- Do people ever cite “a record label turning down The Beatles” and “Michael Jordan not making his JV basketball team” as part of the same pep talk re: rejection and finding success afterward? I feel like they’re examples that might get conflated even though they have nothing in common outside of “first not success, then massive success.” That said, maybe placing them both in the same conversation is smart, rhetorically, because it broadens the circumstances/causes for “not success then success” rather than providing two of-a-piece examples. I will hazard a guess that the Beatles scenario is far more common than the case of someone being anti-precocious before coming into tremendous ability.
- I’ve been thinking about how successful erecting low-grade barriers (both literal and figurative) can be, even when it would be easy for the person/thing behind the barrier to cross it. Things like putting your belongings in a closed locker at a gym or yoga studio even if you don’t lock it, or having a sticker on your window that says you have a security system, or looping your arm through your purse handle on the subway (not that I think that’s generally necessary, but what if you fall asleep?). I didn’t want all of those scenarios to have to do with theft, but that’s what’s coming to mind. I’m also thinking about the elephant reserve I visited once where the elephants’ area had an ankle-high wooden rail around it, though I think that was more a signal to the elephants about where they were supposed to stay, not something intended to pose even a minor inconvenience if they didn’t desire to stay. Beatles, Michael Jordan, etc.
- I can think of three married couples whose last names are nearly identical. In all of the cases, I find myself wishing that instead of each partner keeping their own name or both hyphenating, they would just merge them. None would lose any letters! Granted, in one of the cases one name would be completely subsumed by the other, but the other two work pretty perfectly. I’ve never had a relationship with this sort of last name kismet, so I find it oddly captivating. In one case the last names are both from the same area of origin and may already be variations of the same original name, but not the other two. And for a complementary situation, since three is a pattern? I don’t know anyone who’s done this personally (or I may know one couple, but if I remember correctly they chose a completely new last name to use when they got married), but couples with disparate names could mash them together. Like…ah! Wait, no. I was going to say “When Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom were married…” but that would be a name best fitted to straight hyphenation. Kerr-bloom! Okay…how about the old days of Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt dating, and the potential we had for a Pittrow union? Sigh, what could have been.
And those are three thoughts that have been bumping up against one another in my gumball machine brain.
