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New Words

It feels like New Years was only yesterday. After the marathon that is christmas to New years, including the weekend session of sledding, building snow-slimes, christmas-tree bonfires, drinking, Apples-to-Apples and poorly performed karaoke...

...after all of that (there is a lot more of that here), I began a 7-day, all-out, cram for the Series 7 License Exam. Like so many other situations where I had been asked to learn 800-1000 pages of material, I diligently worked for about 30 minutes a day up until the last week before finals and only then took refuge in the library, this exam truly tortured me, because you see, I have no library here. I now study in a home that contains 3 dogs (sometimes more, if you count the other miscreant-neighbor dogs), 2 cats (one of whom is in heat, and the other, a male) who are constantly cooing at me, or roaring at me (depending on the gender), and several delinquent Roomba robots who are constantly going off and upsetting some larger robot and incurring the wrath of the kitchen appliances. At least they clean up after themselves.

In any case, 7 days later (or approximately 140 hours waking-hours later), I entered the testing facility, sat down for 6 hours and emerged with my heart and brain intact (my eyes fell out on the way out to the car).

Now that that's all done with (and while I wait for the next shipment of financial security study material to arrive), I'm re-reading through Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People ( or, How to Do Things with Words while Smiling). The nod to Austin won't seem too far fetched if you take note of all the references to Emerson (which I stretch from Cavell), and how much the book focuses on expressing that the "lives of others (and their words) are neither here nor there; they drift between their own inexpressiveness and our inaccuracy in responding to them," and that if we search for that hesitation with a smile, we can all be like Cary Grant or Irene Dunn.


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