My phone worked fine internationally. I did not have any issues at all. However, when we touched down at JFK, and I was allowed to open my phone, I knew there was some sort of problem. I could log in to JFK wifi, but my Verizon services would not work. This cause me a moment of anxiety. When we got back to our apartment, I used my Husband’s phone to try to call Verizon customer service. Of course, Verizon customer service was closed…

arghh…

Can you feel the mellow of my vacation seeping away?

I tried googling troubleshooting, which said it was a SIM card error, but I couldn’t get the SIM slot open on my phone

So I played with my phone a bit, knowing that I would have no phone with which to call customer service the next day as everyone would be at work, and I saw a thing that said RESET NETWORK. I figured what did I have to lose?

So, I reset the network.

I am grateful that this was exactly the fix that my phone needed. Within a minute my phone was back up and running.

My prompt for kinda/sorta the past few weeks has been HUMOR. This is how it was used in the books that I read:

  1. Betty Wertheimer was known to have a good sense of humor, and Sargent always looked for ways to amuse his sitters. Deborah Davis
  2. “Just humor us, Mom, ” she’d said during their last conversation. When she replayed that line in her head, she sounded like a spoiled teenager. Jennifer Close
  3. We’ve been so busy, people haven’t had a sense of humor. Helen Ellis
  4. Yet the trip was a pleasure to him, for by now he was so entranced with China that he took even took the poor accommodation in good humor: “I never expected ti find my way strewed with luxuries,” he admitted drily. Sarah Rose
  5. Thinking about my grandmothers now, I understand that it was faith, bravery, curiosity, and humor, as well as their fashionable hats, that made them beautiful. Caroline Kennedy
  6. Firas would be on his phone, and Mustafa would snatch it from his hands and put it in one of the empty honey jars, but he would never really get angry with his son- there was a certain humor between them, even when they were in battle with each other. Christy Lefteri
  7. His emotional distress only humored us further. Daniel Black
  8. If I were a waitress, walking around offering people a refreshing palate- cleanser between heavy novel course, I’d hold out a tray of humorous essay collections and let them take their pick. Emily Pullen, highlighted in a book currated by Jane Mount
  9. In the winter, while everyone else was laying out copy, he summoned me to his desk and told me I had a “biting sense of humor”. Stephanie Foo
  10. Eventually she is through the checkout, once again marveling at the assistant’s unruffled good humour, and zigzagging her trolley through the car park. Elly Griffiths
  11. As a text (referring to Under Milk Wood), I find it unknowable, but I’m always drawn to its undulating rhythms and wicked humour. Katherine May
  12. It’s a strange feeling, thinking about who you were in past relationships: a mix of sadness and humour, of mortification and frustration. Natasha Lunn
  13. Even when we disagreed, it was always good-humoured. Marian Keyes

What I’m going to think about humor/humour

  1. Can the Brits and the Americans get on board and agree to a common spelling?
  2. How often do we humor people?
  3. How hard is it to go through life without a sense of humor?
  4. Is humor universal?
  5. Should humor be universal?
Face Lift
Sylvia Plath

You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask.  The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They've changed all that.  Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me.  He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents.  At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . .
I don't know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten.  I grow backward.  I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.

Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.

www.allpoetry.com

31 thoughts on “Gratitude and Mindfulness: 8/6/22”

  2. Proves there’s no need for customer service! Clever you 🙂 I got so distracted by the Sylvia Plath poem I lost all ability to form any other comments regarding humour/humor.

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  3. Sylvia is one of my favorite tragedies! Oh how I wish she could have stayed here longer, maybe died of an old age in stead of an oven, and continued to enlighten us with her words. The fear of a failed phone is a real thing. I hear you. When our connection is cut, it’s distressing. So glad you found the solution with your humor intact! Glad you’re home. Hugs, C

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  4. It’s amazing how we can panic when our technology doesn’t work. It’s not just you, me too! I’m glad you fixed your phone against all odds. We depend on it for so much of our day to day lives. Now tonight you can lay your head on your pillow and dream about what life was like without planes to whisk us to Barcelona and Internet connections to share pictures. Think about young brides saying goodbye to their families for the last time as they head west for parts unknown. And you can smile, knowing that throughout traveling delays and technological glitches, you managed to keep your sense of humor and maybe even humoured some frustrated Brits along the way.😉

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    1. You know….I feel we live in a humorless society right now…I guess I wanted to show what the downside of not having humor is…plus she’s a great poet…

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      4. Sorry LA I guess living with someone who almost never seems happy because her mind won’t ease it up…I guess Plath was a bit of a trigger for me.

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  7. The reset most likely helped the phone “find” what cell tower it needed. It is an issue sometimes when going between Europe/US. I carry two SIM cards. One for US network and the one I have for Europe. You can’t usually do that with an American cell phone as they are mostly SIM locked to that phone.
    Answer to ? 1. Nope! We both speak some sort of English but both parties seem to think their way is the only way! The Queens English is maybe the reason why my ancestors paid to cross to a more reasonable land.

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  8. Literally five minutes ago, Tara and I were talking about how important a sense of humor is in a good relationship. At least for us. I knew she was The One when she laughed at my jokes. True story.

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  9. Why should we need to agree on a single spelling? In 17th century England there was some feeling that spelling a word the same way all through a letter was boring and a sign of a dull mind. I feel no need to adjust any of my spellings to accommodate Americans, and feel no urge to make you change yours.

    It’s all pointless anyway. After a sustained bombardment of American TV and spellcheckers, the English spoken in the UK will disappear anyway. Then the English spoken by Americans will be swept away in a torrent of Spanish and Chinese. . .

    Plath doesn’t look so depressing now, does she?

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    1. Plath is most depressing because she couldn’t be helped…there’s nothing worse than knowing you can’t fix something. As for the language…we had an Irish tour guide in Barcelona…I had to “translate” some of the things he said to the group because I’m well versed in British tv shows and novels, and I understand what a “council” is. But yes…everyone will speak Americanese eventually…

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      1. 🙂 Such a contrast – the early brilliance and the depression. Then she married a Yorkshireman (not known for their cheery outlook) and, just few years before suicide rates fell dramatically ( we changed to non-poisonous natural gas) she used the gas oven, or even if she had moved back to America, which was already on natural gas (though full of guns). It could have been so different.

        https://gizmodo.com/why-have-people-stopped-committing-suicide-with-gas-5959303

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  10. Any problem with any cell phone instantly drains the fun out of anything. Happy to read that you went on a vacay. Barcelona is on my list of international destinations. Someday I might even get there!

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  11. 1. I agree. It’s pretty confusing.
    2. I don’t know if I humor people.
    3. It’s very hard. I’m a very serious person. I do have a sense of humor but it’s very different than my husband’s. What I find funny, he thinks is ridiculous. What he finds funny, I think is mean.
    4. I think different cultures have different senses of humor. Plus, personality plays a role.
    5. Yes, it should

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