I make a point of including in each day a little humor, both as an antidote for life's absurdities and just because it's fun. My favorite kind of humor is unintentional humor. Here are some examples from actual courtroom transcripts (courtesy of Mary Louise Gilman's "Humor in the Court").

Q. Did you ever stay all night with this man in New York?
A. I refuse to answer that question.
Q. Did you ever stay all night with this man in Chicago?
A. I refuse to answer that question.
Q. Did you ever stay all night with this man in Miami?
A. No.

Q. What is your name?
A. Ernestine McDowell.
Q. And what is your marital status?
A. Fair.

Q. Officer, what led you to believe the defendant was under the influence?
A. Because he was argumentary and he couldn't pronunciate his words.

Q. Do you know how far pregnant you are right now?
A. I will be three months November 8th.
Q. Apparently then, the date of conception was August 8th?
A. Yes.
Q. What were you and your husband doing at that time?

Q. Doctor, how many autopsies have you peformed on dead people?
A. All my autopsies have been performed on dead people.

Q: The truth of the matter is that you were not an unbiased, objective witness, isn't it. You too were shot in the fracas?
A: No, sir. I was shot midway between the fracas and the navel.

Can a person fully appreciate happiness without also experiencing sadness?
(This was inspired by a blog post from my friend Kelly. Thanks Kel!)

To fully understand an emotion, one has to experience it. If someone describes to me what it feels like to have a loved one with Alzheimer’s, I can imagine what it might feel like, but my guess is going to be wrong, probably absurdly wrong, because I haven’t been in this situation. Similarly, to fully understand an emotion, one probably has to experience it at different magnitudes, and probably has to experience the emotion’s opposite (if it has one), or at least the absence of the emotion.

It’s quite common for people who experience temporary suffering to emerge with a heightened sense of well-being. Maybe it’s because they then know that they can endure the suffering and will make it through. Maybe their suffering has given them a deeper appreciation of the times when they aren’t suffering. Maybe it has led to some insight critical to their personal development. Regardless of the reason, one could make a strong case that a life that was mostly happy but had occasional, brief, not-too-intense suffering is actually to be preferred over a life that was entirely happy. (Intense or prolonged suffering is an entirely different matter, of course, and not to be wished upon even one’s worst enemy.)

One problem is with the labels "happiness" and "sadness" themselves. Obviously we need to name things in order to communicate with others about them, but this is usually a dangerous oversimplification. I remember arguing with my second-grade teacher when she claimed that there were seven continents and four oceans. For me, that was the beginning of a gradual realization that just about everything is spectral and not yes/no, and the labels are merely an approximation of the truth.

With concepts like emotional states, things are even cloudier. Are happiness and sadness really opposites? How does happiness compare with contentment, or pleasure? Is joy simply extreme happiness, or is there something more to it? I have thought about these questions a lot but have only partial, unsatisfying answers. By continuing to talk with others who have experienced emotional states with the same labels I’m using, and by discussing the details of their experiences, I hope to eventually have a better understanding of the emotions.

Most people tend to insulate themselves from strong emotions instead of welcoming them. When I first read about the principles of Buddhism, a lot of it made sense to me. But Buddhism professes a policy of non-attachment and avoidance of passion, which I think deprives followers of a lot of what it means to be human. A more enlightened approach might allow for a great reduction in suffering without requiring non-attachment. Given the choice between a life checkered by happy times and sad times and one lived in a grayness that knows neither highs nor lows, I know which I’d choose.

We may be able to understand self-awareness by studying, physiologically and phenomenologically, regular dreaming (which lacks self-awareness) and lucid dreaming (which has self-awareness). From one viewpoint, lucid dreaming isn't fundamentally different from other dreaming; in any dream the dreamer has access to some information, and the piece of information a lucid dreamer has is that he/she is dreaming. But this difference of just one piece of information changes everything. It enables experiencing the dream in a richer, deeper, fundamentally different way, and it sometimes even enables the dreamer to control the dream world. By analogy, perhaps it is self-awareness in the waking world that enables control and freedom that an entity without self-awareness lacks. Not total control or freedom, admittedly, but a control and freedom (and depth and richness) different from a life on autopilot not just in magnitude but in kind.

Money can buy most of what most people desire. Is this because money can buy most desirable things, or because most people want only things that money can buy? Are we trapped in a positive feedback loop of humanity creating artificial needs and then fulfilling them? The situation seems to be analogous to science's tendency to focus on what can be demonstrated empirically and ignoring the spiritual unseen which it is powerless to explain; here, capitalism focuses on that which can be created and consumed and as a result non-material needs tend to get disregarded.