It's pretty amazing the world we live in where we can live completely different lives from other people, never intersecting, never touching at all, except for some chance occurrences that make you aware that those other people exist. That's what happened tonight when MJ and I went to a performance by an LGBTQ church group.... renditions of popular songs from Hairspray, Hadestown, Frozen, and even Bob Dylan. A lot of people packed into a church on Saturday night during Spring Break weekend..... I often wonder how other spend their mid-March weekends and get FOMO, but FOMO no mo! A great time for all. I often wonder how my life would have changed if I was gifted in singing... I have a good stage presence, I crave attention from other people, I like to hum in the shower..... life would havve been so much more artful!
I now value having an inquisitive mind because I realize how much of life was passing by back in my 20's when I was ONLY focused on Dodgeball, Dating, and learning Japanese.... I left everything else pass me by, including common knowledge that adults in America pick up, like hundreds of common food items like herbs, spices, American cuisine, foreign cuisine, utensils, mixing bowls, exotic fruits, names of sugary baked goods, etc. I didn't know (and barely know now) what a souffle is because I just never wanted to try one, and didn't care to learn about it otherwise. I had a vague sense of this around 2015 when I found myself sorely lacking in knowledge when talking to my friends, but could usually get away with it by relating the conversation back to something I knew, make a joke, and move on to the next topic, but the lack of common knowledge would eventually catch up with me like a debt that kept accumulating interest, and only now am I paying back those debts and revealing the depth of the deficit (if only the U.S. federal government had as much interest in plugging the budget deficit instead of continuing to spend money it doesn't have).
Recently I learned what a "cherry picker" is. I had heard this term used on the basketball court for a player who didn't play defense on one side of the court and instead snuck to the other end under the opponents' basket and scored an easy bucket when their team got the ball. Easy explanation: he was doing the convenient thing and not earning it, he just wanted the credit. I (and probably anyone who reads this) understands this concept perfectly well: co-workers who only want the easy assignments and pass up on the hard work, only to swoop in when it's time to dole out the credit and quick to grab the figurative cherry in this case, the sweet-tasting rewards from doing that work, when someone else had really done the work. Heck, I've been a cherry-picker in that sense too, and gotten away with it. The difference is I feel guilty about it and try not to do it again, and want to be fair about it. There are people who have a thick face (Chinese proverb) or (related American proverb) are thick-skinned enough they don't care about other people's feelings, they just pick the cherries, or perhaps they're worried others will pick the cherries if they don't, thus they do it prophylactically. Whatever the case, it's really frustrating when working with Mr. or Ms. Cherrypicker, especially when I'm in a team of 20 other people and there are multiple (up to 7 or 8!) cherrypickers, in a profession full of cherrypicker/ambulance chaser types who want the easy score, the quick return. It's actually very much the problem with society today: we are all more cherry pickers now than ever before because we realize how easy life can be, seeing other people take shortcuts and make it makes us less likely to put nose to grindstone and plant the cherry tree, lay the foundation, till the fields day in and day out, etc. (at least that's how I imagine cherries are grown).
Oh and also, cherry pickers are a real item in life, aka "aerial work platform" that looks like a lift or crane or mechanical arm, that lifts people up so they can pick fruit. I never knew that. I also never knew about the spade-like gardening tool called a trowel, that police wagons used to be called "Black Marias" (also the name of Edison's NJ film studio, but ALSO the name of the Queen of Spades in the card game hearts that's the crucial card in the game, etc.), didn't know that the Spanish version of French dessert madeleines is called "magdalena," didn't know a "technocracy" was rule by scientists or engineers (we may very well have a society like that in the future, although the way we're trending with Trump and influencers seems like the opposite, an "idiocracy) didn't know there was a troposphere, stratsophere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere in our Earth's atmosphere, in that order, didn't know that there were garlic-looking things called shallots in our food vocabulary. I'm kind of embarrassed to profess to be a native English speaker and not know these things, much less have many advanced degrees and earn a living partly from my language ability. Also further proof that even at 36 (soon to be 37! Oh my!) we never stop learning, and should always strive to do better. And not settle for being cherry pickers.
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