Saturday, May 15, 2010

A Few Burning Questions: Things that Make Me Go Hmmm



Okay, the weekend is upon us again.  It’s been a pretty good week.  It was pretty productive for me.  How about you?  I got a lot done, and I was still able to get me some rest.  I even managed to get a little time in for myself this week. 

But in my idleness, I began to think.  Well, I think all the time, but during this time, a number of questions came to me that I just can’t seem to answer.  Maybe you can help.

Why do people with foul breath like to chat so much?  I have a good friend.  He’s a very amicable fellow, loves to talk, and is an excellent conversationalist.  He can go on for hours and never be boring.  But his breath stinks.  He seems to have the condition that my uncle always referred to as zack-ly.  That is when your breath smells exactly like your behind.

And when you are talking to him, it’s almost like you get caught up in this foul green miasma.  Even after you are out of his presence, you can still smell his breath.  It’s almost as if it gets caught up in the fabric of your clothing or something.  He has to know his breath stinks to high heaven.  Can’t he see the disturbed, pained expressions on people’s face as they talk to him?  Why doesn’t he just shut up?

But speaking of chatty people…

Every time I am in a hurry and run into the store just to pick up a few items, I always end up in the line with the chatty check-out person.  Why?  I know this has happened to you.  You are in a hurry, but you have to stop by the store to quickly pick up just one item.  But there is just one line open, and that one line stretches to the back of the store, and the check-out person is the jolliest person who has ever lived and is holding marathon conversations with every customer.

All the while, you are looking on from your place at the back of the line and checking your watch, silently seething.  I do believe in service with a smile, and I love a cheerful check-out person, but by all means, greet the customer, smile, and keep the line moving.

But speaking of long lines…

Did Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton sell his soul to the devil in exchange for success?  Recently, I ran out of ink at about three in the morning, and I desperately needed to print a document.  So I saddled up and headed to Wal-Mart since that is the only thing seemingly open at that hour.  However, once I got there, I could not believe my eyes.

It was three in the morning, but at Wal-mart, it was like high noon on Main Street.  What in the hell of department stores are all these people doing out shopping at Wal-Mart in the wee hours of the morning?  And not only that, it was the motley-est, half-nakedest, most oddly clad, weirdest, most inbred, most tattooed and pierced bunch of human beings I have ever witnessed in the same place at the same time in my life.

It was if the dregs of the earth seemed to converge on Wal-Mart at the same time.  And there I was standing right in the midst of it all.  Suddenly the thought came to mind, if I am here with them, what is wrong with me?

But speaking of tattoos and piercings…

It seems that a number of young people are choosing to adorn themselves with a multiplicity of tattoos and piercings.  Do they ever expect to find a job?  In one of my classes, I have two students who are actually a married couple.  They are about nineteen or twenty years old and both are very smart and very attractive individuals.  They are perhaps the very best students I have had in quite a while.  But both are covered from head to toe in tattoos and piercings.

The young man even has this disk through his earlobes that is opening this big hole that is about one inch in diameter.  It certainly occurred to be that if they are in college, it could reasonably be assumed that they do desire to enter the workforce one day.  But who is going to hire them with them looking like that?

I checked my class rooster so that I might ascertain just what their majors might be, but it said undecided.  So, curiosity finally drove me to just ask them.  Both said that they planned to be elementary teachers after college.  Elementary teachers, huh?  Okay.

But speaking of jobs to do…

Why does my wife get to dictate what I do with my weekends?  Every weekend, my wife presents me with this honey-do list a mile long.  But she doesn’t refer to it as a honey-do list or a to do lists, but a list of “suggestions.”  She suggests that I do these things that weekend.  However, I know that if I don’t at least make an attempt to get to some of the things on the list, they’ll be repercussions and consequences.

Nothing on that list coincides with what I had planned for the weekend, my weekend that I earned through a week of tiresome, unrelenting work in the salt mines.  Well, today is my day.  Damn that list.  She knows what she can do with that list.  I tell you what I am going to do.  I’m going to…  Wait a minute.  Here she comes.  Gotta go.  Holla.

Do you have any burning questions to add to the list?
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