I read an article about a woman Supreme Court Justice, probably Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and it briefly mentioned that her children kept a journal documenting anytime "Mommy Laughed" because she didn't laugh much. She was a very serious person and didn't do a lot of laughing.
That resonated with me.
My older sister who was a serious person with a serious career and not exactly your giggly party girl, once told me one of her friends asked her if marrying young and having children young made me so serious and sis replied "No, she was always that way."
My kids think I'm fun. I had to stop reading bedtime stories to them because they would get so excited, they were jumping on the bed and all revved up instead of nodding off to sleep. But even my kids agreed I didn't laugh much.
My oldest son eventually told me that at an extremely young age, probably prior to his second birthday, he decided he wasn't a freeloader and he needed to earn his keep. He decided making me laugh would be how he earned his keep.
So he was a clown when he was little because he was on a mission to get me to laugh.
My kids were in elementary school when the first Toy Story movie came out. My oldest ended up owning a "little green man" alien toy based on this scene in the movie.
It had three lines it would say. I think you had to squeeze it and with each squeeze it would go through this order of lines:
1. The claw is my master.
2. I have been chosen.
3. Oooh.
And it never failed to make me laugh, so he frequently brought that to me and cycled through the lines.
The whole scene is a brilliant bit of insight into human psychology. They are asked who is in charge and they say "The Claw. ...The Claw chooses who will go and who will stay."
That's their entire world, sitting in this machine and waiting to be chosen. The Claw is the mechanism by which that happens and they don't understand that some person is controlling its movements and trying to pick one of them.
It's also funny to me because it's got religious overtones. It uses language that mirrors or evokes "the chosen" or "the chosen one" or "chosen of God."
And they are "awestruck." The whole "Oooh" as their reaction to anything, like this is incredible!
It's sort of gently mocking of Christianity.
I grew up in the Deep South and it's the most religious part of the US and it's mostly Christian. Religion has been called the opiate of the masses.
Now I think a primary value of Christianity is that it has a long history of fostering education. Historically, in many poor families, the Bible was the only book they owned and they read from it nightly.
My parents were both very pro education in ways that were quietly out of step with and more rigorous than that of a lot of elitist snob type thinking.
I had a childhood friend I sometimes tutored and their mom was a friend of my mom and the mom wanted her kid to be "smart" -- smart like I was -- and also didn't want the kid reading comic books.
I read comic books. I had stacks of comic books in my room. Conan the Barbarian. Red Sonja. Mad Magazine. Some short-lived series about Rima the Jungle Girl. And likely many more I don't remember the names of.
When we were still relatively young, my mother told her friend that if he read comic books "At least he's reading." We were probably in elementary school.
Getting good at something takes regular practice in quantity. Reading comic books regularly for hours is something kids will do voluntarily.
As a teen, one of my friends nicknamed my bedroom La Bibliotheque -- that's French for The Library -- because I had so many shelves of books. I had a small bookcase under one window and shelves of books screwed into the wall above my desk and wall units across one wall that all had a mix of open shelves and closed storage and the open shelves held books.
I'm not a big fan of religion. I'm not a big fan of the emotional stuff in most Christian churches.
I think it deserves the accusation that it's the opiate of the masses. People frequently go to church for some emotional thing and I think one use of religion is trying to emotionally manipulate people into behaving under circumstances where we don't have antibiotics and birth control and it's a subsistence culture, so casual sex is disastrous for the community.
Everything "goes to hell." And it's "eternal damnation" because they don't know how to fix any of the problems it causes, so it's forever effectively.
And they hope to scare people into not messing everything up. Instead of educating people, which is generally better.
But Christianity left-handedly fostered reading, so much so that Fredrick Douglass supposedly was taught to read because his owner's wife needed a reading partner to help her learn to the Bible, even though as a slave it was against the law for him to learn to read.
And fostering reading fostered science, so much so that for hundreds of years Christian scientists as a survival mechanism developed philosophical arguments like Occam's Razor to defend their RIGHT to believe in this irrational thing called God that you can't prove exists and be respected as scientists.
Christianity both fosters education and is rife with people OPENLY hostile to education and liberal thought associated with advanced education.
And I don't mean politically or socially "liberal" where we are for sleeping around and toking all we want. "Liberal Arts" means studies that free you, that give you the tools to be free and empowered citizens.
Liberal as in liberating as in let freedom ring.
Most Christians are kind of like Native Americans and Black Americans with baggage about formal education who openly reject higher education and blah blah blah AND historically their religion gave us a lot of the science we have.
Gregor Mendel, The Father of Genetics, did science experiments that got no traction in his life while he was a friar. He worked as a teacher and couldn't pass some teaching certification and ultimately stopped having time for hobbies like breeding pea plants after getting promoted to abbot. His work was rediscovered decades later, after his death.
Both of my long-time therapists, people I worked with for a year or more, were men of the cloth. These were educated men and my sister commented once on "But WHY? You're not religious." Like I picked them because they were religious when that's not how that happened.
My dad was a high school drop out who taught college at one point as part of his long, distinguished military career. My mom self identified as "the maid" when she stopped calling herself a homemaker while making good money working from home.
But they were very much for the right to feed your mind and seek a standard of excellence. And that's really what education should be about and unfortunately frequently isn't.