I have been visiting my parents for about a week. To say that I have not done much in the way of visiting humanity is accurate. More accurately, I am something like Howard Hughes meets Boo Radley. When I come home in August, I spend most of my days in my parents’ house being catered to by mom, watching baseball with dad, and working. I know this doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s 100 degrees outside and we have air conditioning so any opinions stop mattering to me when it’s a public health issue.
Once a year, my sister and I enjoy a day completely void of work and completely filled with pleasure and self-spoiling. We go swimming, get massages, eat cheesesteaks, drink at a pub, go shopping for stationery, and work a diner breakfast in there somewhere. We gossip and talk about movies and say how much better drinking is when you don’t do shots all the way up until we start doing shots, then we switch to talking about how great shots are. As this is everything I enjoy about being alive wrapped into one day, I was very for this plan.
My sister picked me up early. It was rainy, so instead of swimming (aka the only quasi-physical activity planned) we called an audible and went for breakfast. I find little difference between omelettes and the breaststroke, so I saw this as the warm up to the massages that swimming was supposed to be. Also, anyone who can say no to scrapple doesn’t deserve a massage.
With still an hour to kill before massages I suggest a visit to the pet shop next door the massage place. I need a new leash for the pup. It is called Pet Valu. Yes, I know. I can’t mentally manage the editorial choice of cutting off the e in value. As the e in value is silent, I understand the editors seeing it as a superfluous letter. But Valu without the e just looks weird and unnatural, not as if some genius realized the efficiency of cutting of the e to save time and space, but as if Value had a bad motorcycle accident and needed its e amputated.
This is the thing with our occupational hazards. An orthodontist might take a day off to go golfing and spend the whole time in the club rearranging his waitresses’ canines. A
And I as an editor and teacher spend the whole day finding language tidbits which make my teeth itch.
With Pet Valu closed down for good, no doubt due to its clientele’s distaste for their imbalanced sign, we went to the safe haven of Target. Target is better than Walmart. There is no evidence to support this claim other than it is and everyone knows it. We look at shirts and then are drawn to journals where we spend the better part of thirty minutes deciding on which journal to get. The world is again a good place of balance and decent editorial decisions.
We get into my sister’s car and the car parked opposite us has driven through the spot, so we are looking at the back. An advertisement tells me that the car belongs to a driving school. A boy in the driver seat and a woman in the passenger seat are speaking. As we pull out, I see the sticker on the bumper: DRIVEN2DRIVE.com.
Now hang on.
Is it:
- Driving to drive (as in, I am driving now so that I may drive later0
- Driven to drive (as in driven to drink, as in man that girl drove him nuts, he was driven to drive)
Or
- Driven to drive (as in man, I am very encouraged and determined to drive)
I don’t know.
Option 1 makes sense. It implores those around the driver of this vehicle for patience in this trying time of learning and mistake. One can almost hear an apologetic tone in it. Hey, be nice, I’m driving to drive.
Option 2 doesn’t make much sense. Who has ever heard such a comment? And who gets so stressed or upset that they are made to drive? Plus, if this is used as an advertisement for driving, their school, their teachers, or the act of studying to drive, then it’s a bad one.
Option 3 is also possible, but who’s telling us this? Is the teacher driven to drive? Is the student? Is everyone driven to drive?
Creating an overview of this and organizing my thoughts on each are how I spend the majority of my massage. I basically miss my peppermint scalp massage and I only really come to when my feet are tickled during my sole knuckling.
At our post-massage pub visit, I realized that going out at all was a massive mistake. I should have stayed in my parents living room and avoided such unpleasant language. Which is what I shall do from now on. Also, we have air conditioning.
