April 5: Sense of Humor, Sharon Olds Again, "Diagnosis"

One of the things that allows me to live the life I have is my sense of humor.  I have two basically full-time jobs that barely allow me to pay my bills.  I'm a part-time medical records clerk who works over 50 hours per week for part-time benefits.  I'm a part-time adjunct English professor who's been teaching part-time at the same university for close to 20 years.  I have a book manuscript that I can't get published.  And I have a blog that I obsessively write posts for that I'm not sure anyone cares about.  I have to have a sense of humor.

I've had a good day.  I had breakfast with my best friend whom I haven't seen in close to a year.  I had a great appointment with a therapist.  I just ate a Reese's Peanut Butter Egg.  I'm watching Stranger than Fiction, one of my favorite movies ever.  The snow is melting, and I have the whole weekend ahead of me.

On this P.O.E.T.S. Day Eve, Saint Marty's turning to Sharon Olds again, because she is a poet who has a sense of humor.

Diagnosis

By the time she was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me.  I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood.  My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long.  My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face--
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She's doing it now!  Look!
She's doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor.  Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.

Jesus had a sense of humor, too