As a lover of the English language and the ways languages play with words, I am always fascinated by things like expressions. The way words can be put together and played with to express an idea. I appreciate the ability of an expression because I admire the attempts made to perfectly sum up an idea or thought. This is the sort of thing I’ve always longed and searched for: the best and clearest way to make one’s meaning known.
That said expressions can be a real pain when they come back to bite you in the ass in such a smug way. In particular the expression that has been running through my head lately is “the best laid plans of mice and men”. Though a sentence fragment it hopes to express the frivolity of planning, and that no plan can ever truly be perfect as no person can account for any of the infinite number of variable presented in the universe. That said it seemed as if my plans for R&R on spring break were pretty fool proof. My plans were not so much plans as a looking forward to the absence of plans. The chance to do sweet, sweet nothing. Ultimately what I did not plan for is the irony of how getting sick really did reduce my Spring Break to “doing nothing”. It was all to be so easy, and yet by day 3 there I was in the courtship stages of the flu. It had made its overtures known to me with love letters of cough, congestion, and headaches.
I’m no stranger to my plans going awry, but usually the plans that go awry are those in which I am planning to actually do something. The irony that I did wind up doing nothing (but not in the way I’d hoped, in a sleep, sniffle and cough way) while envying the wild drunken adventures others were having in exotic places was not lost on me. I suppose next time, to use an expression, I’ll be careful what I wish for.
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