My favorite time of the day is that hazy period between 12 midnight and 3 in the morning. Beyond it, I start to experience that uncomfortable feeling of head and stomach merging. Earlier than that, the remnants of restlessness brought about by the activities and ruminations of daytime are still ebbing.

What is of interest for me are those intermittent periods in which I find myself smiling without reason. This alternates with moments of awareness that I am actually sitting in front of the computer, by myself, very much awake, the only one left straddling the in-between of, in this case, Saturday and Sunday.

This smiling without reason - it is not one of happiness, like that feeling akin to a pail about to overflow with water from the tap that someone forgot to close. It is just there and the only reason that I identify it as such is because I caught myself doing it. Otherwise, it is another ordinary passing of time.

This thing, ordinariness. I hear self-descriptions such as 'I am an ordinary housewife' or 'It was an ordinary day.' The latter is usually the first sentence invoked to begin a narrative of a tragedy that, more often than not, radically transforms an individual, he or she never the same afterwards. The former, a downplaying of the thankless, unpaid work that is put into being 'an ordinary housewife.'

'Ordinary' is one of those adjectives I consider to be catch-basins, in that their function does not so much describe (as adjectives are supposed to work in the first place) as a wide basket into which a noun is thrown in like a crumpled ball of paper. It does not say much about the noun. It locates but nothing more than that. Its coordinates are given but its terrain, its texture, its angst, its silliness, its its-ness, are nowhere to be found. In other words, words such as 'ordinary' are unhelpful. It is a lazy word used by lazy people.

On the other hand, it is a word used by people who have to use it; otherwise, if they even come so close as to the most proximate description of something that strikes at the heart of the human condition, they will not be able to handle it. They will simply deny what they know, shun its very sight and will not have anything to do with it. They just don't have the facility to confront its impossible brightness, its compelling presence, its terrifying secret.

Against this unbearable alternative, the word 'ordinary' is a necessary security blanket.

~ * ~

I rediscovered words when I was trying my best to internalize the glossary of vocabulary words in the GRE Reviewer. What struck me the most about the whole exercise was the reality that most of the time, I never bothered to check up a word in the dictionary. Mere reliance on how a word 'feels' or 'sounds like' carried me through most of my readings, both fiction and non-fiction.

As I now know, mere feeling or emotion does not provide the broad spectrum of just what something is. So it is with words.