Words as an Image, HAWMC #30

The final day of HAWMC! So many endings in this season of new beginnings. The final for my Linguistics course is live. Students will be taking it throughout this week, I'll turn in grades late next week. Everyone in my immediate support network is gone or going away now or soon (all coming back too, though). With some fudging (but no fudge) I've satisfied them that I'm at a safe baseline to be able to stay here, but out of the other side of my mouth, some indicators yesterday and this morning have alarmed me even in the midst of my obstinacy. When is stability ever more than an illusion?


It feels so good to do small kindnesses for others, to treat each window of connection as the only, or final, opportunity. A song of farewell.


Today's final prompt is another visually and technically oriented one: to make a word cloud around one's blog or health focus, using Wordle. I first heard of Wordle from Erin, who recommends it as a revealing tool for identifying underlying preoccupations in one's body of work, as it tends to highlight the most oft-used words. Well, I couldn't fit my whole blog in there ;) I tried, and could tell from the words that came out it was only looking at the most recent two or three posts. So, I threw in a list of words I see myself typing regularly, and did my best. There was even a color scheme called "Organic Carrot"--must have been made with me in mind!


And then the smug little java applet sat there on my screen and refused to be copy-linked to my blog. Printed to .pdf but sat there, wouldn't go up to my blog. If I right-clicked, it offered to remove the nearest word. Little Miss Tech-Nitwit put out a desperate plea on Facebook, and thankfully Gretchen suggested a screenshot, which could then be saved as a.jpeg. Thank you!! Then I had to learn how to crop the menu-bar off. Of course, when I finally figured out how to set the "crop" crosshairs, I cropped everything but the menu-bar (thank goodness for "undo"). In the process, I also noticed that the screenshot had cropped some letters off the right end of the wordle on its own account. But one of the cropped words, beginning with "man" is an embarrassing word, so maybe it was in tune with my subconscious.
Here it is, organic-carrot-colored!

Not every word I put in came out, by the way. I think that's interesting and a lot like life.

What would be in your word cloud?