Tom and Desdemona’s 'digital' word-play

(a disgustingly useless anecdote about getting things done)

Tom and Desdemona were lacking in fingers; together they were missing seven or eight out of the usual twenty digits that two people, combined, would ordinarily possess (as each person would usually possess ten fingers). So one Saturday afternoon in June they went shopping for some extra fingers, in the Superfluous Finger District, which in Toronto is located between Gerrard and Dundas along River St—so basically we’re talking Regent Park, aka ‘the projects.’

Now it seems quite fitting that Tom and Desdemona went to ‘the projects’ to find some spare fingers for their hands; this was a Saturday afternoon, and finding a good fingers-to-hand match was a rather time-consuming ‘project’ indeed. And so noting this ghetto-nickname/digit-retrieval-task verbal-relation appropriateness, Tom waxed comedically on the aforementioned phenomenon, remarking, “It’s a good thing we’re here in the Regent Park projects, Dez, because trying to find and attach our missing fingers is quite ‘the project’ indeed…” and he looked at Desdemona for a response, raising his eyebrows and remarking “ha ha ha”--but Desdemona just groaned: “Groan,” she groaned quite groaningly. However she was not groaning because she was, for example, pregnant with Tom’s baby and going into labour (in fact Desdemona was born, quite tragically, without a uterus; she would eventually adopt her children instead of birthing them, although not for a few years would she adopt, since it wasn’t feasible to raise a son or daughter on her scant hairdresser’s income; she would have to do some saving first)—no, not because she was about to go into labour did she groan, since she was (it must be emphasized repeatedly) not busting out with Tom’s baby right there on the sidewalk, nor breaking water, nor spilling a bunch of placenta from her person and thus dramatically increasing the ‘sidewalk-placenta’ quotient of that stretch of River St—but rather Desdemona groaned at Tom because he had made a rather lousy joke.

And it took all afternoon, but they did find their fingers that day on River St in Regent Park; it was indeed ‘quite a project’.

(And so, you see, when the talking's over, that’s how things actually get done.)