the 'i can't even...' game

I was thinking about Gwen Stefani on my drive into work this morning.

It was one of those "and I can't even..." mental conversations where I look at the accomplishments of others and compare them to my own lack of by realizing that I can't even (insert babystep to the accomplishment here). I'll give you an example: when I heard that my friend's 27 year old boyfriend bought his second house, one of my first thoughts was "Geez, I can't even commit to a magazine subscription at my rented apartment and this kid is on his second house?".

Back to Gwen. I was thinking about how she'd created her 'L.A.M.B.' clothing line around her favourite words: love, angel, music, baby and I thought "Geez, I can't even pick my four favourite words let alone design a clothing line, run a company, and sell millions of records" and I felt bad. At first. Then, the more I thought about it the dumber it seemed.

The ability to select four favourite words is NOT an accomplishment that I need to add to my (admittedly small) repertoire. In fact, it seems kind of gradeschool-ish; like picking my four favourite friendship pins or scratch 'n' sniff stickers. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of glorious words at my disposal where would I even begin narrowing the possibilities down and why would I want to limit myself that way? What would my criteria be? Mood? Temperature? Atmosphere? Activity?

The beauty - the pure, decadent luxury of language is that I can be unhappy or distraught, cool or freezing, happy or ecstatic and, although they fall into the same broad categories, they have wildly different meanings. I love words. I don't want to be able to pick my four favourites, it would be like asking a parent to pick their favourite child. In fact, NOT picking my four favourite words is my accomplishment.

But just for the record, if I were to create my list, the first to be voted onto my word-island would be Zephyr which, in my opinion, beats all four of Gwen's somewhat-simple favourites hands down anyway ;)