"The rhino sleeps in the apricot tree, but Tuesday the typewriter will choose the yogurt."
That's my philosophy of life, in fifteen words. Interpret it if you can; make of it what you will; continue at your own risk...
Here's how it began, twelve years ago:
There was a boy who went to school with me, who supposedly had the same birthday as mine. And I just happened to have an insane crush on this boy, who was the smartest person I'd ever met, and had one of those weird and twisted minds. Nothing he said ever made sense, and that in itself made perfect sense.
So when the birthday came around, I was on a mission to find the perfect card for this fascinating enigma. And I finally found it: on the front of the card was a long-legged, funny-looking bird, and it said "I'm going to take the plunge by saying something that a birthday card has never said before"...and on the inside, "The rhino sleeps in the apricot tree, but Tuesday the typewriter will choose the yogurt."
It seemed to me at the time that there were only two people in the world who would ever get that, and he was the other one. (Now, of course, I realize there must have been more - because somebody wrote it, and somebody bought it, and there it was on the shelf in a major department store - so obviously somebody else was getting it.)
At any rate, he did get it, and we spent an afternoon laughing, not only at the card but also at the looks of bewilderment we got from other people who read the card, trying to figure out what we were laughing at. We tried out various interpretations of the line about the rhino...I think we finally decided that the rhino was nuclear power, the apricot tree represented the world's superpowers, and the yogurt stood for world destruction. Something like that.
In later years, the phrase still stuck in my mind. Eventually it became my own personal Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - something to say when I wanted to throw people off their stride. And I still think it works pretty well as a metaphor for life.
Interpret it if you can; make of it what you will.
Continue at your own risk...
