A coupla years ago when I was still teaching high school ( another plug in that caused me to be simultaneously apprised of youth culture and divorced from it) a hip female student used the word "emo" . I inquired and was given a passable definition of "emotional", esp. as relates to music.
Today the term was employed in a NY Times article referencing the style of Rosie O'Donnell's blogs , and I found myself stymied.
"No, " my son explained, "emo would never be in a hard rock song, it would be a happy sounding song that had pathetic lyrics about life sucks and I'm sad. "
"Oh." I said, only partially enlightened. I'm clearly not getting the subtler connotations of emo.
Which brings me to my time wasting activity for the day - deleting 750 names from my Plaxo
Before I had my own business that would have been termed "goofing off" . This was in fact a necessary business task as I'm about to send a mass mailing with my new website info
in preparation for a grand opening of the bookstore.
But back to my point, it seems there were 750 people I no longer knew, some of whom I couldn't recall having known in the first place. Admittedly, there was a perverse satisfaction to deleting those I'd never liked, a sort of asceticism , paring down to the essentials, nothing but the best and all that crap.
Though women aren't billed as having monastic values often, I could muster something, perhaps end up like this
...an image that turns up when I look for monastic, rather apropos, I thought, with a touch of wit. Not to worry, we won't be doing the catholic thing, and almost no one wears a habit today except those in cinematic comic relief.