What? Things are happening? In my life?
Sort of.
First, my collage birthday party: laura b's carrot cake + paper & glue = good launch for 7 x 8
Me v in blue shirt, clapping:
At this party I announced I was looking for a job,
and John S. (not pictured) invited me to come check out a classroom of special-ed preschool kids at the school where he works--they're looking for an aide until the end of the school year, and based on my work with adults with dementia, I'd be a good fit, he thought.
I just now got home from an afternoon with the kids, and it was... full of stories. I'm not supposed to tell stories about the kids, of course, but I can say one of them leaned close to me and whispered, "What are you doing here?"
Which struck me as a pretty darn brilliant question.
Also I can say that small children move more in two hours than I have moved in two months, and I want this job if only so I will start moving again.
Meanwhile, the editor did a bang-up job on my ms, returning it with lots of good ideas for making it better.
So there's a week or two's worth of work there.
I do think the final book is going to be fun.
Speaking of fun, I'm taking a 4-week community ed class with bink:
"Funny Up: Adding Humor to Your Writing".
I am wary. Humor and I have a mutually suspicious relationship:
I think it's manipulative, and it thinks I'm trying to analyze & explain it out of existence.
Both are correct.
For the second class tonite, we're supposed to think of a favorite funny thing and why it's funny, what the mechanics of its humor are.
I immediately thought of Gene Wilder's attack of hysterics in the Producers. [links to vid in NTY]
I'm surprised how little I've thought about humor.
The teacher talked on the first night about what it is (like, basically, it's surprise--the breaking of a norm: like chess, it has simple rules and infinite variations). I could tell that she was giving us the party line, but I'd never even heard it.
Anyway, I love that scene because it's actually very kind, at root--Zero Mostel only smiles to get Gene Wilder to shut up, but you know what? It works. For both of them.
Sort of.
First, my collage birthday party: laura b's carrot cake + paper & glue = good launch for 7 x 8
Me v in blue shirt, clapping:
At this party I announced I was looking for a job,
and John S. (not pictured) invited me to come check out a classroom of special-ed preschool kids at the school where he works--they're looking for an aide until the end of the school year, and based on my work with adults with dementia, I'd be a good fit, he thought.
I just now got home from an afternoon with the kids, and it was... full of stories. I'm not supposed to tell stories about the kids, of course, but I can say one of them leaned close to me and whispered, "What are you doing here?"
Which struck me as a pretty darn brilliant question.
Also I can say that small children move more in two hours than I have moved in two months, and I want this job if only so I will start moving again.
Meanwhile, the editor did a bang-up job on my ms, returning it with lots of good ideas for making it better.
So there's a week or two's worth of work there.
I do think the final book is going to be fun.
Speaking of fun, I'm taking a 4-week community ed class with bink:
"Funny Up: Adding Humor to Your Writing".
I am wary. Humor and I have a mutually suspicious relationship:
I think it's manipulative, and it thinks I'm trying to analyze & explain it out of existence.
Both are correct.
For the second class tonite, we're supposed to think of a favorite funny thing and why it's funny, what the mechanics of its humor are.
I immediately thought of Gene Wilder's attack of hysterics in the Producers. [links to vid in NTY]
I'm surprised how little I've thought about humor.
The teacher talked on the first night about what it is (like, basically, it's surprise--the breaking of a norm: like chess, it has simple rules and infinite variations). I could tell that she was giving us the party line, but I'd never even heard it.
Anyway, I love that scene because it's actually very kind, at root--Zero Mostel only smiles to get Gene Wilder to shut up, but you know what? It works. For both of them.
2 comments:
Hope you get to work with the kids. I find humor is helpful in coping. Maybe you find it manipulative because it is a way asserting control - over circumstances if you are using it to cope.
I liked my afternoon with the kids, but the teacher said afterward they want someone with experience with kids.
(Though she'd agreed to have me come visit knowing I didn't have experience: I wonder if she thought I was too old to handle their physical activity. Or maybe she just didn't like how I was with them? Who knows.)
Yes, I don't like feeling manipulated by a certain kind of humor---like a certain kind of stand-up comic who seems to NEED to MAKE you laugh.
[Not sure about all this--must think more on it.]
But like you, I TOTALLY find humor helpful in coping--
maybe especially the kind that points out absurdity.
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