I had posted this as my Facebook status a while ago, so many of you may have already seen it. However, I felt I should post it again in my blog because this is where I first used the phrase "Circular Absurdity" to describe something so completely mind-boggling that your mind spins and won't get out of the loop.
One day my sister and I went to a local craft store. My sister makes greeting cards and other crafts, extremely well. In the back, near the cake decorating kits was a wall of "geese costumes". These are little matching clothes people put onto their plastic lawn geese. The clothes can make their geese look like pilgrims for Thanksgiving, or Uncle Sam for the Fourth of July, or even an elf for Christmas. I find this practice to be completely bizarre, but at least I understand it. My mind can wrap itself around this strange custom.
One of the costumes on the wall was of a goose.
Yes, that's right. You can dress your goose up as.......a goose.
It even had an orange felt-beak.
My brain still turns to mush every time I try to figure this one out.
Hence the definition of "Circular Absurdity".
Ah, cognitive dissonance at work. The duck thing could be either a rock-bottom case of "you're missing the point, folks" or it could be self-referential. Like, "ha ha, I took this duck that people usually dress up in costumes, and I'm dressing it up as ... A DUCK! Aren't I clever!" It reminds me of the post-modernist literature-criticism crowd, drenched in irony and endlessly self-referential, the hipsters of academia. If absurdity is my favorite form of humor, cognitive dissonance is theirs.
ReplyDeleteBut since you saw it at a craft store, it's probably just people Doing It Wrong.