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| Blogs > Canus2011 > Adventure my ass! |
Same time next year?
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Same time next year? That title is one of those phrases that somehow always tickles me on New Years Eve for some reason; I guess I'm easily amused if nothing else. Sometimes it takes a little more work than others, but I've tried to find the humor in things for as long as I can remember ...especially having been "blessed" with a weird sense of humor that almost seems genetic in a lot of ways. I remember talking to a co-worker once about my going out of town to a family reunion; when he asked what my reunions were like, I replied that it was "mostly just standing around visiting with a hundred or so people with the exact same sense of humor as I have." My co-worker thought that sounded like one of the seven levels of hell, but I always enjoyed our reunions (on Mom's side anyway ...Dad didn't even care much for his own side, so my exposure to them was minimal). There's no disputing that most of my family is pretty weird; the fact that so much later in life when the illusion that our family was even remotely "normal" began to fade, it made them somehow seem less interesting for some reason I don't fully understand. It generally takes a certain level of weird to even grab my interest, but maybe there is such a thing as overkill (or something ...like I said, I don't really understand it either). I definitely view life through those glasses with the big nose and fake mustache; I honestly think that it's mostly just out of a sense of survival though. I've always loved humor ...Dave Barry was one of my idols even at an earlier age before he was especially well-known by anyone (I wonder if anyone reading this will be asking "who the hell is Dave Barry?" ...if you don't know, find out and get back to me; you won't be sorry). I only recently discovered that he is also the of a minister and an atheist; I suspect we'd have fun trading childhood horror stories. Between the funny papers and Dave Barry's column ...one can find a lot of me lurking in that peculiar negative space. Back in the mid 80's I was in a particularly ugly car accident and spent a week in the hospital. A week in the hospital probably doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but I was 18, had it all figured out and was immortal. Maybe I was just putting on a brave front; I'm not really sure I felt too immortal, but having walked away from an accident that would generally leave a person in itty-bitty pieces did somewhat leave me with a weird sense of being "untouchable" or something. So ...armed with an extremely peculiar sense of humor and an equally odd room-mate, we had a week of making the nurses life difficult, filching ice cream at every available opportunity ...and mostly just making the best of a bad situation. I'm not sure anyone can say they EVER had a "good time" in the hospital, but I did as close as one could come. I even wrote about it almost immediately afterward; I spelled out our antics in an essay for freshman English and didn't think much of it. Well ...not until the last day of class that semester anyway; it turned out that the professor had been sitting on my essay since I had turned it in. He was impressed enough by it that he wanted to share it with the rest of the class. I found the original essay a few years ago (written on a piece of papyrus with a manual typewriter); the next time I move I'll probably want to fish it out of it's current hiding place (meaning, I have no clue exactly where it resides at the moment) and re-write it (maybe when it turns 30). For a college paper, the grammar was atrocious and my ability to put together a sentence had a lot to be desired (it still needs some work), but even looking back from now, it really was a pretty good paper all-in-all (and may have even been a factor in why I passed that class at all given my grammatical cluelessness). The problem was ...after even the short amount of time, it just wasn't funny so much as "extremely personal" by the time he "got around to" reading it in front of everyone. I almost hate to admit just how "not all there" I was at that time, but I was pretty naive about a lot of things; some who know me well enough might say that I still am, while others would probably say the exact opposite and call me overly jaded. I'm not too sure which is closer to accurate, but in my years on the earth one very large part of what I call "my coffee cup philosophy" is: rule #1: Don't sweat the small stuff rule #2: It's ALL small stuff I violate my own<b> philosophy </font></b>all the time and really don't have a lot of problem with my lack of internal consistency in that regard. Not everything is "small stuff" although everything inherently has the exact value that we place on it; I endeavor to pass things though a simple filter: when I'm on my deathbed, how important will *insert current drama here* really be? I'm finding in the last three years that quite a bit more has been fitting itself into that little filter. I'm also trying to grasp the notion that although humor is a great coping mechanism, sometimes perhaps it's still good to share a little bit of it even when it might feel a bit more personal than I'm necessarily comfortable with. It doesn't help that my memory isn't quite what it used to be, and not committing it to print means it's gone forever. I'm living in a story that is going to have an extremely sad ending. My mother has cancer, she's getting increasingly frail even though she still manages to work. Three years of chemo is taking its toll on her mind, and the constant redefining of "chemo-brain" seems almost mean when looking from the outside, but when you're on the inside ...being able to find the little bits of humor in it is a hot commodity. So this is my New Years resolution: to try to publicly write a little more again. I can't always guarantee that it will be in this particular blog, although I'll try when I can. That being said ...Happy New Years to all & hopefully I'll see you next year! |
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