The Jennifer Blogs

I’m definitely a glass half-full kind of person, so it’s hard for me to understand how people can be so pessimistic sometimes. My son, for instance. He’s got one of the worst outlooks on life of anyone I’ve ever met! I’m not sure where he gets its from, but it’s difficult to try to give encouragement to someone who really doesn’t want it. Ever try to cheer up a pessimist?

My daughter, on the other hand, is an incredible optimist. She always looks on the bright side of things. Suzy Sunshine. How she and her brother were made by the same two people is beyond me. Something somewhere went berserk. They are as opposite as two people can possibly be.

Last night at dinner I asked my son, daughter and husband to name one thing that had happened to each of us this week. The goal is to make sure we are all paying attention to one another’s lives. I did this exercise once last week. I made my son go first. When he had to name something that happened to each of us, he was stumped and struggled through. I then asked my daughter to do the same thing. When my son realized this was the same thing I did last week, he said, “Oh, I get it. This is to make sure we’re paying attention to each other, or to make sure that I’m paying attention.” (He thought I was targeting him because he really doesn’t pay very close attention to what we’re all doing from day to day.) That gives you an idea of his attitude. My daughter struggled a little, but she said, “That’s okay, Jean-Luc, we’ll get better at it!”

Reminds me of an old joke about a pessimist and an optimist who were each placed in rooms full of horse manure. The pessimist cried and cried, depressed that he was surrounded by the smell, the sight, the icky feeling of manure. The optimist, on the other hand, was gratefully digging through the manure, excited and giggling. The psychiatrist asked the optimist what he/she was so happy about. The optimist said, “With all this crap, there’s got to be a horse under here somewhere!”