Comments on: Pre-Friday Fluff: Spaghetti language

By: fillyjonk

fillyjonk — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 18:15:03 +0000

I am redefining "late to the party" here but I can't believe I forgot my best piece of spaghetti language ever. We have these lights in our room. At the moment we barely ever turn them on but in the old apartment we did. One night I'd fallen asleep without turning them off, and when Dan came to bed he asked me if I could get them (they were on my side of the bed). Instead of unplugging them I waved at them and said "hello heads! Hello heads!" We still call them "the heads," and in fact other similar string lights are "paper heads" etc.

By: The Bald Soprano

The Bald Soprano — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:43:08 +0000

My husband was on a business retreat last weekend, and he just told me that his room-mate says that he said “Who is this?” or something like that in the middle of the night. In English (he’s German). He said to me “I guess my default language is finally switching.”

My immediate response? “Then why do you talk in your sleep in German to me???”

By: Rani

Rani — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:50:23 +0000

I once fell asleep on the couch while watching Roman Holiday with my sister. She hadn’t seen it before, and I had this vague desire to explain and comment on the movie to enhance her viewing experience. So near the beginning of the film, I pointed to Gregory Peck and slurred out, “You see that guy? That guy’s a pussy.” I was confident that I had made a witty and not at all nonsensical joke about the film. A few minutes later, I woke up and realized something had been off about my sleep-addled movie commentary, and we had this conversation:

Me: …..Did I just call Gregory Peck a pussy?
Her: Yes you did.
Me: I need to go to bed.

Spaghetti language happens to me because I get weirdly embarrassed about zonking out on the couch at 10pm. So I’ll try to maintain the illusion of wakefulness by making conversation-like sounds and insisting that I’m not sleeping, I’m just resting my eyes.

By: Karen

Karen — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:05:02 +0000

Once, at the age of eighteen, I stayed up all night on the phone before attempting to go to work. At the time I was working in a physics lab, plugging different materials into a variety of machines to test their electrical properties, and had to take extensive notes on everything I tried.

It was hard to concentrate without sleep, but I made it most of the way through the day, and even diagnosed a problem with the “gain” knob on one of the machines … before nodding off in the middle of my lab book. When I startled awake, I looked down and read the incriminating sentence:

“The resistivometer appears to be malfunctioning when there is not enough love in the world for horses.”

Initially I was horrified, and tried hard to blot out this evidence that I was an incompetent (and apparently quite sentimental) lab assistant — but it quickly became my favourite piece of spaghetti language, and I told the story whenever the subject came up in conversation. Then one night many years later, at an hour when I really ought to have been asleep instead of just talking about it, I nodded off while telling the story, and concluded triumphantly:

“So I was trying to write down that the problem was with the ‘gain’ knob, but the real Mr. Bentley has been dead in his chair for hours!”

By: Nom de Plume

Nom de Plume — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:29:08 +0000

I was once awakened by my roommate ringing the doorbell. She proceeded to thank me profusely for getting her a wireless internet connection last night as she ascended the stairs; when I confusedly said I hadn’t said I was getting a wireless link, she said something about Comcast being now called Comcrap (… Some people still have good judgement in their sleep…), announced she was going to her room to drink her food and eat her sex, and promptly sat down on her purse at the top of the stairs and went to sleep.

(I eventually managed to relocate her to her room. Where she promptly curled up into a ball seated on her purse and went back to sleep.)

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:44:43 +0000

My personal favourite, from J, my boyfriend:

[gazing over my shoulder with an expression of bewilderment] “Rachel….. there’s an angry mob behind you!”

Closely followed by:
“Wow! You have a moustache and it was your eyebrow!”

And, one of my own:
Me: “If we have a baby we can call it Elizabeth and it can become Queen and rule the world”
J: “what if we have a boy?”
Me: “We’ll call it Elizabeth.”

By: pianoamy

pianoamy — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:58:09 +0000

Chiming in a little late, but…

I know that when I was living with my parents I often had coherent conversations while asleep that I couldn’t recall later. And I used to talk in my sleep occasionally.

I have no idea if I still do, as I live alone.

In any case, my favorite was from when we were camping when I was about 7 or 8 years old… My dad woke up when I was apparently insisting that:
“Squirrels are eating my feet!”

By: octopod

octopod — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:00:21 +0000

I do the spaghetti-writing thing. I once found in my notebook — in my handwriting, in a page of graphs copied from the lecturer, with NO recollection of having written it — the words “The Ostrich in Exile”.
I still don’t know what I meant, but I like it anyways.
Also, one ex of mine once woke me up and started asking me a question in Turkish. I have no idea if it made sense because I don’t speak Turkish, but I think he’d forgotten that. He, of course, didn’t remember it.
This is a fucking spectacular thread.

By: Rebecca

Rebecca — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:54:48 +0000

This is a gem from my brother.

Me: Sam? Time to wake up.

Sam: (dreamily) Customers want metal cupcakes.

I wish I had tried to continue the conversation! Instead I just stood in the doorway and howled with laughter.

By: evewitch

evewitch — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:21:51 +0000

My husband and I do this all the time, but I can’t remember any good examples. Except for this morning:

Him: [godawful noise complete with facial expressions]
Me: What’s wrong?
Him: Feel my throat!
Me: [dutifully feeling throat=nothing] I guess it’s a little swollen. I’m sorry.
Him: Yeah, you’re pretty fucking sorry!
Me: [trying not to get upset] I was trying to be sympathetic.
Him: You can’t be sympathetic. You’re a cop!

At which point he woke up completely realizing that he was spaghetti talking. (This would not, however, be funny at all if I was actually a cop. I’m not.)

My favorite though, was one I did when I was little. I sleep-walked into the family room where my parents were still awake and said “Zoom zoom zoom” complete with flying-airplane hand motions, and then turned around and went back to bed.