Friday, July 20, 2012

The same effect cannot be achieved via an ellipsis... (Project 190, Day Eleven)

Today I biked, without Mr. Hufflepuff around, and while I biked I played "Peggle" on my Kindle; it's the kind of video game I like -- not 10,000 different controls for characters, no long quests, you can quit anytime you like -- and I listened to music, and I thought stuff.

Mostly, I thought about this idea I had, that if I right now decided to (mentally) insert a parentheses into my thinking/speech/actions... such that before I said or did anything else in life, I thought to myself:

PARENTHESES!

Or just:

(

And then just went on with my life without ever closing that parentheses, then it would be like everything in my life was an aside, that everything I did was a parenthetical insertion into whatever it was I was really doing.

I liked that because not only would it be a rebuttal to e e cummings, but also it would imply that my life might not be the sum of my existence, any more than a parenthetical expression (like this one) is the sum of a sentence.

Then I wondered if maybe I hadn't heard a comedian say that once, that he had one time done that and so was living out that very thing that I thought.

Then I considered how hard it was to know, sometimes, whether I really had come up with something or whether I'd just heard it long ago and now didn't remember that I got that idea from someone else, which kind of happened to me once when I was at the library and I was looking at a book on the rack and I picked it up and read the back of it and thought "Hmmm... this sounds like the kind of book I would like" and then carried it with me while I looked at other books and selected, finally, a few books to check out and then I waited in line and as the librarian started checking out the books I pulled out that first one, the Hmmm this sounds one and I told her not to check that out because I had already read it.

And she looked at me like I was crazy -- like I'd read it while waiting or something, and her look was not unwarranted because that's kind of a weird thing to say, "Oh, here's this book that up until you touched it I was apparently going to check out but no, forget it, I've read it."

The truth was, I had read it; it was a book about a guy who builds this superhotel kind of weird thing, it's hard to explain, but I'd only just realized that I'd read the book before, and in fact, I had liked it.

I thought all that in 20 minutes, on the bike, while playing Peggle.

Today's workout: Biking
Latest weight: 253
Today's song that is so catchy that I kept calling Mr F "Miss Teen Wordpower" this morning even though that makes no sense at all but still, it's a catchy song: Miss Teen Wordpower, by The New Pornographers.


PS: I was unable to find a comedian who had told a joke like the parentheses, and I searched for nearly a minute.  I did find this XKCD comic strip but it's not quite the same thing.

PPS: Also, I did the parentheses thing.  At about 6:05 this morning, I thought to myself:

(





2 comments:

Andrew Leon said...

It's like the Gilligan's Island movie where they get rescued and the Professor makes all of these things that he came up with while on the island only to find that other people invented them while they were there.

I feel like that a lot.

I don't think I want to be reduced to a parenthetical.

Liz A. said...

At least you didn't get home with the book, read it and think, "Gee, this sounds awfully familiar. Have I read this before? I have. I have read this before."

Not like that's ever happened to me or anything.