Awesome

I like to think of myself as a concise person. At the dinner table in high school I minced my words so I wouldn't lose my three brothers' looming gazes too quickly. Stories found their best parts quickly. Words found their place in my mouth. And I succeeded at sounding like I knew what was saying. I cast certain words to the wayside, eliminating them for their ambiguity or meaninglessness.

Teenage boys are the only people that can use the word "awesome" because it's just silly to use casually unless the speaker is talking about Halo or blue frosting-glazed poptarts. That's an obvious one though. I don't like the word "yummy" because I feel like I'm trying to be this cutesy college-aged girl eating goat cheese or some other health-food snack made by Kashi.

Words like "weird" bother me because anything from a soccer kick to a cup of tea could be described as weird. Let me assure you - I use these words far too often. And so I am losing speed in my speech. My tongue spouts sentences like, "Wow, this book is great. Some of the characters are weird though, and I don't really understand everything, but the writer is an awesome author."

Other words irritate me too. Somehow adverbs find their way into sentences, completely changing and totally disproportionalizing them.

Let's shelf these words. It's not a snooty recognition to abolish their use. I would like to retain my older brothers' listening ears. I would like to be intentional and creative with my conversations with you.

snap trap

A gopher with long claw-like nails got caught in the trap outside in our yard the other night. His beady eyes looked up at us seeking our own eyes
on that warm milky summer evening.

Our neighbor was called. He brought his gun and shot that little critter (it was causing a messy ruckus in the ground all around our house). Our neighbor picked up its hind leg and slung it into the soybean field.

Today we caught a rabbit in that trap. I came near to see if I could help it out. It spastically fipped around; its mouth was all bloody from gnawing on the cage's wire.

Another neighbor came to greet my mother just returned from California. He's a science teacher. He'll know what to do with this little trap contraption.

The door was pinched open and that furry brown rabbit, nervous and terrified, zinged out of there. In a second it had turned a corner. Gone, forever.

Swatting

That boy keeps swatting the air with a twenty-four-inch long stick. He does that a lot. He paces on the tennis court in the middle of the day whipping the air, beating some meaning out of it. It's a hot July Sunday afternoon and he's out there at it again. He holds his steady gaze on the stick as it beats back and forth.

That stick is not a weapon in a battle. But the boy's pendulum-like stick ticking is too precise to be careless. Back and forth. Whip, whip, whip. He walks home slicing the air as if scything his way through the tall jungle grass to his fort.

What is he thinking?

Cords

My friend ranted to me one day, "In a strange way, I feel like my life revolves around cords." I thought about it. Yes. All of us are deeply connected to our cords. I have a little box recharger for my camera, a white cord for my iPod, and another long black cord recharger for my phone. My daily living tools rest each night on the surcharger with a cord plugged into the wall on the floor in my room while I sleep on my bed.

Then there's my dad's silly cord to his computer. Since his iBook is a little outdated, the cord doesn't pop off nicely when one jolts the computer. So gingerly I must hold that little white laptop. Without it the computer dies. With it I can hardly move a muscle. Also I have to plug a yellow telephone wire into the side of the laptop since our wireless internet isn't working at the moment.

But then what about those daily living tools. I have to be able to connect them to other places as well. To upload pictures onto a computer, I need my little cream-colored, designed-for-Canons-only cord. I also need the syncing cord for my iPod. Oh, and I have two or three extra black ones for my phone somewhere. And in my Grandma's car, I gotta have that tape with the black cord coming out of it so we can jam to my iPod on the way to detassling. And I need my headphone cords for the field.

I feel like my whole being is plugged into the nearest socket in any room. And that the easiest way for someone to kill me would be by strangling me with the mountain of cords in my top dresser drawer. Or maybe, he could just bury them.