Thursday, July 07, 2011

This Is My Brain...On A Bed Of Lettuce Leaves With A Side Of Summer Fragmentation. Would You Care To See The Wine List?

Remember how in seventh grade your health teacher would show you the Before and After pictures of lungs to demonstrate the Horrors And Evils Of Cigarette Smoking?

Good.

Now look at that nice, pinked-up brain on the left there.  There is No Way In Hell that my own personal brain looks like that. Mine is probably purply and twisty and sinister-looking.  Mine is not even a brain anymore; it is a Random Spasmodic Thought Fraughtenor. (And yes, I did just make up that last word because I do feel as if my brain and consciousness are besieged and fraught with thoughts most of the time.)  Does my brain not know that I AM RETIRED?!

Here is a random sampling of how I am beset by my RSTF (see above!):

**My eldest son, Jared, has a...rambunctious Twitter feed.  I read it online and frequently send him emails regarding its content.  Often, I harp about his lax spelling and grammar, primarily because I know that he knows better and secondarily because I know it stems solely from a vast ocean of laziness/unconcern.  He majored in English in college!  Back in June, I could not restrain myself or, rather, my RSTF could not, so I sent him this email: 
Sigh.  Really? An “affect/effect” error on your Twitter feed? Come ON. 
Immediately by return email came this brief missive: 
#thingsonlyyounotice.

**So, I dare any of you to try and escape hearing or seeing any mention of The Royals!!!! when they are on the move or marrying someone or having children or anything.  Rick and I were on a lovely holiday jaunt up to Niagara-on-the-Lake, and of course WilliamandKate!!! were in Canada at the same time.  (This lessened the impact of my presence considerably, I'm sure.)  NotL's historic/famous Prince of Wales Hotel had its red carpet rolled out--literally--every day, even though The Cambridges!!! weren't going to be anywhere near there.  But I digress.  (Oh boy, do I. Wait 'til you see where I end up.)  Anyway, all the Wimbledon coverage was showing the crowd shots of Those Two, and there behind them was Billie Jean King.  My RSTF started working Overtime.  "Holy crap!" I said to Rick.  "Billie Jean is looking really rough!  And with that dark helmet of hair and dark glasses, she's starting to look like Roy Orbison!"  So, I start Googling pictures of BJK and Roy, and then, as I start looking at pictures of Roy Orbison, I notice something even more startling, this:

I know, right?  Do you see it, too?  Charlie Sheen is absolutely Roy Orbison.  (Yet, we all had to wander through NotL, Wimbledon, BJK, and The Royal Family (!!!) to get there, didn't we? Sorry. Blame my RSTF.  So calisthenic.)


**For those of you scoring at home, I am, in fact, fully aware that the brain "brain" in the picture at the top of this post is a fake.  It's a gelatin mold of a brain.  The human brain is probably more beige and not so uniform-looking.  I always used to tell my students that every time they learned a new piece of information, it made a new groove in their brains and that the more wrinkled and convoluted their brains were, the more intelligent they were.  That their brains were like a roadmap of their thoughts and ideas and that the more roads they had, the more efficiently their brains worked because they had more on- and off-ramps to knowledge--more connections/intersections.  The science is complete bullshit, but it sounds wonderful and it worked for years, both to impress teenagers and to make them want to be smart.  Damn, I was good.  Sigh.

Rick says I'm always this scattered and fragmented right at the start of summer break, and our jaunt north did do us both a lot of good. More about that later.  And the wines...always the wines.

17 comments:

  1. To quote from anm early Adam Sandler bit, "the mind Is terrible thing"

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  2. I think if he could just sing as well as Roy Orbison I might like Charlie Sheen again. Who am I kidding? He would be JUST as disturbing even if he could sing.

    I'm just glad you didn't mention Casey Anthony in this post.

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  3. Sounds a little like PTSD flashbacks

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  4. I'm trying to wrap my RSTF around that photo of the gelatin brain.

    In the school where I used to teach, we once had a guest speaker who explained that new knowledge was, in Effect, something that 'stretched our dendrites.' She then demonstrated this with rubber bands acting as dendrites which she would stretch continuously throughout the lecture. From then on, whenever I needed to impart new knowledge, I would announce that it was La Hora de Estirar las Dendritas (= Dendrite Stretching Time.) This proved to be amusing and even somewhat inspirational until a feckless student announced one day that she was not going to risk stretching her dendrites because they might just snap off and be lost forever... (thus causing her to lose what little knowledge she did have?) I could definitely have used your groovy brain theory.

    P.S. Can't tell from the photo of Roy, but I'd say Charlie's dendrites are really workin' for him.

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  5. Ortizzle--I once went to a seminar where the instructor used a rubber band as a visual for "expanding" ideas in a paragraph. What is it with these people and their rubber bands? Very into the special Effects. Re: the lettuce. Last night I made a big salad for dinner, but we added grilled ribeye instead of brains. Much better.

    The Bug--Back In The Day when I could stand to listen to music in my car (a 1996 Ford Explorer, fully tricked out with a wonderful stereo), we discovered Napster in its heyday. We downloaded a ton of songs, and one was Orbison's "Crying". One of my favourite trax of all time on a certain CD that I called "Sweet 16."

    Sillyak--I'm flattered that my post was so thought-provoking that you read it, commented, then had to come back again and comment later! :-) Anyway, yes, I think my brain does sort of go through a larval version of PTSD each summer as I de-schoolify. Holy crap, what an odd little sentence THAT just was.

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  6. Oh, thank God that's just a mold! I was starting to sweat.

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  7. Can't help but love the royals. I know. I'm sorry. I don't love the system, but the people are in such a singular situation, it's fascinating.
    I'm worried about Kate though. She's too thin. She used to be kinda healthy and muscular. I don't blame her, that's a very stressful situation they're in. I just hope she can avoid eating disorders, you know?

    I love that you harass your kid about his grammar. He's right though, no one else cares. I mean, I would, but I don't do twitter.

    And it's funny to me that you do twitter but not facebook. HA!

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  8. j.@jj--oh no. NO NO NO. I do not DO Twitter. I said I READ his twitter feed. Period. He has been after me to have a Twitter account, but I will not. Reading it to see what Jared is up to and thinking about is far, far different than posting 140 characters of my own bullshit every 35 minutes. And facebook...erg. Still don't get how it's a "wall." Not in the least bit wall-like, not one bit.

    RD--Actually, I think it's a gelatin mold. I just assumed. I just know it's not MY brain.

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  9. Ha, ha!! Just read the article your martini glass links to. If M.B. ever got interrogated by the police, she could give you-know-who a run for the money. ;-)

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  10. Looking forward to hearing about the wines. Where do you find your pictures?

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  11. I'm not a huge Anglophile or anything, but I do love Prince William. He seems to be a decent sort. Here's my question for you: Now that you're retired, what's the next chapter of your life look like?

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  12. Life at the Funny Farm10:46 AM

    Whose brain is that? Abby-something? Abby Normal? Sorry, I just couldn't resist as every time I see any brain-like matter, I always flash back to Young Frankenstein.

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  13. My brain looks exactly like the one you have pictured here. Nice and pink and full of grooves packed with information.It's a beauty,if I say so myself...

    BUT, If you want to see a BRAIN, you should look at the one in my attic. Dorian Gray would be so proud! It's full of bad words and "impure thoughts" - as the Nuns would say- and gossip and sins of omission and hanging around with people who were the occasions of sin and missing Mass on Holy Days of Obligation and ,get ready for this one,eating that hot dog on a Friday.

    Now, THAT'S a brain.....

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  14. Nancy--You sound like My Kind Of People! (I would love a badge that says "I Am An Occasion Of Sin")

    LaFF--I'm not sure which movie is funnier: Young Frankenstein or Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein.

    SW--Wills does seem very normal and nice. Harry is more of a rakish sort, but I like him, too. Right now, I'm pretty keenly focused on Being Retired.

    Lisa--I find all my pix on Google Image Search by typing in some pretty varied search terms.

    Ortizzle--Watching the actual video is even better. MB is so horrifyingly squirmy when it comes to questions she simply does not want to or is not mentally equipped to answer. What a dodo.

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  15. You had me at "brain."

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  16. You have VERY sharp eyes Nance!

    And even sharper wit

    merci
    carolg

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  17. carolg--ce n'est rien! I love perusing your site, and while I often sneak one of your lovely pix for my laptop wallpaper, a publication like Vogue should never just take an artiste's work and use it with no attribution as they did with you, not to mention the horror of altering it to suit their needs. Thanks for stopping by.


    dbso--As I knew I would! Hang tough down there in Cincy. XXOO

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