Over a lifetime, most of us will have to face, seriously, tragedies and challenges that will test our capacity to endure. When we realize that we can survive, even thrive, after such challenges, we begin to recognize the healing balm that laughter provides. It’s a blessing, this morning, to learn this lesson from women who are sharing their stories of meeting some of life’s most difficult challenges with humor.

Mugsy - HAPPY BIRTHDAY - left it the other day because no sure if I would be on today - have got a lot of work today. Anyway miss Cinco de Mayo - have a good one

I think most things in life are incredibly serious as you live them, and yet incredibly funny in hindsight. It’s all about the perspective - when you’re mired down by life, you have to take it seriously, but once you move on, you wonder what you were so worried about!

I always search for what I should take serious and what I should take easy. In my twenties, I think I should take the work and study serious while I should take the life easy. I should take the course serious while I should take the result easy. I should take myself serious while I should take others easy. I should take the mistakes serious while I should take the complements easy. I should take the actions serious while I should take the attitudes easy. … I think I am optimistic, maybe I could not undergo the disaster till now. What I faced as the difficulties are about the scores of my study, the results of my experiments, the frustration of misunderstanding by my friends and parents, and the passing away of my grandparents. When I came across the disappointing things and felt despairing, I would like to wait for another day and hope everything would be OK. This morning, I recieved my report card of an English Test, and I got an awful score. I have been working on it for several months, however the result made me so frustrate that I suspected my capability of my English. As the second language learning, I usually confuse how I can do well on it? But I told myself the whole morning that through the study of English for these months, I have a great progress comparing with before. And I found a lot of fun about it, and not viewed it as a task at all. I enjoyed the process rather than the result, that making me feel easy. I think I should take life serious when I am young, but sometimes, I need the space to take myself easy.

One of my favorite quotes is: “Life is terrible and hard but never serious.” But then, I also like one I heard yesterday, on CD, Jonathan Kellerman—Compulsion: “Why settle for pessimism when you can have fatalism?” So don’t go by me.

Absolutely. I tend to have a sideways view of life, and my friends think I am very funny. I think one side of my family had a genetic predisposiiton to humor (and addiction too, oh dear); my son is very funny too. I write pain and humor sometimes. Buoyant pathos a friend called it. Besides my eyes, I value my humor the most. I think it takes life to the abstract, and then it can be handled. Think of all the brilliant humorists and I’ll just mention a few - Lily and Whoopie right up there. I love Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, as they make us laugh at something that would be totally painful otherwise. Remember Conrad the political cartoonist? Irreplaceable. Read Pnin by Nabokov. Droll. It’s all grist for the mill.

LOL! Dancin’ for Donuts! Mugsy B’day Celebration…thingy: Dedicated to Mugsy! and her ‘church of the universal cookie dough’, of which we are all, a spoonful. The birth of a cell a moment in time when time is engaged loving itself and lo there is born a child of the wild of the fingertips singing of the paint in her hair of the loving and laughter universally ringing cookie dough everywhere!