Today's word

causerie /kohz-REE/ - 1. an informal conversation : chat  2 : a short informal essay

The write-up does a nice job of explaining how the second definition developed from the first one. One popular usage is often all it takes. This is a nice new word for me, but I don't know that I'll get much of a chance to invoke it. 

empty

i need a news-free cocoon. forever.

The other attempted suicide story . . .

. . . that I recently read - maybe early last week - was about a guy who had a lightning bolt tattoo that he almost never talked about. One night he'd been drinking and told a friend the story behind it. Some time in his past he'd grown weary of dealing with his darkness, and decided to end his life. His gun misfired, but before he realized that, in the moment after he'd actually pulled the trigger to the point of releasing the firing pin, he instantly regretted what he'd done. He was unspeakably relieved when it didn't fire. As it happened, there was a thunderstorm that night, and the lightning became a symbol for him and a reminder that, no matter how bad things might get, he doesn't really want to die.

Sometimes I still have self-destructive thoughts

For a couple minutes yesterday i was feeling incredibly stressed out and frustrated, to the point (excuse the unintended pun) that i considered whether it would be possible to jam my pen through my temple. i recognized the madness in the impulse, and rejected it, and soon worked past it. Though they won't know of it, i'm sure my coworkers would be grateful for that, not to mention the people who love me.

i am, gratefully, long past the days when i would sit on the kitchen floor with the cold steel of the sharpened chef's knife pressed against my wrist. but i still have vestige impulses of the habit of not wanting to live anymore. The two stories i read this month from people who survived suicide attempts help with putting those impulses into perspective. i still think i could probably benefit from more therapy to further help with that, but don't really want to explain why i'd be going there again. 

Today's words

nuncupative /NUN-kyoo-pay-tiv/ - spoken rather than written : oral

I'd encountered this word before, but don't think I got its meaning quite right from context.

burke /berk/ -  1. to suppress quietly or indirectly  2 : bypass, avoid

Okay, from the write-up you can see how this word came into being and got these meanings, but there are clearly some steps of the linguistic journey missing.

"How DARE you . . .

. . . PRESUME for a MOMENT to associate yourself more with these countless wounded women than with their abusers?"

- what my brain or my adversary (are they the same? I am he?) is screaming at me today.