I love to make lists. It’s therapeutic. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I make lists of things in my head – my top ten favorite songs of all times, my top ten favorite movies, my top ten favorite books, etc. If the insomnia persists, I continue with the lists – top ten favorite video games from the 80’s, top ten favorite episodes of “Friends,” top ten favorite cousins (I have a lot of cousins – and if you are one of them, and you happen to be reading this, then yes, you definitely made the top ten list.) Okay, I’ve never really made a mental top ten list of my favorite cousins – I pretty much adore them all, so it would be more like a top bazillion list. But I have made a mental top ten list of pretty much everything else, given the fact that I have never been what one might consider a “regular sleeper.”
A couple of weeks ago, my blog crashed. I had just written a post about my top ten current favorite things about my job (top ten lists are fluid, and they change frequently as life adds to them), and when I posted it, the site crashed. With some help from my Cousin Jill, the Ninja Blogstress, the blog was able to be repaired, which made me happy, because writing has been a really fun thing. So tonight, as I go to rewrite the post, I’m realizing that a couple of work-related things have happened in the past week or so that are also list-worthy, and that I need to add to my original top-ten-current-favorite-things-about-my-job list. So, here we go.
Top Twelve Favorite Things About My Job
1) The chance to be a part of a team who is deeply committed to each other and to our patients, and the fact that we can laugh at and with each other to the point that it causes physical pain.
2) The necklace given to my fellow social worker, who is courageously battling cancer, by our Medical Director. It says, “Heal me, O Lord, and I will be healed.”
3) The fact that our Utilization Management Director hung up on me from the get-go when I called him with a question earlier this week, simply because he did not feel like talking to me at the moment. This elicited the physical-pain-causing laughter mentioned in #1 above.
4) The fact that this same above-mentioned Utilization Management Director has Christmas balls hanging from the ceiling above his desk, for no apparent reason whatsoever.
5) My dear co-worker who assists our patients in obtaining funding for their medications. Although she has a progressive muscle disorder that limits her mobility, it does not dampen her sense of humor. Everyone with whom she comes in contact is better for having encountered her.
6) The giant, taller-than-a-Volkswagen (my Volkswagen, to be specific), mound of ice that was strategically placed behind my car recently, resulting in my having to wait until it melted down before leaving the hospital.
7) Our Activities Therapy Department, who help our patients to find expression and amazing creativity within themselves that they often did not know existed.
8) The fact that my friend and Crisis Team coworker actually rubbed Campho-Phenique on my sunburned feet a couple of weeks ago after I spent too much time in the lazy river.
9) The giant, economy-sized bottle of Germ-X in our hospital administrator’s office, which exists for the purpose of keeping us all squeaky clean.
10) The fact that when I called our Crisis and Forensic Services Director to get the name of a contact person from her, she not only provided the contact, but drove up to the hospital to help me with a difficult situation. On a Friday night. Before a holiday. In the pouring rain.
11) The bowl of warm nuts given to me by our Medical Director when I brought some papers to her home for her to sign while she was working from home recently. Warm nuts are really good, turns out.
12) The occasions when we get to see our patients leave the hospital with more hope and a greater sense of dignity and value than they had when they arrived, and the honor of being a small part of their journey.
I love to laugh. There’s really nothing I’d rather do than laugh – especially with a group of people, who are also laughing. (It’s generally not as much fun if I’m the only laugher in a large group of non-laughers – it tends to elicit those “looks” that I try so hard to avoid.) There is something healing about laughter – physically, spiritually, and emotionally – and there really is nothing like it. It is one of the great joys in life.
In addition to loving laughter, I also love to make other people laugh. It feels like giving them a gift, and it is so much fun to watch them “open” it. I don’t mean this in a cocky way or in an “oh, wow, I’m funny” kind of way. I just mean that being goofy is sort of my thing that I do. I can’t sing, or cook, or dance, or stand on one foot, or plant flowers that live more than 2 days, or wash clothes without shrinking them, or refrain from eating carbs late at night, or draw faces that look even remotely human. Or a thousand other things. But I can occasionally make people laugh. And that’s fun.
In addition to loving to laugh, I also love to write. I’m rusty at it – I used to write a whole lot as a kid and as a college student, but adulthood came around (chronological adulthood at least), and life got busy, and it just sort of faded into the background. I had teachers in elementary school who encouraged my love for writing, and I will be forever grateful to them, despite the fact that I think they probably encouraged me to write because it kept me sitting in my chair for more than the customary 5 minutes I could usually maintain inertia.
So last summer, assisted by my cousin Jill, who is much more of an expert in all things world-wide-webbish than I am, I decided to do a blog, and to combine two things that I loved – making people laugh, and writing. And I did it. And it sucked. And that was that. I didn’t enjoy it – it felt “forced,” and I had to make myself write, and then I found myself wondering if other people thought it was funny.
Over the past six months, God has been teaching me much about who I am in Him. It has been a time of growth for me – a difficult time, but I am learning that my identity is based solely on who I am in Him, and not on anything I can do – including make people laugh. And I have found myself writing again. But this time, it’s different for me. I feel the desire – actually it’s more like a need – to write, because there are things on my heart that I want to write about. And I’m not so much concerned about whether people think it’s funny or not – because I’m not sure it’s always going to be funny either. It probably will be at times, because there is just way too much bizarreness out there to not write about it – I don’t think I can help it – plus there’s light and fluffy stuff to write about too, and I’ll have to do that sometimes – but it is probably going to be a bit deeper at times too. And if people want to read it and chime in that’s wonderful. If not, that’s okay too – they can always go to www.feelfreetoreadanotherblogthatisfunnierthanthisone.com. (Hee hee hee that’s not really a website…)
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