Breaking News: Laughter Cures Cancer and Chlamydia! (Not really but a girl can dream, right?)

LOL: We all do it, if you don't you either have your jaw wired shut so all you hear is a low gargle noise so you refuse to laugh out of embarrassment or you're dead.

I hope for your sake, it's the ladder.

But for seriously you guys, laughter is the only thing in life that seems worth pursuing because there is so much power behind it. Maybe I am considered a hippy-dippy airhead for believing in strength in smiles, laughter and rainbows...or maybe just the first two? But I have anecdotal proof that humor saves lives the way lifeguards do; quickly, efficiently, wetly and entirely in slo-mo.

I owe so much to my friends who, even when I was down and crying like a drunk girl from The Bad Girls Club, cracked jokes to lighten the mood. They ignored me when I told them to fuck off or choke on it (I am not a pretty sight when upset) and kept it up until I broke and smiled. Soon enough I'd be throwing it back at them, having pretend (and real) fights over origin of commonly used phrases like 'eavesdrop' or 'tequila worm'. Giving each other shit and being general idiots brought me to life. Sometimes I wonder whether or not I'd ever feel as good and alive as I do when I'm with my best friends. Doubt it.

Or the time I was walking down the hall in high school as a Just-Coming-Out-Of-Her-Shell-junior with my new artsy friends, whose friendship with me was freshly forged and fragile and then it happened: I fell. Hard. No stumble. No trip. No slippage. Just, knees. Elbows. Face. Floor.

Panic flushed over me as I laid in the middle of the student stuffed hallway. I had two options to mull over quickly within the span of .02 seconds; either lay there and wait for death to come over me like a warm blanket or do something weird to negate the fact that I just ate shit in front of like, 1/8th of the school.
So I died.
PSYCH. I certainly considered it but I, in all my haste, struck a pose. I turned over to my side, propped my head up with my hand and clutched my hip with the other. I looked up coyly at my potential new friends and smiled. And that was it, I was never known as The Girl Who Ate Shit in the Hall. Instead I was refered to as The Girl Who Ate Shit and Struck a Pose in the Hall. Not really, but they helped me up and laughed with me all the way to class. And we are still happily friended to this day.

So whether it's having elaborate hypothetical conversations while wondering around Jewel, whispering sexually-violent-nothings into someone's ear at work, leaving voicemails from "Planned Parenthood" on a friend's machine informing them of their severe strain of gonorrhea or just stuffing Corona Lights into mailboxes at midnight, funny shit like that makes the (my) world go 'round. (Fuck you, run-on sentences.)