LMAO – Laughing My Abs Off

A friend of mine reminded me yesterday that life is the funniest joke I’ve ever heard. I’ve always had a difficult time coming up with standardized and canned banter. When giving a presentation, I can never remember a good joke to start out. I usually begin with a good story of a life event. Nothing is better than a good “location quotation” to break the ice.

Yesterday started out just like every other day. Get up, let the dog out, make the coffee. Never would I have realized that it would be the day I laughed harder than I ever have ever laughed before. It all started when my partner, my visiting friend, and I began setting up Twitter accounts. I have to admit the catalyst event was the realization by my friend that Crystal Chappell had set up an account herself (with the help of some tech savvy purple dreamers). Knowing that Crystal was in need of barbecue and was going to wash her car was just the breaking news required to chip away at my resistance to this minutia of micro blogging and social networking. Remember, I AM the original OTALIA widow…if you can’t beat them join them. Selfishly, it can’t hurt the old blog site, either, to follow and be followed.

I have read quite a bit about Twitter and the propensity for new users to misuse the correct terms of service. Trying to remember that a post is a “tweet” turns some of the most educated and accomplished people I know into “twits”. And thus this day of continued hilarity began. My partner of many years and genius in the financial world just could not get the hang of the lingo. My compliment of patience was waning as I was asked to respond to practice “tweeters, twits, twitters”, and then the ultimate…”twats”. All I could do was look at her and ponder, are you serious? And yes, she was mistakenly serious. It was the brain just refusing to get it right. Then I started thinking, “Twatter”, the lesbian social networking site; it made perfect sense. Now, I’m sure this has come up in conversations all over the Saphic world. I’m not so narcissistic to believe the concept is unique to my sometimes juvenile and more often dirty mind ala mindschmootz. It’s just funny in respect to the word and the community and what this site would look like. As we went deeper into the schmootz of our collective psyches, the possibilities became endless and the laughter prolonged. Oh, my side! I can’t see, the tears are falling, and I can’t breathe.

Ok, recover. We have responsibilities here. We get caught in a torrential downpour so we decide to wait it out in the car. The conversation of course, makes its way back to the mind schmootz of before. I try to steer the conversation in a different direction by categorizing our next stops. Let me say here, where in the hell did the name Dick’s for a sporting goods store come from? Really? Dick’s? That’s like calling a hair salon, Vagina’s. That’s the set up. So as I was talking about “Dick’s”, rain from the ongoing storm blew into the car window that I had cracked earlier. As soon as I got Dick’s out of my mouth (and as I type this, it just happened again!), I said, “Oh, it came in my face!” So, adding this to the earlier conversation of Twatter, and now I have something phallic coming in my face. The back seat erupted in historically uncharacteristic wheezes of hilarity.

Now, we have dubbed my house guest visiting from New York , the “observer”. She is my best resource for examples of human behavior as she quietly monitors from afar and categorizes for future commentary. I can’t say I have ever seen her giddy (well, outside of a possible OTALIA moment) or frivolously bemused. To observe her in fits of merriment with jags of crying, speechlessness, and coughing is a moment of personal historical importance that produces uncontrolled laughter and crying for me as well. Damn, this was no day for the non-water proof mascara. Laughter is contagious, so it is not long before the car windows fog as the visible expression of inexplicable happiness.

I woke up this morning and my abs are killing me. There is no need for my daily circuit of abdominal punishment. I worked them out already. It just goes to show that perhaps those particular muscles strained by absolute comic euphoria need to be exercised more. It’s a definite reminder that laughter, with friends and loved ones, should be part of our recommended routine of a healthy life.

Look for mindschmootz on Twatter, uh, I mean Twitter for blog posting and updates. Oh, and special thanks to those drag queen divas last night, and their personal suggestion for a good waterproof mascara!