{"id":7070,"date":"2011-06-12T04:15:27","date_gmt":"2011-06-12T09:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrsellars.com\/mrblog\/?p=7070"},"modified":"2011-06-09T12:10:21","modified_gmt":"2011-06-09T17:10:21","slug":"conversation-stoppers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/?p=7070","title":{"rendered":"Conversation Stoppers…"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are certain things, that when said aloud, will bring most any conversation to a screeching halt. You know the things I mean. Stuff such as, “Whoops, my hair is on fire…”<\/em> or “Whoa! Is that Dana Delany over there?”<\/em><\/p>\n

Personally, I have an intense fondness for the Dana Delany comment, but then we already knew that, right? Well, if you didn’t, you do now… Oops… Guess that was sorta awkward, eh?<\/p>\n

The thing is, there are several such phrases that can bring a conversation to a sudden halt. Case in point…<\/p>\n

I was prattling on endlessly with my PA the other day. As it happens, the o-spring is out of school for the summer, so she was sitting there fiddling about with her Nook or some such since it is loaded up with a ton of summer reading for her. Since she’s all kinds of brilliant and has a high school level command of the English language, I often forget that she’s still just a tween, so my filters aren’t always in place. In this instance, they weren’t, and I was talking to my PA about Merrie Axemas<\/a>, and In The Bleak Midwinter<\/a>, giving him a synopsis of the stories, how they related, differed, and other such nonsense.<\/p>\n

Well… Anyone who has read Merrie Axemas<\/a> knows that there is a dismemberment involved. Merrie. Axe. Mas… You get the idea. So moving right along, as we are talking the o-spring pipes up and says:<\/p>\n

\n

“Did you know that when your head is chopped off you still live for eleven more seconds?”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This really shouldn’t – and didn’t – surprise me. After all, she’s my kid… But that’s not the thing that stopped the conversation. I mean, think about it. I research all manner of nastiness for my thriller novels… After all, I write about serial and\/or spree killers for the most part. That’s why I’m a member of the HWA, and not the “Grandma’s Cozy Knitting Happily Ever After Ending Whodunit Club”…<\/p>\n

But on with the story… you see, since both my PA and I know my kid, we just continued the convo, involving her at this point. Mainly discussing the fact that 11 seconds might be a bit of a stretch, but that there was some evidence to indicate that the brain continued to function very briefly<\/em> following decapitation.<\/p>\n

This then turned to different ways of dying, and before I knew it my PA and my daughter were into a discussion of which way to go would be the least traumatic. They got onto beheading, suffocation, drowning, etc, and I added my two cents, that being the fact that I was under the impression that suffocation wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to go, no matter HOW the suffocation happened. That’s when my PA regaled us with a tale of how he had almost drowned – or come somewhat close – when he was a child, and how it had gone from a fearful struggle to a simple calm… Well, obviously he didn’t drown, or he wouldn’t have been there having weird death conversations with my tween daughter.<\/p>\n

But this was when the conversation stopper came.<\/p>\n

Darling daughter pipes up, “Yeah, I almost drowned a few years ago.”<\/p>\n

You could hear a pin drop. I stared at her. She stared at me. My PA stared at her. She stared at him. We all stared at each other.<\/p>\n

Finally I broke down and said, “When was this?”<\/p>\n

“A few years ago at blankity-blank<\/em> pool,” she replied.<\/p>\n

“How?”<\/p>\n

She shrugged. “It was before I knew how to swim and my friend took me to the deep end and left me there because she didn’t know that I couldn’t swim.”<\/p>\n

I stared some more. “Why am I just now hearing about this?”<\/p>\n

“I dunno.”<\/p>\n

“So, did the lifeguard jump in and save you or something? I mean, it seems to me they would have told us about it when we picked you up from summer day camp.”<\/p>\n

“No,” she said. “My friend just took me back to the shallow end.”<\/p>\n

“Well, did you start sinking or what? How did you almost drown?”<\/p>\n

She thought about it a second and then said, “Well… I might’ve kinda exaggerated…”<\/p>\n

Guess I can’t complain. She’s my<\/em> kid. She got it honest…<\/p>\n

More to come…<\/p>\n

Murv<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Things that can bring a screeching halt to a conversation. Observations on parenthood, from author M. R. Sellars…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1477,5,156,7],"tags":[5976,3226,5612,4862,4861,6422,6402,6414,6410,6404,6420,5038,3369,4819,1391,6419,5227,6421,5626,6418,2898,6114,6415,4820,4699,4156,6403,5831,6416,6399,4277,6409,6424,5270,6417,4608,6400],"class_list":["post-7070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends-and-family","category-life","category-parenthood","category-writing","tag-anyone","tag-axe","tag-bleak-midwinter","tag-case","tag-case-in-point","tag-convo","tag-dana-delany","tag-dismemberment","tag-english-language","tag-fondness","tag-grandma","tag-head","tag-hwa","tag-instance","tag-kid","tag-knitting","tag-level","tag-mas","tag-midwinter","tag-nastiness","tag-nook","tag-phrases","tag-pipes","tag-place","tag-reading","tag-right","tag-screeching-halt","tag-sorta","tag-spree-killers","tag-stoppers","tag-stuff","tag-sudden-halt","tag-suffocation","tag-thriller","tag-thriller-novels","tag-tween","tag-whoops"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brainpanleakage.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}