I haven’t been listening to much music this week, except Jars of Clay’s “Good Monsters” during my workout on Tuesday, and a couple jazz CDs while I worked yesterday afternoon. Instead, I’ve been listening to Jim Gaffigan.

Our girls don’t want me to go to the movies with them anymore. I’d like to think it’s because they’re getting older, but, really, it’s been like this for a while now. See, I embarrass them. Not because I don’t dress cool enough for them. No, it’s because I laugh too much.

When you’re used to reading fake news, sometimes you forget what’s real. I discovered The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, awhile back. Because the iPad app looks similar to other news apps, it’s easy to confuse real news with made-up news. The Onion is sort of like “Weekend Update” on SNL, which I haven’t seen in a long time.

What makes reading books for the purpose of reviewing them is that normally you try to read them quickly, which isn’t always the best approach. I read through Phil Callaway’s To Be Perfectly Honest far too quickly and probably didn’t appreciate fully the premise. To be perfectly honest myself, Callaway’s book is better fit for bathroom reading than for sitting on leather chair in your study and smoking a pipe while sipping brandy. I don’t have a leather chair, study, pipe, or any brandy. But if I did, they wouldn’t make up my setting for reading Honest.

Humor is not so easy to find in the Bible. Maybe it’s the cultural differences. Maybe ancient punch lines are easy to miss in modern times. But because I love humor in writing and in movies, and even in music, when I happen upon it in Scripture, I always make a note of it. I’d never regarded the Apostle Paul as funny. Read the book of Romans and you’ll likely scratch your head at the headiness of his logic. And don’t use “The Message”—that’d be cheating.

Depending on the tone of the post, I try to bring in humor. I’ve found that I’m not usually funny the first time around. It takes rereading my post several times before I find my comedic voice. It’s like this in real life too. I think back on conversations and how much funnier I could have been, if only I could get another take.

This Thanksgiving I’ve been thinking about some of my extended family, those I rarely see these days, since we haven’t been home around the holidays in over five years. When I was a kid, I wanted to be like my uncle Brad. He was different from my dad in so many ways, different from my other uncles too. He was pretty fit, not carrying a beer belly like my dad; he looked trim in his white-collar job clothes. He also seemed to enjoy spending time with his kids: my cousins Shannon, Megan, and Jordan. At times he was a kid himself. Aunt Katy used to babysit my sister and me, so I remember him on his lunch break drinking milk and eating Oreos.