In my opinion, this beautiful song from Mokey is one of Fraggle Rock‘s most underrated.

This song is from the episode “The Preachification of Convincing John,” which I always think is something of a misnomer.  I mean, obviously Convincing John is in it, and he does preachify (or whatever the verb form would be), but it’s really a story about Mokey, and Convincing John is pretty incidental it.

I also think the theme of this episode–that just because you think you know what is best for others doesn’t mean that you really do–is really sophisticated.  It’s one that I know I could have benefitted from as a kid, and one that I think a lot of us–a LOT of us, myself included–can benefit from as adults.

It reminds me of a class I took in my third year as an undergraduate called “Human Relations.”  It was part of my education course, and the education classes that I had to take were hit and miss; some were really useful, and some were a complete waste of time.  But this one was excellent; I really thought that it should be required for all majors.  The goal of the course was similar to the main goal/theme of Fraggle Rock, actually: to help people see past their prejudices and promote understanding of other people, different cultures, etc.

I give a lot of credit for the quality of the class to the professor.  I call him the professor, but he was so much more to me: teacher, mentor, counselor, and friend.  I would call him a kindred spirit, but that might be presumptuous of me because he was so far beyond me in so many ways.  He was a bit like Cantus actually: wise, funny, implacably calm.

Anyway, he said something in class once that struck me as being very profound at the time and has stuck with me ever since.  It was a variation on the Golden Rule; rather than “treat others the way you would want to be treated,” it was “treat others the way THEY want to be treated.”

It was so obvious, I couldn’t believe it had never occurred to my in the 21 years that I had spent on this planet at the time.

(I’m getting major deja vu right about now.  Have I written about this on here before?  If so, I apologize.)

Well…that was a lot deeper than I intended to go with this post.  That’s the great thing about Fraggle Rock, though, isn’t it?  There’s so much more to it than is readily apparent on the surface; you can just go deeper and deeper and keep exploring it forever, singing all the while.

Anyway, what  I was going to say is that this song, “Why?”, has been on my mind a lot lately because it’s a question I’ve been asking a lot this week, usually rhetorically.  Of course, there are plenty of big things going on about which to ask “why,” but lately I find myself asking it about relatively small things.

For example, why would a doctor spend however many minutes dictating all the medications a patient is supposed to take, with the dosages–all of which I have to look up because I can’t use either inductive or deductive reasoning to figure them out from context–and then later dictate a completely new medication section to replace the old one that he already dictated?

WHY?!?!?  Why would you do that?  Don’t you know that time is money?  I literally make less money if you waste my time like that.

*sigh* It’s been a long week, is basically what I’m saying.  And my weeks are about to get even longer.

Oh, I should probably explain that, shouldn’t I?  Well, I decided to take a seasonal job over the holidays, so until January I’ll be working two jobs and probably not having any days that are completely off.

Why did I decide that working retail over the holidays was a good idea?  I didn’t, but beggers can’t be choosers, so I just took what I could get.  

This was a very rambling post.  If you read all the way down here to the end, thank you, and I’m sorry for not being more focused, and I’ll try to do better next time.