Parlor Spider...Step In, Little Fly

Insightful thoughts and/or rants from atop the soapbox from one who wishes to share the "right" opinion with everyone.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Looking Over My Shoulder

Conscience supposedly supplies the filter to warn us if we are about to do something, let's say, like yelling "You lie!" in the wrong place. It would seem that not everyone has one of those. It might also be possible that we have this little voice in our heads (or many voices,for some people)that tell us that under NO circumstances should we verbalize what just popped into our heads (I'd like to shove this bleeping ball down your bleeping throat"). Some people don't appear to have THAT safeguard, either. So, I'm making a possibly radical proposal tonight: I think everyone should be assigned a personal "editor." Let me quantify.
First of all, a personal editor is not merely the person sitting next to me in the car who says innocently, "What's the speed limit here?" or, in less serene moments, "S#@%! We're going to die!" as she grabs for the arm rest or scrambles for the door lock.
My personal editor is also not necessarily the person who walks into the garage on the 5th of September and notes casually that the garage hadn't been cleaned this summer or asks every day for a week whether or not I had emptied the dehumidifier when I got home from an arduous five hours of work.
No, my ideal personal editor is someone like my buddy Dan who was kind enough to point out an egregious error in a recent blog. Stupidly, I noted that Derek Jeter had just passed Joe DiMaggio on the Yankees' hit list when, in fact, it was Lou Gehrig's record that had been broken. I definitely should have known better, but it took Dan's polite message to inform me of my error. He also noted that it was Ted Williams whose kids were fighting over his cryogenically frozen body NOT Joe D. See, this kind of stuff is important, and I felt grateful to Dan for alerting me, enabling me to go back and amend the blog.
My son Ryun is also a good example of an ideal editor. No matter HOW MANY times I screw up the distinction between using "that" and "which," he is always patient and understanding in his remonstrance...think restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. (Of course, I get the impression that he's inwardly shaking his head and saying to himself," The poor doddering fool has forgotten again. I'll humor him.")
Similarly, no matter HOW MANY times my iTunes folders get messed up with no hope of my retrieving them, he'll sit at the keyboard for an hour or so late at night when I'm sleeping and make everything right. It's not that I'm an idiot, I don't think; it's just that somehow I lose control of a mental function here and there, and my editors keep me more or less on the straight and narrow.
Of course, this organization can be said of the first kind of editor as well...it's just that I feel differently in those situations. I get defensive and tend, sometimes, to overreact.
All in all, though, I think everyone should have a personal editor because, left to our own devices, we might not always make the best decisions, especially if we are devoid of conscience and voices in our heads.

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