Mmm, Burger
One of the skills I’ve acquired as a parent is the quick scan my environment for the most distracting and least harmful object to give my child(ren). Last week, my kind sister Sydney arranged for someone to clean our house. In a frenzy of pre-cleaning prep, I somehow found myself re-organizing G. Grod’s closet.
Why, yes, I do have anxiety issues. Thanks for noticing.
Both 3yo Drake and 1yo Guppy were trying to insinuate themselves into the not-that-large closet with me, making things crowded, metaphorically weird, and fraught with danger. Each by himself has considerable mess-making power. When Drake and Guppy join forces, though, the destructive power doesn’t just increase or double, I think it squares. In other words, it’s not incremental or arithmetic, it’s GEOMETRIC. The whole is WAY bigger than the sum of the parts.
With the Entropy Brothers approaching, my recon produced a talking Simpson’s watch, which I think was a Burger King giveaway, still in the original box. I gave the box to Guppy, and the talking watch to Drake. The noise button is Homer’s voice saying, “Mmm, burger,” but with two problems. One, the watch was a freebie, so it wasn’t that high quality and good an imitation to begin with. Two, it was old. The battery was dying, so the already poor sound was slowed down and gravelly.
My distractions worked, though. Drake backed out of the closet with the watch, pressing the noise button over and over. Guppy backed out and dismantled then chewed on the cardboard box. I finished re-arranging the closet. It just took that few minutes, though, for Drake to perfect his imitation of the watch’s “Mmm, burger.” I was astonished, impressed and disturbed that Drake’s imitation was spot on–Homer’s voice, filtered through a cheap watch, with a dying battery. It was uncanny.
[Isn't this post rather like a Simpsons episode itself; it starts out with me talking about one thing, then ends somewhere very different?]