Category: Platypus people

The introduction of the platypus was such a shock to the British scientific community, in the early 1900’s, that they considered the monotreme an elaborate, well-conceived hoax. They thought they had the animal kingdom all figured out. Those of us who know some platypus people empathize, for when they began to express themselves we thought they were joking. We thought we had human nature all figured out. As we learn more about them, we realize they’re not kidding, and our shock turns to intrigue, as we begin to think they might be able to teach us more about ourselves from their funhouse mirror perspective.

The Seemingly Insignificant Lego: A Philosophy of the Obvious

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“We don’t need no stinking instructions!” I said to the enjoyment of my son. “A trained chimpanzee could figure this thing out. Right? Give me some!” I said slapping skin with my son after we ripped the cellophane away and cracked open the little package inside to begin our Lego adventure. We felt like pioneer adventurers going it alone, because that’s just what we do. We’re the types who venture into dark forests without a map just for the adventure and just to say we did it.  

For those of us who aren’t great at building things, putting big blocks together correctly provides a sense of satisfaction so complete that it just feels so me and so right. “It looks just like it does on the cover,” we say, sharing a smile.

This idea, and I’ll say it, the fun of this adventure all comes crashing down about a fourth of the way through when one of the other large constructs doesn’t snap into another quite right. It makes no sense. It makes so little sense that we drop the ego and consult the instructions. The instructions inform us that we will now have to tear all of our hard work apart to insert a crucial tiny, seemingly insignificant, yellow, transparent Lego. In our frustration, we wondered why the Lego designer didn’t just include a little extension on the larger piece to render the little, yellow Lego unnecessary. 

After we complete the reassembly, and our frustration subsides, those of us who seek philosophical nuggets wherever we can find them, think there might be some sort of philosophical nugget in the requirement of the seemingly insignificant Lego. Some call these moments Eureka moments, or epiphanies, but we prefer to call them “Holy Crud!” moments. “Holy Crud, there might be a philosophical component behind the Lego designers making the tiny, yellow piece so mandatory for completion.” Movies might depict this as the lightning strikes moment, or they might put a cartoonish lightbulb above the head of the main character that leads them to look at the camera and say something to viewers at home that break down the fourth wall. 

The little philosophical nugget we thought we discovered, or imagined, that day was that in most real-world constructs, little parts are as important as the big ones, and sometimes they’re more important. The spark plug might be one of the smallest parts on a car, for instance, but if it’s not firing properly in a spark ignition system, proper combustion is not possible, and our car won’t run properly. Do Lego designers have an unspoken philosophy that they want to share with their customer base that some of the times, the seemingly insignificant is just as relevant and more vital at times?

“The unapparent connection,” Heraclitus said, “is more powerful than the apparent one.”  

“Life is filled with trivial examples,” Dennis Prager once wrote. “Most of life is not major moments.”

When developing a personal philosophy, some of us prefer to go it alone. We don’t want to follow instructions from our parents, or any of the other authority figures in our lives. We prefer the adventure of going it alone for the philosophical purity of it that often leads to greater definition on the other side. “We don’t need no stinking instruction manuals.” We enjoy putting large concepts and constructs together to figure various situations and matters out, and we want to design our own philosophies that discount the need for tiny, seemingly insignificant ideas. Do we make mistakes, of course, but they only provide lessons we can learn and greater philosophical purity and the resultant definition. This can also lead to individualistic ideas that might not be earth-shattering to you, but they lead us down paths we never considered before, and we take great pride in informing anyone who will listen that we arrived there all on our own. 

About a fourth of the way down that path, we make other mistakes, and those mistakes begin to compile, until we realize with frustration that we might need to consult our instruction manuals. At some point, we realize we might have to tear our big ideas apart to allow for the crucial, unapparent connections we failed to make the first time through. The frustrating part is that when we learn the solution to what ails us, it was so obvious that it was staring us in the face all along. We then wonder how much easier our lives might have been if we discovered it sooner.

The Philosophy of the Obvious

The philosophy of the tiny, seemingly insignificant, yellow, transparent Lego suggests that while big philosophical ideas and profound psychological thoughts often lead to big accolades, the philosophy of the obvious states that those advancements may not have been possible without the “Well, Duh!” or “I can’t believe you didn’t know that!” ideas that litter philosophy.

We can’t believe we didn’t know these ideas either, so we compensate by convincing ourselves that we knew them all along, and we make such a clever presentation that not only do we convince ourselves we always knew this, we can’t remember ever thinking otherwise. Yet, we lived a chunk of our lives without knowing anything about the tiny bricks in our foundation, and our mind somehow adjusted to those deficiencies.

How often do we subconsciously adjust to limitations or deficiencies? To answer that question, we ask ourselves another question, how many of us didn’t know we were colorblind, until our eighth grade science teacher instructed us to complete her colorblind test? Our eighth grade teacher gave us images and asked us to whisper to her what colors existed in the photo, and some of us failed it. Some of us learned we were incapable of properly distinguishing the color red for example, and we adjusted to that new reality going forward. We all talked about this test later and Pat Murray informed us that he failed the red portion of the test. Prior to that test, he admitted, he didn’t know he was colorblind. I heard him say this, but the full import of it didn’t register initially. As I gnawed on what this test revealed, I could not maintain a polite, sensitive stance.

“You had no idea that you were colorblind until today?” I asked. He answered that question and the string of questions that followed. He grew defensive the more I questioned him, but he did not grow angry. I don’t know if he thought I was making fun of him in some way, but I wasn’t. I was stunned that he had no idea he was color-blind for fourteen years prior to that day. My questions alluded to the idea that if I just learned, as Pat had, that I had been unable to distinguish red for fourteen years, it would rock my world. “Now that you know you’re colorblind, do you think back on all the adjustments you’ve made through the years?” How often did he adjust to his inability to distinguish red for fourteen years without knowing he was adjusting? What kind of adaptations did he make, in his daily life, to compensate for something about himself that he didn’t know. How many times did he leave his bedroom with mismatching colors on, only to have his mom say, “Um, no, you are not wearing that today, Pat, it doesn’t match.” How many times was he surprised? How many times did he say, “I thought it did.” Were there so many arguments on this topic that he just learned to concede, or did he always concede? We might say Pat figured he was just a dumb kid who didn’t know any better, and his mom always forced him to check with her before going out, but how did the mom not know? Did she just think he was a dumb kid who didn’t know any better? I know Pat had, at least, two brothers. Did she have to do the same with them, was there a pattern with her sons on this topic, or was Pat an aberration in the family? Either way, she probably should’ve noticed something. On that note, how long do some suffer through school before discovering that they suffer from some level of dyslexia? As one who was fortunate to have never suffered such deficiencies, I think it might find it earth shattering to learn such things after suffering in the dark for so long.  

The mind-blowing reactions I’ve witnessed from people like Pat is that they don’t have much of a reaction. Our instant assessment must be that the reason they act blasé about it, or attempt to downplay the news is to avoid any teasing or condemnation. I can tell you that with Pat, and the others I later met, who experienced what I would consider mind-altering information is a quiet and unassuming acceptance. They treat it like a person might when finding out they’re one of those who can’t roll their tongues.

“It makes sense now that the reason I was having trouble reading,” they say, “or the reason I couldn’t match my clothes well … was based of a deficiency.” I would’ve been so flabbergasted by the findings that I would’ve asked for a retake. I would’ve considered the tests flawed, but my personal and anecdotal experiences with sufferers is that they  don’t think about all the struggles they’ve endured, and they don’t think about how learning the diagnosis would’ve made their lives easier if they learned it earlier. They don’t consider the information impossible, flawed, or earth shattering, they just move onto the next phase of life that involves them approaching such matters with the diagnosis in mind.

How many tiny adjustments did we make prior to discovering the philosophical equivalent of the tiny, seemingly insignificant, yellow, transparent block? How many things do we now view in hindsight thinking if I just knew that sooner, I could’ve saved myself a lot of heartache and headaches? How are we going to use this information going forward? Most of us just adjust, adapt, and move on. “Nothing to see here folks, just a fella doing what he does.”

Regardless how we arrive at this place, or exit it, we gradually move to the philosophy of the obvious. It can take a while to uncover what we’re trying to write about in an article, on a website, but some of us uncovered our whole modus operandi (M.O.), or our raison de’etre (our purpose) while trying to do something else, something as relatively trivial as cobbling a bunch of Legos together. This otherwise trivial experience in my life proved a humbling and illuminating experience, and it changed the manner in which we think about such matters.  

We all have these moments that some call epiphanies, and others call “Holy Crud!” moments, that change the way we approach situations, philosophical conundrums, and life in general. These moments don’t move most people, as they illustrate what an adaptive species we are, regardless the circumstances. Some of us, perhaps those of us who can be too introspective at times, can easily be shocked by a unique approach to a common dilemma, a fascinating outlook on life we never considered before, and people who just think different.

We’ve catalogued the weird individuals we’ve met in life, but where we started cataloguing these weird people, and their strange ideas, for immediate entertainment. The more we wrote on the topic, the less rewarding that theme became on every other level. There were too many tiny adjustments to log here, but suffice it to say that we went from weird for the sake of being weird to understanding that some people genuinely think so different from some of us that the greater question is why. To make such a progressions, we initially considered it natural to move to large philosophical concepts and profound philosophical constructs, but as the philosophy of the tiny, seemingly insignificant, yellow, transparent Lego taught us, some of the times these progressions require us to move downscale to the tiny, little nuggets found in the philosophy of the obvious.  

The Complaint Cloud

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When the complaint cloud approached our table, we didn’t need a meteorologist to tell us that conditions were ripe for a chance of complain. All we had to do was wait for the complainer to receive her food. 

“There’s something wrong,” Rosalyn said to introduce us to her complaint, and she added the international prelude to the complaint, “I don’t want to complain, but …” She probably expected us to avoid starting our meal, until we could address her complaint. We didn’t even pause. In lieu of that apparent insult, Rosalyn repeated her complaint. She wouldn’t eat. She couldn’t, because she found something wrong with her food.

Rosalyn didn’t call the server over, because some part of her enjoyed having the complaint cloud hover over us while she instructed us on the proper way to prepare an onion ring. She said she didn’t want to lord her industry knowledge over our table, the server, or restaurant, but she couldn’t help herself. It might’ve taken a server two minutes to address her concern and return with a new plate of onion rings, but Rosalyn didn’t want to explore that avenue. Rosalyn wanted to guide us on a tour of the knowledge she attained in her years in the industry. She shared a strained smile to reveal her internal struggle, but she knew too much to just eat a poorly prepared onion ring that she knows isn’t a temperature the industry requires.

Rosalyn could’ve said her onion rings were room temperature, but she knew that description carried no attention-grabbing exclamation points, so she said, “They’re ice cold!” to superlative her way to some real attention. When she finished displaying her mastery of provocative adjectives, we feared touching the onion rings the way we do dry ice, because we know the physics behind something being so cold it could burn.

To bolster her characterization, and the resultant sympathy that followed, Roslayn added that her slightly above room temperature onion rings were, “Gross!” Was it a gross exaggeration to call them gross, yes, but isn’t it always. We all do it, because no one challenges the “Gross!” assessment. Gross is also such a relative term that it’s personal, and any challenge of a personal assessment is perceived as a personal insult.

The proper reaction to the “Gross!” assessment, as illustrated by our fellow patrons across the country, is the sympathetic and empathetic crinkled nosed. The crinkled nose response is so pervasive and ubiquitous that it’s almost reflexive now. We don’t even require the “Gross” assessor to back up their assessment. They say it, and we crinkle our nose. Gross can now be used to describe everything from finding live insects in our food to tasting excrement in fresh seafood, to finding a french fry in a serving of pasta, or being served an onion ring that is somewhat less than perfect. 

My prime directive, at one point in my life, was to try to unseat the word gross from atop its perch in our lexicon. I tried to develop a campaign to limit use of the word in my social circles, to give it back some of its power. I made some strides in my battle against the ’ly words, literally and actually, so I thought I might experience some success with gross. I didn’t know what I was up against. The word is gone, it’s just gone. Overuse has diluted any power it once held, because it wields so much power, (and yes that dichotomy was intended).

When someone at our table tired of her grumblings, as a result of Rosalyn’s carefully orchestrated drama, they called our server over. It was anticlimactic when the chef quickly arrived, in a surprisingly timely fashion, with a new hot plate of onion rings. The chef informed us that the price of the onion rings would not appear on our bill. Shows over folks, time to go back to other conversations, because there’s nothing left for us to talk about in the immediate aftermath of a resolved dilemma.

“How are those onion rings?” one of the uninformed asked her.

“Eh, they’re all right.” The uncomfortable truth about those onion rings was they were not all right, and they never would be, because no onion ring can ever be all right in the complaint cloud. They’ll never be as tasty as they could be, or as hot as they should be, or as crispy and pleasing as the industry requires. “I prefer a solid crunch when I bite into an onion ring, don’t you? Yeah, no, these are not for me. This is a fine restaurant and all that, that’s known for their onion rings, but these… these just don’t meet my expectations.” Rosalyn picked the restaurant, and she selected the side item that she would eat, for which this restaurant was well-known. She knows restaurants, because she works for a competitor, and she knows what this restaurant specializes in, and she’s “always wanted to try their onion rings”. When they arrive, she takes it personal when they serve her something that is a couple of degrees below the industry standard that she knows only too well.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” is a question Rosalyn would never ask, because she knows they don’t, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t care. Plus, no one outside of the cartoon world of Gilligan’s Island or Scooby-Doo says that anymore fearing that someone might confuse them with an archetype, obnoxious rich guy. Yet, the subtext of her complaint suggested that part of her complaint was just that, an attempt to treat her like a commoner who doesn’t know the difference between gross, room temperature onion rings and the top-notch onion ones they reserve for the clientele of discerning tastes.

Roslayn made her complaint cloud personal, and she concluded this dramatic portrayal of her virtuosity by saying, “I will eat them,” when the server returned to see if the second plate of onion rings met her expectations. She was kind enough and virtuous enough to suffer through those onion rings, so we wouldn’t view her as a complainer after she spent the last couple minutes doing nothing but complaining.

Praised be the all mighty, now will you climb down and speak to the peasants, as you said you would when you invited us to try to enjoy an evening out with you?

***

Complaining is what we do. It’s what I do. We even complain about complainers. “I don’t want to hang out with him anymore, because all he does is complain,” we complain. I complain all the time. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m doing in this article. I’m complaining about complainers who complain too much. We complain about family, friends, politics, religion, our place of employment, and the people who walk extra slow through cross walks. Complaining is just kind of what we do when we’re in groups, but we shroud most of our complaints in humor. Complaining is fun and illustrative. It defines our character, and it can provide for some provocative, engaging conversations. When we invite friends and family for a night out, however, most of us try to keep those complaints in check. We know the looks, the eye rolls, and the physical discomfort some display when we complain too much about our relatively comfortable lives. We also know some of our complaints can bring an evening to a crashing halt.

Some of us don’t complain when we probably should, because we don’t want to bring unnecessary attention to ourselves. Is this submissive? Perhaps, but how brash are you? We know that they “Don’t want to get you started, because you have so many opinions to challenge the status quo that you’ll shake up and shatter their whole world,” but are your complaints really that substantive, or do you just enjoy lofting yourself up into the complaint cloud for the impressions it accrues?

“I don’t care. I’m paying for these goods and services,” complainers say to justify their complaints, “and the least they should do is try to provide me what I’m paying my hard-earned dollars for, and some of the times they don’t.” They also say such things about air travel, “You’re flying in their aircraft, and the airline should do everything they do to accommodate you and assure your comfort and feelings of security.” It’s all true of course, and it’s actually a good rationale to expect as much from our fellow man as we expect from ourselves, especially when we’re paying them, but as Malcolm Gladwell once wrote, there is a tipping point.

The tipping point arrives when everyone you know, knows that you’re going to complain about something, anything, just to complain. We know that it doesn’t really matter what you’re complaining about as long as you’re complaining about something. The meal they set before you could pass every stringent code restaurants have for quality food, and you will find something, because you’re not some stooge who’s going to eat anything just ‘cuz. We could try to dig into their past to figure out what drives them to do this, but it all boils down to one incontrovertible fact that some people just love to complain. Most of us go along to get along, and others debate, argue, and fight because it provides grist for their mill. They might not consider themselves complainers, and they might even say they hate people who complain all the time, but if the people intimate enough to know them know that the minute they sit down for a meal that a complaint cloud will darken their table one minute after that server puts food before them, it might be time to reevaluate that perception. When it happens once or twice, it’s annoying. When it happens so often that the people at your table dread this moment, it should be obvious that your greater complaint is not with the goods and services others work so hard to provide, but with the way your life panned out. 

Pretentious Absorbers

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“You’re what’s called a pretentious absorber.” Stewart Griffin

“What’s that?” Brian the Dog

“You remember how Madonna lived in London for, like, a month and then started talking with a British accent? It’s that.” Stewart Griffin

“The easy life?” Betty Bettle asked her friends in college. “You think I led an easy life? My family had a small, family farm. If you know anything about farming, you’d know what a stretch it is to call that the easy life.” It was probably her fault they thought that. She told them too much about herself. She complained about how her overprotective dad strongly encouraged his daughters to stay home most nights. She made the mistake of confessing that her brother helped tend the farm, while she and her sister helped their mom in the home. She then compounded her mistakes by complaining about being cooped up, “I never experienced the world.” The idea that they didn’t see that life as an awful experience didn’t shock her, but she couldn’t see how anyone might mistake that for an easy life.

“I’m free,” Betty whispered to someone she didn’t even know at her first college party. Throughout that first year, she met so many different people from so many different backgrounds that she grew to love college parties. Betty got wasted at the first couple parties she attended, but she didn’t enjoy those nights the way those who unleashed did. She didn’t enjoy getting drunk or stoned, but she attended every party she could find. Betty found that she could be whoever she wanted to be at these parties, because no one knew her. She eventually ruined that by telling them everything about her, but she developed so many friends before doing so that they still welcomed her to every party they had.

These college parties introduced Betty to a slice of life she never knew, and she didn’t to just want to nibble at this newfound freedom, she wanted to explore it as much as she possible could. She wanted to meet more people, different kinds of people, have more experiences, and grow, but the problem was she never had any money. Her family never had any money, and even if they had, there was too much work to do at the homestead to travel. When her new, college friends introduced her to their friends from other countries, Betty thought she found something of an end around to her desire to travel.

For a variety of reasons, Betty was more attracted to people from other countries than she was anyone else she met in college. She wanted to be there when they dropped tales about life in other countries, because she wanted to learn everything she could about the world outside the Bettle homestead.

It confused her when her foreign friends began accusing her of living the easy life. She was so confused that she found herself becoming defensive. She lost those arguments so often, with so many foreign-born people, that she became convinced that they were right. No matter how many hardships the Bettles experienced on the farm, they paled in comparison to what some of these people had to go through. Over time, she found the best way to avoid being so defensive all the time was to go on offense. She found herself becoming so sympathetic to their plight that she became empathetic. She learned their plight so well that she joined her foreign friends in arguments they would have with any newcomers.

“You don’t understand how that offends my people,” Betty said when she returned home on a break. We knew nothing about her foreign-born friends at college, but we knew something changed her. We assumed that she heard that line so often that it became a reflexive response to her. The offensive statement she was addressing had nothing to do with the Irish, the Germans, Americans, farmers, or the Bettles. The statement was referring to involved the home country of her new foreign friends. When she informed us what she was learning in college, we assumed that this Irish/German woman was falsely attempting to assume the characteristics of her new friends, but we knew her so well that we couldn’t believe this was the case.

The only thing we could assume was Betty heard so many of their tales, and learned so much about their culture and customs that she began adopting them as her own. She learned how to prepare their dishes, and she eventually learned how to speak their language on a less than fluent basis. She did everything she could to have them accept her as one of their own, and when they did, she felt like she was one of them.

“Aren’t you Irish and German?” one of us said, in the midst of one of her rants. It shocked her. She said yes of course, and she blushed a little, but it was obvious that what shocked her was that anyone would call her out. One might suggest that she enjoyed the company of her foreign-born friends so much that she bonded with them, and that bond was so strong that she considered any offense made against them as an offense against her.

At some point, the revelations she learned led Betty to believe that her parents lied to her. Either that, or she believed her small-town parents just didn’t understand enough about the plight of human existence. When she learned “the truth”, she thought anyone who approached the issue from a different perspective was either as passively uninformed as she used to be or willfully ignorant. To further their knowledge, she used a “must” or “should” pulpit to help us all view matters from her new perspective as a foreign-born citizen.

Betty Bettle graduated near the top of her class, and she immediately entered into a career that paid her relatively well. She saved every dollar she could to travel to experience the world in ways she never could as a kid. She hoped to use the college degree and the extensive travel to establish a status in life that might lead to a station. From this station, she developed an approach, based on a level of pretentiousness she didn’t intend, whenever someone argued with her. “How do you think you know so much?” she said one day. “You haven’t traveled.” Her book smarts proved a little intimidating at first, and she sought to round up whatever street smarts she might lack due to her upbringing, by traveling.

As intelligent as Betty was, she wasn’t a great debater, particularly on this topic. When someone scratched at the surface, just a little, Betty crumbled. Most of her conviction was tied up in the talking points her foreign friends, books, and TV provided. She had no firsthand experience being a foreigner of course, so she could not answer follow up questions or challenges to her newfound passion, and we walked away from her thinking she was someone who did what she was told.

Betty’s sympathy for citizens from other countries and cultures was genuine, but it was also conditional. The foreign-born citizens she met in college provided her a prototype. Betty met foreigners who strayed from that model, later in life, and she developed narratives for why some might succeed where others didn’t, but she preferred to focus on those who required sympathy, and she developed a certain criterion of musts for them. She also developed a list of shoulds that they should exhibit. She considered successful immigrants anecdotal evidence of the foreign-born experience.

Betty Bettle always knew she was of Irish and German descent, but she ignored this fact so often and thoroughly that she viewed reminders as unnecessarily confrontational. As odd as it sounds for someone to try to convince themselves they are another lineage, how often do we become so convinced of something to the point of developing convictions? How many of our convictions are based on personal experience? How many of us use literature or philosophical text as a conduit to conviction? By doing so, aren’t we, in essence, using another’s experiences to modify our thoughts from theory to fact? How many of us absorb so many of our parents’ ideas and platitudes that we accidentally become them? Betty didn’t agree with her parents’ worldview, and she didn’t want to model herself after them. She agreed with her foreign-born friends in college so much that she ended up adopting their culture and characteristics as her own. Cultural appropriation was not a widely recognized term back when Betty was in college. As a person who abides by the prevailing winds, we can only guess that Betty now has a tough time squaring everything she did back then. She might suggest that she views her approach as complimentary, as she only sought to understand other cultures better, and if she accidentally adopted some of their customs and characteristics, it was unintended. To which the cultural appropriation crowd might say, “That’s what everyone says.”

Betty didn’t intend to be a pretentious absorber. It just sort of happened. It was an accident. It was something that happened in that way we incidentally mimic and imitate our parents, our teachers, and anyone else we admire. Betty never admired anyone to the point that she would mimic or imitate them, until she met those foreign-born students in college. She was so fascinated by their ways and customs that she hung out with them almost exclusively. She met their parents, and partied with their aunts and uncles, until she eventually gained acceptance among them. She never felt so accepted by a group of people before. She never truly believed she could change her ethnic heritage. It just sort of happened.

For reasons endemic to their upbringing, people like Betty Bettle choose to imitate and emulate sympathetic characters, and they do this so often that they begin to absorb their traits and characteristics until they exhibit them. The first question that runs through our mind when we watch this happen is how does an otherwise intelligent person begin to believe they are different? The next question is why do they do it? Are they trying to achieve some level of superiority? If that’s the case, why would they imitate and emulate people they regard as sympathetic? Are these sympathetic characters flawed, or in some ways relatively inferior? If they weren’t, why would Betty feel sorry for them? Most of us spend most of our lives trying to emulate and imitate the successful. Our desire to find some relative measure of success through money, love, or some other form of happiness drives us to imitate those who experience some measure of success in that regard. It has given birth to numerous multi-million-dollar industries online, in seminars, and in the book industry. Do we do it to one day achieve some level of superiority? Perhaps, if we consider it superior to conquer our personal flaws better, quicker, or in some ingenious ways others haven’t considered before. Pretentious absorbers believe that by imitating and emulating other cultures, they derive virtue. If we ask how they can abandon their own customs, tradition, and culture, they might provide a wide variety of reasons, but those answers won’t be clear or direct. Their answers won’t revolve around what it says about them that they do what they do but what it says about you that you don’t. They are pretentious absorbers.