There are a number of things in life that straight – out confuse me. Their purpose, function, and intent confound my intellectual capacities. For example, adding salt to chocolate. What are we doing here? Can’t chocolate stand fully and completely on its own? In a rare few instances, other flavors can be added because they’re sweet or compliment – like mint, caramel, even peanut butter or coffee. But that’s about it. Salt is clearly a seasoning for meats, in particular burgers, a bit with pepper in mashed potatoes. Some may wish to add it to the boiling water for pasta, but after that, we’re done here. A while ago, a friend gave us some specialty chocolate candies with sea salt. There were great boulders of salt perched atop the chocolate. All I could taste was the salt. What were the masters of chocolate-making thinking?
The NFL draft. Now, here’s a mystery to me. Can’t the football league just recruit and hire like anyone else? You don’t see Google, Amazon, and Microsoft holding a “draft”, and they presumably hire way more people. You never hear them say that they’re planning to take a couple of programmers from Caltech in the first round, or trading a second round pick from MIT. Wouldn’t it be exciting to see education using this process? All of the state’s school heads gathering at Boston Garden to draft new teachers. How exciting would that be? “I’ll let you have that math guy from Bridgewater State in the third round if you let me have the chemistry lady from Amherst in round two, and I can let you have the poetry teacher from Fitchburg. Our special teams in the English Department are solid.” The Massachusetts Department of Education could give out signing bonuses. Major orchestras could do the same thing. “The Philadelphia Orchestra today signed a cellist in the second round of the NOD (National Orchestra Draft) in a three-orchestra deal, giving away a first round bassoon pick to the Chicago Symphony and a third round viola to the Minnesota Orchestra. Pictured below is a smiling Yevgeny Smednick out of the New England Conservatory, proudly holding up his Philadelphia Orchestra jersey with the number II-1 (second stand, first chair).
Do we really need an entire aisle of cold relievers? Don’t they all essentially do the same thing? Other than “immediate relief” versus “long lasting”, is such an impressive array really vital? This is brain overload, like looking at paint samples. Way too many choices here. Do we want to focus on the decongestant or the scratchy throat and runny eyes? I could buy both and mix them. Voila, now I’ve invented a new cold medicine! I’ll name it “Stuffiawaythroatacal.” Oh, wait. What’s this letter from the pharmaceutical company’s attorneys?
Why does the lilac bush across the street always bloom two to three weeks before mine? Have you noticed that all spring-flowering trees and shrubs have their own unique timetable? Shouldn’t there be a shared sense of community among these bushes? My flowering crab tree is just starting to bud, while others in the neighborhood have full-on buds and are ready to leap into action. They all share the same soil, the same rain, the same sunlight. So, what’s up with the time delay? I don’t understand . . . . .
Why does my phone need to be “updated” about every two days? It’s working just fine, thank you (when I remember to activate it and take it with me). It does everything I need it to do. Will it be faster, clearer, have more tasteful backgrounds? Will the ring tone be more pleasing? My coffee shop app needs to be updated regularly, but it doesn’t tell me that until I’m actually in the shop about to pay for the coffee. It can’t do anything until it’s fully upgraded, which takes more time than I have, so I pay cash. Thanks so much, little whirling thing. And I tried twice to reset my password on my iPad. It sent a new security code to my phone, which was . . . . wait, where did I put my phone? We played a security code game until it tells me the reset was successful on my computer. Then the iPad tells me the new password was incorrect, and they no record of me. There aren’t enough angry emoji’s to express . . . . . .
Why do we get, like, two dozen phone calls per day from these same annoying people named “Anonymous” and “Unavailable”? Boy, were their parents unimaginative. They typically call about half an hour into my afternoon nap or as we’re heading into “final Jeopardy”, and then someone tells me to “stay on the line – they have an important message about credit card rates.” I beg to differ, but In the great scheme of life, that’s not terribly important. So, I hang up. Then they call back to say they’ve made repeated attempts to reach me. I know because I’m ignoring each and every call. I got a call yesterday that caller ID said was a “Michael Bergman”. I don’t personally know Michael, but thought, oh, what the heck. It was a gentleman from the Asian subcontinent telling me there’s a problem with my computer and he was standing by to fix it for me. I told him he sounded nothing like the Mike Bergman I know. That stopped him in his tracks, and I took the opportunity to hang up.
How many presidential candidates do we really need? I still can’t understand how we as a proud democracy could have had a winnowing process in 2016 and ended up with the one we did. Now there are about two dozen vying for our attention. Presumably there are some really good ones, but somehow we’ll never know because all the messages are beginning to blur. It’ll end up being the ones that can delete their emails most effectively or maybe the one that has fewest indictments or FBI investigations going. As the cartoon says, maybe it’s time to give up on the notion that “anyone can grow up to be president.” I had to laugh at a line from VEEP. The candidate asked how she was doing in a southern state with the white college graduate demographic. Her staffer replied that, in that state, “it was statistically insignificant”.
Why does Kim Jong Un need nuclear weapons? Is he aiming at world domination? If so, I’ll send him biographies of Napoleon, Alexander the Great, and Adolf Hitler. He can see for himself that as a concept, it’s never worked out well. Some day, aliens from another planet may achieve it, but we humans never will. And if it’s a defensive posture, then he needn’t bother. There’s really nothing much in North Korea anybody wants to take over.
Why is it that when I enter a grocery store with my daughter to pick up one or two items, I always leave with two bags full and spending about sixty bucks? All we needed were paper napkins. What just happened here? I have a tiny basket and she’s grabbing stuff off the shelves the names of which I’ve never heard. She’s baking cookies this afternoon with ingredients from the Mediterranean, Northern Africa, and the mountains of Peru. Are these even store items? Have they been fully vetted by the Food and Drug Administration, State Department, or the official Market Basket shelf monitors? I think elves in the night put these random, make-believe boxes with fictitious names on the shelves.
Weren’t cauliflower and broccoli good enough on their own? Now, we have to combine them into a new vegetable, apparently. This is like the olive loaf of vegetables. We have lots and lots of vegetables now – my wife even likes one or two, so let’s not invent new ones. Pretty soon, we’ll be seeing asparabeets or carrosquash. I still can’t wrap my head around “spaghetti squash”. Wasn’t the pasta version of spaghetti quite successful? And while we’re at it, pizza crust is, and always should be thin bread. Who had the bright idea to make it out of cauliflower? It won’t be long before we’re making pizza crust with rice or poi, and then civilization as we know it collapses. Let’s just stop toying with the universal pizza constituency.
Life continues to get more and more mysterious. I think I’ll retreat to my couch and take a nap. Before I go, I’ll have a piece of . . . . oh, who put sea salt and chili pepper on this?
I'm Thinking...No! 