"First stop, Motivation Station!"

If you were hunting for metaphors, where would you start? The jungle of Shakespearean tomes? The fresh fields of daily conversation? The tundra of public television?

In all seriousness, good comedy (i.e. comedy I like) is full of great language. Parks and Recreation takes it up a notch, deploying metaphor for character development even as they earn a laugh. 

Killing two birds with one stone, you could say. If you were obnoxious.

So how do the ways some of the funniest characters on TV speak show us the who they are? 

CHRIS TRAEGER

The title quote of this post comes from the show's exercise-crazy city manager, literally the most affirmative personality on TV ever. His conversation consists almost entirely of descriptions of his own physical health and blithe encouragements of other people. He powers on down the path of life. Really.  The show practically declares his obsession with running a metaphor for his worldview and personality. Chris, whose goal is "to run to the moon," becomes increasingly aware of the parallel. 

The man who, early-on, happily announces "The world's my gymnasium!" begins to question the validity of his perfectionistic, body-cenetered goals. At the same time, he reveals (and realizes?) their origin: a lifelong fear of death. As he acknowledges the lonely and emotionally thin lifestyle his focus on self-preservation have created, he applies the language of physicality and extremes to his psychological state: "I was dying earlier today. Now I'm dead." 

TOM HAVERFORD

The trendy, materialistic, presumptuous rank-and-file government official's speech is, like every other character's, I suppose, wonderfully unique. Besides Twilight-loving, promiscuous Donna, Tom is the only character in the world of Pawnee City Hall who seems to keep up with the times. He values novelty way over tradition, personal gain over service, and entertainment over wisdom. In other words, he's hilarious -- and not for being unidentifiable.

 There's something refreshing about the honesty and self-awareness of his otherwise sleazy, offensive statements. They take the edge of outrageous comments like, "I have never taken the high road. But I tell other people to 'cause then there's more room for me on the low road." The way he talks leaves me with the impression of a smart, sweetly desperate little kid stifled by pretentious Armani suits and gold chains with an earbud glued to his head. Who else could joke by asking "On a scale from one to Chris Brown, how pissed off is he?"

RON SWANSON

I recently learned that the show's writers drew inspiration for this die-hard libertarian, whose belief that his own department should cease to exist makes him a unique parks department director, from an actual government official. Life truly is stranger than fiction. What makes Ron so hilarious and lovably bizarre, besides the irony of his position, is his bold use of imagery and hyperbole to defend his unusual convictions. "It's never too early to learn that the government is a greedy piglet that suckles on the taxpayers teat until they have sore, chapped nipples," he says of a nine-year-old girl he ultimately converts to libertarianism. 

Ron's passion against government is matched only by his appetite for meat (red meat -- fish "is practically a vegetable") and sex. Ron's ideas are all consistent with his intensified rustic ideal of manhood, according to which he chooses his hobbies, maintains his relationships, and does (or doesn't do) his job. This ideal even dictates his opinion on pets, and the rhetorical violence with which he expresses it: "Any dog under 50 pounds is a cat, and cats are pointless."

LESLIE KNOPE

Amy Poehler's stubbornly optimistic, blatantly ambitious protagonist is probably the most dynamic and complex character. Well-educated, binder-crazy, and having read and herself written vast numbers of formal documents, her speech often has a smart ring to it, aided by the fact that she's almost always talking about government. Except when she's giggling about her boyfriend's butt or ranting against Eagleton. Still, even her jokes (or are they just sincere comments?) are about government: "Well, our budget has been slashed to zero. I tried to buy fertilizer the other day for the soccer field. Request denied. We literally can't buy [bleep]." 

Leslie's intelligence, with which she constantly evaluates and re-evaluates her own and others' statements, more than makes up for her bleach-blond hair. And just as her enthusiasm for waffles and whipped cream adds sweetness to the daily grind of her work-dominated life, the goofy comments that bubble out of her occasionally buoy up a fierce, single-minded, feminist personality. She is unashamedly feminine and hilariously sharp when she says of a symbolic, diplomatically intended "unity" quilt, "Of all my metaphorical art projects, this is by far my coziest." Leslie is somehow fully sincere and self-aware at the same time. Paired with an appreciation for metaphor and a command of language, these qualities lead her to both put herself in hilarious situations and draw out every ounce of comedy in them.

"What am I going to do?" she cries when a woman steals her jokes and, in sudden anxiety, she reaches for a drink relabeled as a prank against her antagonist. "I just opened up a can of Whoop Ass on myself!"

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Do you know any other good quotes from Parks, or from another TV show with creative, intelligent, or plain ol' humorous examples of metaphors? They lurk everywhere. Catch some and bring them to share!

Urban Dictionary

I don't always use questionable sources of information, but when I do, I prefer urbandictionary.com.

For conscience's sake, I need to reveal the source of this blog's title and conception. I am not very witty or original. The way I came upon the idea is this: Being both thorough and random in equal parts, I was doing intense online research on metaphor. I didn't really know what exactly I was hoping to find. That level of uncertainty makes research rather excruciating, but undeniably interesting -- whimsical, I suppose, in a way that offends my left hemisphere and tickles my right. Your response to me might be similarly mixed. Understandable.

I should probably rewind a bit. Why am I writing a blog at all? Because I like to write. But I am not a fan of writing for writing's sake. (Yuck.) Ideally, for me, writing involves a sense of mutual discovery, a respectful and genuine relationship between reader and writer, an invitation to think about and discuss something both ubiquitous and not commonly acknowledged or fully understood -- food, feelings, money, oceans, war, technology, humans. I began asking myself what I am both already well enough versed in to write anything at all about, and interested enough in to continue to write about, potentially FOREVER. Or at least a few years.

Metaphor was the first word to come to mind.

I like poetry; I like life; I like symbols. I often confuse the three. Is that bad, or beneficial? irresponsible, or productive? Sometimes I really don't know. So when I saw the word literaphorically pop up among Google's 25,400,000 other results (found in 0.21 seconds, or about 0.20 seconds too slow for my taste), I was impressed and comforted by the implication that someone somewhere also conflates life and art. For better or for worse.

According to urbandictionary, literaphorically refers to a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is both literal and metaphorical applicable in order to suggest a double meaning about one incident. The neologism reminds of what I love (and sometimes hate) about both literature and life: the mystery of language, the potential for finding mutually edifying (and potentially deceptive) connections among objects and ideas, the way relationships between any person and any other thing is mediated by symbols.

Symbols are everywhere. You can't escape them, particularly if you want to communicate or even think about literally anything. (See what I did there?!) Metaphor is the stuff of thought and language, and thought and language are the stuff of life. It's a concept worth investigating, and incredibly fun to play with. I don't know where this will go, but sometimes spontaneity is key to discovery.

So please, if even half of your brain is interested in learning or arguing with me, read on, comment, discuss. My only request of you, dear reader, is to remember that I'm human, and you're human. By which I mean that if you come at me with the wrath of God (however framed by logic your anger may be), I will probably cry like a little girl, because I am a little girl, and because you are not God. So let's keep it open, let's keep it interesting, and let's keep it respectful.

And let's go.

Meander

Two thousand years ago, around the time a nondescript couple shuffled into Bethlehem, some Greeks were busy bringing lawsuits against one of their gods. His name was Maiandros, known as Maeander to the Romans.

Maeander's river, neighbors claimed, had been "wandering deceptively over the Phrygian plain [...] conceal[ing] the direction of its flow" (Propertius) and "altering the boundaries of the countries on his banks" by sweeping away "projecting elbows of land" (Strabos). In other words: 

Once a channel begins to follow a sinusoidal path, the amplitude and concavity of the loops increase dramatically due to the effect of helical flow sweeping dense eroded material towards the inside of the bend, and leaving the outside of the bend unprotected and therefore vulnerable to accelerated erosion, forming a positive feedback loop. 

In the end, Maeander was convicted for destroying property with his twisted ways. His name became synonymous with "a winding course". And so it was associated with a classic Greek design of linear motifs;

mathematics borrowed it to describe a self-avoiding closed curve intersecting a line;

surveyors started running meander lines along the banks of streams and lakes;

and in the 19th century people traveling by boat started to "meander" just by doing their thing. Today all you need to do is walk (or talk) circuitously, even in the middle of a bone-dry desert, to evoke his name. 

Unfortunately, though Maeander paid his dues to society (through local ferry tolls), the god was never able to clear his name. Four hundred years later, a poet described him "lurking in the secret places with his water in the lap of earth -- [he] who rolls deep through the earth and drags his crooked stream towards the light, crawling unseen and travelling slantwise underground, until he leaps up quickly and lifts his neck above the ground" (Nonnus). Not a particularly heartwarming characterization, though Gollum might disagree.

Perhaps the god deserves his sour reputation. Maeander continues to frustrate many, at least vicariously, through aggressive river curves that "migrate" downstream too quickly and wreak havoc for civil engineers... 

In other words, meandering meanders still manage to mess stuff up.

"Meander scars" of Argentina's Rio Negro

And so the river god's name lives on, for better or for worse.