I may be a little late to the party, but I’m enjoying flitting around http://visual.ly/ a fair bit at the moment – in particular where their infographics concern blogging and social media and have been enjoying the song mashups and free music downloads on http://www.waxaudio.com.au/ – they’ve made a nice distraction between writing the curious crime/horror/urban fantasy mashup that my novel is becoming.
I spent some time last night chatting with a friend online and debating the fine line between muttering and complaining with friends and it turning into a stand-up routine.
Notable quotes from last night in that vein included the following:
“you know you’re in for a long evening at a wedding reception when you look at your daughter and her expression seems to be saying: I think we may be the most intelligent people here, and as you brought me here I’m not even sure about you”
and in trying to characterise my humour, coming up with the following snippets:
My therapist described my sense of humour as being not so much ‘close to the bone’ as ‘digging into the knuckle to see who will notice first’
and
Someone else once described my humour as ‘a bit Lovecraft’ – sounds normal at first but then the lingering sense of something wrong and not of this world creeps up, slaps you round the back of the head and sends you running back to R’leyh with your tentacles flapping.
We also talked about the rich vein of very black humour that resides with those who have struggled with mental illness – it led to the following sequence:
When I was ill, and self harming regularly, my boss did make the mistake of hauling me up after a fraught afternoon and saying “I asked you to go talk to the directors to update them and I didn’t appreciate the pained look on your face.”
Boy, that led to a long conversation with HR
My exit from that job wasn’t so much comprised of burning my bridges as dive-bombing the burning wreckage and kamikaziing the survivors just to be sure. Nice to know I made an impression. I think they thought it was an impression of Mr Pennywise from Stephen King’s ‘It’. I was originally going with saying ‘an impression of Jeffrey Dahmer’ – I wasn’t sure if I could spell Dahmers name properly so…
Weird how people get so scared of mental illness, but my biggest fear is spelling the name of a serial killer incorrectly for fear of waking up to find a very disgruntled critic wanting to discuss the matter with my spleen.
It kind of tailed off after that as I was getting tired, but I think there’s room for a routine in there somewhere…
