Yanking yellow yo-yos.
(Tagged by viscera (and damn, girl, these were hard)).

The Top Ten of 'Y'

Yonder - I'm always curious as to what life is like over the next hill, in the next town, in the world my eyes don't reach. That curiosity doesn't always make me investigate the differences, but I try to accept new ideas when life imports them.

Yearning - I never want to be content. I never want to be satisfied. I always want to want more - not in a pathetic consumerist sense, but in wanting to achieve more, see more, understand more. Every morning I get up and hope my life will be a stranger and finer thing that it was the day before. It's the only way to live.

Young love - Old love is good too, but less photogenic. And hell, isn't there something beautiful and defiant about teenagers and twentysomethings declaring they've found true love? And maybe they do; maybe true love then loses them. Sneaky stuff, love.

Y'all - It's better than 'all of you', damnit. It's a word with an elegant simplicity and a cheeky twang, and one unfairly dismissed as the vocabluatory territory of rednecks.

Yellow leaves - In Brisbane leaves don't dry out in autumn, they just fall off, disappear, or deliquesce into slime. Here the trees turn yellow and orange in autumn, fireworks and shooting stars lining the Orson Welles streets. God, I love it here, even though it's so cold I can't feel my limbs.

Yeats, William Butler - Not my favourite poet (I'm more partial to Eliot and Bukowski), but I love the richness of his words, the rhythms and imagery he pushes into the page. There are better poems than 'The Second Coming', but the way Yeats erects terrifying, resonant images with just two or three words again and again... genius.

Yesod - The sephiroth of Foundation, the righteous pillar of the Kaballah. I don't believe in magic, but I do believe in meaning, in metaphor, in the power of resonant imagery. The power we give back to ourselves through the filter of our ideas. The Kaballah is groaning with that power, and it makes everything from religious writing to videogames that much more fascinating.

Yclept - An archaic but still extant English word meaning 'named', generally only used by fantasy writers. I love archaic words; I love their resonance and their contextual ambiguity, I love trying to use them in different ways that suggest the old usage but are something new. Separate the context from the sound, then connect them back to front. It's fun

Yes (Prime) Minister - Twenty years later, and it's still funny. And by 'funny', I mean 'makes me want to burn Western society to the ground and start again". Humour, insight, cynicism, courage, intelligence... if they made it today the entire cast would be in Guantanamo by now.

Yesterday - Nostalgia is the lie of memory; yesterday should be a foundation, not an anchor. The past is the launching pad for the future. Remember yesterday, draw what love and insight you can from it, then let it go. Only forward.

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If you'd like to play, leave a comment. I'll give you a letter. Then you post ten words beginning with that letter in your journal and explain why they're important enough to make the cut.