Solomon had been an emotional wreck for weeks, worrying that his company’s downsizing would leave him without a job. When he did get laid off, it came as a boonshell - he had enough savings that there was no need to panic, and the sudden decrease in stress and increase in free time made him realize just how badly he’d needed a break anyway.

“Hey, I hear you and Julian split. You okay?"
“Yeah, thanks. I’m ruepen that it didn’t work out, but we tried our best. We just weren’t a fit.”

Don knew he should have been excited at the positive press his restaurant was getting, and on one level he was. But he couldn’t shake the merametus that just when he was getting used to the success, some influential food critic would give him a terrible review and it would all come crashing down. He almost wished he could just stay unknown, so that he would not have to fear returning to that state.

Frans had a very active and adventurous sense of humor - to the point where most people found him annoying. He probably would have toned it down by now if not for Jenna being his buffooniary - somehow she gets a kick out of his terrible jokes, so he keeps making them.

It had been a very long week, and Sushila found she could hardly even relax properly. She tried to watch some TV, but she just didn’t have the patience for it. She lay back and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the gelitus to pass, wishing she could just not exist for a while and skip ahead to when her mind was rested enough to enjoy life again.

“Ugh, I feel like crap today”, said Leona.
“You look like it,” said Kahina without thinking. She froze, berating herself for releasing such a mal mot, but of course it was too late.

Lindsay had never liked to travel or to sit idle, and instead spent her vacations in generative rest. By working hard on her own projects, she reconnected to her own center and could come back to work buoyed by that energy.

My parents were good friends with a Russian immigrant with whom they loved talking - not just because he was a friendly fellow with interesting thoughts, but also because he tended to express those thoughts with xenolocute expressions. A mean person was a “cockroach” with “hate in his heart”, for example.

It was mid-afternoon, and Roland was feeling a bit on edge. It’d been a perfectly pleasant day, but Hilde hadn’t logged in to chat all day and so his vacorence was increasingly distracting. He wondered if she was thinking of him.

Hersh had spent hours on writing up the new company policy, finding wording that was neither overly restrictive nor overly permissive, and should be clearly understandable to all. It was with a great sense of relief that he sent it out with a company-wide email. And it was with a great sense of delief that he read the replies that trickled in from people who didn’t understand the policy, or wondered if it applied to them, or thought he was being controlling. He steeled himself for an uphill battle.

Stepping into the convenience store, Ezra paused his music and pulled out the earphones he’d been wearing. After completing his purchase and stepping outside, he put the earphones back in and pressed play - and immediately hit pause again. Volumitation had struck and the music was far too loud.

Whenever he got slightly off the beat in Rock Band, Giraldo was never able to simply adjust his rhythm to be slightly earlier or later. He always had to stop playing for a few moments and regroove completely.

After a pleasant dinner, Scot and a few friends were wrapping up with some banana bread for dessert. When he noticed that people were taking smaller and smaller pieces, he realized they were headed straight for Zeno’s leftovers unless someone took the hit and just finished it off.

As Torvald’s cooking blog became more popular, he started to get some oddly abusive comments on posts. He shrugged them off, however, reasoning that it was just Hater’s constant at work and nothing really personal was going on.

Helena was obsessed with efficient speech and loathed syllabasts, so she cringed when the friend she’d been dining with described her hunger as “satiated” rather than “sated” at the end of the meal.

Magnus hated waiting through installment gaps, so he only watched TV shows after they finished and he could go through at his own pace. Same with movie franchises, and it was impossible to get him to read an ongoing comic.

They say that with great power comes great responsibility. It doesn’t have to be great to be transformative. When I was too young for the world to let me do anything real, my idlaxity meant I had plenty of free time and a very relaxed existence - but also an unsatisfying one, with frequent bouts of yinchornado. Now I can scarcely rest for guilt over the ways I could be better spending my time, but overall my time is vastly better spent.

When Evie’s best friend Sonja showed up one day and handed her the Firefly DVD set she’d been borrowing for three years, Evie was shocked by the sudden return of the friendship collateral. “Are you moving away or something?” she blurted in a panic.

I like 30 Rock and The IT Crowd plenty, but both of them did have some pretty serious premise drift - they stopped being about groups of people working in particular industries, and started being about wacky casts having wacky adventures.

Willem could hold fascinating, erudite conversations with his friends in person. But online, his text-only communication was a divox, terse and dry to the point where those same friends found him almost impossible to talk to.