The last few weeks have been balls-to-the-wall for me at work. If you're not familiar with that particular phrase, I'll offer the alternative of "hella busy." Two weeks in a row were back-to-back recording days for me, where I was teaching content of the software to a group of people. That in itself is not too bad, but what made these particularly exhausting was that in recording them, I was instructed not to take questions from folks as we went along, taking questions at the breaks through a buddy I had proctoring them or at the end of the day instead. In other words, I was literally talking to myself in a closed room for six hours. The result was a complete mental tap-out by the end of the day, and then turning around and doing it the next day. Two weeks of that, and then a week-long onsite.
This has left me in a particular state of mind post work, which involves the following symptoms: increased forgetfulness, difficulty in making mundane decisions, inability to think out past a certain time frame (as in, I could only think about a week ahead at most), and a certain state of punchiness, where mundane or even mildly amusing things were just freakin' hilarious.
Sometimes we call it "Skyward brain," meaning that particular state of mental exhaustion from the work that we do, the kind of strain of being "on" all day. I also like to make up little songs about having a "puddin' brain" or a "mushy brain." But the Roy side of the family has another shorthand for this particular state: a Shary Bobbins day.
Every now and again, I'll get a text from Mother, informing me that it's a Sherry Bobbins day (yes, spelling can vary)--this tends to then trigger a small flurry of texts of silly words, which may or may not frequently include "testicles," knowing on the other end that it is potentially sending her into a fit of giggles.
This term was coined from one particular day, perhaps about twenty years ago, by this point. Mother had had a LONG shift, where she was called out in the middle of the night or possibly had not actually been to bed that night--keeping regular hours as a surgical nurse on the heart team wasn't always easy. Sleep deprived and ready for a good long sit, she came home from work, where the rest of us were already home, the three kids around the TV watching the Simpsons just as she came through the door. The episode happened to be the Shary Bobbins episode, where the Simpsons did a spoof of Mary Poppins. Mother was starting to tell us a bit about her day as the episode was beginning. As Shary floated down from the sky on her umbrella, said umbrella hooks on a phone line and she flips around it with a "woo-woo-woo-woo!" before continuing her graceful decent. Mother started laughing, the particular kind of sleep-deprived, exhausted, "that is the funniest shit I've seen in my life!" kind of laugh. And it kept going and going, almost tears kind of cackling.
We watched the rest of the episode together, but mostly we watched my mother watch the episode, as every joke or gesture was amplified to her in that moment--we were cracking up watching her being cracked up. It was a couple of years later before this became a standard term, with the kind of "It's a Sherry Bobbins kind of day" texts. It pulls us all back to that shared moment. Andy was adopted into the meaning of the term initially without having heard the story, but fully understanding that when it was time to send her a flurry of texts, he was ready to send silly words, pictures, etc. It's one of our family stories, the shared fable that we remember together that became its own adjective.
For me, there'll be a number of these yet before the summer is over, but the fun tied to that memory makes it at least a little bit better.
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