Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt: Where can I learn to laugh rather than cry?

The context here is the ability to laugh at the absurdities of life, at those small annoyances and follies that, if taken completely seriously, might drag a person down, particularly in the face of much larger issues.

I’ve always believed that having a sense of humour is far more powerful than any kind of “positive thinking” claptrap. As a pair of socks I recently bought state, sometimes the universe is kind of a dick. I am a huge fan of black humour. Like this. (The comments kind of prove the power of this kind of thing.)

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Even more people off at work today.

I’ve been working off and on on the matched pair of scrolls and am taking a break. The painting is substantially done, although there will still be some highlighting to do. I may start in on the other scroll tonight as I think I want to let this pair sit for awhile.

Today is the anniversary of the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883–or rather, eruptions, because there were three of them, culminating with the final one, which disintegrated the island and produced the loudest sound–estimated at 310 decibels–ever produced by natural causes; it was heard thousands of miles away. The debris and gasses expelled into the atmosphere produced spectacular sunsets for years. All of this makes me want to re-read one of my books on it, although I’ll need to finish the book I’m currently reading on the New Horizons mission to Pluto. (It occurs to me that I’m currently indulging two of my longest-standing nerderies– astronomy and volcano disasters.)

The other big news? As I predicted–although earlier than I expected–Doug Ford has caved on vaccine passports. As recently as a couple of days ago he was still singing the tune of “I don’t want a divided society.” I guess he finally realized that the idea of vaccine passports has a ton of popular support, and that society is not going to become more divided than it already is by introducing them. The fact is, if he wants a better chance of keeping things open, the passports may allow that, plus give an incentive to the hesitant. I suspect someone showed him some polls that brought it home that the very vocal “Freedom!” lovers were, in fact, the minority. Let’s see now how quickly this gets off the ground. Quebec is launching next week.

I have also transitioned my purse back to the backpack style bag I was using 18 months ago. It had, unfortunately, apparently housed some moths, so it spent a couple of weeks in the freezer after being scrubbed out. I did a bit more work on bagging up some items in my closet, and found another item that the moths had damaged. I also have my bycocket hat in the freezer for the same reason – while it was heavy enough not to have visible damage, it clearly had hosted some of the lil’ bastards.

Tomorrow: Errand to pick up a special project. Then I’m stopping by the local mall and getting some batteries installed in some watches and picking up Extreme Pita wraps.