Llamas and Refrigerators

A friend of mine recently described the various tattoos she had considered getting in her life, though she had never gotten one. She said she had four main options that she had debated. They were these:

1) “Yes”

2) “?”

3) A circle

4) An elephant

This list made me very happy. There is a certain beauty in completely off-the-wall randomness.

Now I know I am biased on this issue. I have been told by many that I am the most random person they know, and I am no longer surprised when I here this. At work, I am the random fact guy, who occasionally spurts out completely useless, unimportant information. And every time we have a team meeting, I am expected to produce new geographic commentary as we view the wall-sized map in our team room. (I like these duties, by the way. And today I branched out of mere terrestrial geography and discussed Neptune. Did you know that this frigid planet can have sustained winds of up to 1500mph?? Wow.)

But there are many who are not so keen on things random. I have many friends who find peace and joy in the complete ordering of their surroundings. I’ve always been glad there are people like this who can balance out the ones like me.

Recently, though, I have begun to realize that my love of randomness is not so different from a love of order. Many before us have noticed that opposites in their most extreme manifestations often suddenly find themselves rather similar – Communism and Facism being an oft-cited example (I think before long General Relativity and Quantum Theory will become another one). And in some areas, like natural selection, randomness is rather orderly indeed.

But at a more basic level, I’ve realized that the manner in which I judge the merits of any random thing is in fact a logical process. It’s a lot like one of those logic games where you are presented with a group of objects and asked to spot the one that doesn’t fit. Except this time, I want them all to be completely unique, sharing as few traits as possible with all the other items in the list. That’s why my friend’s list of tattoo options was so excellent. The four options have almost nothing in common. “Yes” is a word, whose part of speech I cannot even say I know; “?” is a symbol, only slightly related to yes in that they can both be used in sentences, though “yes” is very definitive while “?” is extremely uncertain. A circle is also a symbol but it has definite physical applications and occurences and is used in math rather than language; an elephant is the only purely physical thing in the list and is obviously unique. And this list would become even better if the items’ small similarities were eliminated, though completely eliminating similarities can only go so far.

I now see that this love of orderly randomness is why I am so fond of a particular, random video entitled “The Llama Song.” I was first introduced to it in college, and it is completely ridiculous and makes no sense. It includes lines like, “I was once a treehouse; I lived in a cake. But I never saw the way the orange slayed the rake,” and lists like “tablet, brick, potato, llama,” and “doorknob, ankle, cold.” That last one is particularly good from a logical perspective. Doorknobs are physical, inorganic, and discrete; ankles are physical, but organic and continuous (who can really say, “the ankle stops here”), and cold is conceptual and subjective, never necessarily present or absent. How wonderful!

So now that I have sapped all randomness of its pleasure, I will leave you with a different sort of randomness, which is equally thrilling, and not of my making:

Haikus are easy,

But sometimes they don’t make sense.

Refrigerator