By Marla Boone
Contributing columnist
You know those days that give a person hope? These are the days when the coffee pot actually turns on at the correct time. You wake up to the indescribable, luxurious aroma of freshly brewed coffee and the smell alone lures you into a vertical position. These are the days the trash company finally decides that a 3 a.m. pick-up is not strictly necessary. The lid-rattling, can-manipulating refuse cascade just doesn’t happen. Peace reigns. These are the days no pet suffered an unguarded moment of raging incontinence. The carpet is dry. Your vulnerable, unshod, recently unbedded feet are not met with a squishy mess or, worse, a squishy smelly mess.
On days steeped in such perfection, first of all be grateful. A happy life really is about finding pleasure in simple things. Second of all, enjoy them. You never know how many of these treasures you’re going to be the lucky recipient of. Third of all, beware of actions from the bummer desk. Isn’t that term just filled with foreboding? Bummer desk. I wish I had made that up. Instead, credit goes to Dave Barry whose other bon mots (French for “good mots”) include booger beat. According to Dave, the bummer desk is the department responsible for ruining, as we say in Troy, your feng shui.
The bummer desk is unhappiness central. It causes the coffee pot to turn on, but to run over. The bummer desk is the place that induces you—-oh the humanity—-to forget to put ground coffee in the filter. The bummer desk is where trash companies get their idea to resume 3 a.m. pick-ups. Twice a week. Plus Saturday. The bummer desk is the malignant entity that feeds your dog some semi-rancid racoon and a quart of water right before bed time.
In Dave Barry’s case, it was the party responsible for the issuance of a report stating that left-handed people live an average of nine years less than right-handed people.
What is difficult to understand is why this is so. Is it because some heretofore unheard of chemical in the brain says, “Hey, it’s not bad enough that every desk, every scissors, every everything is made for right-handers. I’ll put the icing on the cake by icing left-handers early, so to speak.” What is not difficult to understand is that the study was done at all. This just screams busy-work. We can only hope this isn’t a government project funded by you-know-who. Your tax dollars at work in a meaningless, stupid way that accomplishes nothing and upsets the twelve per cent of the population that not only has to run their hand through their recently-written words but also must now worry about falling over dead before their time.
Having many smart friends, I have listened to some interesting topics for PhD dissertations. I have even understood one or two. One friend of mine, a mathematics genius who does something for the Air Force he is forbidden to talk about, wrote a two hundred seventy-eight page dissertation on some facet of math that did not contain a single number. It was all letters. It’s on a shelf somewhere with a hundred dollar bill tucked into the pages. He is that sure no one will ever read it.
The study on the life span (or lack thereof) of left handers sounds like a research project made up just so someone would have something to write a paper on.
Much has been made of the fact that of the latest fifteen presidents, seven of them have been left-handed. Some of those presidents were pretty good. (Can you say balanced budget, thank you Bill Clinton? And, please, before you start composing the hate mail, remember I said he was a good president, not a moral giant.) In 1992, the three major party candidates for presidents were all left-handed. Two of them have died but I think that has more to do with their being in their nineties than it does with being left-handed. Maybe I could write a paper on it.
Marla Boone resides in Covington and writes for Miami Valley Today
