“Jim walked in the door to find a panda on the couch eating potato chips.  Over the rustle of the bag, the panda asked Jim where his cat, Seymour, was.  Jim was perplexed because Seymour usually follows an online ballet tutorial on Tuesday afternoons.  “Maybe he went out for more beer?” mused Jim out loud.
At that, the panda jumped off the couch and darted out the door, almost knocking Jim to the floor as he passed.  Stumbling away, Jim knocked a pineapple off the top of the coat rack.  It landed with a thud on the hardwood floor and rolled behind the couch.”

I do not know where that came from.  I was bored mid-November and quickly wrote that in my notebook.  Thumbing through the notebook today and I still found it so random and slightly funny.  I considered trying to continue the narrative, but I was fairly sure I would be incapable of entering that frame of mind today, if ever again at all.

Weird moments like that have comprised my whole thought process for many years.  Sometimes I have been misunderstood when people were talking near me.  Often there would be a smirk or a small chuckle, not because of their discussion content, but because my brain spat out something akin to this.  Yet, I was the only one who was aware of it.  The people would think I was laughing at them or belittling the tragic tale they were telling.  Usually, it was simply my brain, awash with warped years of experiences from time in schools, restaurants, the army, and as a paramedic, that produced my socially inappropriate reactions.

Now, the above paragraph is not all that weird in the overall scheme of things.  Plenty of people out there get much more weird.  For me it is actually a step forward.  The experiences of the past decade have made most of my internal monologue turn in either a dark or a negative direction; sometimes both.  I have been sour.  I have not always been this way.  It goes against my base self.  I am starting 2018 with a personal challenge of trying to find the humor, joy, and wonder in life again.  Now, that does not mean that I will not write something off-color or darkly humorous, but this year will be best lived from a positive perspective.  That means more time spent enjoying friends, travel, education, and personal exploration.  We should all laugh a lot more…for our own health.