Well the Super Bowl commercials are over for another year. Seemed to be a lot more focus on dear old Dad this year. Apparently some of us men folk aren’t as painfully inept at the parenting gig as the majority of sitcoms portray.

During the game I managed to happily eat my weight in the wonderful wings my wife prepared for the masses but the rum chasers I prepared don’t seem to be getting along with the globs of guacamole and lil' smokies so let the post-game nausea begin. If only the distance from hand to mouth were greater so we would have more time to ponder and possibly dampen the overindulgence. Possibly but not likely.

We human types aren’t so smart sometimes…many times. Most of us have been around most of our lives so we should know by a certain time, let’s say 42 years, that too much good is bad and bad is not good. Many a good human has been laid low by that gap between knowing and doing. Knowing what’s right and doing what ain’t so right is a right. Right?

I exercised that right to ignore what is right and now I feel sorta wrong. I’m sure it’ll never happen again. Right.

The phrase, “I know right” has cropped up the past few years or so and I don’t like it. Can’t say for sure why I don’t like it and now that I’m over forty I don’t have to have a reason. Right? Maybe it’s because it’s a throw away phrase that doesn’t seem to lend anything of value to a conversational exchange. Kind of the verbal equivalent of the half-hearted head nod. The head nod that is code for, “I have nothing to say…shut up so I can move on with my life and take part in something more productive than this conversation before I die…please.”

A code that many choose not to appropriately acknowledge. So it goes or as they say, “It is what it is.” “It is what it is”? Well what else would it be if it isn’t what it is? Something else? Then it wouldn’t be what it is I suppose. All these little throw away phrases that we use to fill up that quiet space in conversation. Quiet space isn’t so bad. You can learn a lot in quiet spaces. We need more quiet spaces to interrupt the nonstop nonsensical dialog in this ever connected disconnected world. Right?

A college classroom is a captive audience that is many times not so captivated so for sport I enjoy seeing how big of a quiet space my students will tolerate during class after a question is posed to them. I ask the class a question and mill around in the quiet space until someone cracks and provides an answer. The sport within the sport is seeing how quickly some students will avert their gaze when you look at them within that quiet space between question and answer.

Ten seconds is about the average quiet space they can tolerate. Sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more, but someone always talks. That someone may not know what they’re talking about but they talked and now the ball is back in my court. So goes the game. Some days it’s a good game, some days you throw an interception on the goal line when you should have run the ball.

It is what it is…Right?