dear reader - we come again to that special time of the year -- mardi gras has passed (and les bon temps have rouler-ed), daylight is being actively saved ('though this writer does not quite understand how, or why, we would try to save it without first deploying a bunch of photovoltaic gear), and the kids are shaping up for spring break -- when the typically-disparate conversational miasmas of girl talk hell and boy talk hell tend to topically converge, and all talk everywhere is of that sport, and that league, and those schools once again.
wherever you are, i hope you either share (and enjoy) the mania or have sufficient insulation.
for myself, well, some explanation may be due.
not subscribing to the faith, i nevertheless remain shaped by some aspects of that faith's (those faiths'?) prevalent influence in the environment in which i arose.
so for some years i have tried to, sort of ironically, observe lent. i don't give up a guilty pleasure, or a vice, though. quite.
during lent i try to categorically exclude the syntax "i hate" from my vocabulary, both expressed and thought. it is quite difficult.
i selected that syntax, particularly, because statements i begin that way aren't true, exactly. "hate," in such statements is a placeholder for some other more complex set of responses to the posited object, which use of that word permits lazily introspective me to decline to examine.
secondarily, in the event a statement of mine pertaining to a particular person, place or thing and beginning in that fashion were to be true -- and given that "hate" may be described as having something like opposite valence and similar magnitude to those values of "love" -- experiencing much less maintaining such a state must be unbearable, and it would be desirable to stop hating pronto.
before i began this, some years ago, i imagined (and still do imagine) that i did not think or say those words often, you know, in the comfy conceit that i already exercised a pretty effective mental austerity regime. but i was wrong. well, either i was wrong, or from that first hateless lent i have increasingly used it, or, i suppose, both. probably both.
that first hateless lent i mentioned it to some friends and acquaintances as a quirky anecdote, something i had thought would be at least an easy way to giggle through lent, but wasn't. since that time i have received a t-shirt that says simply "i hate" from a friend, and developed a reputation for hate around the office place.
the t-shirt is a blast: you don't need to feel too much inhibition when a total stranger asks you what you hate. on the other hand, it is hard to avoid generating statements beginning with that syntax. (and when you uninhibitedly answer such questions from familiar strangers around the office place, you may develop a reputation for hate. or some sort of inscrutability.)
so it's lent, and it is march madness, and i'm still trying to so something a little more refined and precise than hate . . . with little to no noteworthy success to date. (for example, once i hit "post" i will be using that syntax several times during lent in perpetuity).
be careful what you wish for.