Second Meeting with Zooz

I made an awkward assumption at this meeting. I purposely didn’t eat lunch so I could eat with Zooz (he came to meet me right after class), but he told me he already ate. He told me it was ok if I got food and ate, and I felt guilty leaving him at the table and eating while he didn’t, but it was my only chance to eat until after 5. He didn’t seem to mind, though, occupying himself with videos on his iPad. I quickly got some food, and then we began talking.

While we were in the cafeteria, we saw a girl being escorted out by a group of cops/security personnel. She looked visibly shaken, possibly sick or a victim of something. It was uncomfortable as we both sympathized and watched her leave, wondering what had happened. As unfortunate as the situation looked, neither of us knew her and knew nothing of the situation, so we just had to move on with our conversation.

  Zooz told me about his weekend, he spent most of Saturday in Dallas. He had to take a test in the morning, and after he went on a quest for a gold iPhone (he also looked for one on Sunday, but no luck). His current phone has a shattered back, so it’s not really usable. I’ve gotten glass/plastic splinters from phones before, it’s annoying.

He also showed me some of his pictures on Instagram of himself, wearing a traditional outfit. This included a thobe, which is a white ankle-length garment and kind of looks like a robe. He also wore a ghuttrah and agal, which are a cloth headdress and a black cord that goes around it, respectively. He also showed me some pictures of his cousin, who is a little boy with long hair. He told me about how his cousin cried when he had to get his hair cut and he saw the scissors.

I then showed Zooz my Instagram and a picture of my pride and joy from fall break: cat jack o’lanterns. He hadn’t carved a pumpkin yet, but I think I may have convinced him. He also asked me if people eat pumpkins, so I told him about pumpkin pie and how my mom always roasts the pumpkin seeds. While he hadn’t made a jack o’lantern, he did say he still loves Halloween. Over the weekend he bought a monkey mask and gloves for a costume.

While we were in the cafeteria, we saw a girl being escorted out by a group of cops/security people. She looked visibly shaken, either sick or a victim of something. It was uncomfortable as we both sympathized and watched her leave, wondering what had happened.

Healing through Laughter

After just one chapter, I can confidently say The Comic Toolbox is so much better than Comic Relief. No offense, Dr. Williams, I understand why we read Comic Relief, but man that was a rough read. The Comic Toolbox is light and fun, and I might say it’s even more informative than Comic Relief. By creating formulas about how to make people laugh, John Vorhaus is basically creating his own theories on humor (and I like his theories better).

The first chapter introduces his idea that comedy is truth and pain. This reminds me somewhat of the Superiority Theory from Comic Relief. When I learned about the Superiority Theory, I thought, “Wow, this seems accurate, even though it makes humans seem like an incredibly cruel species”. As much as I felt like it wasn’t completely correct, I couldn’t come up with a better explanation until now. I think the idea of comedy being truth and pain is much more accurate. Yes, we may be laughing at people in the moment, but in a way we are also laughing with them. We see someone trip and fall and we sympathize; we see the truth (everyone trips) and the pain (falling hurts) and we laugh because we know what that person is going through. We know that someday that person will be us, and when it does happen to us we’ll probably want to laugh it off, and it’s easier when someone else is laughing with us. If we didn’t laugh, we’d focus on the pain, so it’s good to have people laugh at/with us. They’re not trying to demonstrate superiority, they’re showing us the humor in the situation so we can laugh and ease our suffering.

When a small child learns to walk, they fall quite often. If you rush over and search them for bruises, they begin to cry because they think they should be hurt and focus on their pain. However, if you give them a smile and a giggle, unless it’s a truly awful fall they’ll usually smile right back and stand up happily. Therefore, it’s beneficial for everyone involved if we laugh at our pain, and the pain of others. Of course, there is a limit to when a situation is funny and when a person should stop and help.

When we originally discussed the Superiority Theory in class and referenced racist/sexist and other derogatory and inappropriate humor, I felt conflicted. On one hand, yes, I often thought the jokes were funny. On the other hand, I began to feel guilty about finding them funny and really had to evaluate my sense of humor. If comedy truly is truth and pain, is it so bad to laugh at these jokes?  A thought I’ve tinkered with before is: is laughing at these “inappropriate” jokes a way to heal? If someone said “Wanna hear a joke? Women’s rights,” and they meant it in a joking manner and were not seriously sexist, I would most likely laugh. It wouldn’t be because it’s funny to me that women have been and continue to be oppressed, but if I don’t laugh then I dwell on some horrible situations in the world. Laughing is way of getting over it and moving past painful and tragic situations. Obviously there is an extremely fine line still between jokes being offensive and maybe being something we can now laugh at as we distance ourselves from old situations, but I think laughing at some of these jokes may not be as bad as it seems. I sincerely hope that doesn’t offend anyone, it’s just an idea I've been contemplating.

My New Friend Zooz

I met with Abdulaziz for the first time today! Meeting with a conversation partner was something I was incredibly nervous about. I don’t think I’m great at keeping up a conversation with someone I’ve never met, plus I’m awful at trying to understand accents. I was so afraid that I would spend much of the conversation smiling and nodding. Thankfully, Zooz (Abdulaziz’s favorite nickname) has been here a bit more than a year and speaks quite clearly. He said when he arrived, he didn’t even know what “yes” and “no” are; it’s amazing how quickly he has picked up the language!

Our conversation mostly focused on Abdulaziz’s background, and I learned a lot. Apparently camels are extremely valuable in Saudi Arabia, where he is from. The jaw-dropping example he used was that camels can be more expensive than a Lamborghini! That whole concept blew my mind. They even have camel beauty contests, and owning a winning camel is exceptionally prestigious. Then he showed me a video of his family’s camels walking through the desert in a line, and told me his father gave him a camel and that camel had a baby.

Abdulaziz has a tremendously large family, partially because Saudi Arabia has different marriage rules than the United States. Men can have a maximum of four wives, which his father does. His mother is the first wife, and he is the youngest of her children. Between all the wives, there are twenty-four kids: fourteen girls and ten boys. Not all thirty of his family members live in the same house together, many are married and live on their own now. This is a fairly typical situation. I asked if he ever has family reunions where everyone in his extended family gets together as well, and he chuckled and said no. 

Those were our main topics of conversation, and we discussed a few other items briefly. Of course, theres always the soccer/futbal/football discussion to have with anyone who isn’t American, and we talked a little about how Texas is different from where we’re from (hotter for me, cooler for him). I found out he turned twenty one in August, and he went to Las Vegas and had a ton of fun. He also told me that when he saw my name he thought I would be a boy, and I had to reluctantly admit that Madison is traditionally a boy’s name so his guess was logical. Overall, we had a great time and I’m excited to continue meeting with my new friend Zooz!

Here are some pictures of camels that competed in a beauty contest!

Roomie Love

I love my roommate. Cami Fannin is my spirit animal. I do not think we have had a day where we did not make each other laugh. I feel incredibly lucky to have a roommate I get along with so well, especially because we were not friends before coming to TCU. One of the main reasons we get along so well is our open goofiness with each other, and she makes a lot of silly mistakes that make us and our friends laugh.

The first event that made us laugh was when we had a friend in our room that noticed our semi-lofted beds. They are at an awkward height, so she asked how we climb into them. Cami immediately hops up and says “Let me show you how it’s done!” and proceeds to hop on her ottoman chair and fall right back off. It was hilarious watching her act all cocky and then stumble (she was not hurt and laughed as well).

My favorite funny thing that Cami does is make English errors. She is a communications major, so she should probably have mastered the English language pretty well by now. She is an incredibly intelligent girl, she just has a lot of “blonde moments”. When we were still setting up our room, we had a calendar and Cami wrote “Fieild Trip” on one day. At first I did not notice, but upon closer inspection I realized she had put two i’s into the word “field”. I started laughing and pointed it out to her, and she said she could not remember which side the i was supposed to go on so she just put it on both.

For my birthday, I got a balloon. I set it out of the way in the corner of the room, and at night it hovered above the blue glow of the Keurig. Before falling asleep, I looked over at it and remarked to Cami about how creepy it was, a dark shadow floating around above the blue light. When I was asleep, Cami moved the balloon right next to my bed and stuck a post-it on that said “Am I a creppy ballon now?!?”. She meant “creepy balloon”. Instead of scaring me, I got to tease her about her errors.

Since Cami is in Alpha Delta Pi, one of their on-campus projects was putting up post it notes with kind and encouraging messages. They wrote them all at one of their meetings, and when Cami came home that night she brought one with her. It had the simple message of “You are beauitiful”. She put one too many vowels into “beautiful”. I have both of the incorrect post it notes pinned to the wall above my desk.

Not only does Cami make written errors, but if I am lucky enough she makes spoken errors as well. One night at Chick-fil-A, I was eating french fries and Cami was eating chicken nuggets. We were with friends and all discussing how I have been dabbling in vegetarianism. Trying to convince me to eat meat, Cami says “They’re good, meat is.” All she meant was meat is good. She just felt the need to awkwardly clarify what was good. Needless to say, the whole table started laughing, and we still enjoy referencing the moment.

Other funny things Cami has done include hammering something with a magnet stuck to the hammer and getting in the way, taking numerous selfies on anybody's phone whenever she can, and jamming our friends car trunk with her purse.

Adjusting to College - Yay!

Literature and Civilizations II is my first college-level English course, and one of our continuous class assignments is to blog. Basically, I get to fine-tune my writing skills with the whole class (and any strangers who find this) viewing and commenting on my posts. As a freshman, this is a little bit intimidating. I expected the class to have mostly freshmen, I am not sure why but I did, and there are actually not many freshmen and a bunch of upperclassmen. So not only must I learn to write at a college level and have my attempts graded, I will pretty much be evaluated by everyone. However, I am thankful that blogs are casual.

Over the past few weeks of class, I learned that this situation was no big deal whatsoever. We are all in the same boat. Maybe a few people know each other, but many of us are strangers. I am a fairly shy person, but I have still found people to talk to and I am getting comfortable. Sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, I can see everyone else doing the same thing and settling in. 

So now I am excited. We have some pretty funny people in the class, and everyone is intelligent. Conversations that were already good before are going to get much better now that everyone is opening up and ready to express themselves freely. In my opinion and past experiences, the knowledge you absorb from a class and the experience you get out of it over all is greatly based off of the environment the teacher and the students create. If the teacher is laid-back enough to let students take the reigns but still help guide us, then we learn not only about whatever subject we are discussing, but also develop critical thinking and discussion skills. If there is an atmosphere of relaxed but serious students willing to participate, then the class will delve deeper into topics and have fun with it at the same time.  Which is all wonderful, it is like the ultimate dream class for teachers and students (well, students who actually want to learn). I feel like this is exactly the type of class environment we are beginning to create.

I learned all my worries were pointless. Any worries I did have were most likely shared and are dissolving as everyone starts to relax and get into the swing of things. I learned and am still learning that college education is flexible and open to interpretation and creativity, as evident in the wide variety of the “What is humor?” video projects. I love the new freedom of being able to take liberties with assignments and getting a general schedule from syllabi and planning for myself from that, and not simply being told what to do. This is probably a lot of old news to any one reading this that is not a freshman, but I am a freshman so it is all new to me and it has me extremely excited for the next four years.