why am i beating my head against this brick wall? that hippopotamus song is playing. again. it will never stop playing.

1. Parallel Thinking. Or was it Lateral Thinking.
My sweet uncle donated a book of riddles for me to use on the kids. I was delighted and curious. The point being about getting to think in parallels. Or laterals. Anyhow, the scene at breakfast is me reading the first one (from the easy section) to Sim.

The Man in the Elevator

For a start, here’s one of the oldest and best-known lateral thinking problems. It goes like this:

A man lives on the tenth floor of a building. Every day, he takes the elevator to the first floor to go to work or to go shopping. When he returns, he always takes the elevator to the seventh floor and then walks the remaining flights of stairs to his apartment on the tenth floor. Why does he do this?

We both laugh nervously. Then, a long pause, in which we come to the same uncomfortable conclusion that we are both Girls Who Are Not Very Smart.

Finally Sim blurts out, “Because of his big belly??”

Mamie, on the phone later, snaps: “He clearly has a crush on the person so only rides the whole way up when he’s with her!”

The answer is: “He is a dwarf.”

In other words, the answer is that parallel thinking is designed to send you zooming off at a perfectly equal distance to reason and logic, with no chance of ever intersecting truth.

Or else, as Mamie suggests: it reveals your own insecurities/obsessions (Sim=health, Mamie=dating, Me=nothing, a giant blank. Because the kids have, in the night, replaced my brain with a dirty sock.)

2. Me, You, and Everyone Mamie Knows

Her life should be some sort of musical. Am convinced she rolls out of bed in the morning, is dressed by bluebirds, and skips out of the house lilting, "Bonjour! Bonjour!" Or, alternatively, “Can I get a tall, with-whip, non-fat, sugar-free, toffee-nut latte? And would you mind, is it okay, could you add half a Splenda to that? Oh, and a Venti ice water? Thank you so much, Pierre.” That’s one of our early phone calls. Later, on call 55, she is speed-walking through the park, greeting the homeless and calling encouragements to firefighters. In the background, a perpetual chorus of: “Mamie! Hi Mamie!”

She’s even more insufferable right now because: Mamie has a BOYFRIEND. She asked me to blog about it, so I want to make sure you all heard me. His name is Carlyle. They’re going on 72 hrs, so I’m already worried about having to buy a yellow Galliano and elbow gloves. I won’t do it Mamie.

There are a few problems with Mamie dating anyone. She goes all soft and giggly and I have to hang up. The man is deluded enough to use words like heartbreaker. More giggling. And my final point on the subject: the other morning, I woke up to find myself in the same room as them. As in, my phone rang at 730, and I was suddenly on speaker phone with Carlyle talking to me—both of us groggy—while Mamie brushed her teeth in the bathroom. That can never happen again.



3. The story of an hour. Or, in our case, an hour that is then repeated endlessly and so constitutes our lives. Or, the answer is that parallel thinking is designed to send you zooming off at a perfectly equal distance to reason and logic, with no chance of ever intersecting truth.



5pm: The kids are going to their mother.



515pm: No, their father.



520: They have two different sets of tickets. Leaving from the same city. On the same day.


6pm: They might be staying here.


4. Milne.

"Hallo, Rabbit," said Pooh, "is that you?"
"Let's pretend it isn't," said Rabbit, "and see what happens."

***

One fine day Pooh stumped up to the top of the forest to see if his friend Christopher Robin was interested in Bears at all.