washwords

Ink: Say It All in Six Words: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker

“Brevity: a good thing in writing. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. Not associated with the biography genre. But then—why shouldn’t it be? Life expectancies rise; attention spans shrink. Six words can tell a story. That’s a new book’s premise, anyway. “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” A compilation of teeny tiny memoirs. The forebear, it’s assumed, is Hemingway. (Legend: he wrote a miniature masterpiece. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Slightly sappy, but a decent sixer.)” from the New Yorker online 2/25/08

Me: Girl writes, grows, wonders; heals again.

Your turn….

On instant messenger, I ask my sister, “What’s the name of the birth control pill we both didn’t like?”
“Why?” she asks. “So you can not be on it again?”
“Exactly. So what one do you take now?”

We talk like that. One long conversation rolling over minutes into years, from yahoo to hotmail to google chat. We trade momisms. We trade stories of where each of us are. I tell her about my dating life — the guy who rated me over dinner, the guy who told me he was time-sharing a cow – should I give them a second chance? She tells me about her husband’s nemesis, the rival E-bayer who always seems to snag the best historical sailing publications a second after my brother-in-law bids.

We detail the annoying people we see on the train, in the office, everywhere. We don’t need to describe them much – we can simply say “mega” – our own shorthand developed years ago for those who are mega-annoying, mega-jerks, and all other manner of mega-bad.

It didn’t always used to be like this. Not until IM.

For the complete text of this personal essay, to publish or broadcast it, please contact me at washwords.dc@gmail.com.

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from vienna, with my british tour group

Judith says, “This is curious. It looks like pork, but tastes just like poultry.”

“Don’t you think? Don’t you think it looks just like pork?”

“No,” says Chris, running her fork through the gravy. “I don’t think it’s a thing like pork, or poultry.”