Shits & Giggles

Warning: this blog entry contains explicit, gross, and somewhat distrubingly personal insights. Skip it. Serious, just skip it. Ok, who are you to listen to me, but don't say I didn't warn you.

Have you ever been in a bathroom - not your comfy, warm, private toilet next to your own bedroom - I mean a public bathroom, like a stall in a tiled echo chamber with nothing separating you from a dozen perfect strangers except a 1/2" divider and the mores of common decency?

Sure you have, we all have, but have you even been in one when your bowels decided to surprise you with an especially violent eruption? I'm talking a true come-to-God, Thunder & Lightening (very-very-frightening), dumping-a-gallon-of-corn-into-a-vat-of-warm-jello kind of release?

Odds are good you probably have, though maybe you didn't find it an especially thought-provoking experience. Point of fact, I don't know how you react, and unless you start an uber-honest blog of your own, I probably never will. But I do know what happens to me, and on one not especially important evening in Serbia, it occurred to me that perhaps my reaction had greater implications abot my character, my future, than I had ever imagined.

I won't go into the gory details (ok, not the Really gory stuff), but the gist of it is this: if you've ever been in the bathroom with me when something especially graphic occurs, the next thing you hear after my last grunt, plop, or squooze (*invented for this occasion)... will be the sound of me laughing.

Not laughing, really, but not chuckling either. More like giggling. Yes, giggling unlike any little school girl you've ever heard. It's deep, sincere, a little jeuvenile, but decidedly masculine, if I do say so myself. It's a sound I'm sure my family is very familiar with, not only because we all grew up in the same household, but because such giggling is a trademark for when the youngest generation of Webers find themselves in a particularly stupid situation. I don't think it's genetic, though I can't imagine where we would have learned it from (and at this point I'll quit speaking on behalf of my brothers Brad and Duff to save them any possible remaining face), but I'm pretty sure we all do this.

So what's going on? Shouldn't I just be mortified into silence, or perhaps cleverly devising a distraction or a way to shift the guilt... "Gee Davey, I told you that Chicken was still pink..."

Well maybe I should, and perhaps you do, but when I rip off a loaf of destruction in the undeniable presence of others, i just can't help myself - I giggle. Is this merely a sign of prolonged adolescent potty humor, or something more, and if so what? While I won't - Can't - deny getting a chuckle now and again from some particularly crass Adam Sandler flick, by and large my tastes have evolved, matured, and refined to the point where it takes more to genuinely entertain me than a swift kick to some poor schmuck's schlong (thank you Yiddish University of Reubensteinium).
See Mom - Progress!

So why does the real-deal, mother nature's whoopie cushion, still catch my funny bone at just the right angle for instant humorification? What occurred to me (after, you know... occurring to me) on my 2nd day at the Serbia camp, with almost my entire team standing a few feet away, was first that I should be embarrassed, second that I was embarrassed, and third that personal humiliation was the source of my eternal amusement.

In my opinion, anyone who wants to write anything autobiographical (blogs, novels, technical manuals or binary) must be able to look at their life and discern just how silly and funny it must seem to everyone else. I had a similiar thought in Estonia while watching a Doberman Pincher pop a squat. That's a fierce dog, but his hind legs don't bend right for proper squatting, so instead he just leans back and hopes he doesn't fall over. I'm sure there are pictures on the internet, but trust me, it turns the worlds scariest guard dog into the most laughable critter on this green earth.

And let me say this as well, self-depricating humor isn't all that hard to pull off, and it usually does satisfy an audience (case in point - this blog!). But self-deprication usually implies recognizing and laughing at your previous errors and misfortunes, often years later and in very distant hindsight. What I feel has kept me (or is trying to keep me) vibrant in life and almost eternally optimistic has been an acute, but surely not rare, inclination to stand outside myself and laugh - heartily - at my own misfortunes, embarrassments, discomforts, self-induced pains, and miseries, all in the real-time present.

Now I'm not saying I always do this, or that it's some special life mechanism I've developed
and cultivated over the years to become a better person. Quite the contrary. This isn't a "how-to" blog, it's a self-discovery blog, and I'm learning about the ways I deal with what happens to me in this wide world. Presumably you're reading this to see what we have in common, or just how strange is this person you've known for (__) months or years. I don't know why I developed this reaction, where I got the idea it would help or if it even does, but the more I think about it, the more traces of "the giggle reflex" I see in more complex parts of my life. Psychology majors, I'm sure, have written theses on this stupid thing, so please forgive my floundering about. I'm just a bad classicist or an amateur radio-ist, so cut me some slack.

You see, there's just so much to laugh at. I've been a right royal twit with some regularity, but I can't help feeling a touch more enlightened, more adult, maybe even happier, not because I feel that these innocuous and not-so-innocuous incidents are helping me become a smarter, less-twitty person, but precisely because I know with the certainty of Moses that that aren't. If shoving feathers up your ass doesn't make you a peacock, then I can assure you that pissing you pants in Athens at the age of 26 does NOT make you a smarter 27 year old. I may be more cautious (paranoid even) about keeping a weather eye for the WC, but I will still meander aimlessly into other equally (ok, almost equally) inane situations in the near, if not immediate future.

So how does my little epiphany help, and why the hell are you still reading this?

Well, to be honest, I don't know if this will help you at all. I struggled to find some sort of brilliant insight, some nugget of wisdom, any reason at all why I should share this with you for the benefit of anything other than my own self-indulgence, and I've come up wanting. The point, for me, is the realization that my eventual "happiness" or "development" may be dependent not on me getting any wiser - which may or may not happen - but on my ability to accept whatever happens to me with a giggle, and then move on with my life. Spilt milk, and all that, but with poo in this case.

Now please don't take this as the Gospel according to Weber, I'm only messing about with some thoughts in my head which is half as likely to have any useful information as I'm sure yours is (see, self-deprication), but these are the things one thinks about between uncontrollable giggles on a tiolet in a Serbia wildlife reservation.

Maybe not anyone, me, and that's as much as I can hope to understand - someday. I'm not saying we should all laugh at our lives, and I'm not suggesting I don't get royally upset, frustrated, grumpy, stark-raving mad. Sure, that all happens, shit happens, as the saying goes, but for me there's a certain breaking point, an embarrassment point of no return afterwhich whatever hardship I'm traversing transmogrifies into pure absurdity, and I guess I just realized how lucky I am to recognize it.

Because really, if we can't savor the absurdity of our lives, what does that leave us to enjoy? Adam Sandler?

fuck that.

Weber (on the lamb)