Response to comment and ramble

Sorry--I may have confused things by talking about jokes. The rhubarb joke isn't a joke. It's just a statement. My friend's mother lives in a small town where people grow so much rhubarb that they give it away, sometimes by sticking it in unlocked cars. I just thought that was cute. As I said, where I live, other things are done to people's cars. I just thing it's great that there are places in this world where people unburden themselves of excess rhubarb by placing it in people's cars. That's all.

The reason I introduced it on this blog in the context of a joke is that my mom's reaction to it was the same as her reaction to a joke: she asks irrelevant questions, to the point that a one- or two-line anecdote becomes hardly worth it.

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I was hoping we'd leave the house pretty early, but it's been one thing after another. So when I realized we wouldn't be leaving the house, I went outside to read. But I couldn't really read, because mom started talking to me instead of finishing up whatever she was doing. I didn't mind; I like it when mom talks to me--not to be confused with "when mom talks to herself and expects me to pay attention." That's annoying. But when she's actually communicating, rather than asking herself where she stuck the phone bill, and saying "well?" when I don't answer, it's all good.

She told me a story that reminded me of another friend's story. Except mom stopped mid-story to ask what was wrong with my forehead. At which point I told her to finish whatever she was doing to get on our walk. But she started talking about going around to very poor villages in Russia--she was traveling as part of her job--and peasants--dirt-poor people with nothing to their name--would come out and offer her whatever they had, whether it be cucumbers or a head of cabbage. I've seen the same thing in Central America, heard other stories of it as well. Someone I met while traveling in Nicaragua said she'd been in El Salvador, where someone had offered her her chicken.

I thought about a friend of mine who, in grad school, was recruited by a friend of hers to work a suicide hotline. The friend who recruited her went to India for a few months, came back, worked the hotline again. And soon quit because she couldn't take it. Having been to India--having seen people who have practically nothing and still manage to be happy with what they have--she couldn't stand to listen to people contemplate taking their own lives because of a repossessed car.

I'm not romanticizing poverty or generalizing about motives for suicide--just relaying my friend's friend's experience. Those people in India who had nothing might have hit a wall when that nothing limited their options for medical treatment, or they might, by now, have moved to the city and become more miserable from factory work. And people think about killing themselves over more (and less, and different) than a repo'd car. And people also don't think about killing themselves about more than a repo'd car.

I don't really know what I am saying, except that I've seen people who have every reason to be miserable, happy, and every reason to be happy, miserable.