Opposite Day

My kid loves what he calls "pranks," and what the rest of us would call... I don't know, actually. Entertainment? Jokes? Something like that.

Lately, he's been into me tickling him.

I know, tickling is wrong. It's a show of domination and force disguised as playtime. At least, that's what some of the psychiatrists I know say. I also thought it was fun to be tickled when I was a kid, and as long as whoever is doing the tickling stops when the other person asks for a stop, I think it's got to be at least partially not wrong.

Anyway, he's gotten that he can't out-tickle me. He used to ask me to "cut the pickle" and would then shout "TICKLE TICKLE" as he tried to get me. But now he tells me to make a pickle and cut it with my own head, which means I've got to tickle myself.

I don't always feel like tickling myself, though, so I've started invoking opposite day at random, which means that sometimes I'll pretend to tickle myself, and sometimes I'll tickle him, and other times, opposite day means something totally different.

That's the beauty of opposite day – most things don't actually have an opposite. There's not an opposite of the song I'm listening to right now (Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, if you're curious) – there's a suite of songs that almost certainly includes Taylor Swift's entire catalogue, but there's no true opposite.

And there's no real opposite of cut the pickle, either, because of course you can't really tickle yourself. Hence, this:

It would be awesome if we could actually have opposite days at work. Again, though, it's hard to figure out what the opposite of most things is. The opposite of a burger and fries is probably a salad (I guess, if you're feeling like a pedant, it would be a veggie burger and mashed potatoes). And the opposite of a meeting is having a not meeting, which is I guess is staring off into space on my own rather than staring at other people and saying whatever it is that they expect me to say.

The opposite of a sale would be... bad.

But given that we all get rejected way more than we sell stuff, I suppose all of those rejections would turn into sales. So yay! Opposite day!

Almost everything turns out to be a matter of perspective. Even though opposite day isn't a real thing, choosing how you view a day is.