The title of this post is taken from a Rodgers & Hammerstein song from the musical Carousel, a production of which I saw at a dinner theater with my mother, nephew Daniel, and Daniel’s mother Terri in 1986. At that time, I believed (right or wrong) the musical was a favorite of Lynne’s, and since I wasn’t familiar with it, I looked forward to seeing it. Had I known some of the plot, theme, and sorrow of it, I might have realized I was seeing it at the wrong time considering my reality during 1985/86, but…as Jim likes to say, “It is what it is.” It was a night out in company I enjoyed, and I remember that part of it with affection.
One of the advantages (for me) of getting older and a little wiser is that during particularly difficult times (however that difficulty manifests), history reminds me that everything is not all bad and forever and never has been all bad and forever. Though June this year has been challenging and expensive, it’s just… June. Just right now.
Yesterday, when the dogs and I had to be out of the house from early morning to well after dinnertime, we were in a quiet, cool place together. Meanwhile, Tom was overseeing and doing lots of things at Houndstooth Hall that will be beneficial in the long run, and I got to read two of three books by a favorite author, Martin Walker, that I’d downloaded via Kobo to my iPad quite a while back (meaning I still have another ebook to look forward to from him!):
I can never regret a day spent reading this ongoing series set in France, full of people, places, dogs, horses, and gastronomical feasts (without consequences like calories and hangovers!). I read all of the short stories yesterday, and finished the novel today. It was a joy once again to be in the company of Benoît Courrèges, aka Bruno, Chief of Police, in the fictional town of St. Denis.
I’m so grateful for writers.
Does a linguistic virus exist, or are they all merely catch phrases mutating into ear worms that are out to beige or compress a language into a Huffman Coding Tree so that our machine overlords don’t have to work so hard to understand us?
“How about that!” was maliciously exclaimed by a coworker who would rather live in his ASCII and pixel worlds he calls games, but that too could be just those machine overlords up to something more sneaky than those mice performing frightfully elegant experiments on us all to find that ultimate question.
I think this is the one and only time I’ve found a use for “it is what it is” that various mutations of “having said that” give me the creeps.
I’m not sure of the mutations of things we hear/say, but emojis are definitely a new kind of code that speak volumes, as are the acronyms used in texting and on social media. I have to look things up all the time to understand what my younger relatives are communicating.
(And I love the story of the mom who was told and believed AF means “as foretold” instead of “as f*ck.” It sounds so much more magical to say, “My dog Clyde is lazy AS FORETOLD,” like he was part of a mystic vision from years prior.)
‘Twas foretold, he’d LOL –AF!!
May all your AF be As Foretold, that’s one I now enjoy.
When I first came across that acronym, I struggled trying to get Abercrombie and Fitch into any AF context, but “As Foretold” is so much better.
The emoji characters though, sometimes I struggle with what it looks like first.
When it was all plain ASCII or whatever character sets the Apple, Atari, Commodore, Oric, BBC Micro aka Acorn, Synclaire, Typewriter, Teletext, etc. were using, all those messages had to be character re-mapped to the destination’s unique character set. International characters (not those squiggly pointy curvy marks we etch out in English) had their own tables and making them map to a destination’s way of the world is a huge challenge even today. If your device doesn’t handle the full set, coding bugs can lead to crafted messages executing as instruction code, and that had happened lots of times. So, with unicode character codes being the size they are, we could have a standard set of all characters. Then came emoji replacements of : and ), which seemed like a good idea at the time, to help the reader get the missing body language etc., but it started filling in the vast gap of undefined characters that probably could include hieroglyphics.
Like art, this communication method it is.
Good old Clyde, dressed ear to paw in Abercrombie & Fitch. How does he afford such when everyone knows he’s lazy AF? Overly indulgent parents, probably.
You read two books in one morning..?
Not quite! One night, I started the ebook of short stories when I couldn’t fall asleep. I think I read two of them? The next morning, I took my iPad with me and finished the short stories at Debby’s. However, we had workers in the house from around 10 am until after 7 pm, so the dogs and I couldn’t come home. Thus, I began a novel by the same author. The next day, I finished that novel. Then I spread the second novel over a couple of days, as well. Though I haven’t mentioned it, I was pretty much shut out of much computer use because we had to replace two systems (desktop and laptop), which meant Tom was doing a lot of backing up, updating, and setting up.
I couldn’t write. I could barely squeeze in a little social media time via my phone, and I managed to update the website (though sometimes late). Other than finish the last season of “The Crown” during dinners, there was little else to do but read, which is not a bad thing. =)