u/fujimidai

At lunch time today, I decided I wanted to have a specific energy drink with my meal.

I have only ever drunk one can of an energy drink, as I grew up before they were a thing.

A month ago, my high school daughter and I were at a store where the name of the store used to tell you the price of everything in the store, but now it is just a reminder about a faceless Vice President of Marketing who made a suggestion about holding the line on pricing in the face of rising costs shortly before they were told to hand in their keys to the executive washroom and be off the premises in ten minutes Or Else.

As we stood in front of a small refrigerator containing energy drinks, my daughter told me that she was very angry (she was exaggerating for humorous effect; the vibe she was giving off barely rose to the level of "miffed") at a certain energy drink company because each individual can was so expensive. I noted that the price of each can in the refrigerator fairly demanded that the store be merged with another store named "The $1.75 Store, Plus Tax" so that the combined total of the resulting store name would begin to resemble the price of the individual cans of energy drinks.

She then proceeded to explain that there was only one good flavor offered by this specific energy drink company, all the other flavors tasted like battery acid. But this one flavor was "the bomb" (which I took to be a good thing), especially when it was cold.

We left the store without purchasing any energy drinks. I was willing to buy one for her (refer to the first clause in the first sentence of the next paragraph), but she declined on principle.

As I am desperate to secure my child's love (especially since she will be going off to college later this year which means that I am running out of time to do so), once we returned home I did a little research on the web, and found that I could buy a case of that flavor at a per can price that was much less than the price she had complained about. (I could probably buy "Lemon Double Citrus War of Attrition Battery Acid Flavor" or any of the other battery acid flavors at that price as well, but my focus was solely on the flavor desired by my daughter. I am nothing if not focused.)

So I ordered a case of 24 cans, and a few days later it came, and when I presented it to her, she was duly pleased. She is a smart young woman, so I did not need to say, "Don't drink it all at once," even though every fiber of my being was straining at the leash to say it because as Dad it is my sworn duty to give out lots of helpful, obvious advice.

Since I had never had an energy drink before, I asked her if she minded if I had one, too, and of course she said that was fine. So we put a couple cans in the refrigerator, and then later we each had a can of cold energy drink.

I liked it.

So that was the one can of energy drink that I have ever had in my life, as I mentioned about 27 paragraphs earlier.

Today I decided to have another. But I had bought the case for my daughter, so in my legalistic mind they were now hers, and I therefore felt that I should ask for her permission before drinking one. (I am pleased to say that even without being told not to, she had not drunk them all at once.)

So I grabbed a can from the basement refrigerator, and then went to her room to make my request. (Since she is a senior in high school, she is in that weird last three months of school where the seniors hardly ever have to actually be in school because everyone has kind of figured out that nothing much is gonna change one way or the other anyways, so she had come home early today.)

As I neared her room, I put my hand over my mouth and started making a respirator sound (shi-puhh, shi-puhh, or is it puh-shaa, puh-shaa?) and then stood in her bedroom doorway and said in a deep, muffled voice: "I am taking another can of energy drink. Pray I do not drink another." She said fine and laughed politely, much in the way that you might laugh for a small child who proudly told you that they made up a joke: "Do you know what Old MacDonald has on his farm? Hamburgers, french fries, and milkshakes!!!"

That was this afternoon.

This evening, for reasons that you would no doubt find so incredibly humorous, and then touching, and then enlightening in the metaphysical sense that they would possibly make you want to go to a monastery in Tibet to become a monk and live out your days in meditation on the meaning of suffering and impermanence, I read a longish note that I had written in 2012 or so to her older brother when he was about 16 years old, battling a stubborn case of "messy room." The note, a masterpiece that received many awards in its day, implored my son to pick up the clutter in his room and to put away his clean laundry when his stepmother was kind enough to fold it and put it in a basket in his room.

I had previously told my son he was free to use the work area in the basement, but on reconsideration I decided that giving him permission to increase the number of areas in the house in which he went about his cluttering was not wise, so at the end of my note I told him that unless he had a specific large project that simply could not be accommodated within the confines of his work space in his own room, I was rescinding my permission to use the basement work area. I closed the note by writing:

" I realize I am altering the deal.  Pray I don't alter it any further.  (puhh-shhh....puhh-shhh)"

(OK, now we know that it is "puh-shhh...puh-shhhh"...man, I used to be so much smarter.)

So here it is, almost 15 years ago I wrote an allegedly humorous note to my son in which I make a Darth Vader joke, and then tonight I happened to reread (unintentionally, and for unrelated reasons) that note on the very same day that I had earlier made basically the same joke to his younger sister.

I assume that one of the universe quality control techs decided that a 50-year-old Star Wars reference can probably be safely dropped from my parenting repertoire. But I have such a small amount of material, I don't feel that I can give it up.

By the way, the second can of energy drink that I ever drank in my life (earlier today) was just as good as the first, which is not surprising since they were the same flavor. But if you would like to know why I had never drunk (drank? drinked? gedrunken?) any energy drinks before, I will point out that it is currently 1:46 am, I am wide awake, and I drank that bad boy twelve hours ago.

I spend my lunch break in my car. As I walked out of the building today, I saw the clouds to the west were quite dark. When I last looked at a weather forecast, it was predicting thunderstorms between 11:00 am and 1:00 pm. It looked like the predicted weather was going to be accurate.

I stopped and was about to go back in to spend a rare lunch in the break room, when I ran into young coworker, who is generally friendly and optimistic, probably an unavoidable side effect of being youthful. I like him.

I mentioned my meteorological concerns as they related to where I would spend my lunch half hour, and speculated that I would be returning to the building in a downpour.

He pointed out that the car would be quiet and peaceful and relaxing, and I thought, yeah, it is like that, and besides, I had some Wint-O-Green Lifesavers in the car, so I told him I would risk coming back to the building sopping wet.

The rain was coming down hard with lightning and thunder. It has been pleasant, though, listening to the rain as I type.

I'll be sopping wet for a few minutes at my desk, but it is not a bad trade. The rain is now less than when I typed the title, so it looks like my hubris will only get a slap on the wrist

I have only gotten about six massages in my life, and I think I fell asleep during three of them.

I can totally understand that it might seem disrespectful of the massage, so to speak, but it is relaxing and frankly I am frequently tired.

Did I commit multiple faux pas as a client?

If anyone is familiar with how this issue is perceived in Japan, please chime in because these mostly happened in Japan, but I am also interested in how it is viewed elsewhere.

About five days ago, backing my car out of the driveway with my high school daughter in the car, I went gently over the "end-of-the-driveway" curb normally and then continued backing into the street when the car started making a scraping noise like "$2000.00," as in how much it was threatening me to cost to repair.

I stopped the car and got out and bent over to see if there was a large branch or small metallic child caught underneath, but it was nighttime and I didn't want to get down on my hands and knees for a careful look because we were in a mild hurry and didn't have the fifteen minutes it would take for me to stand up again. So I took a quick cursory look under the driver's side door area and didn't see anything there.

My daughter was telling me to come around to the passenger side and look there, but there were some teenage girls practicing dance moves or something on the front lawn of the house across the street on that side, and I didn't want them to laugh at me as I looked under the car in an undignified manner, so I just climbed back into the car and decided to see if the car had healed, because sometimes they do that.

And sure enough, as I put the car in drive and slowly moved forward, it didn't make any weird noises. It was cured! So I gingerly drove away, proud of my faith in natural mechanical healing, and we didn't experience any difficulties at all. And nothing happened for the next few times I drove the car to work.

And then last night my wife and I decided to go out for a casual dinner of Thai curry somewhere, and as I backed out of the driveway again, the car started making a noise like "No, really, I'm telling you, $2000.00."

Since it was still sunny out and there were no dancing teenagers in the vicinity, I decided to get down for realsies and take a good, thorough look under the front of the car. And I could see a black plastic panel/cover hanging down in an abnormal but casual manner.

It was about four inches off the ground and was hanging in the direction that would catch for a bit on the road when I was going in reverse, bouncing over the curb.

So it looked like it would be OK for the moment, as long as I didn't do anything stupid while driving, which is normally a big ask, but it worked out OK. We had delicious Thai curry, she had green, and I had red, but the waitress convinced me to try their panang curry when we go back. And I managed not to back over any large potholes at high speed and thus rip the hanging cover off the bottom of the car. All in all, a successful evening.

Back at home last night and today I thought about the car while living my best sedentary life and decided that I should take a look and see if it was possible to use some zip ties to secure the cover up more tightly to the underside of the car. Then the next time I took my car to our mechanic for an oil change, he could have a good laugh at my handiwork and then charge me $300 to replace the piece of plastic splash shield that I see I can buy on the Internet for about $30.00. But it would be worth it to fix it, and at least it was not $2000.

So I got out my trusty zip ties, and prevailed upon my high school daughter to come out and help, which would basically involve handing me a decent size zip tie or whatever else I might need while I am lying under the car, saving me the aforementioned 15-minute minimum standup time.

But when I started to shimmy on my back under the car to get a better look, I remembered that I have an abnormally large head (very long front to back...think the monster in "Alien"), so that if I faced upward, my nose was about a centimeter from the underside of the front bumper. It felt like it was going to be difficult to work like that.

So I called out to my daughter, "I think I am going to ask you to try to take a look to see whether there are any zip-tieable holes, because my head is too big." And she reminded me that she has received the gene for Alien skull herself, but she is overall smaller than I am, so in the end she agreed to at least try.

And then she made the fantastic suggestion of spreading out what she called the "Ikea mat," a heavy duty blue sheet that I keep in the back of the minivan. If you like, you can guess where I bought it.

If we spread out the sheet on the driveway and under the car, she wouldn't get her clothes dirty, "so that mama doesn't have to do more laundry." And it was easier to slide around on the mat instead of the asphalt of the driveway.

This little essay is already about five times longer than I intended, so I will spare you the hilarious details of how my daughter, my wife (she saw we were working under the car, and she knows that she is the most capable of all of us, so she came out to help) and I were able to secure the panel to the car with zip ties successfully, so I do not expect we will have any more scraping noises at the end of the driveway.

Anyways, they went back into the house while I began my fifteen minute standup procedure, and then I proceeded to put away the mat. And as I was folding the blue vinyl reinforced Ikea sheet back up, I realized that when my daughter called it the "Ikea mat," I should have put on my best Admiral Ackbar voice and said, "It's a tarp!" But I didn't. Another missed opportunity.

I was the youngest child out of five, and my sister (who was older than me by five years) took part in an student-written and -produced musical variety show while she was in high school. The school AV Club made an audio recording of the performance, and they even had a record album pressed for students to buy, and my sister did.

I had seen the performance and enjoyed it, so 11 year old me enjoyed listening to the album. Repeatedly. Much more than my sister ever did or would have wanted to. I cannot overemphasize how much I listened to this album. It got to the point that I memorized the words to all of the songs.

There was one skit that was a parody of the "rescue a princess from a dragon" type of fairytale, with one set of prospective heroes being a group of scientists from IBM (which would be the tech equivalent of Apple or Google back then, 1974 or so).

The scientists had a catchy intro song...I wish I could convey the bouncy music that it played with, but just the lyrics will have to suffice:

"Oh, we're the men from IBM,
With computers we just cannot fail
To win the heart of the maiden fair
....."

...and that is where my personal memory degradation breaks off the lyrics...oddly, I do know the melody that follows.

For reasons I won't go into right now, IBM has bounced back into my personal mental environment lately, so this incomplete snippet of a song has emerged from its grave in my cerebral cortex, merrily skipping and flouncing through my brain until it runs face first into the brick wall of Stuff I Have Forgotten. Repeatedly. Over and over. On a daily basis.

There are other fragments of this song that I also half recollect, where the Men from IBM are saying what they propose to do to the pernicious dragon:

Slowly building up: "...We'll bisect all his rhombuses..." (pause, and then triumphantly:) "And stick them up his tesseract!" (Well, remember, these were high school students, so geometry was front of mind for them.) This was followed by: "Then we'll find the segment line..." and again the void opens and I can recollect no more. I cannot remember what they will do to the dragon after they find his segment line. I want to remember, but can't.

Being a student run production from 1974, the source material is utterly unGoogleable. I have no hope of filling in these gaps. So I am stuck trying to work, or eat dinner, or mow the lawn, or drive my car with echoes of incomplete snippets of a high school variety show from fifty years ago bouncing around inside my cranium. "Oh, we're the men from IBM..."

I studied and then worked in Japan in the late 1980s. My first job out of school was as a "native checker" at a computer company. This meant that I proofread the English translations produced by the local translators that the company used.

One Japanese translator was a tall, burly man. If he had been American and the same relative size as he was among Japanese, his nickname might have been "Big Hoss." He was very stoic and serious and quiet, and hardly said anything to me, or to anyone...he just worked on his translations while he was in the office. I don't remember his name, so I'll just call him Mr. Tanaka here.

There was a Shakey's Pizza across the street from our building, and they had an "all you can eat pizza buffet " deal for lunch, and the young people in our office would go there once in a while, myself included.

There was only one time that I ever encountered Mr Tanaka outside of the office, and it was waiting in line at this Shakey's during lunch break one day. I said some sort of greeting to him, and maybe he said a normal greeting back, maybe he didn't. Whether he did or not, he then said in English, completely out of the blue, "I shot at Americans with a machine gun during the war."

I cannot emphasize enough, he did not say this in a threatening or intimidating manner, or with a glare or a scowl...nor did I sense that he was trying to shock me or get a reaction. He said it very apropos of nothing.

I also didn't get any sort of confessional vibe, or any sort of "Hey, if we are working together, maybe you should know this about me" feeling from him. Besides, I wasn't about to hold a grudge against him for doing his job ("shooting at Americans") when he was a young man drafted into his country's army during a war forty years earlier.

In short, I could not read his expression or body language for any clues as to why he said this then and there, in line for pizza at Shakey's.

I do not remember exactly what I said in response. I was taken aback...not because of the content of what he said, but just at the abruptness of the comment. I probably said something like "Wow. Really? That's ...interesting." I was too young and poor at conversation to be able to say much of anything else.

And that's basically where the conversation ended, if you can even call it that. I eventually sat with my young coworkers, and he sat by himself, and nothing changed about his interactions with me in the office afterwards.

I may have missed a chance to have a very profound conversational experience, or maybe I avoided getting drawn into something very unpleasant. I'll never know.

I just now went through a bout of synchronicity...

Background: A few weeks ago, I posted a story on another thread about my drive to work. A commenter replied that I should read Stephen King's short story "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" because it kind of tied in thematically.

It so happens that I had read that short story forty years ago...it is in a collection of King's short stories called Skeleton Crew. I remembered reading the story, but not even the general plot of it. I knew I still had the paperback book somewhere in the house, so I thought that maybe sometime I would pull it out and read the short story.

Last week, I did find the book and read the short story, and it reminded me of why I liked King's stories. I resolved to read some of the other stories in the book in the near future.

None of that is what I am referring to as synchronicity, it was simply the course of reasonable events that set up today.

This morning, I was scrolling through Reddit, and one of the thread titles that rolled by was something like "Why does 'fridge' have a 'd' and 'refrigerator' does not?" I didn't open the thread because it didn't really spark my interest, but it was an odd enough question that I remembered it.

This afternoon, I picked up the Stephen King collection again, and decided to read "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet." The title was interesting, but like the other story, I had forgotten the details.

In the middle of the story, one of the characters mentions that they once knew "an almost screamingly literate writer...who used to spell 'refrigerator' with a 'd'..."

Whoa. OK, I thought, I'll write a little thing for r/PointlessStories later about this...

I resumed the story, and on the very next page, it contained a phrase that you don't hear every day, except this week you do: "Logan's had apparently decided to eighty-six the fiction department."

Whoa, whoa. OK, I'll write a little thing for r/PointlessStories later about this right now.

And so, I just did.

Twenty years ago, the first spring that my wife and I were together, I took her to a nursery. Not a baby nursery, which we would not need for a few more years at that point, but a garden plant nursery.

It was a new experience for her, because she had never been interested in gardening, and she also did not know a lot of English. I was happy to answer her questions. It was fun to look at the plants together.

We came across a few flats of a flower that I had never seen before. I had been planting flowers every year for about fifteen years at that point, so it was unusual for me to find something that was new to me.

If you know what Celosia is, it had vibrant yellow and red colors like Celosia, but it wasn't the feathery shape of Celosia, it was kind of mounded and had folds...in short, it resembled a colorful piece of human brain.

My wife asked, "What's that?", and without much thought I said, "It's called Brain Flower." (It is really called "Cockscomb.")

Now, I am playful and sometimes make dry comments with a straight face, but I am also aware that it is not fair to do that with someone who has no way to know that you are kidding, especially if that person exercises a healthy dose of skepticism and asks, "...Really?"...If you double down and say "Yes, of course" or something equally confident without a hint of a grin or chuckle, they will have no reason not to believe you. It is incumbent on you, the Deceiver, the Deceptor, the Liar of Many Tongues to come clean and reveal the truth after a reasonably short period of time

So when I answered "Yes, absolutely" to my wife's skeptical "Really?", I fully intended to admit after a moment that I was just making it up, but I must have gotten distracted by some other flower and promptly forgot to correct the misinformation.

We did buy a flat of that flower because it was unusual, and planted it in the garden. It must have been a month or two later when she casually said something like "The Brain Flowers look really nice."

...Ooops. "Yeah, about that..." Anyways, to this day she is wary of anything I say that seems even slightly unreal.

By the way, about that name "Cockscomb..."