TFPCONT

Gentle Readers, bear with me. I am about to get philosophical.

Have any of you ever had a job somewhere in your murky pasts where in order to get through it you have to turn your brain off entirely otherwise you might wind up strangling the next person to come to you for help?

Or where what you do is the same thing for 8 hours, day after day? Luckily, my current money-earning endeavor allows me to deal with stupidity AND the same thing all at once. So, I've gotten into the habit of not thinking, of just turning my brain off and going with it.

I call this The Fluffy Pink Cloud of Non-Thought. You don't have to think on the cloud, you don't get bugged by somebody's random use of apostrophe's (see what I did there?) or the same damn question asked a bajillion times in a row, it's really kind of a happy protective non-space, where nothing much goes on in the brain and you can just get on with it.

But yesterday, Bob Hallett of Great Big Sea posted something on his Twitter -- a YouTube video -- and that video knocked me right off of my pink cloud and suddenly made my brain start working again. I found myself deep in the shadowy mists of geographical-social-cultural philosophy and also thinking about bullying, national self-esteem, and what's so wrong with being who you are that others would lampoon you on national television -- even when who you are is not bad at all.

A friend from Newfoundland (not Bob) tried to explain it to me. Apparently it's perfectly ok for Newfoundlanders (and all Canadians?) to make fun of themselves. It's even a whole separate genre over there. To me, I just cannot wrap my mind around this. I understand satire, but aside from Terry Pratchett, who is poignant, accurate, and occasionally brutal -- but never cruel -- satire really has never been my thing. I think this is mostly because it comes much too close to bullying and making fun to me, teasing somebody until they cry.

And call me a pollyanna, but I don't like humor that makes people laugh at somebody else's expense. That's not 'fun'.

I got really upset watching that video. There was very little about it that I found humorous, once I realized what it was making fun of.

And that's what dragged me off of my pretty pink cloud. I realized that I suddenly had to think and figure out why I was upset. And that led into a whole discussion about culture and humor and geography and even politics. I hadn't realized just how much time I was spending on my pink cloud until the video pushed me off, which, I suppose, was a good thing. Opting out of thinking is never good.