are over 500,000 words in the English language, and most of us have never heard 80% of them. Take didapper, for example. It’s a real word (a small grebe as it turns out), but you’ve likely never even heard it. You are no doubt an articulate speaker with a wide-ranging vocabulary, and yet you couldn’t pick a didapper out of a lineup if it mugged you. Grebe is just five letters and yet if I played it in Scrabble you’d make me whip out a dictionary to prove it was real.

There are hundreds of thousands of words just like that. There must be one for this! Everyone I’ve asked knows exactly the feeling I’m describing, and yet they can’t think of a polite name for it.

In case you’re still confused about that feeling, here are some other descriptions:

  • the sickly feeling that drowns your mind when you remember that you left your presentation/homework/wallet at home
  • the sensation of your bowels plummeting to your knees as you realize you’re not alone when you thought you were
  • the instant your mind achieves total calm and with perfect clarity gazes upon your mistake in all its splendor
  • the sudden jolt that runs through your body at the sound of a shotgun round being chambered unexpectedly

That feeling. It’s not fear, although fear often follows on its heels. It’s not surprise–surprise is having something unexpected happen whether good or bad. This is the sensation that follows surprise as you begin to process the event and realize that it is very, very bad.

Most emotions are destinations (the state of happiness or sorrow, for instance), this one is more of a journey.

What’s the word?

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

Things I bookmarked last week on del.icio.us.

Disclaimer: these links are posted automatically using the excellent yawd hack and are merely things that were interesting enough to bookmark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.

More Holiday Happenings

After I posted last night’s entry I was filled with even more memories of the holidays.

  • Home cooking. Home Cajun cooking.
  • Eating at the Steamboat for our anniversary. Tasty beyond belief.
  • Teaching my nephew Rick why you should never lose at Tic-Tac-Toe. Also, reducing niece Rebecca to whining because I wouldn’t “go easy on her” while demonstrating my mad Tic-Tac-Toe skillz to a suitably impressed Rick.
  • Reading Soldier, Ask Not as an adult and realizing the hero is someone other than I thought it was when I first read it as a kid.
  • Being a missionary table host for the students from FSU Chi Alpha when the assigned discussion topic was sexual purity. There was so much boisterous laughter at our table that we got a dirty look from one table and a snide comment from another, “Do you see how that table is laughing over there? They don’t take sex seriously.” To which my reply was, “I find humor in everything I value greatly–laughter is one way of delighting in something precious. Besides, if you can’t laugh at something as ridiculous as sex you are seriously humor-challenged.” In the other table’s defense, however, we were having a disruptively good time.
  • Finding out that many of my former RUi students really enjoyed my sessions and remembered them in surprising detail.
  • Seeing how many Chi Alphas are spreading into the elite schools. One couple I helped disciple is heading to establish a ministry at Cornell and I met another chap heading to Brown (his brilliant support-raising motto: “What can you do for Brown?”). Of America’s extremely prestigious schools, that makes staff-supported chapters at Stanford, Georgetown, MIT, Brown, Yale and Cornell. We’re making major progress on that front.
  • Chatting with Gene Breitenbach about the recent intelligent design court case (he’s a huge fan of the way the case was decided).
  • Realizing how stark the imbalance is between Chi Alpha Xanga users and the more enlightened Chi Alpha WordPress crowd. I may have to post an article on that someday (but only if I want to endure a good-natured web fight, especially since my wife is a Xangan).
  • Dana screaming “Home!” with delight when we stepped back through the door of our apartment.

Holiday Highlights

As always, we spent Christmas in Lousiana. In addition, I got to spend around 14 hours in a car driving from Lafayette, LA to Louisville, KY for The World Missions Summit. Nearly 4,000 college students from Chi Alpha groups across America gathered to consider their role in God’s global plan. And then I got to spend 14 hours driving back again.
Some highlights from the trip:

  • Getting loot for Christmas, including Munchkin.
  • Having Dana decide that daddy was her favorite for a little while.
  • Watching my parents finally get broadband internet service. Also, fixing computers for both my parents and my in-laws.
  • Discovering that Steve Barke has a snore that would cause a dead person to search for ear plugs. Also, purchasing ear plugs.
  • Listening to J. Rufus Fears talk about Winston Churchill for 12 hours. I’ve long admired Churchill based on what little I knew about him–now that I know more I’m astounded. He was among the greatest of all time.
  • Hanging out with Greg for 14 hours in a car.
  • Discovering that there are whole stretches of road in the South which only receive country and/or rap stations.
  • Chatting with Lindsey and Nicholette about their upcoming moves to join us. They’re both such great people–Paula and I can’t wait for them to be here!
  • Meeting Will Phillips. He was every bit as entertaining in person as I had hoped he would be. For some reason he thinks he out-geeks me. Someday I may have to disabuse him of that notion (I contribute to Wikipedia, for crying out loud).
  • Seeing my old bud Randy Jumper again. We were classmates at AGTS and have kept in touch digitally since. Nice to have a face-to-face again.
  • Discovering that Stanford frosh John Sillcox can focus out of each eye separately. Freaky.
  • Way cool worship in the morning. In an odd turn of events, the morning services were consistently 5 to 7 times better than the evening services.
  • Seeing over 650 students make a one-year committment to missions with the option for a lifetime extension. Woohoo! And they weren’t just signing up for the easy places, either. A lot of closed countries are in for a big surprise.
  • Watching the amazing level of panache with which the Ascent (a Chi Alpha staff event) was pulled off. Knowing that Belkas Lehmann and I had planned the whole thing made it extra-special.
  • Getting a free copy of Full Gospel, Fractured Minds. I’m enjoying it so far, and I’ll post a review when I’m done. Big thanks to Jerry Gibson for hooking me up.
  • Randomly walking around Louisville at dark looking for food (which I finally discovered at a gas station).
  • Finally watching The Magnificent Seven.
  • Watching The Fantastic Four and finally realizing that they’re the four elements.
  • Having Dana behave on both flights.

Funniest Subject Line In A Spam Email

I just returned to the office after Christmas and The World Missions Summit (details forthcoming) and I’m processing the gazillion emails I had waiting in my inbox. Funniest subject line so far? How A Man Can Do It Like A Lesbian. I actually chuckled as I was hitting the delete key.