Friends! Neighbors! Lend me your duhs!

So, someone mentioned maybe doing some sort of contest to give away the last of the party favors and to that person I say, you are a genius!  You should be rewarded for your brilliant idea by being the first to receive one of the party favors…HA!  I crack myself up.  You will work for it like everyone else!  Not that you asked, but I haven ‘t gotten the chance to make any formal decrees lately so I couldn’t resist.  Anywhoooo, the point is, we’re having a contest!  (Yay!  Woot!  Yippee Yahooey!)  Here’s the deal:

I’m looking for the best “Duh” moment.  “Duh” moments, for my purposes, are defined as a moment in which you do something that upon hindsight is completely retarded, but at the moment you do it, it seems like the most sensible thing in the world.  Email me your submissions with the subject “Monkee Contest” and I will post them on Sunday night.  They’ll be up from about nine o’clock on Sunday night until about 9:00 o’clock on Monday night during which time, you’ll all vote on your favorites in the comments.  Brilliant, no?  If you have any questions, you can email me with the subject “Contest Questions.”

Being the benevolent dictator of this blog that I am, I will get this contest rolling by offering up two examples of what I’m looking for from my own extensive arsenal of “Duh” moments.  Tonight will be the first one and tomorrow I’ll post the second one simply because it’s too late to write out both tonight.  I may be a benevolent dictator, but I’m also a lazy good-for-nothing.

When I was a kid, probably about four or five, I got the brilliant idea one day, to use the edge of the pool as a makeshift balance beam.  I started walking around the pool, placing my feet right up against the edge, but entirely on the concrete as I went.  I did this for a few feet without incident before the “duh” started to seep into the picture.  Realizing that this was entirely too easy and that I would never be considered a true master of the balance beam if I didn’t take any really big risks, I decided to liven things up a bit.  Obviously, by placing me feet solidly on the ground, I was playing it too safe.  The only way I was ever going to really demonstrate my brilliance was to stand directly on the edge, half on the concrete and half over the side. 

Despite the fact that I was fully clothed, wearing my souvenir Minnie Mouse t-shirt and pink Keds and all, I went through with my plan and predictably fell in the water.  There’s some very basic physics at play here, but let’s just leave it at, what I was trying to do was physically impossible.  That, however was not the big “duh” moment.  The “duh” moment came a few weeks later when the maintenance guy came to clean the pool.  Why I was outside alone talking to random strangers is beyond me but there I was, standing in the backyard with the pool guy, wearing my souvenir Minnie Mouse t-shirt and my pink Keds, yet again. 

Maybe I was bored, maybe I was making conversation, maybe I really thought I could do it that time, but for whatever reason I decided to tell him about it and, um, demonstrate.  So, to the edge of the pool I went and I walked along just as before, with my feet flat on the concrete and told him the story of how I was doing this very thing just the other day, in this very manner and how had I decided to make it more challenging by doing it a different way, a more dangerous and daring way (Aren’t you impressed, Mr. Pool man?) and just as I described it to him, I began to demonstrate, placing my feet half over the edge and half on the concrete.  A moment later, as I was spluttering to the surface and being fished out of the water by the confused pool man, I couldn’t help but be more than a little bit peeved.

“Why didn’t you help me?”  I demanded of the bewildered pool man.

 

“Because I thought you were still just demonstrating.”

 

It was a “duh” on many levels.

 

Comments

[bluepaintred]

holy crap do I EVER have a DUH moment.