Epigrammatic – A Review
Brevity is not my strong suit.
I’ve never been one for late-in-early-out.
I’ve only wrongfully been called a man of few words, because if I bit my lip even half as often as I should, my jaw would just be scar tissue.
I run my mouth more than a refrigerator motor. More than mascara in the rain. More than a nose in September. More than a brook, a stream, a river.
But that’s not to say I’m not quiet. I just have this habit of speaking when spoken to. And then continuing to speak for quite some time after that.
But there’s line in a song I like, it goes: “you’ve got a lot of long answers, to a lot of short questions.” And I can’t help but shiver every time I hear it. I think about the short questions I’m asked that turn into 40 minute conversations, and I just wonder why. I’ve been made aware that what I do isn’t necessarily annoying, it’s more so just surprising that I can go this long without taking a breath.
But what can I say? Other than… all that stuff I seem to just be saying… without a break…
I just seem to have a knack to fill silence. I don’t know if it’s because I read a lot as a child, or maybe because we went on one too many road trips, or if I just had a habit of being friends with the shy kids, but I’m certainly a talker.
Then you put me in a room with more than one person, and suddenly, I’m silent. Weird how that works, right? I go from an active participant, to an active listener and I couldn’t tell you why.
I’m just a sociable introvert, I guess.
But, that’s not why I’m writing this today. See, I wanted to mention my love of flash fiction and how that became me reading epigrams to root out an especially pounding headache that plagued me throughout the day. Epigrams are pithy pieces of pseudo-poetry that are either sarcastic or offer advice. And those are two of my favorite things, so it’s weird that I had never really jumped down this rabbit hole yet, but I wanted to share some favorites:
Some can gaze and not be sick
But I could never learn the trick.
There's this to say for blood and breath;
They give a man a taste for death.
— A. E. Housman
"I can resist everything but temptation."
— Oscar Wilde
“If you can’t be a good example, you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
— Catherine the Great
At some point in the past three hours, I read those instead of writing this blog. To be fair to myself though, I have 4,000 words in scrapped blogs that I can’t use. So it’s not like I was just sitting here. I’ve just had a lot on my mind, and a lot to write out.
Anyway.
My next blog will be my 100th. Which is WILD. Will I do something special? Maybe.
Technically I should wait until Friday, since I've only written 97/99 of the currently posted blogs. But, we will see. Kind of wild to have been doing this for long enough to have all this out here. Hm. Guess I should save this prattle for number one-hundo.
Alright, I'm going to try to finally sleep. Hope you had a good week. Have a great weekend, and as always, thanks for reading.
