Tag: lunaversary

Day in the life: 20240915

lunaversary

Occasionally, I write a day-in-the-life post. This one is for Sunday, September 15th, 2024; I designated it 20240915 in a year/month/day formula, which makes sense to librarians and computer geeks.

My wife stopped at the gas station and I tend to fill up the gas tank because I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I don’t mind it but my wife doesn’t like to get gas on her hands.

While I was doing this, a guy asked me for change. I waved him off and said, “When I’m done.” The thing about the process is that it’s pretty easy, but I need to do it in a methodical order: credit card in and out, type in the ZIP code, pick the grade of gas, and then place it into the tank. Because he continued chatting, I missed a step. “Do you need help?” “No, I need you to stop talking to me.” I didn’t realize that pumping gas was a bit of a zen experience for me until this guy was harshing my mellow. Yes, when I was DONE, I gave him some change.

The thing is, I LIKE helping people when I can. A couple of days earlier, I was sitting at a bus stop. A gregarious young adult male, 20 to 25, came up to me and asked, “Could you tie my shoe for me?” I replied, “Can you put your foot up on the seat?” because my knees and back didn’t want me to bend over. He said OK; I tied his shoes, and he thanked me, by which time the bus was coming.
Food
My wife and I stopped at the co-op to get sandwiches for a luncheon after church, and then we went to church. I got to attend choir rehearsal, the first week the choir sang since the spring. I missed it terribly. Even though we had a couple of rehearsals it’s not the same as singing in front of the congregation.

After church, we partook in the aforementioned luncheon. I was talking to one of the pastors who is particularly good at remembering names. There were a couple of congregants I could not identify. She said, “Tell me where they were sitting, and I could probably tell you their names. So, I noted that along with a general physical description. She knew their names even though they were newcomers to the congregation.

A couple of people around us were fascinated by this, not that the pastor knew their names but that I knew where they sat. If you’re sitting in the choir loft, you tend to notice where people are. Most people sit in the same place so it wasn’t that difficult for me.

We helped clean up, and then we went home for a couple of hours. My wife visited her mother while I was on a Zoom call with my sisters.

We try to have a lunaversary dinner. It often falls by the wayside, but we still attempt to go out to eat on or around the 15th of the month because we got married on the 15th of May. I checked the website of a nice restaurant in Watervliet, and it showed that it was open, so my wife drove us over there, but it was closed.
More food
We went to an Italian restaurant in Albany where we had been before. There was a football game on the TV (Chiefs/Bengals). A short time later, another couple came in and sat down not very far from us. They looked very familiar.

After dinner, we acknowledged seeing them in this restaurant some months ago. I said, “Oh, yes, it was the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Dallas Cowboys.” The woman said, “How do you know that?” “Because you hate the Cowboys, and our fathers were big Giants fans in the Binghamton area.”

My recollection was partly aided by my writing about it at the time. Still, the details of that meeting were fresh in my mind even though it had been eight months and a day since that earlier game.

My wife and I went home, and soon, my wife went to bed. About an hour later, a police officer in a cop car was in front of the house across the street directing someone to get out of their car. I brushed my teeth, did some reading, and went to bed.

Things that bug me a little

very LOUD

After going to NYC, I started pondering a few things that bug me a little. Maybe a bit more than a little. I’m listing from most to least annoying.

Motorized bicycles are a hassle to avoid in Albany, especially the lunkheads, who insist on riding on the sidewalk.  But in Manhattan, they ride in the designated lanes, yet often don’t yield to pedestrians, ignoring traffic signals.

As someone who has been going to the City since 1971, I have found that car drivers have been, in the main, more aware of pedestrians. I had to scowl at only one car, and naturally, it was a taxi driver turning left and heading toward me as I was in the middle of the walkway.

Snow removal is something I excel at. Before I went to church on January 7, I shoveled the walk. The WHOLE walk. Then, just before dark, I shoveled again. There was a dusting the next morning, which I planned to get to, but the sun took care of it.

On the 9th, the absentee landlord for the property next door, Tick, and his long-suffering wife were trying to clear that sidewalk, which had mainly turned to ice by then. Not that he asked my opinion, but he might be better served to engage one of the tenants to shovel for a monetary consideration. Heck, I’d do it myself if he paid me enough.

Bathroom etiquette

I put the toilet seats down. There’s a sign in the all-access bathroom at my church asking people to lower the seat, yet twice in 2024, the seat was up. When I grew up, I was in a household with three females and one other male.  I live with two females currently.

A few years ago, I mentioned this topic to a guy who was quite perturbed. He gave me a diatribe about how women are liberated. “Why should men have to touch the filthy toilet seat?” I had no pithy response, so I just walked away. And I still put the seat down, but don’t tell him.

Hands-free cell phones bug me because the person walking down the street yakking is often very LOUD. That said, sometimes, it’s entertaining. One guy seemed to be pumping himself up when he said, “I’m ready to take on whatever they think I can do.” Another guy muttered,  “I don’t know what the f*** they’re talking about.” A woman was delighted to share, “I  was kind of lying telling people that Disney is involved.”

The photo, BTW, is one in a series of failed attempts to take a decent picture of the moon with my phone. I sort of like it because it looks like the moon lit the porch.

Pigskin conversation

On the other hand, I enjoyed this conversation immensely. On January 14, my wife and I ate dinner at a local Italian restaurant for our lunaversary. A television showed the Green Bay Packers playing at the Dallas Cowboys. The Pack was leading 27-0 until the ‘boys scored a touchdown just before the half.

I told my wife, ” I hate the Cowboys.” The woman at the next table, dining with her husband, said, “I can’t help but overhear what you said. I hate the Cowboys, too.”

While eating and watching the game during the second half at our respective tables, we discovered that our fathers and we were all New York Giants fans. She had one sister, and growing up, they both watched the games on Sundays with their dad. Since her family lived in Delaware County, NY, adjacent to Broome County, where my hometown of Binghamton is, we all watched the games on WNBF-TV, Channel 12, the CBS affiliate that carried the games locally.

I know a great deal about this person, including the fact that she is two years younger than me, except for her name. It was fun for us to do a running commentary of the game. At one point, I noted that Dallas, then down by 24 with about 20 minutes left, could tie the game if they scored three touchdowns AND two-point conversations. Fortunately, GB beat DAL 48-32. Our spouses were very patient. 

Get orbisculate into the dictionary

To orbisculate. Meaning, “to accidentally squirt juice and/or pulp into one’s eye, as from a grapefruit when using a spoon to scoop out a section for eating.”

orbisculate“Is ‘orbisculate’ a word? The late Neil Krieger’s children want it to be.” That’s the title of a recent Boston Globe article.

“Hilary Krieger, now 43 and an editor for NBC News’s THINK, was 24 when she used it with a friend… ‘We were eating fruit – I believe it was oranges – and I said, it ‘orbisculated on you.’ [The friend] was like, ‘That’s not a word. … My first feeling was pity. Like, this is going to be embarrassing when he finds out that this is a word.'”

Except that it wasn’t. It was a creation of her father. “Neil Krieger was a scientist and entrepreneur. After 20 years teaching neuroscience…, he founded West Rock Associates, a biotech grant recruitment firm. He was committed to civil rights activism and was involved with the Boston chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).

“Krieger died of complications from COVID-19 on April 29. He was 78.

“Now his adult children are on a mission. They want ‘orbisculate’ added to the dictionary, to honor their father. (Also, it’s a perfectly useful intransitive verb, they say.) They’ve launched a website with a petition to dictionary editors.”

The blog

And on the website is the post How to Break into a Dictionary.

“The way a word qualifies for inclusion is when it’s being used by a lot of people. Dictionaries employ scores of editors to scour the English language for new words and check whether they’re being used often and widely. And like many things, the best way to get a word used widely is by word of mouth…

“But there was, of course, a catch. Dictionary editors only count certain types of uses of the word: When it’s used in context. That means that references to the word as a word, rather than employing it for what it means, don’t get added to their count.”

OK. “I hold the Friskies cat food can away from me when I open it, lest it orbisculate on me.” BTW, this is true.

The Krieger family is “also selling T-shirts with the word on them; all proceeds benefit Carson’s Village, an organization that helps families with resources right after a loss (the group does everything from helping to coordinate burials to setting up obituaries, for free).”

Lunaversary

I am sympathetic because I’m a big fan of the word lunaversary. It’s made it into the Urban Dictionary, but its example is terrible. “Our 4-month lunaversary is on Saturday.” NO! “Our fourth lunaversary is on Saturday.” Yes!

The Merriam-Webster people are looking at the ‘-iversary’ word part. “Monthiversary (with its variant monthaversary) to be the strongest contender for full establishment in the language.” [SHUDDER!]  Mensiversary would be OK, I guess, but one loses the sense of the insanity of new love.

L is for lunaversary

Luna- is the prefix, not just for moon-based objects, from which the word “month” comes, but for “lunatics” and “lunacy,” all the things “early-stage intense romantic love” is.

moon-20120922-thm“Six-month anniversary.” Something is just linguistically WRONG about that. Anni- refers to the year. Now, semi-anniversary, or some variation would be OK.

You may have read about the studies dealing with the “swooning magic of head-over-heels love.” Researchers “found high amounts of activity in a ‘reward’ part of the brain when the smitten subjects were shown photos of their honeys. That part of the brain has previously been linked to the desire for cocaine, chocolate, and money.

“It shows us exactly why love looks so crazy. It’s activating these circuits that are associated with very intense desire,” said SUNY Stony Brook psychologist Arthur Aron,” who helped lead one study.

Well, luna- is the prefix, not just for moon-based objects, from which the word “month” comes, but for “lunatics” and “lunacy,” all the things “early-stage intense romantic love” is. Lunaversary (loon’ a ver’ sah ree) is the monthly recurrence of a notable event. It is far more accurate than “one-month anniversary”, and far shorter to boot.

You never heard of lunaversary before? That’s because I created it. Or so I believe. When I wrote about this previously, some other guy claims HE invented it, and he probably did, and around the same time; the logic is rather rudimentary.

Nevertheless, I had sent this word to the late William Safire’s “On Language” column in the New York Times about twenty years ago. Safire thought it was interesting construction, and he did type me a response suggesting that the idea had merit. He said he considered using it in his column, but never did. I still have that blue postcard somewhere in the attic.

Use “lunaversary” at will. Tell them when they say “fifth month anniversary” that the PREFERRED term is “fifth lunaversary.” Impress your friends, and confound those who aren’t familiar with this word.

(Based on a post from June 15, 2005.)

abc 17 (1)
ABC Wednesday – Round 17

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