Jokes, Irony, and Sarcasm

A few days ago, I was standing at the ticket booth of a theater asking to have a couple of tickets reprinted because my friend had left them in his car. I tried to be funny and said to the ticket seller, “my stupid friend forgot his ticket,” being kind of in cahoots with her, “could you please reprint them?” My friend said nothing at the time, but a few days later, he told me he was really offended by being called stupid.

What I saw as humorous, he saw as hurtful. Of course I felt terrible and wondered how often I use joking, irony, even sarcasm, which I see as humorous but which is perceived as insulting. How can one tell when it is okay to joke and when it isn’t? Realizing I had been insensitive to one of my best friends and that only a close friend may feel confident enough to say, “You hurt me,” I worried that I do this to others who, unbeknownst to me, also react negatively.

Teasing, joking, and making fun of ourselves and each other can often create intimacy, diffuse barriers, and bond friends and colleagues. Joking about myself with self-deprecating remarks is usually OK, but even then some people are literal and will reply to my remark about being so stupid about something with, “No, no, you are not stupid—you’re smart.” To the question: “How are you?” I have answered with the absurd statement: “I’m perfect and improving,” and then been told in a parental tone, “No one is perfect.”

I often use irony as a reverse of the expected. For instance, if someone says, “I will have to work late for the next few days,” I might say, “How exciting!” as opposed to “What a bummer.” It really says the same thing, the tone of voice highlighting the intended incongruity.

Sarcasm is a different story. It can by funny, but hurtful at the same time. Never use it with someone who would not feel free to reciprocate or who might be especially sensitive. An example of sarcasm used at White Sands, the retirement community where I live: our executive director said, “We are getting a new bus.” A resident retorted, “In our lifetime?”

I joke and use irony with people I am fond of—I assume they know I like them and will take it with a grain of salt—but this is not necessarily true. Some people feel vulnerable when joked with.

I am not very good with boundaries and tend to cross the line thinking I am being terribly funny, when, in fact, I’m being hurtful. The problem is that people seldom admit to being hurt, because that makes them feel even more vulnerable just when they are under attack. Even if your intent is clearly to be humorous, they may be wonder if you have a secondary motive because some jokes have an element of truth.

How to tell why a joke you have just told has gone sour? One way that may help is figuring out what went wrong by looking at the following components.

1.    The Teller: What was your intent, to be funny or punishing?

2.   The Receiver: Do you know if this person has a potential sensitivity?

3.   The Content: Topics such as race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, politics, and one’s appearance may be off limits for some people.

4.   The Tone: The tone of voice should indicate whether the statement was meant to be a joke.

5.    The Culture: Some cultures allow kidding in ways which would be unacceptable in another culture, each family also has rules about which types of teasing are acceptable.

It is important to apologize for a perceived slight and when in doubt…don’t!

We all love the sound of laughter which is our reward for having been funny. Humor depends on an element of surprise. All in all, adding fun to our lives by whatever means is a worthy endeavor and, notwithstanding the possible pitfalls, it is worth the attempt.

Copyright © 2013. Natasha Josefowitz. All rights reserved.

A Life Without Passions or Missions

One of my friends recently told me she felt she was always searching for something, but didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. She doesn’t have a mission in life, she said, like a passion to paint or write. She has a job she likes, but it does not enthrall her. She is happily married but worries if there is something extraordinary out there that she’s missing.

Her question made me wonder whether it is a disservice to lead people to expect a “life passion” or a “life mission” as necessary for fulfillment?

Is it necessary to have a passion to be satisfied with one’s life? Yes, it is wonderful to have a great talent for painting, writing, or music or working in scientific discoveries, making a difference in the lives of children or the lives of patients in a hospital or being innovative in technology, but these do not have to be all consuming. These and other endeavors can be fulfilling but only one part of one’s life, with satisfaction also found in family and leisure activities.

After my husband died, I was so bereft that I felt my life had lost all meaning. A psychologist friend of mine said, “Meaning is overrated.” It helped me to put my life into perspective. And so it is with passions and missions. They are unnecessary in most people’s lives. Yes, it would be nice to dedicate ourselves to the betterment of mankind—but how many of us have opportunities to do that?

Is it possible to expect too much of oneself, to romanticize passion and mission? Can one of life’s goals be something totally different, such as trying to have integrity in all of one’s dealings, to be honest in communications, to do the best one can in making others’ lives a little easier, to be compassionate—in other words to be content with being a good person? Content with one’s work, with one’s family life?

Some people do have an all encompassing need to be creative; the great artists of the world sacrificed everything for their art. Other people are true missionaries and spend their lives in the service of others.

And then there are the rest of us who muddle along wondering what is missing when we don’t feel the urge to do great deeds or lack the opportunity to be heroic. There is a need to transcend oneself, to be part of something larger, to serve some greater cause. Many of us have known the exhilarating feeling of sharing something momentous with one’s neighbors and community. When people battle floods together or unite as a community to raise a barn or renovate a park, they experience a high from working hard towards a mutual goal. We feel joy and camaraderie celebrating the success of sports teams we support and spill out into the streets with our neighbors when they win a championship. But these events occur infrequently, and so we must make the best of just dealing with our daily lives.

I too am often torn between feeling, on the one hand, that I should do more volunteer work and be more active in my community, and on the other hand, thinking that at 86 I can allow myself to read more, see friends, and smell the flowers. So maybe it is also OK to not have a passion or a mission but just do the best we can every day.

Perhaps being oneself, being there for family and friends, is really not only good enough, but actually quite wonderful. One of my goals is to never let a day go by that I don’t have some positive interaction with someone. It can be a kind word to a checkout clerk at the supermarket or a warm hello and how are you to the delivery man. I believe these small acts of caring may make a difference to the person in the moment and may even carry on further in the way he or she interacts with the next person. They say a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa has an impact on the air currents half-a-world away, and so it is with every little thing we do.

Copyright © 2013. Natasha Josefowitz. All rights reserved.

Complaints about Technology Through the Ages

I am in the age group that decries new technology. We are not only the un-wired generation, we are now becoming the un-wireless generation.

When I had young children, I wished to be married to a pediatrician, now I wish for a computer professional. When my grandchildren visit, they set me up with blogs and other ostensibly helpful services. The problem is what I learn today, I tend to forget tomorrow. They return home, and I am left alone and befuddled. Of course, I can always call someone to help, but I will be charged by the hour.

I am not one of those who is upset that the children are all on their cellphones and no one is talking to a real person. I am not raising my voice in protest about the lack of face-to-face communication. I am not throwing my hands up in despair that the grandchildren are texting while talking to me. I once asked one of them what he was texting, and he said he was telling his friend that he was talking to his grandmother….

And so let us look at how changes in communication have been received throughout history. Although the invention of the alphabet has been popularly attributed to the Phoenicians, recent excavations have uncovered earlier writings using only about thirty symbols, suggesting that the Egyptians may have invented script about a thousand years earlier. But it was in the fifth century BCE that the Phoenicians introduced the alphabet to the Greeks.

Plato criticized this spread of written language as an impediment to wisdom. He said that writing is only a semblance of truth and that people will seem to know something when in fact they will know nothing. He complained that writing things down would eliminate the need for memory. He said that Socrates, too, had decried the written word, and had said that one can ask questions of or argue with a speaker, but the written word may not be understood and may be interpreted falsely—a precursor of today’s complaints about the lack of face-to-face communication.

In the mid-fifteenth century, the next communication revolution occurred with the advent of Gutenberg’s movable-type press, and it too was criticized for allowing the dissemination of misinformation. The Church, in particular, was losing control of what people could know and think about as the printing of secular books became more affordable. A Benedictine monk who was a professional scribe, warned, “They shameless print…material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths….” The Reformation ignited by Martin Luther in 1517 was made possible by the popularization of scholarship. The dissemination of standardized information accelerated advancements in technology and science. (Think of today’s ease of global information and the possibility of movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.)

In the 1800s, the next communication revolution was taking place—the advent of the telephone. There were privacy fears, that people would listen to the phone conversations and would lose the face-to-face communication. Complaints abounded about unwanted calls, and the annoyance of interruptions plagued even its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, who refused to have a phone installed in his workroom. The phone was thought of as so intrusive that in 1890 Mark Twain wrote a Christmas card wishing all people rest and peace, except for the inventor of the telephone. Today we also complain about interruptions in the form of spam e-mails and text messages.

And so it is, that writing and reading, the Gutenberg press, and the telephone have all led us to where we are today—the internet. We are living in the midst of another communication revolution. And what do we hear? Not only the same complaints, but in the same words. Fear of the written word as opposed to the spoken one, fear of the invasion of privacy, fear of the rapid dissemination of ideas, fear of the loss of control over potentially oppositional social and political movements, these are all fears voiced over the centuries and again today.

Change fosters discomfort until we adapt and move on. So in the meantime, let us accept our texting children, tweeting grandchildren, our wireless phones vibrating in our pockets, and celebrate our continuous need for invention, our endless creativity, for what we call progress: the relentless pursuit of more, faster, better which defines our civilization.

Copyright © 2013. Natasha Josefowitz. All rights reserved.

States of Grief

Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross wrote of the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She attributed these to people dealing with their own imminent deaths. The popular media seized these stages and attributed them to people grieving the death of a loved one. This is not what she had intended.

Eventually the stages were debunked as not necessarily uniformly, nor sequentially, felt by most people. After my husband’s son died, we went to one of her workshops when she lived in Escondido. It was helpful in as much as we were surrounded by others who were equally grieving the loss of a loved one. These were children having lost a parent, parents having lost a child, spouses mourning the loss of a mate, and even someone bereft after the loss of a dog who had been a constant companion. Neither my husband nor I went through these so-called stages, although some people felt helped by being able to put a name to their feelings.

Three years ago I lost my husband and again went from unbearable pain to eventual peace without the interim stages and now another death propels me to rethink whether there are indeed stages to go through. I just lost my son after a long illness and in trying to understand the processes I am going through, I came up with the following. This may or may not help others, I did no research to find out whether these are also familiar to other mourners.

Since these are not necessarily sequential, I call them “emotional states,” rather that “stages.” The first I call the “zombie” state. It was days of numbness, of feeling nothing, of living in some kind of fog, going through the motions like an automaton. Nothing seemed real. From there, I went on to “free-floating anxiety,” a kind of pervasive feeling that something awful was about to happen (when in fact it had already happened), an anxiousness not related to anything in particular, just this unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach. Next was “the meltdown,” when tears were hovering just below the eyelids, ready to spill at any trigger or at nothing in particular. Crying made me feel drained, it did not help. Where I am now is “get out of your own head by doing something for someone else.” I had to give a speech I had committed to some months ago, and even though I considered canceling, I went. It was not one of my best addresses, but I got through it, and it turned out to be therapeutic.

One should expect the recurrences of the fluctuating emotional states in bits and pieces. So today, I am a bit of a zombie while still functioning more-or-less normally. Tomorrow I may feel anxious when I wake up or shed a tear during breakfast, but whatever happens, naming the states somehow makes me feel like I have, if not some control, at least some understanding and I will not get caught off-guard by the reaction. “Oh,” I will say to myself as a sob starts somewhere in my throat, “I am in my meltdown state, and it too will pass.”

I really don’t know whether this is helpful to anyone else. Everyone grieves differently, there are no rules, no better or worse ways of dealing with death. We all experience losses, some more damaging than others. Loss of a job can be devastating; loss of a pet, loss of a home, even the loss of a beloved object can trigger sadness. But, of course, loss of a person who was part of one’s life is the hardest to come to terms with. The literature speaks of “complicated grieving.” This term refers to obsessive grieving beyond one year. At which point it is suggested that one should seek help.

One grieves differently if a loved one dies suddenly or after a long illness. One grieves differently depending on the relationship. One grieves differently for a parent, spouse, child, or best friend. Everyone grieves differently with some of these emotional states lasting weeks, others lasting hours, some never felt, and others I can’t imagine. We need to have compassion and tolerance towards ourselves as we go through unpredictable emotional states. Healing begins when the loved person is less constantly in your head and starts resting more peacefully in your heart.

I like the Buddhist saying:

When someone you love dies,

the main difference is

that he is no longer

outside of you,

he is inside

Copyright © 2013. Natasha Josefowitz. All rights reserved.

“Up” May Not Be The Only Way To Go!

I am often struck by the differences in value systems between the U.S. and the other countries I travel in. Because we can understand each other, live in similar circumstances, have more or less familiar political, organizational, and family systems, we assume we also share a similar value system. Some of these values may be issues such as honesty, loyalty, fidelity, ambition, money (earning it and spending it), power, pride, revenge, and respect for human and animal life.

For instance, giving and receiving bribes is the accepted way of conducting business in many countries. Loyalty to one’s company is a higher virtue in Japan than here. Infidelity in marriage is accepted in many Latin countries (as long as it’s the man who strays). Revenge is expected if you’re a Sicilian.

I came across a value that I had assumed was universal. It wasn’t. During a speaking engagement to a group of 130 female executive secretaries in Portugal, I encountered women had come from all over the world for a three-day seminar. English was the common language, and much was gained by their talking to one another and comparing jobs, bosses, and social and political environments.

In fact, one woman worked for a boss in Italy and another worked for the same man when he traveled to his Belgium office. In Belgium he was call “Sir,” was formal and non-interactive. In Italy he was known by his first name and joked and socialized with his staff. This man obviously was fitting into the culture of his particular work group and was a good example of how the expected norms of conduct should influence behavior.

The speakers were excellent and all emphasized upward mobility, job opportunities, and strategies for getting ahead. The participants were surprisingly non-responsive. I noticed that they had no questions at the end of the talks and looked glazed a good deal of the time.

I decided to take a survey and found the problem. A large majority of the attendees had been in the same job for over fifteen years and only a small minority had any interest in moving out of their secretarial positions into more managerial or administrative jobs. The organizers expressed not only their surprise, but also their upset at the lack of ambition from the women there.

Their companies had sent these women for three days to a lovely resort by the ocean as a reward for loyalty and good work. If they achieved some personal growth, learned to communicate better, improved their telephone skills, broadened their general knowledge, learned of new computer technologies, and enjoyed the sunshine—that was good enough. The seminar organizers, on the other hand, had seen their purpose as getting the women out of their secretarial roles into positions of greater responsibility, authority, and power.

I was fortunate to be the closing speaker and could use the information from my survey. I changed my talk from “Onward and Upward” to “Happy at Work.” In other words, I extolled the virtues of predictability and security and gave permission to not “go anywhere” and to not feel guilty about it.

In our culture, ambition is almost universally seen as positive, whereas words such as “stuck” and “plateaued” have negative connotations. We don’t have a term in our language defining lack of ambition as a happy state of standing still, as a satisfactory place to remain for an indefinite period of time. I have often heard people ask questions such as: “Where will you be in five or ten years?” As if one should expect to be in a more satisfactory place; the assumption being that wherever you are now is not going to be good enough.

We need to re-evaluate our unexamined priorities. “Up” may not be the only way to go. There is a recent trend of professional women leaving their jobs in order to raise children and find satisfaction as stay-at-home moms.

I have caught myself trying to help people move into more lucrative or more fulfilling work, never wondering whether indeed more is better. I had not considered the security of stability, the pleasure of staying in a position one knows and does well, nor the validity of the choice to prioritize other aspects of our lives above professional success. We will find satisfaction only when we give ourselves permission to follow our own individual paths rather than running wherever the herd is headed.

Copyright © 2013. Natasha Josefowitz. All rights reserved.