Reflections: Laughter

I don't know how to say it... it's small... subtle things. I feel like our humor has become similar the longer we've been married.

How so?

Sometimes, everyone in a room will be silent, but you and I will be laughing. There was a time that we were at Bryn Mawr [The Birthing Center] and we were watching a video. Everyone was silent during this one part but you and I were just laughing.

Subtle.

Weird.

Ironic things that we sometimes laugh at.

I don't know how to phrase it, but it's just life's ironies... I don't know...

This is a question that I punted to my wife tonight to answer. The

italicized are her responses.

I really think I laugh at a lot of the same things others do... but I think that there has been a transformation at what I laugh at and why I laugh. I remember sitting in an English class in MiddleSchool... we all had to read an essay we had written. I think my essay was on disassembling and then reassembling a lawn mower engine (it was something I had recent experience in and a task that is uniquely dull and tedious). When it was my turn to read, I remember standing.

And then I laughed.

I laughed uncontrollably.

I laughed because I was unbearably nervous.

The teacher told me I could sit back down.

That nervous laugh left me over time. I can actually stand up and say nearly anything in a crowd (sometimes).

What my wife was getting at though is that there are still a lot of instances where I will laugh and no one will know why (sometimes she doesn't understand either). My imagination runs when I see or hear things and often it creates a context that might or might not exist.

So... I laugh at possibilities of humor.

I laugh at the things in life that a lot of people think of as normal.

Normal is funny to me because I'm usually thinking about the things that lead up to the event, or maybe what might follow. Sometimes I'm thinking about something totally unrelated to the people I am talking to because of something else that happened somewhere else with someone else that happens to be very similar to what is happening with the people I am talking with.

I've been told more than once that this makes other people nervous.

I love to laugh though. I laugh at a lot of things. Laughing means that I'm not hurting and (hopefully) the people I am with aren't hurting. Laughter makes me think that God has a sense of humor even as all of use are created in His image (I laugh at things that happen in the Bible to0 - some of it is ridiculous while still miraculous - when was the last time you were spoken to out of someone's ass; it really happened per the Old Testament! Check it out here in several translations.) Laughing is a stark reminder that even though my soul is broken, there is hope in a world where Jesus promises that one day there will be peace and wholeness.

I like to laugh until I cry. I like to laugh with other people. I am pretty simple to please and will often and admittedly laugh at very crude things.

Laughing is proof of my humanity even while I will act sub-human.

Here are some other things that make me laugh. Hopefully this non-exhaustive list will help you to laugh too:

• Failblog
• Failbook
• Schmoyoho
• Dumb and Dumber
• Napoleon
• Mullets
• Arrested Development
• Coco
• David Sedaris
• WireTap
• some episodes of TAL
• Mike Judge
• And on, and on...

I laugh a lot.

On Compliments

Working through Corrin's Reflections Project. Today: "What was the best compliment you got this year? What compliment would you secretly like to get? Be as honest as possible."

The most honest answer I can provide is that I often despise compliments as much as I despise criticism. There is a dark feature of the way my self tends to operate (I think this is an appropriate usage of the possessive noun "my self," rather than "myself"). My self tends to shy from receiving compliments. When compliments are bestowed, I think that my self will often work to down play those expressions or even dismiss them altogether.

There is not any one compliment I could remember that I received over the course of the year (actually, there are a few, but they're all recent... so I think it qualifies as not being able to remember the rest).
I cannot think of one compliment that I would secretly like to receive over the coming year either.

Part of this is borne out of a certain self image - half way puritanical even. There is the thought that to say or accept anything good said about myself would be a work of abject hypocrisy. I say this because I know myself and I know the sort of sludge and muck that rests beneath the surface of the outward appearance of what seem to be victories and failings.

But here's the reality: this view of my self in the rejection of criticism and compliment is borne more out of a pride that neither allows others the freedom nor right to observe what is good and bad about what they see in Gene Twilley. That pride is a sort of denial of the gospel of Jesus in that it attempts to extinguish the lights that shine on my neediness. As it is, self-definition is the idol who rules the roost and fights hard against any real sense of community, or of dependency, or of real humanity in the depths of my own soul.

This is the antithesis to humility.
This is the antithesis to the Spirit of Christ within me.

The two: a denial of compliment and a denial of criticism is so intertwined within me. "How?" one might ask. "How," I would respond, by merit of the fact that if you have the freedom, right or privilege to not only see what might be deemed as good in me but also declare it, then you might also have the right or privilege to see and declare what is bad in me. If that's the case - if my laundry is hung out before the both of us, then that which is damnable really needs to be addressed as it makes for a bit of awkwardness for you to see something in me, say you see it, and for me to leave it out there hanging. And if that's the case, if I can hear and respond gracefully to your criticisms and compliments about me, then I (and this is specific to me) am really getting the gospel of Jesus in that I am understanding the need I have for you in my life.

Objectively, I get this.
Practically, this is a little more difficult for me.

And I'll be honest saying that there are people who do not subscribe to the same set of beliefs that I do who excel in taking criticism and compliment. This is an area that has some elasticity in the spectrum of life. In my spectrum, it just happens to reflect the muck that resides in me.

New Year, New Post

A friend's wife (and by extension, friend herself) wrote a comment to me as what I deemed a challenge to start blogging again. You can check out her challenge by clicking here. Essentially, it is a thirty day jaunt of reflecting over 2010 (while not being married to having to blog everyday).

Today's assignment: Describe the best moment, the one you really want to remember, from 2010. Paint a word picture and then share an actual picture.

I think that the easy thing to say would be, "The birth of our son." While this event is, undoubtedly, the most memorable and the best even that has happened to the Twilley's in 2010, I'm not going to write about this event (maybe some other time... but not right now).

The middle of the summer was burdensome by measure of heat. Philadelphia is a surprisingly hot city during the summer months. Sometimes, I check Birmingham's weather just so that I can reassure myself that even though we're 900 miles away from where we used to live, the temperature is still (at times) unbearably hot.

I wake up early because I'm used to waking up early for my job. My commute is easily one hour in the morning, many times more. In the afternoons, I am on the road for one and one half hours... sometimes two. As I said, sometimes I wake up early. When I do this on the weekends, I walk the dog so that I can come back and make breakfast for my wife and I. On Saturdays and Sundays, I find that I am strangely unfamiliar with my own neighborhood.

There is a depth of silence that is often yearned for (by some) yet seldom experienced. The silence with the warm morning air is strange and burdensome to me.

My own neighborhood is alien to me.

I worked for Allstate for nearly six years. There is so much that I learned from my experience there... so much that I gained and so much that I gave. But this day marked a new chapter for these Twilley's in Philly.

I walked in to the office. My desk was cleaner than it had been since I moved to Philadelphia (in honesty... it was cleaner; when I moved here there were actually tobacco stains in my desk drawers and on the desk itself). The office was a little different than when we moved here three years prior, but not by much. There were a few new faces, but work, gender and geography really always kept me from developing any sort of more meaningful relationship with many of the folks in the office.

I was actually asked if I could close any loose ends I had early (by noon) because the IT manager had planned on letting me leave earlier than expected (I think everyone else was off for the fourth of July).

June 29 was a weekday. It was also my last day working for Allstate Insurance Company.

June 30 was also a weekday... it was my first day as a full time student at Westminster Theological Seminary.

I had actually taken some night classes at the school and two distance courses during a time of heavy travel at work. I mention this only because being a student is not what made June 30 so momentous for me. What June 30, 2010 meant was that I could start being a neighbor. It meant that traveling to New England and various parts of Pennsylvania was no longer my M.O. It meant that my wife and I could really start focusing again on our marriage in ways that we haven't truly been able to over the course of the past three years. It meant that I could fall in love with my city again.

The ramifications behind this are multitudinous so that they would make this post beyond bearable in length. While working for Allstate was a great experience for me, at the end of the day it was no longer for me. Starting school full time meant a freedom for me that wasn't afforded through a life of long commutes and extended travel. Being a Wesminster student is not what makes all of this so great - it is more of the idea that I can finally live in the city where my home is... if that makes any sense.

I'm sure that more of those ramifications will come out in future posts... but this is enough for now.