Anybody who knows me will tell you this: I am a sunny ray of sunshine.
Positively dripping with optimism, I rarely fail to meet life and society with anything less than the very essence of chirpiness. Like I said, ask anybody.
But, dear reader, I must confess: even I, they guy whose middle name ought to be positivity – even I suffer from the odd bout of depression. Every now and then, I happen to chance upon a snippet of news, for example, that makes me despair for humanity.
And just such a thing happened to me the other day, when a black film of despair climbed steadily upon my senses, and I all but gave up on hope. What, you ask, was this news that plumbed me into the inner depths of pessimism? Ah, therein lies today’s tale.
We have, and by we I mean society, created an abomination called runcations.
If you, like me, are a civilized being, you might not have understood the word the first time around either. It is the coming together of two words: running, and vacation. It is, it slowly dawned upon a horror-struck yours truly, a vacation during which you run.
Well, correct me if I am wrong here, but it ain’t much of a vacation then, innit?
Honestly, I do not understand why we as a society keep doing this. Regular readers will recall a column in which I ruminated upon the absurdity of something called beer yoga. Runcations, I reflected, was even worse.
First, of course, is the fact that somebody could actually think of combining the two. They just don’t go together, much like beer and yoga, or politics and honesty. Second, and this is what made it worse: they dared denigrate as holy a concept as vacations, and appended a prefix as ghastly as ‘run’ to it. Beer yoga, for example, at least afforded one the opportunity to tune out after the word yoga was uttered. They didn’t, bless their souls, turn it into boga, for example.
But forget nomenclature. Let us turn to the more important issue at hand. Why… just WHY would you want to run on a vacation?
In my time, vacations used to be days on which the art of nothing was perfected. The odd game of table tennis, perhaps, or some lounging about in the pool, and maybe a spot of carrom or pool.
That is the very outer limit of physical exertion that ought to be allowed on a vacation.
Certainly nothing as barbaric as the notion that one puts on running singlets and goes from point A to point B and then back to point A. No, dear reader, one can do that, if one insists, during the rest of the year. A vacation, in case it wasn’t clear already, is where one does the exact opposite.
And it is the fact that this needs to be explained that shook me up so. Dark days for humanity indeed.
Runcation, it seems. Pah.
~~
He doesn't expect the paradox to be resolved in his lifetime
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