Two things today. One, job is really dumbing me down. All I do is cut and paste things I've communicated at least 12 dozen times to people possessing the mental retention abilities rivaledonly by gnats. And the gnats are winning. I think I spend too much time trapped in this cubicle. I'm giving myself current events homework to break up the monotonous tedium so that I don't feel like I'm just drifting so much. I miss working with people who share interests and opinions on a regular basis that do not pertain to what was on reality television last night or Facebook. I'm now a habitual user of that nifty highlighting function The New York Times provides where you click and highlight the word and the li'l pop-up appears providing you with a definition. Part of it is I know the option is there so I can't help myself because I just think that is so friggin' cool, but mainly I'm concerned that whatever knowledge I once possessed (after the tremendous number of hours I spent studying root words, Latin meanings and the dictionary itself) has become obsolete in my mind. Moot? Do I really need to re-orient myself as to what that word means? Am I no longer capable of determining a word's meaning from the context of the sentence? When did I become the person informing people about what's going on in Africa or that the Nobel Prize is handed out by Norwegians who are not the same as Swedish or Danish people and how Scandinavia is a region and not a specific place? When did I become the person who has to pause when reading a Post-It that says "Let's touch basis on this _____ later."
Two, I've probably been trying to describe this my entire life and it's really hard because I belive (really I have come to believe) that I am inherently, innately funny, so it's exceedingly difficult to document how other people are not funny and to the extent at which they are completely not funny. Several times I've been trying to explain to someone how desperately unfunny people at work are or about those acquaintances that I've merged to my outer circle because they kill every conversation we've ever shared together with the dullest story ever.
Let's face it, if you're reading this you're not one of those people - conversation crushers (CCs). No. In fact you possess fine quailties that enable you not just to get me when I'm funny, but qualities that enable you to bring me the funny, too. Qualities such as timing, pace, intonation, facial expressions; the knowledge of not only pop culture references, but a general awareness of the world itself. Anyway, I often wind up recounting the unfunny only to find that either the sight of me being so perplexed at the unfunny becomes extremely funny (mainly to my mom) or to my horror, I contract the unfunny and find myself rambling on about the most incredibly boring series of events ever. Like, I become aware that the person listening has stopped hearing me and I begin to hear myself going on and on like a beat-down pickup truck rollin' to a completely gassed-out stop on the side of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. See? That right there? I've contracted the unfunny.
This is all because I just spent ten minutes or so listening to two people talk about bones they've broken (I broke my toe once! It was awful!) and how tall they are or aren't and from where they got their tallness or lack thereof. See, One Person has always been tall and hasn't grown any since college maybe. He believes he got his height from his dad because - wait for it - his dad is really tall. There are also other tall people in the family. Well the Other Participant isn't very tall at all. In fact, no one in the family is tall. Well there's an uncle who's kinda tall, but he's not nearly as tall as One Person. One Person is really tall.
Ugh. Contracting the unfunny feels as deadly as the H1N1 virus. Speaking of that, I read a headline over the weekend where it's believed that pigs have contracted the H1N1 virus?! Ain't that some mess? You name it "swine flu" even though pigs ain't got it, then you change the name because you don't want people to abandon their Wilburs and bacon and now it's really swine flu ... all over again.
This world is a crazy, funny ha-ha place.