Les Bonnes Choses

A couple things occurred to me this evening. Actually, 3 did, but I forgot the last one, so I probably won't mention it unless I remember it by the time I am finished talking about the other two.

So, first of all, I was shopping for my dad's birthday this evening. I won't say what store it was because it might give away the surprise. Not that my dad reads my blog. Or even knows I have a blog. Or thinks that blog is a word in the English language. Anyways, I got to the checkout, and paid by credit card. Then the guy hands me the little receipt thing that I am supposed to endorse, and tells me he "just needs [my] autograph down at the bottom". It's one of those cliches that everyone in retail says -- I'm not sure why, because it's too tired to be useful for breaking up the monotony of it all. I had to pause because my brain was apparently in smartass mode. I really wanted to reply, "Shall I make this out to my number-one fan Steve, best wishes, Chris?" But I didn't.

Right afterwards, I met up with Rebecca in Toys Я Us*. And when I walked around looking for her, I remembered how I used to go there all the time as a kid -- I grew up on the street right behind it, and remember when the land on which it was built was a muddy field. Anyways, I had one of those moments when I realized that I was on the other side of the looking glass. Although I didn't buy anything for Pokey, I could have, and that's why it occurred to me that I am now in the role of a parent who goes into toy stores to buy toys for their kids, whereas my memories were of being a kid for whom the toys were being purchased. I'm not sure if I can adequately convey how deep and trippy that was, so I may have to appeal to the inadequacy of my writing if you don't believe me.

Maybe that last thing I wanted to mention concerns Deanna's word association norming study that I did. I won't give away specifics, in case she has enlisted you to help, but suffice it to say, it turns out that one of her dad's peculiar responses was not so idiosyncratic after all. If you know Deanna, feel free to ask her for details.

*I really wanted to type a backwards 'R', however I could not find an equivalent HTML Unicode character code in the two character map websites I googled.
UPDATE: I was able to select a similar character from the Cyrillic alphabet on one of the character maps, and cut and pasted it.