8/31/04 by Racheal

"On The Same Page". Is anyone ever truly "on the same page". Who came up with this silly little phrase? Have you ever actually been reading the same book at the same time with another person? If you have, do you get on the phone and say, "Hey, Marge, this is one helluva page, isn't it?" Oh, I'm sure it happens, but most of us don't do it. We borrow the page when they've finished with it. And if you are reading the same book at the same time, you're really on the same page as your friend, are you? Someone's invariably a chapter or two behind. Why are we satisfied with being on the same page? If this phrase is supposed to truly represent unity of thought, the ultimate connection, the end all meeting of minds, shouldn't we at least take it down to the same paragraph? If we diagram the same sentence, aren't we closer than just being on the same page? Hell, if I want to truly connect with someone, I'm takin' it down to the syllable god-or-mother-nature-dammit! I mean if I really want to connect with someone, I'm not going to mess around with the page; I'm gonna do things by the book. To the letter. Does the type of page matter? Are you on the same page if you're reading the newspaper, or does it have to be a book? Do auto-manuals count?
Is this how gear-heads connect? "Hey, Joe, did you see page seventy six of last month's Car and Driver?" "Yeah, man, I read the same page!"
What happens if two people are on the same page, but they disagree? I'm pretty sure a black lesbian feminist is not going to agree with a right-wing conservative Jesus-freak if they're reading the "same page" of an article fighting for the rights of chipmunk marriage in Arkansas (the lesbian doesn't believe in any of Arkansas's behaviors and the conservative has a cousin down there who's a little too fond of chipmunks).
Back to the form of the page. I guess we can count car manuals and newspapers, and I think we've got that being on the same page doesn't work in cases involving rodent rights, but what about the pages that everyone has read hundreds or thousands of times for hundreds or thousands of years? No one can agree on those! Constitutions, Korans, how-to-put-it-together-instruction-manuals for children's toys? Nobody's ever on the same page with that stuff! Is it really the page, or can it just be writing? If two people are reading the back of the same milk carton at the grocery store, and agree that Jon Benet Ramsey's press coverage ruined it for milk-carton kids everywhere, I'd say they're on the same page.
How far can the writing go? If two guys read the same phrase on the bathroom stall and agree that "for a good time" you really should call Stacy, are they on the same page? Enough of that. Let's get back to real pages. The ones made out of paper. People on the same page can be downright scary sometimes. The phrase is supposed to have a positive connotation, but what about people who think that the stories in the Weekly World News are true? That's a scary page to be on! I wouldn't want to be on that page, no sir. What if two people think they're on the same page but can't quite decide because the bottom corner of the page is torn off? "What kind a shit is this?!? We thought we were on the same page and now we'll never know!" What if people were once on the same page and now they're not? Hey, it's not the page's fault. Can people be on the same page for half the page? "This stuff up here, I'm with you, but this stuff at the bottom? We are definitely not on the same page." It's the same freakin' page! What about people who lose the page they're on? What can they use for a bookmark? Two people who speak different languages can never be on the same page. Pretty sure you gotta be reading the same language to be on the same page. No gettin' around that one. And where does that leave the illiterate? Conversely, can a multilingual person be on two different pages at once? Worse, yet, can they be on the same page in one language and not the other because something got lost in translation? Can someone author something that they themselves aren't on the same page with? And if so, have the people on said same page been duped? I mean, they're on the same page with that thought, and it was bullshit! That's probably the worst page I can think of.
I don't know. It's beyond me. God or Mother Nature help me if I ever "get the picture". Way too visual for me, man.