Pressurized Rats

A fellow sailor recently came upon a cute boutique during her boating travels. She texted me this photo saying it brought sweet memories of me to her mind. (OK, that’s perhaps not a direct quote.)

I responded to her by reluctantly admitting that the sentiment expressed on the shop door might need to be reversed for me - my mermaid swimming is frequently spent in the shallows due to my inability to equalize the pressure in my ears when under deep water. A clear and simple reply, right? But through the fault of fat fingers, flawed vocabulary, and the hazards of text message autofill, my response instead read “my living is pretty shallow" because "I can’t pressurize my rats”.

Now, my dear friend would never confess to me that she thinks I might spend any inappropriate amount of time in shallow living. But she did respond with her fear that the occasional dock rat might have invaded our boat!

In the good-ole-days (i.e., long before the internet) we played the game of “gossip” – someone would create a short story and whisper it to the next person, who would whisper it to the next, and so on down the line. Eventually, the last person would repeat the story, which would have us all roaring with laughter when the initiator shared with us the original version. No resemblance whatsoever.

As a blogger and sometimes Facebook scribe, I do enjoy my social media (mostly). But while admittedly a silly example, I think my texting story points out how easily texting and social media can create and perpetuate a rumor or mistruth. With a few simple “shares” the world would now be mortified by my shallow living in a boat overrun with pressurized (see my earlier instant pot post) rats.