Laughter

Sitting at lunch today with Michelle and Megan - very fun and interesting people in my life - we started an interesting conversation about laughter. The conversation mainly consisted of storytelling and mocking, but that's pretty much commonplace for most of our conversations. Laughter is quite strange if you really think about it... something is so funny that your body simply has no other way to contain the funny thought or circumstance than to blurt out a weird combination of awkward sounds. Maybe that's why so many laughs only create more laughs because they are simply that ridiculous.

It seems that everyone has a laugh for different situations. Let's take Michelle. When she thinks something is funny she will do her "dolphin laugh", just imagine Flipper with red curly hair and much cuter and you have it about right. When she thinks something is sort of funny she will simply "ha" a few times with a rather low pitch. When she thinks something is really funny she will make a ridiculous looking face, open her mouth noislessly, look down, and then a much louder quicker dolphin laugh emerges. This is quite entertaining. There are many more variations of laughter that she does but I have neither the time or the space. Michelle is famous for the "that's funny" saying. Whenever I hear someone say this with no trace of laughter in their voice, I simply cannot believe them. Funny will come out, but not in a bland statement.

Megan is another one with laugher full of variety. Her hardest laughter is my favorite variation. She is my roommate, so there are of course many opportunities for her to laugh her hardest because I am so funny... just kidding. But I have seen her laugh really hard. Most of the time I witness this event I am sitting across from her on my bed. She will lean forward on her bed, where she is sitting, squint her eyes up, looked shocked, open her mouth, make a few voiceless laughs, and then rock around laughing out loud. She often tears up when she laughs this hard. Very funny. Then of course there is her "I want to laugh but I'm not going to face", you have to see it to truly appreciate it, describing it would take away from its splendor. She has one of the most unconvincing fake laughs you have ever heard. She will squish up her face and laugh like an old nerd - again you have to see it to truly understand and agree with me.

I guess in publicly, or however public this blog is, poking fun at my friends I need to involve myself in this. I have many laughs, many. It all started with the donkey laugh which I adopted as a younger person in grade school. A portion of that laugh still lives on in my vault of laughs, but it is much more mature now. The way I laugh now comes out in many forms, but the one in which we were discussing today at lunch is a laugh that has not been replicated since. One night in South Africa with Michelle and my sister we got into a laugh attack. It was late at night and we were all a little out of it - so when I started laughing in cycles of "hahaha, hehehe, hohoho" the humor of it got blown way out of proportion and Michelle will never let me live it down. Another laugh that my sister would add to the list if she could would be my most recent, still unreplicated laugh, that took place a week ago at Chipotle. It was a very windy afternoon and I was wearing a dress. As I was stepping into my cousins, overly large truck, the wind started to pick up my dress in a bad way. So I blurted out a completely uncontrollable "Woohoohoo" and it happend to be a very low pitched "Woohoohoo". My sister of course laughed her head off. And being herself, a major STASM (small things amuse small minds) she kept on trying to repeat my laugh and in so doing would crack herself up. She did this repeatedly until we arrived home.

I love laughter and I'm so thankful that God created us to react to funny situations with it! I think it probably makes Him laugh too.