Contacts

In about a month many of my friends will be graduating. It's a bittersweet thing. On one hand, they now get to enter real life. On the other hand, they now have to face real life. Of course, I don't give a damn about their trials and tribulations. Doing that would make me a Real Person, and as a UChicagoan I traded all of my empathy for the ability to rant about comedy theory for 24 hours straight. Their graduation affects me in the regard that I'll never talk to them again.

It's a simple problem. People only talk if they're in contact. Tautological. But contact is hard to maintain. People use facebook, but it's hard to make that meaningful. Calling and email is better, but nobody uses that. I should, because it forges powerful connections, but GUESS WHAT: unless I have a responsibility to email, I won't email!

Oh wait.

What if I made it a responsibility to email? Not that emailing becomes a chore, but that I have to do something I want to. Not tricking myself, but building additional structure into my life to make something I want to be important more important. So I'm going to slowly over time build an emailing list, where I must email certain people on certain days. I can email other days, but I must email those days too. Going to start tomorrow with a couple of names, then add from there.

Word Puzzles

I love word games. Not all of them, though; things like scrabble and bananagrams never held much appeal to me. Mostly I like the ones that focus on properties of words. Word puzzles are even better. I find it incredibly fun to search for words with a given property, whether etymological, definitional, or even just structurally. Plus you can play them in your head anytime, anywhere. Here are some of my favorites. My best answers are linked.

Shortest word with all five vowels: http://tinyurl.com/7s5cpnu

Longest word without any vowels: http://tinyurl.com/88vadcg

Longest word with only one vowel: http://tinyurl.com/6upsokt

Longest word with only one type of vowel: http://tinyurl.com/6wfbmb (yeah, I'm kinda fixated on vowels)
 
Longest word with alternating vowels and consonants: http://tinyurl.com/894pped (if we can count y as a vowel)

Longest word with only one consonant: http://tinyurl.com/6pafg2o

I need to find some new ones. Any ideas?