school

well, i am back at school and it's pretty definite that this year is going to be awesome. i already have pounds and pounds of candy stored away, my mini-fridge has pickles and olives in at, my roommate is the bomb, and so far my classes all seem really strong. my most current amusement is in trying out different types of laugh. i've always really liked literary descriptions about people having deep, powerful belly laughs that build up and roll out in joyous fashion. (on a side note, i've always always really liked the phrases "a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth" and "a smile played across his face") but i realized that i've never actually watched or heard anyone smile or laugh anything like this. so my friends and i have been experimenting to see if we can make ourselves laugh like that. so far no success, but we have hit on some other good ones. my favorite so far is the idea of replacing repetitive laughing with just a single really loud "hhhHA!" it's really fun. one year margaret got a CD that was just 60 minutes of other people laughing. it sounded like a cool idea, but was actually really creepy, we didn't listen to more than 45 seconds before we had to turn it off.
speaking of laughing and CDs, i hear mitch hedberg has a new posthumously released CD that just came out, that i definitely want. i only recently discovered that he had basically crippling fear of public speaking, and it was totally confirmed when watching youtube videos of him. he closes his eyes a lot, and has his hair in his face so that he can pretend the audience isn't there, i guess. he also would do jokes with his back to the audience.what a weird profession to choose if you have that fear. maybe the jokes weren't for the audience as much as for himself. comedians seem to generally have a weird relationship with their audience, where they need them there for the performance to even be the performance, but then they often seem to resent them. anyway, practice your own laughs on this video.