People laughed in concentration camps

Freud, that old clever clogs, referred to laughter under adversity as "gallows humour" and in my family "black" humour is welcome and perhaps even expected.  When Mum was dying, an unbelievably devastating loss to me, we were still making jokes - We talked about renting a fishing boat so we could make her wish to be fed to the sharks come true... at the blackest moment after the doctor had left the room someone piped up "must be time to rent the boat".  That was her humour too, she would have been laughing right beside us if a persistent bleed in the brain hadn't been stealing her away.  When there is NO insecurity about how much you love someone, when everyone KNOWS and it is unquestionable, then everyone KNOWS that your heart is twisted in agony even though your wit is still snapping out quips and puns.

[WARNING SWEEPING GENERALIZATION TO FOLLOW]

I found, in my time in the US that  many American's take things a bit more seriously than Australians do.  Lots of my American friends have incredible senses of humour and make me laugh constantly, but the black humour thing... um... maybe not so much.  So to my American mates just know that I am not really a sick and twisted individual I'm just an Aussie embracing irreverence and upholding my national identity!  (A regular beer, an occasional meat pie, and a passionate love of the water covers most of the bases.)

Humour is a coping mechanism, a tool that helps us to escape for a moment, to release tension, to breathe more deeply and maybe to reset some of the mental roundabouts that our minds become caught upon.  I think that living with a condition like Fibromyalgia makes it very easy to fall into a trap of downwardly spiraling mental thought processes...  The name of my blog derives from just such an attempt to redirect mental processes into nonsense and silliness instead of gloom.

Nobody loves me

Everybody hates me

Think I'll go and eat worms

Big ones, small ones

Fat ones, thin ones

Worms that squiggle and squirm.

I'll (here the tempo increases) bite their heads off

Suck their guts out

Throw their skins away

Nobody knows how well I live on worms three times a day!

It's hard to explain to someone who doesn't have a chronic illness how you can be laughing and making jokes while still feeling like crap.  But this isn't a case of food poisoning that brings you down for a little while, it isn't something where you can permit yourself a couple of days of wallowing in self-pity knowing it will all be better by the weekend.  This condition is unrelenting and in spite of the pain and fatigue you still have to try to find ways to enjoy life and you must find ways to laugh.  Just today someone, whom I love, told me "it's not that bad", "you're okay".  I tried to explain how much I push myself for them, how much I hide the truth for them, how much I am at my very best when I am with them, and how much I pay later in private for those efforts.  More to the point I need to explain that I can't go on doing it.  That it's impossible to sustain a appearance of high energy and vitality now.  I want this person I love to know that when I feel joy and when I find things funny it doesn't mean that I'm not in pain.  You can't live your life in a morass of misery where your every thought is about how your body feels.  It would be far too easy to sink into a very dark place if you did.

So like the bloke on the way to be executed who when offered a cigarette quipped back "no thanks, I'm trying to quit", I'm going to keep trying to find things to laugh about.  It's Thursday and so tonight I am back to the Synagogue for another cooking lesson.  I'm resting up today so I can really pay close attention and have the stamina to make it through two hours.  

No silly, I'm not going to pay attention to the class, I'm going to pay attention to the people, and the ripely humourous moments that occur, so that I can remember them to tell you!

Adventures of a lesbian agnostic carnivore

The fact that I am an agnostic carnivore did NOT prevent my friend S, in a fit of giggles, from signing me up to join her daughter at the local synagogue for a kosher vegetarian cooking class.  In the process of signing me up my email address was repeatedly auto corrected to read "gentiles" -  it may have been the I Phones way of trying to warn the synagogue that a heathen was soon to be in their midst!

Tonight was the night!

Would it be alarmingly ironic if there were thirteen in the class?  I seriously think there were... (plus the teacher/chef and her partner)

I was being REALLY good until the onions.

There was a fellow there who was asking questions phrased in very odd ways... "Would you like to tell us something about the onions?" he asked.  I'm thinking, 'Like what?  That they were abandoned on a doorstep at birth?  That they cost $3 a kilo?  That they prefer their martini shaken, not stirred?'  Clearly the chef was also wondering what he wanted to know but she bravely launched into an explanation that those were the nicest ones in the store.  Then she leaned across the room with an onion in her outstretched hand and said. "Go on, feel how firm they are."  I watched him hesitate, his hands almost reaching out but pausing tentatively, heading towards the onion but not making much progress, a pregnant pause hung over the room as he seemed to teeter on the horns of this great conundrum...  I couldn't stand the tension...
"Go on mate, it's not every day a woman wants you to feel her onion!" I said.

His next comment related to the herbs and he asked her "How long does thyme keep?"  I managed to leave that one alone...  I also managed to resist when the chef was warning us very seriously NOT to let the orange zest  sit in the water in which it was boiled and I successfully refrained from saying "It just isn't kosher".

Seriously though they were really nice people and I had a great time.  The feast at the end of the meal was delicious, fresh and nutritious.  I'd never been to a synagogue before, as chance would have it, but I'm pretty sure by the end of the 5 week course I will have spent more time in the synagogue than in any other house of worship, and that's just fine with me!

BTW thyme keeps for a week if it is in water.