Tender Tears & Da Breaks
Episode 10:16:2023 - Prompt: Sayings
Where Sayings took me…
My partner & I frequent a bar called Bubion II (dos / two) after we finish our training sessions in Granada. There are many choices in the neighborhood, but one or the other of us will usually say…
“What about Boobie Dos?”
Bubion II is known for a tapa they call Lagrimitas de Pollo al Limon, directly translated as Little Chicken Tears with Lemon (not tear, as in tearing a sheet of paper, but tear as in when you cry).
Sad chickens, we eat their tears.
My partner made a comment that the chicken tears were tender. Yes, at this point, we could have called them Chicken Tenders.
Instead, my mind flashed on the phrase:
Tender is the night.
I didn’t remember the title of the book by F. Scott Fitzgerald while I was at Bubion II. The lyrics of Jackson Browne’s song of the same title came into my mind. I thought he may have borrowed the words from a Saying or a poem.
I started to wonder when a poet would consider night to be tender. As someone who doesn’t experience a lot of tender sleep, I don’t find the night tender at all.
But maybe it’s romantic? Or tenderness expressed in the shadows?
Is the night really tender?
Which brings me to a slippery, shapeshifting Saying…
A Saying says a lot about the sayer.
It can be inclusive, exclusive, age-indicative, social-class-experience-dependent, education-based, culturally-ingrained, and so on.
I wrote the Saying for this Substack:
The only truth you can control is the truth you tell. Gimme some.
It was inspired by John Lennon’s song Gimme Some Truth.
If you don’t know the song, you have to take the words of my Saying at face value.
If you know the song, you might make a quicker connection to the underlying call for social protest using your own personal agency:
The choice to tell the truth in an extremely long era of hypocrisy.
Back to slippery Sayings…
Use It or Lose It
A Saying that depends on the context.
I’ve never worked in a corporate or government environment. I didn’t realize Use It or Lose It referred to vacation & sick days. That you have to use up your paid days by the end of the year or you lose them. That sucks.
We also hear Use It or Lose It with services, insurance, and other products that don’t care about us. The idea that you have to get all of your medical needs taken care of in one calendar year once you’ve paid your deductible seems like coercion… ransom even.
Use It or Lose It is also related to neuroplasticity and the '“ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connections.” It’s also applied, in this same context, to language, aging, and motor skills.
We hear Use It or Lose It in sports & fitness. Exercise regimes for building muscle strength, training programs for running, cycling, and swimming.
I know that after 15-years of yoga, I had the arrogance to think I could stop for six years and return to my practice without much loss.
So wrong!
Yes, there was muscle memory, but there was also aging. I spent one year mourning my practice before I came out on the other side with an entirely new practice.
I didn’t use it, and I lost it… but not all of it.
(Thanks to neuroplasticity!)
Use It or Lose It could also be a tool in de-cluttering, as Contributor Julia W. writes. When going through your closets full of unworn shoes in boxes, ask yourself:
Do I use it?
If not… Lose it.
When living in a squat in Berlin, the understanding about space appropriation was that if it was Not In Use it was up for grabs. You could not aggressively take space someone was actively using. But if they hadn’t touched it in months,
Well… dems da breaks.
YOUR TURN: Does a Saying need to follow “It’s like they say…”?
Or “You know what they say…?” for it to be considered a Saying?
My mother likes to say, “It’s what I like to call…” before she says something that is very close to a Saying.
Is fear all we have to fear?
Is war over if we want it?
Don’t we have something left to lose?
Where do SAYINGS take you?
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Happy writing!
The saying, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” is attributed to Jesus by the Apostle Paul in the book of Acts, but the saying does not show up in the gospels. I’m sure many things Jesus did were not recorded. And Paul had intimate knowledge of Jesus’s ministry—from the experience on the road to Damascus and thereafter—and was well acquainted with the other apostles. So, I have no doubt about the veracity of the saying. Still, I struggle with this axiom, not the giving—I love to give—but the receiving. For instance, after playing a flute solo or duet in church, I often receive kinds words from others. I tend to mumble in embarrassment rather than receiving gracefully, or put myself down by pointing out my mistakes, thus creating an awkward situation. I have to practice in order to receive well, which in a way is another form of giving. Here are some of my practice sayings: just say, “Thank You;” share the credit by acknowledging others; quote from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians chapter 10 verse 31— “…all for the glory of God.” Now that’s a saying—and a whole lot more!
“If you’ve been to Tenerife, he’s been to Eleven-erife.” – a saying that never fails to make me laugh.
There was a lad on my uni course who was notorious for it. When someone at a party mentioned they'd been to see the band Paramore, he said he'd snogged the lead singer in a club. We doubted she would have been in a student nightclub in the UK but he insisted it was true.
When someone recalled spotting a (very famous) footballer who lived in the city, this lad told us that only two days ago, he had been walking along near the grounds and the very same footballer stopped his car and gave him a lift all the way home.
That wasn’t so much one-upmanship, I guess, as compulsive lying. It used to really infuriate me; I think because the things that make us cringe the most are the qualities we worry we have inside us too, and I used to exaggerate wildly as a child. It reminds me of another saying that always makes me smile, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”