Stunningly efficacious

I have no particular, publicly-declarable goals to commemorate the incrementing of our calendar year, except that --- as always --- I want to hone myself into the startlingly effective, time-efficient, prosperous, merry, well-balanced person that other people (hopefully) think I already am.

I like circuitous sentences and superfluous verbiage, and I refuse to change either of those personal attributes in 2018. Come back and try again in 2019, haters.

Day 1 is marked by a high turnaround of holiday letters and emails, paying bills, updating all my yearly-in-January donations, and staring in awe at the truly prodigious list of half-written draft posts for this blog.

(Sorry about that.)

You, my diligent readers, whether my parents or my overcurious students or internet strangers looking to post advertisements as comments (don't, I delete them and it wastes everyone's time), will simply have to put up with me as I am, striving yet again, always, in a continual manner. I want to write more, and more cleverly, and because this platform is free and quick (except when stuck in draft limbo), it will likely be the recipient of this output.

Although frankly, a lot of it goes to /dev/null right now anyway, and that might be for the best.

My year-end phrase-stuck-in-my-head is "flamboyantly intelligent", which is a descriptor of the kind of people I'd like to surround myself with. Maybe there's a subreddit? I'm on a (mild) quest, in any case; if you find any such people, please send them my way. I am a diligent and snarky correspondent, and I have been told I am secretly kind and caring, but that was 2017 and I am looking to turn over a new leaf, so...


This post's theme word is palilalia (n), "a speech disorder characterized by involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or sentences." I am trying to remember the word for "having a phrase stuck in your head", but all I can come up with is palilalia, which is not-quite-it-but-close-enough-to-blot-it-from-recoverable-memory, plus: contains "lila" as a substring!

Quotes

Quotes that enterprising persons heard in my office, and recorded on the board, but which are now being erased so I can have more space for research:

• "Hot damn, man"
• "I have very large hips compared to a mice baby."
• "PLACENTAS, Lila"
• "On Thursday I have to give birth... I have to interview candidates, get inseminated, and fully gestate a human child."
• "Think faster... and also better."
  "It's solid advice. If only you could follow it."
• "You, in particular, need help."
• "Why is everything covered in metal?"
• "I didn't realize there was both a top and a bottom."
  "How did you think boxes work?"
• "It's gotta be true, right? There are so many emojis."
• "Christmas star" [accompanied by un-star-like diagram of a graph with 5 vertices]
• "I'm very professional, except for the hole in my pants."
• "Today is not. Halloween."
• "I do. Because I know stuff. Because that's what I am."

This post's theme word is farraginous (adj), "heterogeneous; having a mix of random things." What a silly, context-free, farraginous collection of quotes.