Mirth at one’s own ridiculousness is a phenomenon I highly value. If I was unable to utter even the minutest chuckle at my own ineptitudes, a dour and dismal life I would lead. Grateful I am, thus, that I do not vise myself with seriousness. I simply accept that I am an unintentional lummox and aquatic baboon most of the time.
I find occasion to laugh at myself multiple moments a day. The inane way I word something, for instance. “Aquatic baboon?” What …? Some shaking of the cranium and some chortles are likely to ensue here.
Another common humiliation I find a bit of hilarity in- my falling habit, intentional or involuntary, no matter.
Sometimes (or often), I decide to take a spill, ardently keen on a particular angle of some “majestic” little scene to snap with the old camera. An individual observes Photographer up, ambulating about one moment; completely flattened, chin kissing the loam, the next. Observer gambols over to assist.
“Are you okay? Oh, you’re photographing something? That’s so nice! What it is?! It must be very interesting to make you crawl around on the ground like that!” cries Observer.
I get up and reply, “I was photographing a twig. Would you like to see it?”
And the preposterousness never ends there. A new acquaintance and I will be enjoying a most lovely conversation about a little snowy-white bird with a long, curved bill known as an ibis.
“It’s so cool,” he says licking his lips and looking to the right, picturing the dainty blue-eyed, crimson-billed bird in his mind, “how they sometimes hang out in huge groups, it’s like, so awesome, and they are so social, ya know?”
Here, I become excited, and what bugles from my thin lips is a habitual phrase I never become free of, “MOST indubitably!”
Eyes become glazed, body stiffens. Not mine, his. Every blasted time, the individual to suffer the onslaught of “indubitably phrase” disturbingly believes I have suddenly lapsed into a posh, stuffy, insipid, vodka-drinking-rich-old-lady type of superiority. Oh dear.
So, instead of sitting there mindlessly cackling, I decide to try and come to my own assistance, for social reasons, after all, “Yes, it is just fabulous! Is it not grand, too, when they emit those uncanny honks as they squabble about for a bit of crust? They must be the cutest birds on the planet!” Here, polite laughter should follow. (Why does that still sound like an insipid, vodka-guzzling snob?)
So, reader, you may be convinced now that the author is quite a sea of incessant.
Incessant blunders, I mean.
Just look at the wreckage of the way this post has been written. I think this may be the most annoying thing I have ever crafted. Ah, but at least I am grateful. I rather like this daily entertainment, whether it is the way I talk in an aggravating nameless accent from nowhere (people always inquire what country, what planet…), or my constant losing of hats, glasses, ties and phones, there will always abide my inner peace. Better to Accept, with great bowls of guffaws, I think, than to self-berate, always in fear of lurking mortification.
(Great bowls of guffaws?)
Many good cheers,
Autumn Jade
“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope”
“When I left my home and my family
“Even death has a heart.”
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
“The old ones called it ‘the hour of the wolf’. It is the hour when the most people die, and the most are born. At this time, nightmares come to us. And when we awake, we are afraid.”
A Day in the Brine 