Collision

"Enervate" means to weaken vitality, not strengthen it? But this is absurd! In Harry Potter, the spell to re-awaken someone who's been knocked unconscious is enervate, so that word must mean to strengthen vitality! This is madness. It's utterly counter-intuitive! Either the wizarding world mislabeled their spell, or ETS and the Concise Oxford contain typos. I must write a letter to the latter pair disabusing them of their fanciful notions about the word...

There is this word, weltzschmertz, which means the feeling you get when your ideal world and the real world collide. Yep, I can feel it right now, weltzschmertz generated by a potterverse-reality collision. I wonder if we'll get a second moon out of this collision. According to a GRE reading-comprehension passage, the moon might have been a result of Earth's collision with another celestial heavy-weight.

On another note, I finally picked up a book by Noam Chomsky ("What We Say Goes"), and I should restrain myself from saying so after only having read 3/4 of 1 of his books, but no: he is brilliant. Admittedly, I have a tendency to idolize and idealize those I admire to an extent somewhere beyond what's called for. Still, the amount of knowledge contained in the man's brain is outrageous. A skillful debater includes examples and facts and figures in his arguments, and he seems to have a bottomless pit of them in every topic people throw his way. Which, albeit is usually related to politics or linguistics.

It's interesting to note how pro-Palestine he appears to be in the book. No, maybe I stated that incorrectly: I don't know if he's pro-Palestine, but he's completely against what he sees as US-Israel criminal activity/schoolhouse bullying. I don't know a lot of people who take the anti-Zionism stance, and when I asked a Jewish friend once, whether he supported the State of Israel, he replied "What do you mean? Of course I do!" Like, duh, what kind of answer was I looking for? I don't know,...with what little knowledge I have of the situation, it seems wrong to kick out hundreds of thousands of people from their homes just like that.

Also, Chomsky scares me the way he talks about nuclear warfare and the end of our species. But then he goes on to say later that Iran's not going to shoot nuclear missiles unless they want to commit mass suicide, in other words: not likely. Inconsistency there, but maybe I'm missing an element. A word or two about 9/11 conspiracies, the futility of name-calling in politics (and why it may actually help the one being verbally abused), and many other issues, written in the form of a dialogue between him and a journalist. The point of the book, as you can guess, is that the U.S. is an outlaw state, fully acknowledged, whatever we say goes, no matter how hypocritical or criminal. I just remembered one thing that the journalist mentioned in the book that cracked me up: Bush accused Iran of "meddling" in Iraq. No irony intended. What a riot.

A note about this other book I'm reading at the same time "Rich Dad, Poor Dad": Something about the methods to striking it rich that are described in the book strikes a bad chord with me. His methods seem sound and reasonable, and at first I was a most enthusiastic reader, thinking about buying mutual funds and all, but as I kept reading, I started to feel like something was wrong with some of his methods.

It took me a while to pinpoint the cause of my unease, but when he started raving about corporations, it hit me: it's exploitation. He's bragging about dooping people and ripping them off, and how you can make so much money by playing with corporations. How you can avoid taxes by spending as much of your asset-generated money as possible on fancy cars and dinners and vacations to Bali before taxes. And I really dislike the way he makes "hard-working professionals" and in particular, his own father ("poor dad") out to be idiots. It's awful. This is a major problem with our society, that there are people like him who think as long as your technically sticking to the rules- paying close attention to the wording so you can make loopholes- then what you're doing is perfectly okay, morally, and your winnings are justly obtained. He has good points, like the importance of differentiating between assets and liabilities, and everything he says makes sense, but is it enough to be technically true?

Oh, and today, I found myself flossing at the bookstore. I happened to have a little tooth-shaped container of dental floss in my backpack, and after eating an apple and a nectarine, I really, really needed to floss. I suppose I could've gone to the bathroom and done it in private. At any rate, Jess, I wish you were there to see it. It was a defining moment in my tooth-care career.