Looking at the list now, I see a few words I need to remove. I used conceit last night at dinner, in fact. And I’ve definitely mastered both magpie and piebald. (You can read why here.)

When the perfect word runs and hides, you can always grab a good-enough synonym. But substitutes never, ever satisfy me. When I know there’s a particular word I want, I become hell-bent on digging it up. That’s why I discovered the magnificent hyper-thesaurus OneLook.com. (It’s probably my favorite spot on the Internet and just one of the excellent writing resources you’ll find on this list I put together for you.)

Why do some words refuse to come when called? I can understand why it’s hard to master a weirdo like paraprosdokian, but what’s the deal with bromeliad or oracle? I’m generally pretty good at accessing the vocabulary I need, so when certain words consistently conceal themselves, I have to wonder if my subconscious is at work. Maybe there’s something about a fugitive word that I find repellant or troubling, and my brain does me the favor of submerging it for me.

For example: When I was a kid, my grandmother suffered a stroke that left her unable to access almost all words—a condition called aphasia that scares the sweet bejeezus out of me. So a few years ago when I couldn’t pull aphasia out of my brain-bank (XXL irony), I thought maybe I was too afraid of aphasia to even name it.

Side note: While ruminating on emotionally hazardous words, I had to wonder about the term verboten. Does that verb business at its beginning have anything to do with words, as in verbal? I looked it up, and the Online Etymology Dictionary, as always, had the answer for me: nope.

Now, back to ambitious (and its sibling ambition). Historically, this pair has evaded me like a healthy housefly. So much so, that I casually wondered if the concept posed some sort of discomfort for me. But I never really focused on that hypothesis until recently.

A few weeks back, on the recommendation of my friend Carolyn, I listened to the audiobook You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero. And if the title of the book makes you squeamish, its thesis definitely will too. Sincero posits that money isn’t inherently evil—​au contraire! Money is what enables us to do everything we need to and want to in life, whether that’s living under a roof, traveling around the world, bestowing philanthropic gifts, or any of the countless other opportunities life presents. She encourages us to get very comfortable with both desiring and pursuing money. Mantras are involved. À la: I love money because it’s the root of so much awesome. Yikes, right? If this makes you want to unzip your skin and run out of the room, I totally understand. And yet. The woman makes a good point.

So I bought the book in paperback for both Carolyn (birthday gift) and me. And I’ve been working my way through the exercises chapter by chapter, giving thought to my long-held, deep-seated attitudes about the pursuit of money. And in the process, I realized something: I’ve always been comfortable with being industrious—in academics, in parenting, in my career. In fact, I think my industriousness is a dominant part of my character. But I’ve been far less comfortable with seeking achievement. Or, God forbid, pursuing filthy lucre.

Now, my peers and I all had well-understood goals growing up—to make good grades, to get chosen for the “A” teams in sports, to be accepted by the most prestigious colleges. Yet I’ve generally felt pretty uncomfortable saying such goals out loud. It’s always felt sort of gauche and desperate to me. But then, if I’m being honest with myself, there may be some self-protection in there. If you don’t name your goals, you can’t be a failure at achieving them.

Which brings us to that elusive word ambitious, the conceptual crux of all this striving and wanting. I think I’d like to get friendly with it and everything it represents. Writing this very blog has felt like a long date with it. We’ll see where things go.

At least I can remember the word now. That’s a step in the right direction.

At some point in my twenties, my mother mailed me a collection of letters I had begun writing as a child but never came even close to finishing. Generally, they went like this:

Dear Grandma:

How are you? I am fine.

And that was it.

​I imagine that as soon as I wrote those words, I would sit there for a minute wondering what I could possibly say to a woman in her 80s or 90s whom I barely knew. And then I’d take off—to watch Sesame Street, maybe, or to roller-skate, or to play with my parakeet.

In adulthood, I’ve gotten much better at follow-through. But Exhibit A, below, demonstrates that I’m not entirely cured of project abandonment syndrome. It’s a screenshot of blogs that I have begun to write but haven’t come close to completing.

English morphs. (Abandoned July 3, 2020.)

People often complain to me about the “misuse” of words and grammar. But the fact is, language changes constantly. That’s why we don’t speak anything like the characters in The Canterbury Tales. And it’s why the twelfth edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, published in October of this year, contains more than 5,000 new entries.

It’s not just sick being used to mean impressive or literally being used as an intensifier. Spelling changes too. For example, as late as 1972 (when the following ad was printed), Sanka was still using the spelling caffein (no final e).

At some point between 1972 and now, the spelling became caffeine. Today, if you visit Merriam-Webster.com, you won’t see caffein at all.

So, the next time someone reaches out to me on LinkedIn to lament the way modern word usage differs from what they were taught in sixth grade, I will just type a 😁 and share a link to this very blog. 

Anger is inefficient. (Abandoned January 10, 2022.)

​I only had a visual for this one—a screenshot from Facebook:

I’m struck by the fact that I’ve been ruminating about the hostile, intolerant, judgmental, polarized climate in the US for the better part of four years now (probably longer). Just recently, I’ve been fantasizing about making a T-shirt like this:

Other shirts might read: Ask questions and listen. Or: Try to understand instead of trying to win.

My point then, and my point now, is that too many people like to ascribe motives to others (see the screenshot above), while too few seem willing to ask non-judgmental questions in order to learn why others think what they do.

Not that you asked, but it is my belief that we need to stop making assumptions, stop depicting those with different perspectives into cartoonish villains, and stop interpreting the world in black and white (or blue and red).

Here, I will again make make a plug for Braver Angels, an organization dedicated to helping Americans “practice courageous citizenship across political differences.”

​I have Disastro-Vision. (Abandoned July 24, 2024.)

I’d jotted down a few notes for this one:

That character on Electric Company who read the warning signs too slowly.
My well-honed ability to recognize cults and psychopaths.
My tendency to explore all the things that could happen (catastrophizing).

This blog was going to examine (and probably justify) my tendency to look out for every danger in every situation. I’ve written about this sort of thing before (claiming that worrying is my superpower), but I must have planned to plumb the depths of my “Disastro-Vision” in some new way.

Just now, I searched for the Electric Company cartoon mentioned above, but I couldn’t find it. As I recall, the story arc went like this: Cute little man approaches a sign with a word like DANGER. The poor guy is not a strong reader, so he slowwwwly sounds the word out over and over, never realizing there’s something like a pallet of bricks dangling over his head. He scratches his head in confusion just before getting crushed to death by the danger he failed to recognize.

Aaaaand, scene​!

Now that I’m contemplating this terrible plot for an audience of children, I have to wonder if I made the whole thing up.

Cookbooks and other quixotic ... (Abandoned August 28, 2024.)

​I didn’t even complete the title of this blog. 🙄 But again, I know what I wanted to write about.

I was considering how human beings do a fabulous job of wishful thinking, and how cookbooks are the very embodiment of our self-delusional optimism.

If you’re anything like me, when you flip through a cookbook in a bookstore, you see the recipes (and often, appetizing photos), and you imagine sitting down to enjoy the dishes portrayed. You envision serving them and receiving appreciative compliments. You trick yourself into thinking that if you just buy the book, those wonderful experiences are sure to follow.

Conveniently, you forget about reality.

Those recipes require planning and shopping.​ You invariably have to track down ingredients you don’t own, like tamarind paste or blueberry vinegar. Every new recipe is a time commitment and a risk—who among us hasn’t labored long in the kitchen to be met with a disappointing failure?  And then, whether the results are sublime or sorry, every cooking endeavor requires cleanup.

So is it any wonder that my cookbooks sit on my shelf, collecting dust and mocking me? 

Oh, but we love to hate. (Abandoned November 3, 2025.)

I barely began this one. I wrote:

I saw this bottom-of-the-article ad today, and I thought, “Lordy

And that was it.

I don’t even have the screenshot I captured that day, but it was one of those bottom-of-the-page clickbait ads trying to tempt you with some secret the medical establishment is allegedly hiding from you. The headline was along the lines of “Doctors hate him for revealing this one weird trick.”

I was thinking about why that headline was chosen, and why humans have such an attraction to hatred, resentment, conflict, revenge, and the like. (You might be noticing a theme with me here.)

But now, I’m going to completely abandon that topic and tell you what I learned while researching those bottom-of-the page clickbait ads. They have a name! And it’s both perfectly accurate and remarkably disgusting. (I have added it to my list of terrible words just for the way it sounds.) Please enjoy my link to the Wikipedia article entitled “Chumbox.”

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go delete everything in my drafts folder. Thanks for inspiring me to get this done!

I received this message on LinkedIn yesterday:

I had not written on this topic. I’d never even thought about the relationship between these two words. I couldn’t imagine what contentment had to do with containment.

I was all too familiar with the ubiquitous noun “content.” In fact, I’ve railed against that term. I hate the way it’s used these days to refer to so much writing—including blogs like this one. To me, it just connotes “void-filler,” and it’s an insult.

But how about the adjective content, describing a state of contentedness? What was that all about? I went straight to the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary and got the answer. 

In other words, if what you want falls pretty well within the bounds of what you have, you’re content.

Interesting, right? It immediately made me think of two things.

One was a powerful photography exhibit I saw many years ago at the art museum in Lakeland, Florida. In each photograph, a family was posed in front of their home with all their possessions. The families were from around the world, and I remember the shocking surfeit of stuff* Americans owned compared to their counterparts in other countries. You couldn't help but wonder, as you looked at these photos, what we really need in our lives, and why we’re so driven to acquire more and more things.

By the way, you can get a book of these photographs called Material World: A Global Family Portrait. And the irony is not lost on me that I’ve just invited you to acquire something. (Plus, I used an affiliate link so that I could acquire something myself—0.0004¢ if I’m lucky.)

The second thing I thought of was a scene involving two yachts. I’d read it in the delightful, entertaining, and informative book by Richard Conniff called The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide (another affiliate link). The scene took place at a time when

... Oracle’s stock was soaring and Larry Ellison briefly passed Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to become the world’s second-richest person. Ellison was celebrating aboard his 243-foot yacht off Capri. Then he spotted a 200-foot yacht heading out on a twilight cruise to the village of Positano. It was Paul Allen’s Meduse ... Ellison ordered his captain to crank his yacht’s three engines to full speed. He overtook Allen’s yacht at forty miles an hour, throwing up a huge wake that sent Allen and his guests staggering. “It was an adolescent prank,” Ellison told The Washington Post afterward. “I highly recommend it.”

Don’t recommend it to me, buddy. I think it makes you sound like an insecure, childish fool. I can’t imagine feeling compelled to do such a thing.

​The book is filled with anecdotes like this—of obscenely rich people not merely displaying their wealth, but rubbing others’ noses in it. Conniff explains that such behavior is natural, because we’re mammals who want to achieve and demonstrate dominance.

Yes, I’m a mammal. And I’m not an ascetic, by any means. But I don’t run with the crowd that yachts around the Gulf of Naples. So the “adolescent prank” above just strikes me a bizarre and kind of ... pathetic. It’s the very opposite of contentment. It’s not enough for this guy to be be the second-richest person in the world—he has to literally push his zillionaire adversary around with his huge pleasure craft. I mean: 🙄.

Contentment gets the suspicious side-eye in America, particularly on LinkedIn, land of hustling, humblebragging overachievers. According to all the “boss babes” and “bropreneurs,” you must never stop “crushing it.” You have to “stay hungry,” even if Americans have so many calories available that staying slim has become a $90 billion industry. “Never settle,” we’re commanded. “Manifest that shit.” (A search for that sentence pulls up five thousand results on Etsy.)

I have goals, sure. But when I look at the Venn diagram of my life, I know I’m living very happily inside my “what I have” circle. I love it here. I appreciate it here. I’m content here.