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.
“How many bugs in a box?” It’s a stupid little song that has been going through my head for years. When I’ve finished writing this post (because I don’t want to stop) I’ll look it up and if I can, insert it so that everyone can be tormented by it.
It’s from an animated game for the computer that my kids used to play when they were little. The game was called “How Many Bugs in a Box” and it was a counting/math/number/pattern recognition game. Why am I writing about this? Because every time – and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME – I try to write a blog post I think of that sentence. The question has been plaguing me now for around fifteen years. Fifteen years of wondering how many bugs are in the damned box!
Why is it that songs get stuck in our heads, anyway? There’s a name for it now: ear worm. Usually it lasts a morning, or a few hours after we either think of a song or hear it after not having heard it for a long time. It doesn’t usually happen – at least in my experience – when it’s something that’s on the radio or my playlist all the time. I think my worst ones to date have to be “C is for Cookie” by the Cookie Monster, or “The Song that Never Ends” by whatshername with the lamb puppet. (Holy crap, “whatshername” didn’t get a red squiggly line underneath it!)
Anyway, by finally writing “how many bugs in a box” in a blog post, I’m hoping to dispell the magic that keeps me wanting to come back to it. I’ll let you know if it worked in another post. Maybe in next week’s SoCS post.
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!
I lose things all the time. I can have something in my hand one minute and the next it’s gone. Disappeared. Like gremlins took it for fun. The idea for this post actually came about when I was looking for my thesaurus so I could look up a good word to use for my “K” post. Can you tell I didn’t find the thesaurus?
What I did find, however, was an idea for a post. I got to thinking, whilst searching, about how the minutiae of life could fit in to a story. For the most part, it doesn’t. It’s rare that we read about in a book or see in a movie a character searching for something they can’t find, having aches and pains, or even going to the bathroom, unless it’s important to the plot.
Then I took my idea one step further – what if something as small as life’s pesky little problems became the plot? It could work, right? It didn’t take me long to realize, it already had!
Where did I drop that damned ring?
Wow, that’s one hell of a belly ache – oh look, an alien!
Next time you need to plot a story, think about the last thing that got on your nerves. Then run with it. At the very least, you may get a blog post out of it.
I can’t write anything funny. At least not on purpose. And it really sucks, since I love to make people laugh. Both in person and on paper, I enjoy being the cause of people’s smiles. It’s a thing for me–I don’t consider myself successful in conversation until the person I’m talking to has laughed, in almost every circumstance. In fact, the only exception I can think of at the moment are telemarketers. Apart from that particular breed of unfortunates, who I’m sure would be doing anything else for a living if they could, if I don’t make a person I’m speaking to laugh, I’m convinced they’re either devoid of a funny bone, or under the age of four months. The latter of the two wouldn’t be reading what I write, however, and that’s what I really mean to talk about.
Writing funny is both difficult and easy. It’s near impossible if I’m trying too hard, even if I leave the piece I’m trying to be funny in to sit while I brood over it. Humour, in my experience, must be spontaneous. It comes out of me like wit, or while making up stupid scenarios over conversation with a friend. In prose it’s … well, I don’t want to say it can’t be done. One of the lines that still comes to mind of my father’s was his most romantic:
Your teeth are like stars; they come out at night.
You’d think with all the times a moment for the perfect joke comes along and goes whisking by, when I say to myself, “I should have said that!” that it would be easier to write witticisms, since I have more time on my hands to think about it. But the opposite is true. Maybe it’s because there’s no pressure when I’m sitting in front of a computer screen, as there is in a social setting. The funny is either there or it isn’t, and no amount of forcing is going to make it show up.
lindaghill.com 