Pretending to Understand

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

No one who asks the question, “What’s your problem?” is expressing an invitation to join them in the quest for a solution. It is a statement costumed as a question. In linguistics, this sort of accusation-posing-as-a-question/concern is known by a linguistic term that I have not yet researched and may not get to today. “Accusation-posing-as-a-question,” or APAQ (™ pending) works for me, though.

It is aggressively passive-aggressive only almost approximately one-hundred percent of the time that it is uttered. The person speaking the non-rhetorical non-question is profoundly certain of one thing, is philosophically sure of this, however: That they are not now doing, nor have they just been doing, nor were they about to do, something that falls in the range between perplexing to annoying to criminal.
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Today in History: Happy Birthday, Jen!

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is the birthday of the love of my life, Jen. I keep discovering how few ways there are to say “I love you” but how wonderful it is to learn new ways to tell her.

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The Bill of Rights was approved by Congress on this date in 1789 and was readied to be sent to the states to ratify.

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Satchel Paige pitched in his final major league baseball game on this date in 1965. He was 59 years old, and Charles O. Finley, the owner of the Kansas City A’s, signed him to a single-game contract. The game was against the Boston Red Sox, and Paige started, pitched three scoreless innings, and stuck out one batter, the opposing pitcher. Paige sat on a rocking chair in the bullpen between innings.

An interview with Satchel Paige from 1958 (after the jump):
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Panic Room

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

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Any room with me in it is a panic room.

“Take my advice—I’m not using it.” I can tell you to keep calm. At my worst, I might insist that you keep calm. But as someone who can introduce stress into the least stressful, sweetly innocuous, and even some of the more pleasant experiences in life, when I am confronted with the parts of life that others find truly stressful, I hunker down and find the effort deep inside myself to make them yet more stressful.

In one of my lesser achievements in the field of stress management, I gave myself a black eye while tying my shoes. These were boots with leather laces (I am not a cowboy) and such laces can take a little effort to yank into position. While securing my “half-knot” on my right shoe, the length of lace in my left hand broke and I clocked myself in the right eye. At the time, I was 34 years old, not 11.
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