I love to laugh...

... long, and loud, and clear!

Well, here I am, re-entering the blogging world. I had a previous middle school foray over at the other blog site, but I find this site to better cater to my now, shall we say, more refined tastes. Er, right. I figure now is as good a time as any to begin; with starting college this fall, I may not have any other outlet to release my excessive thoughts and emotions, so this offers insurance that I do not, heaven forbid, take up my younger sister's habit of broadcasting every minute occurrence via near-instantaneous facebook status updates.

I will try not to bore you with rote recitation of my daily goings-on, but rather, offer a hopefully insightful (at the very least, thoughtful) view of the world. Or at least, what little of it I am part of. Of course, I can make no promises against the occasional frustrated rant at the various unfairnesses of life, but I'll do my best to keep such instances to a minimum. My main hope for this blog is to regularly post about the good, the beautiful, the weirdly beautiful, and the beautifully weird things in life, that are so often overlooked.

Let me elaborate. I am about to leave my wonderful high-school youth group. Essentially every Wednesday for the past four years, I've gone to "prayer and share", where we've related where we've seen God's presence in our lives. I find this to be a wonderful mindset to live with, and I don't care what your religion, or even if you don't believe in religion, seeing good in the world is always a better way to live.

So, In the hopes that I won't lose this mindset, and perhaps even to encourage its growth, the majority of my posts will follow the simple template of "I've seen God in..." followed by my tangent-ization and expansion of the subject. As for posts that don't, well, we'll see.

So, that brings me to my first "sighting," as I'll call it. I've seen God in laughter.

Many of my friends happen to possess rather unique laughs, which, truth be told, are often ridiculous enough to induce laughter on their own. Actually, I can't deny that I also possess such a laugh, or so I've been told. This lends itself to a rather large amount of awkward situations which generally involve a table of people practically peeing themselves laughing-- over absolutely nothing. It can happen quite easily. I think everybody has chuckled to themselves over some privately amusing thought that flashes through the mind. Imagine, then, that you happen to let out the merest expression of mirth, and that alone manages to set all people in the vicinity off-- even the ones you don't know. It's quite a powerful and unifying thing, actually.

I'm not really sure there's any better way to make a bad day... well, better than by laughter. Even if it means you have to laugh at whatever outrageous or infuriating situation you find yourself in. I won't get into the scientific studies, and postulations, and conjectures and theories, etc., about the stimulation of the release of endorphins when laughing, but I can tell you, the more I laugh, the better I feel.

Sometimes, though, I have to wonder about about our sixth sense. I am not, of course, speaking about the sense that allows us to communicate with the dead, but rather, the all important sense of humor. What makes things funny? I could laugh all day at something that some may not find hilarious at all, and sometimes I find myself looking around at people as they laugh at, what was to me, a poor joke. "Yes, I got the joke, I just think it was stupid. Can we move on please?"

My sense of humor has always been a rather strange one. Case in point: I was in first or second grade, and I had a friend over, and we were playing Cooties. Not the whole "circle, circle, dot, dot" thing, but that game where you had to roll the dice to get legs and eyeballs and such for a little bug. Well, quite bored of the standard game play, my friend and I decided to have a cootie wedding. To this day I have no forgotten the antics that had us in uncontrollable giggles. The phrase "wafflely wedded wife" is key here. We though that was the funniest thing we'd ever heard. We laughed for hours. We're still laughing. I don't know why. It's random, it's weird, but to me, it's hilarity at its best.

So, laugh today. If I were witty enough, this is where I'd leave you with a joke to assist you in this endeavor, but as it is, I think it's best if I just let you find amusement within the confines of your own mind. I know I will.