Inflating my intellect

When I was younger, the simplest things perplexed me, and I wondered about those little things whenever I saw them again. “How does that happen?” “What does that mean?” Are my two most common questions about the normal things I observe that I can’t figure out.

For example, how do graduates sneak inflatable beach balls into graduation ceremonies? Beach balls are big, and if you tried to hide one under your robe, it would be really obvious that the miracle of pregnancy wasn’t being experienced by a male college grad. Surely as you walked past the graduation ceremony organizers, one would notice and yell, “Hey, gimme that beach ball, yah lousy bum!” But still they magically appeared.

The dilemma of the beach ball became more complicated for me when I heard rumors of inflatable sex dolls showing up at graduation ceremonies to be bounced around the heads of the graduating seniors. OK, so somehow got a beach ball into the ceremony, but a blow-up doll? That seems extra impossible. Maybe the person used a graduation robe and he walked the doll along beside him, propping it up.

The tipping point in my confusion came when a blow up doll that was supposed to represent Christina Aguilera showed up at an Eminem concert and got passed around the audience. Now I was really confused. If it came in with a concertgoer, it absolutely would have been confiscated by the security team. I’ve been to wrestling matches where the security screeners were more through than the security agents at airport screening points.

So how did the beach balls and blow-up dolls get inside? The light-bulb went off in my head, my “eureka” moment. I think I was sitting on the couch with my husband, Matthew, or riding in the car with him, or maybe it was my college best friend, Geoff, but anyway, I said, “Oh! They take them into the stadium flat and blow them up once their inside.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Beach balls at graduation. How do students smuggle them in, they’re huge. They inflate them after they get inside,” I said.

“You really just figured that out?”

“Yeah, it’s always bugged me. I mean, how could someone get that past security?” I asked.

My companion laughed hysterically, so I started laughing too.

“Really, you didn’t know before?”

“Nope, never knew,” I howled.

I was at least 25 years old at the time.

Another of my top ten list of obvious things that are confuse me is the song lyric, “Everybody’s workin’ for the weekend!” I always thought this was a sad song about a guy who wanted to go out and party on the weekend, but all his friends had weekend jobs and they couldn’t go with him. I guess this interpretation was best explained by realizing that I was a student forever and always had weekend jobs, so sometimes it was me who was “working for the weekend” and couldn’t party with my 9 to 5 friends.

Around the age of 27, I guess, I was riding in the car with Matthew, and I had the same light-bulb moment! “Oh my gosh! It means that everyone has jobs they toil at, and they get through the week by waiting for the weekend to have their fun. It doesn’t mean that everyone’s working that weekend, it means everyone works to live for the weekend.”

“You just got that?” asked Matthew.

“Yeah,” and I explained to him my premise that the dude’s friends were working that weekend so he had no one to party with.

More riotous laughter at how silly I am.

I’ve been waiting patiently for my next big discovery about obvious cultural phenomena, but if I’ve had any recently they weren’t big enough to register on the seismic scale.

Well, there was one, actually.

Last weekend, when I was in Kentucky to visit my family, my brother and I went to a blue-collar bar where he hangs out on the weekend with his 9 to five friends just like the song (har-har). The karaoke lady was playing songs to jazz people up and get them ready for the magical experience of karaoke entertainment (it’s either magnificent or like grating your eyeballs). She picked 2 Live Crew’s “Me so horny.” The chorus, “me so horny is pretty obvious to hear,” but there was another bit to the chorus I could never figure out. I heard it as, “We rock it on time.” At the working-man bar, through the excellent karaoke equipment and PA system, in the surprisingly acoustically clear concrete bunker, I heard and understood the chorus for the first time: “Me love you long time.” Wow. That was profound. My whole body tingled with the realization that this line fit the song so well where my interpretation stumbled and flinched.

I can only wonder what my next moment of clarity will be.