A Loose End
February 23, 2020

    Okay, I know, I know.  I left that "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal" thing just sitting out there without coming back to it.  So here goes:

    It comes from that old joke about the kid who is relentlessly positive – almost pathologically so.  In fact, in the version of the joke that Ronald Reagan used to tell, according to one of his speechwriters, the kid is actually a twin, and their parents take them to a psychologist because the kids are so extreme in their personality types.  One twin is so negative about everything that he bursts out crying when the psychologist fills the kid's bedroom with new toys.  "They're all just going to break!" he wails.  The other twin, by contrast, is so positive about everything that when the psychologist fills this kid's bedroom with horse manure, the kid leaps into the pile enthusiastically and starts digging.  "What on earth are you doing?" the psychologist asks.  Breathless with glee, the kid yells back, flinging dung into the air, "With all this horse shit, there must be a pony in here somewhere!" 

    Now, regardless of one's take on Ronald Reagan's politics – I was too young to have an opinion during his presidency, but my studied assessment now is that much about his politics was misguided – one can nonetheless appreciate that the 40th president was a legendary story-teller.  He knew how to tell a good joke, and he did it with both genuine humanity and keen wit.  I never heard Reagan deliver this particular joke (although I'm sure there are YouTube videos of it out on the Interwebs), and it was probably a full two decades after his presidency before I heard a version of the joke for the first time myself.  But when I did, something clicked in place within me.  I knew I had found my own personal pop culture icon.  I knew I was that kid.  I knew I was a "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal."

    I was also wise enough by that time to know that while I took this as a point of pride, a minor badge of honor (and still do), it is not always a good thing to be a "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal."  While the life-hands-you-lemons-so-make-lemonade mentality is generally laudable, preferable most of the time to less sunny alternatives, there are some situations, some realities, where it just does not work or is straight up inappropriate, perhaps even pathological.  More on that to come.