Tag: Words

Stories by the fire

In the beginning, early hominids huddled in dark seclusion deep inside caverns on the fringes of the world, scared of beasts and inclement weather threatening their existence from the wilds outside.

Then everything changed in the year of our lord 2001, when the blessed Kubrick himself delivered our ancestors a gift of blazing fire: Bright enough to stave off the darkness and hot enough to cook most anything.

Since then we have gone through hundreds of years of evolution to become the kings of the proverbial and literal food chains, shaping the world and even external worlds to our whims.

Yet one thing has not changed in all those decades.

That same sparked flame which bolstered our growth was and continues to be the perfect backdrop for gathering around and exhibiting our social capabilities, doing what we humans are arguably known for best:

Talking.

After an especially windy day traveling around to do some chores, my family returned home and decided to whip up a fire for some extra help keeping warm.

Considering we’re positioned smack dab in the middle of Southern California, there’s not many chilly opportunities to necessitate a fire every year, so it’s a nice change of pace whenever we do light one.

Though my set-up might suggest there was a large storytelling element to this particular fire, I wouldn’t say there was in such a traditional sense.

The television is on right next to it, so that’s a pretty large story outlet right now.

Especially with someone like Alton Brown on. Can’t argue with re-runs of Good Eats.

However, something I’ll always link to a fire being set at the Rochlin household is the story that literally always gets told whenever we light one. Without fail.

It’s my parents’ story and I stake no real claim to it, but like I said it has become a significant part of the experience for me.

So I figure I’ll save it for posterity, if nothing else.

My parents moved to California not very long before I was born, having lived more or less their whole lives on the East Coast — New York in particular. My Dad had aspirations to be a famous actor and had long venerated the Golden State, though soon enough he had moved into more work behind the camera managing computer systems at companies like Disney.

Neither had ever owned a house with a fireplace before, so having one when they moved into this place was something special to try.

However, the first day they did try it out, the fire department showed up. Apparently they didn’t realize you needed to open up the flue, otherwise smoke would pour back into the house rather than out.

When they answered the door, somewhat confused by what had gone wrong, the official asked, “You guys just move in?”

Now that’s what I call a punchline.

Bit of a weirder post than usual tonight I know, but like I said I haven’t done too much besides chores and freeze to death in the windy tundra of SoCal.

Figured this small, fun subject would serve as a nice capstone for the end of Winter Break. Tomorrow I’m headed back to school for what looks to be my last semester of college.

Needless to say I’ll be looking to write as many fun, distraction-filled posts as possible over the next week or so to keep my mind occupied.

The Benefits to being a Hoarder

They called me crazy.

“Why would you keep all of your old binders,” they said.

“You should just throw out/burn all that old stuff,” they said.

“When are you ever going to use your high school notes ever again,” they said.

Well who’s laughing now viewing audience who I’m imagining chastises me for my corner full of old binders on a daily basis. For one of the first times, I had to break out my old AP Psychology binder from about four years ago now (Yikes, I’m getting old) to help fill in a detail for a research paper I’m writing in my Sensation and Perception class.

For context, I’m writing my paper about the way language affects our perceptions of the world around us.

Part of the reason I was interested in grabbing this topic was because it stood out so much to me back in my AP Psych days. My friend Nina, who’s aiming to become a professional interpreter (and is well on her way from what I understand, given that she’s doing a gig translating for the CEO of Sony), made the idea way more tangible at the time by explaining her experiences struggling to translate certain words or emotions between English and Japanese.

Now that I’m writing a paper about that exact topic, I knew I needed to use the general idea we were learning about at the time. Unfortunately… I couldn’t remember the exact term.

My current textbook didn’t exactly provide any useful clues in that department, either.

So it was off to the pile of old binders. Eventually I managed to find the one I needed, and with a cursory search found this:

Linguistic Determinism

A range of views in which our thinking (or worldview) is seen as being determined or shaped by language.

That term, coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf, is the crux of my current paper.

And I would not have remembered it if not for this four-year-old binder sitting around idly in the corner of my room. Now I feel completely vindicated for hoarding all of these bulky old documents for as long as I have.

Perhaps I’ll have to go through the pile, clean up the binders and re-organize them one of these days, however. Because these things are dusty as hell and covered in silverfish.

Guess that’s the price I have to pay for just haphazardly throwing them back there after each year/semester when the promise of vacation proves too much for my better judgement to bear.

But anyway, extra special shout outs today to my AP Psych professor, Mrs. Mata, and to my friend Nina for creating such a strong, lasting impression on me that I have the perfect foundation for my big research paper this semester.

Plus that AP Psych class was what drove me to minor in Psychology in the first place so… You know. Just some icing on the cake there.

Jason’s Ten-Dollar Word of the Day

I spent a lot of the day today doing work, copy editing for a number of different people mostly. While I could go on about why that made me late for getting this post out into the world, that would be boring.

Plus anyone reading this after tonight probably wouldn’t care in the first place. So I’m just going to not do that.

Instead I’m going to pull out an interesting tidbit from one of my jobs today and expand on it.

See, while doing a copy edit for a story coming out of Boom sometime soon regarding the current discussions about separating immigrant children from their parents at the border (a topic I don’t plan to delve too deeply into here, don’t worry) I found there were a few words I had to look up to see if they were being used correctly.

One such word stood out in particular because it gave me a more proper term to use for something which otherwise I’ve always treated in a casual manner.

Proselytize

Intransitive Verb form

To induce someone to convert to one’s faith.
To recruit someone to join one’s party, institution, or cause.

Transitive Verb form

To recruit or convert especially to a new faith, institution or cause.

via the Merriam-Webster dictionary

Basically, when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to your house to talk with you about their faith, they are proselytizing.

The term extends further than just religious door-to-door salesmanship, however. It’s also a politician’s term, a social movement’s term, an industrialist’s term, so on and so forth.

Funny enough, the word actually reminded me of a story I wrote back in 2013 for the High Tide. Julian Stern, a kid who I’d known through being a school acquaintance for some time by then, was running for City Council while just 18 years old.

Very specifically I recall him spending some time in my house to do the interview because he happened to be going door-to-door campaigning in my neighborhood at the time. It was an interesting interview to be sure, and I actually wound up reflecting that in the lede to my article.

You can read the article here, by the way. Bottom right-hand corner of page three.

Looking back on it now I probably would have been laughed out of my high school newsroom for trying to use a term like “proselytize” in my story, but it would’ve fit quite well as a more specific, mature term.

Of course the average reader more easily understood that he was “selling himself rather than magazines,” and that’s why it was the better choice to go with, but still. I would like to see myself use proselytize in a sentence sometime soon.

Also, don’t read too much into my saying ‘selling himself.’ I know you internet, you’ll make anything dirty, but this is not the time.

Stop it.

Well that’s my ten-dollar word of the day. I actually enjoy seeing things like ‘words of the day’ on every online dictionary and goofy calendar ever made, so I might just try to do this again next time I find a new word that’s interesting. If you’d like to see more of it, or if you learned an interesting new word today yourself, let me know down in the comments!