Wrinkles and Laugh Lines

It's hard to believe that it has been a full year since I graduated with my master's degree. Looking back at my recent posts this weekend, I've realized that I write far fewer funny entries than I did in the early stages of this blog, or even last year. 

If you started reading when I was regularly turning out poetic commentaries on my filmmaker-nemesis, writing New Year's UN-resolutions, raving about the misbehavior of my computer Marvin, developing software to increase grad student productivity, anthropomorphizing my thesis, rapping about my thesis defense, or pondering alternative careers for grad students, you might find this version of Jen's Write Side a little more "Debbie Downer" than you expected.

I tell myself that one reason is the dearth of readily-available comic material: I'm not in grad school surrounded by sleep-deprived twenty-somethings, my computer functions relatively well (knock on wood), and I'm not writing a 150-page document about obscure topics from the 1500s.

Then again, if I were looking for those moments, I suspect I would still find plenty of them. David Lynch had one thing right at least: life is full of absurdity.  When I encounter it, instead of taking the time to write about it, which involves some analytical processing as well as the rhetorical canons of invention and arrangement, I take the easier alternative and post a brief comment on Facebook or Twitter. The problem, then, is not lack of content; it is lack of motivation on the writer's end.

As I continue to transition away from my longstanding linear track to a Ph.D. and into a scatter plot of lives unled that may or may not produce a valid regression line (Andrew Miller and statistics: what a combination!), I think the truth is that I'm not wearing my quirky writer glasses all that often. They don't fit as well as they did before. They need new frames, and the lenses have gotten scratched a few times. 

I like to think I'll get new ones eventually.

By re-posting some of my favorite comedic entries (I know, the subliminal message encouraging you to read those posts is thinly veiled at best), I'm trying to remind myself that I can do funny---have done it in the past and will do it again in the future. 

My hope, if I may be corny for a moment, is that the ornery wrinkles that have sprung up around my eyes this year will eventually be overwritten by laugh lines, whether that happens this coming year, or the following year, or the year after that. I don't think that's too much to wish for.

Happy Anniversary, graduate friends. See you in the funny papers.