but the real question is, what IS an exact science? virtually nothing.
have you ever stood in your life’s moment – right now – and looked back a decade or two or maybe three and thought, “i never would have thought i’d be here/i’d be doing this”?? just a couple days ago, michele said, “if you had told me twenty years ago that i would be playing a gong for a room full of people, i would have said you were crazy!” and yet, she had just had this remarkable experience playing for others, born of practice and study and a new-found love of the instrument.
magic is not an exact science. art is not an exact science – in any of its forms. science is not an exact science. it all makes us realize that, indeed, life is not an exact science.
we have had a recurring theme this past fall, winter and spring. last week, while cleaning the burner plates on our old stove, i found a cache of dog biscuits hidden underneath. now, you wonder how that happened? next to our stove, we keep a beautiful pottery tray that judy gave us. on it we keep dog biscuits (“cookies” we call them.) since i have talked about mysterious appearances of dog biscuits before, i am sure you are connecting the dots.
oh yes. somehow those little dickens carried about ten dog biscuits from the tray to under the burner plates. they had little picnics under there, until they realized the weather under there was pretty arid, even acrid, as the dog biscuits turned darker and darker and were burned on the edges. ummm….that could have been a disaster! what on earth is babycat doing all day and night? clearly he is not paying attention!
so, as incorrect as this flawed cartoon may be, it really does make me laugh. babycat needs to take a lesson…a little more cunning could go a long way.
interrupting is an art form on long island. i know this. i grew up there. and, apparently, i carried this forward. it took d a while (read: a few years and meeting crunch) to realize i was paying attention, that i wasn’t ignoring what he was saying when i interrupted…i just knew where he was going with it and jumped ahead. now, i do realize that sounds pretty rude. it’s not my intention to ever be rude, so i have tried, in recent times, to w.a.i.t. before i speak…at least a little bit longer. if you are nearby when jen and i talk, you will think we are interrupting each other, talking in a circular path and arriving back at the point; carol and i have, for decades, conversed in short snippets of interrupted tangents. regardless of our intent, no one wants to be asked to “pay attention!”
yet, we have all these ways, nowadays (using this word makes me sound old), to not pay attention. how many videos have you seen where people are walking in a mall (or somewhere) texting or reading on their cellphone and fall into a fountain (or some other obstacle.) we sit with others and try to hold a conversation, but they are busy on their phone or some device checking facebook or texts or twitter or the news…so many ways to not pay attention, so many distractions. we see the tragic effects of split focus while people are driving cars.
we are no longer just giving our attention to the moment. we are interrupting conversation, our work, the activity we are involved in, each other’s safety. we would be well-served to pay just-a-little-more attention.
wednesday nights in the trinity choir room are pretty funny. is that because it’s wednesday? is that because it’s easy to have fun singing or strumming the ukulele with a wholebunchapeople or playing handbells while talking about everythingunderthesun? maybe it’s a little of everything. wednesdays are like that. we need the fun, the laughs, the rolling-of-eyes to get through the rest of the week.
FLAWED cartoon is also like that. you may laugh. you may groan. you may roll your eyes. but any way you look at them, they are good wednesday fare.
FLAWED cartoon was another run at syndication (which, by the way, is compared to winning the lottery, according to a friend of ours whose fun strip THE BRILLIANT MIND OF EDISON LEE runs daily and who said he felt like he had won the lottery.) david and our dear friend 20 created this cartoon and i have handled all the technical blahblah of it. we cackle every time we jot down a new idea. ohmygosh, isn’t “cackle” a great word?!?
the wiener dog sled makes me laugh aloud. we are pretty devoted life-below-zero fans and have great respect for andy and jessie on that show, both of whom run dogsleds. john and michele next door have three wiener dogs and i just can’t imagine them pulling ANY sled. and, although i don’t remember her well, i spent my babyhood years with a dachshund named shayne, who tells stories through my momma’s books of the same name. wiener dogs rock, but as sled dogs?
and so, our melange of studio-created-stuff continues and FLAWED cartoon wednesday will hopefully bring a grin to your wednesday-can’t-wait-till-friday-face.
reverse threading 