#692 Un Shui

I get into the habit of using certain words. Words that I didn’t understand before I started using them. Then I just naturally assume everyone else is on the same page and am surprised when other people don’t know what I’m talking about.
In the sales business, we call it jargon. You are supposed to avoid using it—inside terms about your industry that may make other people feel ignorant, and therefore resentful, and therefore think you think they’re stupid, and therefore don’t buy from you because you made them feel like an idiot.
All of which is to say that the other day I made a joke about feng shui and was surprised when the couple of people I made it to didn’t get it.
Feng shui, as you no doubt know, is the art of placing things in a room so the energy lines promote feelings of joy, good will, harmony, and possibly weight loss.
I don’t really know a lot about it, nor, frankly, do I care to, I just like the sound of the phrase feng shui. It’s confusingly Asian enough to stand in for any number of other Asian ideas or phrases.
One of the people to whom I made the joke was bumping the other and I said to the bumper that he should be careful because the bumpee knew feng shui. They both looked at me blankly. Then the bumper, obviously not sure, said, “Isn’t feng shui the...”
“That’s right,” I interrupted, “the ancient Chinese martial art of decorating. Bump her like that one more time and she’ll knock you out with a well-placed knickknack.”
At this point, everything resolved nicely into laughter. But like many jokes, it could have gone flat because the listeners weren’t up on the references.
But you know, it got me thinking a little further.
Ikea furniture is certainly not the most elaborate in the world. And its sparse, no frills, styling really doesn‘t lend itself to elaborate and foofy decors. It is, in a word, functional.
So would it be possible to decorate a place along that theme?
And call it functional shui?
America, ya gotta love it.

#691 Unstrung Tea

The other day I was at a coffee house with a friend and I decided to have tea. They had a bunch of different kinds in jars and it was cool to watch them take a measure of tea, place it on a piece of tea bag paper and fold it into a little diaper.
After pouring a cup of blank water, they gave it and the diaper to me. What, no string? I asked.
They looked at me with the scorn only people in the know have for the uninitiated.
It was like the first time I went to a peel-your-own-shrimp place. I really hadn’t expected to get my fingers that messy. So it was with stringless tea bags. I couldn’t figure out how to squeeze the bag enough with only a spoon so it wouldn’t create a sopping puddle on the table when I took it out.
And I really didn’t want a hot tea bag bouncing off my lips every time I drank if I left it in the paper cup.
So I wondered, is there some environmental crisis I hadn’t read about with teabag strings? Some exotic animal being choked with all the string littering the landscape.
Some bird perhaps, regurgitating the tangling remains of a teabag into the unsuspecting throat of its young, only to watch that bird-child waste away from the avian equivalent of an impacted colon?
Maybe a landfill-adjacent pocket gopher accidentally garroted by two teabags strung across his hole.
These are concerns.
And then I had another, because all of a sudden I wondered about the staple. So I went home and rummaged through my pantry for an old-fashioned stringed bag. I found some traditional medicinal herbal tea and, yep, my memory was right. There was not only a string, but a metal staple holding it to the bag.
Ah, that explains the taste that’s missing from all those fancy hand-diapered teas—aluminum. Or possibly nickel or some other base metal.
In any event, a probably toxic-in-enough-quantities metal leeching its poison into each and every cup of, um, soothing herbal tea.
So how do you fold those diapers?
America, ya gotta love it.

#690 Unhinged

Life sucks then you die. But first there’s pain. Nothing funny here. Just thought that was a cool way to start an essay.
What is funny, as in odd, is that I need to find a way to turn off my unhinged and twisted brain.
The other day I was driving down the road and I saw this sign that said “We Don’t Serve Teens.” I immediately thought, is this a veal kind of thing? We don’t serve babies either, or even mature adults.
Because we aren’t cannibals!
So then, the song “Stacy’s Mom” comes on the radio. You know, the one that’s got it going on. The story of the teenager that’s hung up on his girlfriend’s mom. My first thought is, I wonder if Stacy’s mom was actually Jesse’s girl. And then, unhinged mother that I am, I think, what if Stacy’s mom was Mary Kay Letourneau? That teen got served a whole different sad song...
So then, someone tells me its 9 O’clock and my mind starts to whittle down that word. O’clock means of-the-clock. So what people are really saying is it’s 9 of the clock.
That means that at some time someone felt the need to specify. I mean it’s 9 right? Maybe 9 in the morning or 9 in the evening but either way it’s still 9.
Why do we need to stipulate from which method of time keeping we got our information? Was there once a big rivalry and the clock was deemed more or less suspect as to time accounting?
Well it’s 9 of the clock, but it’s 10 of the sundial.
Yeah, and according to the old hourglass its only 7:30, but it looks as if there’s a crack in it and some of the sand is coming out.
Time keeps slipping away doesn’t it?
Apparently, at some point in the past, the clock won out. But we still delineate the source of our measurement. Maybe we should modernize.
I look at the bottom right corner of my computer a lot. Should I say it’s 9 O’computer?
Or how about the timepiece that’s constantly serves our watchless teens.
It’s 9 O’cellphone...
America, ya gotta love it.