Saturday, August 16, 2003

As I've discussed occasionally in the past, I'm a big fan of Top5 and their weekday humor lists. It's a great, consistent source of the funny, and as such things are designed to do, will often act as a welcome break on a long work day.

From time to time, I won't have the opportunity to read them when they arrive, and I'll just let them sit. If they sit for too long, I get less interested in reading them. It's illogical, but they don't feel as fresh to me if I don't open them right away. It's the same way I feel about watching a recorded sporting event. If it's not happening right that moment, it loses much of its appeal.

Well, except for preseason football. That's another story.

But I digress. I had a couple days worth of Top5 lists and Little Fivers (subject-specific lists) piled up in my inbox when I got up this morning. I slogged through a few, not really enjoying them at all. It's not that they weren't funny. I just wasn't in the mood at that moment. But I worried that I'd be even less interested later in the day or tomorrow. So I read them.

When I opened the last one, it suddenly hit me how ridiculous I was acting. Why was I forcing myself to do something I should be enjoying? Were they going to go to waste? Are there humor-starved children in China who would love to have any Top5 list, regardless of how fresh it was?

It was just one of those little epiphanies we all regularly have. A brief moment of self-awareness, potentially leading to self-improvement, is an ideal way to start off a lazy late-summer Saturday.

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I had dinner with my folks last night, and we got to discussing the grape-sampling woman I wrote about earlier this week. They had read that post, and the Grape Thief's rationale ("That's what my mom did!") put my father in mind of one of his favorite stories.

A woman was preparing a roast for dinner. As she'd learned by watching her mother, she started by cutting both ends off the roast.

She stopped and wondered, for the first time in her life, why she was cutting away and wasting perfectly good meat. It didn't make any sense, but she'd done it unquestioningly for as long as she'd been cooking. Puzzled, she called her mother.

When presented with this question, the woman's mother had no idea why she'd engaged in the practice, either. It was something she'd picked up from her mother, the woman's grandmother. The mother said she'd call the grandmother and get to the bottom of things.

A few minutes later the woman's mother called back, and she was laughing. It turned out that the grandmother used a very small roasting pan, and cutting the ends off the roast was the only way to get it to fit.

Posted @ 10:42 AM

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