Mysteries Of Life

Highlights From August: I’m Not A Flower. I’m Not A Fork. I’m Not A Foe.

/ Ally Bean / 179 Comments

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The Flower Part

Late one afternoon while sitting outside on the deck, I was viciously attacked dive-bombed by a hummingbird who mistook me for a flower. Why, you may be wondering, did this little piece of flightiness think I was a flower?

Here’s the scene: I was wearing a pale pink baseball cap [similar here] + a medium pink fleece top [here] + raspberry-colored moccasin slippers [on sale now here] whilst drinking a pink grapefruit Italian soda [from here] that I’d poured into a clear plastic tumbler [here] with a bright red travel lid [here].

My basically pinkish-reddish ensemble + beverage were not intended to attract hummingbirds, but I nailed it.  And that little birdie with the fluttering wings couldn’t take his sparkly little eyes off me.

I was startled, but flattered.

The Fork Part 

Zen-Den and I finished watching Elementary, a TV series about Sherlock Holmes re-envisioned for modern times starring Jonny Lee Miller as Sherlock and Lucy Liu as Dr. Watson. I enjoyed it and thought the final episode was a good way to end it. Apparently not all fans liked the ending, so I just wrote something potentially controversial here.

Anyhoo, like many TV shows or movies, we sometimes focus on one line that we find absurdly funny and start saying it to each other— like a goofy inside joke. And this show gave us a good one.

In a scene where Sherlock and Marcus, a NYC police detective assigned to work with Sherlock, are kicking back after a difficult day, Sherlock who is often quite full of himself tells Marcus that he knows why Marcus is so taken with him.

It’s a scene of arrogance gone wild.

Sherlock starts babbling on about how his astounding intellect magnetizes people who are then drawn to him. It’s a burden Sherlock must live with.

Marcus, who has the patience of Job when dealing with Sherlock’s ego, replies: “You’re not a magnet. And I sure as hell am not a fork.” 

Thus I, too, want to establish the fact that I’m not a fork. You can’t magnetize me. Don’t even try.

The Foe Part

A friend, who seemed sincere when she said this, told me that she wanted to change something about her behavior so that she’d have more free time.

I was surprised BUT I am one to help others when they decide they want to change. To be clear I don’t believe I need to fix people, yet will help you fix yourself when you’re ready to do so. Think of me as your personal cheerleader.

A few weeks later I see this friend and compliment her on how she has changed herself, how she has followed through on doing that which she told me she wanted to do in order to have less stress in her busy life.

Welp, she lays into me for mentioning she was doing things differently now: things she told me she didn’t want to do anymore.

This was her idea, remember?

She got on her high horse and lectured me about how her well established M.O. was what she was known for and no way would she ever change it for fear of not being known for it.

This was slightly unhinged thinking— and a complete 180º from what she’d confided in me a few weeks earlier.

Obviously at this point I had a decision to make: do I remind her of what she told me about how she wanted to change? Or do I let the conversation drop knowing the more I say, the more she’ll think of me as her foe.

Thus I let the conversation drop, realizing that being a cheerleader for some people is a sure way of irritating them.

Go figure, huh?

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SO I’M BACK 

WHAT’S NEW WITH YOU?

TELL ALL IN THE COMMENTS BELOW

I NEED TO KNOW!

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A 3:00 A.M. Tale In Which We Experience Batshit Crazy For Real

/ Ally Bean / 230 Comments

As if last week, a difficult week for everyone, could not have been any stranger…

Forget your ancient church belfry, this tale takes place in modern times, starting in an upstairs suburban bedroom, moving to the two-story foyer, dashing about in 2 upstairs guest bedrooms, and culminating in the downstairs TV room adjacent to the kitchen.

Who is the star of this tale? Zen-Den, of course!

Here’s what happened.

I was awakened from a sound sleep when I heard the rattling of our wooden blinds at the bedroom window. I glanced over at the blinds and saw swooping birdlike shadows at the window. The shadows reminded me of scenes in the Alfred Hitchcock movie “The Birds.”

You see, in my drowsiness I thought somehow the bright light from the lamppost in front of the house was shining through the blinds making it appear that birds were creating shadowy silhouettes OUTSIDE the window.

But I was wrong.

I realized this when I got out of bed, walked over to the blinds to see what was going on at the window, only to learn that what I was seeing was INSIDE the house.

I definitively discerned this when something flew straight at me, swooped over my head as I hunched and shuddered, then dashed out the open bedroom door going into the foyer where it started flying around the chandelier like it was crazy.

Batty, even.

Fleece throw aka my impromptu babushka

Calmly, you would have been proud of me, I woke up Z-D who was oblivious to our winged intruder. I told him something was wrong, something creepy was flying around, and that he needed to get up to investigate. I also told him he’d be in the lead during the investigation.

I’d follow behind, on his six.

Utilizing my natural ability to scream loudly when under attack startled.

Without complaining he got up, dressing in jeans and a ragg wool knit beanie, and started walking around the upstairs rooms while I followed behind him, still in my jammies but with a plaid fleece throw [photo above] wrapped around my head like a Russian grandma in her babushka.

Quickly we realized that what I thought was a bird, was a bat. And that Z-D needed to get a broom from the garage, leaving me to stand alone in the foyer defending myself by screaming and holding a heavy doorstop [photo below] in front of my face, using it like a cross meant to keep vampires away.

This might have been helpful, maybe.

Heavy doorstop aka my potential weapon

The rest of this tale is what you’d expect if’n you’ve ever chased a bat through your house. We turned on lights everywhere. We got him out of one room, closed the door; then got him out of another room, closed the door; so on and so on, et cetera, et cetera. This went on until we were downstairs in the TV room where the bat was trying to hide on the floor in the shadows near a lounge chair.

Zen-Den saw him, wacked him with the broom, held him down, and shouted for me to get a cookie sheet from the kitchen. Which I did, putting it on the floor so that we could carefully slowly slide the bat, who was still alive and squeaking, onto it while Z-D used the broom to hold him down on the cookie sheet.

Together we slide our captive to the back door where Z-D then tossed the dude, who got into our house somehow but we don’t know how, outside into the snow.

The bat was shocked, but still alive, and gave us the evil eye as he straightened up and flew away into the night, no doubt as perturbed by this experience as we were.

And that, my gentle readers, is how it came to be that we experienced batshit crazy.

For real.

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

Have you ever had a bat flying around inside your home? Assuming you didn’t want a bat flying around inside your home, what did you do to get rid of it?

Bats are known for their exceptional hearing abilities. Do you see the irony in a bat waking me up in the middle of the night because I’m extremely sensitive to sound? Am I part old bat and don’t know it‽

What’s the last batshit crazy thing that happened in your world? Tell all, we need to know.

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Ain’t We Just: Rambling Thoughts About Superpowers And Using The Powers For Good

/ Ally Bean / 190 Comments

Let’s just say for purposes of discussion that my superpower is mind reading. A fact [?] I discerned after taking this nifty National Geographic Superpower Quiz.

You see, and this was news to me but considering the source we must conclude that, superpowers aren’t just for fictional characters anymore. To wit, I proudly tell you this is who I am:

“You can read minds! Well, not exactly, but you’re very aware of how others feel.” Yep, true dat

Naturally I wanted to get a deeper understanding of who I am so I went to my old friend, Merriam-Webster, to research the word.

As one does.

According to M-W a “mind reader” is “one that professes or is held to be able to perceive another’s thought without normal means of communication” and that the first known use of the word, which in this case is actually two words but who am I to argue with M-W’s way of explaining things, occurred in 1875.

[A studious aside: In case you’re unfamiliar with M-W’s Time Traveler feature it’s fun for a wordy person. To see what it is like, click HERE and learn what other words* were new in 1875. Information like this is available under most definitions, just scroll down the page to the feature.]

Anyhoo, getting back to the discussion aspect of this post, after learning the aforementioned I started pondering, in an abstract rhetorical way, about how does one use any superpower for good:

• In general do you think, like I do, that determining and acknowledging your superpower is one thing? But implementing it, like a hero** not a villain, is another thing? Two different skill sets, two different moral cores

• And further, specifically, what do you do with the ability to read minds? It’s one thing to know what someone else is thinking but that doesn’t mean you have the capacity, or desire, to change their mind. ‘Ya know?

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

If you took the quiz, what is your superpower? OR if you don’t need a quiz to know your superpower, what is it?

Are you a wordy person who likes knowing a bit more about interesting words that appear in your life? Is Merriam-Webster your old friend, too?

When you think about fictional heroes with superpowers who comes to mind? Is the source from myths, literature, movies, TV shows, cartoons, comics, or games? Other?

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* Ilsa Rey from Writing and Martial Arts is going to find one of the words on the 1875 list, linked to above, especially pertinent. Yep, I’m a mind reader.

** When I think of the word “hero” this brief conversation from the TV show Firefly flashes through my mind:

  • Mal: “Well, look at this. It appears that we got here just in the nick of time. What does that make us?”
  • Mal: “Ain’t we just.”

One Last 2022 Post: Alexa Gets Nosy & I Ask You A Question

/ Ally Bean / 218 Comments

ALEXA GETS NOSY

“The answer is negative one.”

I was composing an email reply to a friend who’d written about a mutual acquaintance who was going through a difficult time.

I was rereading out loud what I’d written to make sure my grammar was correct and the content made sense. I’m a wordy girl after all and I take pride in how I put words together in a sentence.

Even in casual correspondence.

What I’d written, saying to myself in a quiet mumble, was: “ALSO SHE HAS ONLY ONE, NOT TWO, MEANS TO DO WHAT SHE DOES.” It was praise for our mutual acquaintance and how she was handling things.

But then out of nowhere, unasked, Alexa the little eavesdropper piped up saying the line I shared at the top of this post.

She startled me so much I jumped into the air and almost lost my stuffing. Confused and annoyed, I wanted to figure out why the heck she’d inserted herself into my life.

I looked at what I’d written then said to myself a few seconds before. I realized that Alexa had understood the word “ALSO” to be her name, then she’d interpreted what I’d said after that to be a math problem.

That is, I’d said “…ONE NOT TWO MEANS…” which she translated to the equation 1 – 2 = [one minus two equals] resulting in her reply [“the answer is negative one”] that she blurted out answering the question she thought I’d asked her.

Which, of course, I hadn’t.

And with that ridiculous realization about what had just happened, I solved my nosy Alexa mystery.

Bless. Her. Heart.

I ASK YOU A QUESTION

This will be my last blog post of 2022, but I have one last thing to ask you, my little partridges in a pear tree. I have four blog posts started, but FAR from finished. They require more research &/or introspection than I’m willing to put into them in December.

Because I want to goof off now, thus I shall write later.

Getting to what might be the actual point of this post, which one of the topics listed immediately below would you like me to write about first when I return? Yep, I’m crowdsourcing this decision so please tell me your preference in the comments. Thank you in advance for your kind cooperation concerning this matter.

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HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE
See you next year

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