Comma Dot Comma

His thoughts on Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, which he gave 4 stars:

Him the Smokey Bandit has the fast car to escape with courage from corrupt police captain. I much for enjoyed the many excitement of action and expert driving as a pair of business men conduct negotiations with Smokey Bandit in restraunt business selling. But don’t too much comfortable in your recline– Smokey Bandit may to drive out from your television with surprise and gusto!

“I don’t want to. I’m not disgusting.”

–The Mister, on why he would not demonstrate a proper belch after repeatedly deriding my own belch attempts as “pathetic.”

I thought I was going to do a synopsis of several classic books as if they were Looney Toons bits. But I could only think of one.

The Grapes of Wrath

Daffy is chasing Bugs around and around a big tub of grapes. Daffy is mad! He is full of wrath! Sometimes he kicks Bugs or shoots his head off but Bugs keeps bouncing back. Boy, now they are really tired! Everytime it seems like Bugs’s luck is going to change, something else happens! Bugs has no fur and Daffy has no feathers. His beak keeps slipping around so it’s on backwards. It’s a question of who will last longest. Elmer Fudd comes along and so they both jump into the tub of grapes. Most likely, they will survive. They have been beaten and broken, but they know how to keep going! A turtle crosses the road.

And now, here is a Mork and Mindy quiz.

Before I get to the long-winded part of this post, Liz led me to this Sacred Spaces ten-minute interactive prayer site. I’ve gone through it a few times (it changes every day) and have found it lovely. Those Jesuits! Gotta love em.

Sometimes people ask me what it feels like to be a Christian. If they ask at lunchtime I am inclined to say “Hungry,” especially if they are eating some deliciousness containing avocado and bacon, and I am eating the one un-mushed corner of a peanut butter and honey sandwich that got mangled in the bottom of my purse. Then I eye their deliciousness and sigh heavily.

Other times I say “Mork from Ork.” He looks like a regular human apart from the bad fashion, and most of the time in casual interactions nobody notices anything different about him. Even if he tells someone straight out that he’s a citizen of another planet, they laugh and let it pass because they assume it’s not so, or that he’s being metaphorical. Anyone who spends enough time with Mork, though, learns that he can drink through his finger and sit comfortably on his head and communicate with his boss via telepathy: “Mork calling Orson, come in Orson.” He spends a lot of time feeling out of place and unsure of why people do what they do. He’s doubly an outsider: not human, yet banned from Ork for due to his human-like qualities.

Though I can’t drink through my finger, I have got bad fashion and enjoy sitting upside down on occasion, especially with some light reading, say the funny anecdote section of a Reader’s Digest. Most people don’t care whether I am a Christian, so long as I don’t take up more than my share of space on public transportation and wash my hands before leaving a restroom. Even if I announce it, they are likely to pat me on the shoulder and say, “Isn’t that nice.” (It seems that most people in this country are Christians of one stripe or another, though, strangely, in my current set-up, almost nobody I see regularly identifies themselves as such. )

The two ways I really identify with Mork are his outsiderness and his special powers. As I move through my ordinary day I am aware that there is another presence in me and in the world around me. I want to describe it as another layer, but that wouldn’t be right, because Jesus is all mixed up in it. I feel warmth or an ache in my chest when Jesus wants me to pay special attention to something. I start praying and looking around, really noticing. (I am really happy when Jesus wants me to notice chocolate candies in the break room.) Sometimes I will feel an almost physical nudge– to speak to this person, pray for that situation, give something or act in some way. Sometimes an overpowering sensation of love will sweep over me and I will have to stop what I am doing and start crying. Those swept away times are rare.

I can sometimes go days or weeks without that warmth or nudge. Mostly what I get on a daily basis is mental nudging. When I start complaining about a boss or some nasty cookies, there’s a gentle nudge reminding me to shut up. Or if I don’t shut up, I get nudged later reminding me to apologize or in some other way rectify the situation. When my thoughts start down certain paths, I get nudged out of them most of the time.

All this warmth and love and nudging doesn’t make me an obviously better person than those around me, but I think it does make me better than I would be without it. I love saying “Mork calling Orson, come in Orson” when bad or good or puzzling things happen; my automatic response is to turn to Jesus with it, whether to yell or complain or ask for help or collapse. Jesus and his pop don’t mind having Orson for a nickname I don’t think. They answer to it, which is a good enough sign for me.

So on the one hand I got the SECRET POWERS to change myself and the world. Which is pretty fun most days (except I don’t like getting nudged out of bed on work days). On the other hand, it gets a little loney because the other peeps don’t got the secret powers yet. I get a little too Morky for my non-Morky friends at times, and too non-Morky for my church people at other times; but this whole dang planet is just not Morky enough for me! When’s it gonna Mork out, I ask you? We should all be rescuing raw eggs and sleeping in the closets!

Okay I know this is like cheating.  But for my own amusement, here are some recent google search terms that have led people to my site:

fuzzy monkey

Pro Evolution (the most popular search by far)

man-eating maggots

Kerri Strugg smokes

Jesus punctuators

comma skis

waa scraper

comma spice quizes

waddly acha DVD

There are several other interesting ones but people I know did them so I’m leaving them out.

I don’t remember enjoying The Electric Company that much as a child, perhaps because I already knew how to read by the time I started watching that show. I was only allowed half an hour of TV a day, and I always picked 3-2-1 Contact (in-your-head sing-along time: CONTACT. Is the REASON. Is the ANSWER. Why everything happens.) . Singing the 321 Contact song now makes me realize how lamely simplistic those lyrics are, but didn’t it have a great opening sequence? Water drops falling in slow motion and stuff?

But 3-2-1 Contact is not available on DVD, and Electric Company is. I have to say it’s pretty good the second time around. Bill Cosby actually smoking cigars and talking sort of drunkenly. Somebody else writing a list of insults on a chalkboard for the TV audience to sound out. A few dresses that fall into the mini-mini-mini category– children’s television could never get away with it these days. Best of all is Morgan Freeman, who looks about 20 years old and 120 pounds in the first season episodes from 1971.

He has two characters that are especially cool. One is Easy Reader, who asks to borrow a book of matches even though he don’t smoke. Because if he got a itch, he scratches. He reads the matchbook aloud. Then he sings and dances in a cool-cat manner:

“Easy Reader, that’s my name. Uhn, Uhn, Uhn (insert head twitch and shoulder shrug here). Readin’ words, that’s my game. Uhn, Uhn, Uhn.”

His other character is a radio disc jockey where he is even more, um, psychedelic, if you will. He lets you listen to songs about punctuation that are “righteous and outta sighteous.”

Finally, a fun take-home activity for you: Talking Electric Company. For every word, you say the first sound, then the second sound, then the whole word together. Like so:

Ih. tss. It’s. Fruh. iday. Friday. Make sure you prounounce each part with verve. To really mix it up you can do it with another person and have them invent the last half of the word.

My intermediate pottery wheel class starts today. I will galumph down the hill to the clay cooperative near my work and hope they let me get messy as soon as possible.
It is not the wheel which is intermediate, in case there was any confusion on that point.

I still have a little pile of misshapen bowls, vases, and pitchers from my beginner class last summer. Every so often I cull the worst atrocities and send them to a better life in the dumpster.

Weaning myself from the atrocities is a slow process. I have a certain affection for their uneven glazes, their variable thicknesses. Eventually they will all, with the exception of a bowl or two, go to the better life. My goal for the intermediate class is to double my save percentage. If the non-cull pile contains two to four items, I’ll be happy.

Actually I don’t do it for the bowls; I do it for the mud. That gray clay sure feels good, first when you are slamming and twisting it to get out all the air bubbles, and again when you sprinkle a light sheen of water over a lump of clay and press it down to center it on the wheel, and even more when it’s slick and growing like a wave into some interesting shape.

And at the end your hands and arms are white with drying clay, so you know you’ve actually done something with your time. If there’s no mess to clean up, you weren’t trying hard enough.

Everybody now:

Simplest thing, there isn’t much to it, all you got to do is doodly-do it. I like the rest but the part I like best is doodly doodly doodly doodly doodly doodly DO.

I experienced A First this weekend. On Sunday morning I walked out my door, stepped onto my cross country skis, and skied through the ‘hood for awhile. That is something I’ve never done before! I’ve had skis but no snow, or snow but no skis, or snow and skis but things were already plowed by the time I got out there.

Swish, swish, swish! Even with the skis I was knee deep. It was fun to watch the ski tips break the thinnest intermittent threads in the snow surface from below, like stitches. And to watch the snow break around my knees, wooshing away on either side. The only boring part was how all the neighbors in a mile radius said exactly the same thing: “You’ve got the right idea.” Why would that exact sentence occur to everyone, regardless of age, gender, or ethnicity?

Two excellent blogs that have attracted my attention recently:

Topic Drift. I don’t know this person but her humor is off center in exactly the way I like best.

Grace Notes. Tara has a way with words.

Awhile back I had a temporary summer job as a consultant. Basically it meant shuttlecocking back and forth between some deeply dubious govt. agency people and some deeply disinterested software developers.

This work entailed hand-patting, nodding, cluck-clucking, and translating hyperbole into logic statements. Then I’d try to persuade the developers that it would be a very interesting problem for them to tackle on my behalf. My madd skillz at literary interpretation really came in handy.

Made-up example: “This is impossible! It will never work unless the BPCs come up blue when you input the LBRs! We have to know they are invalid and destined for hell!”

So I go back to my desk and write, “If LBR= null, then BPC is red and active. If LBR > 0, then BPC is blue and inactive.” Sometimes I put in random if/then statements to see if anybody is paying attention. “If LBR= banana, then your boss will tango.”

Then I take it to the developers. “This is an interesting update. They want flashing colors, which is cool from a design perspective, don’t you think?”"We had flashing colors before and they didn’t like them.”

“That was for the QPXs. This is for the BPCs so it’s totally different.”

I was supposed to be filling in while they hired some flashy more qualified person. That fell through, and at the end of the summer the head honcho called me into his office.

He was a nice guy but I had never talked to him in person before; he tended to stick with his own sphere if you know what I mean. He said several nice things (someone who actually knew me had obviously prepped him ahead of time) and offered me the job on a permanent basis.

I was tempted for about second, but I had already signed a contract for a fellowship at the university where I’d recently received my degree.

“Perhaps you could spread the word to your former classmates. This job requires a Master’s and I’m sure you must know several good people.”

“I’ll do that if you wish, but to be frank, I don’t think many poets and fiction writers would be interested.”

He goes pale. “What is your degree in, exactly?”

“Poetry writing.”

“Oh. Oh! I see. I wish you the best of luck!” I could see his thought, Narrow Escape, blinking in boldface above his head. He ushered me out as if he knew there was only so much air left in the office and it wasn’t enough for both of us. Politely, of course.

Sometimes I think about the money I would have earned at that job. Is a 1/3 lower salary worth the pleasure of having no one blanch when I mention poems? I also get the occasional flurry of emails in which my department members try to write the opening lines of hard-boiled fiction novels using mixed drinks as character names. Or try to fit ten unrelated words in the same sentence. Or laugh at puns that nobody who hasn’t read Great Expectations could get.

Big bucks: out there for the taking, I suppose. Putting aside, for awhile, my perpetual status as Office Weirdo: priceless.

This week I’ve been entertained by fake movie trailers. It turns out careful editing and inspired music choices make all the difference.

The grandaddy of them all is The Shining, recast as a feel-good family comedy.

And here’s Sleepless in Seattle as a thriller.

And here’s Brokeback to the Future, the title of which speaks for itself.