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Nancy Mendelson

Words to Live By

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” so sings Andy Williams in his classic holiday standard. Maybe it was when the song was written back in 1963, but these days it’s a challenge to not go full Bah Humbug with each new Covid variant and the ensuing media sh*tstorm of conflicting information. It’s like walking on tectonic plates!

Being an optimistic person, lately, I’ve been catching myself going down the rabbit hole of negativity; but, when I do, I can climb back up by reminding myself of this old chestnut my mother shared with us back in the day; and it is now my pleasure to share it with you. Here you go:


The parents of identical twins are really troubled because, while the girls look exactly alike, their personalities could not be more different – one is a pessimist, the other an optimist-- and they want to understand how this could have happened, so they take them to a psychologist.


The psychologist puts each twin in a separate glass cubicle filled with horse poop, then walks out and joins the parents from an observation booth. Within minutes, the pessimist is sitting in a corner… angry, sullen and bemoaning her fate, being stuck in a room full of crap.


The optimist, on the other hand, is excitedly digging around and joyfully flinging the stuff in the air. In fact, she is so cheerful that the psychologist goes into the booth to ask her how she can be so incredibly happy given her current circumstances, to which she gleefully shouts,


” With all this sh*t there’s got to be a pony here somewhere!”

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