Welcome to ‘Signaling for the Cows — and other exercises in futility’

“Signaling for the cows? ...we know what all those words mean individually, but…?”

I know, it’s an odd phrase, but I assure you it originated as a response to one of life’s WTF?! moments, and that’s the whole premise of this exercise. Somehow I manage to have more of these moments than I think can possibly be strictly healthy, and rather than ranting about them to myself, I’ve decided to share them with you, aren’t you lucky!

There will be swearing. There will be adult themes. There will be questionable metaphors. There will be ridiculousness and seriousness and … something between the two of those things that doesn’t have a name, or if it does, I can’t remember it at present, but you see where I’m going with this. Words will happen. You can choose to read them or not. If you like them, great! Let’s talk about that! If you don’t, feel free to flit off to another corner of the Internet and read something else. You’ve been warned about the likelihood of fuckery, so if you’re not keen, off you pop. Shoo!

::waits::

Are they gone now? Good.

Signaling for the Cows, an anecdote.

One winter evening many years ago when I was probably nine or ten, my mother was driving us home from somewhere or other, I don’t remember exactly. It was dark. We were on a country road — no street lights, and nothing but fields on either side. At one point in this particular road, there is a ninety-degree turn to the left if you are traveling in a westerly direction, as we were at the time.

Allow me to elaborate. Remember the fields on either side? Well, this ninety-degree turn isn’t because there’s another road, or a driveway, or any other sort of traffic phenomena. It is simply a change in direction of the road in question. If one were to continue straight on, one would end up in a field. If one were to turn right, one would end up — surprise surprise — in a field. Left is the only option. Savvy?

Back to me and Mom in the car. Ahead of us is a vehicle, far enough away to not be bothersome, close enough to be visible. This vehicle comes to the ninety-degree turn. Do you recall how I made sure you knew that there was no sensible alternative to turning left at this point in the road, and that there was no reason for anyone else on the road to think you might do anything besides make the turn in a perfectly ordinary fashion? Well, the vehicle ahead of us decides, for some reason, even though there’s no other vehicles particularly close to them and no threat of cross-traffic or pedestrians, TO SIGNAL.

Quoth my mother, “Who in the hell are they signaling for, the cows?!”

One can only assume that they were.

After that, of course, it became a running joke when we reached that point in the road.

“Don’t forget to signal for the cows!”

“Oh lord, the cows won’t know we’re going to turn!”

“COWS! WE ARE TURNING!”

I feel I would be remiss if at this critical juncture I didn’t mention the fact that the cows don’t care.

I promise you, they don’t. There is no empirical data from studies done by universities with too much money and time on their hands to suggest that a cow would be in any way interested in the fact that you are going to change the direction of your strange-moving-thing-that-is-not-a-cow-and-therefore-as-a-cow-I-couldn’t-give-a-toss, or that it would even understand the exclusively human construct of a car signal in the first place.

Sometimes you just have to take a step back and marvel at the absurdity of the world. I do. Frequently. It’s a clusterfuck of the very definition of insanity — repeating an action again and again and expecting different results — and the good old catch-22 of ‘if you think you’re nuts, you're not, and if you think you’re not, you are’. It’s a vicious cycle, a downward spiral, and these days, the idiocy has a tendency to go viral.

Trigger warning for occasional rhyming.

If you don’t laugh, you’re going to cry, and considering the fact that the best piece of advice I got this year was from Episode 8 of Team Four Star’s Hellsing Ultimate Abridged — “Don’t weep for the stupid, you’ll be crying all day.” — I’m determined to laugh. Sometimes angrily, obviously, but laugh nonetheless.

And it’s more fun to do that with company.