Wednesday, February 13, 2008

On being rigged

Nearly every day, at around 6:00 pm, I put a dvd on for the boys and I go upstairs to do yoga. I used to have issues about letting them watch tv on school days, but I got over that quickly. Of course, being able to rationalize helps - the dvd is always in English and they need all the exposure to English they can get. Even Disney exposure.

Anyway, part of the routine deals with me going back downstairs at least 3 or 4 times to fix the stupid cord that goes between the dvd player and the tv. Don't tell me to change the cord, I already have, twice. It's a problem in the little slit things. I'm not a particularly mechanically inclined person, I wish I were. I can put together Ikea furniture, without swearing, and that's about it. I've never been great with my hands, I'm much better with my mouth. I often talk my way out of a situations I can't fix. But try talking to a prise péritel.

So yesterday evening, at the end of my going-up-and-down-the-stairs rope, I looked for a less stressful solution. After several tries, I found the perfect toy to wedge in between the tv and the hard part of the cord, holding it in exactly the right position. It's a cube, with monkeys on it, and it's perched, maintaining balance on just one point.

Which brings me to the real topic of this post and to the second person pronoun.

You've been rigged, haven't you? You probably even did the rigging yourself. But perhaps you forgot that rigging is a temporary solution. There is no permanence to it. And yet, the oddest thing happened. That ridiculous position you were in, perched, like those monkeys on that cube, balancing on a point, came to seem so normal. How on earth did you get used to that? How could you possibly have believed you had achieved any balance at all? You have edges, not just points. Use them.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There are days when everything is rigged - it's how I get thru them. By the way, great rigging with the monkey thing