embarrassing admissions

The truth is, I love re-reading my own writing. Isn't that terrible? I just crack myself up. What one cruel student wrote on my "Rate Your Professors" page once is entirely true of me: "laughs at her own jokes."

Although my indignant response then was: well, why shouldn't I? If I didn't think the joke was funny, I wouldn't tell it. Geez.

Besides which, if I don't laugh at my own jokes, who will?

When I was initially out of my surgery and still taking those steroids that made me so irrepressibly happy, I would lie awake in bed for hours after bedtime, thinking funny thoughts and cracking myself up with them. It was like watching my own little comedy show, intended just for me. I giggled all night long. At last I would have to drag out some serious tome written printed in tiny font just to put myself to sleep.

And now I'm the same way about my own writing. I love reading it, polishing it up, and thinking about what it is that catches someone's attention or that makes them laugh. I admit it freely and unappologetically, because why not? These are things that just make me happy. And I giggle at my own writing all the time.

This is a counterpart, now I think on it, to the opinion I've had almost my entire life about writing: it's so egotistical. What makes you think YOU have something that's so danged important to say?

I no longer think I need have anything that important to say (except: EAT YOUR FLAX SEED OIL! DO IT NOW!). That's not really the point. That it's not that important IS, in fact, the point. Making people smile for a moment is as valuable as anything else. And if they don't laugh, there's still always me. I'll laugh at myself any day. I mean, come on: everything about me right now is just so absurd: my bald head, my ridiculous situation...it just doesn't get much funnier.

That, honestly, is why I teach Chaucer, even when I'm on sick leave. It's why I like to write. The less serious the topic, the better. And if I ever succumb to that dreary, let's-learn-our-important-dire-lessons-about-the-ugly-obligations-we-owe-the-world crap, please just aim a smallish-sized potato at my head on the spot. That'll knock the sense back into me.

Goodness: I've just suddenly realized the entire significance of the pie-in-the-face routine in those old black-and-white movies. Why did I not recognize this before?!!