As a bit of pre-blog trivia, isn’t it nice to know the peanut gallery can’t be recalled?
It was fun getting some feedback from friends to my inaugural blog entry. People who know me well usually scratch their heads and wonder: “How do you come up with this stuff?” Well, I’ve always been interested in the little stuff: brain teasers and such. Will Rogers said he never met anyone he didn’t like, and I haven’t come across any topic – as minute, weird or outlandish as it may be – that couldn’t be turned into an interesting story.
My internal clock just ticks that way. People are all too often in a hurry and forget to take a little time here and there along the grand sweep of their lives. I’ve always marveled at that little stuff that keeps the tapestry of our lives hanging together, sometimes by a mere thread. It also helps to be naturally curious about things. That drives some people nuts. They are the ones who say, “I don’t care how it works. I just want it to work.” I guess I just need to hear the gears grind a little. Probably helps that I write for a living.
One of my friends was stumped as to how I came up with the name of the blog. Yes, there is a story here, and I’m going to share it. Years ago, when I first moved to Colorado, I actually worked in an 8-to-5 rat race job. I suited up for duty, employed my exceptional talents, and came home exhausted. I was getting to know a coworker. It was at that critical point in the dynamic that causes the tumblers to shift one way or another. So as we’re doing this mental sizing up, we got talking about other people we know, other places, and funny things that happened. She mentioned that she had been to party (or had she heard this from someone who had been to a party?) where – now this is an intuitive obviosity -- the liquor was flowing like a Western spring flood, and people had their tickets punched and were boarded on the train for headed for Happy Town.
OK, this is a no-great-shakes picture to be sure. But one of the inebriated guests was apparently waxing philosophic, perhaps in an effort to wow the babes basking in his presence. There’s nothing worse than a drunk whose brain is whirling along the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy, but whose lips forgot to find the rocket fuel. As it turned out, something was uttered that was probably forgotten by most everyone else, given that some law of the universe says that things look for equilibrium. But the comment was passed along to me to preserve the historical (or hysterical) record.
As I was told by my coworker, a comment was apparently made (I expect by a man who was working up to the best hook-up line ever), and our drunken friend wasn’t to be outdone. So, responding to the situation, he hoped to score some points by saying that the statement from HookUpMan was “intuitively obvious.” But the cranial synapses were French fried and tie-died, and DrunkenBud’s honest assessment was that the statement was “an intuitive obviosity.”
That’s really funny! DrunkenBud unwittingly groped the darkest recesses of his mind and came up with a plu-perfect description. He may have been high on the tox panel, but his mind delivered a killer one-two insight.
Here is an example of an intuitive obviosity: “Don’t you think you should put your sneakers on your feet before you go outside?” Talk about a duh-moment. Where else would you put them? They’d look a little silly as ear muffs….
I get my perspective from my father, who was a lover of word games and especially plays on words. He was one of the best at telling bad jokes and making us all laugh at them in spite of ourselves. There were, in fact, times when the jokes were SO bad I couldn’t stop laughing because of their inherent badness. Having an absent-minded professor for a father was precious.
Another friend reminded me that one person’s poison is another person’s passion. She enjoyed reading about the rhubarb ice cream, but she kindly reminded me someone close to home probably would love to get the recipes I tossed as we do have an annual rhubarb festival up here in Pine, CO. Wow, that one slipped my memory banks! For as many years as I’ve attended that festival to take in the sights, smells, and sounds (all done sans sampling anything), it didn’t even occur to me that I could have found a home for the recipes.
My friend reminded me that sometimes we have to be knocked out of our mental comfort zones, that it might be a good thing to walk a mile in someone’s rhubarb patch.
I told her I’d make restitution by snatching the recipes out of the trash can and getting them into appreciative hands. By the time I went to retrieve them, however, they were buried in the kind of muck one shouldn’t have to sift through without with the aid of rubber gloves.
So I’m going to offer a collective “sorry” to my friends in Pine and hope they don’t shoot me at this year’s event!
PS: I did indeed make some ice cream with my new churn, and it was wonderful. Yeah, I started with vanilla. But next go-round, I plan to tackle strawberry and decadent chocolate. What a wonderful way to get your antioxidants and produce some endorphins!
