Round is Good!

A nice round trailer in the parking lot across the street from work

In front of my current work place...Yes I'm working... woo hoo.. I have seen a trailer sitting in the nearby parking lot for the last two days. Normally I wouldn't notice this kind of thing but it's round and possibly cute (as a guy, can I even say that word without the reference of a female in the same sentence and still retain my masculinity?). As my profile states I like all things round. I wonder about this every now and then. Is it from being a kid with a lot of sharp objects around? Or it is that all things that are round are indeed friendly?

Taking a time machine we go way back. Back to a time when I still lived with my parents. Back when I didn't have the financial woes or dating problems of today, back when I was a computer jockey still in high school. It's incredible how some things really don't change much at all.

In the kitchen, my parents used to have a notepad right next to the phone. Makes sense. The phone rings, the person being called is not home, you write a message down. Effective and efficient. Also next to the message pad was a pencil/pen holder. This also made sense. It would hold your writing utensil at a forty five degree angle so it was easy to get at. It was located in a close proximity to the notepad. You just pull the pencil out and start writing. You didn't even have to readjust your wrist or move your hand very far to do that quick notepad jotting to keep up with mr. or mrs. speedy mouth on the other end of the line. All was good.

Now another thing next to the phone, correction, directly beneath it, was a garbage pail. Perhaps it was there to throw old messages out or maybe it was just there because there really wasn't anywhere else in the kitchen to put it. So to review. You've got the phone, pad of paper, pencil sticking out at a forty five degree angle and a garbage can directly beneath the phone. It all seems quite logical and could be the configuration of anybody's kitchen/phone set up.

Now, enter a guy chewing gum. (Yes that guy was me). The gum is getting stale. More to the point, it was stale. I had been chewing on it for hours. The flavour has been gone for quite a while. What do I notice? The garbage can! "Hey a garbage can!" What a great place for it and so convenient a place to get rid of my gum of no flavour. "hooray!" I think to myself.

I lean over to spit the gum out only to find that the pencil has been stuck into the holder backwards. I find this out because I've just jammed my head into the hard lead pencil tip instead of the nice soft (and rounded) eraser side. When I move my head back, as a knee jerk reaction to get away from the pointy pain, the pencil comes with it.

I look at myself in the mirror. There's a yellow HB pencil sticking out of my skull (at a forty five degree angle) and it hurts. Being the brain that I am I decide it would be better to take the pencil out of my head and put it back into the real pencil holder. So I do what any normal well adjusted pencil victim would do. I grab a hold of the pencil and pull with my right hand.

The pencil comes out. I look down at the pencil. I look back in the mirror. Cheap ass pencil! The lead had slid right out of the pencil and was still stuck in my head like an antennae. Using the left hand I pull the lead out and notice a blueish dot where the lead used to be. To this day I still have that stupid bluish dot slightly over my left eyebrow.

Morale? Do you even have to ask? Round good. Non-round, sharp, pointy bad. Get the point? I sure did, but then I got the lead out.