Sunday is For Counting One’s Fingers
Posted on July 25, 2010 Posted by John Scalzi 31 Comments
Oh, don’t look at me like that. You can’t tell me none of your fingers has ever gone missing in the night.
See you tomorrow.
Posted on July 25, 2010 Posted by John Scalzi 31 Comments
Oh, don’t look at me like that. You can’t tell me none of your fingers has ever gone missing in the night.
See you tomorrow.
Category: Uncategorized
Taunting the tauntable since 1998
John Scalzi, proprietor – JS
Athena Scalzi, editor – AMS
About the site
What's the Big Idea? Authors explaining the the big ideas behind their latest works, in their own words. See the latest Big Ideas!
Authors/Editors/Publicists: for information on how to participate, click here.
Theme: Profile by Organic Themes.
well as of yet not one has gone missing but I better go check
Fingers lost, no, tingly-I’ve-lost-circulation-for-more-than-a-minute feeling, yes. On a couple of occasions it’s been bad enough that the hand just wouldn’t work for the first ten minutes or so.
I’m counting spiders. It’s like a spider bomb went off in the house or something. No bugs, though.
But the cat’s missing.
I did wake up one morning from uneasy dreams, to find myself changed in my bed into a monstrous bug. Lost a good few fingers that day, let me tell you. Toes, too.
For digital problems like that, I usually perform a cyclic redundancy check. Then I get pantsed and jammed in a locker for being a geek….
As we used to say in the woodshop, any day everyone can go home and count to nine is a good day.
Being a retired IED operator, I’m proud of the fact that I still have all ten digits. Not all of my former co-workers do…
Dealing with a bit of honeymoon paralysis, are we?
I never lost any fingers, but I did have a knee go AWOL one night. I fell asleep on a love seat with my legs draped over the arm. I woke up an hour later and decided to go on to bed. I could feel my feet just fine, but when I tried to stand up my knee just wasn’t there. I went down hard, taking a bookcase shelf with me. (The one with the glass dragon statue that was my first Father’s Day gift.)
When it came back I grounded that knee for a week.
I think losing fingers during the night may be a disorder limited to owners of cats.
There was a pretty good rant by the British comedian Jeremy Hardy about how it’s odd that we so placidly accept the progressive decrepitude of aging, and that when we get up in the morning and see that some of our hair has fallen of our heads and is lying on our pillow we just take it in stride, but that if the object lying on the pillow had been some other part of our anatomy – an ear, say, or, in this case a finger – lying there we’d freak the heck out.
Ah, well, he tells it better.
I’m watching a giant, stinky flower wilt on a webcam, so I really can’t fault your chosen Sunday activity.
I assume Lopsided Cat brought yours back, John?
I’ve heard of falling apart in bed; but, that is taking it to extremes…
Where would your fingers go in the middle of the night….while your asleep in bed…..never mind…
As a teenager, I did wake up rather abruptly one morning when a zombie hand reached over the side of the bed and landed on my face. And then when I grabbed for it in a panic to get it off, one of my hands was simply … missing. In the dark, it took 30 seconds or so to figure out that the zombie hand was, in fact, the missing hand. ;-)
That’ll teach you to stick your fingers where they don’t belong.
Eh, it’s just one of those little things you get used to in living with cats. Honestly, the snuggles and the purring make up for it.
It isn’t lost. It just has a life of it’s own…
For all the wrong reasons, that reminds me of the movie TEETH.
And now I’ve just squicked myself typing this.
I never worry about my own fingers.
Others should worry about theirs. Especially given what I used to do for a living before law school…
I panicked, only finding nine fingers, but then realized I wasn’t including the finger doing the counting. Whew! That was close!
Not totally off topic, but did someone bring you a gift of brownies yesterday? Perhaps brownies that tasted a little different, and maybe had a slight greenish tinge?
Mr. Scalzi:
Just wanted you to know that I bought a copy of “Your Hate Mail will be Graded” today. I like your website and your fiction. I have read most of your stuff through the library, but decided it was time that I made sure you could continue to keep writing and amusing me.
I have a plane trip coming up and you’ll be keeping me company on it!
all the best.
JSS –
Not totally off topic, but did someone bring you a gift of brownies yesterday? Perhaps brownies that tasted a little different, and maybe had a slight greenish tinge?
Wait. You think this might be related to…zombie brownies?
Yes, yes. I see it. If anything can make you start dropping off body parts, it would be zombie brownies.
Haven’t been able to count to ten in more than 30 years. Although I did get better dealing with fractions
Important safety tip: Tractors eat fingers.
I wouldn’t say it’s exactly fingers gone missing in the night…
…but I know a lot of people who haven’t been able to tell you where their fingers were the night before.
Those are people for whom “the night life” is qualitatively different than daytime.
True story,
After one grueling CS assignment (more tedious than difficult) I was having difficulty switching back to decimal from hexadecimal. I never new one of my fingers were numbered “A”.
Actually it was a saturday. In the daytime.
:Kelly
in this case
Important safety tip: So do motocycle chains. If you are a fool (as in a fool and his finger(s) are soon parted).
Weird thing is I type better (accuracy/speed) now.
I believe there’s a scene in “Girl Interrupted” where the girl is staring at her hand and her fingers fade in and out of existence. Or maybe that was in the DVD bonus material as a scene that was cut out of the movie. Can’t remember.
Intriguing movie.
freaky scene.
” You can’t tell me none of your fingers has ever gone missing in the night.”
Well, yeah. But my alter ego is a yakuza.