Enough With The Negative Advertising: 10 Things That Take The Perfect Amount Of Time

Holy George McGovern! It's not even Labor Day and we've all had enough of the negative advertising, haven't we? It's bad enough that people running for high office engage in the kind of nasty, distorted mudslinging of one another that directly goes against all their platitudes about a "better America," but now it seems that the negativity is infectious. I ran across this de facto ad on Buzzfeed, one of my favorite sites for finding out all the stupid, must-read crap floating around the internet. Samsung, in an effort to tout the speed of its latest computer, has concocted a list of ten things that "we" wish took less than ten seconds. I flatter Samsung with the word "concoct"; all they did was round up the usual suspects--do we really need somebody else telling us the DMV is a time-killer? It took me about seventeen seconds to scroll through the list; seventeen seconds I'll never get back. So let's get iconoclastically positive here and make a different, more ebullient list.

Ten Things That Take The Perfect Amount Of Time

1. Eating a banana: From the sensuous peeling, to the not-at-all-challenging biting and practically-melts-in-your-mouth chewing, is there a more satisfying (and salubrious) mutli-dimensional experience that takes less time than re-booting a frozen Samsung computer than this?
2. Watching a perfect tee shot: Granted, this one comes with qualification. It might take you, as it does me, several frustrating (i.e. sliced, hooked, topped, popped, whiffed, etc.) attempts, but when all the wrong things about your swing somehow harmonically converge to offset one another and you hit the sweet spot and that pale, dimpled nemesis flies high and long and straight and takes a good bounce down the fairway, you feel a little bit like Him/Herself sitting back on that grand Seventh Day and taking in the view, and saying, "Hmmm, not bad." Any longer would border on hubris, any shorter would be not enough.
3. Writing a "back in 5 minutes" post-it: Given the short duration of your absence and the need to inform your audience/customers of your absence, this is perfect. If you're going to be away less time, it's a waste of time to write the post-it; if you're going to be away longer, you got some 'splaining to do.
4. A sneeze: Not the allergen-induced onslaught of rapid ah-choos, nor the three-day phlegm fest of the common cold, but the out of nowhere, here and gone one-off bone-rattling sneeze. When executed to perfection--the instant brain-alert that makes you instantly realize, oh no, everything in life's on hold for the next few seconds, to that glorious intake of breath before lift-off ("ah") to that cathartic, ultimate experience of living in the moment expulsion ("choo") and the quick recovery time of receiving God's blessing--the sneeze is about as close to perfect timing as possible.
5. Napping: Be it a five minute power nod off or a luxurious two-hour asylum snooze, any nap is perfect.
6. Watching a Road Runner cartoon: How long are these things, five, six minutes? An hour? Who knows, but they're perfect. Any longer and your nerves would start to fray and you'd be cursing Road Runner's smugness and Wile E.'s stupidity. Your suspension of disbelief that allows you to believe the rock Wile E. just painted black could grant passage to Road Runner but stop Wile E. dead in his tracks would disintegrate. Your annoyance at the shoddy craftsmanship of the Acme Co. would have you flinging various catalogs at Wile E. You might end up hearing Beep Beep in your head for eternity. But any shorter, and you'd miss the complete arc of the existential story. The transformation of your emotions from glee at Road Runner's insouciance to sympathy for Wile E.'s tortured existence. You'd miss the musing upon the anvil's place in human history that always occurs. You'd stop identifying with Wile E.'s amazing recovery from certain death to attempt another scheme. Come to think of it, the exact duration of a Road Runner cartoon might be the perfect time frame for just about anything in life: X will only take as long as a Road Runner cartoon? I'll endure.
7. "ABC" by the Jackson 5: Pop perfection.
8. Cooking spaghetti: I am certainly no culinary master; food is merely functional, tasty at best. If it takes more time to make it than consume it, I'm skeptical. Spaghetti, given this credo, is perfect (sauce out of a jar, naturally; no simmering, stirring, pinching things into it for hours).
9. Proclaiming, "Ah, go to Hell!": Conversations, dialogues, debates, arguments--all of them can go on much too long, with a whole array of negative consequences. But with one simple--and quick--"Ah, go to Hell" (the "Ah" is essential, and can be accompanied with a rather limp-wristed, dismissive wave of the hand), the stake is decisively driven. The long-time assumed aphorism that the first one to raise his or her voice in an argument loses begs for revision in these crasser, more combative times. I say, the first one to proclaim AGTH wins, no questions asked. (Now's not the time to wax philosophic about the contrasting perfect words Heaven and Hell --Hell with its one-syllable stab, its bombastic and culminating double L; Heaven with its two-syllable elongation, its mighty V; the same Heh- beginning.) In fact, I say whichever candidate is the first to ditch all those despicable negative ads and resorts to a short (and cheap, austere), eight second ad showing five seconds of the opponent's highfalutin' gibberish followed by a quick cut to the candidate simply proclaiming, "Ah go to Hell!" would win in a landslide.
10. Reading my blog posts: What the hell, like Wile E. Coyote, a man can keep on concocting and hoping.