Stubborn Streak

But not stubborn enough not to admit it.

Something in me defies logic. Those who know me will guffaw, saying that I defy logic on a frequently philosophical scale. And they may be right. But I've managed to sneak the word 'guffaw' into this post - twice - which makes it all worthwhile.

Unlike Jeffrey Archer, whose book "False Impression" I am currently perusing. Actually, the more accurate term is that I'm reading it, but 'perusing' has that somewhat Anglophile aftertaste, and I like to polish my Welsh roots from time to time. There are some words, when repeated, don't necessarily go lau hong, and I say this because like everyone else, I do have genes. Unfortunately, Archer's use of the word "limpet" is not one of them. Wind gone out already, mate. And now you're downright linguistically confused. Or you should be, in any case. Dash it if you're not.

The other little habit that Archer has - well, other than an overfocus on his time in prison - is his decision to leave details of physical descriptions a little late. So, fifty pages in, you're told that the bad guy who you figured to be an Antonio Banderas-in-Assassins type turns out to be closer to be sans hair in toto. Or the classy heroine who you figured to be the Who Framed Roger Rabbit type -


- turns out to be blond. Go back and get out your DVD of Secondhand Lions and take a gander at the deleted scenes; there's a perfect example of having to rewind and change your whole perception of things. Sounds superficial, but then I've been told I have a one-track mind.

Let's sidetrack here to a little musical joke told to me by one of the faculty back in Indiana. Silly Babbitt, serials are for kids! Get it?

Back on track. Lucky Archer still knows how to tell a story, or his suddenly blonds and his multiple limpets - plus the fact that I actually had to check up "limpet" in a dictionary and realized how long it's been since I've used something other than Wiktionary or dictionary.com - would have had me put down the book a while ago. I'm stubborn that way, which brings us back to the beginning. I tend to be hard to please as far as books are concerned (and I hear people mumbling that I'm hard to please as far as life is concerned). In recent times, I've put down just as many books read halfway as I've completed. I ditched An Equal Music, the emo-strong must-read, about three-quarters of the way through because the protaganist is a wimp and even I can't imagine thinking that the issue of arranging a chamber music concert chronologically or via the stress of changing keys is somehow life-changing. More like Bridezilla at one of the many wedding functions musicians end up in.

I'm also stubborn in sieves. I paraded the white flag of surrender at 5:30 in the morning and went to cook Maggi Mee - the mee goreng (asli!) which I oddly think is better than the real mee goreng. Which relates to reading too, because I just can't help thinking of food if the characters on the pages are chomp chomping. And I couldn't find the sieve and the water was about to boil which gave me about a countdown of four minutes to find the darn thing. The stubborn streak reared its head, which happens just about every time I look for something. I'll pick out three likely places, and when I can't find what I'm looking for the logical thing is of course to check elsewhere. But instead, I end up convinced that those three places are the most likely and I must have missed something and I end up on the merry go round rechecking the three places which are by now the three most unlikely places where the darn sieve is located. Once in a while the thing I'm looking for will actually be there hidden in the back of one of those three places, which will provide affirmation to my merry go round... instead of all those times when the darn sieve has run away like a rabbit from a gun. And while we're on this topic, "merry go round" is better said as "carousel" which Wikipedia notes "originates from the Italian garosello and Spanish carosella ("little war"), used by crusaders to describe a combat preparation exercise and game played by Turkish and Arabian horsemen in the 1100s."

Anyway that's why I'm stubborn... and random. Though I don't go streaking.

But not stubborn enough not to admit it. But just random enough to repeat it.