Mel Brooks, of all people, gives the best definition of these terms.  It is concise and full of great insight, a frank and brutal snapshot of our lives here.  Tragedy is when I break my fingernail, comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.

I haven’t been sleeping well, it will no doubt sadden you to learn.  It isn’t that my sleep is fitful, or that I have insomnia, I just don’t get to bed at a reasonable hour and set my alarm, lately, five hours from when I finally get to bed.  To do otherwise risks switching night and day, sleeping all day and fussing at night until the dark rooms here are flooded with a sickening light and I retreat to my dark sleeping coffin.  I’d rather not go that far, though I am, without question a night person.

After several days of this short sleep I hit the wall yesterday.  By 11:00 pm I felt like I was moving underwater.  At midnight I took a dose of a new sleep product called Zzzquil, just to be sure I didn’t start getting energetic and alert at 1:00, as often happens no matter how tired I am all day.  By 1:00 I was in bed, groggy, drowsy, sleepy, sleeping.  Alarm set for 10:30 to have a nice catch up on sleep session before conducting the animation workshop with a new group this afternoon.

At 1:47 there was a sudden commotion near my head, my cellphone rattling and cackling.  It was my cousin Jon, my only living first cousin.  I knew at once that his father had just passed away.  My broken fingernail, being woken from a sound sleep at an hour I’d normally be awake, ironic and all that.  But there was nothing very comical about my poor uncle falling slowly into a manhole and dying, after two weeks unresponsive in the hospital.  Nor was my cousin laughing.