Every lady at the ball was jealous of Lady Worm. “How does she stay so long and lean?” asked Lady Mole.
“And so graceful?” asked Lady Chicken.
“Well,” said Lady Badger, “when you don’t have limbs, you never have to worry about where you put them.”
“And to do so much! She seems to be able to be in so many places at once!” exclaimed Lady Mule. “What does she do, clone herself?”
“Cut herself in half and send her one part to the flower show while the other picks up her daughter from tennis camp?” asked Lady Mantis.
This sent all the ladies to murmuring and then Lady Worm passed by in her evening dress and they all got quiet, then stepped all over themselves to greet her.

While I’m here in Vancouver, I decided I wanted to rent a guitar. I didn’t want my callouses to disappear, nor did I want to lose the facility that has taken me many months to build back up.

Guitar stores are generally not made for women. They are usually staffed by men who are particularly invested in the guitar as part of their masculinity. This does not make them inclined to facilitate a woman getting her hands on a guitar.
And while the fella at this music shop was perfectly acceptable in his customer service, I did notice that the entire staff at the warehouse size music shop was male.

So even without the active sexist atmosphere of a guitar store, it remains ever thus.

Humans are so funny. We so crave affirmation from one another for our thoughts. Perhaps we choose our friends by how much they will affirm us.
Those who refuse to affirm our ideas are not likely to affirm our humanity.
My friends are largely likely to agree in the affirmative if I ask them a question like this. And Horatio does this for Hamlet in so many ways.

My lord such-a-one met my lord whatchamacallit at a party thrown by lord so-and-so. They all had animated conversations about this and that and as the night drew to a close, they all passed through the what’s-it-called to get to the stables. Lord such-a-one became quite envious of the other’s horse and conceived of a plan to ask him for it. This scheme began with some lavish praise of the animal and he hoped it would end with the reins in his own hands.

I am very curious about what it might do to me to be spoken to this way on a regular basis. Like – would being called “good lord” somehow increase my sense of potency in the world? I suspect it would.

The use of the word “sweet” here makes me wonder if Hamlet is thinking of some courtier in particular. It also makes me wonder about Hamlet’s childhood and his relationships with such people.

It must be so weird to be a prince. There must be some confusion around what is genuine affection from adults and what is solicitousness for the royal child. Did baby Hamlet feel the “sweet” from a courtier? Did it make him favor one over the other? Do courtiers sometimes slip child princes little bits of candy or sweets to curry future favor from a future king?
An emotionally intelligent child will likely learn to discern such differences but I imagine some of them never work it out.

Politicians do indeed seem to be trying like hell to circumvent God. Especially lately. And when I say “God,” I mean an accountability for one’s moral choices. I mean – the same men who want to keep women in the house to avoid getting raped, turn the other way when confronted with a rapist who shares their political position.

The way they can casually eliminate the means of survival of millions of people without a thought. This suggests to me that they think they can get around the rules of God. It’s shocking – especially in religious people.

And who is the most politician-like character in this play? Who is the most politic? Who speaks in long-winded obfuscating speeches? Claudius, Claudius, Claudius.

I mean, Polonius, too, to a degree. But he’s not quite as good at the politics. He speechifies but his speeches don’t sound like a politician.

Hamlet himself can get a wee bit political here and there but Claudius is my pick for an association with politics. I imagine he was just as political even before he was king.

But in any case, the gravedigger, this ass, is better than the politician is – just by being alive, of course – but also in his treatment of the former politician’s head. He could bop him on the head with no consequences. The politician has entered the gravedigger’s kingdom now.

This is one of those beautifully inconspicuous bits of invention here. Jowls, normally a noun for one’s jaw or cheeks or hanging flesh, here becomes a verb, a verb like throw, perhaps. Jowl and throw having a couple of letters in common and a sound in common so we can work out what he means when he says the knave jowls it to the ground.
If I were going to use jaw as a verb, I’d use it to mean something related to the mouth, like chew or talk but that does not appear to be what’s happening here. We’re in a zone where a word appears out of its common usage and then poof! We’re also time traveling and this skull and/or jawbone is suddenly shifted to the opening bits of the bible. We get chewing and throwing and killing all at once – all from the actions of this one “knave” described by Hamlet.

I love that the thing the skull could do when it had its tongue is singing. There are so many other things a tongue in a living skull could do – talk, kiss, eat, lick, taste, tie cherry stems into knots – but singing has a poetry that the others lack.
And it is surely not insignificant that the gravedigger has been singing at his work, connecting us from a living, singing man to the skull of a dead one.

But, I think, when I am gone, it will be the singing I’ll miss the most.