As long as I can remember, I have hated watching people make fools of themselves. I was probably no more than 6 when I found myself running from the room at one of many episodes of “Lucy” in which she does something humiliating.
Rather than finding it funny, I find myself identifying with the embarrassment. I can’t help but think how awful I would feel if it were me. Humiliation is a horrible feeling, often impossible to forget no matter how many years pass.
Humor that depends on embarrassing or making fun of people does not make me laugh. I love witty dialogue, literary allusion, puns. I love parody and all kinds of cleverness, but with the exception of villainous bad guys who more than deserve whatever they get, I never want to see anyone embarrassed. I hate cruelty, mental or physical and cannot watch it, even when I know it’s fake.
Not surprisingly, I was one of the kids who got teased and bullied. Way too sensitive. It’s 60 years later; I’m still too sensitive.
Everything and everybody changes. Most of my family and friends have changed relatively gradually over the years. Recently a couple of people I’ve known for a long time have changed suddenly and dramatically. Overnight, they became dry and humorless.
It appears they had a humorectomy. While they slept, their sense of humor was removed. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but it’s deeply disturbing. I think it’s possible they have been replaced by pods, like the ”Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
I could not survive if I did not see how ridiculous my life is. If the absurdity of it didn’t make me laugh, I would do nothing buy cry and bewail my state. Laughter heals me. It’s better than sex. Better than yoga, meditation, medication, or street drugs. It’s free, unrestricted by laws, available to anyone who is not yet dead and is acceptable behavior under almost all religious systems.
Many friends are going through rough times. Their problems vary, but the results are the same. Stress, anguish, fear, worry, insomnia. You worry, try to keep it together until you’re ready to explode.
What can you do? If the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed the headlight of an oncoming train, I say: “Buckle up and let your hair blow in the wind. It’s going to be a Hell of a ride.”
Laughing at the craziness, insanity, ludicrousness, the utter absurdity of my life — and the demented world in which I live it — is my first line of defense against despair. Take away laughter, strip away my sense of humor and I’m a goner.
At our wedding — 22 years ago — my cousin and I danced the hora. What makes the dance so memorable – other than discovering that she was in great shape and I wasn’t — was feeling like I was going to spin out of control. That feeling of being grabbed by something stronger than you and being twirled and spun with no ability to control what happens has become an allegory of my life.
I laugh any time I can, at anything that strikes me as even a little bit funny. It helps me remember why I bother to keep living.
My friends make me laugh. I make then laugh. When our lives are in tatters and everything around us is collapsing, we laugh. Then, we take a deep breath, and laugh some more. The more awful the situation, the more dreadful and intractable the problems, the funnier it is. We are not laughing at tragedy … we are laughing at life.
The difference between tragedy and comedy is how you look at it. Laugher is the universal cure for griefs of life.
A huge thank you goes toMike at Mikes Film Talk, who thinks more of me than I think of me. By giving me this award, he has honored me while simultaneously depriving me of someone on whom I would have liked to bestow this award. Mike certainly deserves it. He has a great site that is only partly film-centric. Mike is a lot more than a film critic. He is a literary omnivore, writing everything from personal history and fiction, to book and movie reviews. And such excellent writing it is. Please make sure to visit him. You’ll be glad you did.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the folks over at Moment Matters for originating this unique award. They’ve also created a fine logo for recipients to display on their walls. There are words and music to accompany it. I’m sorry I don’t have the music, but following are the words and they’re lovely:
Awarding the people who live in the moment, The noble who write and capture the best in life, The bold who reminded us what really mattered - Savoring the experience of quality time.
Pretty nice! As with most awards in the WordPress Blogging community, there are a few rules. Simple guidelines. Not onerous, but specific. Since this is my first encounter with this award, here they are. They are simple:
Rules:
You can reuse this post, altered to reflect your nominees and including your acceptance speech. You can reuse as much of this post as makes sense for you.
Your can write your speech or put it on video.
Winners have the privilege of awarding The Best Moment Award to chosen recipients. Your post should contain theindividuals and blogsyou are nominating.
There is no specific requirement for number of new recipients.
Inform your winners you’ve chosen them.
As a courtesy, please link back to whoever gave you the award.
Resources:
I’ve included these since they are a legacy from Mike’s post and provides guidelines if you need help:
What makes a good acceptance speech?
Gratitude. Thank the people who helped you along the way
I’m genuinely touched by this award. Touched and grateful. Receiving appreciation from ones peers is a special kind of recognition. It means more than I can easily express.
Living in the moment has become a way of life. After finally admitting I have no control over the future, I relaxed, stopped trying to push the river, and began to enjoy whatever came, even stuff I would have considered “bad news” in my misspent youth. I’m a lot happier since I stopped trying to force life to go my way. Living in the moment and going with the flow takes a whole lot less effort than fighting the current. Whatever chills and thrills come with the ride, I’m ready. Remarkably, I keep discovering it’s fun. Live and learn. I wish I’d learned a little earlier!
This moment — this exact moment in time — IS your life! This is the day you’ve been waiting for. It will never come again. Enjoy it.
I am delighted to accept The Best Moment Award originated by MomentMatters.com … another site definitely worth checking out.
I never stop being awestruck when I realize I have influenced someone in a positive way, maybe even made a difference in one or more lives in this mad, mad world. Again, thank you Mike!
Blogging has become very important to me. I have always been a writer, but until I started blogging, I never wrote about personal things. As a professional, I wrote what I was paid to write. Now, I write from my head and my heart. It has been life changing. Everything inspires me. Other bloggers — especially Mike — have influenced me in more ways than I can list. But in the end, all of life is inspiration.
To all of my friends and followers, thank you for taking time out of your busy lives to share mine. The blogging community has given me a sense of purpose, participation, comradeship and a much broader life-view than I ever had before. There’s a lot of ugly stuff going on everywhere. Scary stuff, unfair, wrong, dangerous, evil. We haven’t the power fix everything, but we have some influence as individuals and collectively. We can help each other through difficult times, rejoice with each other over triumphs (they are few enough), and maybe give something back to our human community.
Everything we share has value. Knowledge, memories, pictures that express beauty or expose evil. Stories we write, books we read and recommend. Movies we see and share. Humor that banishes sadness. It’s not just big ideas that matter. Small things resonate and change lives too. Never think the ordinary parts of life are not worth exploring. They may be the most important of all.
Anything we do to make someone feel good, help them think in a different direction, see the world in a new way, is a deed well done. By giving of ourselves, we continue to grow the chain of good will around the world. If blogging has any ultimate purpose, that’s it.
I have saved every “like” I’ve ever gotten and will continue to do so until my email explodes. I am so glad you like me . What a miracle this virtual community is to me. You touch me. I love reading your comments, love answering them. Love writing them, too because I want you to know I appreciate your work. That people follow me makes me glow in the dark. No really, it does. It saves a lot of electricity!
For all of you who I follow, each of you enriches me. Your views about the world, your pictures of it, your understanding and your humor brighten my days, keep my mind alive and make my world exciting.
Like Mike, I have felt the wings of the dark angel brush me. Life is infinitely precious with all of its perils and problems.
Thank you all for making my world a better place to live, and thank you Mike for appreciating the best of me.
The winners for the Best Moment Award are:
I have had to think hard about this one because I can’t give it back to Mike, who I would have given it to. Like Mike, I’m going to limit this to people who really actually truly have influenced me and changed me way of thinking, writing, looking at reality or unreality, as you would have it.
For Sharla at Catnip of Life – She’s having a rough patch and I know she’s not really online right now, but eventually when her life is less fraught, she’ll be back and this award, so well-deserved, will be waiting for her. With all the wretched difficulties going on in her world, she is endlessly kind, caring, and good. Deep to the bone, a good person. You don’t meet so many of them!
For Rarasaur who has a name, but I can never find it when I need it. She shares my somewhat addled and bizarre view of life, has overcome much and has much to overcome. With sense of humor intact and flags flying, she’s challenged me to match concept and vision in new ways. and I’ve been having a great deal of fun with her various blogging challenges that force me to put pictures and concepts together and make them coherent. Better yet, she makes me laugh.
To Hot Rod Cowgirl whose photo essays make me yearn for a life I’ve never had and has become something of an icon and a living hope for me … to be in the mountains surrounded by nature and horses and sunsets is a dream and it makes me glad that someone is really living it.
To Tyson at Head In a Vice. It’s not about movies, though he writes great reviews — mostly about movies I’m unlikely to watch. It’s how he brings people together. Starting with a fondness for horror movies, he has created a community of inclusion, involving all kinds of people in his projects and always having something kind to say about everyone, no matter how strange their choices or taste. He has worked hard and deserves recognition.
To everyone else, I know you and appreciate you. I’m trying to follow the leader in making this award specific to people who, as they live in their moment and in sharing them, have made their moments mine.
I apologise in advance to anyone who may feel slighted. Most of you have gotten awards from me in the past and will again in the future. This one is specific; I hope I’ve chosen well. There are a few of you to whom I don’t give awards because you don’t want them. But I appreciate you anyhow! I have many wonderful followers and I don’t like having to choose. But sometimes — and this is one of those time — that’s the way it is.
My awardees are a varied bunch, but each is great in his/her own way.
The last part of this Award process is the instruction to share this with your followers and to tweet your “success” with the hash tagged #MomentMatters. And as soon as I figure out how to do that, I will!
Congratulations to all my winners and I want you to know that you have touched me.
I blew in my husband’s ear and whispered: “Now, will you follow me anywhere?” He laughed. Then we realized that we couldn’t remember where that line came from.
Turned out it was from “Laugh In.”
Back when this show was on the air, we knew how to laugh. The Pod People hadn’t yet come to steal our sense of humor and turn us into sour, bad-tempered drones.
It was a different time and psychically, in a galaxy far, far away. We had problems. Nixon and the war in Vietnam for starters. That was no picnic. But we found ways to enjoy our world, to have good times. The “era” didn’t last long … just a little bit of time but we had fun.
We guffawed. We giggled. We snickered and chortled. We ate food full of fat and sugar and watched TV on sets that barely got pictures you could see, but we were free and young. When we weren’t working, it was okay to let our hair down, relax, and play.
These days, it seems we have forgotten how to play.
The time is not merely here. It’s overdue. We need to remember things we used to know, to play and laugh. Maybe if we could spend more time laughing, we’d spend less time hating.
With the economy in tatters, our politics polarized beyond recognition, with unemployment out of sight and in a world gone mad with terrorists and war — more than ever, we need to laugh.
By the way, how did they know that 1989 would be when the Berlin Wall would come down? Eerie!
And how did they imagine Reagan would be president? Apparently, they did, but no one else I knew seemed to have considered the possibility.
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In ran for 140 episodes from January 22, 1968, to May 14, 1973 on the NBC network. Look how the world has changed.
Back then, amidst all our problems we believed the world could be changed for the better. Change it did … but is it better?
So, I hear your life is falling apart? Join the club. Got no work? Losing your house? Hiding from the repo guy? Bank sending threatening notices about foreclosure? Oops. Life’s a bitch. Disaster is life’s way of reminding you that you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control. You might as well laugh because crying all the time annoys people.
My life has collapsed 3 times. The first was more or less voluntary. I gave up on a marriage that wasn’t working, gave all my stuff to my soon-to-be ex (big mistake), and moved to Israel where I promptly married a guy so much worse than the one I’d left it still makes my head spin more than 30 years later. What was I thinking? Was I thinking?
Of course that marriage fell apart too … it lasted a lot longer than it ought to have because I was too proud to admit what a horrible mistake it had been in the first place. Staggering, head reeling, bloody, dazed and penniless, I came back to the USA. It took a couple of years to stop feeling like I’d been run through a wood chipper, but when I got up off the floor, I married Garry. Amazingly, it’s fine. Exceptional. I’m unsure what it proves except that I should have married Garry in the first place. We’d both have been spared a lot of angst.
Tales of awful mistakes and even more horrendous outcomes make terrific after dinner conversation. A few drinks can transform them into hilarious. The stuff that fuels humor is not funny. Human misery, errors and disasters are the stuff of jokes.
Funny movies aren’t about people having fun: they are about people in trouble, with everything going wrong, a life in ruins. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that everyone does not die at the end of a comedy, but tragedies usually end with a pile of corpses. Otherwise, it’s just style.
Funny stories weren’t funny when they happened. Now, well, yeah, they’re funny. After I was told I had cancer in not one, but both breasts (they were having a two-for-one special at the Dana-Farber), I had them removed and replaced by silicon Hollywood quality implants, but stopped short of adding fake nipples. Previous surgeries had left me with no naval, so without either a naval or nipples, I have come to believe I am no longer human. Aliens walk the earth and I am one. I own tee shirts that say “Yes, they are FAKE. My real ones tried to kill me.” It makes people laugh. It’s the high point of my cancer experience.
People divide neatly when your life collapses. A lot of people disappear, as if whatever is wrong with you might be contagious. Or else, they offer you everything they have, even when it’s barely more than you’ve got. Stick with the latter. It’s the people who have the least who will offer you everything they have. Jesus had a point about rich people.
A lot of folks that were sort of friends eye you with suspicion and dread, but also with a subtle hint, a light whiff, of satisfaction. They’d never be rude enough to say so, but they are so glad it’s your world rather than theirs that’s gone to Hell. Sorry about your life, really. Furtive grin.
If you are a writer, you will are awarded one novel or a good book of short stories from the train wreck of your life.
And speaking of trains. Don’t take it personally. The locomotive that ran over you wasn’t after you. You were just a bump on the tracks. Oops.
We are all collateral damage in the movie of life. Prepare some clever repartee for the next get together with your more successful pals. Don’t think there’s nothing to look forward to. Now that you are in bloody pieces on the floor, you can really appreciate the irony when their lives turn to rubble.
You will stop bleeding sooner or later. The depression will ebb, that feeling that you are being crushed to death and can’t breathe will be replaced by a generalized and permanent sense of panic, which I call “normal.”
That’s when you can start laughing because tragedy is ridiculous. Hilarious. Heaven must be dull because in Hell, everyone is laughing.
John Howell’s “Rule is as Rule Does” which I reblogged the other day got me thinking about life and how we invent our own rules as we go along. I make rules for myself and I follow them with almost religious fervor. But I hate rules and resent them. I was born rebellious.
The only rules I follow are my own. What are those rules? I’m glad you asked.
I’ve had an interesting life in which the light at the end of the tunnel has pretty much always been the headlight of an oncoming train. At one point, I got so stressed I could barely breathe. That was when I realized I needed to do things differently. I had plenty of problems without stressing myself to death.
I began by getting a tattoo, a visible symbol of my life. It was an acknowledgement of change and in a way, an acceptance of my survival and the likelihood of having to do it over again. I didn’t know at the time how right I was. It is a large phoenix tattoo. It’s a one-of-a-kind, designed for me. I had it put toward the back of my left calf. I didn’t realize it was going to be quite so big, but I’ve come to quite like it. I was 57 when I got my piece of body art. It’s my only tattoo. One shouldn’t make permanent life decisions in a hurry or before one is old enough to know ones own mind (that’s a rule too). A tattoo is more permanent than most marriages, so if you’re going to get one, make it neutral enough so if life changes a lot, it won’t be a highly visible embarrassment for long decades to come. Spelling and punctuation count. A typo in a tattoo is with you forever.
It is difficult to take a focused picture of the lower back area of ones own left leg. Also it’s worth remembering that blue jeans leave red ridges. If you want a picture of a your own body or some part of it, getting someone else to take the picture is probably better. The good part? Both terriers were really excited when I took off my jeans and socks. I’m pretty sure they thought it was a new game. Bonnie figured maybe she’d score a pair of socks but I outwitted her and put them on the desk where she couldn’t get them. Hah! Gotcha! Anyway, asking Garry to take this picture seemed too weird and would have required more explanation than he or I was ready to deal with. So I did it myself. Someone else could have done it better. I’m just saying.
I never really formulated my rules before, so this has been an interesting exercise. I don’t expect anyone else to follow them, though they aren’t bad and I don’t think they would hurt anyone. They come out of years of doing everything wrong, of worrying myself into ulcers, of simmering with anger at injustice, and being frantic with concern over every ecological or political crisis. I never learned anything the easy way. These dozen rules work for me.
Laugh often. Cultivate friends who share your sense of humor.
If you can’t fix it, don’t brood about it.
Have a pet. Cats, dogs, chickens, ferrets, bunnies, reptiles, bats or birds. Anything but spiders. I don’t like spiders.
Don’t argue with stupid people.
When you know you’re wrong, give up and apologize.
Worrying is a waste of time. Whatever you are worried about, something else will happen.
Staying angry at someone who wronged you hurts you, not them. They aren’t losing sleep over you. Forget it. Move on.
Be a gracious winner. People may sympathize with a sore loser, but everyone resents a gloating winner.
The path less traveled frequently winds up at a dead-end. Before traveling down unmapped roads, be sure you know how to make u-turns in tight spaces.
When you have a choice, do the right thing. If you don’t have a choice, do the best you can.
Brutal honesty is inevitably more brutal than honest. Be kind.
If you’re an artist, do your thing. Talking about it doesn’t count.
One rule to rule them all:
Make your own rules and live your own life. Everyone is unique. Celebrate your difference.
It started out as a joke. My husband sent me an email and I thought it was funny. It made me laugh, so without worrying much about the source, the deeper truths, the verifiable facts of the matter, taking into consideration only the fact that it made me laugh, I published it.
It is called “The Man who saw the future” and you can click on it and see the source for all of this brouhaha (google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
I have been accused — me, the queen of geeks — of being anti-technology! Imagine that. A woman who owns three computers, an electronic reader, a tablet, a smart phone, three external hard drives, 4 digital cameras and Lord knows how many accessories, has DVRs and Blu-ray players all over the house … I am anti-technology? If I am not pro technology, no one is.
My laptop. Today’s super little machine.
But I am not in favor of letting technology replace human relationships, of instant internet searches replacing research. I’m in favor of using technology intelligently and using intelligence and creativity to define what technology is good for, not the other way around. Tools are intended for use by human beings for human pursuits.
I’m a big believer in facts. I research. I check and double-check sources even though I know that it’s impossible to completely verify any fact or statistic because the act of interpreting information alters it. Most important, I learned that not everything is equally important. I spent decades documenting and verifying … but there are things that do not need to be verified, double-checked, or confirmed. Among these things are jokes.
Not only do I like to laugh, I need to laugh. What is more, I think we all need to laugh.
So, in pursuit of brightening my own and maybe your life too, I publish jokes which I think are funny. I do not verify the source of the joke. I do not research the origin of laughter. If it’s funny, that’s good enough for me.
Lighten up America!
It’s been a rough period. Not everything is life or death. Laughter can be a bridge over troubled waters. Nothing else, not pill, drugs, or therapy can uplift you the way laughter can.
As far as trying to prove that technology is “bad,” I love my electronic gadgets and goodies. However, you need to recognize what these things are good for and not try to use them to replace the world. Too many people, especially young people, confuse the means and the end.
They substitute electronic communications for relationships. I watch my granddaughter and her friends sitting next to each other on the sofa texting. How do you learn to have relationships if you can’t have a conversation? If you use computers to think for you, you never learn to think, especially considering that computers can’t think. They are processors. Very fast, efficient information processors. Anyone can use a computer to collect information by the bushel, but most people can’t connect two related ideas without a flow chart and maybe, not even then.
In a society where we have to warn people not to text while driving, something is seriously wrong.
Information is not knowledge. It’s human minds and creativity that change raw data into concepts, inventions, and ideas.
Information is not communication. You can provide all the information in the world, but if you don’t disseminate it in a form that others can understand, it’s just noise. We collect information at the speed of light. The dumbing down of society is not because of the tools we have available, it’s because we’ve forgotten they are only tools.
We have fantastic resources that we waste on drivel. Technology has not improved our ability to communicate, relate, think, or create. If anything, our dependence on them has reduced these uniquely human qualities. Without a human context, all our fancy technology will remain trivial. Time wasters. Stupid toys.
THAT is the message beneath my humor. NOT that tools are bad, but that we misuse them, fail to use them to any worthwhile end. We have come so far … and remarkably, advanced very little. Our civilization is not one bit more advanced that it was in ancient days.
I suggest that instead of analyzing my jokes to see if they contain accurate attributions, that you analyze your life and see if it’s worth living. In the meantime, have a good laugh on me.
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
