Category Archives: Humor

On the Second Step

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My sponsor asked me to write a paragraph or two about my higher power.

When I close my eyes in the darkness and the silence, nothing comes to me. There is no still small voice. When I meditate, my mind wanders away like a neurotic puppy, and I bring it back, but I find no peace or joy in the activity. When I try to pray, there is no presence. When I grieve, there is no comfort.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.

That’s Isaiah 55:8. It’s the verse that I most relate to.

So much spiritual abuse has been heaped on me. So much pain in the name of God. Manipulating, forcing, cajoling. Writing pages of the bible until my handwriting improved and I developed mild carpal tunnel. Not believing in mental illness, not getting help, watching me retreat further and further into myself until I was a shell and then trying to break me down with an exorcism. I regret not being stronger but more I regret needing to be strong. Needing to be protected from those that were only acting out of love, only doing what they knew and thought was best.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.

No, I don’t find God like that.

But when I am making something, something fanciful takes over me.

I see God in the way an edge gets shaded just right,

or a piece of sheet metal bends precisely how it needed to,

or the twirl of a burr being removed,

or a cut falling away.

My higher power is not passive. I must worship at the alter of calluses and minor burns.

I must seek out the Muse. She is not a god of prayerful prone postures. She delights in mad midnight marches of over-caffeinated whimsy.

And with that, I close my prayer.

I wouldn’t touch that if I were you…

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I was proud of a particularly nice weld. It lay between each hunk of steel, puddles so tight and smooth that it looked like metal bred with liquid silk. I wanted to show it off, so I pulled off my helmet, which had no doubt left strappy sweat marks trailing through my hair, and went to where my brother, face contorted, was setting up the CNC mill. I watched the wiggler approach the shaft for a moment, then stop. I took my chance.
I asked my brother “Are you grumpy?”
He replied “I’m always grumpy. What do you need?”
“I just wanted to show you a weld that’s pretty special looking.”
As we walked over, he asked, “Does it glow in the dark?”
“It can if you give me twenty minutes. I do have that spray paint.”
He stood over the bench and examined the part. “Huh. That’s pretty nice.”
I would never expect higher praise from him.

Have fun and be good.

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“I got thoroughly chastised by Krista for throwing away a banana. She said you’d still eat it.” My dad was busy writing a check for the Snap-On man but he still smiled.

My mom pitched in “He still might if he can find it in the trash. What was wrong with it? Was it bad?”

“No such thing as a bad banana,” my dad chirped.

My mom made a blanket disagreement. She’s not sure if there’s any such thing as a good banana.

“It wasn’t ripe.”

My father turned turned to the Snap-On man and said “I get a lot of crap for pulling thing out of the trash. Reusing paper plates…”

“The dogs already cleaned them, so they should be fine!” My mom grins.

My father nods to her and says “She draws the line at floss.” He pauses. “At least after the dogs got a hold of it. ”

The Snap-On guy keeps grinning while I huff. “I remember getting all kinds of mocked when I brushed the dog’s teeth when I was in 4-H.”

I think he gets a lot of amusement out of this particular stop. Whenever he leaves, he reminds us to “Have fun, and be good!”

A letter for me.

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“Write me my affirmations.” I directed Alyssa. There wasn’t a whole lot for her to do at the meeting while we fiddled with the laser downstairs.

“But I don’t have anything to write on.”

I sighed, knowing that I would gladly leap to solve any problem she had, but probably shouldn’t. “You are not helpless. You are a very clever girl. I have faith in you.”

“Okay, MARK.” She spat her husband’s name at me with a tone I recognized, on that I had used before, substituting the name Josh instead. It took me until this moment to realize what a weak argument that was.

“Wow, that’s really your response?” I had already started walking backwards out of the room and could no longer see her.

She raised her voice. “If you’re gonna say things like him, I’m gonna call you on it.”

“Maybe he’s just right.”

She yelled vivaciously from the other room, full of defiance and spitfire. “NO. THAT COULD NEVER BE THE CASE.” I smiled as I went down the stairs, wondering if she’d actually work on it. After all, I had given her the assignment of writing down positive things about me about two weeks ago.

–

She came down to the shop a little while later, and began playing with my hair. She smirked, saying that she was gonna “Pippi Longstocking” me. As she pulled my hair into short, tight braids, I sighed and resigned myself to my fate. Then, presumably bored, she traipsed upstairs again to see what Denise was up to.

I wandered the space. I found a chunk of plexiglas that someone had lasered something out of, leaving several inches of wasted space in the material. I picked it up and walked over to Mark. “One thing that I really hate about this place is that there’s not a single person that has a clue how to use materials effectively.”

He was less miffed, and being his traditionally sassy self. “Out of all the things that are wrong in the world, including your hair, that is what you focus on?”

“You’re one of them, you know.” I said, thinking back to several times that I’ve seen him set up materials.

“Yes, I’m one of the things that are wrong with the world.”

Despite the fact that he’s one of the most important and productive people that are involved with the makerspace, there’s no point in engaging with him while he’s having an incompetence fit. I headed back upstairs.

–

First thing I did was head to the fridge to grab a soda. As I walked towards her, Alyssa hissed at me and shielded the papers she had strewn out around her. I guess she really was working on my letter. I smiled and went towards Denise instead.

–

When the first set of puzzle piece structure was finished in the laser, I asked Mark “Is there a method to the madness here? Which ones are which?” Each segment had 6 pieces and the pair of them were slightly different. He explained the order and I opened up the laser to pick them out. Knowing the difference between the pieces, I felt confident that I knew what I was doing, so I just scooped them together and plucked them up randomly.

“So I guess it doesn’t matter even if there was an order.”

I smiled brightly and shook my head.

Mark sighed as he put in the next sheet. “Thanks sweetie.”

–

When Alyssa handed me an envelope, I beamed at her. I was very excited. It was thick with several sheets and had my first and middle name on it in cheery, loopy handwriting.

“If that’s not still sealed by the time we leave here today, I take back everything I said in it.”

“Okaayy…”

–

Denise left early, wishing us the best as it had taken her and Stacey 6 hours to put together the tab and slot structure. Mark went to the auto parts store, hoping to fix the forklift. This left Alyssa and I alone with all the paperboard pieces of the prototype. We worked industriously and listened to Andrew Bird.
After Mark showed up again, I stole his abandoned pair of glasses and put them on.
He didn’t when he sat down. I came to the end of the first side of the construction, and began to fiddle with the second spiral. “Yeah, you can do this part. I don’t wanna.”

Alyssa graciously began inserting and bending tabs, very quickly becoming adept at it. The spiral spun and spun and spun some more. Mark fiddled on his phone, periodically showing something interesting to us or reading bits of an article. Alyssa was reaching the end of the spiral again, about a half hour later when she exasperatedly said “Are you really not gonna notice that she’s wearing your glasses?”

“Why should I care?” Ever so generous, that one.

We spent a little time fiddling with the various lenses and then came the question.

“What do we do now?”

“I guess we go home.”

They began packing up. Mark stalked up behind me and wordlessly pulled his glasses from my face. I glared at him. “What?” There are times I feign anger just so that I get to enjoy the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles defensively.

We hugged, we left, I came home, I wrote. And now I have a letter to read.

I can’t wait.

Something

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I don’t remember what exactly we had been talking about when Alyssa looked at me and said “You’re destined for greatness.”

“Yeah, okay, JOSH.” Kind of sad that the best response to that was to point to another person with similar hopes about me.

“You have too much going on in you to not be meant to do something.” The emotion in her eyes was genuine.

I brought up a story from the night before. “You should’ve heard what Josh said when I mentioned trying for that job. He goes on, ‘When they ask you to weld aluminum to titanium and then stainless steel and loop it around again, you smile at them and say “I got this. I did that last week.” Because you can. You tell them that you’re the best damn welding engineer in the city. In the state. Because you KNOW you. You know your learning curve, you’re smarter than 99% of people out there. You got this. You just gotta know it.’ I just looked at him, a little stunned(only slightly thinking about the metallurgical sins he mentioned) and said ‘You really believe that.’ He gave me his you’re-the-smartest-idiot-I-know grin and said. ‘I do. ‘”

“Yeah, he’s right. There’s no reason that you can’t be the best in the state.”

“There’s a lot of people out there that are smarter than me.”

“Josh and I both see something in you- and we’re negative people. For you, we’re hopeful cynics.”

I cocked my head and nuzzled in with “I collect the delusional.”

“We’re not delusional. We just see the potential in you. And how brilliant it must be, if the negative people see it in you.”

I kissed her, she wrapped her hands behind my neck and told me to leave.

“I’m getting mixed messages…”

She smiled, kissed me, and then let go of my neck.

“Go home. Write me something.”

The Egg Story

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My husband is a bit of a city boy, which often brings some bits of amusement into my life. This particular conversation about eggs jumps out…

Michael insisted that “you don’t need to refrigerate them, they come out of the chicken hot.”
This is technically true, if you don’t wash the protective film off and they have never been refrigerated. But I think the subtlety of that was lost on him based on his next statement.
“I know, I know… Chickens are cold blooded.”

It kept getting better. Weeks later, the following happened as we sat in the food court at the mall.

“What is feta made from?”
“Cheese.” I wouldn’t disagree if someone were to diagnose me as a smartass.
“From what animal?”
“I dunno. Cow. Goat. Chicken.”
“Chickens don’t give milk. ”
“I don’t know that you know that. You thought chickens were cold blooded. ”
“Birds are cold blooded. They are amphibians. There’s more than one kind of cold blooded.”

I’m kinda curious how many kinds of cold blooded that there are.

Unintentional body image humor

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My mom shows my sister and I an ad of a young woman in a tiny blue bikini with dangly fringe. “That’s gonna be my swimsuit this year.”

I stare blankly at her. “Okay.”

She steps back, grinning with exasperation. “It was supposed to be a joke, it’s funny, laugh!”

“I’m trying to not make assumptions about your comfort level with your body.”

That got laughs.