Jury duty = the pits

After 3 days of jury selection... I have been selected to be on a jury! Well, not even truly on a jury. I'm an alternate. I guess there are good and bad aspects to this:

Pro: I don't start til 11 every day, giving me good homework/TV time in the morning.
Con: Missing work, and probably exceeding the 5 paid jury duty days I get from my job.
Pro: BF meeting me for lunch to brighten the experience.
Con: I can't talk about it so I can't blog about it yet!
Pro: It is actually pretty interesting...
Con: Not knowing exactly when I'll be set free!

I guess it's part of our civic duty. But I just don't like being out of my routine, and feeling like my time is not my own.

Oh well, gotta go to jury duty now. More about this later...

Question of the day

Name 3 people who have made you smile today.

Brian, Laura, and JD.

And Angie. And Jason Segel.

What about you?

great expectations

This weekend was one for the books - highs and lows like anything else you are looking forward to for months, but it got me thinking about expectations. Things don't always turn out the way you expect them to. This isn't to say the weekend was good or bad, it was actually pretty fabulous, but it just wasn't quite what I expected.

First, on our way down to San Diego, BF and I drove over a cone on the freeway. Not just a cone. A humungous cone. The biggest kind they make. Flew out from under the car in front of us, and under my pretty, white, year-old car. It cracked the bumber and scratched it up real nice. Boo. :(

Next, we headed to a dear friend's wedding, which was beautiful and perfect. There's nothing that makes me happier than seeing a friend light up the room with happiness (super cheesy, sorry, you should have seen her though.) I had been looking forward to the wedding for months, and whoops, a bottle of wine later, I woke up in one of the bedrooms, having pretty much missed it all. I got up and joined the remaining fun, and annoyed the crap out of my friends by apologizing and talking about how this has never happened to me before.

The rest of the weekend was lovely, aside from not feeling super hot. Staying the night at BFF's new apartment, eating delish pizza, and a smidge of shopping on our way home.

This weekend's events just got me thinking about how, when we anticipate something for such a long time, things usually don't end up the way we expect. And, again, not to say it's worse or better, we just don't have any idea what life has in store for us. That's what makes it such a fun ride....

And on another note, seeing my summer family this weekend at the wedding made me miss them more than ever. Summer never comes fast enough.

Why do we laugh when people fall?

One thing to know about me is that I always, without fail, will crack up at the sight of someone falling. (As long as they're not hurt. I'm not that sadistic..) I watch AFV as often as I can. I giggle whenever I remember a falling story shared by a friend. It's one of my top 3 things to laugh at.

So... a friend sent me this article explaining exactly what is going on in our brains when we laugh at someone falling. It gives the scientific reasons why we laugh at the sight of someone falling. Read and enjoy. And, if you feel so moved, share one of your favorite falling stories. I will probably crack up at the thought of it.

Why do we find it funny when some­one falls down?
—William B. Keith, Houston

William F. Fry, a psychiatrist and laughter researcher at Stanford University, explains:

Every human develops a sense of humor, and everyone’s taste is slightly different. But certain fundamental aspects of humor help explain why a misstep may elicit laughter.

The first requirement is the “play frame,” which puts a real-life event in a nonserious context and allows for an atypical psychological reaction. Play frames explain why most people will not find it comical if someone falls from a 10-story building and dies: in this instance, the falling person’s distress hinders the establishment of the nonserious context. But if a woman casually walking down the street trips and flails hopelessly as she stumbles to the ground, the play frame may be established, and an observer may find the event amusing.

Another crucial characteristic is incongruity, which can be seen in the improbable or inconsistent relation between the “punch line” and the “body” of a joke or experience. Falls are incongruent in the normal course of life in that they are unexpected. So despite our innate empathetic reaction—you poor fellow!—our incongruity instinct may be more powerful. Provided that the fall event establishes a play frame, mirth will likely ensue.

Play frames and incongruity are psychological concepts; only recently has neurobiology caught up with them. In the early 1990s the discovery of mirror neurons led to a new way to understand the incongruity aspect of humor. When we fall down, we thrash about as we reach out to catch ourselves. Neu­rons in our brain control these movements. But when we observe another person stumbling, some of our own neurons fire as if we were the person doing the flailing—these mirror neurons are duplicating the patterns of activity in the falling person’s brain. My hypothesis regarding the relevance of this mechanism for humor behavior is that the observer’s brain is “tickled” by that neurological “ghost.” The observer experiences an unconscious stimulation from that ghost, reinforcing the incongruity perception.

welcome!

Welcome, friends.

This is my second attempt at blogging, and I am going to try to do better this time. Last time, I kept getting disappointed in myself for not blogging more often, and on an impulse I deleted the whole thing. Welp... I regretted it, and now here I am!

The focus of my blog will be the parts of my life that I would like to share and receive input about: weight loss, education (anyone a teacher or a parent?), and my various hobbies, such as movies, tv, and books. And, I should be honest, celebrity gossip.... (I know too much for my own good.)

So stick around! Let me know what you think about what I think through comments, if you feel so moved!