What's in a name? Butterside up

What’s with this name, “Butterside up,” a friend, who swears he read my blog, recently asked?
 Using today’s vernacular I told him, “It is what it is.”
 To which he promptly responded, “Huh?”

 So, perhaps, a little philosophy behind the blog might help, I mean now that we are four blogs deep it’s time to make sure that both of my readers (my wife Jackie and my cousin Mike, who chides me about formatting issues) will have some understanding about what I am really trying to do with this blog.  And, maybe I will understand what I am trying to do as well, which would give me some kind of goal other than “it’s late in the week you better write something.”

On the face of it butter side up is a term I learned a long time ago. I had a piece of toast and had applied a single-side surface coat of margarine and peanut butter on it.  Pretty content and ready to dine, I picked up the toast, only to have it slip from my fingers and land on the floor. Frustration with my lack of coordination must have settled in my face, because my mother, alive at the time, immediately queried “Butterside up?”

I remember looking at her as if she had gone crazy.  Butter side up? It was peanut butter toast. As I looked down at my breakfast, I noticed that indeed the peanut butter side was facing me.  That had two meanings to me:  1.  All was not lost with my breakfast, a quick application of the five-second rule and I was on my way, and 2.  Clean up was much easier.

So Butterside up was much better than Butterside down.  Butterside down had exactly the opposite effect, as the breakfast was unsalvageable and there was a significant mess made by the warm peanut butter.

Ahh, you’re stuck on the five-second rule, huh?  Well, I can’t say that I blame you. In this day and age, it seems like everything contains some kind of carcinogen or something that is out to get you.  Hence, the prospect of picking up a dropped piece of toast, butter side up or down, and continuing with breakfast is not one that many of us would choose to follow today. In fact, butter side anything is the first step toward trash can relief, unless you have a local dog to help with the cleanup.

The prospect of things being dropped or things not exactly flowing the way you would want them to is the idea behind my blog name.  In life, things naturally get out of sync and ideas just sort of jumble around, or at least in my head things sort of jumble around. You, my two readers, probably don’t have that problem at all. You probably move through your day with everything falling into place exactly as you planned them two or three weeks ago.

Not so for me.  Personally, I love the idea of planning things out. I love the idea of a place for everything and everything in its place. But that is not the reality I live in. That is a pipe dream in my reality.

My reality runs more like this:  my sister’s birthday is two weeks away. I think about it and even put it in my calendar.  A week later, I get a notice from my calendar that my sister’s birthday is on the weekly horizon.  Cool, I say to myself, I must get a card to send to her.

But things start to happen and I get distracted through the week. The reminder note pops up while I am in the midst of typing some important document, so I clear it from my screen and take no action, thinking all along that I will now remember to go get a card, fill it out with some pithy quotation that continues to build on our awesome relationship as brother and sister, and post the card in time to arrive exactly on her birthday.

In my mind that’s what happens.  In reality, I check Facebook and see that tomorrow is her birthday and I have no card, I have no pithy commentary, and the Post Office is closed to boot.  That’s classic Butterside down. I dropped the toast, the ball, the card, the whatever you want to call it, but in the end the job didn’t get done; at least not the way I had envisioned it.

What to do now?  No way can I get her a card in time, no way can I salvage favored brother status (that goes to Mike, again), no way can I take this negative incident and turn it into something even slightly more positive.

Then, of a sudden, I remember there are e-mail card services.  I quickly head to Blue Mountain and grab one of their “free” cards, type a few pithy lines:  “Hi Ruth, Happy Birthday, Love David” and voila’ home free, my duty done.  That’s Butterside up.  Of course, you have to remember to actually e-mail the card to the right address to make that happen, but that leaves room for improvement for next year so all’s well that ends well, after all. Happy belated birthday, Sissy.