a_word_that_isn't_a_word raze pretersion. i'm wondering what this word might mean, if it really did exist as a recognizable blemish on the landscape of the english language. the word was used in a dream last night, in which i was myself, and at the same time, i was david_foster_wallace. i was trying to make sense of the "pretersion exercises" mrs. howell, my eighth grade teacher, had set out for me and the rest of my class. no other students were seen, but i sensed they were there. the exercise (because it was very much a singular, self-contained thing, regardless of how it was billed) involved a probing philosophical examination of a jagged grey rock the size of a hand, named carl. i carried carl with me trough a brutal, unrelenting winter. i seemed to exist in three different spheres at once. in one, i was walking the streets with carl and two nondescript human companions, seeking out mr. klein, an influential high school substitute teacher (influential to me, at least), who was found in an apartment building, red-brown brick, a few stories up. he was standing at his window, looking very kind, and very naked. in another, i was in a high school classroom, taught by a much more open-minded incarnation of the aforementioned eighth grade teacher. and in another, i was engaged in a discussion with a no-longer-naked mr. klein, our conversation captured on video for posterity and projected onto the wall in front of me while i sat at a desk near the front of the class. and in this film i was myself, only i looked and talked exactly like david_foster_wallace. no bandana. glasses. long hair down. i was able to communicate with the inhabitants of this video from my place in the classroom, interrupting mr. klein while he spoke to an unfamiliar woman. i needed him to introduce his projected-onto-the-wall self to mrs. howell, so i could prove to her that he was real and not a figment of my imagination. he complied, grudgingly, and a meaningless two-way greeting passed between them. "there's the little dish and there's the big dish," mr. klein told me in our filmed discussion, though sometimes we broke away from this and our words were seen as text at the beginning of a chapter halfway through a paperback book. "and you're using her." this felt like a metaphor for the ways in which we use our minds, split into two female partitions, one much more powerful than the other. it wasn't clear which partition i was using. the little dish or the big dish. i'm still not sure. and still i wonder what, exactly, is pretersion? and wouldn't "pretersionary exercises" have been more grammatically correct than "pretersion exercises"? 130511 ... raze "through", not "trough". motherfucking sluggish h key piece of fucking shit. 130511 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Happens with non-English languages in my dreams. In an airport, I was assured by some blond-haired children that airplane was “Aerotahn” in German; in another dream, my mother's friend used the French Québecois expression “La tarte est niée” which meant something like “The pot calling the kettle black.” In real life, autobahns are German highways and “tarte” means pie, but what in the world does “nié(e)” mean? 130613 ... e_o_i swears in her native language Why do the diamond question marks keep appearing, when before there were accents? It makes my attempts at correct French feel unwanted, and I am sad. Well, not sad, just slightly angrish. There, THAT isn't an Anglostani word, is it? But va t'en, namari-ay, you bezoomny meshuggah blatherface with diamondy markings replacing diacritical thingamabobs. Blurzurk!!! 130624 ... raze that's odd...all the accents still look like accents over here. maybe there's something funny going on with your browser? i don't think it would be a flash-related thing. maybe your computer ate a bunch of mashed potatoes when you weren't looking. covert mashed potatoes can cause all kinds of problems. 130625 ... e_o_i Okay, so it works in other places... I'm not sure what went wrong here, I'll check my updates... I don't entirely know how this machine works, and of course it isn't a big deal. I just wanted something fairly innocuous to rant about. 130625 ... e_o_i OK, works now, after I updated the updates. Hey, I might not know the terminology, but I know what to do (sometimes). Blurzurk is a very good word for when things go wrong, in general. 130626 what's it to you? who go blather from