i hate to say you told me so

so i was wrong about me. actually, i was wrong about you. i said in my last post that your words wouldn't make a difference, but strangely they did. and not to diminish the power of your words but at the risk of i'm tooting my own horn, i'm gonna go ahead and say that my own words might have made even more of a difference [toot toot!].


you would think that talking and writing about my hopelessness would make me feel more hopeless but strangely it has had the opposite effect somehow. now i'm not recommending that one should commiserate at length as some sort of psychological self-medication. usually pity-partying leads to more self-pity so i'm honestly really baffled as to how this could've even happened. my only hypothesis is that this mysterious sense of hope might be the result of a really poorly delivered joke.


i'm sure you're thinking that i couldn't POSSIBLY have been the one to deliver said bad joke but believe it or not, sometimes i'm not hilarious. i know! i know! sounds crazy! [i'm sorry about the butt injuries for those of you who just fell out of your chair] but a several times in the past few weeks i've been trying an old joke and not getting any laughs. the first time i told it, i was talking to some friends that had been inadvertently hush-hush about their relatively new status as a couple. the girl turned to me and asked, "if you were dating someone, would you just randomly announce it?" and i said, "um, of COURSE! if i were dating someone, i'd tell everyone i knew: REPENT! REPENT! THE COMING OF THE LORD IS NIGH!" and then... crickets.


now i thought this was some of my better material. so much so that i attempted to tell the joke again a couple more times but again my brilliant punchline was met with a couple uncomfortable giggles but mostly, just crickets. i thought about trying to salvage the dead silence by quoting Revelations 37:85 which i believe says something about white horseman, plagues of locusts, and Jessica tricking a boy into dating her [that's just my paraphrased version; don't quote me on that one] but then i remembered that verse in Proverbials about not kicking thine deceased horses, Amen.


i'm guessing my audience didn't find my joke funny mostly because the subtext is so sad. i acknowledge that it's quite a passive-aggressive way to whine about my singleness and i acknowledge that whining about one's singleness is generally pretty gross [especially in a blog, so my apologies kind readers]. i would expect anyone to be annoyed by such thinly veiled self-pity but i found that the victims of my bad joke -- and you kind readers of my blog -- instead seemed to be kinda sad. and not just sorry-for-me sad, but more like sad with me that i would feel so hopeless. i guess i'm proof that misery really does love company? granted, i could just be lacking in skills of perception and there could be non-commenters out there too annoyed with my self-pity to even comment but i'm gonna intentionally choose to read the silver lining embedded in the binary code; i'm trying not to sabotage this miraculous sense of hope i have. and though my hopelessness was almost exclusively wrapped up in my hang-ups about my singlaciousnesiocity, this hope isn't exactly hope that i'll magically become un-single anytime soon. i guess i'm just re-remembering where my hope should be coming from in the first place. i'll probably need to re-remember this a whole lot more in the future but for your sake and mine, i'll try not to blog about it so much and i'll try to refrain from passive-agressively joking about it. or at the very least, i'll make sure my passive-agressive jokes are effing hilarious.