Brought to you by the letter P and the number 18

[semperfiona]

From dakiwiboid, who gave me the letter "P"!

Comment, and I shall give you a letter. Go back to your journal, and write ten words beginning with that letter, including an explanation of what the word means to you and why.

So, what shall I say about "P"? I free-associated on words starting with P and the following are what I got. There are more than ten; I wrote down words for a while and then went back to add commentary on them, intending to cut those of no interest. Once I'd done the commentary I didn't want to cut anything. But this is the original order of the words, if not the order I commented on them.

Pink elephants: For some reason this was the first word that popped into my head when I saw Kiwi's suggested letter. The only thing I can think of that they mean, though, is the drunk scene from _Dumbo_. Would Disney get away with making a film nowadays where a child character gets drunk?

Penis: *shrug* I'm horny, what can I say.

Portmanteau words: I love these. I love to make them up. One of my favorites is *huggle*, which means something much more comforting and cuddly than a mere *hug*.

Partnership: My loves, lavendargrrl and ohari. Working through problems and complications because we're committed to each other. Not that there really are very many. We seem to suit each other very well.

Parenthetical comments: Oh, I'm the queen of parenthetical comments. If I leave my writing as it comes out of my head, I'll often stack parentheses several layers deep. But, being a computer programmer, and one who started out her programming career with Scheme/Lisp, I always anal-retentively close them all. And being also a copy editor manqué, I generally edit them out, reordering the text into a semblance of coherence or deleting them altogether.

Painting: Been doing a lot of this, if you mean turning walls and furniture from one color to another. Not been doing nearly enough, if you mean making art on paper or canvas. I used to paint a lot, but I've really done very little in the way of art for years now. I've got to make more time for it.

Purple: My favorite color.

Ping-pong: WTF? Where did this come from? I'm not even a particular fan of the game. Though I do remember leenoox used to IM me with "*ping*", to which my usual answer was, of course, "*pong*". Pong, however, means "bad smell" in Br.English, which somehow never occurred to me until now.

Pantheism: As good a shorthand for my spirituality--such as it is--as I can think of.

Pandas: Who could resist 'em?

Paleontology: A random word beginning with P. Involves bones and is therefore interesting to Rosa, though they're not always People Bones and that's what she really digs (heh).

Pacemaker: Another such, with even less relevance to my life.

Providers: My bugbear at work: deregulated electric service à la Enron.

Pink: I'm not a fan of the color, but I rather like the singer. She's got a smart-assitude that I appreciate. I think my distaste for the color pink is actually reaching an end; it's become more ritualized than real. It's more of a stand-in for conventional notions of femininity than a color to me. If I can start thinking of it as just a color again, it might become less objectionable. Rosa, of course, loves it.

My bedroom was painted pink during my adolescence. I had wanted blue. Blue walls, white curtains, white bedspread, white braided rug on the hardwood floor. What I got was pink walls, pink-dominated floral curtains and bedspread, and pinky-brown mottled carpet. My parents wouldn't let me have the white accessories ("too hard to keep clean") or remove the carpet down to the hardwood floors that really are under there, and my sister got to choose her paint color first; she chose blue. I cannot figure out why I didn't just take blue as well. Maybe I wanted to be different from her, maybe my parents didn't want to paint both rooms the same color; I don't remember any more.

Oddly, before it was pink, my bedroom was orange: a color very like the inside of a cantaloupe that almost but didn't quite match the (pre-existing) orange shag rug on the floor, and no, it wasn't that color when we moved in. That's the color we (or my parents) painted it. I liked that color. Why didn't I stick with it and just get a new rug?

Someone will be wondering why I didn't choose purple, and the only answer I have to that is that purple didn't become my favorite color until much later. It was always blue when I was a kid.

Potato: Po-tay-to, po-tah-to, To-may-to, to-mah-to, let's call the whole thing off. Don't ever put an extra E on the word; I am not a fan of Dan Quayle. Potatoes are a staple of my diet--the more toppings the better--to the detriment of my waistline.

Pal: Only just tolerable in isolation in old westerns, it's a word I otherwise loathe, especially in the phrase "gal pal". A colloquialism that does not exist in any dialect I actually use or hear used, that only appears in print in society columns or entertainment news. If it's a cutesy way of saying "female partner" it's even worse yet. (For the record, I don't like the word "gal", either.)

Padme: Star Wars episodes I, II, and III Do Not Exist, therefore there is no such character.

Pornography: (See Penis) Porn is a weird thing for me; some of it merely bores me silly, and other things, not even necessarily explicit, will make me crazy horny. One of the hottest things I ever saw was an episode of "Real Sex" (I think it was) about a women's event called "Strut Your Strap-On". Real women, showing off for other real women, getting off with other real women...We hadda go out and buy a strap-on after watching that. (Never had one before.) As much as I enjoy sex with men, I often don't get as aroused watching het porn. Maybe it's because girlsex is a more recent pleasure for me, but female-to-female scenes get me hotter. *makes mental note to check out moominmuppet's recent recommendation*

What? No penguins? (Pronounced "Pen-ju-ins" at our house.)