I might tell you that today I am soaring with the Turkey vultures. Or that I would rather be asleep. Who knows what I will say, and that includes my selves, err I mean myself I could be finer than frog hair, or lower than a turtle in a ditch. Tickled pink or wondering if anyone got the license number of the truck that hit me. Somewhere along the life's line, I decided that the standard response of "fine and yourself?' was a convention of society not an honest answer. That doesn't mean I believe that a litany of woes is a good answer either...it's good have a positive attitude and speaking your mind can result in a much more spirited conversation. Since I don't know how to text I'm forced to us plain old fashioned words, which includes the charms of inflection and nuance.
I also love it when people ask me what I am doing, they don't expect to hear making jam, folding laundry, sorting dried beans, they expect to hear "not much" or "nothing" At one point someone said to me, "I ask you what you are doing because you are always doing something interesting." I replied something like I was washing the floor. In fact even those of us blessed with interesting lives have to do some cleaning once in awhile, of course no more than necessary, because housework really is unhealthy, all those nasty cleaning chemicals, falling off step ladders, getting ones finger caught in mouse traps, mouse traps carry Hanta virus!!! I know this to be absolute truth because I made it up.
But I digress, often actually, my deep and abiding feeling is that "nothing" or "not much" is something one says to mitigate any sense of interrupting someone's day, on the part of a caller who doesn't have enough to keep them occupied. Or may-be not. who knows? Especially necessary on days when one has convinced themselves that they will do some task that they just plain don't want to do.
I know that this picture has nothing to do with what I was rambling on about, but I always liked those little wax bottles filled with sweet syrupy stuff.
