{"id":1287,"date":"2006-08-17T20:18:00","date_gmt":"2006-08-17T20:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog2\/2006\/08\/down-the-rabbit-hole\/"},"modified":"2006-08-17T20:18:00","modified_gmt":"2006-08-17T20:18:00","slug":"down-the-rabbit-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/down-the-rabbit-hole\/","title":{"rendered":"Down the Rabbit Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking a lot about the spin we put on things to feel better about them. I don’t do this often enough; I frequently torment myself with just how bad something was over and over again. Why do I want to make myself miserable? But I can’t help it. My mind gets stuck in certain tracks. Therapy and other tools have helped over the years — I won’t pretend I don’t have OCD — but still, obsessing and getting bogged down rather than spinning is part of my personality. Love me, love my bog.<\/span>
Ned and Dad are better at spinning. In my last post, I mentioned how Ned spins the whole waiting-in-line irritant, where people do not move up to just the right distance behind the next person. What is the correct distance? Dane Cook has a funny bit<\/a> about this, where he talks about a guy who was hedging, neither in one line or the other at Wal-Mart. I think the correct distance is something cultural; I actually studied this at Penn as part of my Communication degree. This study is called Proxemics<\/a>, I kid you not. The right distance is totally ethnocentric. Yet I would expect that cars from Massachusetts and Connecticut would know that one whole car length is too long a distance! Ned spins his annoyance by saying, “What does it matter? It doesn’t get us in any sooner!” Ad nauseum.<\/p>\n

Dad spins many, many things. Dad is totally Qui Gon Gin about everything<\/a>. As I have no doubt mentioned, 69-year-old Dad is a total jock who must get a lot of hard exercise daily or he will be miserable. He loves to ride his bike, and here on the Cape the bike paths are wonderful. Dad mentioned the other day a phenomenon called, “Bike Path Farn,” which is only something you will understand if you are well-versed in the book, Watership Down by Richard Adams<\/a>. Our family life and lore is suffused with stories, language, and characters from Watership Down. This book is not a child’s animal story; it is a fantastic read with fleshed-out characters, most of whom happen to be rabbits, a basic rabbit language and glossary, and a riveting adventure of how the rabbits go to find a safer place to live. <\/p>\n

The rabbits’ lives are rife with danger. They are called the creatures with a thousand enemies. Much of what they think about and do is about identifying or escaping danger. Many of us can relate, I’m sure. “Farn” is the daze a rabbit gets in when staring at something, usually something dangerous, but also mesmerizing. The headlights of a hurududu<\/span> (moving vehicle) can give a rabbit farn<\/span>, and cause him to be killed.<\/p>\n

Bike-path farn is what Dad came up with to spin his irritation with the families who gather in the middle of the bike-path, oblivious to all others, because they are so caught up in their vacation moment and enjoyment of each other, that they create a danger to themselves or other unsuspecting, fast-moving bikers. Dad’s ability to pin something annoying into a pleasurable, funny context (anything from Watership Down) helps him get on with his ride and his life. And it makes us all laugh next time we happen upon some annoying clusters of other vacationers.<\/p>\n

How do you spin your life’s torments?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking a lot about the spin we put on things to feel better about them. I don’t do this often enough; I frequently torment myself with just how bad something was over and over again. Why do I want to make myself miserable? But I can’t help it. My mind gets stuck in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-kL","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}