A Commonplace Glossary: June 2009

recur v. \ri-ˈkər\

I don't know why it happens.

I am asleep in bed in my apartment when I hear someone moving in the living room. I stir awake but I don't move. I don't want them to know I'm awake because they're a criminal and I have no way to defend myself. I hear them move into my bedroom. My eyes are closed. The footsteps thunder. They stop for a moment, must be deciding what to steal from me. I hear them move towards me. I have to do something. I try to move but I can't. My body won't wake up. I hear them startle. Some sign has given me away. A change in my breathing. They weren't expecting me to wake up. They start to run away. Footsteps like a deer's running into the woods. I try to call out or make any kind of noise but it only comes out as a groan. Even my vocal chords won't work. I wake up. I see no one. There is no sound but the gentle night wind.

These things happen when I am stressed out. They follow the same pattern each time: someone breaking into my apartment, coming into my bedroom. In most cases, it is someone I never see. Once, it was my sister holding a knife. They always mean me harm but there is no explanation why. Most times, they are robbing me. I can never move. I always try to, but my body can't. I force myself to wake up instead. Somehow I know it's a dream. I focus on my eyelids. If I can open them, it ends. Eventually I can make it happen. It hurts afterwards.

I don't know what to call these things. They don't feel like nightmares. There's very little plot and no characters at all. I can't call them night terrors, either. Those are when you can't remember anything that happened when you closed your eyes but wake up deathly afraid. And it isn't sleep paralysis; that's when you wake up but your body remains asleep and inert. It's all three of these things and none. It happens when I am stressed out, but I'm not now. Everything is rolling forward in my life like a long, even wave. I am riding on top. Everything this week has gone slower than I imagined it would. I can see each thing happen before it does.

I lie in bed. My body feels flooded with adrenaline. I turn on my phone and console myself with Twitter, the random noise created by people at 3 o'clock in the morning. Some people at parties still. Some people strung out on marathon video game sessions, hallucinating in pixels. Some people with insomnia.

I get up and walk down the hallway. I have to do this. The apartment is still locked. The blinds to my patio rustle in the wind. I left the door open.

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font n. \ˈfänt\

First of all, you ought to use the word typeface instead of font. A font is Times New Roman, 18 point bold. A typeface is a set of letterforms, a feeling conveyed with curves and lines, a meaning that lies in the text's shadow but remains present nonetheless. The scent worn by the woman you have loved from afar for years, unnameable and unforgettable. Helvetica is plain, frank, sometimes impersonal; Baskerville is dignified and literate. Part of the sense of a typeface comes from its shapes: wide letters seem friendlier, more youthful. Serifs denote seriousness.

But memory is also mixed in with the meaning born in geometry. I see a thick serifed font on the menus at a Quizno's shop and think of the park road signs along the way to my grandparents' in Virginia. I see posters for Dollhouse and think of the old Apple IIs sleeping in a computer lab in my elementary school. An MTA bus passes me and I remember the cover of my high school yearbook. These things accrue meaning over time, almost by accident.

I fell in love with typography when I became editor of my high school's newspaper. It was the era where desktop publishing on the Macintosh was a rare and almost magical thing; there was something eldritch in being able to position a block of text exactly ten picas from the left edge of the paper without using a ruler, in having a machine balance three columns of text so that they were exactly equal in height, in switching between typefaces with a pull-down menu. I learned what kerning, leading, baselines and x-heights -- what all these terms meant by fiddling with them in dialog boxes.

My teacher lent me a book on the basics of page layout when I started out. It expected you to lay out page dummies with a grease pencil, to place columns on the page with an X-Acto knife. Any mention of using a computer was left for the appendix, where the author also speculated that in the future our newspapers would personalize themselves to our own tastes and interests. It was one of the few times in my life I felt I was outracing what the world knew.

I set the text of the newspaper in Palatino, a classic, almost regal face. In college, I switched to Bookman. I told myself that I liked how wide Bookman's characters were, how easy-to-read and friendly they felt while remaining intelligent. But really I chose it because it was the typeface that the Baltimore Sun used then. It was when I loved that paper the most, before Michael Olesker fell from grace and Gregory Kane moved to Washington. It was also when I thought seriously of becoming a journalist, of working for a newspaper -- if I was lucky, maybe the Sun. It felt like a noble pursuit then. It felt like something I would love to become.

Somehow, I started to receive catalogs of typefaces in the mail. I don't know how; I have never bought a single font in my life. Foundries expect that only graphic designers will buy a typeface, so they usually price them in the hundreds of dollars. I instead pored over the catalogs the way I once did hint books for video games I did not own. I imagined buying them -- not the gimmicky ones, but the classic ones, the ones that serious designers would use. In my head, I was immersed in them.

I became skilled at identifying typefaces as I walked around the world. When McDonald's rebranded itself in the late 90s, they used Tekton's near-handwriting qualities to imply familiarity and openness. Ikea used it on the price signs in their stores for the same reasons. It was a game I would play by myself, a series of signficances no one else seemed to take note of. I think you can find meaning in anything, if you know how to look at it.

I did not become a journalist, and I feel coldly fortunate for it. The Web is where I live now, and it is a vastly different place. The menu of typefaces that you can count upon nearly anyone visiting a page to possess is about ten items long. Adobe's catalog of typefaces contains around 2,200. I can no longer be picky. I think in terms of serif, sans-serif, and monospaced: generic keywords instead of flavors. I lay things out inexactly. I'm happy when Firefox and Internet Explorer render things roughly the same. I measure things in pixels now, not picas.

I borrow a book from a friend and stare longingly at the pages set in perfect lines of Caslon. What could have been. What has been, and will no longer.

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desperate adj. \ˈdes-p(ə-)rət\

The man jams on the parking machine buttons, the coin return and the print receipt, add value, subtract it, max it out -- he doesn't care, he only knows that the machine contains contains coins, and maybe today it will give a few up by accident. Machines everywhere fail, especially those that bear computer screens. This one doesn't. He walks onward in the drizzle, leaning on his cane. My coworker says to me, "It has really good imported Italian food, but it's really cheap." We are walking to Trinicria, skirting the edge of the bubble.

I cannot think of where I work as anything but a bubble; I don't wish to but I must. There are police at its edges, where university students and hospital workers go one way and poor people go another. We are easy to distinguish. We wear scrubs, khakis, suits. Once a man mistook a group of us for lawyers, and insisted on shaking each of our hands. We wear name badges, lanyards, ties. We stand out and we walk quickly. My father used to work at Metro West, a block north of the bubble, when he and my mother first moved to Baltimore. His only advice when I started working here was: keep moving, no matter what you're asked.

Most people don't ask. I don't want to overstate things. But when they do ask, it's for money. A quarter, sometimes for bus fare, sometimes just because. I have always said no. I used to ride the metro to work. Every morning, there would be a woman standing at the top of the escalators. She smelled terrible, had a wild unfocused look to her eyes, and jangled her feet as she stood leaning against a brick barrier. She sometimes asked for a quarter as the mass of us swept past her. Sometimes she said nothing. I never saw anyone ever give her any money. I told myself: you can't, if you give her some one day, you'll feel like you should every day. I am ashamed of myself for thinking this way. Some of us make it easier for ourselves and carry no cash at all, instead use plastic cards to buy our lunches and our drinks. When people ask for quarters, we can be truthful when we say we don't have any. The university has invented a plastic card of its own that you can use to buy snacks out of the machine down the hall and burritos from the Mexican place next to the Hippodrome. Inside the bubble, you don't need to handle money at all.

Past her, I would walk through Lexington Market. Almost none of the stalls would be open by that point in the morning, but the pizza place was. There would be two or three men standing there drinking Bud Light from plastic cups. They looked bad off too, like they had not had a shower or a shave in a while, but not as bad as the woman. They never asked for money. I would see them in the market at lunch sometimes too, milling around, listening to the Friday bands. The bubble is pierced at lunchtime in Lexington Market. Everyone needs to eat, and everything is cheaper outside the bubble. You can buy sushi 40 cents a piece and a sub and a bag of chips for four dollars. Fire trucks and ambulances park outside the entrance while they take their lunch break. Crowds ring around the deli counters, trying to catch the eye of one of the workers. Lines of office workers and single mothers alike form at the turkey sandwich stand, the one place that can be unambiguously counted as healthy. In this mix, there's safety and perhaps the feeble beginnings of a community, but then there's never really danger from 9 to 5, when there are crowds to stay lost in. I keep an eye out for pickpockets but I think it is only paranoia. At 5, everything closes, even the shabby stores around Lexington Market. The metal shutters come down. By 6 o'clock each day, it is nearly deserted around the market.

Once I was walking down Vine Street, a shortcut behind the mental health facility. It was lunchtime and there was a couple pushing a stroller. They stopped me and the man started to explain that he had just come from the VA down the street, he had just gotten back to the United States and he didn't have any money because of some mistake with processing papers, and his family was hungry. I looked in the stroller. There was a baby there. He did not ask for money, only help. He had clean clothes and spoke in a calm voice though his sentences had no punctuation. He offered to show me his VA ID as proof. I told him I didn't need to see it. I didn't even know what a VA ID looked like, anyway, and the cold logical part of me pointed out that a VA ID didn't prove anything at all. I told him to come with me and started to walk to the sandwich shop I had been planning to go to for lunch.

On the way, I asked him what branch of the service he was in.

"Special Forces," he said.

I knew he was lying but there was a baby.

I walked into the shop; he stayed outside. I could guess why. I asked for an cold cut sub, for myself, and two extra bags of pretzels. I couldn't see anything else on the racks I could give them that wasn't junk food. I should have bought another sandwich. I wasn't thinking clearly. A young girl, maybe twelve years old, came into the shop while I was waiting and asked me for a quarter, something that had never happened before though I had been to the place many times, and I said no. It made me nervous, that it was happening to me twice. When I came out and gave him the pretzels, the woman looked at him but didn't say anything. I was wasting their time. Maybe I was supposed to ask him what I could do to help instead of coming up with an idea. Maybe he would have asked for money then. I said goodbye awkwardly.

That was the only time I tried to help anyone.

I saw the man again later that week, same place but he was alone. I was walking with a coworker to the parking garage. It was around 5:30 and there weren't many people still left out. He began to speak to us, I didn't hear what he meant to say this time, but there was no baby.

"You," I said and pointed at him. My tone of voice carried an accusation, I don't know of what. He turned and walked away, and my coworker didn't ask a single question at all.

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explore v. \ik-ˈsplȯr\

I can't decide which to bring, my sweatshirt or my sunglasses. The sky is bright blue, but hidden among the wispy cumulus clouds are dark fragments of rain clouds. I stand in the gravel parking lot by my car and stare at up at them, trying to decide whether they're just the halo of a storm that will pass well wide of here, or if they are the edge of something serious.

I have never gone hiking in the rain. I imagine walking along the path, pulling up my hood as a drizzle begins, then ducking under a tree when it turns to a downpour. I imagine someone else is there with me; it doesn't matter who. It would be the conversation we had that would matter. I imagine that hidden under a tree in the rain, secrets wouldn't mean as much to anyone.

I decide to play it safe and place my sunglasses on my head and carry the sweatshirt in my left hand. In my other hand, I have a guidebook I don't trust completely. The author's directions are vague in places and sometimes leave out intermediary landmarks. He can be especially unhelpful about difficult turns, when there are many choices and few landmarks to offer guidance. This is hike #16, Cromwell Valley Park with Loch Raven Add-On. I need to avoid the add-on; it adds four miles to the path and I hate out-and-back hikes. Without the add-on, the hike is a neat loop.

Last week, I carried notes on the turns in the text but got stymied when things no longer corresponded to what I had written down. There is an interpretative wildlife trail with thick numbered posts that tell you where to read in a pamphlet that no longer exists, but once you leave that behind, the trail blazes are few and far between. The text said to turn right at a series of metal cables holding up an antenna; there are two sets of these cables close together. This time, I am carrying the text with me.

The parking lot begins in the valley between two hills. I start up the trail, stopping to read the book at every intersection. I climb up onto a ridge; knowing this time exactly how high the top is makes the climb easier, and I dig into it with more gusto. I circle round the edge of the park just as I did last week, turn left at the red #1 post, then at the red #11, then a final left at green #5. And then I climb all the way to the top of Cromwell Valley, following a meandering stream all the way to its source. The ground is still wet from the rain yesterday, but I can walk at the edge of the trail, where there is grass and fallen leaves, to avoid getting my feet muddy.

I reach the top, where I stopped before when I glimpsed the edge of what appeared to be someone's house. I have not seen anyone on these trails either time I have been here. Being alone in the woods is a calming thing so long as you feel you know where you are. I have a terrible sense of direction, to tell the truth, so all I need is to know roughly what direction I'll need to go to get back to the trailhead, and how far it is.

"Head right, cross the stream, and go straight up the hill," the text says. I locate a small cut in the path that leads to a stream crossing I hadn't noticed last week, but there are two hills I could climb next: one that parallels the trail I have just been on, and one that heads perpendicular, in the direction of the cut. I have not seen a blaze in a while now, and none are visible from where I stand.

I decide to go parallel because the incline is softer. The trail turns very muddy here; I waddle up the path, placing my feet against the trail edges where the mud is at least more firm, but I splash myself anyway. After some time I start to see red blazes again: a very good sign. I am on the trail of the text.

I think I located the turn for the add-on; I'm losing sense of the text a little, but I take the fork that turns back towards the start. The path widens and flattens out into a grassy path, almost a fire road but wider, and then I come to the clearing.

It is a wide, almost circular opening, and the grass appears to be mown, judging from how short the grass is and the tractor treads in the ground. There are no flowers here or wildlife. It is in what feels like the center of the park, and definitely at its peak. There is nothing above the clearing but sky, and these were dirt paths I walked to reach here, difficult ones so far as I could tell for anything mechanical to traverse. The clearing appears to be a dead end at first, but when I walk into it I notice a small opening that leads back into the woods. There are no blazes.

I bookmark the location in my phone and name it "UFO Landing Field."

It is Melvil Dewey's fault that I read so much about aliens when I was in middle school; my first destination when I went to the library was the 000 section: Computer Science, Information, and General Works. Next to the books that explained how to write games in assembly language were ones about Betty and Barney Hill, the Mary Celeste and Roanoke Island, ghosts and exorcisms, even disappearing planes in the Bermuda Triangle and its Pacific twin, the Devil's Triangle. Everything unexplained in the world was just one shelf down.

I was a skeptical child, but I could not imagine that all of the photographs could be hoaxes, that not all the abduction stories could be lies. I tried to guess which were true and which weren't, but it didn't matter: I already believed that there was truth in that shelf of the unexplained.

It took me a long time to turn my back on it, to conclude all of it was the modern-day equivalent of fairy tales. Because no matter how much of it I decided was hoaxery and fabrication, there was always one more story, one more possibility, out there.

I think all of us need the world to be wider than we know.

The path past the clearing is covered in dead leaves, and leads sharply downhill. I walk slowly, intent on not losing my footing. Suddenly I realize the world is darker than it should be, even with the trees over my head. Rain is coming. I do not like the idea of it now. I still haven't seen any blazes and though I think I am now on the path I did not take past the stream, the sharper uphill, I'm not completely sure, and rainstorms present a strong penalty for mistakes.

I hear a branch crack and start to fall somewhere behind me and a primal fear catches me briefly -- I can't see where it is, but it sounds heavy. I speed up until I do indeed find the stream again, and follow it downhill. Everything seems a little different than before. The light has changed it. No rain drops yet. At the foot of the stream where it levels out, I turn left at a footbridge I remember from before, when I had abandoned the text and simply decided to follow the trail.

Blazes are everywhere here. I follow them until I reach a clearing where a couple sit on a bench together, looking down on a rolling field. Past that is the road to my car. The sky is clear now. No rain clouds at all. I shyly say hello to the couple and walk to the road. Across the meadow of the valley, people are setting up picnics, stretching out in the sun, going for walks together.

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snapshots plural n. \ˈsnap-ˌshäts\

My father calls the pictures I take snapshots with a hint of the same tone of voice he uses when he says the word marginal. He uses the word to describe restaurants whose menu consists of different kinds of hamburgers, for example, or movies with Will Ferrell in them.

He takes photographs, however. As long as I have been alive, he has been a dedicated photographer. When my sister was perhaps two years old, he took a photo of her peering up at the camera from inside the canvas bag we carried our beach things in. She smiles playfully at the camera, as if she has been playing hide-and-seek with the photographer and has just been discovered as the shutter of the camera opens. My father sent the photo to a contest run by a local newspaper, and though it only won a honorable mention, the editors ran the photo beside the article announcing the results. He had been published.

Back then, he had a single-lens reflex camera with a flash mounted up top that made a pleasing clacking noise when you adjusted its angle. Over time, he has collected photography equipment the same way he does radios -- he has more of it than he really needs, but he doesn't collect simply to accumulate things. Each lens or camera has a specific purpose, sometimes even a history. He has a Diana camera because my mother had one as a toy when she was a child. He thinks the following around it is a little silly.

My father brings a camera nearly everywhere, sometimes two. He fades into the background at family gatherings, presses the viewfinder to his eye, clicks the button as we talk. I have learned not to look at the camera, to pretend it is not there -- that he isn't there, either.

The first year my sister brought the man who would become her husband on our yearly family vacation, my father made all of us stand on the sand dunes together in the golden hour, posed us for a seemingly interminable length of time. Turn a little this way. Take a step to your left. My mother explained afterwards: "He's really happy."

I never picked up my father's skill at photography. I read the books he had, liked the discussions of focus and light but never really understood what an F-stop was, or even if it mattered. I took a camera with me when I visited Paris ten years ago, but only snapped photos of objects and art, not people. A sign directing you down the stairs to the metro. The way a lamppost curves at its top. The exterior of the Louvre just before dinnertime. The fountains at Versailles. I chose these snapshots because I wanted to remind myself what it was like to be there. I never felt I needed to show anyone proof that I myself had been. Why else would you take a picture of yourself?

When my sister became pregnant, my father bought a high-definition video camera. The chime the camera makes whenever he turns it on is identical to the one that begins a remix of R.E.M.'s "I'll Take the Rain." He holds the camera out in front of himself when he records; though it has a viewfinder, he uses the LCD mounted on its side instead. It looks as if he is scanning the world -- for gold or life signs, maybe.

I visited my sister with my parents two weeks after her son was born. We were sitting on a couch together after we finished lunch. She asked: "Would you like to hold him?" I said yes and tried awkwardly to cradle his head the way my brother-in-law instructed. My nephew looked at me, confused. I couldn't tell whether he was unhappy or not. His eyebrows wrinkled.

I asked, "No?" He frowned and looked away briefly at something above us. The camera chimed. His eyes turned back to my face. Blue. All babies' eyes are blue, I had learned the day he was born. They change in a few weeks' time, if they will ever change. The frown left his face but he still seemed undecided. I felt everyone's eyes on me. I felt the camera on me. Sweat was forming at my forehead. My nephew's eyes rolled back into his head a little; my sister had told me about that, that they did that when he was sleepy, that it wasn't cause for alarm.

"No?" I repeated. His eyes focused on me again. Just curious now. Emotions seemed to flicker across his face, none able to find purchase. Finally, he started to fuss a little. Not cry, but he needed something. I tried to give him back to my sister, but I was terrified of doing something wrong. My brother-in-law lifted him up from my arms. It seemed effortless, how he did it. I thought of my father giving us baby lifts when we were small, raising us up all the way to the ceiling with his arms and then bringing us gently back down. The camera chimed again.

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luck n. \'lək\

I was lucky tonight. After the first few hands of poker, I had already drawn out a straight flush, and in the last hand of the night, I would hit quad fives on the flop. Both of them were Omaha hands, where you have four cards in front of you, not two, so the odds of each occuring were that much less infinitesimal. When I showed the straight flush, CH said to me, "You're more likely to be hit by lightning than to get that hand."

I asked, "Really?" and he laughed, I don't know whether it was because it was just a tall tale I had fallen for, or if he found it funny, the way my eyes must have widened at what he said. I decided to let it go, to feel lucky whether or not I actually was.

I don't believe in luck, actually. I don't believe there is really such a thing as randomness, that things occur without any reason. I also don't believe that all reasons are grand or complex, or even that they're all fair. These are matters of faith for me. I don't know how I decided this, or even if I decided it at all or simply knew it, but I do believe it. Instead of luck, I believe in probability. You have to in order to have any measure of success with poker. If you need one more card to make a flush, the odds of that happening are roughly 1 in 4; if you need a straight instead, it's 1 in 3. Some people would call whether or not you complete that particular flush luck, I think. Instead I think of how the deck was collected after the last hand was over, the particular way each of my friends shuffles a deck of cards, even how humid the air is, and whether that makes the cards stick to each other. Each of these things carries a meaning, each affects how the cards will end up, and all of it is unknowable. This, I think, is what is luck is made of.

There are thunderstorms forecast for every day this week. I watched one roll in this past afternoon; the dark clouds streamed overhead faster than I have ever seen clouds move. (I remember marvelling the first time I ever noticed clouds moving -- I thought, how could I have missed this for so long?) It was quitting time so I packed up my things as fast as I could, though I felt I had to stop once I was outside to snap a few pictures of the stormclouds. They didn't even look like clouds. They had no shape at all. They could not be named rabbit or dog or balloon; there was nothing for a child's imagination to latch onto. They were a continuous roil of dark gray, frightening and disordered.

As I walked to the parking garage, I felt a buzz in my body like a static electricity charge building. I've read that people, before they are struck by lightning, feel it coming. That a positive charge washes over you before the electrons of the lightning grip you tight. Behind me, to the west, there were bolts of lightning in the distance, distinct lines that I could make out though I had heard no thunder. I hurried my walk to the garage, but I did not run. I was lucky.

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A Commonplace Glossary, vol. 1

me