3 Complaints & a Funny Story

Awfully tempting to use this as a forum for griping about whatever minor detail of life has annoyed me on a particular day, but being a professional grouch is a very niche role and unlikely to be a redeeming quality in a young woman. Besides, the position is already filled by Roger Ebert, Jack Cafferty, and, when the Democrats are in office, Rush Limbaugh (Oscar the Sesame Street Muppet does not count because you’d be a grouch too if you spent your life with someone else’s arm up your backside).

Here, in chronological order, are the things that I will endeavor not to complain about:

1. The freshman in the car behind me doing her make-up with full Hollywood intensity who does not realize that not even the face of Aphrodite herself will save her from a life as an insignificant dust mote on the lowest shelf of the twenty-first century.
2. The lab assistant in my Well-Respected Nursing Program who insisted that “paranesia” was a word synonymous with “proprioception.” Fact: it is not a word, except for someone on Facebook who has called themselves “Chocobee Paranesia.”
3. The mysterious inability of the professors in my Well-Respected Nursing Program to feed 47 test forms into the grading machine, or even consider doing so, when the computer lab manager is on vacation.

And now, to ensure my status as a non-grouch, here is a true story to tell at parties as your own:

The children I baby-sit, Hansel and Gretl (OK, the names are not true), are unreasonably intelligent for their ages. Hansel is 8 and excels at asking questions to which there are no answers. Most recently he correctly observed that I was taller than his mother but not his father, and asked why men were taller than women. Faced with the options of, A) explaining the humane genome to an 8-year-old, and B) giving an innocuous back-up answer, I chose the latter which in this case was, “that’s just the way God made them.”

I did this merely to invoke a mysterious authority on the matter rather than involve a deity in the discussion, but Hansel paused for approximately 0.001 seconds before telling me, “That doesn’t sound right, I’m pretty sure it’s the result of a hereditary genetic shift.”

At which point I explained the human genome to him and he spent the afternoon building one out of Lego’s.

Lastly, as a semi-useless side-note for those of you with small children, I do know that Oscar the Grouch does not truthfully have someone’s arm up his backside. In point of fact, I suppose he has someone’s HEAD up his backside, since full-body muppets like Oscar, Big Bird, and Cookie Monster are usually performed by puppeteers with their head and shoulders inside the puppet’s body, one hand in the muppet’s head to work the mouth and the other in the  left arm. The muppet’s empty arm is connected by fishing line to the mobile one so it moves in opposition with it and does not look empty. As an even more useless side-note, almost all muppets are left-handed because almost all puppeteers are right-handed and need that arm to work the mouth.