More personal philosophies (you can have one too!).
This one MAY have been sponsored by an anonymous donor, or it may have been selected by me to acknowledge my debt to The Onion in conceiving some of these now plentiful personal philosophies. So, in keeping with the desire to select not the top brass at some organization but a tireless mid-level functionary, Onion "Staff Writer" Jason Roeder is the recipient of today's cogitation:
Jason Roeder's Personal Philosophy*
I believe that any situation can be transmuted into humor. Or pathos. One of those. I could just be sitting here doing nothing, but if I pull back the camera and see my sitting as the the force of gravity with a stranglehold on my overindulged girth, and my "doing nothing" as an admission of the vapidity of my ordinary actions and the fruitlessness of even the best intentions, well, you can just about hear the laugh track. Or stark cinematography of the sort used to depict pathetic mundanity. One of those.
If I write a funny joke, the act of writing doesn't seem funny, does it, even if the joke itself does. Well, if I pull back that camera lens, I reveal the comedy (or bleak assessment of the world's meaninglessness) that pervades this playful and/or desperate act of creation, much as depicted on the old Dick Van Dyke show and the films of Ingmar Bergman. When I go home to my family, our warm-hearted but underlyingly empty interactions recall, when viewed from a comic/tragic distance, the antics of the "Brady Bunch" as experienced through the frustrated ennui of "Mad Men."
In conclusion, my power to see the lighter (heavier) side of any situation allows me to bring joy (despair) to all those around me, and to keep perspective when wacky hijinks interfere with my many suicide attempts.
*This personal philosophy should not in any way be taken to reflect the actual, current views or predilections of this person, though, given that it was crafted JUST for him or her, he or she should really feel obliged to adopt this philosophy out of politeness if not actual gratitude.
-Mark Linsenmayer
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