Do you have any guilty pleasures? I run a lot every morning.IN THE COMMENTS: Ignorance is Bliss asks: "Is a cake a birthday cake if it wasn't bought for someone's birthday?"
That sounds neither guilty nor pleasurable. But I do it so I can indulge in the guilty pleasure of eating birthday cake.
Every day? Most days, with ice cream. Early on, when my wife and I were dating, we went to the grocery store, and I told her that sometimes I just buy birthday cakes, and I eat them. And she said: �Really? I do, too.�
I think the best answer to that is that Tom Cotton and his wife like to eat a kind of cake that they think of as "birthday cake." Either they like the idea of calling it "birthday cake" or they go stores where it is labeled birthday cake or has "Happy Birthday" written in the icing. What kind of people are they that they enjoy that kind of cake � light, spongy cake with thick, sugary white icing� or they get a kick out of a birthday feeling when it's not anyone's birthday?
I think of 2 things:
1. The Beatles "You say it's your birthday/It's my birthday too." When that song came out, it was generally understood � as I remember it � to refer to something other than one's actual birthday. Both Paul McCartney and John Lennon said later that they just set out to write a birthday song. Paul said it wasn't anyone's birthday, but birthday songs get played. And John said "It was a piece of garbage." If I remember correctly, we hippies of the time thought The Beatles were offering the theory that every day is your birthday or every day that you achieve heightened awareness of your existence is a birthday.
2. The idea of an "un-birthday" in the Humpty Dumpty chapter of Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass," which is combined with Carroll's Mad Hatter's Tea Party (from "Alice In Wonderland") in the Disney movie "Alice in Wonderland." In the movie, Alice arrives at the party as the Hatter and others are singing "A Very Merry Unbirthday to You." In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains that "there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents... And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!" Alice doesn't understand his use of the word "glory," which leads Humpty Dumpty to utter his most famous line (beloved of lawyers): "When I use a word... it means just what I choose it to mean � neither more nor less." (In this view, "glory" means "a nice knock-down argument.") I'm thinking that when Tom Cotton eats cake, it's birthday cake if he chooses to think of it as birthday cake.
No comments:
Post a Comment