A Whole Lotta Misunderstandin'

The other day I was telling Light Bright about a woman I know who has two PhD’s and can’t find a job, and she thought I said “two pasties,” which makes some sense – one isn’t enough for most women and three is too many, right? – but she didn’t understand what that had to do with getting a job. We had a good laugh over that misunderstanding, especially since the woman in question is extremely overweight so it made for the kind of mental image that makes you want to scrub your eyeballs.

When I told this story to A-Joz and some other girls from the bus, I said how two pasties makes sense, and one of them responded that it depends how hungry you are. The rest of us were flabbergasted by the idea of eating pasties, but she was thinking of a Cornish pasty, and I don’t know about you, but I pronounce that word so it rhymes with “blast-y,” more or less, whereas the word in the story I had told rhymes with “hasty” and is more pertinent to strippers than hungry Cornish farmers.

However, the weirdest moment of all might have been when I was sitting around with Richard Bonomo, Kathbert, and Anna Banana II, and I told them how Light Bright misunderstood me, but I wasn’t sure if the problem were her hearing or my diction. As we discussed this woman, the conversation naturally drifted to another woman in a similar predicament: a PhD, a personality glitch, morbidly obese, and trouble keeping a job. Rich said something about two highly educated people with personality disorders keeping them from getting jobs, and I added something about them both being fat as well. He asked in surprise who the other one was, and we all said well, both women are quite LARGE, and he said he had been thinking of the second woman and a really skinny guy who had not come up previously in the conversation. Unlike, say, the first woman. When I told Light Bright about this, she said that’s just men for you, and her fiancé does that all the time. “They forget we can’t read their minds,” she said.

So that was plenty of entertainment mileage out of one simple case of mishearing!

Famous Hat