CSotD: Humpday Humor Break
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I’m not thinking about games and consoles, but I am taking a day for humor in hopes of distracting from the news a bit.
That doesn’t mean giving in and it doesn’t mean turning off entirely. I emailed my Congressional representative before I began today’s posting. It took about two minutes, in part because I didn’t have to make a complex argument: Maggie is definitely on our side.
So I just dropped her a quick note to let her know I appreciate her and to encourage her to hang in.
“Contacting your congress people” counts even when you agree on things, and it gives you permission to sit back and have some laughs until it’s time to re-enter the fray.
Not that everything I laugh at is funny. This cracked me up because I flailed for years until I began finding ways to get paid for doing things I wanted to do anyway. I never cared about money but I needed to pay rent and buy groceries and give my kids relatively normal lives.
Finding the balance between who you are and what you do is one of the main challenges of adult life, discovering that comfortable point between starving in a garret and taking a job that shrivels your soul.
Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning. — Stephen Dedalus
Of course, Jim and Nora Joyce often strained to pay their bills, and, like Blanche DuBois, were known to depend upon the kindness of strangers.
I wouldn’t take much guidance from a rightwing war profiteer, but I guess if you don’t have his attitude, you don’t end up in his position. We all make choices.
Double laugh for this Moderately Confused, because my first reaction was that, yeah, who goes into the bank anymore? That was a chuckle. The laugh came when I said, “I haven’t been inside the bank since …” and couldn’t come up with an answer.
My banking is done almost entirely on-line, with a few trips to the ATM, which is how you can tell I’m an old fart, because the young folks do everything on their phones. My landlord prefers checks, so I write 12 checks a year, plus maybe three or four more for random things like my car and dog licenses, but even those can be done on-line these days.
Panhandlers are gonna need to start carrying card swipers, because cash won’t be around much longer.
I was filling out some form the other day and remembering how, when the on-line world was new, the passwords and URLs and other things seemed so confusing and impossible to remember. Now they all flow readily, though passwords seem to be on the verge of extinction and hackers are already exploiting super-secret double-magic we’ll-send-you-a-code security.
Had a conversation yesterday about how people my age can remember the phone numbers of their friends from second grade but don’t know any phone numbers from the past two decades. A lot us can no longer read maps or find our way around anymore, either.
And it’s not like we’re filling those unused spaces with important information.
The Visigoths won’t even need to bring swords.
The only thing I ever blamed on the Bossa Nova was the need to repeatedly switch from WABC to WKBW to WLS because that stupid song was on the Top 40 for 17 weeks in 1963 and thus in heavy rotation.
If people my age commit mortal sins, they go to a place where loudspeakers play Blame It On The Bossa Nova, Dominique and Pepino the Italian Mouse, the only occasional break being for An Open Letter to My Teenage Son.
I keep seeing that kids don’t read anymore but I also keep seeing that the market for middle-school literature is booming. My recent experience is skewed because the kids I knew had signed up to be journalists, so obviously they liked to read and write.
But one of the things I had to teach young book reviewers is that not every story has a moral. The books you’re assigned to read in school all have morals, because teachers and librarians choose titles that hammer you over the head with deep, important meanings that you should then paraphrase, summarize, outline, compare, contrast and infer.
You’d have to dig mighty deep to find a moral in Captain Underpants.
Here’s the thing: Science can explain a sunrise, but I’d rather just sit there and stare, me with my belt wrapped around my head and you in your brand-new leopard-skin pill-box hat.
I feel the same way about reading.
Juxtaposition of the Week
Somebody commented here the other day that Crabgrass was awfully frank in wondering if the strip had jumped the shark, but I think we’re going to have to hang around and watch to see.
When I was a kid, I was vaguely aware that the Superman folks were goofing off when they brought on Mr. Mxyzptlk or Bizarro Superman, or featured a “red kryptonite” story. They were amusing, but lazy and off-topic.
I’ve enjoyed the interdimensional Crabgrass story, however, and I’ll give Bondia credit for not resolving it with a dream explanation.
But now Kevin and Miles are back to normal and Wallace is chasing a sprite through the forest primeval.
Meanwhile, Danae is off on a new adventure, but I’m sure it will be firmly based on reality, just the simple story of a little girl and her talking horse.
Consistency and continuity matter. Reality, however, is vastly overrated. Long before Kellyanne Conway invented “alternative facts,” we were dealing with “subjective reality.”
Intentionally.
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