Riantly, or This Week's Laughter

An archive

In no particular order and with no regard for strength, here are some of my memorable laughs this week.

I’ve watched more and more of my share of women’s soccer lately. I don’t feel particularly great at becoming a sports-person but considering my family raised me where Saturdays and Sundays were entirely spent watching college/national sports, I think containing myself to one or two soccer games a week is a good enough compromise. This week’s matches I watched were the Portland Thorns over San Diego Wave where I belly laughed during a late-game moment where forward María Sánchez for the wave went up against Thorns midfielder Hina Sugita; Sánchez was dribbling immaculately and would try to get a cross off from near the sideline of the Thorns’ 18, except for Hina deciding she would simply body check Sánchez and the ball out of bounds. Secondly I was on the edge of my seat for the awaited Orlando Pride versus Kansas City Current, a match against the top two teams, both undefeated, and both with star strikers who lead the league with 11 goals each in 15 games. Without regard for the competitive result of the game, I was laughing as it was a very physical and aggressive game with the players of both teams bodying, checking, and tackling each other rampantly. There was a particular moment later in the game when an Orlando midfielder went against a KC defender, trying to breakaway until, in their exhaustion, they’d both lost the ball and effectively just two-handed shoved each other away and to the ground. I sincerely get the exhaustion, but it was very funny in such a tense match to have a near-slapstick moment where they each discovered they no longer had the ball and instead of just slowing down and returning to play, shoved each other down. Very hard laughter heard through the room.

While not quite as loud or as belly-laugh as a usual jubilant expulsion would bring me, I recently discovered a fairly mundane administrative professional in my life who I’d befriended has an OnlyF*ns. I hold absolutely no judgment over them other than the joyous smile and laughter I have over their shared story of ‘having sold an old pair of sneakers to some perv for $200.’ An internal laugh and a smile walking down the road.

Hazelnut, our newest cat who is about 10-12 months old, has been growing both more playful and lazier in her precision for playing. Meaning she is practically jumping and ramming herself into things with more disregard for the fact that she is not going to move a heavy coffee table, for instance, or a closed closet door. She hasn’t hurt herself in any means, and of course we were trying to get her to recognize that her safety is valid and necessary; however, in the interim, hilarious to watch her half-run, half-fall down stairs, drift around a corner, and take off to effectively tackle an immobile corner of couch we’d last left one of her favorite mouse toys on. Soft-to-moderate laughter with a ‘Tsch,’ and a ‘Heh.’

I forget which day, but in anticipation of this week’s heat wave, Heather laid up a wall of aluminum foil along our near wall-to-wall-to-ceiling windows in our living room to minimize the heat building up in our apartment. Of course, it has been a genius move, and has worked tremendously. Still, what a funny thing to arrive and witness. More of an exhilarating exhale

We’d escaped the heat to Ocean Shores, Washington (West of Aberdeen, birthplace of Kurt Cobain) to get some beach time and reduce our heat for a day. While there, we’d placed our belongings on a blanket some few dozen feet behind a large dune. Occasionally, a kid would poke his head over the dune. At first I thought it was an odd plant, and then the total image became resonant to me of the kind of paradoxically obvious-inconspicuous of that old cartoon and/or comedy gag of cutting out a painting from a hung frame and putting your face in the frame. I was sleepy, and sun-drunk, and overjoyed to be with my darling, and even something as little as this image was something I’ve laughed at on-off for the last few days. Internal with a sigh of a laugh.

While I don’t think this was a laugh from this week, I find I have to bring this up. We started the Amazon Lord of the Rings series recently, the Rings of Power. The first episode we watched was very odd to us. Pacing felt all over the place, emotional moments felt intensely forced and unearned (including a long, dramatic, implicitly sad ‘departure’ scene as a teen-character heads off into the world on their first adventure, leaving behind their friends and family who we’d only just met in that scene). It felt like fairly revelatory plot points were being dispatched every five minutes with little context for why and what place in the story they held. And, naturally, as the episode ended, we discovered the Amazon player had started us on the season finale of the first season. For what it’s worth, as funny as it was to go through 70-minutes of a show and purely be critical instead of thinking there was something wrong, I am relieved that the show isn’t that bad as to commit all of those heinous seemingly basic screenwriting crimes. Embarrassed loudness.

And finally, in hopefully no surprise or confession, I do love my dungeons and dragons live-play shows. Especially Dimension 20, which seems to embody the type of rule-breaking creativity that I really love about tabletop roleplaying games (do all the shit you can’t do in real life). I’ve been watching through their series Burrow’s End which is gamemaster’d by Aabria Iyengar, and follows a family of stoats trying to survive the collapse of their forested home. Without spoiling much of this dystopic fantasy, the stoat-group comes across another society of stoats where the children of the family of protagonists are sent to stoat school. These children are rebellious teens and walk into the class asking two questions: ‘Do I get the vibe I could bully this teacher?’ and ‘Who is the weakest looking kid in the classroom? I want a sidekick.’ What followed was a long scene in which two players do, in fact, effectively bully a teacher and adopt a near cult-follower of a snotty, nasally stoat child to run errands for them. I mean, it’s ridiculous right? A loud laugh, and a chuckle as I explain to folks relatively in-the-know.

Tell me some of your laughs, soon, in-person or out.