Fairy story no. 396

“Will I ever see you again?” the child asked excitedly.

“Only if you believe you will,” the fairy said.

“Oh, I believe! Where, when?”

“If you truly believe, we will meet at twilight, in that time when the first dew drop forms on the first rose petal of summer. Or we will meet on a cold midnight, at that place where, for one moment, past and destiny merge.”

____________________________________________________________

“That's so sappy,” the writer thought.

“That's the way fairies talk,” the fairy snapped back.

Pet Peeves: An Exhausting But Not Exhaustive List

Today, a friend of mine posted a status update on Facebook about a pet peeve of hers. That got me thinking about my own pet peeves, of which I'm afraid that there is an inordinately long list.

Back before Facebook, these lists of questions would go around via e-mail to help you know more random details about your friends. Oh, sure, we know the important things about our friends: whether they're honest, loyal, and can be relied on in a real crisis. That's what matters. But have they ever, say, won the Betty Crocker Future Homemaker of Tomorrow Award? (As my sister-in-law did in high school, just to teach her mother a lesson.) Or have they ever sky-dived? Or been to sub-Saharan Africa? What's their favorite color? What occupation would they pick if they weren't doing what they're doing?

To find out little details like this, people would think up a list of about 25 completely random questions and then would send the lists off to all of their friends, imploring them to answer them and then send them to all of their friends, as well as back to the original sender. You usually even got a chance at the end of the list to name which friend you thought would be most likely to answer you quickly and which one you would never hear from at all.

I was always named as the friend from whom none of my friends would ever hear back when they sent those lists. I hate that my friends found me unreliable in answering their random questions about me, but the truth is not what they thought. They probably thought that I felt like this activity was too frivolous to take up my time; that I felt myself to be above such an activity. That was not the case. The truth was that I do not answer questions well, especially with short answers. I could have gone on at length in answering any of these questions. I also don't answer questions well because I always come back with questions of my own. I have to qualify and quantify your question before I can answer it correctly. Finally, I have to give a lot of thought to my answers to these questions. Some of them—sent years ago—I'm still thinking about to this day. I'm a muller of questions, which is why I don't fill out forms very well. I have to think about it, then ask you a lot of questions about exactly what you're trying to get at with your question, then think some more about your answers, and then, several days later, I might have an answer for you. By then, you'll have forgotten that you sent me this silly little questionnaire, and you will wonder if I'm not a bit dim, coming in so late, and with such serious answers, to something that was just meant to be kind of a light-hearted ice breaker.

Ah, but I've digressed.

The reason that pet peeves made me think about those old e-mailed ice-breaker questionnaires is that one of the questions on the list would often be “What is your pet peeve?”

And I would think, “Pet peeve? As in singular peeve? I only get one?” And this would send me into a reverie—that would last for days—of trying to come up with my top, number-one, most annoying pet peeve EVER. I found that I could not limit myself to just one, and thus, I could never get back to the question asker with an answer.

So, here, today, I'm going to list some of my pet peeves. Not my top ones, perhaps. These are just some that I'm going to think up as I go along. And I'm going to give myself 10; way more than one, yet not so many that I end up looking like a really peevish person (ha!). So, don't go thinking that these are necessarily my biggest pet peeves, they are merely the ones that will occur to me over the next few minutes.

1. When people take up two parking spaces to protect their cars from dings.
2. Bad driving. Which is to say, driving that is different from mine. Actually, other people who drive like me around me also annoy me. (And to those who will feel compelled to comment on this, I'll beat you to the punch: YES, I know that my driving is a pet peeve to all of my family members, all of my friends, and pretty much everyone else on the planet. Just so we set that straight right here: I'm clear on this.) 
3. But ESPECIALLY, people who get in the left lane on the highway and stay there, regardless of how slowly they are going in comparison to other drivers and/or how long a line of cars has built up behind them (which should be their clue that they are not going fast enough in the “fast” lane). Okay, the truth is, I have too many driving-related pet peeves to be able to list them all here. I need a special list just for Driving Pet Peeves. So I won't list any more of them here. 
4. I would like to say that one of my pet peeves is mean people. What I mean is, people who are mean. The problem here is that I'm sometimes the mean person in an exchange and I'm sometimes the hapless victim of a mean person. So what I really mean when I say that mean people are my pet peeve is that when people are mean—except for when the mean person is me, in which case you should just excuse me because I am probably having a Bad Day—I hate that. But if I've been mean to you, I apologize, and I hope you understand that I've just had a Bad Day. 
5. Mean People Suck. The bumper sticker. Yes, mean people do suck. But, see item above. If you are willing to admit it, as I did, you are probably sometimes a bit mean yourself. And even if you're not, isn't a bumper sticker with which you tell some people that they suck kind of, well, mean? Or are you one of those people who thinks it's okay to be ugly toward someone if they were that way toward you first? 
6. Sand stuck all over me. I love the beach. I hate having sand stuck to every inch of my skin. It makes me want to dive into the ocean to get it all off. But then it will just restick to me on my way back to my beach towel. Which will make me want to go back into the ocean. Which will make it restick.... 
7. Okay. I realize that not everyone is born with a gift for doing well in English class. I really do get that. Those people should realize that, if they are going to have a blog, or even post much on Facebook, that they should really make the effort to learn a few things to keep from tipping the rest of us (the literate world, that is) over the edge. Again, I really don't mean to be picking on people who just aren't that good at language skills, as I have my areas in which I'm not gifted, too. The thing I would most like for those people to learn is the proper use and placement of apostrophes in English words (and note that I didn't say apostrophe's. Its and it's; there, their, they're; your and you're. They each have their own place in the English language, please do not treat them as if they are interchangeable. I won't even go on about your spelling if you will just work on your apostrophes. Okay? 
8. The word “utilize.” I just think that there is no place where people employ the word “utilize” where “use” wouldn't sound better and less like you're trying to make things sound complicated. 
9. People who can't count to 15. Whom I only notice or would even say anything about because I get behind them in the express lane at the store, with their—oh, I don't know, maybe—28 items! Oh, wait. Maybe they can count properly. The problem is, they can't read the sign that clearly says “15 items or less.” (What the sign actually means, of course, and we will be kind to the sign-maker, who had limited space in which to write, was “15 items or fewer.”) 
10. Babies crying loudly in public places, especially in restaurants where I am simply trying to have a nice, relaxing meal. Yes, I know that this makes me a horrible person—to say, out loud, that I hate crying babies—but there you have it. I do. I actually don't hate the baby, just the crying. The sound of a baby's cry can just send me over the edge. It completely derails my brain from whatever thought process it was having. I just can't abide that sound. So, please, little babies, stop your crying. And, please, baby parents, if your baby persists in crying in public for, let's say, 10 minutes or more, take that baby home! It's what he or she needs. It is you who wants to be at the restaurant. Do what your baby needs, not what you want. Take that kid home and put him or her to bed!

I am going to stop here today. That's because I think that it is petty and, well, peevish for a person to 1) go on at length about her pet peeves (ha!), or 2) be able to name more than about 10 in one sitting. One should not nurse one's peeves. One should work at not having any peeves rather than nurturing the peeves that one does have. We should strive to be a peeveless people, holding no grudges and judging no one, in spite of how rude, illiterate, or annoying they might be. You can see that I am working on this. But the truth is, I really can't come up with more than 10 at one time. This is probably caused more by a lack of concentration on my part than it is a lack of peevishness.

Stupid Questions #3: Self-Report

I'm hoping to get on at some point today and post something substantive, but in the meantime, here's my newest stupid question, asked by one of the dimmer people I know: myself.

I called my sister on her cell phone, having left her a message earlier. 

My Sis: I'm sorry I didn't call you back. I went off and left my phone in one of the company cars.

Me: Did you get it back?

My Sis: Get what back?

Me: [light dawning]. The phone you're talking to me on.

Stupid Questions, pt 2 in an ongoing series

Maybe it was more like just a clueless conversation than a truly stupid question.

It was a hot day and I was tooling around in the little convertible, so I stopped at Sonic for a cold drink. To be specific, a milkshake. Sonic has more than the usual number of flavor choices. I looked over the list, only to see that my favorite, peanut butter & hot fudge, was no longer on the menu. Neither was peanut butter by itself on the menu, though hot fudge was still one of the options.

I hit the call button and was asked how they could help me today.

Me: You don’t have peanut butter hot-fudge shakes any more?
Sonic Voice: No, they discontinued that flavor.
Me: [very disappointed] Oh.
SV: [cheerily] I could make you a hot fudge shake!
Me: [still thinking, saying nothing]
SV: Or a peanut butter shake.
Me: [thinking to myself, "But peanut butter isn’t even on the list any more." But saying to the intercom:] Ummm. Could you mix a peanut butter shake with a hot-fudge shake for me?
SV: No, but I could make you a peanut butter shake and put hot fudge in it, if you’d like.
Me: You could?
SV: Yes. [pause] Would you like for me to do that?
Me: Yes, please.

So, be advised: Sonic no longer has peanut butter hot-fudge shakes. But they will put hot fudge in their nonexistent peanut butter shakes for you. Or, if that won’t work, you can probably talk them into putting some peanut butter into a hot fudge shake for you.

The Gift of Time: Ode to a Father

My dad figured something out very early into his parenting years. Actually, my guess is that he figured it out before he ever had children. Maybe he figured it out when his own father died when my dad was 12. His dad left behind eight children—one not yet born—and a wife, at the height of the Great Depression. Dad, as the oldest child, took over the role of father for his siblings and consultant and confidante for his mother, who needed someone she could trust and rely on during the coming difficult years. Dad took on a lot of responsibility early in life, and it changed him. The changes, some of which were good and some of which were not so good, became a permanent part of his personality.

What my dad figured out was that the time we spend with anyone—our parents, our children, our friends, the cashiers at the grocery store—is the most lasting, most important, and greatest gift that we can give to another person. Dad did not shower us, his five children, with a lot of material gifts and certainly not with much in the way of financial gifts. But we knew him better than most of our friends knew their dads, and he knew us. I mean, really knew us, didn't just know about us.

Dad was comfortable with his children, which I took for granted growing up. It wasn't till I was a teenager and would visit friends' homes that I realized that not all fathers are comfortable with their kids. Not all fathers know not only what to talk to their children about, but how to talk to their kids. Dad was a natural with children, from the time they were babies through adulthood. He loved kids, and kids loved him. When I was little, not only did my siblings and I gravitate toward dad, but so did our cousins (who lived next door), as well as the neighborhood kids. For one thing, everyone knew who had popsicles in the summertime!

My dad loved baseball. The Brooklyn Dodgers were dad's team from day one. He and his brothers and friends would play stickball in the streets, and I'm sure that, just like the junior athletes of today, they all took on the identities of their favorite players.

When dad and mom moved their young family (just one child at the time, and another on the way) from NYC to Knoxville, Tennessee, they settled in a semirural area called Rocky Hill, nestled among the gentle hills between the city of Knoxville and Nowheresville. Dad saw what was missing from this rural paradise right away: Little League. He and some of the other dads of the burgeoning movement that would become known as the Baby Boomers got together and formed a league in Rocky Hill. Dad was very involved in Rocky Hill Little League for as long as we remained in Knoxville. They got baseball fields installed on Alki Lane. I will never forget Alki Lane. It is seared into my very skin. I spent most of my summer days playing in the hot dust under the bleachers there as each of my three brothers took their turns in their respective games. It seemed as if baseball games went on forever. If I sat out on the bleachers with my mom, under the unblinking eye of the summer sun, my fair skin would be bright red within a few minutes and I knew that days of misery would follow. Therefore, my sister and I and all of the other little siblings of Little League players, would roll around in the dust under the bleachers.

But dad never missed a game. He coached, he umped, he attended all of the Little League meetings, and even if he hadn't been involved in all of that, he would have never missed a game. My dad LOVED baseball.

I had assumed that my turn would come to join the girl equivalent of Little League. I actually looked forward to it. Ironically, when we weren't at Alki Lane, my family and all of the neighborhood kids were in our spacious yard, playing...baseball, of course. My brothers had taught me how to throw the ball so that they would not have to suffer the shame of having a sibling who threw like a girl. I was a fair enough player that I was allowed into the neighborhood games. That's not saying much, since we had to employ imaginary players anyway, so real bodies were preferred over having too many imaginary ones. I think that part of the draw of playing organized ball was that I knew that my dad loved the game, so I was assured that he would come to my games.

However, my family moved off to Atlanta before my turn to start playing organized softball. Only three of us kids went with the folks to Atlanta, what with my older brothers having already gotten ensconced in local university life. We were all older by then, and since we didn't have any history with anyone in our new home, we had to start all over again. Alki Lane was no longer a part of the local landscape, and our new back yard was not big enough to accommodate a truly decent game of baseball. We kids all moved off into our own activities and cliques at school.

As teenagers, my sister and I discovered this interesting new game that was so egalitarian that almost anyone could play halfway decently. Since we were of a somewhat athletic bent but only mediocre in talent, we were drawn toward this weird new sport called soccer.

My dad loved baseball. He didn't know from soccer. We didn't even know much about soccer. But, under the tutelage of Frau Barnett, the German teacher/girls' soccer coach at our high school; her husband, whom we all called “Herr Frau”; and a wonderful and almost mythic Irishwoman, Mrs. McGee, whose daughter played with us, we learned. Mrs. McGee had 10 children, all of whom had played “football” since they could walk, and all of whom could literally do passing skills in circles around the rest of us, took a great interst in our new girls' soccer club.

You see, we couldn't be a team because there was no school funding for girls' soccer. So we had to form as a club. Another challenge was that no other high schools in our area had girls' soccer, so we had no one to play. We played boys' soccer teams, to provide them with full-field scrimmages during their season, and they routinely wiped the field with us. But for some reason, our pathetic little team held together. During the boys' off-season, we played girls' AYSO teams. These girls, of Amazonian proportions, had been playing together since they emerged from the womb. They routinely creamed us much worse than the boys did (the boys having, at least, some idea that they should be nice to us because we were girls).

Because we couldn't have school fields during any season when any other sport was using them, our “season” was from January to March. We played in rain. We played in electrical storms. We played in sleet, in freezing cold, and when sheets of ice covered the entire city of Atlanta. Since the grass was dead when we played, we usually ended up playing in mud. We wore shorts when we played. (I was a much hardier lass then than I am now.) We were terrible, and I say with some pride that we played our hearts out and we never won a single game.

Our games were usually very, very early on Saturday mornings. Besides us players, the only people regularly in attendance were Frau, Herr Frau, and Mrs. McGee. There were no cheering parents or friends on the sidelines at our games. There were no siblings playing under the bleachers. Hell, there were no bleachers! There was nowhere to sit on the sidelines, and lawn chairs were kind of useless, what with the freezing cold, raging winter winds, rain and sleet.

Bill Burke never missed a single one of our games. He, alone among all of the parents, was there, along with the “Fraus” and the legendary Mrs. McGee. He watched every game with the intensity of someone who was really interested in soccer. After each game, dad would pepper my sister and me with questions about specific plays, about what had happened and why, about rules and refs' calls. He seemed intent on absorbing as much as possible about soccer.

And yet, DAD LOVED BASEBALL. I knew this. And in my heart of hearts, I knew that, though he was really trying, dad did not even understand soccer, much less love it.

This left me to draw a rather stunning conclusion. Dad didn't love baseball. Dad didn't love Little League. Dad didn't love coaching or umpiring or attending neighborhood meetings. Dad didn't love to spend summer days out in the overbearing Southern summer sun nor did he love to spend winter days outdoors in the sleet and wind.

Dad loved us. His children. He loved each and every one of us, and he cared what we were involved in. If we were interested in it, then, by golly, he was going to learn about it. And, on top of everything else, he was going to be there.

Dad didn't give us much. Dad gave us everything. He gave us the gift of his time.  

The Old Man the Boat: The Garden Path and Psycholinguistics

My nephew RJM recently introduced me to "garden path sentences." I'd encountered them before, but I didn't know that there was a name for the phenomenon.

Put simply, garden path sentences start out one way and then end up veering off another way, so by the end, you have no idea what the sentence is saying.  Now, if you are thinking, "But Kathy, that's the way I feel about your writing," all I can say is that, first, that is not very kind of you to say that, and second, it's true. But that's not really what I'm talking about.  So, to clarify what a garden path sentence is, I'm going to quote from the experts at Wikipedia. And by "experts," of course, I mean "any doofus who wants to post a knowledgeable-sounding article about any subject at all on the Internet and then be quoted around the world as if they actually know what they are talking about."

So, here is what the experts at Wikipedia have to say about garden path sentences:

"A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that the readers' most likely interpretation will be incorrect; they are lured into an improper parse that turns out to be a dead end. Garden path sentences are used in psycholinguistics to illustrate the fact that when they read, human beings process language one word at a time. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down the garden path", meaning "to be misled". According to current psycholinguistic theory, as a person reads a garden path sentence, the reader builds up a structure of meaning one word at a time. At some point, it becomes clear to the reader that the next word or phrase cannot be incorporated into the structure built up thus far: it is inconsistent with the path he has been led down."

I know that right now you are feeling kind of confused--and, if you've made it this far, more than just a little bit bored--so I will give you some examples of garden path sentences so that you can join in on the fun instead of mucking about in the theory behind the phenomenon.  By the way, the examples will not actually help you understand garden path sentences because the whole subject is so weird and confusing that the examples only help to confuse you even more.  But here goes.

The man whistling tunes pianos.
The man returned to his house was happy.
The government plans to raise taxes were defeated

The sour drink from the ocean.

The old man the boat.Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

The confusion is most often caused by one of four things (this is my opinion, not straight from Wikipedia): confusion between an intransitive verb being used as a transitive; a missing "understood" word or words like "who," "you," "is," "was," etc.; the use of synecdoche in an unexpected place in the sentence; or mean-spirited elves coming into the newspaper office and writing headlines while the copywriters sleep. 

If you want quick explanations for the above garden path sentences without having to figure out what words like "synecdoche" mean, here we go:

The man [who was] whistling tunes pianos [for a living].
The man [who was] returned to his house was happy [about being returned].

The government['s] plans to raise taxes were defeated

The [people who are] sour [in disposition] drink from the ocean.

The old [people] ["man"--staff or work in] the boat.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. [Think about it.]

What does all of this mean? What is this leading up to? Well, I think it's obvious. I want to be a psycholinguist. 

I never heard of the field before today, and I certainly don't want to do all of the studying, researching, academic writing, and talking to people with doctorates that would be required to get an actual degree in this field, but I think that "Professional Psycholinguist" would look extremely impressive on my business card, and it would allow me to bandy about terms like "synecdoche" and "parse" in an authoritative way that would keep people from asking me what these words actually mean (which could get embarrassing for me).

So there we have it, if you are going to get led down the garden path by a sentence, make sure that you take a psycholinguist along for the trip. 

I might be available. For a fee.

Lettuce Entertain You

I am eating a salad right now. I’m really enjoying my salad. I made it myself, at the salad bar at the grocery store, so it has only things that I like in it.

Okay, the above paragraph is almost a complete lie. First, I am not really enjoying my salad that much because I would much rather have something dipped in batter and deep-fried. Second, when I say that the salad has only things I like in it, what I mean is it has raw vegetables that I can tolerate in it. If it truly had only things I like in it, it would have ice cream in it as well as chocolate in some form. But I suppose that all of that can be taken as read, since that’s the way we all feel about salad. I mean, maybe you would rather have a slice of pie than ice cream, but the fact is, we only eat salads because we are supposed to.  Salad is not part of the natural order but came about through an excess of civilization. 

We have all heard the term “politically correct” ad nauseam. In fact, we now use it when we actually mean socioeconomically correct or culturally correct, but "PC" has just become the shorthand for all things that we say and do to keep from looking like cavemen. Well, I will add a new kind of correctness to our vocabulary: healthfully correct. There are a lot of things that we do nowadays that we would never have dreamed of back when we thought that food was supposed to just taste good and when we got exercise by going outside, playing, and having fun. But now we engage in all of these healthfully correct behaviors to please our doctors, our spouses, and, most importantly, our insurance providers. In the HC world, just as in the PC world, it does not matter what your actual opinion of something is. You must subsume your actual likes and dislikes to the Greater Good. In the PC world, this means that you must not act like a caveman toward people who are of a different gender, race, ethinicity, religion, or lifestyle than you are. In the HC world (note that HC can also stand for "high cholesterol" and "heart condition," both of which you will end up dying from if you do not become healthfully correct), you must no longer eat like a caveman–meaning that meat and potatoes are off the menu–and you must not say demeaning things about people who eat differently from you, meaning, they claim to actually like salad, tofu, and whatever that horrible stuff is that Vegans substitute for chocolate.

Well, just as with political correctness, that’s not entirely true. In all types of correctness it is okay to say demeaning things toward people who are in the mainstream group. It’s just not okay to say discouraging words to the people who are in the “alternate” groups. So, we omnivores must not even look askance at vegetarians, fruitarians, and vegans or at people who eat a “raw” diet (are they "rawans?). However, members of any of those groups are allowed to give long lectures to omnivores about the errors of their diets and how their diets are going to, in fact, be the death of the entire planet, except for that, blessedly, the omnivores will all die of heart disease, pesticide poisoning, and steroid overdoses before they can do too much more damage. It is okay for them to tell omnivores about how chickens are treated on factory farms (which is beyond abominable, by the way) while we are eating our KFC and to tell us how much grease is in those delicious Mickey D's fries that we are scarfing down. But omnivores are not ever supposed to mention to the non-meat eaters that tofu tastes just like cheese that has had all of the flavor and texture left out or that the stuff that they are calling chocolate tastes a lot like dirt.

But I digress. I was talking about eating salad and enjoying it. I remember something called iceberg lettuce. It was served as a vegetable from about the 1950s through the 1980s. It was crisp, crunchy, cool, watery, and, best of all, it had no discernible flavor that anyone could object to. It was the perfect vegetable. Except for, apparently, it also had no nutritional value. So, in the 1990s, we began to disapprove of iceberg lettuce, with feelings that became stronger and stronger, until finally, iceberg lettuce was outlawed in California in 2003. More and more western and northeastern states have outlawed it since 2003, and it will finally be outlawed in Tennessee in 2210 and in Mississippi in 2212. (Except that those two states, plus West Virginia, will still allow iceberg lettuce to be served deep-fried at county fairs.)

Now we who are HC make our salads with something called “mixed greens.” Mixed greens are a variety of lettuces, leaves, and grasses that add texture and a variety of nutrients to our diets. In addition, mixed greens also have taste–a novel concept in a salad–meaning that many children and most adults who were raised on iceberg lettuce will not like them.

For the most part, I can tolerate these mixed greens pretty well. I’m generally well-disposed toward most grasses, leaves, and lettuces, so I happily munch away while hoping that my dinner is going to be followed by ice cream with chocolate sauce. Except for one thing. There is this one kind of...lettuce (?) that is unacceptable to me. It always occurs in big clumps, for one thing, that are very much like a plant version of a hairball. (Do not think cat hairball in this example. Think the huge wad of hair that you pull out of your teenage daughter's hairbrush.)  It consists of long, spidery limbs on light-green stems with sort of spindly, sickly-looking leaves hanging off of them. It looks like a vegetable invented by Dr. Seuss. And there is always such a big clump of it together that it cannot be cut up, corralled, or contained, no matter how you try to attack it with your fork. There is nothing for it but to stuff this huge amoebic lettuce creature into your mouth all in one piece, which leaves parts of it sticking out of your mouth as you try to choke it down (which is hard to do because it reminds you so much of eating hair) and thus pull the errant limbs into your mouth as you swallow the initial tumbleweed.

I do not know the name of this plant. I am sure that it is from another planet, probably one invented by Dr. Seuss. It does not occur on earth. It can’t. It looks like a plant that does not get enough exposure to sunlight, as if it can be found growing in the dim sunlight of one of the moons of Saturn. The only possible earthly origins for this plant would be caves or underground hydroponics labs. I also do not know who thought of putting this plant into the bag o’ salad called “mixed greens,” but I do know that I wish they would stop.

I do not mind eating in an HC fashion, to a certain extent, as long as I do not have to eat lettuce that is like a big wad of hair.

Thank you.

Leo Tolstoy, Pt. II: East Tennessee Mountain Man?

After I inserted the photo of Leo Tolstoy in my last post, I kept being struck by how familiar he looks to me. I finally realized that it wasn't that I was so familiar with Tolstoy himself, it was that I see his face around Knoxville and every time I travel up into the nearby mountains of East Tennessee. He could easily have passed for one of our mountain denizens, until he opened his mouth, at which point he would have been met by suspicious looks and the inevitable question, "You ain't from around here, is you, boy?"

If he had felt too alienated by always being asked that question, he could have left the hills of East Tennessee for a lucrative career playing bass for ZZ Top.

The Leo Tolstoy of Bloggers

That's me.

I have made every effort to write shorter blog posts in the hopes of giving my readers a quick laugh, a brief respite, and then allow them to go. But I'm giving up on that.

You know how in some card games—like Bridge, Spades, Hearts—one must, at the outset of each hand, bid either high or low, depending on how many tricks they think they'll take? Well, some bloggers can bid low in the word-count game. I'm going to have to bid high.

I worked up some statistics this morning.

What novel do Americans most often use as the measuring stick for length? Yes, that's right: Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. It's the bellwether of word count, as far as we are concerned. However, weighing in at just 560,000 words, it comes in at a distant 15th compared to other novels. (This is purely word count, not page count. It's possible, if you use really long words—as Tolstoy usually does—to have a higher page count than an author who trumps you on word count.)

I apparently should've been born French. French novels come in as the top three word-count books, with Artamene (a whopping 2,100,000 words), Les Hommes de Bonne Volonte (a close also-ran at 2,070,000. Goof grief, Jules Romains! Another 35,000 words and you'd have had the record!). But after the top three spots, the English definitely have it, claiming seven of the top 10 slots. So I guess I'm onto something. By the way, for those of you who have slogged through Hugo's Les Miserables, it comes in at a very lightweight 513,000 words. So if you want to read a really long novel in English, go find Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (number four, with 969,000 words in the first edition, but upgraded to over one million words in its third edition). But if you really want to be considered a heavyweight reader, learn French.

Compared to the above stats, I'm definitely a lightweight writer. But compared to most bloggers, I definitely measure up at least to Tolstoy. As I said before, I've really tried to shorten my posts. I've also read other people's blogs and admired their concise, pithy posts that fit easily on one page on my tiny 13-inch laptop screen, without scrolling. I've tried, but I just can't do it. I'm many things, but concise isn't one of them. And for those who might say that I am pithy, I'd argue that though I sometimes might act “pithed off,” I'm hardly terse and to-the-point.

At any rate, I think that at this point, I'm just going to give in to my wordiness, bid high, and hang the consequences (the consequences being that no one but the stalwart will want to read my posts). I've tried to bid low, but even my “short” posts are long by others' standards.

My longest post, I think, was the “two kinds of people” one, which I split into two posts, to try to trick people into thinking it was shorter. Total word count: 1,729.

So, then, I decided to try some shorter posts. One of these was my post about Larry Niven's extremely short story, called “Unfinished Story.” Niven's short story was a total of 10 words long. It took me 288 words to tell you about it.

Next, I thought that I could quickly write about my favorite quotation in “The Human Condition.” It was a short little quotation that required some set-up. Word count: 658.

Then, yesterday, while eating lunch, I was thinking about this problem of my posts being so long. I looked at the salad I was eating and thought, “I should write about lettuce; that couldn't possibly be very long.” I was thinking that I would just literally write about my lunch and keep it really short. I haven't posted that story yet, but it came in at 1,105 words!

So there you have it. I may not be in the same category as the old French novelists, but I do seem to weigh in around the Tolstoy level. For blogs, that is. (Word count of this post: about 699.)

The Human Condition

I’m a great reader of quotations by people from all walks: the famous, the infamous, and the unknown. Winston Churchill said, “It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” I am not exactly uneducated, but I am a slow reader, so, rather than spending my time reading whole biographies to learn about great people (which I’d like to do), I often instead read collections of quotations.

There is a lot of wisdom to be gleaned from famous quotations, and they give you the measure of the person without having to muck about in their everyday lives. Of course, there’s much to be learned about people’s true character by mucking about in their everyday lives, so I don’t at all discount that aspect of reading biographies.

My favorite quotes, as well as aphorisms, axioms and adages, are those that pretty much sum up the human condition. There are lots of great sayings out there, of course, including many that can improve our health, our parenting, our perspective, our character, and every other aspect of our lives. But the ones I like best are the ones that sum up human nature or the human condition in a nutshell.

I think that my all-time favorite quote, though, about the human condition, came from someone who is not famous, and I won’t make him famous because, to be quite frank, I’ve long since forgotten his name.

He was an old farmer living somewhere in the hinterlands of Houston, Texas. Houston and the flatlands around it are prone to flooding every time there comes a big gullywasher (as we call them here in the hills of east Tennessee). Being from the hills–where water drains very rapidly during storms, what with its always wanting to go downhill–I never imagined what water could do in flat country. It just piles up and sits there. Which I learned about during my brief stint in Houston.

So, we’d had days or perhaps weeks of rain and flooding, and the water was encroaching slowly from the lowest spots toward the higher spots. Folks in surrounding low-lying counties were sandbagging like mad, trying to stay ahead of the water and keep home and hearth dry.

On the local news one evening, they showed an aerial view of a farm that was completely surrounded by water. Only the house and the barn were still on dry land, and that was thanks to a very good job of sandbagging done by the farmer and his family. However, the water continued to rise, and the news reporter asked the farmer whether he was going to hold out and do more sandbagging or whether he was going to evacuate, along with his neighbors, when the local constabulary came calling.

He said, “I just don’t know. If I knew what was going to happen, I’d know what to do. But I don’t know what’s going to happen, so I don’t know what to do.”

Well, there you have it. About as succinct a summation of the human condition as I can imagine. He was quite serious, of course. This was no time for fooling around or being cute. He was looking at possibly losing everything that he and his family had worked for, probably for generations. So, he was not just idly philosophizing. This was human-condition examination of the most important kind. This was where the rubber meets the road.

I think of that old farmer all the time. Every time I come to a crossroads in my life, where I have to make a pretty important decision that, it seems, will shape the rest of my life, my mind brings back the words of the old farmer. If only I knew what was going to happen, I’d know what to do. But I must muddle through, just like everyone else, not knowing what the outcome will be till it’s too late to change my decision.

A very short story

Since yesterday's post was sort of longish, today's will be short. In fact, my intro will be much longer than the featured story. (Which is par for the course with me.)

Larry Niven is a science fiction author, probably best known for his Ringworld series. But he's been a quite prolific author, and one of my favorites of his is The Magic Goes Away series. I could be wrong, but I believe that the story I'm going to repeat here is part of that series. I went and lent ALL of my Larry Niven books to RJM (who'd better be taking good care of them!), so I can't look this story up. I am therefore working entirely from memory, as I also couldn't find the specific story in a very quick Google search.

Anyway, it was called something like Unfinished Story. It may have had a number after it because, again--if I am recalling correctly--he may have published three or so of these unfinished stories, which then became numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.

But then, I could be completely wrong on any or all of this. I'm sure that, if and when they read this, REB and RJM can correct my mistakes. So, I really hope that I can get Mr. Niven's story right, because I'm working entirely from a memory based on reading the story probably 25-plus years ago. It was one of my favorite short stories that I ever read, so I tried to commit it to memory. I believe that it may be the shortest story ever published, at least by a major publishing house.

So hear goes:

Unfinished story

There are some things man was not meant to know.

***
The End

Children's Fiction, snippet #1

Following is a little piece of a story that I've been working on here and there. I've just got little snippets of it. In short, it's about two or three of the Brooks family kids (I think there are six children in all) who meet a mysterious gentleman who takes them on a series of adventures through magical doors that appear out of nowhere. Between adventures, they sometimes have strange, interesting, enlightening, and/or acerbic conversations with the mystery man.

You can ignore this, if children's fiction is not your thing, or you can read it and tell me what you think. Does it seem worth pursuing? Does it make you want to know more? Does it make you want to go back to the riveting article you were reading in the Washington Post, or go back to your experimental work with hybridizing the world's hottest peppers? Feel free to let me know what you think. I can take it. I think. Well, maybe not. We'll see.

...
“Slug mugs and mudbugs and flub dugs
Slog togs and dog slobs and frog mogs
Blurb glurbs and slurp tubs and slub dubs.
If it's dirty or geary, greasy or smeary,
oily or noisy, if girls don't like it, or
if it can be made into a sword,
boys like it.”

“That doesn't paint too nice a picture of boys, does it?” Caitlin asked

“I think it's pretty accurate,”said Keaton. “I like it. I'm not sure what a flub dug is, but I have a feeling I'd like to poke it with a stick if I did.”

“Well, if that's what boys like, I don't think I want to even hear your opinion of girls. But go ahead. What do girls like?”

“Girls like to twirl.”

“That's it? That's all you can say about girls? We like to twirl?” Caitlin was indignant.

“If pressed, I could say more. But mostly—and I have to admit that this is purely from observation, as I've never been a girl—I would say that girls like to twirl. But, if I absolutely had to say more, I'd say that girls like jumping rope in the sun, spinning in the rain, singing, humming, and dancing on daddy's feet. If it's furry or lacy or princy or prancy, if it's shiny or glittery, glimmery or gleamy, girls want it. If it can swirl or unfurl, twist or twirl, twitter or flitter, skip or slip, splish or splash, or if it's a bath towel that can be made into 27 dress styles, girls like it.”

In spite of herself, Caitlin had to agree with this. Perhaps not every point of it was true for her, but a lot of it was, and the parts that weren't, she could think of at least several of her friends for whom it was true. And, truth to tell, she did enjoy twirling.

“So,” she said in her best ingratiating manner, “what do adults like?”

“Sleeping,” he said with finality.

She scrunched up her nose. “Really? That's all? No funny rhymes, no activity, no...nothing? Just sleeping?”

“Well, if you push me, I'll also say resting. And relaxing. Dozing. Snoozing. Snoring, even. Hammocks, sofas, lazy summer days and sandy beaches, long winter nights with a fire. Sunday afternoons that stretch into infinity. Doldrums and boredoms, dreary and dreamy. It takes the rest of your life to get over all of the activity of your childhood,” he said very seriously.

“But they work all the time. They pay bills. When they're not paying bills, they're talking about paying bills, or when they can buy a new dishwasher, or a better car. They talk about that stuff all the time. They must enjoy working and paying bills.”

He eyed her with one eyebrow cocked. “Just like you must love school and homework because you talk about them so much,” he said drily. With this, he turned and said, “Next!” and they knew that a door was about to open and they must follow him or be left behind.

Stupid Questions #1

This is my first Stupid Questions post (thus the clever title), in what I hope will become a series.

I am the Queen of Stupid Questions myself, as almost nothing is self-evident to me. I am not talking about obvious, run-of-the-mill stupid questions. A really good Stupid Question sometimes takes a moment to recognize. It makes the askee squint his eyes and cock his head the way a Labrador Retriever does when you are holding food in your hand and talking in a high-pitched, squeaky voice.

Following are a couple of my all-time favorite Stupid Questions (that were actually asked of me). I will not even attempt to give any of the answers that have occurred to me over the years. I'll let you entertain yourself by coming up with your own answers.

From a restaurant hostess: "Are you waiting for someone who's already here?"

From a co-worker: "Do you live at home?"

And one that a friend, who owns an antique and art shop, told me over the weekend.

A customer came to the cash register, holding aloft an old-fashioned biscuit cutter (which, for those who don't know, is a lot like a very simple cookie cutter), and asked, "Does this work?"

If you have a great Stupid Question story, feel free to post it in the comments section or e-mail it to me and I'll post it for you.

Shorter Posts for the Busy and the Dim

I know that most of my blog posts are too long. They require reading, thinking, and other troublesome activities. I've been thinking about what I can do about this, and I've decided that I should write some shorter posts for those people who just don't have the time to read the longer pieces, Twitterers who have the attention span of a flea with ADHD, idiots, and the functionally illiterate. You get to decide for yourself which of these categories you fit into.

I will probably develop some regular short features. The first one that occurs to me is "Is There Really No Such Thing as a Stupid Question?" So, I'll start with that one. Another that occurs to me is "World's Shortest Short Stories." I'll be looking for short stories that are about the length of Twitter posts. I'll even try to write some myself, but Twitter is not my medium of choice, as I can't say much that is useful in 140 characters or less.

Talkin' 'Bout My G-G-Generation

Paul: Heh? What'd he say?
Mary: He said he's talkin' 'bout his generation!
P: What, does he stutter now?
M: No, honey. Don't you remember? He had a stroke. He has trouble speaking in full sentences.
P: A stroke!? A young guy like him?
M: He's 65!
P: No, he's my age.
M: [Look of disgust.]
P: [Sheepishly] Well, I mean, 65 isn't old.
M: It's not exactly young either. You know, honey, I think we're going to have to admit that we are getting older. We are the people that we used to warn ourselves about. You know, the ones who couldn't be trusted.
P: Nah! Not us. We're not old, not like our parents were.
M: You mean that we refuse to grow up and take responsibility?
P: No! I just mean, you know, we're not really old.
M: When we were 18, we thought that 65 was pretty damned old.
P: Well, now they say that 65 is the new 45.
M: I thought that 65 was the new 55.
P: It was, but now that we've reached 65, it's the new 45.
M: Oh. I see [clearly perplexed].

[Disclosure: I am a Baby Boomer (toward the end of that generation), so I feel fully justified and qualified to make the following observations without apology to my fellow BBs.]

So, it happened. The Baby Boomers (BBs) have gotten old. Not that they're willing to admit it. And there's so many of them, and they are so used to getting their way, that they will completely revise the language before they admit that they are old.

Ten years ago, we were told that 60 was the new 50 and 50 was the new 40.

But just a few days ago, I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room. There was a TV on, tuned to a morning news program, out of my sight but not out of my hearing. They were doing a segment on how BBs feel about being grandparents. To sum up: they don't like it. Oh, wait. I mean, they love that their kids are having kids, and they love their grandchildren, but they don't love being seen as being old enough to have grandchildren, and they really don't love the word “grandma” because it embodies, for them, all kinds of negative stereotypes about age. In this segment, one of the women being interviewed whined on and on about this stereotype that she had about being “grandma” and how it didn't fit her and so forth. She went on to inform the viewing public that everyone knows that now 60 is the new 40, so she's really only about 45 years old, and that certainly isn't old. So people need to get a new idea about grandparenting, according to this woman.

I was surprised by this because I didn't realize that we have now dropped two decades in age. Pretty soon, I'll be young enough to return to high school. (Ugh! What a horrible thought!)

Well, I can, and I will, over the coming months, write more about the Whiniest Generation, but for now, I'll just put forth this revised language guide for those of you who are having trouble keeping up.

As things currently stand, the following new terminology applies:
60 is the new 40.
50 is the new 30.
However, I think that 30 is still 30, and 20 is still 20. Otherwise, 20-year-olds would be infants, and high schoolers would not even be a gleam in their parents' eyes (not an altogether bad thing, mind you).
Jazzy power chairs are the new VW Bugs.
Deafness is the new rock-concert day-after.
Medications for actual medical conditions have taken the place of recreational drugs.
Strokes are the new recreational-drug-induced blackouts.
Alzheimers is the new LSD.
Nursing homes are the new Woodstock (too many people—many of whom are unbathed and/or out of their minds—crammed together in one place with not enough facilities to go around).
Death is the new life.

Adjust your age, medical diagnoses, adaptive devices, and undergarments accordingly. Actually, speaking of undergarments, they are problematic. Depends® would be the new underwear, but since we dispensed with that long ago, we don't actually know how to reframe incontinence-wear, we just know that really bad things happen if we don't use it.

The New Speak ages refer only to people in their mid-40s through 60s. You are out of luck if you are 70 or above, as the Old System still applies and you are still old (and not to be trusted).

We hope that this helps in interpreting what you hear being said around you these days. If you can even hear what's being said around you. If you can't hear what's being said around you, just enjoy the trip.