Thanksgiving Serving Suggestion – Feel Good

5 Replies

While some of us are having rather low-key Thanksgivings in recent years, some of you are enjoying wild ones. I envy your big-group noise and merrymaking and even the fighting. It makes me wicked nostalgic.

A friend lamented when his daughter left for college, “Where did 20 years go?” For me it is, at this time of year: where did those beloved people go, those sacred homes, those raucous laughs of Thanksgivings past? Those kids all growed up. We all growed up. Sigh. Do you ever wish you were a kid again? Those older people (now frail or gone) still in charge? 

I looked up “nostalgia” and found the craziest assortment of definitions, ranging from things along the lines of “a sad longing” to, for real, “mental illness.” Sounds melodramatic, but makes sense. Because if you wallow in a sad longing for the past long enough, you are probably 1. Ignoring the bad things about those times, 2. Experiencing mental anguish, and 3. Not living your life.

This is an odd topic for a holiday column, I realize. Stay with me.

Many best-loved beings have left the building. Favorite musicians, actors, friends, lovers, pets, family, neighbors. The world at large seems a giant mess. While nostalgia implies a glossing over of actual history, I feel that my generation’s past was in fact lovelier – before the major disasters (you know the names) that imperiled our overall sense of safety and trust in humans, no matter where we live. At least in the US, by and large, life was easier back then. The oceans and wildlife and all of the Lands are now at risk. Homeless tent cities everywhere. And there is so much hate now. Or else we see more hate, due to the devil that is 24-hour news on TVs and screens. So don’t feel too bad about feeling nostalgic.

In our messed-up powder keg of a world, it’s difficult to remain hopeful or sane. Especially as it seems there’s little be done about much of it, aside from sending checks and voting. But I discovered this: that making an effort to feel good can actually pay off. It’s not easy sometimes, but worth trying. I went to see a magical and upbeat band at Chandler Center for the Arts, helped collect gifts for Ukrainian kids, and baked for a dear friend in need. I plan to go back to choir. Do you know that singing in groups (even small) increases your oxytocin? And surely other good brain chemicals.

When you feel good, you feel loved. And when you feel loved, you feel good. It works both ways, right? Well, guess what: feeling good allows great amounts of what some call Life Force to flow through you. This makes you healthier physically and emotionally. This makes you better able to navigate illness and difficult situations. Energized. Motivated. Resilient. So go feel good if it kills you. Maybe right now you’d rather lie around feeling like holy hell. Go right ahead, but don’t do it for long. It’ll make you sick.

Like many of you, I always dug Thanksgiving because my mommy put on such good ones and because it’s non-denominational. We would host people who had nowhere to go, much as our family’s loud antics were no doubt technically embarrassing. The guests didn’t seem to mind. We laughed and laughed. So did the guests. I miss every single person in those blurry old Instamatic photos, whether they moved away or died or just grew up. 

But in an effort to feel good, and in so doing make others feel good, this year I endeavor to focus far more on who’s here than on who’s not.

What I suggest this holiday to you and to me both is this: really marinate in communal happiness. No matter how small your group, no matter how past holidays appear happier in your mind, feel the love right where you are. When, at the table, verbally honoring the memory of our global and familial stars now gone, really savor the people that are here. Right here. Love the one(s) you’re with.

Feel good. Spread love. Bring leftovers to someone left out. Good Thanksgiving Day. 

Ann Aikens’ darkly comical, uplifting book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is available at Amazon & Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find shops at annaikens.com; more of her writing at uppervalleygirl.com.

How to be More Funny

Leave a reply

When you write something that gets delivered in some way (a book, eulogy, a love letter), you later think of things you left out, or come across things that could have gone in.  Well, in Newspaper Land where this column lives, that can be easily rectified!  Time marches on, but no big whoop because yesterday’s news is yesterday’s news and it’s always a new week. 

To that end … I wrote a month ago about how our messed-up world needs more laughs, that column titled “How To Be Funny.” We had become sorely in need of the medicine of laughter, as it were, in trying tymes. As the world has since somehow gotten even more messed up, I dive into this topic again. Because we need laughs. 

Make Up Words

Use words that don’t exist and see if your listeners run with it. What’s really “sub” about suburban? How about “peri-urban”? Toss it off in conversation, and people will just think they’re behind in the endless modern renaming of things (“TEMROT”). Similarly, create fake acronyms.

Incorporate Weird Things People Have Said into Your Lexicon

Years ago, a friend was driving through a toll in Jersey when the toll booth operator asked repeatedly and incomprehensibly, “Er Zed Poss??” After much back and forth, it was determined that she meant “E-Z Pass.” To this day we call it Er Zed Poss.

Be Unintentionally Funny

Which is funny in and of itself, because you cannot plan to be unintentionally funny. You can soundunintentionally funny, like Suzanne Somers (or a dozen other “dumb blondes,” including Dick Smothers, who played that well), but it is of course intentional. 

Think: Yogi Berra. 

He was clearly not unintentionally funny. It was brilliantly faux faux pas, one after the other.

  • “Nobody goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.”
  • “You can observe a lot by just watching.”
  • “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”


But When Someone Is Unintentionally Funny for Real,

it’s comedic gold. In high school, someone meant to say “the genteel aristocracy.” He said instead by mistake, “the genital aristocracy.” Which conjures up all manner of images. Some 40+ years later we still laugh about it. 

This happened to me recently. I said, regarding something having to do with Halloween, “Oh goody, something for me to sink my teeth into!”  Ha ha, said a colleague. Realizing I’d likely said something unintentionally funny, I guessed: “Oh … you mean like bobbing for apples?” No, she said: Vampires.

Misapply Slogans to Other Products

A radio station did this once, years ago. They took existing corporate slogans, and applied them as if to promote Viagra. I remember only this gem: “When it Absolutely/Has to Get There/Overnight” (FedEx’s tag line at the time). 

More Absurdity, Please!

It seems that when you become successful in sports, you start your own steakhouse chain. Or BBQ, or something resembling a Chili’s. Successful in music? You develop your own gross-looking “clothing line” or, more hilariously, “fragrance.” (I want to go around smelling like the woman who sang such forgettable songs as [can’t name them].)  When I hit it big, which will be never, I will start a “line” of dignity-based enema kits, create a “lifestyle plan” that involves eating while watching TV, and invent a “fragrance” for dogs. I will call all three “Ann,” just to hammer home my “brand” and all-around greatness, and my legions of sycophantic fans will make me rich, richer, RICHER, R I C H E R,  
R I C H E R R R R R R. You can never have enough.

The Laughs You Give

It may be naïve of me, but it seems that our talk about “fighting against hate” – whether the hate referred to means vicious acts by one group against another, police violence against unarmed civilians, an unsuccessful “War On drugs” that seemingly did nothing, egregious cruelty to children and animals, or 100 others forms of hate – I feel like the “fight against hate” just creates more of the same. Like the Hatfields and the McCoys*: an endless cycle of hateful violence. We humans maybe have this “fight against hate” thing backwards. Yet: how do we love or laugh our way out of attacks and atrocities? I don’t know. Still, perhaps there’s something to it. Maybe it’s like the Southern Poverty Law Center taking away Ku Klux Clan properties in courts of law and, with love, turning the land into summer camps for disadvantaged children of color, thus giving people like me who “hate” haters … the last laugh. Just throwing it out there

Good laffs to you. Because love is one million more times more powerful than hate, and because laughter is a form of love, and because laughter dries tears. Good day.

*Read Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, chapter 6.

Ann Aikens’ darkly comical, uplifting book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is available at Amazon & Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find shops at annaikens.com; more of her writing at uppervalleygirl.com.

How To Be Funny

7 Replies

Years ago, after a heartbreak (the first of many), I decided to stretch myself. I learned then that, of all things, fear can boost you out of the hole. Fear trumps all other emotions – logically I guess, as a survival mechanism. 

I had worked at and frequented comedy clubs for years, so I went that route of fear: performing (not, say, cliff diving.)  After said heartbreak, I took a comedy class (lame), attempted standup (terrifying; developed periscope-like tunnel vision of audience), and somehow got into an improv group (practice sessions riotous, even though I never got to “play,” as improvers call it, on show nights, my motorcycle constantly croaking in sketchy NYC neighborhoods after shows). 

Anyway, here goes: How To Be Funny

Hang Out with Funny People

Imagine if you ate breakfast every day with Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. That was Rob Reiner’s youth. No way he (the director of the fake “rockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap) was not going to grow up to be funny.

Callbacks

This is when you refer to something mentioned earlier in your “set” – or conversation – that made people laugh the first time. Everyone loves callbacks. They’re like, “Oh, I remember that funny thing; that was funny, even funnier now, HAW, how clever!” This is not your classic callback, but close enough, and funny as hell.

Footnotes and Parenthetical Insertions

Use for unexpected laffs. The weirder the better, I find.

Sarcasm

Growing up, our parents used sarcasm to great comedic effect, especially while driving. “Yo Einstein, find a parking spot already, it’s not that complicated.” “Hey Quicksilver, the pedal on the right is for the GAS.” I later learned that my favorite aged kid is eight, because they’ve learned sarcasm but still respect authority. This doesn’t last. Well, the sarcasm does.

And my personal favorite…

The Absurd

Example: Rodentologist and author of “Raising Hamsters Right” urges owners to guide their rodents with a firm hand from the get-go. “Establishing dominance is the name of the game. Letting your hamster think it’s in charge can have disastrous effects.” (Point being: Who can train a hamster?)

Be Like My Dad

He recently had a flu shot and his shoulder hurt. I said,”You should probably be drinking a lot of water.” His reply: “I’ll probably be drinking a lot of gin.”

See Live Comedy and Improvisational Comedy

Best viewed with a group, IMHO. Get a posse and go. GREAT standup show coming up at Randolph’s Chandler in October called the Ivy League of Comedy. Go! Saw them twice and they so rocked. Anyone who knows where to find good improv locally, I’m all ears. My contact info below. Nothing is funnier than improv. You’ll LERV it.

Create a Flash Mob

While working banquet at a stranger’s wedding? Bar mitzvah?

Or, If Unmotivated…

Watch flash mobs on YouTube. The bystanders’ reactions are priceless.

Tell Disgusting True Stories

Like how when I lived in a tiny walk-up in SoHo, New York, I subsisted on take-out pizza, sushi, and bagels. Never cooked. One day after 2 years I opened my oven and an absolute waterfall of cockroaches cascaded out. (They call that The Nest.) My neighbors thought I was being murdered, from the screaming. Imagine if you passed out, and they’d scrambled all over you? This story always gets a laugh and amusing faces of disgust. Note parenthetical insertion.

Tell Flagrant Lies to Amuse Self and Friends

At a boring party? Spice it up. Haul your friend over to someone you both don’t know. Ask the person what they do for a living (very American). Acknowledge their work. Then say, “Sheila here is a rodentologist studying the rat population of minor cities. She started out as a trapeze artist, didn’t you, Sheila? It will be Sheila’s job to keep a straight face and elaborate. (Note: This is a callback in two ways: the hamster reference, plus this game is straight out of improvisational comedy.)

Watch Funny Shows/Movies

I know a cosmic person who says his secret to inner peace is meditation and watching funny movies. With his mom.

I’ve been thinking, since recent flicks “Barbie” and “Theater Camp” had me howling, that what the world needs now (besides love*) is funny, yes, funny. Come on writers and directors, crank out those comedies — highbrow, lowbrow, we don’t care. Bring it awn. Go see comedies in the theater. The shared experience crushes home viewing.

Suggested Movies: A Short and Largely Obscure List of Comedic Brilliance

Not necessarily entirely comedies, but mega-comical moments:

Bridesmaids, Go (clever ensemble piece; the Amway scene!), Wonder Boys, Mother (Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds GEM), After Hours (Linda Fiorentino hottt!). Barbie is worth it for the dance numbers with Ryan Gosling, a former New Mickey Mouse Club alum who can DANCE.

Mel Brooks: Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and High Anxiety.

Forget Paris: the pigeon scene with Debra Winger

Stuber: So, so good. You won’t regret. Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista!

The Spy Who Dumped Me: the chase scene alone…Milla Kunis and Kate McKinnon

Three Woody Allen movies you may not have seen that kill: Small Time Crooks (Tracy Ullman), Hollywood Ending (absurd plot, luminescent Tea Leoni), Manhattan Murder Mystery (Diane Keaton)

Cricket On The Hearth: old-school animated Christmas movie my nieces love.

Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion (when they ask for a Business Woman’s lunch)

Pink Panther flicks (“It’s not my phaone.”)

Bill Murray: Scrooged and Caddyshack

Groundhog Day: romantic to boot!

The Royal Tenenbaums

Overboard: I’ve seen it 10 times and I do not re-watch movies.

Anchorman (I’ve never seen)

Christopher Guest: Best in Show

Napoleon Dynamite: The dance sequence, you’ll be afire

Alan Arkin (total god): Glen Gary Glenross, Little Miss Sunshine, The Russians Are Coming The Russians are Coming

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: another old nugget

Meet the Fockers (I’ll tell you a funny story if you ask at contact info below)

Shows: Maybe another column, with Dear Reader’s input? Your call. Good day.

*Nod to Burt Bacharach

Ann Aikens has released a darkly comical yet uplifting book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, available on Amazon and local Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Information at annaikens.com.

Cutie pie Ginger! At top is Marshmallow; RIP our classic darling. You brought only joy.

Know Anyone in Tunbridge Likes to Laff? This Friday!

Leave a reply

Come and go as you please from 6-7:30 for reading, signing, plus pizza & childcare thanks to goddess librarian, Mariah. Bring your book or get one there for cash or check!

Yo, Will the People of the Land Please Nicen Up?

2 Replies

It has been on ongoing observation, since COVID, just how rude Americans have become. From workplace conversations to articles everywhere, people are asking, “What the heck is going on?” People hide behind the shield of social media to act horribly. Parents and students both often treat teachers poorly; many schools don’t back teachers up.  Nurses are quitting due to hostile patients.  Who could ever work in customer service or airports, the way those poor people are treated? There are 27 theories, including David Brooks’ in the The Atlantic recently.

My own guess is this rude irritability stems from frustration with just about everything: money, politics, wars, weather, disasters, understaffing, social media, homelessness, inhumane prisons, lazy workers just dialing it in, supply chain issues, gas prices, grocery prices, price gouging. How about low-paying jobs plus overpriced housing squeezing workers? Might that make one short-tempered? Ticks ruining our outdoors, COVID ruining our plans anew, floods ruining Vermont’s rivers, overwhelm and loneliness ruining our moods. 

Technology keeps changing so we cannot possibly keep up with it, while the Customer Service we need (a human, please!), to make techy things work, goes ever faster down the flusher. And don’t get me going on the impending A-I Armageddon (call me alarmist). I’m sure you have your own ranklers. You’d have to be living entirely off the grid to not notice. Or on another planet.

David Brooks has a much-quoted theory: “The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.”

Of all the triggers, this is to me the gloomiest. The others are enormously complicated and out of our control. But basic human kindness can and must be taught – and learned!

Personally, I have found flight attendants to be far less pleasant, possibly due to ongoing abuse by rude travelers. I’ve noticed little kids being less friendly, maybe due to hours on devices, with masking during their critical developmental years, plus a long stretch of limited interaction with people outside their families. When I meet a friendly child, I’m overjoyed! How’d that kid make it through, I wonder?

Happily, the crime rate has recently dropped. And I’ve been on flights where passengers were remarkably kind to each other despite painful delays – special kudos to the Young People who were very polite indeed. Maybe they’re used to all this adversity?

Those tidbits aside: Come on people. Teach your children well. And, okay, maybe your elders didn’t teach you to be nice, but isn’t it common sense to treat others as you wish to be treated? Teach down! Learn up! Teach up, if you have to.

One role model: Chip Milnor. If you missed it, read Maryellen Apelquist’s lovely paean to Chip on the front page of the August 17th White River Valley Herald. It’s moving in part because Chip is so missed, gone too soon, and in part because his type is so rare these days, it seems. Someone who went routinely out of his way to help others, with no need for accolades, and enjoyed, I suspect, every minute of doing so.  

Chips are an otherworldly breed who inspire awe. One idea for the rest of us: go out of your way to feel good and to relax – in order to be able to be nice. Try it. Make an effort to calm yourself, have fun. Do whatever it takes. Me, I get in water. Sleep. Amuse self. Feel good … to be nice.

My tiny, grass-roots initiative is to spread laffs. Laughter is good for what ails our knockout planet. Make time for your clever friends and shows! Might I suggest taking a posse to “Theater Camp” – our audience was hooting. A blend of Christopher Guest, Ru Paul, and The Office. Perverse premise, lines well delivered, with solid pacing. Go laugh!

In closing, a funny story. I have a friend who’s noticing the first physical limitations of aging. He’s 40-something. That’s when it starts. For the first time in public, he used the steps on the back of his pickup truck. As he fairly skipped up them to impress a boy watching him, the kid said dryly, “I’ve never seen anyone have to use those.”

I’m not certain what my friend thought yet didn’t say in response, but I am sure it was rich. Reminds me of the old gem The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming, when Carl Reiner’s son waxes bratty. A ripsnorter worth renting, if outdated.

Go get yourself the last days of summer. Good laffs to you, good moods, good niceness, and good (Labor) Day.

Ann Aikens has published a darkly humorous book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, available at Vermont shops and Amazon. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. List of shops, email signup for events, and more of her writing at annaikens.com.

It’s All Happening at Once: NBC + Monarchs

Leave a reply

Night Blooming Cereus blows…3 days from now? Hard to predict.

Meanwhile, the Monarch caterpillar eggs in the ground at the base of the milkweed plants somehow survived Vermont’s flooding. The fuzzy guy is young; the juicy fatty is ready to TRANSFORM. Decided not to bring inside this year. I always miss its cocoon spinning no matter how closely I watch the thing. But it does keep them from getting eaten by birds, so I may change my mind.

But in general: aren’t things happening at once? It’s a bit much, no?

The NBC: Big Change Coming Soon

4 Replies

Been out of town & just know a lot happened while I was gone. Here’s last week:

Sorry I kept changing angles. I’ll rein it in. Catch you soon!

Similes, Extremes, and the Strength of Hercules

3 Replies

When I’m not eating like a hog, moving like a sloth, sweating like a horse, and smelling like a goat, I’m swimming like an otter, laughing like a hyena, sleeping like a log, and smelling like a rose. Or some mixed-up combination thereof. It’s all extremes lately.

In a week’s time we have such highs and lows, no? One day it’s a crazy-good 4th of July; days later, disaster strikes. If, in Vermont, you haven’t suffered serious flood damage, you know people who have. Flooding and dam issues continue. It has us on pins and needles, drinking like fish. Our daily lives seem full of extremes.

Maybe this is partly due to COVID. We’re now positively overjoyed, in a way we weren’t prior, at simply sharing a sunset or religious service or dancing together. A party is a big deal. Dining out? Thrilling! Contrarily, with people being more forthcoming these days, we hear sad personal news like never before (diseases, suicides, overdoses). Throw in endless televised news with upsetting global stories and there is much to fret about. The highs are higher and lows more frequent, like a screwy rollercoaster.

The weather is reflecting the extremes inside us, or causing them. Both?  Initially, I dug the mad dash to close car windows for daily cloudbursts. Now it seems silly that I’d planned to stand out in the biblical downpours and get soaked.  Fun as a kid. Now: rain is scary.

Before the flood, I wrote: “How do wild animals feel about such rain? Do they just run with it? Or are the birds like, come on already, quit raining, we gotta  f l y. The fish hate droughts, but do they enjoy chronic turbulence? I envision little fish banging into rocks, mystified. Is that what divorce is like? Nothing makes any sense any more, and you’re just tossed around, blind, lost?”

Now it seems unlikely any fish survived Vermont’s waste-filled rivers. Riverside songbirds have taken off, their cover washed away.

There’s not a hell of a lot we can do for these floods except build wiser, use less fossil energy, monitor rainfall better, and help each other dig out. With terrible timing I had a bike crash right before the flood, so I can’t get that hopeful feeling you get from helping others; I can’t lift my own head. Fit as a fiddle after the Irene Flood, it was easy to roll up sleeves and dig in. The Bucket Brigade marched by in their Wellies, waders, and shorts, bailing out basements gratis. We cheered! Our young, Superhuman Heroes! Nothing beats in-person neighbors helping neighbors. Sign up at vermont.gov/volunteer.

Friend Sassy and I were discussing how, decades ago, we just felt more safe. Then I see a sign, “WARNING: Windows can be hazardous.” For God’s sake, what isn’t? We constantly learn of new hazards, with dread. Like: Do not go in brown, churning water. There is no oxygen in such water, and humans have no buoyancy as a result. A life preserver does no good; you will sink like granite. As I’m afraid did the fish.

Weather disasters, ticks, shootings, marauding bots … who feels safe? The good news is that humans default, mostly, to trust. (See Malcolm Gladwell’s dark book Talking to Strangers.) Turns out we mostly try to envision a safe world. We trust.

Electrical storms, now there we can take action. Lightning can mess you UP. Fuse your vertebrae, destroy your bone health or hearing … avoid! If you can hear thunder, you can be struck by lightning. Lightning can strike from 10 miles away. Do not go in a shower or tub during a storm. Or on a landline. Or by a window (hazardous!). Hide in bed. I do.

A friend said about The Flood, “Not sure what the damn message is.”  I have no answer. Some questions remain ever unanswered (“What’s that smell?”), others answered eventually (“It was the O-rings”). Undeserved misfortune is simply part of life, no? In Vermont we try for tiny carbon footprints. California blows us away in electric vehicles, but Vermont buys local, promotes rideshares, and wastes little. And gets punished anyway.

For now, we’re like blindfolded rats in a maze, operating on some combo of memory, ESP, and science – to repair and rebuild. Then, as humans do, buoyed by the LIFT of helping each other and an inclination towards trust, we will bounce back. Soon we’ll run like the wind, baying like hounds, having the time of our lives. Strong as an ox, maybe a blue ox. Maybe sooner than we think. 

May you rise like a Phoenix, with strength like Hercules’, helpers lifting you like angels, and your worries vanishing like a mist. Please enjoy, as able, a Good Day.

Night Blooming Cereus 2023

7 Replies

As I’d vibed, the NBC is going to bloom when I’m out of town. Drats! The good news is it’s VERY tiny right now, 1/16th of an inch. I’ve never caught one this early. She always takes longer to blow than I anticipate, so it’s possible I can send pix upon my return.

This is the first year time in years there are 2 blooms. The 2nd one (not pictured) is even tinier. So I remain hopeful! If I gave you a plant, look for the above. Careful, they’re wicked fragile. If you’d like a plant, let me know!