My New Joke: "Human Perspective"

   You know, humans have a lot of problems, but I think the biggest problems have to do with relativity and perspective. Let me give you a few examples...

  I have these friends who are a darling couple. They love each other, have good jobs, a nice house, and five wonderful children. The other day I am over at their house, in the kitchen, and the husband comes back from the supermarket. The wife says, "honey, did you remember to buy the Pepsi this time?" The husband slaps himself on the forehead and says, "oh my gosh, I am so sorry darling, I forgot again!" And she absolutely goes nuts, yelling and cursing at him, then storming off to their bedroom. 

  Now, they are both my friends, so I go off to the bedroom to comfort her. The husband tries to warn me not to because she is so angry. But when I get to the bedroom she is not angry at all, in fact she is in tears. Total despair, just weeping buckets of tears, and I ask her what's the matter? And she says," It's just so hurtful that he never thinks about me, about what I want. It's the most painful experience of my entire life!" And I say, "You mean you squeezed five watermelon-sized children through your walnut-sized vagina and your husband forgetting the Pepsi is the most pain you've ever been through?"

  You see what I mean? And it's not just women. I have this older friend who is a war hero. He spent seventeen and a half months in a bamboo cage in Vietnam being tortured every single day. One day, while I was with him, his old clunker of a car breaks down for the fiftieth time and his head slumps onto the steering wheel and he starts crying. I ask him what's up and he says, "This damn car of mine has given me the most pain of anything in my entire life." And I'm like, "Really? Worse than having slivers of bamboo forced under your fingernails and killing rats with your teeth to keep them from eating your diseased limbs?"

  See? People just can't seem to keep things in perspective. To a human whatever they are going through right now is either the worst or the best thing that's ever happened to them. Think about it; you know I'm right. So I read this book about "Childhood Development" and it said that "until a certain age children only live in the present, until they reach that age there is no past or future for them." And I thought, "well damn, nobody grows up until they are like eighty years old, then!"