Unordered lists
When that meme thing swept through I was uncooperative with my lists, so here I’ll do penance of a sort. These lists have nothing little to do with the questions in the original meme, but they are lists nonetheless.
1) For the first two years of life in our building we didn’t use the elevator at all, since we lived on the ground floor. (Oh, but we paid for the privilege of not using the elevator, several thousand tolars each month for its maintenance and greed for electricity). Then last summer we moved to the top floor, which means that now we ride in the elevator several times daily. Magda has an excuse, since any time she goes out she has Adam with her, sometimes wheeled in his voziček, sometimes doing his emergent trudging thing. My excuse is that I am usually travelling from the very top floor to the underground garage level, which is just far enough to justify not taking the stairs. And/or I am in a Type-A type hurry. Usually the elevator is neutral in odor, but occasionally you get a surprise. It’s not a very large space, so it holds onto scents quite tenaciously, and its ability to concentrate them is impressive.
In English, the verb to smell is a generally neutral word. Stink can replace smell bad, but there’s no word for to smell good. In Slovene we can talk about the inside of the elevator with a positive or a pejorative verb:
Dvigalo diši — The elevator smells nice
Dvigalo smrdi — The elevator stinks/reeks/has a stench about it
I’ve been cataloging the occasional olfactory surprises of our elevator:
- Freshly delivered pizza (diši)
- Contents of diaper pail (smrdi)
- Other people’s dinners — typically cabbagey/meaty/frying foody (depends who’s cooking)
- Rotting rubbish (smrdi)
- Romance by Ralph Lauren (diši)
- Elevator machinery oil (neither here nor there — reassuring or scary, depending on your mood and level of dread)
- Horrific oniony body odor, which palpably seems to be coating you, your clothes, and your hair with an indelible, oily film of reek in the seconds it takes to ride the five storeys from the cellar to the top. (Madonca, kako smrdi!)
2) Here are some collocations and phrases which it would please me very much to never hear again:
- Highways and byways
- Thai one on as a gutspillingly HI-larious pun anytime anything related to Thailand or Thai food is mentioned
- Honey and money used as rhyming words in any song
- Spring has sprung, not to mention spring into savings!, both of which are already looming on the calendar’s horizon
- Bratislava, Slovenia and Ljubljana, Slovakia
3) Things I never get tired of hearing:
- “Chickens go in, pies come out”
- “That rug really tied the room together”
- “Mind you don’t cut yerself, Mordechai”
- “You can’t really dust for vomit”
- “And I would like to redirect my career so that from now on the name John Malkovich will be synonymous with puppets”
4) Among the many things that made this January just finished especially busy was a job hunt. Few things make me feel more like a cat with its head in a brown paper bag than looking for a job. This was just a mild scare that the bottom would fall out of my contract sooner than expected, but since I have to have some way to put food on my family I thought I ought to at least begin a desultory, passive search for new employment. This inevitably delivered me upon that doorstep of despair, the javascript employment history form. For every job I’ve had, I had to enter details in a box titled REASON FOR LEAVING and because I was telling the truth in the main, my reasons for leaving each and every job increasingly sounded so mundane and tame that they began to smack of dirty lies. I thought that maybe if I played with the truth just a little bit it would make me sound both more honest and more interesting, and therefore more attractive to any potential employer. Here’s my list of enhanced reasons for leaving my last several jobs:
- Night vision eventually failed
- Wardrobe malfunction
- Ideological disagreement with employer over use of ’supposably’
- Sex with cleaning lady
- Mouse in Fry-o-lator® incident
- Outgrew leotard
- Just couldn’t stand to even look at the bastard anymore
- Dooced
- Bees
Well, you suckered me in. I did actually click on “wardrobe malfunction” just to see if maybe there was more than one. And scrolled down far enough to read about the “crackdown” on rear male nudity on daytime tv. I have read enough. Too much, even.
Comment by gaoo — Sunday 5 February 06 @ 01.40 MST+2.00
I think I’m using the stairs if I ever visit, just in case.
By the way, hello, er, neighbour! It might be that Carlitos is still working on a secret plan to make us meet and gobble pizza… You should ask him.
Comment by Heck — Sunday 5 February 06 @ 02.35 MST+2.00
The elevator at work is a place of dread for me. I am highly sensitive to smells and am frequently laid low by garlic and cologne.
Comment by Jane — Sunday 5 February 06 @ 17.03 MST+2.00
[...] !!! Elevators As Isoglossia recently pointed out, elevators are really good at containing and concentrating smells. This is a real problem for me. I have a very sensi [...]
Pingback by Hillbilly, Please » Blog Archive » Elevators — Tuesday 7 February 06 @ 02.13 MST+2.00