Well it's happened again! I had a topic all ready for today, I am up early, I still have time off from teaching, and I have forgotten what I was going to write about. I realize that most of you, if you've been reading longer than a day, have figured out that I rarely have any idea what I am writing about, but it is frustrating to know that I could have had focus today and now it is gone!
It started yesterday when I went to church. I was a little early. Well, I was early for the second service but I was thinking about going to the first service so I was actually quite late. But let's not quibble over details. I saw two friends, Richard and Mark, standing and talking between services so I walked over to say hi. We stood around talking about movies, and New Year's, and how many people must have decided to come to the second service since the first service was empty and I said something that made Mark laugh. Now Mark is not one to hold back his laughter so I am used to hearing him laugh, but after this story he had was bent over and was trying to get air. (and no, the punch line wasn't really a "punch" line) He said, "Oh that's really funny!"
Of course when I hear that I immediately think, "I could put that into the blog!" Not everything that I say to make people laugh makes it into the blog. There are many times that I am with people, and we are all laughing, and the mere mention of the incident will cause people involved to laugh. But most of those times result in what a friend of mine used to call, "location jokes." You had to be there. It's the conversational equivalent of telling a really funny line to a movie...that no one else has ever seen. There's not much worse than trying to reset the situations involved with a location joke and then have people wondering, aloud, about your sanity. After the first fifteen or twenty times it starts to affect you.
I have mentioned before that I take notes in my phone in order to remind me of things that I thought were amusing and wanted to remember to write about. It works, in theory. I do have things on my phone like, "The sermon about the five loaves and two fish and the dessert cart." or "The guy from New York driving without his hair." I can remember that Mark was the one who generated the one about the dessert cart but I don't remember enough of the details to make it a story. Except that I wrote that note in the middle of a sixteen hour car ride back from Arizona and I think we were both going to laugh at anything. The one about the hairless New Yorker is anybody's guess. I'm hoping that it wasn't really funny because it is lost forever.
Yesterday, even with my fancy shmancy note taking phone, I didn't write it down. I feel it's odd to stop and fidget with the recording device on my phone in the middle of a conversation. It makes me feel like I am trying to be important or something like I was a stock broker from a movie talking to his secretary via recorder. "Buy Skynet at $25. Put the Colgate merger on hold until the Crest makes a counter offer. Move my meeting with Mother Hubbard to Wednesday. And remind me to rotate the tires on the Rolls." I suppose if I were getting paid to write then I would feel a little more justified by saying, "Excuse me. Gotta earn a living." But when I talked into my recorder it would be more like, "Buy whoopie cushion for April fools day. Sprite hurts much less than Coke when laughed through the nose. Really...a sign that extols the virtues of ExLax. And remind me to use the word 'kumquat' in a future blog." You can see my dilemma.
Why don't I just call Mark and ask what it was that was so funny? Fat chance. Mark is a fun-loving guy. He finds humor in almost every situation. (Is it any wonder why I tell my stories to him?) Well, you say, Richard was there as well. That is one location joke twice removed. The odds are slim at best. Of course the resulting conversation would be possible blog fodder. I'm just not ready to take the risk.
So now you know. I have no idea what I was going to write, but I ended up being able to bang on the keyboard anyway. It was really maddening not being able to remember what I was going to write, but I think I handled it in a mature way. I, of course, did resort to using my version of a swear word as a title, and that is rare...unless the person in front of me is driving fifteen miles under the speed limit in the fast lane.
It started yesterday when I went to church. I was a little early. Well, I was early for the second service but I was thinking about going to the first service so I was actually quite late. But let's not quibble over details. I saw two friends, Richard and Mark, standing and talking between services so I walked over to say hi. We stood around talking about movies, and New Year's, and how many people must have decided to come to the second service since the first service was empty and I said something that made Mark laugh. Now Mark is not one to hold back his laughter so I am used to hearing him laugh, but after this story he had was bent over and was trying to get air. (and no, the punch line wasn't really a "punch" line) He said, "Oh that's really funny!"
Of course when I hear that I immediately think, "I could put that into the blog!" Not everything that I say to make people laugh makes it into the blog. There are many times that I am with people, and we are all laughing, and the mere mention of the incident will cause people involved to laugh. But most of those times result in what a friend of mine used to call, "location jokes." You had to be there. It's the conversational equivalent of telling a really funny line to a movie...that no one else has ever seen. There's not much worse than trying to reset the situations involved with a location joke and then have people wondering, aloud, about your sanity. After the first fifteen or twenty times it starts to affect you.
I have mentioned before that I take notes in my phone in order to remind me of things that I thought were amusing and wanted to remember to write about. It works, in theory. I do have things on my phone like, "The sermon about the five loaves and two fish and the dessert cart." or "The guy from New York driving without his hair." I can remember that Mark was the one who generated the one about the dessert cart but I don't remember enough of the details to make it a story. Except that I wrote that note in the middle of a sixteen hour car ride back from Arizona and I think we were both going to laugh at anything. The one about the hairless New Yorker is anybody's guess. I'm hoping that it wasn't really funny because it is lost forever.
Yesterday, even with my fancy shmancy note taking phone, I didn't write it down. I feel it's odd to stop and fidget with the recording device on my phone in the middle of a conversation. It makes me feel like I am trying to be important or something like I was a stock broker from a movie talking to his secretary via recorder. "Buy Skynet at $25. Put the Colgate merger on hold until the Crest makes a counter offer. Move my meeting with Mother Hubbard to Wednesday. And remind me to rotate the tires on the Rolls." I suppose if I were getting paid to write then I would feel a little more justified by saying, "Excuse me. Gotta earn a living." But when I talked into my recorder it would be more like, "Buy whoopie cushion for April fools day. Sprite hurts much less than Coke when laughed through the nose. Really...a sign that extols the virtues of ExLax. And remind me to use the word 'kumquat' in a future blog." You can see my dilemma.
Why don't I just call Mark and ask what it was that was so funny? Fat chance. Mark is a fun-loving guy. He finds humor in almost every situation. (Is it any wonder why I tell my stories to him?) Well, you say, Richard was there as well. That is one location joke twice removed. The odds are slim at best. Of course the resulting conversation would be possible blog fodder. I'm just not ready to take the risk.
So now you know. I have no idea what I was going to write, but I ended up being able to bang on the keyboard anyway. It was really maddening not being able to remember what I was going to write, but I think I handled it in a mature way. I, of course, did resort to using my version of a swear word as a title, and that is rare...unless the person in front of me is driving fifteen miles under the speed limit in the fast lane.
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