Overhear, over there

Top of the morning to you, folks. While every day is special and unique (like a snowflake) here at UOPTA, today is even more snowflakey than the rest. Yes, today is the fourth anniversary of my lovely wife becoming my lovely wife. It's been a wonderful four years, and she's been putting up with my oddities since we first started dating way back in '95, so she deserves heaps of praise and admiration. Happy Anniversary, honey. Oh yeah, and it's Good Friday and the Mexican holiday of Benito Juarez' Birthday today too. Bonus. Ready for random crap? Here goes:

Every once in a while, I'll hear a word that someone says and then tune out the rest of the sentence because I'm thinking about that word. It happens more often than "every once in a while," if I'm being honest here. This happened over the past weekend while in the car with my parents and my Aunt Judy en route to the Susan G. Komen breast cancer walk that we do each year. Judy was telling us about some remodeling they're doing in their house, and she said the word "upholstery" at one point. As she continued, I was somewhere else. Here was my thought process as she kept talking: "Hmmm, 'upholstery.' I saw that word somewhere with Amber recently and had a good thought about it. What was it? Something about the H being basically silent? No, that wasn't it. Oh! I know. It's the only word I can think of off-hand in which a PH doesn't make an F sound. I should email myself right now about this so I don't forget." So that's what I did. When I mentally rejoined the rest of the carload, Judy was saying something about buying a bag of grout. Grout apparently comes in bags.

(As a side note, I spent the first 15 minutes of the 5K walk trying to explain the "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" thing from last week to my friends Greg and Ceil. They understood it pretty quickly, which I credit more to them than to my skills of explanation.)

I know I probably say this a lot, but I thought something I dislike. This one's not too high on the list, but I thought of it, and I seem to have misplaced the filter that normally resides between my brain and my blog. (Hmmm, "My Brain and My Blog" by Peter Klein has a nice ring to it. Also, I just accidentally typed my name as Pewter before using that fancy backspace key. How many of you have accidentally typed a metal instead of your name? Yep, I'm special.) Here's what I don't like: Sometimes I will go and see a blockbuster comedy in the theaters. Not often, recently, but it's been known to happen. These films are promoted so much that it's virtually impossible for anyone in that theater not to be able to quote a few of the funny lines from the commercials. Yet, when that one line that has been on every commercial, in every preview, and on every billboard comes up in the movie, half the audience still laughs like they're hearing it for the first time. What's up with that shit? Really, you didn't know that character was going to say, "Don't let him near the kid, he wants to rear your child!" in "Knocked Up"? I find that hard to believe. Assholes.

I heard a radio commercial trying to encourage me to apply to be a deputy. I had no problem with the content of the ad, and if I read the copy instead of heard it, I wouldn't be writing about it now. The thing is, the dude doing the voiceover pronounced the most important word of the commercial as "deppity." And he said it about ten times in the thirty seconds. That bugged the hell out of me. My facial expression went from "Wait, did he say that wrong?" to "What the fuck is wrong with this person" in about 3.5 deppities. Maybe I should stick to listening to cds in the car to keep my blood pressure down.

When I was in Miami for work a wee bit ago, I passed a young woman on the street as she was in mid conversation. I heard her say, "Holy casserole!" to her friend, and it sounded like an honest reaction to something that surprised her. (In retrospect, it could've been the fact that I wasn't wearing any pants.) If you'd have given me 100 guesses on what noun followed "holy" as an exclamation, I never would've guessed it. 1000, and maybe, because I'm sure I'd allot at least fifty to types of meals (quiche, jambalaya, pilaf, fricassee, etc.). I enjoy hearing random bits of conversations, and I wish that happened more often. The best one I can recall right now was back in high school, when a fellow student walked past me while telling her friend, "And I was so stoned that I just put the cigarette out in my belly button." I'm pretty sure I got the best line of that entire conversation just with my perfectly-timed walking. Go me. (Somewhere, someone's telling a friend, "While walking a 5K, I heard some weirdo say 'buffalo' like ten times in a row.")

Here's something I overheard that I thought was funny. Actually, it definitely was funny, so if you don't at least smile, I'm pretty sure it's your fault. When I was on a plane next to a woman and her baby (as detailed a few weeks ago right here), a flight attendant came up to the mom right after we touched down. "They were so good," she said about the twin babies on either side of the aisle, "But I think one of them needs a changing!" "Really?" the mom said, sniffing around her daughter's butt. "Yeah, I smell a poopy diaper over here," she said, then turned and left. The mom turned to her husband and said, "I don't smell poop. I smell, like, pee. I mean, I don't smell like pee, but, oh never mind, you know what I mean." Quote of the flight, ladies and gentlemen.

I know I've already given you so much today, but in the spirit of the day before Easter Eve, I have more for you. Yes, it's time for the one, the weekly, Car Watch!

First off, I saw a bumper sticker that commented on the driver's position on a social issue. That stance itself is not important really, but rather the fact that it was preceded by, "I think, therefore..." You can fill in the blank however you like. Pick a side on abortion, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, etc., and you got the point. Personally, I didn't agree with the person's stance, thus, I apparently don't think. (Well, this would be a pretty stupid name for my blog then, eh?) I understand that people have different opinions on hot-button issues like those than I might, but I've never once thought that they came to those opinions by not thinking. If I don't vote for that woman's preferred candidate, does that mean I don't think too? Probably. I don't like that way of seeing opposing viewpoints, and I think (if I may be so bold) that many of you will agree.

That sticker reminded me of another from years ago, and I'll switch to that and unfurrow my brow. I saw, "I drink therefore I am" while in a car with Dusty the summer before starting college. I made some comment like, "Just because a word rhymes doesn't mean you can switch it out of an idiom and it will automatically make sense or be funny." Yeah, I actually did talk like that back then. Dusty, who was about to start at the University of Rochester, told me that in the campus bookstore, he saw a sticker that said, "I think therefore UR." Brilliant! I'm Peter Klein, and I approve that use of humor on a bumper sticker.

My loving mother-in-law sent me a license plate frame she saw and her accompanying thought process. It read, "Driver Reads Braille." Her first thought, as mine would undoubtedly have been, was that the driver was blind. Then she realized (hoped) that that most likely wasn't the case. Even though I know that sighted people also read Braille, I'm sure the two of us aren't alone in automatically associating it with blind people. See, I wouldn't assume for a second that the driver was deaf if it said "Driver Knows American Sign Language." I think that's because people use ASL to translate for the hearing impaired, while no one uses Braille to help the blind in quite the same fashion. I guess that leads to the $50,000 question: why do some people with sight choose to learn Braille? I can think of two legitimate reasons, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject. First, someone with a blind relative or friend (especially a child) might learn it along with that person as a way of helping him or her learn to read. Second, there are strange people like me out there who like to learn things just for the sake of learning them sometimes. Wait, I thought of a third. When they make books in Braille, they're probably created by sighted people who know how to use the cool machines to make the right markings on the paper. That makes sense unless there are computer programs that do that all automatically. Damn, it's probably the latter. But it probably used to be people. Was this driver one of those original Braille transcribers before the machines took over? Wow, this paragraph got long as I started discussing this topic by myself.

Lastly, my homey Rockabye saw "(Heart)2HEARU" on a plate. Maybe it's that last topic speaking, but doesn't that sound like someone rubbing their ability to hear in deaf people's faces? (Wow, I originally wrote "deaf people's feces" accidentally as I was typing while watching basketball on tv. That's a whole different - more worrisome - type of rubbing all together. Sorry about that mental image, folks.)

Ok, I've officially lost it. Me brain no worky no more. Have a lovely weekend (including Easter, if that sort of thing is your bag) and week until I see you here again next Friday. Once again, if you feel like sending anything at all to ptklein@gmail.com, I wouldn't be mad at you. Shaloha, and take care.