No Idea What to Say

Friday, March 25, 2005

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

No Idea What to Say

By J’AMY PACHECO

Like any job, writing a weekly column has its good side and bad side.

The good side is a really good on—if I want to offer congratulations to, complain about or simply poke fun at something or someone, I have a venue. The bad side is that it’s occasionally difficult to come up with something to say.

It’s been said that truth is stranger than fiction, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the news stories I read in the two daily newspapers I receive and on the Internet. I thank Heaven for that strangeness every day, as it gives me a lot to think—and write—about.

But I try to stay away from controversial topics, so in this week of school shootings, molestation trials and a feeding tube frenzy, it’s hard to find something fun to write about.

Marriage and parenthood have proved to be fruitful ground over the years. In the old days, if I was short on ideas, I’d need do little more than ask my husband to perform some challenging household task.

Tasks involving ladders or plumbing were always good, and I remain grateful for that eventful day he decided to dislodge a stubborn plastic object from a toilet by setting it on fire.

Now, though, if I ask him to do something involving a ladder, he gets suspicious.

“Need a column?” he’ll ask. “Why don’t you write about Spring cleaning?” Spring cleaning…as if. I won’t even do it, let alone write about it.

My daughter is more reliable. She’s really funny, and I could probably fill this space weekly with things she’s said or done that made me laugh–—like the time, years ago, I came out of the shower to find her pulling at her head.

“Mom,” my then-three-year-old complained. “I can’t get my head off.”

She’s nine now, and unfortunately, most of what makes me laugh occurs so spontaneously that when I sit down at my computer later, I can’t remember a single line.

My brother, Kev, is a really funny guy. I saw him last weekend, and thought I might be able to get a column out of simply being around him.

He’s an x-ray technician, and had just come from a hospital where he’d stopped to see a fellow tech performing a test my brother had never seen done. Hoping to get something out of it, I asked what kind of test it was.

“A subclavian angiogram,” my hilarious brother said. I could hardly contain myself as he discussed things like venous contamination and the location of the clavicle.

Unfortunately, I realized later that when retold by someone else, it wasn’t funny. Now, if the patient had fallen off the table, or snorted milk out of his clavicle, that might have been column fodder.

Kev has the ability to make everything sound funny. Commenting on his selection of fried zucchini at a fast food restaurant recently, he did a five-minute monologue on the irony of choosing, for health reasons, a vegetable that had probably been injected with lard before being deep fried in animal fat.

Now, that’s funny.

I occasionally get ideas from other people. Sometimes, they’re pretty good. Other times, they stink—like the time an acquaintance suggested I write about what it would be like to view life from the hose end of a vacuum cleaner.

Huh? I’m guessing he’s in rehab now.

Friends who know what I do for a living are careful to avoid being too funny when we’re together. If I laugh hysterically at something, they look at me with pained expressions and say things like, “This isn’t going to end up in your column, is it?”

Of course, I always lie and say, “No!”

Sometimes, ideas come to me just as I’m drifting off to sleep. Those sleepy-time ideas always seem brilliant— and are always gone when I wake up. (I try leaving pads of paper on my nightstand to record them, but by the time genius strikes, the pads have been filled with “don’t forget such-and-such” notes, or carted off to another location.)

It would be easier if I had a more interesting life, perhaps filled with subclavian angiograms and deep fried zucchini.

It’s been more than a decade, though, and so far, something has always come to me in the nick of time. How long will that continue?

I have no idea.