Becoming Absurd

School

“Who knows what ‘stagger’ means? Who wants to demonstrate to the class?” said the English teacher.

I raised my hand, went up to the front of my second preparatory class, and staggered.

“Why did you do that? You looked ridiculous, everyone was laughing at you” said my best friend after class. Lesson learned: don’t make people laugh at you.

Years and years passed. For the rest of my school years, I was considered poker faced.

 

College

I asked a question in class, my friend next to me turned to me and told me, in a surprised but indifferent tone (at the same time, yes it’s hard to imagine, sorry) “you participate!”

I spent the next 2 years quite quiet, but then I couldn’t help myself. I like talking.

I can’t say I was “interactive” or even talkative. I found it very hard to talk to people, talk in class, all that. But when I got around closed circles I did talk, and people laughed, it didn’t hurt, I liked it. I got a lot of “how could you say something like that?” and “stop doing that” and “people will laugh at you” with very angry scolding faces. Faces I thought I could only see at home, but everyone likes to play big brother/big sister/mother/father/grandfather/distant family member who likes to interfere, or simply a distorted idea of a friend who doesn’t like their friends laughed at. But that was never it, it was always “will being associated with her embarrass us? Will she expose us and laugh?” or maybe it was something entirely different.. who knows.

 

First Job

“we didn’t like you at first, but it turns out you’re fun” a very honest and lovely friend told me once. I wasn’t poker faced, I was indeed quiet, at first, then when I left they told me the floor got quieter and that I made all the noise!

On one of the performance reviews, I got something like: you’re funny, you make everyone laugh, and you lighten up the mood when we’re tense. What I actually got in my mind’s eye: you’re the class clown! I got upset, really upset.

 

Hospital room after car crash

“don’t worry about it, ‘fadaky’ (which is a term that means whatever happened or was lost can be sacrificed for you) Thank God you’re safe” said the family friend (who came to the hospital room when I specifically asked all my personal close friends NOT to come) his wife was on the phone as well.

I responded by hysterical laughter. I mean really, how can I stop myself from laughing other than swearing using words I didn’t even know? How can “fadaky” console me? How can other people’s lives be “fadaya”? His wife thought I hit my head, of course that would be the only thing that would make sense; that I’ve hit myself because I’m being absurd to laugh at a time like this. I hate to say it, but what plebes!

 

Rest of my life

I make people laugh, even if I don’t mean it, especially when I don’t mean it. They never laugh when I do. I am excellent at accidental comedy. I laugh and people laugh with me, or at me, same difference when you’ve been clumsy all your life; falling down and staining your clothes with food, and occasionally tripping over your own feet, oh and I walk into walls as well, just did that a few months ago actually. It’s ok to laugh at other people as well, there are levels of absurd that even I don’t comprehend, but I don’t get why people feel offended if I laugh at their absurdity. I have come to accept mine, and the world’s, which happens to include, well, them!

Wildly unreasonable, check!

Illogical, not always, but, check!

Inappropriate, yeah baby! Check!

The above define absurd. Absurd is life. Absurd is humanity. Absurd is you, dear reader, and is definitely me, even if we don’t comprehend or play the fools on that one. Society considers whatever is not following its norms as absurd, probably throwing it in the inappropriate part. But is it appropriate to accept war or murder when it falls in the area of our interest? Doesn’t that make it inappropriate? Doesn’t that make it, wait for it, absurd? Wait, wait, what about football? Death and love and high blood pressure, absurd?

Let me redefine absurd in my own sense. Absurd is when I perform acts that are illogical (I am a girl after all), wildly unreasonable (I tried to force a guy back at college into tying his shoes for him, the loose shoe lace thing annoys me), and inappropriate (I am so good at that one!)

So according to the dictionary, I am absurd, hurray for me.

How I became absurd is very simple. I stopped listening to all the discontent voices. I stopped looking at all the frowning/concerned faces, and I stopped caring altogether about societies ideas of norms. Well not altogether, I don’t want my mother to get a heart attack, but mostly, I like to live by my own rules, the rules I create, custom made to fit Dina, that’s me, and they just work. It gets hard sometimes, especially when I severely blush, but then I laugh even more and the nervous laughter and silly jokes are so conveniently mistaken for confidence and carefreeness that it just works so well to be absurd.

Sometimes, at night when it’s very dark, I question myself, I got this horrible nagging voice that I can’t seem to bury in my head, and that is always louder than all the other voices that tells me off, it even sounds like it has that frown that’s on everyone’s faces. I admit, it’s hard not to listen to it when it’s dark and quiet everywhere else, maybe I do; turn it down a couple of notches at family gatherings and such, or when the older ladies are around because they would frown at my mom I guess. I’ll accept the “young and stupid” look I get from them and smile. I’ll even accept the nervous smile that says “uh-oh, she’s insane, better make up an excuse to leave” because there is something very relieving at the acceptance of one’s own absurdity, and that is the fact of not caring.

I see the photo of the sad clown all over facebook of all the sad ones out there who smile all day and frown on the inside and I think, I need the opposite of that, I need the photo of the human on the outside and clown on the inside because that is what I am, and that is what I like to stay; a clown. If you think about it, that’s what you want me to be too, the clown, the one who makes everyone laugh and hypes them up and right out of their daily boring tedious routines, I am the human entertainer that lives among the masses, laughing and smiling and just cracking that joke that didn’t even sound like a joke but it’s so absurd it can’t be anything else. In your eyes I am the clown, in my eyes, I am privileged because I see it all as quite very funny, and so so absurd. You can only laugh if I make you, so what does that make me really? Don’t freak out, I’ll just stick with absurd.