Something about television commercials really started bothering me this holiday season. To wit, I was watching a car commercial where the people drive out to their ski lodge to put up an ornament. During the ride, a grandfatherly-looking gentlemen looks out from the back seat and says, “Forty year old tradition. I hope we make it.” Then a smartly dressed man behind the wheel says, “We will.” What got under my skin as I watched was the sudden realization that none of these people are actually related. They’re all just actors who realistically probably just met that morning during the read-thru; and now, they are passing themselves off as a caring, loving family. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop.The couple kissing after he gets her the sponsor’s ring? Perfect strangers. The mom pouring the cereal for her son? Once the cameras stopped rolling, she probably never even said goodbye to him as she ran off to her afternoon pilates class. As naive as it sounds, I wish people wouldn’t fake familial relationships during the holidays just to try and sell me something.
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, specifically YouTube, I was able to immediately answer a question that came up in class recently without having to do any laborious searching. It made me wonder how many engineers it took to create a world-wide information superhighway just so I could discover that yes, indeed, chickens can swim.
Here’s a factoid I just recently discovered. Not only are the seasons reversed in the southern hemisphere in terms of temperature, so are their names. For example, Australians dress up for Halloween in what to them is called springtime. This begs the question: which months do their kids go to school? Would they still go from September to May? Does Christmas come in the middle of their summer vacation? If so, do they then get a two-week break mid-winter (our summer) for no apparent reason? Is there a small town located right on the equator that has one side of the street saying its autumn and the other side thinks it’s spring? What about the Olympics? When Brazil hosts the next Summer Games in 2016, all of the signage will reflect that; but everyone who lives there will think it’s winter. That would be so confusing. Especially for an out-of-towner who goes on a huge drunken bender and then wakes up, looks at a billboard, and thinks he passed out for six months and now is in a different season.
Something else I didn’t learn until after the age of thirty: a drinking straw gets its name because it looks like a piece of straw. I can still remember actually being startled by this realization while dining at a Red Robin restaurant in Victorville, California. The people in the next booth were equally amazed, but the waitress was surprisingly coquettish about the whole thing.
Here’s a mystery that even Sherlock Holmes can’t solve. How do all of the cables behind a television set or a home stereo get so unbelievably tangled? They weren’t like that when I plugged them all in. I know my cat can’t fit back there, so how in the world do they arrange themselves into such incredible Gordian knots? It’s probably the same gremlins who braid headphone wires in storage drawers.
Realizing you’re growing older doesn’t come up on you gradually. It hits suddenly with an incident that serves to remind you there are more yesterdays than tomorrows left on your season pass. For example, I used to run on a treadmill that faced a full-length mirror. One day, I noticed how loose the skin on my cheeks was getting. With each step, my expression was switching from happy to sad and back again. Seriously, I started to look like the two drama masks as I ran: comedy… tragedy… comedy… tragedy… I felt so aged that I went home and put on a pair of parachute pants to feel young again.
My latest killer app idea: the iBalls search engine. Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, using it is a breeze. You simply take your eyes off your screen and look around for a while. You’ll be amazed at all the things you didn’t notice before, things like the sky, your loved ones and the fact that you’re about to walk blindly into oncoming traffic.
So There I Was... 