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What does a Hungarian joke have to do with your life script?
Morris: three tigers and two elephants
There are a few jokes that I brought with myself from Hungary… that describe the human condition very well.
One of them is an elementary school joke: Morris is asked to say the multiplication table… with 8.
He starts to chant… lalala-lala lalala… lalala lala lalala…
What is this? Asks the stunned teacher? Oh, I remember the tune, but can’t recall the words… answers Morris.
Several of my students, maybe all, got stuck in an childhood age, resulting from a decision to fix a traumatic incident.
— One almost choked on a grape before her father rescued her… but after he finished a business call on the phone… while she was choking.
She is a pretty girl, but she thought that had she been smart and intelligent, then she would have been saved. But she doesn’t know the words of smart and intelligent… she only knows the tune…
— Another one was locked into a car on a hot summer day, while his father forgot about him and took a nap. He was saved… but… he decided that had she been somebody, not a nobody, she would have been saved faster.
She looks at people who are somebody, but she sees only what they do now, visibly, not what it took for them to be able to do that… and no surprise, he piles up failure after failure, because he never learned. He also knows the tune, but never learned the words.
— A third one was the oldest of three children. Once the other two, both girls were born, he got no attention… he was no more the beloved child. He decided that he was born the wrong gender, had he been born a girl, he would have been loved.
He looked at what girls did… and they whined, and they were needy, and he started to emulate them… Whether he was born gay or not: is still a question: muscle test says: no… he started out to be a boy, but his desire to get what girls got created an epigenetic shift…
He knew the tunes, but his body was still a boy’s… what a bummer.
Maybe the joke doesn’t work quite as well with him as with the previous examples.
— A fourth lived in Thailand. They had servants, among them a ‘chauffeur’ who once too this…
