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July 20, 2005 This article is about rising to meet the emergency and doing something I've never done before. An emergency has come up. In the smaller bathroom of my house both faucet handles on the bathtub are leaking, and my household members are distressed. Even the cats are upset. For many of you this will seem trivial, but I'm not a plumber, and I've never fixed a faucet of this type before. I've never used a bath tub socket wrench and I've never used a seat wrench. Consequently my mind is on this project more than composing yet another reply to yet another skeptic. Meanwhile, skeptics keep sending me letters, prompting me to reply thoughtfully. In the intensity of my e-mail-induced cogitation I scarcely can think of taking a bath, let alone fixing a leaking faucet. Indeed, the skeptics are paying more attention to me than I deserve. One vocal skeptic is even associating me with Pat Robertson!! I'm touched by his cognitive slippage. Meanwhile, as I sit here keyboarding at an almost deserted university computer lab, remembering at home there is this continual drip, drip, drip, drip of water in the bathroom, I imagine using Chinese water torture on the skeptics. All in good humor, of course. Anyway, why should I dread fixing a leaky bath tub faucet? As a boy I didn't dread learning to ride my bike. I fell many times before I could ride it. As a man I didn't dread taking calculus at the university. I got low grades in algebra and I almost failed the first calculus test. I had to work hard to better understand the subtleties of algebra and calculus. But later I had severe money problems and right now I am dreading taking a loss, and not being able to do the plumbing job even though I spent over twenty dollars on new tools. And if I fail, a professional plumber will charge me at least sixty dollars just to make the house call. On top of that I'll be billed fifty dollars or more per hour for labor. Well, as I said, I've never used a seat wrench before. I've never used a set of bathtub wrenches before. Before I logged on to this website I'd never even heard of such things. Check this article out. You might need to fix your own leaky bath tub faucet someday. Now dear reader, even if you aren't cracking a smile over my writing's content or style, being funny is a way of diverting our thoughts and cycling tornadically around something serious. As a younger man I was advised to take matters more seriously, and not ask so many funny or silly questions. I also hummed and sang a good deal of the time. My impromptu musicality often disturbed more serious people. In the past, in fact, when it came to thinking and talking, some people said I need to stop asking so many questions and ask only the "right" questions. But without a doubt, what is "right" is a debatable subject. Probably Socrates would have agreed. Socrates even proved that any definition is questionable. Or was it Plato who proved that? Hang Socrates and Plato. I need to concentrate on fixing my leaky bath tub faucet. I'll see ya later. ------------ About the author: John L. Waters is an amateur psychologist and independent researcher on self-healing, integration, and problem-solving. John has created art, music and songs, prose and poetry, and helped people solve a difficult problem. For more information, read: John's letters of recommendation: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/recommendations about John's self-healing and integration: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/index.html about John's independent research: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jlw47/index.html about John's seeking an agent or a publisher: http://www.writers.net/writers/39295 Email: blueguntwo@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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