Barefoot in the House

In the movie Die Hard, John McClane's chauffer tells him that when he gets up to his room to take off his shoes and squish the carpet in his feet. This is meant to be some sort of relaxation technique, but if you see the movie, you will notice this is an interesting plot point as he spends the rest of the movie barefoot. Now, it seems that everytime I take off my shoes and I am on carpet I think of that scene.

My wife and I were at a sort of reunion party with some old friends from my single days. Somehow, the subject of using a squeejee to wipe down the shower door came up by this woman and her husband. They went to Home Depot and picked up the industrial size one. Now, every morning as I use our stupid little squeejee I think of them with their big squeejee!

When I get on a plane and buckle my seatbelt, I think of Seinfeld's bit on airplanes "Oh, you lift up on the buckle..."

The Cars' Panorama and Oingo Boingo's Only a Lad albums will always remind me of Uncle M.

Is this what makes these people or items famous? Some people you can associate with many things. But there are others who have hardly anything to connect them with. What am I known for by the people who have come across me? I was the guy who shook all the time or barged in without knocking or said rude things to people because it seemed more clever to insult them rather than compliment them. But I did some good things too... I think.

A friend of mine at work named R has decided to no longer be Negative R. He is now going to be known as Positive R. This is amusing to me, because I never thought he was negative. I kind of just thought he was funny. Now that he has pointed this out to us, I guess we need to take notice. We need to start doing Negative Watch. We need to keep him away from dull objects.

What is our responsibility at this point when it comes to R? Do we need to be more negative ourselves so that he can show us his true positive nature? What exactly does he want from us by telling us this? Couldn't he just start being positive and then we would notice?

But we don't notice because he was never negative to begin with. Well, no more than anyone else.

So, now R is going to be the guy who went from Negative R to Positive R by virtue of his declaration. Hmmm, I prefer to think of him as the guy who helped write the book on hiking in Utah. He is also the guy who took the pictures at our wedding. I wonder if R likes Die Hard. He did not put it in his top five. Nor should anyone...