Well friends, I've got two stories for you today from my past. Someday maybe I'll write a post about stories from my future just to switch things up a little and keep 'em fresh. That day is not today though.
Back before I had my driver's license, I spent a good amount of time in the car with my mom. We often listened to the oldies station, and having been raised that way, it wasn't long before both of us knew every song they played. Weekly, the station did some weird call-in advice show called "The Art of Dating." I'm not sure why she never changed the station, but we listened to the idiots who would call up and talk to a stranger about their problems and believe that the one-line answers would fix everything. The thing that stuck out the most though was the way the disc jockey would say the name of the bit. He always said, "The Art..................of Dating." Yes, that's six ellipses in a row on purpose, for the pause was way longer than a normal one.
Being, well, me, I started to imitate the announcer guy. My pauses went from about two seconds long all the way to a minute long. And then one day, I turned to my mom and said, "The Art." She waited a little while, and then she asked, "Of Dating?" I shook my head no. "What, you're not speaking now?" she asked. I shook my head again. We were sitting there playing cards, and after about ten minutes, she tried to get me with a quick, "Peter!" It didn't work though; I was committed to my new silence.
After about another half an hour and a few "You're really not going to talk?" questions, we finished playing and my mom went upstairs. I was doing some homework and feeling pretty pleased with myself when the phone rang. My brother and I had our own line, and I could tell from the ring that it was ours. He wasn't home, and being a teenager, I couldn't just let the phone ring and miss the opportunity to talk with my friends. The phone rang again, and I started moving near it, still undecided as to what I was going to do. It rang again, and finally I yelled, "Of Dating! Shit!" I picked up the phone, and before I could even say hello, I heard my mom's hysterically-laughing voice on the other end saying, "Of Dating!" She's still quite proud of that moment, and I can't blame her one bit. She got me; she got me good.
My second story is actually quite similar, though in a different set of circumstances. Senior year of college, my friend Greg and I took a Linguistics class together called "The Structure of English." I took it because I had some elective units still and found the topic right up my alley. Plus, I had just taken "Word Origins" from the same professor and liked his oddball style. Greg took the class because he had one General Education requirement left and figured we could hang out more if we had a class together. It was a fairly interesting course, but way more difficult than I had anticipated. I won't get into how incredibly detailed the assignments were, and you should thank me for that.
The class was not without its regular doses of odd examples from our professor. To illustrate some type of clause that I've since forgotten, he used this sentence: "I punched him because he wouldn't give me the God damn tickets." Neither Greg nor I knew what he meant, but that just made it all the better. One day, he used this example for something else I forgot: "If I said, 'Here's a knife for you with which to cut the bread,' it would sound weird, right? But if there's a pause in there like, 'Here's a knife for you...with which to cut the bread,' it sounds perfectly natural." We completely disagreed with his point, because both sounded very unnatural to us. Disirregardless, the whole walk home was filled with us saying that line over and over again. Sometimes it was just a long pause, sometimes we had big hand gestures and faces to go along with it, and sometimes we added a Conan O'Brien-like "ehhhhhhhhhh" before the second half of the sentence.
This didn't end that day, my friends. All week long, Greg and I kept handing each other knives (both real and imaginary) and saying the line over and over again. One day the following week, we were walking together after class, and we got to the place where Greg turned left to go home and I kept going straight toward where I worked. When we were about 30 feet apart, I called after him. He turned around, and I said, "Here's a knife for you!" I kept walking, and he stood there waiting for the second half. I smiled and kept walking, and he put his arms up in the air as if to say, "Really? You're leaving me in this state?" I kept on smiling and walking until I was fully out of view.
Later that evening, I came home and made my way down the long hallway to my room. Greg was standing there with a very serious look on his face. "Hey man," I said. "Don't you have something to say to me?" he asked, still quite seriously. I wracked my brain for a second wondering what I could have done, but he jumped in, yelling, "WITH WHICH TO CUT THE BREAD!" I had completely forgotten during the hours I'd been working, and I apologized profusely to have kept him waiting so long.
To this day, every once in a while my lovely wife or I will say something unintentionally close to "Here's a knife for you" while cooking dinner and then laugh. The other of us naturally finishes the thought, because it's almost impossible not to do so now.
So that's it for today, gentle readers. Tune in tomorrow for another Follow Up Friday. Shaloha.
3 comments:
I guess we turned those pregnant pauses into the gestation periods of elephants. And, yes, I still bask in the afterglow of having "gotten" you. Those times have been few and far between. Here are my wishes for you............for which to have a great day.
I know that sometimes during your 175 posts, many of your readers were thinking, "he's weird". I beg to differ and would rather call your wordplay and view of the language and life as "special". Your active mind and the family that you grew up in are partly the reasons. But you took it to another level entirely. You exchanged family weirdness for friend weirdness while at college.
Keep thinking, it's good for you. Shaloha.
Here's a comment for you..................
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