If only the world were flat. Thomas Friedman's book would make sense, and every sunset would be awesome. Also my wife would complain about one less thing. Alas, the world is not flat, and human civilization has only added to my wife's misery in its insistence on building up and even down. New York is a particularly egregious offender with its miles of skyscrapers and subways, and while elevators and escalators sometimes provide access, other times there are only stairs, which recently joined the list of things that turn my wife into a person unwilling or unable to communicate with other human beings.
(Most things on this list are states of being--being sleepy, being hungry, being hot, being cold--and several have already been chronicled. When these things overlap--when, for instance, she hasn't eaten and it's getting late--the world grows blurry, and animals act strange the way they do before earthquakes and tornadoes.)
After walking up a long flight of stairs, my wife will often ask, "Why did you make me walk up those stairs," as if it were a deliberate decision of mine to locate the F train two stories below West 4th Street. Once, before attending the opera, she protested, "You know I don't like stairs," implying that it would be better not to attend the opera if stairs were going to be involved. Our current house has not one but two sets of stairs, and it is only a matter of time before she sees this as a deep moral failing.
Possible solutions!
1) Hovercrafts
2) Only go down stairs; make people meet you there
3) Relocate to a two-dimensional universe, a la the 19th-century novel Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions (hard)
1 comment:
Wonderful post and definitly worthy of my thank you comment.:)
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