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HT Rob Crilly

Wonderland or Not.

Notes: ugly happens, complaints about not being able to have a dog, NYT list of most looked up words.

It’s far simpler to use the words from the NYT list than to write about the list. There are many posts, searchable via Google, about the merits of the words. Instead I incorporated, good or bad, many of the words into a preconceived post. I think I managed 37 out of 50. The list is here in pdf —->bafflingwords.

I sometimes wish I was Elle Woods from the bildungsroman, Legally Blond. Not because I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror, shrieked at the louche individual peering back, and running late with no time for a fix, shrugged my shoulders and muttered to myself unconvincingly “ugly happens”. No, it wasn’t that.

I’ve been enviously perusing pictures of dogs belonging my contemporaries over at the 20 something forum. I love dogs, and contemplated getting one some time ago. Currently my fish are the ersatz for what I really desire. My fealty to my swimming pets is real, but these two creatures are not fungible. Fish live a banal life, and their life mimics their entertainment and companionship value. I receive neither love or gratitude from my fish, and I don’t love them. My dog, well that was a different story.

The lack of a canine is for penury of time not will. I’ve yet to figure out how people who work, or work and go to school, manage to have dogs. My old dog, though she traveled around the word, caged and quarantined as we moved from place to place, was very accommodating, but she required a lot of attention and could not be left alone for long periods of time. Though not peripatetic, I’m not home for extended periods of time. I’m beholden to analyzing and evaluating Sisyphean policy and sumptuary rules, frequent dinners out, and days away for outside endeavors. A compromise is not possible at this time, presenting an enervating circumstance for a dog.

I envision myself the main character in an Elle Woods scenario. In sartorial elegance I carry a large Louis Vuitton to class. In my bag, one of many appurtenances, a mini dog.

Suffering apoplectic looks from saturnine PhD’s, my profligacy unforgiven, a label of “solipsistic attitude” quickly written in some folder with my name on it, and my fecklessness assumed, I’d survive. I’d endure the face off with the dauphins of academia. The situation would be parlous for a graduate student, but manageable. It’s the paroxysms of laughter I would face from peers, as the recondite student, the abstruse young women, that would bother me most. In addition, the schadenfreude, especially of those with no inclination toward me, would be hard to tolerate.

Better a bonobo to my work office, as an interlocutor, where the atmosphere of comity would be accepting of something close to human, something other than a mini dog. A pup would be frowned upon, a contretemps, a risible creature, but objectionable.

To end what some might consider more of a peroration than a blog post, though the Elle Woods scenario works in my head, in real life it would be a different story. Elle was sui generis, and we mustn’t forget, a character in a movie. I’m merely an inchoate young woman, yet to prove myself worthy of apotheosis, with epistemological leanings toward skepticism, who can’t for the life of me find reason to use the words phlogiston, antediluvian, and hagiography, to name a few, in this blog post.

And I’m still without a dog.

Wonderland or Not.

Irony epitomized is when a magazine titled Self photoshops pounds off, and reshapes, Kelly Clarkson. All this while publishing an interview in which Kelly tells them she is “comfortable with her weight, her looks, and herself, and it’s others who are more concerned about it than she is”.

The editor-in-chief of defending the “retouching” as she called it.

“Yes. Of course we do retouching,” Danziger writes in a post on Self.com. “Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best.”

Is there some logic in there that I am missing?

Getty Images July 2009

Please do tell.

Wonderland or Not.