I gave you, yesterday, a little insight into how my mind works. (Technically, this whole blog is about how my mind works, excepting those nominations from intrepid readers who dare to disagree with me.) Today, let me give you an example of how my job works.
They never quite did, of course, but the strip was funny and had busty women, and I was, as a teenager, a fan of both humor and busty women.
Agatha is both interesting and fun and somewhat of a surrogate of the reader in that she, too, seems a little confused and lost as she's swept along on the larger bulk of the storyline.
It makes me want to get a bigger monitor just to see it all laid out the way it should be (and I have gone and gotten some of the books to do just that.)
and here's why: It's too long and too late. The World Series is seven interminable, slow games spread out over what feels like 33 years. Here's how much I watch of the World Series: the last inning of the last game. That's it. That's all you need to watch. For some reason, major league baseball plays a hundred quintillion games to get to the postseason, and then another hundred quintillion to decide the champion, and by the time they're done I'm more sick of baseball than I was already, and also football is on, so who cares? Before the World Series could really be the best event, it would (a) have to be much shorter, (b) have to be in September before football gets really fun, and (c) not have to involve baseball.
the NBA Finals. You know who else has "Finals?" Schools. So the NBA championship calls up all the excitement of an essay test in May.
Nick Lachey, and here's why: Nick Lachey, from the very very little I know about him, does exactly what I would do if I suddenly found myself with lots of money and lots of time.
Sad songs can be hard to like. Like coffee, they are an acquired taste. And I ask myself sometimes, why would someone work to acquire a taste for something that's hard to like?
a large rat with a rapier. I liked the fight with the sea serpent slowly crushing the ship. I loved that Eustace became a dragon for a while, and I liked the part with the invisible dwarves that had one foot. But more than that, I liked the magical atmosphere of the book. As the Dawn Treader the boat got further and further away from land, Dawn Treader the book got more and more fantastic and ethereal; while the crew sailed away from the known world, so did the reader and so did the writing. So at the end, when they set off in a coracle to go over the edge of the world, it was something completely different.
Cold in a way that I no longer can tolerate. From October 1 to May 1, I freeze to death. I can't get warm enough (until I start sweating) to do anything, and I have to lug around that big coat and gloves and a hat. And my feet get wet. And our driveway has sloped sides and so the more snow we get the harder it is to get it off the driveway because you can't throw the snow up the edge anymore and you just try to heave it out of the way and it slides back down, so the driveway gets narrower and narrower-- it's only about 6' wide now. Any more winter and I won't be able to leave the house.
Why should I leave the house, anyway? I don't ski anymore. I don't ice skate (and if I did, there are indoor rinks available, even in Wisconsin. If they can play hockey in Texas, I don't need winter to ice skate). I don't even sled, which I might do except that the kids are all the wrong ages to sled and besides, I've got a bad back now.
I run into people, now and then, who try to defend winter, and they try to give me things that I could do, but the problem is that all of those things require going outside, and if they didn't then I wouldn't have to suffer through winter to do them. Anything I can do in winter means one of two things. I can get cold and then get warm, by going outside and then back inside to do whatever it is I'm going to do. What's the point of that? Or, I can get cold and then get colder, by going outside and staying there. And there's no point to that.
Those people, the Freeze Meisters, keep trying, and they always pull the same final argument out, too: What about Christmas? they ask. Wouldn't you miss snow on Christmas?
No.
No, I most definitely would not.
Remember that scene in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation when Clark looks outside and envisions his swimming pool, all sunny and warm and "Mele Kalikimaka" plays?
Okay, there's something kind of sad, I agree, about basing your life on Clark Griswold's fantasies, but I'm going to do it anyway:
"Mele Kalikimaka" would be my motto. I can't imagine anything better than being warm on Christmas and wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sitting out on my deck and humming Christmas carols. If I want to see snow on Christmas, I'll watch re-runs of the "very special Christmas" episodes of 80's sitcoms. And when I reach that point, I'll change this nomination from "The Best Thing About Winter... is that it ends" to The Best Thing About Winter Is That I Escaped It.
I can play many songs on the guitar, with varying degrees of skill. The degrees of skill vary from "not god-awful" to "I can almost tell what song you are playing." The songs include such rock standards as "Free Falling," and "Suspicious Minds." (And Sweetie and I used to duet on "Suspicious Minds," and we were good.) I also have written my own songs, including The Big Mouth Frog Blues. Those songs, though, are light on romance, and Sweetie deserves romance.
