Friday
12/08/03
Christmas Trees and Primate Brains
Human beings, flawed as they often are, exhibit a surprisingly varied range of ridiculous behaviors. One I particularly enjoy is when folks make the same ludicrously foolish choices time after time. Look at the hapless Liz Taylor and her inability to choose a husband correctly. You’d think practice would make perfect, but Larry Fortensky, better known as Number Seven, found out otherwise. In fact, she’d have been rather less an embarrassment to herself if she had heeded this little chestnut from W.C. Fields: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again. Then give up. There's no use being a damned fool about it."
But anyway, human being that I am, I occasionally fall in to the same trap. In this case, I must admit that in past years I’ve always been a complete retard about Christmas trees. Namely, I, (no, actually we, as the whole family is involved in the annual finding and cutting of the live tree thing) always choose a tree that’s too big by an order of magnitude simply because we’re outdoors and immediately lose all sense of scale.
And year after year, having lugged the tree up our front steps only to realize that it’s at least five feet too high, I have no choice but to lug it back down the steps to the waiting chain saw, cursing all the way. Finally, having relieved the tree of it’s bottom three feet and it’s top two, I end up with what can only be described as a big, fat, Christmas bush-ball in the living room.
Well, not this year. Not only are we a family of tool-using primates, but we posses the ability to learn from the past. This year we picked what seemed to be the tiniest, most Charlie Brown Christmas tree that there was in the entire field. We then got it home, and in one smooth motion it went up the steps, through the door and into the stand, all without a single snip
So, in the end, it turned out to be just about the most tree-like and entirely stress-free tree we’ve ever gotten. And why? Because unlike poor Liz, we were able to use our big monkey forebrains to learn from the past.
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Christmas Trees and Primate Brains
Human beings, flawed as they often are, exhibit a surprisingly varied range of ridiculous behaviors. One I particularly enjoy is when folks make the same ludicrously foolish choices time after time. Look at the hapless Liz Taylor and her inability to choose a husband correctly. You’d think practice would make perfect, but Larry Fortensky, better known as Number Seven, found out otherwise. In fact, she’d have been rather less an embarrassment to herself if she had heeded this little chestnut from W.C. Fields: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, and try again. Then give up. There's no use being a damned fool about it."
But anyway, human being that I am, I occasionally fall in to the same trap. In this case, I must admit that in past years I’ve always been a complete retard about Christmas trees. Namely, I, (no, actually we, as the whole family is involved in the annual finding and cutting of the live tree thing) always choose a tree that’s too big by an order of magnitude simply because we’re outdoors and immediately lose all sense of scale.
And year after year, having lugged the tree up our front steps only to realize that it’s at least five feet too high, I have no choice but to lug it back down the steps to the waiting chain saw, cursing all the way. Finally, having relieved the tree of it’s bottom three feet and it’s top two, I end up with what can only be described as a big, fat, Christmas bush-ball in the living room.
Well, not this year. Not only are we a family of tool-using primates, but we posses the ability to learn from the past. This year we picked what seemed to be the tiniest, most Charlie Brown Christmas tree that there was in the entire field. We then got it home, and in one smooth motion it went up the steps, through the door and into the stand, all without a single snip
So, in the end, it turned out to be just about the most tree-like and entirely stress-free tree we’ve ever gotten. And why? Because unlike poor Liz, we were able to use our big monkey forebrains to learn from the past.
