Prologue
Mighty Morphing Power Rangers? Forgive me for my dated reference. However, one might argue that Power Rangers are timeless. Honestly, though, the only reason I used them was I couldn’t think of another morphing reference. Butterflies? I suppose. I feel like they are even more trite than Power Rangers. It’s the literary equivalent of getting a Chinese symbol that doesn’t translate to what you think.
What are we actually morphing? Prompt: Language evolves. The meaning of a word can shift over time as we use it differently — think of “cool,” “heavy,” or even “literally.” Today, give a word an evolutionary push: give a common word a new meaning, explain it to us, and
use it in the title of your post.
This makes me two things. One, the morphing of “literally” makes me angry. We already have a word for what literally morphed into. I suppose, now that I think about it, that it’s kind of cool that we created a contranym out of literally. Still, I’m going to stay mad about it. The other thing is, “Stop trying to make fetch happen.” But, this is the prompt, so let’s try to make “fetch” happen.
The Adventure
The featured image depicts one of the lakes/ponds that I notice during my morning and afternoon commute. As of this writing, I’ve passed it almost 200 times. During the winter, I see huts dragged onto the ice for ice fishing. Though I finally got out on the ice again a couple of times this year, I haven’t fished this body of water. Even today, after wandering along a trail that followed the shore, I went back to the car to grab my rods. This is the part of the story where I say I forgot my rods, right? Wrong! The rods are in the trunk. However, I neglected to put my tackle box in there. So, still no fishing here. Another day, perhaps.
Instead, I stood on the shore and watched a bird of prey (perhaps a hawk) circle above. A momma and poppa couple of geese herded their four goslings across the water. I caught two Pokemon in Pokemon Go (A Karrablast and a Tangela). Overall, while not necessarily an “adventure”, I will be back either to fish or kayak or both. Stay tuned for actual adventures from this lake/pond.
The brief interlude, in spite of the lack of “adventure”, was much needed. It wasn’t a bad day. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, it was a pretty good day. During our lunch time (some students hang out in my room during lunch block each day), a student asked, “How’s everyone’s mental health” or something along those lines. I can confidently say that mine is pretty good right now. I’m in a good place. It has been a long and weird year, but a select group of students has helped to keep me grounded and finding what I love about teaching again. I try to tell them as often as possible what they’ve done, but I know I’m not thanking them nearly enough. I don’t know if I’ll ever truly be able to repay them for what they’ve done for me this year. If you find this, simply thank you.
The Journal
In spite of the good day and overall good state of mind, I needed the time to decompress. Teaching took a lot out of me today. The students were energetic, which is great, but they weren’t focused on school work, so it took a lot of energy to refocus them and keep them focused. I hope my exhaustion wasn’t read as anything negative.
Back to the task at hand. While I enjoyed my time wandering around the shoreline, I got no inspiration for a word to morph. Instead, I drove home and worked out while watching Last Chance U. Neither of those activities brought me much inspiration either. So it is that I ended up at Random Word Generator, pressing the button a few times until it landed on “candle”. I passed on a few like “risk”, “propaganda”, and “breathe”.
Why candle? Honestly, it comes from World of Warcraft and the kobold saying, “You no take candle!” So, I thought I might be able to come up with some sort of alternate definition using that connection. So far, nothing comes to mind. Hey, I genuinely tried with this one. Honestly, though, how the hell am I supposed to answer this one? If anyone comes across this post and has an answer, by all means, give me an idea.
Epilogue
Yesterday, I wrote about success and failure. Today I, once again, failed. But, I honestly tried. Given the weirdness of this particular prompt, I actually succeeded far better than expected. Even so, perhaps the topic of morphing is still relevant. Over the last two years, I morphed in several ways. I started working out and walking and got into better shape. I faced some of the tragedy of my past and came out stronger for it. A few times, I told people at work that they’d not recognize the me from 2 years ago. While I still have some ways to go (and that can be said about just about anyone), I am in much better place than I was. So, hey, I successfully morphed the word “Shawn” and that’s more important than any stupid candle.