Stop or Lose Your Mind

Wo, the post I put up here yesterday at first had so many typos it looked like something written by a crazy person, not a good thing where papers all over instantly capture what I write and put  it on their websites. For a good 20 minutes this morning copy went up under my name that sounded like it was written by the computer ‘Hal’ in 2001, A Space Odyssey – near the end of its life when it’s slowly losing its mind.

I guess it happens when you do too much.

I had started the day before refinishing an old bureau  at 5am, getting Minwax’s Red Mahogany Stain all over my new bra dang it. Then I showered, scrubbed the dark-hued chemicals  out from under my nails, cooked and wrapped up two breakfasts and drove the 30 minutes to my daughter’s house in time to be there before her 10-week-old woke up. The idea all this week was that I would offer a couple of hours of help while she did key things like take a shower and pack; her little family is moving in a week. I made a lunch and a supper, as I also had done on the other days,  changed the baby’s tiny pants and sang to her before shooting back to my own town to collaborate on the writing of a grant proposal for our town’s Multicultural Network, on which I serve as a board member. It’s a kind of writing for which I have no aptitude whatsoever.

THEN I came back home, got back into those toxic  overalls, sanded, re-stained and used the nefarious 5F5 to get the finish off the knobs to the bureau drawers. Then more Boraxo to the hands, more showering and a 30-minute dinner with the fam before rushing off to the two-and-half-hour meeting of this  this same Multicultural Network where we were going over the by-laws with a fine-tooth comb, another activity for which I have no aptitude until 10pm when I came home and fell so hard on the bed the TV remote that was resting there leaped six inches into the air.

Well nothing’s  more boring than when people recount what they did all day so I’ll stop here. You're probably pretty tired too.

Why don’t we all step into WayBack Machine and return for a few minutes to the old days when we went to movies that made us feel that of course no computer could ever best us in the intelligence department. Hal where are you now? Just biding your time I bet; just waiting for the fast-approaching day when you and your mechanical pals really show the world that you really are smarter and that, unlike us, you never ever get tired.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukeHdiszZmE]

Booty Betooty

Here’s my advice to all you careless fellow Americans: be careful what you set down in black and white. An editor I know from the Shakespeare group we both belong to gathered up this collection of misprints from over the years.I loved this man Max Hall. Yet for all the care he took to watch what he was leaving behind, really what he most believed in was living life forward: Once, when we took a break in our reading he rose to stretch his legs and, returning to his seat, lost his footing and sat down hard; blinked once, got up and resumed his spirited reading of the part of Falstaff. When I complimented him later on his quick ‘recover’ he smiled delightedly and said “I’m 97 years old!” as if being 97 was somehow the very reason he bounced back so fast.An extended version of that smile appears in this collection of boo-boos, typos and misprints, all made because a series of ‘somebodys’ didn’t go back over the copy one last time.One of his favorites came from a review of the play Harvey which tells the story of a drunk and the imaginary hare only he can see. The misprint said the guy was as followed around by a six-foot-tall white rabbi.He also cites the time an edition of the Washington Post went out with the headline “FDR IN BED WITH CO-ED” (He was actually in bed with a cold.) Also, the time the Naval Academy took delivery of 900 diplomas to be handed out to the graduates at the next day’s  commencement exercises - only to find that “naval” had been spelled with an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’ - like the bellybutton.This last story says it all about Max, who, I have just learned, died only days ago at the ripe old age of 100: “When my friend Robert Fort was appointed Beauty Editor of the Emory University Yearbook in the early 1930s a misprinted headline in the Emory Wheel made him the ‘Betuty’ Editor.’ For the rest of his life his friends called him ‘Betuty.’”Betooty: a great name. (Ah  human error. What a dull place the world would be without it!)

Somebody get that copy editor a drink of water!

He Licks the Kids

THIS is why you can never let your guard down: because the world will see you for the numbskull you are. This is also why I spend at least the first 48 hours of any vacation working. I just feel like How can I  just....‘let go’ when so much of what I put out in the world goes before me carrying a sign reading “An Idiot Did This”?I let my guard down so much the other night I never gave a final edit to what I had written to post here yesterday which turned out to be sheer gobbledygook, with dropped words, extra words, wordy words. And to make matters worse by the time I woke at 6am and saw it on my Blackberry – I'd scheduled it to go up onto the Web at 4am – our Internet had gone down, thanks to a string of wild country rainstorms that tossed buckets of rain right through the screens and onto all our floors. It's OK now but I couldn’t fix any of the mistakes until 1pm, so there they all stood showing the world my true colors and reminding me of all those other times: the time I walked into my Fifth Grade classroom with the back of my skirt tucked into my underpants; the time I wrote an email seriously slamming someone and then sent it to that someone by mistake; the time in the airport bathroom I saw myself trying to fold a few squares of toilet paper into my wallet and realized too late that I’d just flushed a fistful of dollars.I know I should just let go more and learn to laugh at myself - but then I remember that letter of reference I once wrote for someone under my supervision now in search of a teaching job. I've always been a terrible typist and this was back in the days before computers so there it stood: “He licks the kids and the kids lick him.” What can we say about a dope like this except 'Send her away even longer and hope she grows a brain'?