I was doing mundane work today at home, when I got to thinking about fun and when I have it. As I thought, I realized that I don't experience it often.
Maybe I need to work on that.

For me, I remember high school and cheerleading as fun, dancing at the Starlight Ballroom on the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ as fun, and those few moments when my eighth graders were both engaged and enjoying a lesson designed to amuse and captivate them as fun for me for sure and for them I hope.

How about you? What are your must "fun" memories or present doings. Sounds unimportant but in realilty fun or joy or both are what makes living worthwhile.

Ann

not to be morbid but my brother just died a horrible death from lung cancer, everything is relative. i just live for today and not worry about tomorrow, life is too short.

but to be realistic, gardening. and signing up on facebook and reconnecting with old friends. watching the new season of MAD MEN. helping a neighbor, friend. discussing the stock market, investing, politics, environment with friends. splurging at trader joes. life isn't great but i'm alive and there's that slight hope of a better treatment in the next 5 years. i have to admit being retired, grown kids, single, no mortgage removes a lot of potential stress.

plus living in seattle, it's a good place

Soccertese,
I am so very sorry. Please accept my sincere condolences. I know how it feels to lose a brother, and my heart aches for you.
Jean

I guess I should be more exact regarding "fun". I don't mean contentment or pleasure, I mean really having fun. Losing yourself in the moment, feeling that exhilaration, that joy. Once my husband, who had been elected to a union presidency, was facing a recall election. Everyone, or almost everyone, thought he would lose and be recalled. However, he won by a large margin. The relief at knowing he was not recalled was such that when I saw him after the vote, a feeling of "Hey, this is ultimate!" was fun, fun, fun - we were just that overjoyed.

I am sorry about your brother. It does put things in perspective.

Like you, I do enjoy Mad Men and am waiting patiently for 10:00 to watch it!

Ann

trick question?
heck with fun, lets get rid of he profound sadness that is a part of so many of our lives.

on mad men dvds, commentaries by actors/matt weinman/etc. are funny and as good/better than the show. john hamm and the guy that plays sterling are hilarious

As a matter of fact, yesterday I had lunch with a new friend that I met because we both have Parkinson's. I was very nervous before the meeting, almost as if it were a blind date (I remember those with such horror). But we met in a restaurant and connected immediately. We ate, we told stories and we laughed, outloud and heartily, for the entire two and a half hour lunch.

I'm lucky, my family is very funny and we laugh a great deal. It is a survival technique that has stood us in good stead through many difficult times. Finding something funny even if it is macabre or in poor taste, keeps us from becoming too somber or gloomy. I am so grateful that this is the way we have grown up, laughing in good times and maybe even more in bad times.

I don't know if it can be learned, but I would hope so.

Pam, I think my family is a lot like yours - we laugh and joke about things that my husband's family would be in horror over. After my father and aunt died within a few months of each other - with me as the designated point of contact for all estate matters. My mother told me she "was next" and I told her I deserved a break. So I firmly told her that she was not allowed to die for an entire year. But after that she could do as she wished... We both laughed.

Jean

Laughter has rescued me from a black hole more than once. I truly believe the act of laughing is theraputic in itself. My mother is 91 and has been inconsolably angry since my father died in 2006. My daughter recently told me if I ever began to behave like my mother she will put me in a nursing home, and it would not be a nice one. We find that funny, I realize some wouldn't.

I hope I didn't sound dismissive before. Having fun is so essential to having any quality of life that i believe it should be sought out as diligently as nourishment. The isolation that is so closely associated with PD is often responsible. The more removed we are from each other the easier it is to move farther away still. Fun, or any other form of enjoyment requires human associations. No matter how uncomfortable we are or how much we dread social enteraction, avoiding it is worse. Community is the first (and most difficult) step. I know how lucky I am to have a family that forces me away from the solitary life. I would wish it for everyone.

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

The actual advice here is technically a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's "good uncle" Alex, but Vonnegut was nice enough to pass it on at speeches and in A Man Without A Country. Though he was sometimes derided as too gloomy and cynical, Vonnegut's most resonant messages have always been hopeful in the face of almost-certain doom. And his best advice seems almost ridiculously simple: Give your own happiness a bit of brainspace.