To Text: An Unhappy Consequence

Really.  How the hell did we get saddled with the word text as a verb?

How do you pronounce the third person singular?  He, she or it texts.  Does that rhyme with Tex or Texas? 

To this problem there's a nexus
Every day my daughter texts.

Is that how it is said?

I believe that there are some languages that have only the present tense, maybe Aluete or French or something.  Unhappily in English we also have a past tense which in the case at hand leads us to

Yesterday my son texted (?) me five times.  How are you supposed to say that?

I wonder how this has worked out in Spanish where there are two past tenses.  How do you suppose that works? 

Present tense (if text happens to be an er verb):

Yo texto

Tu textes

Elle texte

Nosotros textemos

Ellos texten

Past tense (if its an ar verb):

Yo texte or textaba

I can't go on. Not even sure these are right.  But I'm pretty sure the verb to text is going to vex us for a long time.

Advice

It's quite common for my wife and me to receive dinner invitations from purveyors of financial advice.  Since these events are generally at pretty nice restaurants it is also common for us to accept.  Since I have a pretty strong conviction that it is unwise to pay for anything as ephemeral as financial advice we have never availed ourselves of anything more than the dinner.  Such a dinner about a year ago led to the composition of the following paragraphs.

Thank you very much for dinner. It was easily the best I’ve had since I quit eating animals about two years ago. I must nevertheless decline your offer to help manage our assets. On the other hand I do have some advice for you. I offer it in descending order of importance.

Quit your job and find a new one that is done on your feet, preferably outside. Millions of years of evolution prepared homo sapiens to be hunters and gatherers. For only 10,000 years have we even been stationary on the land and for only about 100 years have most of us been professional users of desks. We are evolved to work outside, on our feet.

Get an average bike and really good rain gear. Leave you car at home as much as possible.

If at all possible reconcile with you wife. I’m confident that splitting up was the most costly thing you’ve ever done in both monetary and personal terms.

Live within your means, humble though they may be in your new job, (see above). If you must own a car, let it be a very modest model.

Place any financial assets you have in a no-load fund that tracks the S & P 500 and forget about it. The “forget about it” is the most important part.

I will conclude by expressing my deep respect for three things I am aware that you have accomplished. I would be proud to say that I had done any of, playing division one football, getting an engineering degree or flying a jet plane. I wish you the best.


The letter was never sent.

To Forget Or Not To Forget, Is That The Question?

Never Forget! 

What does that mean?  I mean when a person puts it on a poster, or T shirt, or bumper sticker, what is he or she meaning to say? 

It might mean, do not forget the sacrifices of the first, and second, and third responders.  I can buy that.  But I have the feeling that it also means, never stop hating the perpetrators, and their kind.  Or never stop feeling damaged.  In these cases I'm not so sure this is good advice.  Wouldn't it be better to just get over it if you can. 

I think I'll look for a bumper sticker that says, "Forget!"

I'll put it on my bike.

All Water Is Not The Same

I had finished brushing and was moving on to step two in my oral ablutions. The floss, in its nearly new plastic dispenser, was in its usual place, a small basket at the extreme right side of the medicine cabinet. When I opened the mirrored door I saw that it had migrated, as it occasionally does, to near the bottom of the collection of small items that share the basket, making it a little tricky to get a good grasp on. As I tugged it out from its surroundings, with fingers grown clumsy with age, I dropped it. Onto the counter top it fell, dribbled off the end, careened off the toilet tank and landed in the water waiting, exposed below. Did I say it was nearly new? It wasn’t easy consigning 39 yards of perfectly good plastic ribbon to the trash, but there’s water, and then there’s water. If I hadn’t, there’d be no more kissing for me – ever.

That, dear children, is why the toilet seat has a lid.

The Rest of the Story

On March 27th of last year I posted a note about renting our little cottage in the University District and described three candidate couples.  I did not report that ultimately I chose the bike riding woman with the semi-monk boy friend who was away on a six week silent retreat.  She had stayed nearly an hour looking over a place that can be adequately evaluated in 10 minutes or less.  My reason was that I found that she would have been the hardest to turn down.  She seemed to want the place the most.

It was not a bad choice.  E and B stayed about a year and a half, paid their rent on time, and left the place as near ready to rerent as any tenant ever has.  There was however one little matter that makes this update blog worthy.  Quite often if I am going to be entering a rental space to do some chore while the occupants are not present I will say in a very cute and charming way, "Hide your marijauna plants, I'm going to be working on the X today."  It's not much of a line, but I've said it to quite a few renters over the years.  In fact it turns out that I once said it to E, although I had no specific memory.  On the next to the last day, just before they departed, I asked if I had said something like that and indeed I had.  We had a good laugh at that point, in my case imagining,  and in their case recalling, just how that line went over.  You see, as was only revealed by the state of the house at their departure, the little cottage had actually become quite a little farm for the past year or so.  Remember the long long period of scrutiny on the first visit?  Ah so.  Maybe I am missing a bet by using this place as a residential rental.

Is Democracy Viable These Days?

Several decades ago, when I spent a few years studying and teaching economics, I recall telling students that they need not worry about the return of another Great Depression because by that time, (the late 60’s) we had learned enough about how market economies work that we would always be able to avoid troubles of such magnitude. I now have much less faith in that statement. How tragic it is that Economics is such an impoverished area of study. Apparently the most fundamental problems are just too difficult for a consensus to develop among professional economists. Take the current situation. We seem to have two big problems. We know we have a high degree of unemployed resources, especially workers. And we fear that we have too large a national debt. These are very elementary issues. An equivalent medical question might be what to do if someone is bleeding to death from an open wound. An equivalent question from the realm of physics might be about the relative rate of fall for two objects of different weight. You remember, Galileo worked on that one. Yet there is apparently no consensus among economists on these most fundamental and important questions.

Of course, if there were consensus there is no reason to expect that the voting public of this country would be persuaded about what should be done. Evolution seems pretty well settled in the scientific community, but millions of our countrymen have no trouble disbelieving. Ditto global warming. So even if there were agreement among economists that what is needed in times of high unemployment is for the federal government to run deficit budgets, like the way the budgets of the second world war period got us out of the depression of the 30’s, and that budget balancing and national debt reduction should be undertaken during periods of vigorous economic growth, there is no reason to expect that the public would get it or that the Congress would act on it. It is enough to rattle fifty years of optimism.

Here's Looking At You Babe

I wrote the short paragraph below a few weeks ago. Although a quaint observation, I didn’t think it rose to the level of a post. Then I was presented with a companion piece that when added to the earlier one made the grade. Here they are.

A Peculiar Intimacy

Imagine passing a lifetime mere inches away from something and never seeing it. That is what your eyes and ears do. Of course your ears don’t see anything, near or far. But your eyes go on for decades, mere inches away from your ears and yet they never directly see them. Your teeth too. And a bunch of other stuff that’s out of sight. It just seems odd.

A Peculiar Sight

I sleep naked and when I go to the bathroom in the morning I walk right in front of a full length mirror. As I get in and out of the shower I look at my naked self in another mirror. (There’s some mild disgust with what I see, but it is short of self loathing.) I am used to seeing myself naked. Recently my wife and I passed a few days as house guests in California. The place we stayed had a half bath on the first floor in which the toilet stands at the right side of the sink. Behind the sink is a mirror, presumably to allow for modest grooming before returning to the company of others. The odd thing in this bathroom is that the mirror extends to the right, behind the toilet. This is something I had never seen before. A mirror behind a toilet. I have a hunch that no woman has ever or would ever notice this situation, but for guys it is different. It presents a new view. There you are, standing fully clothed, (Once I was even wearing a coat and tie.) with your dick poking out of your trousers and in your hand as you hose down the toilet bowl. Ladies, I’m telling you, that is an odd sight.