The Gift of Snark

Mark this one as another milestone day for Ben. And, nope, he still can't tie shoes or mow the lawn, but the kid can (drum roll please)...

Recognize sarcasm!

And thank goodness...we've been laying it on pretty thick since long before he was born.

So, there we were, driving home from the gym, when I commented aloud about sharing the road with a particularly super duper excellent driver.

After a pause, Ben asked, "Mom, are you being funny?"

Hallelujah, he gets it!

Maybe it was inevitable. Our friend Jeremiah predicted during my pregnancy, "that's going to be one sarcastic kid." But he also labeled Wichita "the town that humor forgot," so I started to worry that the gift of dry humor was locked up with the Scarecrow's brain and Tin Man's heart.

Thankfully, I've found and befriended a little pocket of good great-humored people, who aren't openly put-off by my sarcasm. Hopefully they realize I come from a long line of established smart asses, then I married one, so it's beyond my control.

But I can't tell you how many times my (hilarious!) comments to strangers, waitstaff, passersby, etc. have been met by....

Crickets...

Eye rolls...

Blank stares...

Offense.

So, either I change my tone or embrace my new audience: Ben and Roman. And the latter seems more fitting, especially considering Roman's latest, the eye roll, which he was nice enough to let me capture:

Just remind me, when they're 15 and 16, that I once loved their gift of snark.

Don'cha Know?!

"Are you from Minnesota? Or Canada?" I was asked yesterday.

Eh?

The asker: an otherwise quiet Kenyan man who takes my 5:30 a.m. class twice a week. And all I could do was respond with my own questions:

• Do I seem kind enough to be from Minnesota? Because I am not.
• Do I tolerate extreme cold like the Canadians? Ask me in February.
• Do I elongate my Os and lose the ends of words? No-o-o weh.

The culprit, I think, is one of two things: I'm at a loss for words when coaching exercisers at oh-five-thirty ("Go-o-o!" Pause. "Go-o-o!") or, more likely: my California accent is colliding with my Wichita one.

Now, I hold firm that Californians don't really have accents (Valley excepted, of course, but that's a caricature. And all teenagers totally sound like that, BTW.) Indeed, don't Californians have the intonation and cadence that newscasters strive for? If anything, we might be a little free-flowing with slang and, perhaps, a little relaxed.

Wichita, on the other hand, has the most indistinguishable - and incredibly wide-ranging - version of an accent. Sometimes it's just a "y'all" peppered into a conversation. No biggie. Warm and inclusive, actually. But in its most extreme form, it's like a slow, mumbled Texas-light.

Has my relaxed Californian mixed with mumbled Texan to give me never-ending vowels?

Eh, since a lot of Wichitans sound just like me, maybe I just need to have one more 5 a.m. cup of coffee to keep my words nimble. And varied, for that matter. 

Either way, I'll keep ya posted. Here's to a relaxing three-day'er ahead.

P.S. Speaking of relaxing, Roman found a great use for my resistance band today. Better here than around my legs, no?!