I was at a little league baseball game today and one of the coaches walked by the bleachers talking to a kid who was helping ump the game. The kid pointed out that his dad was the umpire behind the plate, and the coach said something to the effect of, "Hey, whoa, what, I, uh, didn't even... yeah, hey!"
It was the ultimate verbal fumble. Good thing he didn't coach football. I do it all the time, of course, but at that moment I thought to myself, "Wouldn't things run a lot more smoothly if everybody said exactly what they were trying to say?" Basically, wouldn't it be better if everyone did NCFCA or something equivalent? I mean, think of how much time we could save, how much miscommunication we could avoid if everyone communicated perfectly.
But then I started listening to a conversation between a few kids who were practicing their swings. It was so cool! They were talking about absolutely nothing and getting on each other's collective nerves, but wow. I started tuning into the conversations around me one at a time, drinking in the completely unique combinations of words.
Most of them had been made before, but the pauses, the inflections, the pitches (no baseball pun intended) - it was like music. Words are like music, really. That's why I love being a writer. Coming up with new ways to say things is so much fun.
I thought of a better way to say all of this last night, but I didn't have time to complete and post this.
Sometimes I wish God had put a "Save" button on our heads so that we could keep a record of all of our thoughts and share them with others exactly as they came to us, before getting muddled and half-forgotten at best. My blog posts would be so much more interesting and so much more honest. They would actually reflect the things I was thinking.
The written word is great, but there's something about the spontenaity of human conversation (or at least the potential for spontenaity) that's fascinating and an incredibly complex result of God's infinite creativity. There may be no original thought, but original sentences are still thriving. I'll prove it to you:
Candles in pheremones; torque your inward purples.
See? No one's ever said that before. I made sure of it by pluralizing purple.
I don't think I've ever made the most of a day. I don't think I've actually ever lived a day as if it were my last... except maybe 9/11. I was seriously certain that the world was going to end that morning. The great thing is that God is so merciful. Today he gave us another day, another chance. Hopefully he'll give us another one tomorrow, because I almost completely wasted this one.
I was thinking about that and I recorded this. 30-second folk renditions of praise songs based on Bible verses FTW!
"Sometimes I wish God had put a "Save" button on our heads so that we could keep a record of all of our thoughts and share them with others exactly as they came to us, before getting muddled and half-forgotten at best."
ReplyDeleteIKR. Or, at least, if all our brains were hooked up to word processors, there would be a whole lot more genius in this world. IMHO.
Torque is an awesome word.
Further, "rjgtzeti" was the word verification I had to type. It seemed pertinent to note.
ReplyDelete"IKR. Or, at least, if all our brains were hooked up to word processors, there would be a whole lot more genius in this world. IMHO."
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was thinking about a bunch of different things God could have done, and then I thought, "Well, he didn't. Obviously there was some reason." Still, wondering is fun, and I wonder a lot. If somebody invents a mind-reading notation system that works with Microsoft Word, though, I'm buying it.