Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Laughter is Good for the Brain

Actor Crush of the Day:

Click the title and read the post there. VERY interesting. Thing is, the vast majority of comedy flicks are NOT funny to me, even when you eliminate (no pun intended) the various Adam Sandler and/or lowbrow bathroom humor and other crap (pun intended) flicks.

So where to get my laffs? I do like my Daily Psychiatry toon on the sidebar, but I've seen all of them, and only occasionally are there new ones (as, of course, he produces toons on many subjects).

Anyone? I need some medicine, I mean laughter.

On another note, today's therapy . . . well, stay tuned for part two, I go back 9am Friday. Two for the price of, well, wait, I can 't really comment on THAT since it's well, I just can't, but hey, this week is a twoferwhateverit'scostingfortwoinoneweek.

Difficult. And at the end, I said, "Well, I'm NOT glad that I just went through all that, said all that, did all that . . . . I am not glad about what I experienced." Often, after an especially emotional therapy session, there will be a sense of catharsis, a sense of cleansing, even to a tiny degree, a sense of some kind of progress, even just in opening up . . . . but today, none of those. And, I started crying again as we wrapped up, I'm not sure why, but it just IS so emotionally difficult, doing and being this. Kept crying as I walked down the hall, down the stairs, and outside.

Cry me a river, I can hear you saying, C'mon, give us a break, quit feeling sorry for yourself.

Well, how else am I supposed to describe a strangely uncathartic sob session? An unrelieved pain? At least, it feels so at the moment.

The part when I was sobbing, "I can't . . . I can't . . . I can't . . . " repeatedly, and he gently asked, "You can't . . .what?" . . . . And I responded, after searching myself . . . ."I can't be hurt by YOU again." It was very intense.

Anyway, perhaps I'll go on more about it tomorrow, perhaps not, guess we'll see. Mebbe I'll feel better after sleeping on it.

Edit: I did go on after that to talk a bit about WHY it may have been causing such intensely deep feelings in me, such a deep HURT over what seemed like such a little thing. So at least I can be proud of bringing up what I was so dreadfully afraid to. And that he kindly and mostly empathetically engaged with me throughout the entire session.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

A movie that really made me laugh was Elf. I usually like to avoid Talk Show Humor as they make fun of people so much. I wanted to see Taylor Hicks the night he was on Jay Leno and was watching a little of the monologue. Some of it was so dirty making me further committ to avoiding it. One part really made me burst out laughing. They were talking about Barbaro and his surgery and how he had been making progress and they had a clip. On the screen, a dancing horse appears. It looked like it was from an old time movie and it was people dressed up like a horse and the leggs were bobbing around in a bit of a jig. Plus, the horse had an odd look on its face. I may not have laughed at anything else in the monologue. I was bursting out in laughter there. Wow! That was quite a mini-vacation. :)

Anonymous said...

I know how hard it is to open up. The first steps are the hardest.

Anonymous said...

A friend of mine said he wrote this knock/knock joke.
Knock Knock
Whose there?
Yah
Yah who?
No thanks, I prefer google
--I miss Dixie cups with knock/knock jokes!

Anonymous said...

That was just a warm up for my all-time favorite knock/knock joke.
Knock Knock
Whose there
Interrupting cow
Intterupting
moo
who?
You interject the moo in between when the person is saying interrupting cow who? Or atleast interpupt where you can. It really catches people off guard. I have trouble getting the timing right when I tell it.

Sarebear said...

oh man! You've had me giggling madly! Hrm, is that a good sign or a bad sign?

GOOD, I think! Now, if I'm in therapy session, might not be so good . . . .

bwa ha ha ha haaaa!

I need some good jokes! I may tell one of these in therapy tomorrow. Wheeeeee!

Thanks Barb.

Anonymous said...

Laughter is good! :)

Anonymous said...

I glanced at the words BUM on my shirt and was reminded of my grandma and his sense of humor. We thought Grandpa's vision was pretty impaired at that point, but when my mom sat across from him at the table, he read her shirt with BUM across it and jokingly remarked about her being a bumb. He may not have known who my mom was exactly when he said that. He had trouble reciting the names of his children around that point. And even when he was pretty conscious that he had a daughter named Carolyn, I think his mental image did not match up with mature woman that sat across from him. I think it was grandpa's sense of humor and people skills that kept people from seeing his dementia until it was more advanced. And when he could not remember a name of a person in his latter stages, he would with a witty intonation prounounce a man to be George and a woman would usually be George or Maude. Although he was not knowledge about current events, Grandpa still had a lot of General knowledge about the world and could hold an intelligent conversation although he may repeat himeself. And Grandpa was so skilled at picking a word or phrase out of a sentence and making a play on it that my dad said equaled very intelligent men in his advanced dementia stage. Grandpa was a welder most of his adult life, but he said people said he spoke like an educated man although he only had a 9th grade education. I wish I could come up with a great example of his play on words but it was so in the moment that I do not recall much. I do remember when he was seated in a dim nursing home and it was almost questionable in my mind as to whether this was my same grandpa as he was removed from his environment. This was a lock down dementia ward that my family went to court three times to have him removed from. As he sat on his bed, I said that I never saw him in those pants before. Without skipping a beat, grandpa asked if I had seen them from behind. Another example was when Grandpa asked in regards to my dad's taxi business,"Is business picking up." He was so cute. And he had cute mannerisms to match. Shortly before he died, he started singing "The Old Gray Mare Ain't What she Used to Be". And although Grandma who was sometimes called "Big John" was not the the strong and able man of his youth, I was so glad that he had the dignity of his humor to cope and to bless lives to the end. :)