O, Where the Mind Goes, by Nils Parker

People spend a lot of time sitting around, waiting for things to be over. Whether we’re on the subway, on a flight, or on the toilet, we spend hours every week with nowhere to go and nothing to do. This is not an original thought. Recognition of it has led, in many ways, to things like the Kindle, underground cell phone service, screens in the backs of airline seats, and the popularity of Dave Barry.

I rarely take advantage of those cultural and technological innovations when I find myself with time to kill. Instead, I let my mind go. I find things in my immediate vicinity, give all my senses over to them, and before long my mind is racing around like a chubby housewife in the final round of Supermarket Sweep.

It has been 10+ years since I began evolving into the type of person who could think about things other than sex, drinking, sports, and farting. In that time, my mind has gone to absurd and interesting places. I’ve figured out how to distinguish between Chinese and Vietnamese people just by smell. I’ve cracked the chicken-or-egg causality dilemma. I’ve developed a complete and logically consistent social order predicated on the ability to kill someone who cuts you off in traffic and causes an accident. I’ve purposely over-hydrated and held my bladder so that I could time my subsequent urination in an attempt to beat my previous personal best (WR: 508 sec, PR: 109 sec).

None of these things are that particularly interesting anymore, at least not to me. Who cares whether the chicken or the egg came first? They’re both delicious. A couple of things, however, still fascinate me.

J is for Jesus, there aren’t many Js out there

Several years ago, I spent the better part of 36 hours in a bathroom while my digestive tract tried to turn my lower intestine inside out. Thirty-six hours with nothing to do but moan and wipe. This was before cell phones had games on them, or the Internet, or even text messaging capability, so I was left to stare at the wall in front of me and the floor beneath my feet.

At some point, I reached into the drawers under the vanity next to the toilet, found a shampoo bottle and started reading the back. The ingredients list was full of those 20-letter science words with lots of X’s, Y’s, and Z’s—benzoethyloxyhydroxylase, or something like that. We think of X, Y, and Z as the rarest of the letters in part because they sit at the very end of the alphabet. When you find them all in one place—a page of a book, an airline safety card, a shampoo bottle—you expect to find the other 23 with little difficulty.

In the words of Lee Corso, not so fast my friend!

I searched both sides of the shampoo bottle and found every letter but ‘J’. This had to be an anomaly. ‘J’ is such a common letter, I thought. I mean, seriously, it’s the 10th one in the alphabet. I reached into the drawer and found a bottle of conditioner. Still no
‘J’. It wasn’t until I reached for the baby oil (don’t ask) that I finally found a ‘J’. And even then it wasn’t part of a real word, it was part of the product name—Johnson & Johnson. It was the ubiquitous nature of the letter ‘J’ in English proper names that led me to this mistaken belief in its commonness. Joseph, James, Jonathan, Jessica, Jennifer, Joan, Jackson, Johnson, Jeremiah, Jeremy, the list goes on.

To make sure I wasn’t missing something, I consulted the ultimate arbiter of word-related issues: Scrabble. There are 100 tiles in a standard, English-language Scrabble game. There is exactly ONE ‘J’. The one J tile is worth 8 points; more than 22 of the 25 other letters. Only two tiles are worth more: Q and Z (10 points each). X is worth the same.

For years since, I’ve scanned signs and pamphlets when stuck in places with nothing to do. Nearly every time, the ‘J’ is conspicuously absent unless what I am reading involves safety and inJury prevention. Try it sometime. Hell, read this piece and count the number of words (excluding proper names) with a ‘J’ in them. You’ll see what I mean.

I want to have the kisses with the tongues

This past New Year’s Eve Eve, I flew from O’Hare to San Francisco on a 747-400 packed to the gills. The plane had 60 rows. My wife and I were in Row 59, Seats H and J. Since the ass end of the aircraft tends to board first and deplane last, we had the great privilege of sitting there with nothing to do longer than most everyone else. Only the 8 people in Row 60 had it worse. The two directly behind us apparently had it the worst of all.

They were Canadians—strangers to one another—who’d been waiting for three days to get out of Chicago after missing connections during a snowstorm. They spent the boarding process, the pushback, the taxi, and takeoff comparing horror stories. He in his clipped Toronto Canadianese, she in her grammatically confused French-Canadian Quebecois.

They were insufferable.

I’ll call the guy Opie because he was a fucking simpleton. He sat there the whole time vocalizing every thought that floated through his head, no matter how trivial. It was like he was narrating for his brain.

“There were 100 people on the stand-by list for this flight but they only had 68 available seats so that means there are still 32 people on the stand-by list.”

“I am going four hours north of San Francisco. It is colder there in the winter than in San Francisco because it’s farther north.”

I shit you not, those are quotes out of Opie’s mouth. The strangest thing, though, was that the French Canadian girl, who I’ll call Elise, didn’t want to hang herself by the oxygen masks that drop from the compartment overhead. She actually liked Opie and tried, very awkwardly, to flirt with him. I almost missed it at first because her speech was heavily accented and the words that came out of her mouth did not match up exactly with our conception of flirtation. English—which she spoke fluently—was not her first language.

Elise had a near complete grasp of English vocabulary, yet her facility with casual, conversational patter was not so great that she could flirt effortlessly. It confirmed for me, again, how difficult flirting is in a non-native language. Not that it really mattered in Elise and Opie’s case. Opie was a fucking dunce. Elise could have taken a cocktail napkin and written on it, “I want you to put your penis inside my vagina and move it back and forth,” and he would have been too busy pressing all the buttons on his armrest to get the hint.

It reminded me of my first week as a junior in high school, when I first realized how difficult it is to flirt in another language. I was standing in line for books and immediately in front of me two Brazilian exchange students—Claudia and Marisel—were talking to a couple of guys in front of them. Claudia was particularly taken with the shorter of the two guys. Her conversational English was rudimentary, at best. I ended up taking a class with her that year and she survived mostly by nodding and flashing a pretty, empty-eyed smile.

With nothing better to do while I waited, I listened to her try to talk to him for nearly 20 minutes. Of course, he was no help. He was a 16-year old virgin who took French and played tennis. Claudia could have been from Brentwood and he would have locked up. As their conversation got more and more bogged down, I could see Claudia get frustrated and attempt to be more direct.

“You are very nice.”

Nothing.

“You have pretty eyes.”

Thank you, so do you.

“I like you very much.”

You are nice, too.

“You have very soft…how you say…,” Claudia motioning to her mouth, “lips…soft lips.”

Nothing, just stares.

“I want to have the kisses with the tongues.”

Nervous laughter.

“Do you wants to haves the kisses with the tongues?”

More nervous laughter. And a boner, probably.

Those two dated for eight months. Claudia, a gorgeous, curvaceous, olive-skinned Brazilian exchange student was this guy’s first girlfriend. I think she was even his first kiss. She dragged him into manhood and drove their relationship into the express lane toward Sexytown for no other reason than she lacked the ability to beat around the bush or even know what that saying means. I watched them in amazement every day of my junior year.

Listening to Elise try to get Opie to engage her with awkwardly structured sentences about liking the things he was wearing, brought Claudia and the idea of bilingual flirtation rushing back to my idle brain. What’s the hardest native language to flirt in? What’s the hardest native language to come from and then try to flirt in English? What does flirting sound like in other languages? Can you tell by tone of voice even if you don’t know the language? Someone should develop a language program for non-native speakers who want to learn how to flirt properly. Kind of like English as a Second Language, but for flirting. Rosetta Stone: Flirtationese.

That is where my brain went as we began our final approach into San Francisco International Airport. I struggled to jot down notes on what a program like this would look like as we descended through a choppy layer of rain clouds at about 7,000 feet. Finally we landed and almost on cue Opie said to Elise, “Oh it’s wet out there. That must be because it rained.”

I pulled my Blackberry from the seat pocket in front of me, turned it on, went to the notes function, and quickly typed “Theres no program that helps stupid”.

Indeed.