Funeral @ MindSay

Here's your (okay mine) daily dose of humor--

So one of my favorite customers stopped to visit me tonight. He is a high school boy. He was all dressed up in a black dress shirt and pants with shiny, patent-leather shoes and a black tie. He said, "don't I look fresh?" Evidently that is new slang for awesome or cool. Whatever. I assured him that he did, in fact, look fresh. I then asked him, "why the fancy duds?", which got me a strange look. Guess that isn't fresh slang.

He told me he was at a funeral. I, of course, was very sympathetic and asked who died. Willy Loman, he said. Willy Loman? WILLY LOMAN??? I couldn't help it...I started to laugh.

For those of you who would like to share in the joke. Willy Loman is the main character of Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman". This young man had just finished reading it in class and the class then held a funeral for Loman, who dies at the end of the play. So they all brought food, dressed up, and discussed Willy's life in context of the play as part of learning in their English class.

Wonderful idea. I doubt that the young man would have been so impressed by the play without the dramatic ending. For once, he couldn't stop telling me how much he enjoyed school.

Gotta love creativity. I'm still chuckling.

I  went on Wednesday to a funeral. It's the first one I've been to.

I wore my blazer for the first time that day.  I was planning on wearing it for a school open-house, but I dislocated my knee-cap two days before, so that didn't pan out.

The reason I went was the reason a majority of my senior class went: the mother of one of our classmates (we call him Beast sometimes) died.  She died on March 27, 2008, a few days after her birthday on Easter.

Our school talks a lot about how much brotherhood the school has. We all thought it was just a joke when we started going here, but there we were, overfilling the pews. 

There were only 6 guys out of the two hundred and thirty-something that didn't go.  Those of us didn't know Beast's mom or Beast himself went anyway to show him that he wasn't alone and that his class supported him.

We got to leave from school a bit after 10, and we were supposed to come back before 1:45, just in time for one more class.  Many of the guys were planning on skipping because it was pointless. 

Even I, Mr. Follow the rules, was considering skipping, but I couldn't decide, so I borrowed a coin, a Sacajawea coin, with the mother and the baby pictured on it, before the ceremony started.  I was gonna flip it after: Heads, I go back to school; tails, skip.

It was a Catholic funeral, so there was the whole mass bit.  There were 3 priests there, one was from our school.  The other two used to serve at the church; one had this really deep monotone voice.  He sounded like some robotronic martian.  I was fighting back a smirk and trying not to laugh when I first heard him talk;  I was so glad that he wasn't the main speaker.

When we went up for communion, I let the priest know that I wasn't Catholic, so he gave me a blessing instead:"May we all be united one day in the kingdom of Tracy [Beast's mother]."

It wasn't very emotional until the end.  Beast's family came up one by one to say a few words.  There wasn't that much crying until that point, I guess it's because it just hit them that they were finally saying good-bye.  I found myself fighting back a few tears as well.

When it was Beast's turn to speak, he started off by saying,"I promised myself that if my mom could fight off cancer for two years, that I could fight off tears for two minutes."  That broke a lot of the tension in the church.  He did pretty well for most of it, but you could tell there was a lot of emotion in his voice, and he paused sometimes to recompose himself.  I'm not used to seeing a classmate cry; it was...weird.

After everyone said their good-byes to Beast's mother, we went outside to release three doves.  I watched them fly off.  The third one flew off a bit late, but caught up with the other two pretty quickly.

The seniors then started talking amongst themselves on where they were going for lunch, and whether or not they were going back to school. 

I realized at that point that I would have nothing to do for an hour if I did.  My mom would probably yell at me if I did, and that's never a good thing.  So I just returned Sacajawea -- I didn't even flip the coin.  I was going back to school, along with half the class.

For the rest of the day we asked, "why did I come back?"

http://www.godhatesfags.com/schedule.html

Look at the first one on the schedule.

Why would they do that?

It really makes me want to cry again. I wish I could be there to fight them. I really wish I could.

Before I continue with the singing vids, I'm going to tell you about something that happened to me on Youtube, and a video I made about it.

I must be getting popular now, because a "Hater" found me. The usual things happened, that I saw on other Youtube channels. Lots of insulting behaviour. The hater was anonymous. Nothing unusual there. It's how I handled it that was different. A lot of video makers on Youtube, block Haters after their first comment, but I decided to get into a conversation with them. What happened in the end was pretty ironic. I will not spoil the surprise though.

After it was all over, I decided to make a video about it all, in a silent movie style. I used the music of Elton John for this one. This video was uploaded to my second channel on youtube. That channel is "Jeffhasspoken". I set this channel up to keep my other videos separate from my music vids.

The comments went ballisitc on this video and it ended up being the 2nd most discussed comedy video in the UK for the day, and is still getting a good flow of comments. A good number of people found it very, very funny. I didn't realise they would, but I'm very happy they do :)

If you've got a spare 10 minutes then watch the video, and find out what happened.

I'm going back to the music vids next.