The Soccer Meeting

          Last week Meshal and I had our sixth meeting already, crazy to think about! It was another meeting at the intramural fields since we both play on an intramural soccer team. We jogged around the fields for warm-up and caught up on the week… I tried not to lose my breath, as I am still relatively out of shape (but working on it!). He told me that his brother’s car had broken down that day, leaving him in an interesting spot. He does not own a car yet and relies on his brother (also in the IEP) to transport him to and from home some ten to fifteen minutes away, so he said he will basically always be either here at school or at home and not much in between. He said that was one thing he missed about home – his family owns multiple cars and his dad owns a car-repair garage as well. Had his brother’s car broken down back in Riyadh they could have just fixed it in the garage downstairs for free with their dad! Meshal remains hopeful, now that he also has his own room in the brothers’ new house, that he will also be getting his own vehicle in the next few months.

            As we jogged our second lap around we began actually talking about soccer and how long we have played the sport. I told him I began when (I think) I was about four on a team called the Rugrats. After a couple seasons I moved to a completely new team called the Knights, but the majority of my soccer career I played on a team called the Thunderbirds. I think I joined this team when I was seven or eight years old and still have several friends from the team. I played left defender almost exclusively during those years and onward, and our team was perennially dominant. Once I got onto the team we kept a core group of players, probably about eight of us, that remained year to year with a few add-ons and drops each season. Therefore, we all were pretty close to each other back in those days. One of my best friends from high school, Alex, was on the team, so when he moved to Aledo in sixth grade a few years after me we became much closer than just friends from the same soccer team. Funny enough, I was on the team with Hans (I still have a hard time not calling him Harry, since that was what he went by back then)…he was one of the original players on the team I believe! I quit soccer, unfortunately, before my sophomore year of high school to play football, but I have had a blast playing it in intramurals this year.

            Meshal told me that soccer is huge in Saudi Arabia, and he has always loved and played the game. All of his friends at home in Riyadh were fans of soccer, so it really has shaped who he is and who he’s associated himself with. We talked about his playing practically every position on the field at one point or another…he told me, “Just get me on the field, and I can play!” He is very confident in his ability as a player. We then began to discuss our favorite teams as far as international teams and club teams go. My family is from Germany on my mother’s side of the family, so I have always been partial to the German side when it comes to national competition (when the U.S. isn’t concerned, of course). Due to this I am also a fan of the club Bayern Munich, though my first club interest was/is Inter Milan for a relatively silly reason: my team, the Thunderbirds, used their jersey designs and crest as our own! Meshal told me his favorite club, but it had a very complicated name, and I have never heard of it so I honestly can’t remember what he told me, but he is a die-hard fan of the team!

Twain Reflections

I’ve always been a lover of quotes and bits of wisdom. I enjoy remembering them and passing them on, pretending I know a lot more that I do about many subjects. Much like brevity is the key to wit, I enjoy succinct quotes that are easy to remember yet packed with sagacity. Reading over all these quotes makes me wish that I had gotten a chance to meet Samuel Clemens or at least attend one of his lectures… he seems to have a great number of opinions on a great number of subjects, so it makes me wonder what he would be able to say to me in his witty southern drawl. I feel like much of what is in this book is relatively obvious, yet it makes me jealous that someone could say it in such a better way than I ever could.

            Among my favorite quotes in this book was this little gem about Joy…

                       

                        “Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have

somebody to divide it with.”

            This quote resonated with me, and for a while I couldn’t really decide why. I think when I read this I had one of those internal “A-ha!” moments that you get when you finally understand something you never realized was there in the first place. Grief can be very singular and very lonely, in fact I believe it is mostly so. Most people don’t want to be seen crying in front of others if they can do it alone in their bed away from it all. Depressed people (I assume?) don’t want to go hang out with friends in a noisy, bustling place with action and fun. They stay alone and do nothing and find it hard to escape. But humans are a social creature, and we have only gotten more social as technology has erupted and produced such wonders as the phone, the computer, the internet, and social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Because we are social, we feel joy most amplified when we are with others whom we love or enjoy company with. Doing something that elicits self-pride like acing a test or winning a race is cool in itself, but nothing feels sweeter than when others gratify your success and affirm your happiness. Similarly, causing others to be happy is one of the primary causes of one’s own happiness.

            On a quite different note, one of my favorite parts of this book is Twain’s relentless criticisms of the vices of humanity in comparison to other creatures, namely when it comes to stupidity and opinions. The section on Religion struck me as one of the funniest because of his obvious distaste for hypocrites. One of my favorite quotes from this section:

                       

                        “Man—he is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his

throat if his theology isn’t straight.”

            I can’t disagree with this quote even a little bit, and it also irks me to see so much hypocrisy from highly religious people. People who use religion as an excuse to do something that is, in fact, against their own religion is, to me, something that I have a very hard time reconciling when I evaluate a person. It really is ridiculous to me that humans possess the mental capacity to ponder religion and other-worldly phenomena, yet blatantly dishonor whatever it is they believe in at the same time by shooting up people who believe something else.

                        

Twain Assignment - Man

       While Twain is quoted saying, "Nothing is more tragic than a young pessimist" I sometimes believe I fit into this unfortunate category when I reflect on our race. There is much good in the world, I cannot deny that. But  neither can I deny the terrible, horrid evils that persist and thrive as well, especially after this last week in the U.S. alone. Therefore, perhaps my favorite quote from The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain is on the subject of "Man." It goes - "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."

       Humans, at our most basic level, are animals. We are filled with that primeval id which, if we are not careful or if we find ourselves in a bad situation, can come rushing out and reduce us to beasts. While our minds are (as far as we know) the most developed and the most capable of containing knowledge on the Earth, we are the only animal to embarrass ourselves in the eyes of Mother Nature and in front of each other with the stupidity of our actions or with the evil of our actions. While a mouse cannot write or read or balance complex mathematical equations it also cannot do something outside of its nature to cause itself embarrassment in front of other mice. Mice, like other animals, do what they need to do to survive as easily as possible and the feeling of embarrassment is lost upon them. Humans want to accomplish more; we have more to gain but much more to lose, and therefore feel the sting of embarrassment when we fail. And then we blush.

Meeting with Meshal: Technical Problems and Video Games

Last Tuesday Meshal and I met once again in the Union Grounds sandwich area and grabbed lunch together. This time, however, he was a bit stressed. “My computer is broken, so I can’t play my online games… it’s terrible,” he said dejectedly as he sat down and threw his bag beside the table. As I have previously mentioned, Meshal is quite the avid gamer from FIFA to first-person shooters. Mostly, however, he is a fan of online PC games and role-playing games (RPGs) such as World of Warcraft. He claims he used to be addicted to WoW before he made himself quit, but he has recently gotten into different, smaller based games of a similar nature. His laptop had fried somehow and he couldn’t get it fixed so he has been reduced to playing games on handheld devices like his phone and Samsung tablet. This was where the problem was stemming.

“TCU wireless is stupid,” he complained, “It’s impossible to set up on this tablet!”

“I can try to set it up,” I replied, but I was not so sure of my capabilities as an IT consultant. I agree with him, stu-wireless is stupid. It’s a pain in the @#$% to set up and it logs out constantly. CONSTANTLY. But, due to the fact that (1) I’ve had to set it up on two phones and a computer over the last two years (as well as deal with updating everything again when I change my my.tcu.edu password) and (2) he did not even know what a my.tcu.edu profile was or that he even had one, I figured I could at least help him. So the next half hour turned into a struggle of getting off SETUP-stu-wireless and onto stu-wireless, signing into his my.tcu.edu account and changing his mobile devices settings, and guessing and checking with all the random number/letter passwords and usernames on a list he obtained from the student help desk.

Finally, we were successful. So he then proceeded to ignore me for the last fifteen minutes as he excitedly and intensely signed into a game that he needed to catch up on in a conquest to destroy some opposing army.

I know what it is like to be sucked into a game that takes precedence over all else at the time and makes you a hermit. During the summer and winter breaks, when I actually have time to do things that actually are not productive, I go on massive video game binges for hours at a time during the day. Sometimes it’s a very old game that I play and try to beat again for the sake of old memories and nostalgia. Sometimes it’s an RPG that can take hours and hours and hours of gameplay to even barely scratch the surface of what lies in the game.

While I have extensive gaming experiences from before I came to college, my best friend wants to enter a career in making video games and, therefore, knows what true gaming is all about. He goes to Baylor (boo I know) and is in their Film, TV, and Digital Media (FTDM) program which, apparently, is considered a “lone wolf” major within the school, not hindered by the overly religious policies of the University; as a program, it is considered one of the best in the nation in Video Game Production and many professors actually have strong connections in the field of video games, film, television, and hardware designing. For example, one of the professors there was the guy who came up with and developed HD television! Talking with him and Meshal always reminds me of my broken XBOX at home (probably for the best) of how much I’ve changed in that aspect of my life when it comes to free time, which I’m not even sure exists anymore. Alas, summer is approaching, at least!

The Final Day of Juha

          Alas, the third section of Tales of Juha more resembled the first section as opposed to the second. That means that this section was not very funny in my humble opinion. I felt that there were also fewer lessons or “truths” to be gained from this section of the reading. For example, while in the Juha the Butt did not entertain me in the least bit, there was a single anecdote that at least elicited a feeble chuckle as I sat in the study room in our fraternity house. The subject of the story was Juha entering a village full of misers, wanting to test the claim that they were as people described them. Upon entering this village he was given a bowl of milk, and Juha was under the impression that the people had been judged wrongly. However, the man only gave Juha the bowl of milk because a mouse had fallen into it. At the very end, when Juha throws the bowl down in anger, the “chuckle moment” arises when the man yells at him “Careful! Don’t break that bowl! It’s the one my daughter uses to piddle in!”

          I found this funny because not only was there a cognitive shift (for the reader as well as Juha) upon discovering WHY the man gave Juha a bowl of milk in a very un-miserly manner, but the reason for giving him the bowl was quite disgusting. But the real kicker was the man’s reaction to the bowl being tossed in anger and disgust. “Hey, my daughter piddles in that bowl!” was the last thing I expected to read. And, while perhaps immature, I find the word “piddle” hilarious, especially when combined with the shock of realizing Juha just drank out of toilet. The fact that this man is so miserly as to use a bowl as a cup and as a toilet is quite off-putting. While this anecdote is relatively funny, however, I fail to see a concrete purpose or lesson to be learned from it. I suppose all I can deduce is that those who are miserly offend people, so refrain from being a miserly person?

            

          One of my favorite types of myth or story is when justice is served. Superheroes always win, the bad guy loses, and hope is not lost completely. Call it cliché, but I like it when the good guy wins. Justice is one of those things that I think everyone wants to believe in and hopes for, but in real life justice is not always given out to those who deserve it: innocent people die, bad things happen to good people, and tragedies always seem to fall hardest on those least able to bear the burden. Because of this we look to stories that, when we control them, end up in a way that we wish our own lives would go. We want to be the hero. We want a healthy portion of lex talionis. So, after that introductory spiel, without further ado I reveal that the Justice and Generosity section of our assignment was probably my favorite section.

          

          The second story (the one about the cook demanding repayment for the use of steam coming off his food) was one of my favorites of this section because of Juha’s succinct, sharp come-back. He made a bag of coins jingle, and said, “You can take the jingling of coins as the price for the flavorsome steam of your cooking.” The next story had a similar purpose and punch-line, as well as the next one after. This last one was probably my favorite of all the passages I read in this assignment. The trickery employed by Juha to teach the claimant’s nonsensical dispute I found hilarious. This story, about the man claiming that he was to be paid for his “nothing,” was brilliantly ended. What was found under the book the claimant lifted?

          “Nothing.”

            

          “Very well. Now, take it and be off with you.”

           

          This clever play on words and mode of revealing justice to someone just making trouble to make trouble made me laugh aloud in triumph.

Juha-Inspired, Childhood Reminiscence

            As a child learning to read I was always drawn to fables, myths, and legends: Aesop’s Fables, Greek mythology, Nordic mythology, the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. These stories always taught lessons and imparted general knowledge that perhaps other kids didn’t absorb by just going through the day to day life, and these lessons were always something I was seeking. Sometimes they were obvious to interpret: don’t steal, don’t ask stupid questions, respect your elders, etc. Others were more challenging to divulge and more complicated to understand, but I was always one to enjoy a logical puzzle or mind game. These stories fueled my desire to read, and as a child I really was a voracious reader. For example the most trouble I was ever involved in in middle school was getting caught reading during class lectures (ironically it was in my English class), and all the way up until high school I would read at least two books a week and be in the library every day scouring for new options.

But I digress a bit. In short, myths and stories with a lesson involved have played a pivotal role in my reading career. So, Tales of Juha seemed very interesting looking it over since it appeared to fit this bill. Also, I’m not very familiar with Middle-Eastern/Arab folklore at all which added an incentive to delve into this book. 

As a book with many short tales of wit and wisdom I find it at least semi-interesting. I enjoyed the story (one of the longer ones) of Juha outwitting the two thieves by playing on their strong greed. I feel like this is a common tale showing the fallibility of the “deadly sin,” as well as the stupidity of many criminals. Similarly, the next tale was about Juha hearing a thief on the roof and purposefully giving him false information in order to outwit the thief showing that wisdom often (and always should) outdoes the stupid.

While some paragraphs have an intentional moral of the story or lesson to teach, some are just plain goofy or contain clever wordplay, for example, the story about age. Someone asks Juha how old he is and he replies forty. Ten years later he asks him how old he is and he replies forty. When the guy calls Juha out on this Juha replies, “I’m not the kind of man who changes his word, or takes it back. Isn’t that the way a proper man should behave?” This is just a trick on words, because yes a proper man should stick to his word, but the joke is obviously that things change and this can’t be taken literally. The story is amusing but not much of an axiom. Which brings me to my next observation…

Not many of these stories are funny. At least, in my humble opinion, they are not funny in the laugh out loud way that some of our readings have been.  I do believe I chuckled at one short tale between pages one and forty-one. And it was about facial hair. Maybe this is because it was late and I was tired, but I really just don’t think many of these translate well into humor when there’s a legitimate lesson to learn, or perhaps I just don’t have a good grasp on Arab humor (which I admit could definitely be the case). Hopefully the next part of the reading assignment will have a few more laughable moments!

Just Joking > Morreall

First, I must say FINALLY. Just Joking was everything I thought Morreall’s snore-inducing explanations of humor and humor theories was going to be and should have been. I found this article very entertaining to read, because the authors themselves actually used their senses of humor in order to write through the lens of humor. This tone and input of funny blurbs was enough to keep at least a half-interest in what was being said. It’s as if they read Morreall and went “yikes…poor bloke. We should probably avoid that,” and used it as a springboard to actually BE funny in book about humor! Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the reading were the jokes and one-liners at the bottom of each page, just motivating you to finish reading the page so you could look down and receive a chuckle as a reward. My favorites included:

            “Imagine if there were no hypothetical situations?”

            “People often say to me, ‘What are you doing in my garden?’”

            “I ordered a wake-up call the other day. The phone rang and a woman’s voice said,

“What the hell are you doing with your life?

I am a fan of witty, clever one-liners that either set you up for one thing and then completely and instantly turn you around, as well as short one-liners that take a second to think about. But that’s just me. Now back to the actual reading assignment.

I think one of the best things the authors did was to give such a strong introduction about how what they were about to do could often make jokes not funny and then linking it to the “dissecting a frog” metaphor. They made this intro amusing and conversational, as well as faux-apologetic, making sure we understood that even after all the fun and games we might not get any more fun text to read. But all this does is prepare us to expect nothing so that when they do write entertaining explanations and examples of the Superiority, Incongruity, Ambivalence, and Release Theories of humor we still think, “Oh, well that’s still WAY better than how Morreall put it!”

Notably, my favorite section of this assignment versus the way Morreal put it was the Relief Theory. The authors’ use of Freud was much more interesting and permeated the theory more, showing how scientists really used to mix the mental and physical aspects of humor in completely unproven ways and ideas. The belief that everything humorous stems from a sexual desire or fetish is a very interesting concept, but come on…really? At least we could laugh at Freud in the context of this paper!

Lurk Left, Lurk Right...

Walking down the hall in the fraternity house I heard shouts and raucous laughter from behind a closed door. While I always have the innate urge to either pop in and see what the hubbub is about or stand with my face pressed up to the door, I finally had the excuse to do so! I slowly put my ear up to the door to determine what was transpiring across the wood.

"You ******* cheater! That was CLEARLY a tackle in the box, that's a RED CARD!" Voice 1 yelled.

Uncontrollable laughter from Voice 2 was interrupted with an "Ow, don't hit me, man!"

Clearly, a heated game of of FIFA was in its final minutes with a close score. I stood with my ear to the door to continue to listen when one of my other brothers walked past me giving me a very quizzical look and shaking his head.

"What are you doing?"

"Class project..." I replied. He walked on without another word. At that moment there was another scream of frustration followed by a maniacal laugh, though the voices were switched it seemed.

"Ahhhhh I can't believe it!" Voice 2 exclaimed in disbelief.

"IT'S ALL TIED UP NOW! GOLDEN GOAL! Muahahahaha" Voice 1 yelled triumphantly and rather nefariously.

I've been in the position of both Voice 1 and 2. FIFA is a very intense and adrenaline/testosterone-packed video game that makes the players sweat and act in ridiculously childish ways. Many times it leads to brutal taunting and humorous situations, though I have yet to lose a friend because of it. While listening in on this game, however, I did not get the opportunity to hear who won and who lost, because the game was paused and the door opened, quickly peeling away from my face and leaving me in a pretty awkward position. Yeah... The inevitable happened. A look of confusion and betrayal was upon the face of Voice 2 as he saw me stumble forward and nearly into his chest. Guess that's the end of my spying days.