Theater Of The Mind

It's Tuesday and Jan is doing her tutoring thing until early this evening, so I'm alone with my thoughts for an hour or two.  I tend to build up thoughts to the point of backlog, so I like to take them one by one and try to answer them in order to clear them out for more important things like "I wonder if I should finish off the rest of that bag of Ruffles Brand potato chips so that I can make some room in my undersized pantry for the bag of Fritos I just bought?"

But then, there are thoughts that I can't answer to my satisfaction.  And since I deep-sixed the idea of writing about work today (never a good idea if you're still working at the place you're going to write about), I thought I'd just throw them out here.

• Which goes faster?  The first twenty years of your life, or the last twenty?  And when do you know when to start counting the last twenty?

• How much money do you throw into fixing up your house before it goes from "I wonder how much this will increase my home's value, to ... maybe I can make this dump look better than my neighbor's so someone will buy mine before theirs?"

• If you're married, or have a significant other, do you really need a good friend, or are they just worthless horseshit baggage?

• If someone in a superior position to you thinks you did something monumentally, earth-shatteringly wrong, but then it turns out you were right, do you immediately pounce on them, or save it up for a spectacular blackmailing double-cross later?

• If you want something really, really bad that costs a moderate amount of money, but know you can get along without it (like a pretty little pony), do you buy said pony to satisfy your underlying selfish wants, or do you "wait 'til later" and savor the time until you buy your pretty little pony?

• Why do they show that yogurt commercial with the old bag Greek woman calling her grand daughter a "prostitute" at 7 o'clock in the morning and then your single digit aged child asks you what a prostitute is so that you have to fend off telling he or she the facts of life when you're still half asleep?

• Why isn't that 1961 half-hour episode of "The Roaring Twenties" that I saw on You Tube last night as good as I remember it when I was 7 years old?

• If you could go back and correct all the stupid things you've done in your life, wouldn't that make you a really, really boring person?

I guess you can't answer everything that pops into your head, even if it stays there longer than it should, so I guess I'll go downstairs and finish that bag of Ruffles so that I'm not distracted by the unopened bag of Fritos.