Schadenfreude Daily Special

Schadenfreude is one of my favorite words. It also one of the many (and by many I mean four) phrases I learned while living in Germany, including “Biergarten,” “Where is the    (fill in the blank with English word that I wish I knew in German)   ?” and “Put your pants on.” One only need learn the essentials when traveling abroad. Schadenfreude means “to take pleasure in another’s pain.” It is the psychological explanation for why I cannot pass up an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Don’t judge—I know that you can’t peel yourself away from watching a dad, who, unlike the rest of us, cannot see that standing in the line of fire of his whiffle-ball-bat-wielding son is a terrible (but inevitably hilarious) decision. But be careful, my love of watching people face plant is certainly the reason that I fell down 30 concrete steps on my face in front of my new law school classmates. It’s probably also the reason that I fell in a window at a friend’s house, fell UP stairs at church camp and beefed it right in front of my boss on my second day of work. Apparently Schadenfreude is counterbalanced by Karma.

I am beginning to develop another theory on the cause of my unremitting clumsiness. Maybe I should have been paying better attention to Bob Saget and his videos all these years. Would I have fallen in a window if I had learned my lesson from the countless videos of future rocket scientists jumping off of carports into kiddy pools? Would staircases (and some escalators) be my sworn enemies if I had taken notes during my favorite music montages? Would I have certainly marked myself as the next partner at my firm if I had noted the hazards of a floor freshly mopped by a Maltese? I believe I must answer all of these questions in the negative. I would likely be less a few scars and fear of climbing stairs in public if I had learned while I laughed.

I am obviously not a chef, nor am I going to enrich your culinary skills. But, I do hope that you’ll take my daily trips and stumbles in my kitchen as a tutorial on experimenting without a guarantee of the end product, on using color as a basis for ingredient substitution and on carelessly teetering over the edge of total destruction without a frozen pizza safety net.  I hope that the lessons you can learn from my experience are as invaluable as my ability to tell people all over the world to put their pants on in their native tongues.  You really can’t put a price on that kind of knowledge. Most importantly, I hope you laugh at me. Lord knows I deserve it after having laughed at hundreds of clumsy and stupid people during my lifetime. Laughing at me may technically be Schadenfreude, but I’ve consented to being the object—so certainly you will avoid the Karmic effects… certainly.