SoCS out of the box — 1.7.23

Your prompt for #JusJoJan and Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “out of the box.” Write about the first thing that comes to mind when you think “out of the box.” Enjoy!

The first thing I thought of (and I’m pretty sure this is where many of my fellow SoCS bloggers will go) was thinking outside of the box. Then I started getting pedantic with myself and wondering if out of the box is the same thing as outside of the box, and I’m not sure it is. I think it is a gray area. I will avoid that, and I will take my stream of meandering elsewhere, keeping a close eye on out.

If something is now out of the box does that imply that it was once in a box? No. It could have been in and now out, but maybe you are wrapping presents and something that is out of the box needs to go in it (so that later it can be out again). I’m getting into existential states of boxitude now.

That degree of uncertainty of things in or maybe not in a box while the observer is out of the box immediately brings forth the ubiquitous feline of that imp Schrödinger. It is on my to-do list (along with relearning calculus for fun and rearranging my bookshelf, as in don’t hold your breath) to really understand that theory. I kind of understand that theory, but the more I learn about quantum physics the less I know, which (come to think of it) puts me on par with the physicists studying it, and so now I’m feeling extremely intelligent! Thank you, Linda!

Which of course leads my brain to the Internet cat meme of If I fits I sits, which has birthed millions of photos of cats sitting in or on or out or outside of various containers including boxes. (See? I’m still on track with the prompt.)

Not Sullivan, but it could have been.

Many years ago, I had a darling cream Persian cat named Sullivan. (His brother was Dilbert. Get it? Dilbert and Sullivan? Yeah, I know…) While all cats seem to have some form of a box fixation, and will flirt with sitting their butts into an open egg carton or two, Sullivan was truly obsessed. If a box came into the house, he would be on it. In it. You couldn’t open the flaps up of an Amazon packing box before he’d be maniacally trying to get into the box, before anything was out of the box. (Still on prompt!) Being cream, which is the cat fancy’s fancy word for pale red, Sullivan was also rather box colored. He’d blend. I can’t tell you how many times I’d bend over to pick up a box and find, to my surprise, that it wasn’t empty like I had thought it was, but it was full of fur in the form of a Sullivan. Sweetest cat in the world, and I miss him dearly.

Cat to box time was measured in nanoseconds. I ♥ U Sullivan!

Camouflaged cat.

An unhappy cat. This is what happens when packaging material for a crock pot was mistaken for a box to sit in… a common enough mistake. He stomped around like this for quite a while because his humans were laughing too hard to extricate him.

Speaking of Sullivan in Amazon boxes, I could do a riff on Amazon boxes. I’m sure something we can all relate to is when you take the tiny item you ordered from Amazon out of the box (grins… so proud of me) then you are left staring in dumbfounded amazement at the sheer waste of resources that company does by matter of routine. They’ve gotten a little better, but, geez, you order a pack of Post-Its and you get a 2x2x2 foot shipping box and a bunch of those air pillow thingies.

The worst case of that was about a year ago, when I ordered a toilet snake gadget. It is a pole of about 3-4 feet in length with a bit of a handle turn. It has length, sure, but it isn’t bulky. Oh. My. Gawd. Instead of a mailing tube or something similar, it arrived in a 4 x 3 x 1 foot box. At least. It was huge. In that case, whoever packed that snake should have been thinking outside of the box a little better…

(See what I did there? You’re welcome.)

I’m pretty sure there is no doubt that this was a pure stream of consciousness post…