In attempting to come up with something new to write here today, I realized there doesn’t seem to be much left of my present life that I haven’t already written about. In short, I’m running out of things to say.
I have this vision in my head of me and you sitting in a restaurant, eating a meal and looking around at the other couples – the young ones holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, *gag* and the middle aged ones with kids, arguing over whether Bobby should get a new computer for his fourth birthday – and having nothing to say to one another. We’ve already talked about the weather and how bad the traffic was to get here.
Your teeth hitting the spoon every time you sip your soup is getting on my nerves.
Your memories of how sexy I was when we first met are fading even as the colour in your favourite cardigan does every time I wash it – it’s a horrible burnt orange and I’ve been secretly putting a drop of bleach in the water for about six months. I figure if it finally goes yellow you’ll stop wearing it.
Is that how things are going to end up with us, WordPress? Is it?
Come on, my dear. Let’s spice that plate of bits and bytes up, shall we? Before I have to face your dentures in a pot beside the sink in the bathroom every night.
I can pull off 50,000 words with no problem. Yeah, okay – it takes me a while. But out of those 50,000 or 5,000 or even … whatever … the words that I get the most stuck on are those pesky noises that come out of our mouths and noses that there are no words for. In fact, it makes steam whistle out of my ears.
Image courtesy of pixabay.com
Some noises are much easier than others, admittedly. Onomatopoeia is a wonderful thing for sounds like banging, clanking and sneezing. The list goes on and on. But what about coughing? “Khe, khe, khe!” How about a sound of derision? “Pff!” Yeah, that’s easy. So many of them are so hard though!
I was quite proud of myself when I came up with the sound for blowing a raspberry. But then people didn’t understand what I was trying to say.
So I’m making it official. And feel free to use it any time. This, “Pthththththth” denotes blowing a raspberry.
As for yodeling? Pthththth. I’m not even going to try.
My day started with a nightmare and a strange noise at 1:30am. The dream terrified me, the noise that I woke up to paralysed me for about five minutes. It sounded similar to my tormentor, Giggling Bob, only closer: Giggling Bob is in a box on the opposite side of the house to my bedroom. Other than not being quite the same noise, it wasn’t Bob’s usual time of 3:14. The conclusion can only be that Bob has invited a friend into the house.
So after five terror-stricken minutes, I picked up my cell phone and called my best friend John, who luckily is working nights this weekend. I wouldn’t have called him otherwise, knowing how precious sleep is. Being the nice guy he is, he talked me down from my panic to the level where I was able to put on pants and get up to check that all the doors were locked. They weren’t – the garage door was open. But after a quick trip around the house to make sure the kids and I were alone (with John still on the line) I went back to bed and, after a full hour of being on the phone, went back to sleep.
To properly explain the next part of my story, I must back up a bit. Last week I scratched the roof of my mouth. It’s been so resistant to healing, and so painful, that I decided to fast today to give it a break. Knowing that the kids would be going with their dad tonight, I wasn’t worried about being hungry well into the evening – I could go to bed early. I’m exhausted anyway from my adventure of the wee hours of the morning. Two proverbial birds with one stone and all that.
Can you hear the scratching of a record needle? Of course you can. My ex texted me to say he wasn’t coming.
In the meantime, I had a doctor’s appointment for my shoulder (which has been hurting since January) so I thought, why not ask him to take his handy-dandy light thingie and shine it in my mouth to see what’s wrong in there. One prescription later, I’m now the proud owner of something I didn’t know existed – steroid-laced dental paste.
Dry your palette with a paper towel, the pharmacist said, (eww) and then put the paste on your thumb and spread it on the roof of your mouth. But don’t try to rub it in. It has to stay there. Just a layer of paste for at least half an hour. And don’t lick it.
….
Do you have any idea what happens to your mouth when you can’t allow your tongue to touch the roof, and you’re thinking about it? You drool. Try to swallow without touching your tongue to your palette. Go ahead. Do it now.
See what I mean? Now sit like that for half an hour.
Now it’s 10:40pm on the same day I woke up terrified. I’m exhausted, waiting for Alex’s feeding pump to finish doing its thing, I’m starving, I’m drooling, and I still haven’t figured out if I have yet another possessed toy in the house to terrorize me in the middle of the night.
If I do find the toy though… it’s going home in my ex’s trunk the next time he picks up the kids. WITH Giggling Bob.
I got an email last night to let me know my Willy is still in good condition and is about 7-8 hours away, north of Sudbury, Ontario. He came out of an ATM! I was afraid that since he was old (2004) he might have been taken out of circulation by the bank, especially since we now have plastic money here in Canada. But it turns out my Willy is still making his rounds.
Also, this morning, I was greeted with an email to say that a user of Goodreads with the handle “Coffee Talk” wanted to be added as my friend.
I accepted, of course. Although I’m surprised – coffee has been my friend for years already.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before! Here I’ve had this amazing, fantastic way of studying the human condition for years without realizing it.
I’m always going on about body language and facial expressions, and the importance of them in writing not only to fill out a story with what is believable, but in finding characters in the first place. It’s by observing people that we get our ideas, and if we can read people’s body language, we can often see what they’re thinking. Scenarios abound!
There’s a good reason that this is one of my Deaf son, Alex’s favourite shows on TV. People in it are genuine and there is no speaking. The language is universal. What is it?
Just for Laughs Gags.
Here you can find any range of spontaneous emotion: surprise, outrage, confusion, bewilderment, joy, disappointment, fear… the list is almost endless, and every single bit of it is spontaneous.
For example, a young guy in a car pulls up to a stop sign and a pretty girl crossing the street waves to him. She proceeds to write her phone number on his windshield with a lipstick and does the international sign for “Call me!” While he’s still sitting there, a guy comes up to the car and squeegees the number off. The guy in the car has gone from happy and flirtatious to panicked in a matter of seconds.
Or in this, a young boy lays down a “hole” on the sidewalk and a man falls into it. The looks on the observers’ faces are priceless.
You can find hundreds of them online at Just for Laughs Gags own Youtube channel. They are each under two minutes long and not only can you watch them with the sound off, I recommend it.
This is truly a wonderful resource for anyone studying body language and many of them are hilarious; even if you’re not looking to observe human behaviour, watch them just for laughs!
I encourage everyone to go to Youtube and watch a few. Share the titles of your favourites in the comments. I’d love to see what you think!
At the mall this morning I walked into a shop, where the clerk behind the counter was speaking on the phone. Her name, according to her name tag, is Theresa Thomas. I stood before her and she held up her hand to indicate that she was almost finished with her call, so I did what anyone would do. I eavesdropped.
As it turns out, Ms. Thomas was talking to someone who wanted her name. This is how her half of the conversation went:
Her: Yes, that’s right.
pause
Her: It’s Thomas. Right. T H O M A S.
pause while I thought to myself, Couldn’t they have figured that out? She pronounced the ‘th’ like one would say the word ‘throw.’
Her: Thanks. Bye.
Her: (to me) Can I help you? (or at least that’s what I think she said. I was distracted by the ingenuity of this woman’s parents and the fantasy of how she might pronounce her first name.)
Her: Can I help you?
Me: OH, yes…
And so it went.
Thufferin’ thuccotash, some people, eh?
This brought to mind a place I worked as a secretary/receptionist, long, long ago in the time before children. The company’s salesman, Mike Daoust, insisted on making sure everyone knew how his name was properly pronounced.
“‘Doe,'” he told people. “Just like a deer.”
So one day I was sitting at my desk, shuffling papers and trying to act like I was working, when a man walked in the door looking for Mike.
“Can I tell him who’s here to see him?” I asked the broad, red-faced man who streamed with sweat across from me at the desk.
My finger poised over the intercom, I couldn’t believe my luck.
I smiled and pressed the button, “Mike, there’s someone here to see you.”
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