HELLO WALLS

54th Episode of NOTEFLIX’s “Troubles in the Garden”:  Attention! Ezmeralda, the Hairy Pig Queen of the Realm of Stuffed Animals living in the land of Humans and Other Dangerous Creatures, has decreed that all stuffed animals must wear protective gear as long as the humans have to.  (For more on this: See below  – at end of this post…Also, if you are a new reader to this site….please go back over the past 53 updates and catch up on this thrilling story. You have time to do this, now that you are shut in.)

THOUGHTS AND WORDS TO IDLE BY THE TIME WITH:(Prepositions be damned.)

•   A few months ago I read studies that showed we have a lot of mental health problems.  70% of workers admitted this to themselves. 6 3% of those did not mention their suspicions to their employers.  (Who would mention that they were going off-kilter to their employers?  Are they nuts?)  Half the people over 50 were afraid of oncoming dementia.  The percentages for fear of dementia went up for the unemployed.  What I’m wondering is, now that we are home and have more time to think about ourselves – do we think we are mentally better off than we thought we were before we had to stay home and think about ourselves?   I admit when I am out and about, I have plenty of occasions to think about how batty everybody else is; driving like craz-oids, taking forever at the counters in front of me, and the like.  But now it’s only me.  I’m doing fine – I think.  I do have trouble remembering what I did yesterday; but I have not read that is a big problem in relation to the present scale of things.
• So now that I have time on my hands, I went to one of these on-line sites to update some personal information…and I cannot ‘Log On’ because I failed my own security questions.  The message comes up that I do not know my father’s middle name.  Then it says I do not know the name of my first pet.  Suddenly I begin to suspect I am mentally losing it.  Next, I tell them I am not a robot.  Then to prove it they ask me to identify pictures that have lamp posts on them.  I do this and they say I am wrong.  I despair and re-look to see if I still know what a lamp post looks like.  In the end  a friend of mine who wants to send me the $15 he owes me…well he can’t do it because I don’t know who I am anymore.  And I’ve only been in ‘Lock-down’ for a couple of weeks.  I think it was better when we all sat around on the ground at night and looked at the stars and maybe a flash of lightening hit a nearby log and we had a nice toasty fire to sing by.
• One of the tasks I thought I’d tackle, while I have all this time at home, was to deal with the wires under my desk.  After 15 minutes of this I decided to leave the wires alone – forever.  If you think you have mental problems, trying to untangle those wires is a way to settle the question.  I would bet you all the money in the world there is no sane person who likes the wire problem under his or her desk.
•  THE DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT:  (I Like this one.) …”in which people of low ability dramatically over estimate their own abilities, in large part because they are incapable of understanding what they do not know.
• AWAKE DEPRIVED:  (I invented this term.)  This is the opposite of  SLEEP DEPRIVED.  Both conditions, I have felt while in ‘Lock-Down’, can follow one after the other – in rapid succession.
• NORMALCY BIAS:  i.e., “Things won’t happen here ’cause they haven’t.” (Examples, gratis: “It won’t flood here, because it hasn’t.’ ,”It won’t get hot here, because it doesn’t get hot here.” “I won’t get sick, because I never get sick”…that sort of ‘reasoning’.)

And now a few lines from the Silver Screen:

• “Who you gonna believe?  Me, or your own eyes?’ -Chico Marx in “Duck Soup”
• “There is no place like home.” -Dorothy Gale in “The Wizard of Oz”

Take care and beware of those not wearing masks, though it used to be the other way around…(See THE DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT, AWAKE DEPRIVED  &  NORMALCY BIAS  above)

Best,

54th Episode cont’d.:  In the spirit of the times, our protagonists have donned protective gear.  The Bluebird of Happiness is not happy with this, for there is nothing he would rather do than to give Mamzelle Pinkie a little peck on the cheek; but social distancing prohibits.

C. E. Metzger

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