Tag Archives: furniture polish

Cob

Cob: (n) the center of the ear of corn

What do you do when the job you were given, which grants you purpose and function, is no longer needed?

It is a sobering thought.

But that is the yearly reality of the cob.

Once the corn is removed, the cob remaining seems to have no purpose. Yet without the corncob, how would we ever have figured out corn?

Was corn supposed to grow, kernel by kernel, on plants?

No, you can store a hundred or more kernels of corn on a single cob and carry it right out the door. But once you dislodge the corn from the cob, the holder no longer has value.

People used to use cobs for biofuel, to heat homes and such, but they burned so quickly that it was fairly impractical. In other words, nobody could eat enough corn to stay warm.

Every once in a while, it’s ground up, placed inside mattresses, or added to furniture polish to give some roughness to the mixture.

But basically, if you’re a cob, your job is done when the corn is eaten.

How would that feel? (Of course, the point could be made that corn cobs don’t actually have sensation.)

The design is so perfect–two little points at each end, where you place your fingers so you don’t burn them on the hot kernels as you chomp away.

I don’t know. Maybe we’re all corn cobs. Just skeletons, holding our parts together for a season, until our corny lives are done. And then we’re looking for some place to discard the cob.

God. This is dismal.

I think I shall stop writing now.

But it did make me hungry for corn…

Donate Button

Burnish

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Burnish: (v) to polish something by rubbing.

An important exercise:

Add up all the hours you and I have spent complaining, resisting, avoiding or diminishing the need to improve something. Now compare that to the number of hours it would have taken to do the job.

Every single time, the amount of energy expended in bitching exceeds the required minutes necessary to burnish up the situations in our lives.

Case in point: when I was much younger and rented an apartment, my parents gave me a beat-up coffee table. It was light brown wood, so every little scrape, nick and stain was very noticeable. Bluntly, I did not care. I was a punk.

One day a girlfriend of mine came in and told me that if I took some furniture polish to the table, it would look a hundred percent better. I nodded my head, simulating interest, but inwardly dismissed all her claims. She made the point three more times before she finally walked in, polish and cloth in hand, and quickly–no more than five minutes–transformed that piece of worn down trash into a burnished surface.

It was so shiny that I could actually look down and see my face.

I didn’t know whether to be grateful or angry over her interference. Before I could decide which profile to select, she gave me a quick hug and said, “You’re a man. You’re often too dumb to do what’s necessary.”

She left the room.

My problem was not being a man. My difficulty was that I did not believe I was worthy of a polished table, so I decided to leave it as ugly and unkempt as I felt myself.

 

Donate ButtonThank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix