You know a year is bad when there are memes about how people are using 2020 as a curse word, as in, “What in the 2020 is going on this year?” And that is precisely why humor is so important especially this year!
If you’re on social media, you know how much Covid19, the riots, the negative politics about the upcoming election and even Murder Hornets have permeated the atmosphere. So many people are practically choking on negativity and some are calling out for a break.
Humor is what has allowed me to remain sane through nine surgeries, several chronic illnesses, financial hardships, homeschooling, and having my kidlings leave the nest. Boo hoo…
Humor is what makes life fun. It’s what allows joy, relieves stress, and turns your frown upside down! They have done studies that show that watching funny movies help people recovering from surgery.
So much of the difficulties in life can actually have humor IN them! I often find a difficult, frustrating, or sad situation has a humorous side to it and I’ve devoted my life to looking for it at every turn. I suggest you do too!
Humor is a MUST for 2020! So, just another reason to come back to JoJoisms each and every week!
One of the first JoJoisms I wrote came about not only because I was feeling my age, but because Fibromyalgia was having a profound affect on me. I think I wrote this one when I was in my early 40s. Here’s what it looked like when I finally made a meme out of it:
I felt it needed an upgrade so here’s what it looks like now:
How much energy do you feel these days? And are you over or under 40?
Brand new JoJoism! Text at 4am: You awake? Insomnia: I take four things ever night to get me to sleep. Of course I’m awake! Now coherent is a whole different story. #insomnia #humor #insomniaproblems #insomniac #insomniamemes #insomniahumor #humor😂 #humorous #funnymemes #funny
In case you missed them on my Facebook page, I give you the best of my inspirational JoJoisms I shared in July!
So much angry rhetoric has been on social media since Covid19 that I felt it important to share this first JoJoism to remind us all how important it is to check facts and inspire us to listen to others point of view before making up our minds as to what the facts say. I think it was Mark Twain who said that facts are suborn things but statistics are more pliable. It’s important to find out which ones are the “facts” we deem true, but it’s also important to not to be pompous in how we discuss them.
The second one is inspiration for those facing their mountain in 2020. Very often, God has to get us to see our mountain in a different way in order that we may climb it.
The third came to me as I was looking at this picture and it occurred to me that when God leads us, He very often doesn’t allow us to see the entire trail at one time. We just see His light shining our way to where He’s leading.
The last two inspire us to make sure the path we are on is leading us to where God would have us go. These days post Covid are often confusing.
In the month of July, I posted several new and a few reposts of my humorous JoJoisms. Since Facebook won’t show most of my posts to but a few of my fans, I’ll recap them here for you!
If you ever want to check out what you probably missed on my Facebook fan page, just come on over to my JoJoisms blog and enjoy!
As many of you know, I LOVE my coffee! Gotta have my coffee every morning. Unfortunately, my body has a love/hate relationship with my coffee. One the one hand, it’s delicious! On the other hand…it’s shaky. You see, my Essential Tremors don’t like caffeine! Really ramps up the old jitters. However, for now I tread a delicate line of not enough coffee and too any jitters.
Coffee has resurfaced as a source of JoJoisms and here’s a Best of collection of my latest coffee JoJoisms both static and video. Here’s a look at the best JoJoisms I’ve created on the topic of coffee:
Coffee is the most important meal of the day! What’s in your #coffeemug? #coffee #coffeelover #coffeetime #coffeeaddict #coffeeholic #coffee_time #coffee☕ #coffeecoffeecoffee #coffees #coffeetime☕ #coffeelovers #coffeebreak #coffeequotes
I’ve been writing for almost 50 years. Wow! Seeing that in print sure does make me feel old! But what is old can be made new. God does that when we invite Jesus into our hearts. He’s doing that with my health now that I’ve been able to lose some weight and he’s been doing that with many things even through this difficult time in the world right now.
In honor of my word for the year, RESTORATION, I’m including a new segment here on JoJoisms for restoring old JoJoisms. You see, some of the JoJoisms I’ve written were created in visual format so many years ago that many of them need a little updating. Today’s memes are more sophisticated and elegant than they were years ago.
In addition, I originally started writing them for my Art of Eloquence communication blogsite. So, many of the first JoJoisms had that URL. However, some of the topics are better suited for this site or for my For the Love of Purple site. I’ll be updating them as I go and sharing them with you here.
The first one I wanted to revise is kind of my motto and the reason I started writing my JoJoisms. Here’s the before and after:
I lost count of how many JoJoisms I have written, but I started writing some of them when I was a teenager. I’m getting dangerously close to 60 so…that’s a LONG time! I thought you might like to take a little walk down memory lane with me.
This was the first JoJoism I ever actually wrote down. Up until then, I had just been voicing my funny commentary on life. At this point, I had been studying communication skills in college when this little gem crossed my mind. I didn’t actually create it in visual format until I was writing for my Art of Eloquence site.
At that time, I was trying to find fun ways of providing communication tips to my students and my Facebook fans who were mostly homeschoolers. It’s kind of ironic now, but I felt society was moving in a dangerous direction as social media and online groups began to spring up. People were emboldened to speak up, but often did so with anger because they didn’t need to look the person in the eye.
After a long while of sounding the alarm for gracious speech, I realized that people no longer took responsibility for the way in which they spoke. Freedom of speech began to take on a different hue. Instead of being a right that Americans have to say what’s on our mind, it became an excuse for speaking in anger or condescension or violence. And it’s only gotten to be more of a problem since Corona!
I felt a renewed leading from the Lord to champion speaking in grace as the more our nation is divided, the more we need to be effective in speaking out for what we believe is right. And that begins with us taking responsibility for how we speak as well as what we say.
It is the speaker’s job to be understood. It isn’t the listener’s job to figure out what the speaker meant. That means we need to speak in grace and speak directly to the audience we are addressing. That means knowing them and speaking to them instead of AT them. I’ll be addressing this more over on my Art of Eloquence blog each week, but I wanted to share the back story behind my very first JoJoism that I wrote down and created in visual format.
It’s ironic how timely this all is. I was inspired. I guess the Lord knew I’d be recommitting to both my JoJoisms blog and my Art of Eloquence blog just when it’s most important. What say you about the way people have been communicating with each other these days?
In just a couple years, I’ll have lived 60 years on this planet and, if there’s one thing I know, it’s success won’t look anything like you think it will! Success is NOT instantaneous, its chart doesn’t look like a straight line trending up, and it is always much more difficult than you think it will be.
I’ve had a lot of experience in this area and I have noticed that life is a lot like my computers have been. When they’re new (think YOUNG), they are fast and eager to please. They zip right along the Information Highway taking you to places yet unknown and bringing you joy and success in the little things of life.
Children ask simple questions and quickly learn their simple answers using that knowledge to catapult them to greater and greater feats of humanity. They walk, they talk, and their parents applaud each tiny victory with great enthusiasm!
After a while, life becomes a bit complicated. More thought is needed to come to a valid conclusion of how to respond to life’s challenges just as your computer’s hard drive becomes overloaded with files. It takes a bit longer to respond and often takes you to places unknown that you really didn’t want to be.
Years later when we are old, life has become so complicated that our hardware burns out. It’s at this point that we need to find workarounds in order to do what used to take us a shorter amount of time in our youth. Legs and backs ache so we walk slowly and have to wait for other transportation in order to get where we are going.
In addition, life will throw a monkey wrench into your plans like a detour in the navigation of your car. Like a program that won’t do something we want so we are forced to figure out another way to get where we want our computer to go.
Success is a LOT like that!
Have you ever heard a success story where anyone accomplished ANYthing without detours, roadblocks, or difficulty? No! And the more amazing the success, the more of those they encountered.
I’ve built several websites, businesses, and ministries from the ground up. Want to guess if I’ve ever encountered detours, roadblocks, or problems? Of course! I’ve shared them on this blog site. I built a huge purple fan page on Facebook that had nearly 9000 fans and then Facebook took my admin status away. And not only from that fan page, but ALL OF THEM! After petitioning for over a year, they gave them back!
I’d built a very successful Art of Eloquence speech communication business selling hard copy books for homeschoolers. Then one day, there was a huge push to provide testing for each batch of materials you made. The law said you had to make sure the ink or whatever was safe. Most major publishers thought it was an extra expense they could absorb. Small publishers like me couldn’t afford to test every 100-batch of books we had published so many of us went to digital format.
The younger generations used to the Information Superhighway to “google” and get instant information often don’t understand what it takes to reach success. Our Microwave Society doesn’t want to wait for results. They want them now! But that’s not how success works.
To achieve success, one must understand that your goal will be considerably harder than you think it will be, more complicated than you’re ready for, and take longer than you ever imagined. You’ll need patience, endurance, and flexibility to change gears when things go sideways. You’ll also need to be ready for the outcome to look significantly different than you had dreamed and that, more often than not, this is for your good and from your God!
That fan page grew to over 10, 000 fans during that year! That Art of Eloquence site has been providing materials for almost 19 years and has included materials for children and adults on many different speech communication topics– and it’s about to expand! Art of Eloquence materials have been endorsed by The Old Schoolhouse Magazine and recommended by the Home School Legal Defense Association.
If you shift your mindset from instant and easy to slow and difficult, you’ll be ready for the journey and better able to adapt to its ever-changing roadways. Take it from one who’s been there…one who is currently typing on a computer whose hard drive is on life support and was given 24 hours to live…about a week ago.
I’ve been creating memes for years, especially the last year since I hadn’t been able to post on my fan pages on Facebook. But I noticed that Canva had a way to create videos or what are really animated memes. Here’s one of my JoJoisms I created about my love of coffee:
Coffee is the most important meal of the day! What’s in your #coffeemug? #coffee #coffeelover #coffeetime …
Once I created them, it was easy to post them to Facebook and Instagram, but I couldn’t find a way to download them to my laptop in order to add them here. Well, I figured out a way to do it using the Facebook link and my JoJoisms blog editor! Yay me!! I’m a nontechie in a techie world, but I have emerged triumphant!
JoJoisms are my way of dealing with life’s difficulties. They are my quirky, humorous and sometimes profound commentary about life.
JoJoisms have no calories, no artificial preservatives and they are hypoallergenic! No JoJos were harmed in the making of JoJoisms. Void where prohibited by law.