{"id":985,"date":"2009-05-15T12:22:52","date_gmt":"2009-05-15T19:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/?p=985"},"modified":"2009-05-15T12:22:52","modified_gmt":"2009-05-15T19:22:52","slug":"if-i-could-draw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/?p=985","title":{"rendered":"If I could draw…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d draw the scenes that you can infer from this snippet of conversation:<\/p>\n

“Really Rich? Really? “Marmots come out of the sky and they stand there?” That’s what you heard all these years?” Marmots!?<\/p>\n

er… Roundabout. Classic Yes tune. I blame the cheezy cheap radio I had growing up. Never experienced High Fidelity till the synapses were hard-wired.<\/p>\n

heh.<\/p>\n

Our language just doesn’t make that much sense, being made up out of all those other ones like it is. Let alone when its spoken.
\nSynonyms, synantonyms, contranyms, chiasmus, palindromes, its a wonder we aren’t causing fights all the time. Btw: I didn’t make those up, but I did have to google them to get the spelling right.
\nI remember asking someone why Marmosets weren’t baby Maromets?<\/p>\n

Just in case you don’t know, these are marmots:<\/p>\n

\"Marmots\"
Marmots<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

and these are marmosets:<\/p>\n

\"These
These don't grow up to be Marmots<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I argue that it only matters that you’re understood. Like all those islanders we taught pidgin English to during World War II.\u00a0 Long as the airstrip gets built we don’t care what you call it. Its all in the context baby.<\/p>\n

A funny attitude to find in someone who is aspiring to be a writer, eh? I blame my lackadaisical grammar instruction back in West Virginia. We moved around a lot, sometimes even within the same county. In Wayne county, there were two or three courses they split up between summer and fall semesters. A cost cutting measure no doubt. Which probably explains why they rank 49th out of the top 50 states in education.<\/p>\n

One half of the tenth grade was Biology and the second half Chemistry. In the ninth grade you were given half Literature and half Grammar. So as a result I attended two biology semesters, and two Literature semesters.<\/p>\n

I still can’t claim to have read many of those books we were assigned in Lit. I think there were 100 titles we were to ‘become familiar’ with.\u00a0 Which meant buying Cliff notes from the local book store I think. I borrowed what I could or just read the dust covers books in the library.<\/p>\n

Some of it rubbed off on me though. Here’s an example:<\/p>\n

Outside my office are several whiteboards, you know the type, that use those ‘write on, wipe off’ markers and smell strongly of artificalness? Well sometimes we use them for announcements, and sometimes for fun.<\/p>\n

One of the ladies down the hall named Corrie\u00a0 tries to put an inspirational message on the board each morning.\u00a0 Today it reads “Speak with a soft voice and treat each other with kindness.”<\/p>\n

I think she gets most of them from Dove bars or fortune cookies. We tease her about it a lot, but mostly about how she’ll share the\u00a0 wisdom of the Dove bar, but not the actual chocolate of said Dove bar.<\/p>\n

I brought in a couple chocolate coins in a mesh bag from home\u00a0 earlier this week and bizarrely enough, decided I didn’t want to eat them. I wanted to give them away, but instead of just leaving them in the conference room for someone to randomly eat them, I taped them to the whiteboard and put beneath them a quote from Moby Dick:<\/p>\n

\"Ahabs
Ahab's bounty on the White Whale<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It says “”Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;<\/p>\n

Whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke–look ye!
\nWhosoever of you raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!”<\/p>\n

-Cap’n Ahab, “Moby Dick”<\/p>\n

Corrie stopped in and asked if I was the one who had put them there? “Are you Captain Ahab?”<\/p>\n

I couldn’t deny it so I just shrugged and said “I’m nothing if not Old School.”<\/p>\n

She left commenting that they may disappear without a white whale showing up. To date there are no takers. I think I’ll eat them after all and go hunting for my own whales. I know enough about the story to know that being capn Ahab isn’t a good thing. I think I heard it secribed as a “Pedantic<\/strong> tale of Obsession.” I don’t know exact definitions, but I think pendantic and obsessive are closely related. I wonder if there’s a name for using two words that mean the same thing to describe a thing.<\/p>\n

Doesn’t sound like me, really.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d draw the scenes that you can infer from this snippet of conversation: “Really Rich? Really? “Marmots come out of the sky and they stand there?” That’s what you heard all these years?” Marmots!? er… Roundabout. Classic Yes tune. I blame the cheezy cheap radio I had growing up. Never experienced High Fidelity till the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","missing-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pDxlf-fT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=985"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1010,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/985\/revisions\/1010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vrharbor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}