What I Shouldn't Have Not Done

Growing up, I often thought the role of adults was simply to confuse me.

It was about the same time I realized my parents didn't have the answer to everything, which I realized, adults in general didn't have answers to a lot of things.

But as an adult you can't just not have an answer, you have to say something. Hence why I think oftentimes adults just make some stuff up, or repeat something they heard somebody else say. Maybe they will bring something out of their "my parents used to say this" handbook.

I suppose it also comes down to the fact that at a certain point, you just run out of things to say. I know for a fact that as a child I was always talking… actually that hasn’t really changed. But I can’t imagine my parents had a response to everything I was saying, also I can’t imagine they listened to everything I said.

Whatever the reason, as a teenager I heard some very confusing things.

Like after I sneezed my parents would say gazzazablatz. To this day I have NO idea where the hell they got that term. And any time I tried to use it out of the house it was met with confusion.

Gazzablaztz!

What?

It means bless you.

In what language?

Um… Boehmcke?

I still say it to this day but I’m much more aware of the face that it is in fact a very niche saying.

My sister and I were frequently accused of inactivity, which looking back seems a bit ridiculous considering I felt like for the first half of my life I was always in motion.

But when I stopped moving, or more specifically, when we weren’t doing what we were supposed to be doing my parents would bust out this gem:


You’re j sitting there, like a bump on a log!

A more vague and generic statement I have never heard. I understand what this means but I also feel like it was a bit unfair. Sometimes, even as a teenager, I was very tired. Had I accused my parents of being bumps on logs I most likely would have been sent to my room.

But the term itself is so devoid of any character. You look like… a thing on… another thing! Bump on a log, lump on a frog, chunk on a dog; none of it really makes any sense.

Sometimes though I think my parents would have preferred I be a bump on a log than the frenetic, 50 question, “can I, may I, would you mind if I,” type of kid that I was.

Whenever my mom was tired of answering my questions, or I didn’t really care specifically about what I was asking, she would say to me:

Knock yourself out.

I found this one to be particularly hilarious because as a child there was a very good possibility of this actually occurring. Whenever they said this I had this image in my head of wearing gigantic red boxing gloves and giving myself an uppercut to the chin, knocking myself unconscious.

And while that never literally happened, the similar equivalent almost did. Like that time I ran out onto an icy path but slipped and went nearly horizontal into midair before landing on the back of my head.

I didn’t knock myself out, but it’s really a miracle I didn’t.

I suppose the opposite of knocking myself out would have been being “bent out of shape.” This was another one of my parents’ favorites. I was a kind of oversensitive kid and even now, I still kind of am. But whenever I would get really upset or frustrated about something that my parents didn’t feel was justified I would be accused of being bent out of shape.

This, to me, always conjured up an image of some metal man all twisted and curved walking all crazy because of his literal imposition.

The other problem with being called bent out of shape is there is no real good come back.

I’m not bent out of shape! I’m… in shape! I’m bent into shape!

I didn’t have a lot of good comeback when trying to refute accusations from my parents.

But when it comes down to the ultimate opposition silencer, that honor must go to my high school band teacher.

He was a really nice guy one on one, always really friendly and personable, somebody you might like to have a dinner party… if you were prone to throwing dinner parties in the 10^th grade.

But when he lost control of a room of 100 teenagers he would lose his cool and dish out what is still the most confusing statement I have ever heard:

WHY AM I NOT THE ONLY ONE TALKING?

He said this every day.

Every.

Single.

Day.

I guess we were a chatty group. It’s tough being a nice teacher, kids frequently mistake kindness for weakness. And anytime we stopped focusing and digressed into chatter he would come out swinging with that confusing statement.

WHY AM I NOT THE ONLY ONE TALKING?

And I would always stop talking immediately, mainly because I was trying to figure out what the hell he was saying.

I’d start making sentence trees on my sheet music.

Why am I the only one talking?

Why am I not talking?

Why am I (not) the only one talking?

It was like a math equation wrapped in words and put to music.

Every time he said it I would instantly become lost in a 15 minute haze of wonderment, trying to figure out why on earth he chose such a confusing statement.

Maybe he did it on purpose. Maybe that is the best way to deal with teenagers is just to confuse them until they shut up. It apparently worked for us.

Sometimes I think about that teacher and wonder how he came across that statement. Did his parents used to say it? Did his band teacher say it to him?

Who knows what he’d tell me, but whatever his reason, I’d probably say the same thing to him.

Hey if it works, knock yourself out.