4 am text from a kindred spirit
I laughed out loud this morning. Belly laughs at 4:00am.
Why I was awake and what caused me to laugh is not nearly so important as my finding a kindred spirit also awake at that hour. My roommate, whom I share an apartment with while we work out of town, had responded to a comment.
Our experiences in towns hundreds of miles apart reminded me that we all have more in common than is apparent. This post has little to do with ‘woe is me’ and a lot more about humour and our individual sense of it. The best writers of comedy find a shared truth, pull it out of the closet or from behind the couch and brandish it to an end so relatable everyone in the audience is nodding or nudging their partners. Agony shared is agony lessened, specially done in large groups, then it’s hilarious.
Hilarity, now there’s a good word, is defined as extreme amusement expressed by laughter. Hell yeah. It’s been a stressful couple of weeks but to be clear my stress is minor in the vast scheme of what was 2020.
Laughter is my go to stress relief and very thankfully the
default setting for my immediate family or I’d likely be
paying for a lot of therapy. For them, not me,
that IS how it works, right?
Vomit on a popcorn ceiling? Your toddler paints with eggs at 2am? Parent/ teacher meetings, operating room…
You can see where I’m going here. The more inappropriate the better. Did I mention that I’ve never been to a funeral? Nopity, nope that’s double jeopardy right there. The hilarity of the ugly cry would do me in socially, perhaps even physically.
So at that early hour commiserating about the state of our separate households upon our return, my pal observed that it appeared we’d have to return home quarterly to clean the toilets…
Guf-faw (noun)
– a loud and boisterous laugh.
