Smiling When You Don't Mean To...

I was reading a friend's blog about how she found something terrifying but at the same time funny and wanted a word to describe it. She ended up creating a word (humourfying). It made me think of a character flaw I seem to have. The flaw is that often when dealing with a situation that is horrible for another person, I tend to smile as I talk about it. Let me give you some examples (as you begin to think that I'm a completely terrible person). At work yesterday morning, I was give a verbal report to the nursing staff starting their shift for the day (remember: I had been up ALL night working), and as I was telling them some pretty horrible things (a patient not having a penis due to genital warts gone mad/bad, a patient who was dying), I kept getting this stupid grin on my face! It's not that I was happy about the things that I was talking about it, it was that I was just reacting to situations so tragic that I was having trouble reacting to them in any other way. It's like mentally, I know there horrible situations but emotionally, I was unable to truly react to them. It made me think of a time in high school when Jason told me about a friend's parents dying in a car crash, with a grin on his face (I should have ran then). Now, I knew he was upset about the news and I knew that he didn't think it was funny but it just appeared that the situation was so shocking and incredulous, he was having trouble reacting to it. So, are we two, callous, hard-hearted people, perfect for each other, to laugh at people's misfortunes as we go through life? Or are we completely normal is the sense that we often have a hard time emotionally taking in difficult news/situations that require a deeper part of our selves to react? And is there a word to describe something that is so horrible, it's peculiar/funny in a tragic sense? Insensitive? Maybe.

Another thing that happened during my night shifts, is that I discovered Google Earth™. Basically, it's the whole world, in satellite picture. It's really cool. I was looking at it with my co-workers who were from all parts of the globe. One nurse was from thePhilippiness, the other from Zimbabwe, a doctor from Australia and me! We were flying all over the world, looking at each other's cities and tops of homes. Edmonton's satellite pictures, currently, show some parts of the city still covered in snow and other parts green and lush. Could this be the current situation in Edmonton? Quite likely. More likely, however, is that it is covered in blue and orange due to all the fans of the Edmonton Oilers out on the streets celebrating (rioting) the Oilers' win to advance to the Western Conference final (yaah!!). Jason and I had a laugh at this quote from an Oilers fan in the Globe and Mail.
“We cheered for their anthem and we got it done,” said Oiler fan Morten Feddersen. “We might be a bunch of rednecks, but we have class. That's the whole difference right there and we won for it.”

The quote is in reference to the San Jose Sharks booing the Canadian national anthem at one of the hockey games in San Jose. For anyone not from Alberta, that quote is pretty much what a typical Albertan sounds like.

I probably should have made this blog site my own as I think Jason will probably not be contributing to any of the blog entries (although he does deserve mention as a huge creative influence).