Jane Espenson writes about removing dignity as a writing tactic:
Loss of dignity is hilarious.
…But the fact that something dignified is made laughable… well, we all know that that can be tragic, too. The kind of humor I've been talking about is just a few degrees skewed from poignancy, a point well understood by anyone who's ever had the misfortune to get very angry while wearing a chipmunk costume.
It's around this time every year I start seriously contemplating life as a hermit. Or a recluse. I'd make an excellent recluse. (Yeah, yeah, I hear the resounding cries: You do a passable imitation for most of the year anyway, Deb…. Hush. Quiet in the galleries already.)
Last night's dream involved me explaining, in patient and excruciating detail, why you couldn't name an eskimo Deborah. (I don't know why, but for some reason in my head Jodi was determined to do precisely this.) It was a true corker of a theory, mind you, tying in the evolution of the Hebrew language and the nature of deserts and date trees and palms and oases and desert foxes and bats (are there bats in the desert?), and even Jesus. I can't quite remember the details, and for that we can all be grateful. Except dream-Jodi, I suppose, who was left with an unnamed eskimo.
No, I don't know the way my head works either. Just be grateful you don't have to live in it!
Before now, I've never really worked in a job that was high-public-contact. Before now, I didn't really know what a fake smile felt like.
I've always been one of those "if you don't feel it, you don't smile" types. Which is not to say I was surly and unsmiling, quite the contrary. Just that jobs involving the first line of defence, as I sometimes come to think of my job, mean the public have an uncanny knack of dropping in, or calling on the phone, at precisely the worst moment. But it's my job to deal with them and keep them away from interrupting anyone else. I have to smile, whether I want to or not.
Hence the fake smile, although fake is the wrong word. Insincere comes closer. Plastic feels best: it's not that it's not a smile, it's just that there's no real meaning other than the perfunctory and the professional behind it. No warmth or genuine attempt to bond.
And boy does that feel different. My eyes never feel quite right: they're too hard, and they sit at the top of my cheeks like a blockage, and the smile feels like it's cracking because my cheeks are so surprised to be pulling out a warm gesture when the body chemicals have given no warning.
Because if there's one thing you absolutely must know, it's What's the scale?