Or Sesame Street inspired ramblings
My 2 year old has watched this video at least 100 times these past few days. The poor thing has been housebound with a nasty cold and has more than a touch of cabin fever, so I can understand why he seems to relate to this song so much. Plus it has Elmo, who is his favorite, even though I’ve been trying to sway him to Team Grover since birth.
It was somewhere around viewing 70 that he turned to me to let me know that “That guy left his laundry!” And from then on we chatted a bit about laundry and laundromats and the protocols for same during each viewing. I have to say it was nice to spend some time talking about my philosophy of laundry and guidelines for proper laundromat behavior with somebody who cared, even if he’d interrupt me every so often to demand I put back all the excess tissues that would fall out every time he tried to pull one out of his tiny personal pack of tissues.
Most of the time I try to avoid being that guy or gal. You know, the one that is always overly eager to share with you their personal policy on everything from parking to how to deal with credit card solicitations or finding cheap bananas. It’s as if there is some sort of Google-like keyword matching system in their brains that goes ding at the sound of the word “bananas” and out comes a detailed account of the price threshold at which they will buy bananas, their desired firmness and the methods by which they make use of the bargain priced bags of overripe ones. Sadder still, when you say bananas again after a week or two or three has passed, they’ll launch into the same monologue and damned if it isn’t word for word exactly the same as if they had no recollection of your previous conversation. Or maybe they do and they just can’t help themselves. I do not laugh at this because I fear I have these tendencies myself.
It’s worse because I blog and could easily indulge myself by giving a detailed account of the 7 signs I look for to determine when a bath towel is ready to be demoted to floor-mess towel status. Or the 4 do’s and 3 don’ts of deciding that a parking spot is the right one for me (here’s a surprising hint, it’s not necessarily the one closest to the door). While if you asked me, Tracy, do you think people who have a clearly defined personal policy for things they’ll do once or twice a year tops are a little nuts? I’d say “OMG, yes! YES! Thank you. YES!” the truth is I am a person who relishes having protocols and procedures imagined for any situation, no matter how unlikely.
Especially how unlikely, really, because that way it probably won’t happen and I’ll never know if I was horribly wrong in my thinking and can rest easy, safe from the knowledge that I am not particularly qualified to draw up a plan for safely evacuating my family in case a volcano rises up out of the Mississippi and an army of previously dormant aliens comes swarming out because they have received a sign that it’s time for the invasion to begin. Actually, I think my plan for that is solid, if overly reliant on my children choosing that time to become cooperative and obedient.
The thing I have learned in my life is that while it’s for the best I have such policies and procedures in place it’s best if I never, ever discuss them with anyone, particularly on the internet, because when policies collide, people very rarely merge the best of the two into one super policy. Instead they prefer to become ever more bullish and committed to their plan, flawed as it might be. Is it better to try to escape an army of invading aliens by foot or by car? I don’t know what the ultimate truth is, but I do know I am less wrong than all those other fools out there.
Usually though it’s not about something so important as how to escape an alien invasion and about something more mundane, like laundromat etiquette. As much as I’m annoyed by people who could write an entire manual on how to deal with clothes left in a dryer, I’m completely baffled by people who can’t or won’t. The way they shrug as if it’s a thing of little consequence, like they could just deal with it on the spur of the moment without putting in the time to evaluate the pros and cons of each possible course of action strikes me as more than a bit arrogant, as if they’d somehow transcended the human need for a plan and a philosophy.
Because really isn’t it a comfort to know that you’re the kind of person whose personal philosophy on squirrel management is X? That you have a strategy for avoiding the need to parallel park? To take joy, nay to exult in your 6 step procedure for getting 4 kids from front door to buckled into carseats in 3 minutes flat (2 if they aren’t wearing coats)? I think it is.
But I would because my personal philosophy is to try to find the good in everything.
