And that's why I think I'm living my life backwards. Let me give you one final example: Last week, I went to a comedy open mic at the Parlor to test out some material. It was the first one the Parlor had hosted, so I'm hoping the audience will be larger on subsequent weeks. But the odd thing was, I was testing out the material at the open mic four days after I had performed at a professional comedy show as part of Pittsfield's 10x10 Festival. In essence, I did the big show first, and then practiced afterwards. This makes no sense.
Because she cares about the environment.
And it's not just me. I have a green-minded friend who orders fancy organic fruits and vegetables online. These foods are harvested and then wrapped up in lots of manufactured packing material to prevent bruising, thrown on a big gas-guzzling truck to be driven to the airport, where the package is thrown onto a jet plane that will shoot through the sky burning tons of jet fuel into the air, before dropping off the package at another fume-spewing vehicle, before it finally arrives at my friend's door. And why does she do all this?
Madness.
I have issues like this throughout my life. I'll serve myself some food, but leave a little bit in the container for another day. If the amount left isn't as much as I'd like to eat tomorrow, instead of putting more back in the container, I'll just eat it all. If I'm going for a ride somewhere in winter, I will
I realize this seems crazy, but life is weird sometimes.
I'll give you another example: I eat less if I'm hungry. I know, it doesn't make any sense at all. But it's absolutely true. At around five o'clock in the afternoon, I often start to feel a little bit peckish. And at that point, my options are either to have a light snack, or to start dinner preparations. If I'm not very hungry, dinner can wait a while, so I will probably just grab a snack. But if I am hungry, then instead of eating, I start making dinner. The result is that I am eating at five o'clock if and only if I am not very hungry.
So that was my first clue that I was living backwards.
I think it started in school, or at least, in the way that I dealt with school. See, in elementary school when everyone was supposed to be playing and hanging out with friends, I was not social at all because I was busy buckling down and working very hard. By the end of college, when everyone was supposed to be buckling down and working very hard, I mainly wanted to play and hang out with friends. As you grow up, you're supposed to pay more attention to serious business, and have less time for just chatting with people you like for hours on end. As I grew up, I made more time for chatting with people I like.
Lately, I've started to feel like I might be living my life backwards.
His work appears weekly in the Transcript, and weakly on RisingPun.com. Seth Brown is a humor writer, the author of "It Happened In Rhode Island," and sdrawkcab.
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