Early on, in this time of pandemic, as I talked with Kevin and Jeremy, we commented on how almost all of the newspeople, reporters, everyone, said, “Unprecedented.” “It’s just unprecendented.” “Completely unprecedented.” And so on.
And I said that there are surely more words that might be appropriate, and haven’t we used up “unprecedented?” So I went to Thesaurus.com, where I found words like “remarkable,” “uncommon,” and “unparalleled” (along with several others). But the word I like best (and which was at the top of the list of appropriate synonyms), was “bizarre.”
“There’s no more toilet paper!” “Bizarre!”
“I can only purchase two cartons of eggs!” “Bizarre!”
We just don’t feel comfortable going to (“the movies,” “a football game,” “our favorite restaurant,” “church” “add your own frustrating destination here,”). It’s just BIZARRE! The Thesaurus.com website has a brief explanation of the possible origin of the word, but it’s not very interesting.
One thing that I’ve found, well, maybe not “bizarre,” but certainly “different from usual,” is what’s happening at Target. I can understand how they, and really, most stores, had to put in their orders for back-to-school supplies many months earlier. And, there is most certainly a need for school supplies, but going back to school is different this year. Target did get ready for back-to-school shoppers, with school lists for different age groups, backpacks, lots and lots of pencils, pens, paper, composition books, rulers, scissors, et. al. And there indeed were shoppers. But there are also lots of school supplies still lying around. And, the space where school supplies have been is now being taken up by, of course, Halloween stuff.
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- School supplies have taken over the kid department, which seems appropriate.
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- In the middle of the ladies clothing department, there are colorful plastic folders right behind the cozy sweatshirts.
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- Now shoppers can coordinate their Sharpie markers with their sweaters.
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- And the wide aisle that leads to the media and electronics area is now crowded with, yes, school supplies.
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- You can see, on one of the displays, a big stack of packages of manila paper, a staple in elementary school classrooms. A few years ago, after the back-to-school rush, there were quite a few packages left on the Target shelves. They dropped the price and I bought a couple of packages to take to church. So did one of the other teachers. Every time I went to Target, they had lowered the price again. So I got a couple more packages, as did the other teacher. The end result was that we had a good sized supply of manila paper. I think there are still packages in the cabinet, even now.
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- Halloween has taken over the space where the school supplies were.
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- And, amazingly, on the other side of the very same aisle–Christmas lights!!
Everything on earth has its own time and its own season.
Ecclesiastes 3:1 (Contemporary English Version)
I stopped by my church a couple of days ago, to drop off some masks, which will go to the nearby elementary school. As I was leaving, I saw a couple of friends in the parking lot. We chatted a few minutes (all masked and distanced) and I said, “How much longer do you think this will last?” And they said, “Maybe six more months.” Bizarre.