Togetherness 4/3/2020

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, the question remains: what does togetherness do? If you and your husband/wife/partner/roommate have been cooped up inside for the better part of three weeks due to corona restrictions, we think you know the answer already.

In the past you may have heard your partner tell a particular story 100 times while you sit there patiently and smile. But now, maybe you’re a little bit testier. Maybe hearing the story for the 101st time is not so adorable. Maybe you just want to get on with it and finish the story yourself. After all, you’ve heard it so many times you could finish the story. You know just the right line, where to pause for the laugh, when and how to deliver the punchline, it’s just, it’s not your story. And that little insight was part precursror to today’s first comic. Truth be told, John had the idea for overlapping speech bubbles being a cool way to portray one person cutting off another, and then that very night, when we got to our prospective homes, John found an overlapping thought bubbles cartoon in the New Yorker. The guy was thinking how wonderful it was that he and his girlfriendknew each other so well, they completed each other’s sentences. Meanwhile his girlfriend was thinking, “I hate that you interrupt me all the time!” So we waited a couple months and then put our own spin on it. If you’ve gotten this far you may have noticed we put them in a restaurant with another couple. Nowadays nobody goes to restaurants because they are all closed during the pandemic. One reason for this is we thought it up two months ago and the other reason is ‘cause one day we’re going to go to restaurants again, and this one was about overtalking, not about the novel coronavirus.

The second comic on your scroll IS about coronavirus. Kind of. It’s about what happens when two people are locked inside the same house for too long. Put it this way, if it weren’t for the corona lockdown, this situation wouldn’t have occurred. Okay, it still would have occurred, but with less venom. This idea comes from a couple years back, when Andy was runningn the Cascade dishwashing detergent account at his ad agency. He observed that there were two types of people loading dishwashers, the loaders and the rearrangers. Loaders just want to throw everything in and run the damn machine. Rearrangers see that it could be loaded better so that everything fits in it’s own place and that you can actually squeeze in a couple more dishes or cups if you just do it this way. We imagined that during the corona lockdown, the house could become a bit more combative and that such a conversation might occur.

These times make us all do things we’re not used to doing, especially household chores. For instance, Andy proudly pointed out how he’d just finished vacuuming to his wife (she mops) and she asked, did you remember to do the bathrooms? He hadn’t, by the way. Okay, it’s day 17 of the self-imposed lockdown, make that 17 days, 16 hours, 43 minutes and 07 seconds, but hey, who’s counting?

See you next week and, all jokes aside, everyone please stay healthy

Andy and John