Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [31]
Even though most public seating furniture must have seemed comfortable to the people who designed it, it seems to have been designed and sat on for the test under laboratory conditions. These conditions don’t exist in a movie theater or on a crowded airplane.
In the theater chair, the shared armrest has always been a problem. The dominant personality usually ends up using the one on both sides of the seat in which he or she is sitting and the occupants of the adjacent seats get either none or one, depending on who flanks them on the other side. The shared armrest may be part of what’s known as the magic of the theater, but it’s a constant source of irritation to anyone watching a bad movie.
The average airplane chair is a marvel of comfort and we could all do worse than to have several installed in our own homes. The problem on board, of course, is the person in the seat next to you. The seats are usually lined up three across, and if the plane is full the middle seat can make a trip to Europe a nightmare. It is no longer a comfortable place of repose; it’s a trap and you’re in it.
At a time when all of us are looking for clues to our character, it’s unusual that no one has started analyzing us from the way we sit in chairs. It must be at least as revealing of character as a person’s handwriting and an even more reliable indicator of both personality and attitude than, say, palm-reading.
The first few minutes after you sit down are satisfying ones, but no matter how good it feels to get off your feet, you can’t stay in one position very long. Sooner or later that wonderful feeling you got when you first took the weight off your feet goes away. You begin to twitch. You are somehow dissatisfied with the way your body is arranged in the chair but uncertain as to what to do about it.
Everyone finds his own solution for what to do with feet. No two people do exactly the same thing. The first major alteration in the sitting position usually comes when the legs are crossed. The crossing of legs seems to satisfy some inner discontent, the scratching of a psychosomatic itch deep inside.
It’s amusing to see how often we use a chair designed to be used one way in a manner so totally different that even the originator could not have imagined it. We straddle a chair, sitting on it backwards with our arms where our backs are supposed to be and our chin on our arms; we sit sideways in a lounge chair with our legs draped over one arm and our backs leaning against the other arm. We rock back in chairs that are not rockers, ungluing their joints. We do things to chairs we wouldn’t do to our worst enemy, and chairs are among our best friends.
You’d have to say that of all the things we have built for ourselves to make life on earth more tolerable, the chair has been one of the most successful.
Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner
You see so many things that all of us have done badly that life can be depressing unless you look for some of the things we’ve done well. And there are some.
Take something as basic as eating, for example.
It’s absolutely necessary that we eat to survive, but we could do that by stuffing food in our mouths with our hands, so we can congratulate ourselves for having turned eating into a civilized and often very pleasant little ceremony called either breakfast, lunch or dinner.
All of us enjoy the ceremony and one of the special treats we give ourselves once in a while is eating out in a restaurant.
There are 400,000 restaurants in the United States and if you ate three meals a day in restaurants for seventy years, you could only eat in 76,000 of them.
Obviously I haven’t gone