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A funny thing happened on the way to the rest of my life

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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.

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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.

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Have a laugh … on me!

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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.

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.kindle fire

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.

Blackberry TorchInformation 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.

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