Pictorial Bloglet#6
Tag Archives: funny ha-ha
Snark-A-Day Bloglet#6
Lost In Translation…Yet Again
At a pre-Diwali party held recently, we had mirth upto our eyeballs and then some. And while it does no good to harp on the difficult year everyone’s been through; the enjoyment for me is enhanced because everyone I see on a daily basis is healthy and largely happy.
A bunch of us started playing a silly but fun game from our childhood and it let to crazy hilarity! In a nutshell, you play Simon Says but whoever gets it wrong, gets whacked by the person next to them.
In one case the person about to do the whacking was a very well-accessorized lady with rather large fingernails and elaborate rings. Seeing that the rings could end up hurting someone, a non-native Hindi speaker spoke up about taking off the rings before delivering the whack. But languages are funny things… if you get a vowel wrong in one place, the entire meaning changes and you can end up someone completely different from where you intended to go!
The lost in translation bit was: “Take off your thumbs before you hit her!!” And there were prettily dressed up women in their ethnic finery, rolling on the floor laughing. Total paisa vasool (aka ROI) on party entertainment courtesy an unintended slip of tongue!
Snark-A-Day Bloglet
I came across these while searching for something entirely different on Google and thought it would be a bit of a departure from my usual content…
Parenting Bloopers#1
I’ve often mentioned the focus on English language that was given during my education. That I also ended up studying English literature during my undergrads was of no surprise to many.
One of the things we’ve been taught over the years, in appreciation of poetry and prose, is the figures of speech that add that little extra sumthin’ to the written word. It would be fair to say figures of speech figure heavily in my speech. That was an example of a pun just fyi and probably something else but my ever-present brain fog prevents me from figuring out what exactly.
Alrighty, enough of punning…yesterday on our way back from his cricket practice TO exclaimed loudly that his stomach was “fully empty”. My years of being at the beck and call of my education rose to the occasion and I mumbled something about an oxymoron while trying to park between a pillar and another car. It was purely reflexive on my part but I forgot about the ears of a fox that children have when they’re about to get the wrong end of something. Pat came the repartee, “You’re the oxymoron!”
And for a rare moment, I was speechless.
If only my teachers could see me now…
Not Talking To You!
Red and TO have been acting like annoying prats and I’m stuck playing referee. Yay for me.
This morning when TO was looking for his meds he had to take Red’s help since Red had kept them somewhere after the last dose.
A sulky and solemn-faced child informed me he couldn’t ask his father since he wasn’t talking to him. It was too early in the day for me to intervene so I told him to write out whatever he needed to communicate and he did. Only thing being that he was asking a question without there being a question mark and I asked him how would Red know that it was a query. I got my answer in 2 seconds.
Red-1 Me-0
I am a linguistic snob. I was educated (read thrashed into proper pronunciation+enunciation) by my teachers; majority of them who were Anglophiles or were brought up to regard Wren&Martin at par with their particular religious canons. And while I’m not always right, am not usually too off the mark.
This morning over breakfast, I mentioned the word caveat and said it the way I have been my entire life- which is KAV-EAT. Red jumped on the moment and V-E-R-Y smugly told me I was wrong. He also very politely told me to SUCK IT (sic)!
In my defense, people rarely go around actually uttering caveat and write it or read it more so…my rare foray into being wrong can be overlooked!
The takeaway here is this-The joys of married life are varied and occasionally you get to stick it to your spouse- excuse the unfortunate and unavoidable puns.
Dish-ing On the Hubby
There’s a new thing Red likes to do and no it isn’t kinky at all. It’s so surprisingly clean that I’m amazed it even caught his eye since as a family we all share the slob-gene though in different degrees.
He’s into technology. I mean *into* technology and while he does switch off as and when needed; he likes gadgets and automation. There are things he’s pushed us to buy during the lockdown which have changed the way we look at our lives; certainly the way we live it.
We got a dishwasher a while back and it’s become Red’s go-to-place, go-to-thing to do. In the initial months after our marriage, any help with the dishes would mean he’d tackle the Corelle ware and leave the greasy metals for me to plod through. With the lockdown, he understood that not only are dishes fun to do, they are a great way to catch up on stuff you can do while being stationary and still getting work done.
But since the arrival of the dishwasher life has become a bit creepy. If I go to check if I can put some dirty dishes in there, the dishwasher’s either full or already running. If I got to check where a particular kitchen item may be, 9/10 times it’s in the dishwasher- hot and ready to be used. It’s freaking me out! This level of adherence to cleanliness and not dropping the ball at all isn’t the man I married!
The man I married can look at a bowl full of corn in the fridge for 10 minutes without being able to locate it, need help finding his glasses, wallet, phone, belt and underwear on a very regular basis. So this level of efficiency is very hard to swallow.
He loads it himself. He unloads it himself. He knows how much detergent to put in, which wash cycle is optimum for the number of dishes/utensils in it- it’s like living in the TWILIGHT ZONE!
And whenever I’m rinsing out the dishes after a meal I almost always find him looking over my shoulder saying the dishwasher can clean anything and I don’t need to rinse things out before putting it in for wash…and his eyes sparkle with an eerie glow when he says it.
If I stack the dishes on the kitchen counter or in the sink, he’ll creep up undetected and do his version of this-
It’s got the extent that after finishing off any kind of a meal or even a cup of coffee, I sneak into the kitchen and just to show my defiance, I rinse out the cup and put it on the counter and run off before anyone (Red, always Red) can find me and tell me to put it in the dishwasher!
Dafuq Bloglet
TO was working on a music assignment for school where he kept sharing bits and pieces of Western Classical music with me and saying what it felt like for him.
Then came the zinger- “Ayu this guy Bitch makes good music!” and he showed me the laptop screen which had this-
The Strategic Mom
Any mother will tell you that manipulation is a bedrock of parenting. Sometimes we manipulate the little rugrats and quite a few times they manipulate us successfully and store that away for future reference of what works on the life-givers.
This is what works with T.O quite well: If I need him to do something that he’s going to whine about, I just ask him to do something else he’ll whine about even more thereby making the earlier task more attractive in comparison.
This morning I needed him to keep all the bottles filled and make sure we all had enough water to drink and there were enough bottles in the fridge too. My child, like MANY kids, drinks up the cold water and leaves the empty bottles outside or forgets to replace them with filled bottles which are within hands reach.
When I asked him to fill up the bottles and he whined…”why do I have to fill up the bottles again???? I just did it yesterday??!!!” I could’ve told him, like I often do, that he’d had screen time yesterday too so why did he find it essential to charge at me like a stampeding rhino and get me to unlock Netflix so many times a day.
Instead I asked him to grab a peeler and get started on the potatoes for our lunch. Lo and behold! There was a beautiful line of water bottles filled to the brim within seconds!
P.S: For those puzzled by the three Oriental men trying to look sinister; they are a reference this book by the author referenced above- Sun Tzu
Random. Structured. Haphazard. All Me. 