Okay, so it has been well over a month since I have blogged. Why? I am not sure. My husband likes to fall back on his military training and say that when asked a non-generative question, there are only a few appropriate responses: Yes, sir! No, sir! No excuse, sir! So let’s just go with response number three.
It is funny the things that get caught in one’s brain. Just now as I typed the word “just,” I was reminded of a former professor who once did a study on women praying aloud in Southern churches. Basically her study consisted of her counting the number of times these ladies inserted the word “just” into their prayers. Such a strange, self-effacing habit, repeatedly prefacing one’s petitions to a higher power with this mere recursive monosyllabic diminutive hint of doubt…
A couple of years ago I was sprawled on the sofa on a summer day, almost mindlessly watching a cooking show, “Semi-Homemade” starring Sandra Lee, and I noticed that she used the word “just” in just about every third sentence. When something like that catches your attention, it becomes hard to rid yourself of it. It is like putting on a black velvet shirt and finding it covered with fuzz because you accidently tossed it in the dryer with the white towels you used to mop up spilled Tequila... (But that is a story best left for another blog.) So anyway, Sandra used the word “just” 36 times in an episode lasting just under 30 minutes. My daughter pointed out to me that this would just not be good as the basis for a drinking game (you know, where you would down your drink every time you hear the word “just”) because the players would be incapacitated within minutes, and possibly exhausted from jumping up to go get another drink… Now, the last thing I need in my life is something else on which to fixate… And so I will diverge here with some degree of deliberation. (Note the alliteration. And see what I mean about fixating?)
Needing a break this afternoon, David and I decided to go to Jalapeno Tree for nachos and drinks (between that last paragraph and this one.) While eating and drinking, I noticed a familiar song in the mix of background noise, music and conversation. “Good Morning Starshine, the earth says hello…” And I was reminded that when I was in sixth grade, I sang a solo during a choral production of this number. I have always said that the one thing I would change about myself is that I would be a singer, but alas, I am too timid. I will, however, never forget the lyrics of that song. “All the way from “Gliddy glup gloopy” to “tooby ooby walla nooby abba naba,” those nonsense syllables have remained firmly fixed in my mind for over three decades. I don’t have a bad voice, but I have always known that the only reason I was chosen to sing that solo was because I was the only one in the class who could remember the words; and I use the word “words” loosely here.
Sometimes I fixate on the origins of language, on the whole driving force of words. So strong was the human’s need to communicate, we developed language so we could connect to each other on a level somewhat elevated above the physical. Just think about it! How did that one grunt become the first understood and repeated word? What series of misinterpretations must surely have followed closely behind. How much are these memes that jump from mind to mouth a function of our consciousness and how fast must they pass across synapses that I can translate them from my thoughts to this page, which does not even exist as real paper, at a rate exceeding 90 words per minute free of errors where they will be read at a rate far exceeding that by who knows how much by who knows how many…
And I am reminded of how I learned to speed read. When I was in sixth grade (yes, this was the same year I made my solo singing debut) it was discovered by a savvy reading instructor that I was having difficulty making my way from the end of one line of text to the start of the next. So, it was arranged that I would be hooked to a computer that would trace with a virtual highlighter each word as I visually made my way across the line, and then it would guide my eye from the end of the line at the right to the start of the next line back at the far left. And since this was a progressive school and they had an abundance of unused electrodes, they hooked a few up to my head and a few to my chest just to see what my reaction to these electronic nudges would be.
Because my eyes naturally followed the yellow cursor, I was soon cured of my tendency to get lost on the way back to home base. Of course, it only made sense to speed up the cursor at that point, to see just how fast it could drag my eye across the page. What we discovered is that I could follow as fast as the yellow light pulsed. I don’t know if I finally hit some kind of reading wall or if the teacher was afraid my mind would eventually explode, but they unplugged me at some point. And somewhere along the way, my reading eyes learned to gracefully make U turns and to skate with controlled abandon across the page between the turns. Even now when I read, I sometimes imagine the blinking yellow highlight and I deliberately read faster and faster and faster, bouncing relentlessly from margin to margin to margin, just to see how long I can sustain the pace before the race from whitespace to whitespace blurs the logic in the middle…
My daughter visited this weekend. She had told me that she has a job reading books into a recording device for a woman who is blind. She told me that the woman then speeds up the tapes when she listens to them. What she didn’t tell me, however, is that she reads the books at a sprint to begin with. I don’t think I would have really understood until I heard her reading. Speed reading orally. And I was reminded that we seldom push our minds to accomplish even a fraction of what we might be capable of doing.
So all afternoon, I have been pondering speed reading, speed listening, speed typing, speed thinking… allowing myself to just change the pace of my Sunday afternoon, slowing it down to make it last longer. I am reminded that time itself is a manmade construct. And it is just like the words to the song, “Just,” by Radiohead, “You do it to yourself, yourself, yourself…”
