My Mind Is A Nose

I wonder if any of you has ever had a text message argument. You know, the kind where you enter peeved little snippets into your cell phone keypad and before you know it the thing is buzzing you back again with a return barrage similar to your own. Wtf!

Maybe this is the perfect kind of argument for modern times, fitting to the character of our society. A communication style composed of abbreviations and cliches, epithets and acronyms.

How many of you have or have had a daughter or a son whose every other word was whatever? Or how about this alphabetical invention: This is an A and B conversation, C your way out.

We have compressed language and communication into a chattering of syllables and single letters, and what is finally communicated begins to adhere to the same format. Okay? Okay. :)

**

One thing you can count on from life, if you happen to be living mine anyway, is that it just gets a little more ironic all the time. As I approach the third anniversary of my marriage to a woman twenty-four years younger than I, who said on our wedding day that she hated me, which itself was because of a lemon meringue pie, I begin to appreciate, in this august moment, how odd a thing it is for my sense of humor, which often depends upon an intimacy with language, to have been dropped into association with people who either primarily or only speak Indonesian.

Here, for instance, is what one lovely girl stated in her Facebook share post:

It's time to work on my garden. Ohhh I miss home when I smell of dirt.

I kindly replied with a brief grammar lesion, explaining that what she had said in essence was that she smelled like dirt, and moreover had implied that Indonesians in a general sense smell like dirt, since it is this odoriferous quality (according to the sentence) that has caused her to miss home.

She took my word for it, and changed the sentence.

"You must be a very down to earth sort of person," I said.

"Yes, I am, " she answered. "But that's a good thing, don't you think?"

**

My mind is a nose. This is the point my head cold has come to, as there is little to differentiate the general stuffiness and congestion of my thought processes from the struggles of my nose toward breathing.

The onset of this cold was so swift that I thought (or dreamed) at first that it might leave just as swiftly as it came. Symptoms that more commonly would have been spread out over a period of days marched in one after another all in one night--sore throat, snuffly nose, fever, body aches, you know the drill.

Far from assembling, however, for a lightening blow, it soon became apparent that they had merely been settling in, getting comfortable, the way one might do on a winter's night in his easy chair before the fireplace, with a thick 19th century British novel at hand.

I would have the reader appreciate, therefore, that what has been written above has been accomplished all in fits and starts, by sentence, by word, during those periods wherein I would dribble miserably out of the bedroom to the dining room table and the laptop.

It's been about five days now, and I'm guessing that I'm about halfway through. Lets call it page 400 or so of Bleak House.