Me: (reacting to Tim's dog barking outside) Are you going to let your dog in?
Tim: The back door is open.
Me: That's what she said.
And then we laughed for like 20 minutes. Even though she's the one who said it originally, my decision to call it back at that moment was impressive, and obviously reflected well upon my intelligence and character.
But there are thousands upon thousands of quotes out there, competing with the always-unnamed she to be casually dropped into conversations. I think I hear this one the most often:
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and designate this phrase "stupid" and people's use of it "annoying". My reasons are several and boring, and I'm not going to talk about them because I hate to sound serious. Besides, everyone knows that the definition of insanity (unverified by the dictionary) is "any act that can be described by a googly-eyed emoticon or by the sound made when you simultaneously hum and flick your finger over your lips" (that's what she etc.)
But as I finally sat down this weekend to write thank-you notes for my birthday, I couldn't keep that goddamn quote from coming to mind. Not only because I wait way too long every year to write these things and still expect family members not to think I'm an asshole, but also because somehow every year I sit down expecting to write the rip-roarinest, most awesome letters ever written in response to 25-dollar checks. Then immediately my brain gets all constipated and I struggle to remember which way the letters S and N are supposed to go, much less how to write effectively. Inevitably, two hours and 5 sentences later, I've come up with a lame-ass form letter to duplicate on every other card, and I slink away thinking much less of myself as a writer and as a human being. It's crazy, man. In almost every other area of my life, I can say that I've learned something since early childhood. But somehow my thank-yous are stuck in a Never-Land of Stupidity. As a point of reference to show you how far I haven't come, I've tracked down a thank-you note I wrote to my parents at age 7:
Your first instinct might be to say something pithy and cutting like "BLAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Oh my God I can't breathe. HAHAHAHA What a moron!" Me? I'll go with a knowing sigh. Oh, 7-year-old me, you probably thought you'd get considerably better with time. Fool. A few things you might notice:
- I had written a first line, but decided to erase it and start again a line lower. You might wonder how bad that line must have been to be deemed unsuitable for this letter. I just wonder whether I did such a bad erasing job because I couldn't see very well through the anxious tears.
- You would probably figure that by age 7 I'd know which direction question marks are supposed to go. Actually, I would figure that, too. This might be one of the few areas of this letter that I can identify as no longer an issue in my thank-you note writing. And that's only because it is such a breathtakingly stupid mistake. To say I've gotten better would be kind of like commending a murderer for at least sparing the family's goldfish this time.
- My lowercase Ks look like uppercase Rs. I should actually point out that my handwriting here is probably a thousand times better than it is today. I've regressed in this area. Now my lowercase Ks look like uppercase What The Fucks.
- "I got everything I wanted" is awkwardly slipped into a list of things I got. It seems like the kind of thing on a standardized test where they'd number the sentences and ask which one seems out of order or shouldn't be there at all. Right now, for instance. I still do this.
- I got a book and a microscope (which I call "neat") and claim to like my gifts "very much". Both the gifts and the adjectives I apply to them would be classified by a child psychologist as "things that are lame".
(Super-long aside: I feel like I need to explain myself here. I was the oldest child, and in case you weren't aware, the oldest child is a fucking hero. By the second kid, parents have usually realized that children are not as sensitive as the egg babies they took care of in high school home-ec classes. But the first kid is shielded to the point of absurdity - never exposed to things that might be dangerous or cool. By the age of 7, kids who are second and third have not only led less-coddled lives in general, but they've also been privy to the cool things that the older siblings picked up at school between having their lunch money stolen and being called words that they don't understand because they're not allowed to watch anything awesome. While younger siblings are at home torturing the cat, the oldest kid is at school every day chipping away at his lameness with a little pickax, then he comes home and readily makes gifts of the cool he mined. I very clearly remember my friend Woody Potter (awesome name? yes) telling me in kindergarten that Santa Claus isn't real, and me arguing vehemently and confidently that he was mistaken. Imagine my embarrassment the next day. Or in first grade, my friend Bryce told me that the F-word was "fuck", and I was positive that he was just fucking with me. It blew my mind that the F-word wasn't a word I already knew. I had always just assumed the F-word did other work when it wasn't being the F-word, like Clark Kent did lame stuff when he wasn't Superman. So I argued vehemently again, going so far as to keep saying "fuck" in the middle of class, so sure was I that it was nonsense. These are the kinds of public defeats that first-born kids have to suffer on the road to knowledge of cool things. I will definitely be sitting my first kid down on the first day of kindergarten and just schooling him(/her) in every vile, depressing thing known to man. He will be bummed for a few days, but will soon be psyched when he earns cool points by telling his friends about Santa* and Fuck and what "teabagging" means.)
Where was I? Oh yeah. I called things neat and liked microscopes. Fucking sue me. This is another area in which I've improved, though when I'm writing letters to my grandmother, using words like "neat" actually isn't a bad idea. Better than "epic" or "sickmendous".
- Probably the most ridiculous part of this whole letter is the fact that I ended a note to my parents - people who conceived me and gave birth to me and changed all my shitty diapers and taught me to walk and taught me to talk and took me to the hospital when I ate a whole bottle of Flintstones vitamins and protected me and bought me a microscope that I wanted for Christmas - with "Sincerely, Shawn Davis". Like it's a fucking business letter. Like when they walked me to my first day of school I turned and said goodbye with a handshake and told them we should have lunch sometime. I can just imagine them getting this note:
Mom: Oh, we got a thank-you card from Shawn Davis.
Dad: Who?
Mom: You know, Shawn Davis? Our real estate agent? He was just thanking us for the radio and the microscope and the books. He said they were really neat.
Dad: (coming over to take a look) Huh. Isn't it weird that we didn't just pay him in money?
Mom: I don't know. He said he wanted those things a lot worse. Remember, when we were closing the sale he gave us that JC Penney catalog, and he'd circled the things he wanted?
Dad: Oh, right. Odd guy.
Mom: He was nice!
Dad: His lowercase Ks look like uppercase Rs.
So yeah, "Sincerely, Shawn Davis" is embarrassing. But I'm pretty sure that within the last three years, I've signed a few of my thank-yous "Shawn Davis" in cursive without even thinking about it.
If I'm being completely honest, I know my notes have gotten better since this one. But not much better. They start with "Thanks" and end with "Thanks again" and in between they very briefly mention how I used the gift (since it's always long-gone by the time I'm writing the letters). So pretty much the same sentiment as when I was 7, but with slightly better execution. It's pathetic. I'm a grown man - I should at the very least be able to come up with something small-talky and inane. I do, after all, write this blog.
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*I would like to mention that I don't blame my parents for not telling me about Santa Claus. Because without a belief in Santa, I doubt I would have been inspired to create masterpieces like "Santa Mouse". It's like, who knows what Caravaggio would have painted if he wasn't a Christian. It's just like that.
Santa Mouse sees all with his big squiggly left eye. He must have also seen that coming to my house would have been a mistake, because if my mom had seen him she would have freaked out and smashed him with a book.
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