Saturday 22 May 2010

Lame Jokes and Tai Chi.

Was walking to the bus stop alone after Cell Group today when I realised that this was one of the few times when I'd be walking alone. Because my Church in Bishan is kind of far from the 136 bus stop in Ang Mo Kio (okay it's not that far). Usually I'd just cut through Bishan Park, although now the park is closed for a revamp and you can't cut through it anymore. :(



Was kind of thinking back to when I first walked through Bishan Park alone after cell group, 6 years ago in Sec 1. Haha. It wasn't that scary to me then, and it isn't scary to me now. I have no idea why though. Although if you're afraid of cockroaches and insects and frogs you probably shouldn't try walking through such a park at 11pm in the night to catch the last bus home.

Went back to read a blog post about the incident. Yes I blogged about walking home alone through a park in the middle of the night because it was strangely something that I thought I should blog about. Maybe it was the fact that a boy in secondary school uniform walking alone through a park startled and interrupted the midnight rendezvous of some couples. Or maybe it was because I've walked by some seriously weird people like a man who did Tai Chi in between some trees. He was so silent that I didn't notice him until I was right next to him. Of course I had the worst shock ever. I bet he does Tai Chi there every night simply to enjoy the looks of shock and surprise on passers-by.

But I'm not going to link to that post, because I think that pretty much everything I said and thought then was really immature and childish. And I'm different now. I started thinking back to what was on my mind back in Secondary 1, and amazingly enough I could recall with an almost pathological clarity the issues that distressed and affected me back then. And in retrospect I think those issues were so trivial and insignificant that I can't recall how or why I was so affected by them. Probably it's because as you grow older you realise that there's so many more things in this World that can bring you down, and the things that used to agitate you as a child now seem like mere trivialities.

I don't think my past self would have liked my present self very much, and vice versa. But for all the differences between my two selves, we're still much more alike than we'd like to think right? There's still so many things that are still the same between us, things that are so subtle and insignificant that I don't remember or notice them at all, but the things are there just the same. The things that define a person are not necessarily the significant things.

Anyways, I know for a certainty that I used to like silly and lame jokes then, and I still do now. Hah. I think the reason I still laugh at lame jokes is because it's a poignant reminder that I can still appreciate and see the humour in them. I think as we grow older we learn that these jokes are silly and adults don't laugh at them because they're adults. I don't know why we get the idea that laughing somehow ascribes the attributes of these silly, lame and nonsensical jokes onto the person that laughed. So if you laugh at a lame joke, suddenly you're childish and immature because it's a joke only children would laugh at? Suddenly as an adult you're forced to live with preconceived ideas and notions and mannerisms, such as laughing only at jokes deemed funny by the majority of your peers and writing off the jokes you used to laugh at as a child? For some reason humour becomes another trait that we employ to communicate with others, instead of something categorizing the reasons we laugh.

I think that's why I still laugh at lame jokes. Because they're a reminder that even though I've changed in the way I think and perceive things, but I still remember the fact that I was once a kid. Maybe it's a connection between my past self and my present self. And maybe it's a way to still remember the past and relate to the way you felt as a child, when jokes were nonsensical and didn't need to make sense, only needed to be funny.

HAH. I just wrote a blog post rationalising and justifying my reasons for laughing at lame jokes. You can so tell that the last bus took a really really long time to come. :P

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