Good morning Kristan, that was too funny. You know what, I probably would have thought you were a crazy woman, if I saw you laughing at a “poor old lady” without knowing the story. I have no funny stories to share at this time, so I will have to wait like the rest of the masses to get my hands on TNBT! Le sigh!!!

Emmanuel, I probably would have thought you were crazy too. Oh, the joy of parenting. Have a great day everyone!It is back to the daily grind for me. Meeting in about an hour. Yippee for me. I really wish I could be on vacation for the rest of my life. Actually, I take that back…bad karma there.

Peace and love,
Paula R.

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We did that with a piano, Tonya…You’d think someone would’ve had a tape measure, but no.

Paula, I feel your pain! But vacation wouldn’t feel like vacation if we had it all the time, right? Or so I console myself…

Emmanuelle, I’m glad I’m not the only one to laugh at a loved one! And don’t worry about your spelling. It’s cold, it’s morning. I understand.

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My grandmother had the reputation in our family of laughting inappropriately. One time as a very young lady, my mom was coming down the stairs for a big date and she fell, tumbling down half a flight … my grandmother laughed so hard she cried. And then asked “did you ruin your stockings?”

I’m not so cavalier, although I do have an appreciation for black humor (which I think every ICU nurse develops). And I laugh at things like “Ace Ventura” and “Dumb and Dumber.” [[sigh]]. Why can’t I be more sophisticated??

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Good to know I’m not alone, ladies! Marie, I can only imagine that poor guy in church…and being in church, it’s just so much funnier. Margo, I too laughed at Dumb & Dumber…Elf is one of my favorite movies, and it’s certainly not highbrow humor, is it? EAP, yikes! Now that’s a time when laughing is really not the best medicine…not when it keeps people from taking you to the hospital!

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I laugh at my husband’s wildlife adventures–specifically, his lifelong enmity with raccoons. Now, I understand that raccoons are serious business. They can be rabid, they’re destructive, they scavenge through trash, and they attack and sometimes drown pets. I know it’s not fun when they fling garbage all over the yard and my husband has to clean it up. But somehow, when my husband flies into a complete rage at the adorable little masked bandits, I laugh uproariously while he curses.

I laughed when they broke into our all-but-padlocked garbage cans. I laughed when he had to buy coyote urine powder to keep them away. I laughed even harder when he explained to me that the reason these little animals make him DERANGED is because when he went camping as a child, they broke into his tent and stole his Twix Bar–the one piece of candy he’d been hoarding for himself.

Of course, all of this inappropriate laughter was bad karma for me. One night, when he was sick with a fever, we heard a raccoon on the deck, and my husband started frothing at the mouth about them. I wanted him to get some sleep, but I knew he wouldn’t stop until the raccoon was gone, so I said, “Just stay in bed. I’ll go down and chase him off, even if he is adorable.”

“Just tap on the sliding glass door,” he said, grumpy as hell. “Make a lot of noise, and when you see him go, don’t forget to put whatever he dragged out of the trash bin back into it.”

So I went down the stairs, flipped on the porch light, and did indeed see the cutest raccoon staring up at me. “Go away, Raccoon!” I said eloquently, then banged on the glass. “Shoo!”

The little guy scampered off, but kept looking over his shoulder as if he’d left something behind. I saw that he’d managed to pull a bag of bottles out of the garbage can, so I stepped out onto the deck in my slippers and housecoat. I picked up the lid to the garbage can with one hand, the bag of bottles with the other, and winged it with dramatic force, into the garbage bin just before attempting to put the lid on.

This is when a giant fanged monster leapt up from the garbage can at me and nearly bit my face! Okay, so really, it was a second raccoon that had been hiding in the garbage can, and angered when I bashed him over the head with bottles–but how was I to know that in the middle of the night?

I screamed. (Do I even need to say that? You know I did.) I screamed like I was being murdered, dropped the lid, and fled back into the house, my knees weak as I slammed the sliding glass door shut.

Moments later, I heard the hysterical laughter of my husband, who had dragged his fevered body out of bed and was now standing at the foot of the stairs, wheezing with laughter.

“There was another one! You didn’t tell me they hunt in packs! He was hiding! And he’s huge, and he’s rabid, and he tried to attack me!” I think I said these and other foolish things. I was so scared I really can’t remember.

At this point, my husband is holding his ribs from laughing so hard, but he decides to be the valiant hero and go outside to confront the rabid raccoon–or at least scare him away.

And that’s when he peeks inside the garbage can and informs me that inside it is the tiniest, most adorable and scared raccoon he has ever seen, and don’t I want to come look?

But no. I can’t even _walk_. My knees are still threatening to buckle at any moment with residual fear. And besides, I am still convinced that the raccoon is a fiend. A demon raccoon!

So I guess raccoons are no laughing matter now

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As a biology professor, I shouldn’t have laughed. Not right in front of the student. But it was too damn funny.

I gave an Anatomy and Physiology practical – you know, the kind of test where the prof labels different muscles, bones, organs? Well, we’d covered glands and I figured I’d throw in an easy one and label the two ovaries attached to the uterus in the female torso… I’ll repeat right now that it was a very obvious FEMALE anatomical model – chest and all. And they WERE enrolled in the class, after all.

Our labs were 3 hours, so I was grading after the 1 hour lab test was done while the students worked on another lab project. I arrived at the test of the hippest, coolest gym rat guy in my class… the kind that always had a comeback to any comment. I’m ticking off the questions, right, wrong, right, etc. when I come to this question. Instead of ‘ovaries’ he’s written ‘testes’.

I crack up. (Nearly fell off my stool.) I’m laughing so hard and so loud that the students turn to me. My eyes teared up.

“What?” they ask.

I turn to Rob (or so we’ll call him) and gasp for breath, brushing away tears. “Since when do men start keeping their testes in their abdominal cavity next to their uterus?” I ask before bursting out into laughter again, shocking both myself and my students.

The whole class fell into gales of laughter. No one else had missed the easy give-away question. Rob blushed the reddest I’ve ever seen him. Beet red. And for once, he had no smart-ass comeback.

I told him that day that I was putting the same question on the final lab practical and that he’d better get it right next time.

He did.

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How about laughing at a funeral?

A woman my mother knew growing up passed away. I had never met her or her family. I have no idea why my mom would drag a teenager to a stranger’s funeral, but I suspect it was because she didn’t want to be stuck sitting by her crazy mother who was also in attendance.

It was very quiet when we sit down in the pew behind my grandmother and her newest husband. My grandma wears hearing aids and has lost the ability to whisper along with her her ability to hear. She turns around and in a very loud stage whisper shouts, “That’s Carol over there. Can you believe it? She’s a BLONDE now!” As the whole church turns around to stare at us, that’s when the laughter began to build inside me with no possible outlet.

Cut to about 15 minutes into the service. My grandma turns around and hands my mom a pile of coupons she’d been saving while “whispering”, “There’s one for dog food in there!” The pain in my chest from hold back my guffaws is growing ever more acute.

At a particularly touching moment in the service when even I shed a tear, my mom hauls out her purse pack of Kleenex, hands me one, then taps my grandmother on the shoulder to hand her a tissue. Grandma grabs the pack, takes one look at it, then THROWS it back over her shoulder where it proceeds to sail over our heads and into the lap of the guy sitting behind us. I’m about to lose it, but it would be unforgivable to laugh while the woman’s children are giving her eulogy! So I’m sweating profusely and choking back those explosive “Bwah ha ha’s” that are literally burning my lungs and threatening at every second to burst out – my seals are only so strong. I’m running through every horrible mental picture I can think of to kill
the urge to laugh. Dead puppies. Those dreams where you show up at school naked. Dying at a stranger’s funeral from a laugh caught crosswise in my chest.

I don’t remember the last half of the service, but my mom and I stumble outside and into the car where we break down laughing. There we sit with tears flowing, laughing that laugh where no air comes out and your face turns red from the pressure and you nearly (or sometimes, who are we kidding) pee your pants. My mom couldn’t see to drive, so we sat in the car looking to all the world like we’re in the throws of grief, unable to sit upright while we “cried”.

My grandmother is gone now, but my mom and I still end up in hysterics when we think of that awful day.

The other time that really stands out is when I was in a graduate level class for my speech pathology major. The dean of the department was giving a lecture on lingualectomies – people who’ve had their tongues removed. I’m sitting smack in the middle of an amphitheater lecture hall while slide after slide of gaping mouths with no tongues are projected onto a 15 foot screen at the front of the room. Shameful but true, my friend and I got the giggles. While I gave my all to hold it in, I lost the battle and out came this horrible long snort. The dean stops the class and says with unimaginable scorn, “Ceci, please leave until you can control yourself.” It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life walking out in front of 100+ people because I was laughing at tongueless maws. Humiliating.

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That post was hilarious!

Most recently I was sitting in a hospital emergency room while my step-father was being checked out (turns out it was a gall bladder attack and he had surgery the next day). I had a book with me (Jonathan Tropper’s “This is Where I Leave You”, in case you were wondering) and was reading it. People were in there all worried about their assorted injuries and illnesses and I was laughing hysterically. I’m pretty sure they suspected I had a brain injury of some kind.

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This is all my son’s fault! One day during Christmas break me and the boys decided to visit my husband at his office. My son, a huge fan of Austin Powers at the time, would constantly whisper in my ear ‘hey baby’ or ‘groovy’ in Austin voice which would automatically make me start laughing hysterically. I could not help it!! Anyway, we were at the office, an office where you have to walk through several offices of clerks and admin assistants etc. to get to the boss’s office. And sure enough my son starts talking Austin to me and I started laughing so hard I started wetting my pants and could NOT control it. My husband leaped out of his chair grabs me and pushes me into the bathroom but i can’t unbutton my pants fast enough and well, i was all wet down to my ankles. Needless to say, my evil children were thrashing about on the floor, hysterical. Then his secretary knocks on the door asking if everything was okay which gets us all laughing harder. I was paralyzed trying to figure out how I was ever going to get out of the building! OMG. So my husband and sons crowd around me like they were my bodyguards and i was the star and we exit, me waving goodbye to everyone as they push me down the hall like i’m on furniture gliders. My boys still haven’t let me forget that one!

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It’s too late for me to think of a good story, so until I do I’ll content myself by saying:

Arrested Development! I LOVED that show (Tobias saying ‘This is the last time you’ll ever see these’ while lifting his shirt – priceless), and my husband never ever got what attracted me to it. I decided to stay with him for the sake of the children.

And: I am very, very dubious about the allegation that TNBT was penned by one Kristan Higgens. There is a CAT on the cover!

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I think your mother and my grandmother might just be related, Kristan. Which would make you and I related, and would explain why I always end up laughing when my grandmother falls down.

Because–I’ll admit it–I do that too.

I love my grandmother, I really do. She may be more than sixty years older than I am, but she is fierce. She’s always had more energy than me, even when I was a kid. This actually used to scare me–old people weren’t supposed to lead more active lives than children! But I think it’s why I’m able to laugh at her so much.

The best story involving her and falling down is one that’s been repeated in the family so often that almost everyone can recite it. My mother used to have a rich friend. When I was… oh, fifteen or so… the friend bought a cottage. I swear, that cottage was at least twice as large as my house! Anyway, the friend was going on vacation for part of the summer, and she said we could use the cottage for a week or two. So Grandma, Mom, my cousin Megan and I travelled up there together. The weather was beautiful, and we got into the habit of spending all day on the dock.

My grandmother liked to take a chair out to sit on. You know those cheap plastic chairs that you can buy in white and dark green? She’d take one of those, because it was light and easy to carry. She’d plonk it down about halfway down the length of the dock and read her newspaper.

Now, the dock was made of wood, and there were little gaps between the planks. One day, Mom, Megan and I decided to get a snack. We reached the part of the deck where Grandma was sitting and paused to talk to her. For some reason, she decided to turn her chair while she was talking to us. Grandma’s not exactly a master of multi-tasking, so she wasn’t really paying attention to what she was doing with the chair. She didn’t lift it up high enough, and the feet got caught in the gaps in the wood. She kept turning anyway, and when she sat down, the legs were twisted.

The second she let go of the arms, they untwisted themselves and the chair tipped over, falling backwards into the water and taking Grandma with it. I saw it happen in slow motion. The chair twisted, then started tipping… and Grandma, realizing what was happening, reached for my cousin to try and regain her balance… but instead of reaching for Megan’s arm, she reached for her face, and seemed to claw at it… so Megan pushed Grandma’s arm off and Grandma’s fall accelerated.

Grandma ended up in the water, still on the chair, with her torso, part of her arms and part of her legs submerged. Her feet were still resting on the deck and she’d managed to keep her head above the water.

I should’ve been helping her up, but I could not stop laughing. She looked so funny! My mother started yelling at me to help Grandma up, Megan started yelling about nearly being scratched in the face, and my grandmother started yelling about the fact that she was wearing her orthodics in her sandals and that they couldn’t get wet! And all I could do was laugh–laugh so hard that I clutched my stomach and fell down on the dock, turning tomato red from the exertion.

Eventually, I pulled myself together and helped my mother to pull my grandmother back up onto the dock. But the damage had already been done, and for the rest of that vacation, I couldn’t look at that particular spot on the dock without getting the giggles.

I also tend to laugh my head off when my dog bumps into things, (don’t ask why he still loves me, because I honestly don’t know) but that’s a story for another day.

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