Wayne's Whirled

…from my friend Jenell who just came back from visiting her family in Kansas:

“The nice thing about visiting your parents is that you come back with a suitcase full of CLEAN clothing.”

From a book I am reading about an 18 year old high school senior who finds out he has less than a year to live and decides to “do it all”, including go after the girl of his dreams:

“There’s not one part of Dallas Suzuki’s face or body that is in any way Miss World, but you put it all together and I’d swim through five hundreds yards of molten turds to listen to her fart into a paper sack over the telephone.”

Hell, if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

Taken from my friend Erica’s blog:

“The concept of two people living together for 25 years without a serious dispute suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.”

– A.P. Herbert

My thoughts exactly. It’s not WHETHER a long term relationship will have disagreements (uh, they WILL), it is how they are RESOLVED.

Have you ever known one of those couples who always seems to get along great and they always tell everyone “We NEVER fight.”? You ever notice that they often SUDDENLY split up and everyone is like “WTF”?

Of course they didn’t fight; they held in all their issues with one another with a smile on their face and then one day it all came out in a BAD way. Game over.

…unless you’re drinking it! My Dad is going in for a “procedure” this week and he has to drink SIXTEEN eight-ounce glasses of liquid chalk (a gallon, essentially) in a four hour period to get ready for it.

To put this in perspective, this is TEN AND TWO THIRDS cans of Coke (except, you know, it’s chalky and lacking all good high-fructose corn syrupy goodness of soda):

My Dad’s actually a Pepsi drinker, so I guess it should look like this:

But you get the idea…

While I was sitting and “thinking” this morning I was internally debating various ideas on toilet tissue. Though in this amazing country we probably have more than 700 choices for this one function, I feel is basically comes down to two things:

1. One-ply or two-ply
2. Which way to hang it (over the top or underneath)

Dealing with #1 (no pun intended), the obvious choice is two-ply; it is fluffier, softer and better yet creates a thicker barrier between “the handle side”, and you know, the business end. The only downside is that when starting a new roll I invariably get it started BETWEEN the plys and then end up pulling it off the roll with it making that pulling apart noise that you can get when dismantling forms that are in triplicate.

And for those of you who say two-ply is more wasteful and therefore less ecologically sound than one-ply have no idea how much extra hot water I would have to use washing my hands after using one-ply before I felt comfortable. Trust me, two-ply is better for the environment in my case.

Dealing with #2 (DEFINITELY no pun intended), there really isn’t anything to decide; it’s a given. Over the top if you don’t have a cat, from underneath if you do. It’s to avoid this:

I just finished a book about a guy who wins a spaceflight from a “Richard Branson-esque” private spaceflight company. Tragedy ensues (of course, else it would have been a much shorter book), the pilot of the craft is killed after they are up in orbit (for what was supposed to be a “three hour tour” and YES, the guy does reference Gilligan’s Island in the book) and all communication is lost between the ship and the ground. Or WAS it?!??

Anyway, this guy knows he has enough air (and enough Powerbars and water) to last five days; he tries unsuccessfully to do what it takes to bring the ship back down (he was given some rudimentary training for a few days before the flight, but I would assume it would be like trying land your tandem freefall parachute jump yourself after your instructor has died while strapped to your back). He eventually settles down to sort of accept his fate, as it were.

However, there is a laptop on the ship so he starts typing his life story: the things he did right and wrong, the things he wished he had done different, etc all in the hope that perhaps one day his children might be able to read it. What he doesn’t know is that laptop is set up on a live download link to earth (which still works) and that a hacker kid in New Zealand (stay with me) has found the feed. He sends it to friends and eventually it gets to the media and after a day or two the whole planet is aware of this crisis in space and is following his words as they are being written. They are scrolling on the bottom of news channels and all over the internet and on the big screen in Times Square; the whole world has basically stopped what they were doing to see this play out and see what this person has to say. He writes hundreds of pages (he has the time, after all) detailing his greatest joys, his deepest sorrows and those choices that he most regrets.

The kicker is that the guy in space has no idea that anyone is seeing what he is writing. This results in his telling some quite personal information including a lot of detail of his first sexual encounter but eventually he just starts telling what he has learned in life, the mistakes he has made and what he would do different if he had the chance.

The chance that the people watching his words now DO have.

Needless to say, the effect on those watching was great, with people having realizations about themselves, their loved ones and they way in which they have lived their lives.

So my question to you is: “What would you say if the whole world was listening?”