Saturday, October 24, 2015

The Giggle Loop



While reading the Wikipedia entry for Weird Al's "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota," it was the verified, cited fact of "After working all year at Big Roy's Heating and Plumbing [the unnamed narrator] accumulates some vacation time" that made me almost do one of those laugh-screams while proctoring the deathly quiet testing center at school.Those types of laughs, the howls borne of the marriage of humor and surprise, are a killer.  But students were earnestly scratching away at their math quizzes, so I instinctively swallowed the laugh so as to not interrupt them - although my shoulders and torso were compelled to still perform the bodily motions that would have accompanied such a guffaw. I then realized the predicament I had caused a second too late – the results of swallowing a laugh can be VERY grave indeed. 



Laughter is like a butterfly - let it go and it flies free and loves you, or something like that. Swallow it, keep it imprisoned in your stomach, and it becomes a trapped, angry, manic moth that you didn't notice fly into your car as you madly opened the door and threw yourself in this morning - because, of course you were late - that you then only notice when it begins beating its giant wings against the back of your head terrified, and terrifying, and then flies straight for your eyes, blocking your vision and making you nearly swerve off the road and crash in the pre-dawn light. That's what laughter is like when you hold it in. 




And so, my stifled, swallowed laugh of surprise over Big Al’s Heating and Plumbing swelled bigger in my midsection. I felt the inevitable growing tidal wave of suppressed laughter - the persistence of energy bashing against membrane and stomach lining, building up within me. It threatened to  explode as I desperately tried to fight it. The British Comedy series Coupling deemed this uncomfortable phenomenon a “Giggle Loop.” It happens when you find yourself in a situation where you can not, MUST not laugh, usually when it is quiet: in a public bathroom stall; at a funeral; or when your spouse tries to dance in a manner to attract you. Something strikes you as funny, but it’s the mere fact that it's socially irresponsible to laugh that makes whatever it is so much funnier. You stifle the laugh, but then realize that stifling a laugh in this situation is funny. This very thought magnifies the trapped energy, and the whole thing grows exponentially. The more you think about the Giggle Loop, the stronger the tide becomes....until....the dam breaks, the giggle explodes and you wind up looking like a deranged imbecile. 




And thus, today, in the testing center. "Big Roy's Heating and Plumbing" was reverberating in my brain. It was all I could think of. "Big Roy" echoed endlessly. "Big ig ig....Roy oy oyyyyyyyyyy!" Airy, staccato laugh-breaths stuttered out my nose. Then I could feel the swallowed laugh bubble up with a vengeance; I felt my shoulders beginning to quake. The laugh welled up fiercely and broke like a wave, wooshing into the back of my throat; at least I had the faculties to manage this event by turning the laugh into one of those unconvincing fake cough things. But, despite that effort, the laugh didn’t fully dissipate. It still continued to grow, to swell, to fill my throat and spread to my fingers and toes - a shaking sort of tremor running through my frame.


I was gonna blow, so I immediately pulled out the only ammunition against the “Giggle Loop” that exists: I went through the “Things in Life that are Not Funny” list. I desperately searched for anything that wasn't funny. Old people? No. Work? Definitely not not funny. The laugh was pushing through; my body hunched over and my shoulders looked like I was jackhammering. Death! Death is not funny - no, actually that's pretty hilarious too. The guffaw was now billowing up past my diaphragm. Suffering animals! That’s it! Suffering animals are never funny! — just ask Sarah Mclachlan.

Mistreated animals, thankfully, quelled the tidal wave and snuffed out the Giggle Loop, and I was safe - aside from a few little tremors every now and again and a newly depressed constitution (poor animals!). Crisis averted.

This is going to be hard, what with most of my new job requiring me to sit in a quiet room with unfettered access to the internet, but not being allowed to laugh. To illustrate, on that very same day, I valiantly fought another Giggle Loop battle when I read an article about a 100 year old teacher named Mrs. Bumpass. 


I can't with this and the no laughing. I am going to die. 

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

The Keyboard



I recently started monitoring the testing center at school. It's a small-scale classroom with plastic chairs, metal frames and laminate writing surfaces all cobbled together into desks, lined up in truncated rows. Students can visit here to make up their missed assessment if they miss a class exam due to a sickness or competing in a texting tournament, or whatever it is high school kids do these days. It's quiet in here – it must be: diligent students taking tests, and all. It’s very quiet. It’s so quiet, in fact that the mouth breathers sound like they’re snoring. I can hear breath rustling nose hairs like a storm blowing through a forest canopy and perspiration squeezing, then breaking through pores. 



It’s so quiet that I can hear the pencils scratching; can hear the fibers of the paper stretching under the force delivered by the pointed graphite as it tries to slice through the strands like the keel of an ocean tanker through water. I can hear as those tenacious fibers finally give up and jubilantly break – sounding like the plucking of violin strings. And I can hear as the tiny graphite particles spill into the newly formed furrows on the page. 

It's so quiet in this testing center that I can hear neurons firing - a sound not unlike that of the vague high pitched noise a television emits when it's on but is not receiving any input

Anyway, it's quiet and the students are conscientious. And everything is great. But where does that leave me? With some free time, that's where it leaves me. Either I can bore my eyes into the rows of tops of bent heads and hone my mind-control skills, or I can do something a bit more productive and write. I choose writing. However, on my first day as substitute proctor, I realized, with a heavy sinking feeling, the fault in my plan to write away these 43 minutes. In fact, I realized this problem the instant I typed but three words onto the open Notepad program displayed on my computer screen. The problem is this keyboard.

This keyboard at my desk... this keyboard has got to be the loudest keyboard in existence. The heavy, clunky keyboards from the 90's - with mile-high “action” requiring finger strength I imagine only Arnold Schwarzenegger to possess - are nothing compared to the noise created by this sleek, otherwise seemingly modern keyboard. I immediately froze and stopped typing due to the deafening, echoing percussion caused by my typing in the testing center. I looked up, with the expectation of seeing students writhing in pain, working to stem flumes of blood shooting out their ears caused by the rupturing of their not-yet fully developed eardrums. But, there they sat, heads bent, scratching away.



"Maybe it’s not as loud as I’m imaging,” I thought. “Maybe it’s all in my head," I consoled myself, thinking that I was just too new to this job and was overly sensitive to any noise I might make that distracts the students. But, no. The cacophony was not in my head. As I tentatively typed the letters "O" and "N" to accompany the abandoned "B-u-f-f-o-" glaring on the screen, a neighboring teacher banged on the adjoining wall, shouting in that perennial exasperated teacher voice to "Knock off that racket, or I'm calling the cops." This really is the world's loudest keyboard.

How can such a modern, innocuous thing cause such a racket? This keyboard is akin to a huge, hulking, rackety, old typewriter. And a giant’s old typewriter, at that. Each creaky, multi-tiered depression of a key sounds like it firstly requires the breaking of some sort of seal resulting in the explosive noise created when you first open a sealed carton of expired sour cream. The next tier of further screeching depression sounds like it serves to summon the hammer, which creakily raises that metal block with the letters embossed on it and heaves it onto the paper, smashing it in and making a depression, which icy, black ink then nosily slithers into. Boom. Creak. Heave. Smassssssh. Woooooosh. Time slows – seconds become milliseconds with each depression and the resulting amalgam of sound reverberates in the room. And this is a keyboard producing such a cacophony – not a typewriter! There's even a thundering echo.

I can’t continue like this. It’s putting me on edge and I tense like I’m expecting a punch in the face every time I’m poised to depress a key. Anyway, the moral of this story is – no writing for me as I monitor silent students taking their tests all day. I’m bummed. And how on earth, dear readers, will you get on without my witty prose?  

And I haven’t even mentioned the mouse yet! Each click, and God forbid double click, is louder than the percussion of 12 gauge double-barrel shotgun...