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Yawn of a New Day

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Today’s post comes from Bart the Bear.

He Found a Smart Phone in the Woods
He Found a Smart Phone in the Woods

Yawn.

Hibernation time is over for me. I’m up. It’s … yawn … not a good time to be searching for food. That’s true every year. But this year is the worst I’ve seen in a long time – basically nothing but snow wherever I look.

I Googled “Hibernation” just to read up on it a little bit. Since there’s nothing … yawn … to eat, I figured I might as well feed my mind. And there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t know, and I’ve been hibernating every year … yawn … for my whole life.

That part about the build-up and expulsion of a “fecal plug” was news to me, and also it was extra gross. Not to go into too much detail, but now I know why I’ve always thought someone was waiting around to take a pot shot at me every year when I came out of my den.

When you’re a bear, every loud POP sounds like gunfire.

But anyway … yawn … it’s a challenge to wake up when you’re weak and under-nourished. So I’m … yawn … yawning. I’m writing in the word “yawn” whenever I do it just to let you know how … yawn … bad it is. It’s bad. Did you notice? I’m yawning a lot.

So to get the image of that fecal plug out of my mind, I Googled “yawn” and found out a lot, including that it’s contagious, like a disease. If I … yawn … yawn and you’re watching me, or even just reading something I … yawn … wrote … you might start to yawn too. People used to think this was happening because there was some feeling of empathy between the yawner and the person being yawned at – the yawnee.

Yawn.

It turns out that’s not true. At least not in this study. What they found instead is that it varies – some people don’t catch yawning from another person – they’re resistant to it. Old people are especially resistant.

I’m thinking … yawn … that the geezers were already asleep, but the study didn’t say that.

All I know is … yawn … when I open my mouth wide at people they can do two things – take pictures or run like Hell. Or both, in that exact order.

But they sure don’t yawn back.

What behaviors do you pick up from other people?

34 thoughts on “Yawn of a New Day”

  1. Morning all. Too bad Bart can’t sleep a little later, at least until some more of the snow melts. In my backyard, it’s still 4 feet high in most spots.

    I pick up people’s hand movements, especially if someone has more pronounced hand movements.

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Top o’ the marnin’ to ya Irish men and women. On St. Paddy’s Day I pick up wearing o’ the green which I will do today.

    To me, yawns are contagious. I pick up habits of time somewhat–If I work with people who are late chronically, I start to run a little late. Recipes are contagious, as well as authors. After someone at work talks about a book, soon everyone is reading the same thing.

    Techological habits are catchy, too. After someone purchased the first iPad, we all had iPad envy. Shortly after that, the actual iPads appeared!

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  3. Good morning. Yawn. It seems I pick up yawning from other people or other yawning animals. Yawn. I also pick up speech patterns and accents. I think many people have a tendency to pick up the accents and speech patents of other people. Ya, you betcha.

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  4. I have to be careful when listening to accents for too long, or I’ll start to copy them. I also pick up words and phrases from other types of English. I have an English coworker, and when we talk I inevitably start using Britishisms, which I think both amuses and relieves her–I’m the one person who will understand what she’s saying if she forgets to “talk American.” My roommate has the same problem with picking up accents. When she worked at the airport she had people speaking to her in French, Spanish, and Italian, convinced because she could imitate certain phrases perfectly that she actually spoke the language. And yet, I had a hard time teaching her to pronounce “lefsa”; she kept wanting to put a K between the S and the A…

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    2. I have the same habit. I’ve worked enough places that I have a nice collection of favorite phrases in a weird range of southern, Yiddish, UP…..

      I currently work with someone who is Fargo’s answer to Hyacinth Bucket (that’s pronounced boo-KAY). I really have to watch myself.

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  6. I’m a bit of a cultural chameleon as well. The English I was taught in school as a kid was of the British pronunciation. That, of course, would not do when most of the “English” speakers I interacted with were American. Worse was that I was taught the English spelling as well, and when I started college at SIU, I was routinely marked down for spelling errors in my “English” classes. Give me a month’s vacation in Ireland, and I’d no doubt come back with a brogue.

    OT – If memory serves, today is Cb’s 70th birthday. Happy day, Crystalbay.

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  7. When I was a stagehand and working at the local civic center, the regular stagehand guys swore like drunken (Irish) sailors. And when I came home from a show I had a potty mouth for a week.

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  9. Like Ben, I used to spend time with people who never uttered a sentence without at least one bad word in it. One fellow, in fact, almost couldn’t speak without using the F-word in each sentence — as a verb, a noun, an adverb, and (ummm) as an all-purpose ejaculation.

    One thing that was hard about being with him was that he was genuinely funny in the way he swore, and when I later quoted him in articles or books I wrote the statements sounded weirdly flat without the blue words. But if I’d had a conversation with him on the phone, my daughter would later shake her head and say, “You been talking with Jim again, haven’t you?”

    What was maybe harder for me to handle was all the off-color erotic humor I heard from others (especially two women I dated). That’s a real trap. When you talk to a person who makes sexual jokes whenever she can, it affects the way you speak and hear. I used to struggle with that until years of writing for this site cleaned up my act.

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    1. There’s another selling point for this blog that Dale could use: “Join in the Baboon conversation and you will be cured of potty mouth and offensive sexual jokes!”

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    2. There were a bunch of guys in the college dorms when I lived there who could use bad words several times in almost every sentence and were probably the equal of those stage hands Ben mentioned. I think they were having a lot of fun demonstrating their skills at using bad words because this was the first time they had lived away from home with no parents to monitor their language.

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  10. I don’t think I do, except for shop talk/jargon sort of language. This trip has me thinking about inherited behaviors. My father curled his tongue over his upper lip to think or to do close work. So do I. Then both my children upon birth did it. My daughter learned to stop when she did gymnastics. My son did know he did when he went off to college so does not know how he stopped. My third grandchild here is the third of three to rest his tongue between his lips. Odd how odd gestures and things are inherited.
    Used to be an administrator in our school who finished your sentences with you /finished your sentences with you. Grrrrrrr! She got a new secretary who started doing that too after a few weeks /doing that too after a few weeks/. . It was like that office had a perpetual echo /had a perpetual echo/. It was maddening /was maddening/.

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  11. the yawning got me before i realized that bart was egging me on. it works every time
    say tick tock a few times and try not to yawn.
    i too pick up an accent , my irish after visiting uk for 5 weeks was pretty severe. i can avoid wisconsin but georgia gets me.
    i tend to pick up the overall vibe of the joint and relate to the atmosphere accordingly. if its dead i am not dead but if its soft and cordial i will not go in screaming like a banshee where if i was at o’garas today i would absolutely be hooting without any added push needed even without the bushmills and guiness. but today is amatures day. leave it to the others. connelly with no mention of heritage. st patty is agreat day. i talked with my cousin and got the st pattys pot on him. watched a movie this morning about iriesh new york families and the mom woke up her adult children to send them off to work with st paty pot on you. a familiar welcome in my family. means all the best.
    i loved the guy at the office bulding who would come out every morning and start the day whistling a predetermined tune and see where it got transported to. he loved how the tune transformed itself as the day went on and took great delight in charting the musical interlude that filled the hallways at that office. it loves how he paid attention to how it was picked up and the delight in the fact that is was so contagious.
    cb enjoy your last day of 69. it was a year to remember. now lets get on with it huh?

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  12. Yawning is at the top of the list for me, especially since it seems I am chronically short of sleep these days.

    Laziness is also catching, as is grumpiness. Cheerfulness, especially in the early morning, is not catching; it transforms to more grumpiness in me.

    Sometimes laughter is contagious – you know how you can laugh uncontrollably hard with another person, while someone else totally doesn’t get it, and you can’t explain what exactly is so funny? That’s the best.

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  13. I sometimes start dressing like people I hang out with. When my mom first came up her – she wears a lot of colorful scarves – I started trying out scarves. I’m a sucker for shoes, and if you’re my friend, I’m likely to ask you where you got your shoes or boots, and then try to find some like them…

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  14. My husband plays the cello. We bought a new cello for him in January, and now we have two cellos. I have decided to learn to play the cello, too. I guess I am picking up string playing behavior from him.

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  15. Lovely comments all, Baboons. I endorse each one. And in case I haven’t mentioned it before, my contagion problem is that I always agree with the last person I talked to.

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