2022 Life Logs, Day 140: Laughing is Good for Your Soul
Date: Friday, May 20, 2022
Weather: Overcast Moving to Sunny; High 65, Low 55 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Every weeknight, I record the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and then watch his monologue and follow-up segment the next day when I sit down to eat lunch. I do it because Colbert’s humor often makes me laugh and laughing is good for your soul. But today, when I watched last night’s feature segment following the monologue, I was almost rolling in the floor with laughter. It started as a commentary on the new ‘comfortable’ look in office fashion, post Covid. It then turned into a spoof on Untuckit.com, the company that produces shirts that are “designed to be worn untucked so they fall at the perfect length.” But in the Colbert spoof, there was a guy who just couldn’t believe how hard it was to tuck in Untucket shirt so he could more easily retrieve his cell phone from his back pocket. The untucked shirt kept getting in his way. So, he designed a ‘new’ kind of shirt that was long enough to tuck in. The funny part was that the bottom of the front of the shirt was attached to the bottom of the back of the shirt with clips on an elastic band so the shirt cannot easily come untucked produced by ‘Go Tuck Yourself’. It might not sound funny but watching three very differently shaped men walk about with these shirts on, sans pants, was hilarious. At least, I thought so. And that reminded me of how different people see the same thing, and that reminded me of the book I finished reading last night, Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine written by Gail Honeyman.
For good reasons, which I will not mention in case you want to read the book, Eleanor finds herself to be a thirty-year-old woman who has not had life experiences that allow her to see the world as others. She is college educated, but because she has no normal life experiences, she takes everything literally. She gets to know the IT person who works in her office and he asks her if she is seeing anyone at the moment. “Yes,” she said, completely seriously. “I’m seeing you right now, Raymond. You’re sitting right in front of me.” She had no idea that ‘seeing anyone’ could be referring to dating someone. Another of my favorites was Eleanor’s description of dancing, or even seeing other people dance, for the first time in her life. “I joined in with what seemed to be jigging on the spot. Some people moved their arms as though they were jogging, some people were pointing at nothing; it appeared that you were supposed to move your body around in any way you saw fit, as long as it was in time with the music, which was a steady eight beats, helpfully marked out by a drum. Then the beat changed abruptly, and everyone started doing the same thing, making strange shapes with their arms above their head. It took me a moment or two to learn the shapes, and then I was able to copy them. Free-form jigging, communal shapes in the air; free-form jigging, communal shapes in the air. Dancing was easy.” What she was describing was dancing to YMCA! YMCA! Then she wondered why the band was singing about the Young Men’s Christian Association. The author’s description of this made me laugh out loud and wonder, like Eleanor, why people do such things and why I had never even thought of what YMCA stood for. Then there was Eleanor’s reaction when Raymond (the office IT guy) gave her a helium balloon to cheer her up. She looked at it and asked, “What’s it supposed to be? Is it . . . is it cheese?” Raymond replied, “It’s SpongeBob, Eleanor. SpongeBob SquarePants.” Something we would all recognize, despite its silliness, but not Eleanor. The point is that all of these descriptions in the book made me smile, while some had me rolling with laughter, but at th.e end of the book, I found that I am looking at the world a little differently, trying to understand how others can see the world so differently from myself.
Jed left on Wednesday for London to collaborate with colleagues and tomorrow he will fly from London to Sweden to a scientific conference, returning late next Thursday night. Tomorrow Heather is driving to Maine to look at a sailboat or two. She will return tomorrow night or Sunday morning, depending on whether she gets to see the second boat. It is the one that they made a bid on, sight unseen. There have been all sorts of issues preventing her from seeing that boat, so hopefully tomorrow will be the day. It is a full seven hours’ drive from here, so she is going to be doing a lot of driving. In the meantime, I, along with friends, will cart the boys to rowing practice and soccer games. If Heather does not return until Sunday, the boys will spend tomorrow night with me. Then on Tuesday, Heather flies to San Diego for one day and then on to Telluride in Colorado, returning Sunday just before Memorial Day. So, I am on Goldpebble duty for the next week. Hopefully I will have time to post my nightly logs, but if not, just know that I am having fun with my grandsons and will report on it when I have time.
