I’ll Do – NOT!

Americans – we’re doers! We work hard, rarely take vacations and even work overtime.  Do, do, do, do, do!  We’re multi  taskers and ball jugglers.  Why do one thing at a time when you can do eight?  Then you can be the envy of other doers who marvel at your ability to do all those things simultaneously.  Best of all, it gives the best inspiration possible to a fellow doer:  doing more!  Yes we are a can do, will do, HAVE to do bunch.  Get ‘er done and do it to death.  But, above all just do it!

And, do we do.  We do ‘do’ TOO much.  Way too much unfortunately.  So much so our language of doing is in, well, deep doo doo.  We are so fixated on doing – something, anything, EVERYTHING – that we apply that verb ‘DO’ to just about everything.  We’ve slipped into our language lexicon to ‘do’ something when in fact we aren’t really ‘doing anything.  What are you doing Bill?  Why I’m doing nothing.  Nothing?? If you’re doing nothing then, what the hell is being done?

For example, we don’t order anything anymore.  We ‘do’ it instead.  I’ll ‘do’ a latte.  OR, I’ll ‘do’ a tuna salad and then also ‘do’ the coleslaw instead of the potato chips with it?  Forgive the appearance of prudishness but doing spaghetti and meatballs seems a bit weird, a tad rude and excessively messy.  When did we feel the need, in our incessant rush to always be accomplishing something, to flush phrases such as,‘May I have…’, or ‘I would like to order the…’ or even, ‘My choice is the…’?  Not the way of the highly accomplished.  Not at all. Why merely have, order or choose when you can just…do it?!

How about ‘doing’ travel? When did we go from visiting grandma’s house for the holiday to doing grandma’s for Thanksgiving?  Does grandma abide being done?  And while she is being done, who’s doing the cooking?  Or you can ask someone where they went on vacation and they reply, “Oh, we did Istanbul for our annual foreign vacation.”  Is there some consular procedure that has to be followed before a country allows you to do them?  This brings a whole new meaning to getting your shots before traveling to or should I say ‘doing’ a foreign country.

We do leather sofas instead of cloth ones, we do four wheel drive versus front wheel drive and we do boxers over briefs.  Stop the Doing madness!  By all means, do what you love, do what makes you happy, do a jig.  But, for goodness sake don’t do a pastrami on rye.  Neither you nor the pastrami will be the better for it.

We are officially overdue in letting ‘do’ be all the way done.