6: Archer

Archer is in it's second season right now on FX, and it's hilarious. It's all about the main character, Sterling Malory Archer, the world's most dangerous secret agent. Sterling is an agent for ISIS: International Secret Intelligence Service in New York City and his mother is the head of ISIS. Lana Kane is the other top secret agent who also happens to be Archer's ex girlfriend. The whole show is completely ridiculous and funny with a lot of dark humor and sarcasm.
At first I didn't really care for the show until a friend of mine convinced me to watch a whole episode, by which the end of it I became a fan of the show. With Archer's smooth pick-up lines and constant vanity, it shows that with even the most important moments of your life are better off with some silly humor.

5: The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

This book of short stories is translated into English from Japanese and it's a little on the dark side of humor. Most of the stories start out with really strange situations of Japanese people and their lives. At first, it was hard to completely get into reading it, but after the first story ended I didn't really want to put it down. Since then I've read it multiple times. The stories are so good that I find it hard to pick my favorites, but if I had to it would be Sleep and The Second Bakery Attack.
Sleep is about a women who finds herself unable to sleep for seventeen days. In that seventeen days she begins to do things while her husband is at work and her son is at school that isn't exactly her normal routine. She ends up drinking bourbon, eating a ton of chocolate, rereading the book Anna Karenina, and going for swims in the gym pool. This story reminds me of my days in high school where I would find myself doing random things due to insomnia. I feel like I could relate because it's something you don't want to tell anybody because it's nice to be out of the normal routine.

4: Sleeping in the Forest by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

I've studied Mary Oliver's poems before and I picked this one because I haven't ever read it before. Mary Oliver is a transcendentalist and most of her poems are about nature. This particular one seems to be about sleeping on the forest floor. In the first few lines she is conveying that she is in one with nature so that she feels completely comfortable just lying down on the earth of the forest like nature is an entity and they are old friends. This makes me wish I felt that way about nature.
The last few lines make me think that while sleeping she became one with mother nature in spirit and in mind. It's about the "luminous doom" of having to wake up and be separated once more from nature. This is how I feel about sleep in general, which is that waking up means I have to go back to reality which isn't as sweet as feeling like you're being part of the world, with your mind shut down. To think of it that way could also mean a symbolism of death. As you shut down your body, you become one with the very nature that made you a separate entity.