A snippet of correspondence between my son David and myself, to illustrate the quality of our interchange: A few days ago, he quoted a limerick told to him by his friend Kris Coppieters.:
A doctor in Gastroenterology
In charades drew the word entomology
But no-one could guess
And his act was a mess
Cause he was trying to mime etymology<\/p>\n
I replied: Too many syllables in the first line. Better, A doctor in opthal-mology would be better than gastro enter ology. Two syllables instead of three. Read it aloud. Incidentally, before spell-check, few could properly spell opthalmology.<\/p>\n
Then David wrote, \u201cTrue\u2026 but I think a lot of people slur "etero" as "entro"\u2026 In this case, I believe he just enjoyed the similarity of entomology, etymology, and "enterology". (Hey, why is there no "enterology"? Oh, never mind, I just checked the dictionary and it says it is basically the same as gastroenterology — study of the intestines. OK, now if I could just figure out why there is no such thing as "com-bobulation" (the opposite of discombobulation")<\/p>\n
To which I, Adam (Pa, also known as\u2014aka\u2014Dad) responded: You and I are combobulated. It’s a word that I just made up the meaning to (or of) that means that in spite of an underlying wackiness\u2014 dis-combobulated-ness—we assert that we are combobulated. First of all, it’s fun to write or even keyboard. (Whatever happened to "type-ing"?) Whaddaya think, huh? Pa<\/p>\n
Then David wrote: It occurs to me that perhaps "Combobulating" is kind of like what "action explorations" or "creating your living" is all about. (Referring to the title of a book I have been preparing).<\/p>\n
I replied: Things are usually in a state of discombobulation, but when we use those techniques we are actively combobulating\u2026 bringing things back together into coherence. It\u2019s a rough coherence, not mathematically precise. Which is the way I draw mandalas. They, too, are combobulated. It’s a nice word, actually. They —the word and drawings—take into consideration the multi-dimensionality of reality. It’s not all mathematically neat. Chaotic variables reign. I like that sentence. It will become one of my mottoes.
(And then it occurred to me that we have that kind of relationship, and I felt a flush of pride.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A snippet of correspondence between my son David and myself, to illustrate the quality of our interchange: A few days ago, he quoted a limerick told to him by his friend Kris Coppieters.: A doctor in Gastroenterology In charades drew the word entomology But no-one could guess And his act was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,14,23,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-foolin","category-whassup","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2870,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869\/revisions\/2870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}