25 March 1999: Clichés

Skimming a few entries, I found a few typos, though fewer than I expected, many fewer than I made in earlier entries and would correct over a year later. I jotted those down to correct sometime Real Soon Now. I also found that I said that I'd reveal how I fractured my proverbs.

"A woman's work/is good for the gander."

Hmm. I can't think of another animal for whom the female name is the generic name and the male gets a different name, like goose and gander. Dog and bitch work the other way. Most people call all peafowl peacocks. Most animals have a generic name and two terms for the sexes, no? Horse, stallion and mare. Chicken, rooster and hen. Rabbit or deer, buck and doe. Larger animals like elephants, bull and cow. I guess cattle are named like geese, too: is there another term for a single animal of unknown sex than cow? or is the sex presumed to be so obvious that it never would be indeterminate?

"A bird in the hand/ is a friend indeed."

You'd have to be a parrot companion to understand the simple truth of that.

"Every dog/ deserves favor."

And despite bird in the hand thing, I do miss a dog.

"Every good boy/ washes the other."

I can't be certain of this, never having been a boy, but it sounded good.

"Cleanliness/is only skin deep."

A related theme.

"Dead men/ spoil the broth."

I've never resorted to cannibalism, but I'm pretty sure this would be true.

"One man's meat/ moves in mysterious ways."

This truism was the first phrase I invented on the fridge where I first saw them.

"A fool and his money/make light work."

According to Ayn Rand, a fool has no money, and she'd hate the implication that you can live off one.

"The early bird/makes the heart grow fonder."

Birds are morning people. If you knew a parrot only in the evening, you might never fall in love with it.

"Many hands/are better than one."

The many-handed massage is one of life's great pleasures.

"Great minds/ make good neighbors."

I haven't befriended any of the cat-owning, cigarette-smoking, mullet-sporting neighbors.

"Misery/ is its own reward."

Which is good, because it offers no other.

"God/makes Jack a dull boy."

Just ask Jill.

"All work and no play/ will get you nowhere."

A really rattly bus this afternoon so I didn't think I should read, particularly anything that requires as much concentration as Kangaroo Notebook. So I tried to doze. I don't regularly sleep on the bus, although when I was regularly listening to audio books I could slip into semi-awareness pretty readily. Anyway, today I thought I would just be a slacker commuter and just keep my eyes closed. Even when I did use to sleep, I was aware enough of stops and turns to gauge where we were on the route. Today, convinced I hadn't slept, I happened to lift an eyelid and realized I had missed the antepenultimate and penultimate stops before mine. Not sleeping, ha. Anyway, I woke up in time.

Cheryl, the Thursday instructor, paused the music for a few moments while she switched tapes, and through the studio, two dozen people straddled the step, left up, right up, left down, right down. The sound of four dozen sneakers scrape, shuffle, scraping, sounded like the beginning of that "Do the Bartman" video with Bart and all his classmates doing their unimaginative, humiliating dance class recital before he breaks them all out into the Bartman. That's a permanent association, especially after that ridiculous adult ed step class I took two years ago in which the music was never loud enough to drown out the sneaker taps.

Thank goodness. A new ER. "Sticks and Stones."