A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

28 February 1999 - Absurdities

In lieu of actually doing anything useful this week, I've been entertaining myself by paying attention to how many ridiculous things I see and hear. For example, there is a disturbing trend in advertising that fails to identify the product being touted. Every day I drive past a billboard on the 405 which reads "What smells better than athletes, supermodels and celebrities?" There's a pinkish smear underneath the words, but I can't figure out if this is a perfume ad or a Zen koan. Then there is a whole series of ads in one of the local weekly papers which consist of black boxes with assorted phrases in them. They might be the names of rock bands, I suppose, but the ads don't tell me anything.

Not that the ads that do tell you what product they're for tell you much more. There was an ad in one of those throwaway magazines that circulates at work which shows a picture of a garden maze with the headline "Will. Ingenuity. Perseverance. A hedge trimmer." Am I supposed to conclude that the consulting company that placed the ad will use the brute force hedge trimmer approach to save time and money? Or that they're too ingenius to need to?

Another absurdity was the interview I heard with several residents of Elizabeth Dole's home town in North Carolina. Now, the idea of Dole running for president is not all that absurd and, frankly, I've believed for a long time that our first woman president would be a conservative Republican. (I had figured on Jeanne Kirkpatrick, but Liddy Dole does fit the mold, too.) What was ridiculous was that the reporter asked one of Dole's childhood friends what would happen if Dole had to confront the prospect of war. (Note that they never ask this question of male candidates, even those with no military experience.) And the friend said that "oh, sure, Elizabeth could declare war, but she'd do it in a ladylike manner." What, pray tell, is a ladylike war? One fought with pearl handled weaponry and soldiers dressed in camouflage trimmed in ink?

Not that my own life is without absurdity. For example, I bought some very silly things at Restoration Hardware. One is useful - a flashlight with a generator so you press a handle trigger rapidly and don't need batteries. The other item was a set of measuring spoons labeled "dash, smidgeon and pinch." Obviously, they're pretty useless but it's a good joke.

And then this weekend I drove over an hour each way to walk for two hours in Orange County. It was a Volksmarch event at Irvine Regional Park and was actually a rather pleasant 10 kilometers, but I spent more time driving than walking. It did serve its intended purpose of a change of scenery from walking in my neighborhood and I got a nice patch and info on other events. I'll have to watch myself carefully or I could get obsessive about collecting Volkssports awards.

Finally, what on earth prompted the screenwriter to come up with that ridiculous intro to Alice in Wonderland on NBC tonight? Lazy daydreaming by the riverbank isn't good enough for them?