this morning i read a friend's blog and she referred to herself as "Frequently Humorless One". (never can recall the rules for where those punctuation marks go. i've already changed the period's location on that last sentence about five times. i actually own a chicago manual of style but it's on the top floor and i'm on the bottom, and there's one floor in between, so that's way too much effort required to get the punctuation right. thus this discourse so you'll know that i do care a little bit about punctuation, even if i don't care enough to be sure i get it right.)

now back to "Frequently Humorless One." her blog reminded me of the time when someone i love dearly told me i needed to go to humor school. even offered to help pay for it! (and this person didn't have a very big budget at the time.)

some time later i saw a class offered at the smithsonian having to do with humor, so i signed up, recalling the earlier admonition.

did humor school solve all my problems? no way! i actually fell asleep in the first class. . . maybe the second one too. then i simply decided to skip the rest of the humor school classes and go directly to the national gallery of art instead. yes, dear hearts, i am a humor school drop-out!

for years i've labeled myself as humor-impaired or humor-disabled. i don't know how your self-talk goes, but when i lable myself as -impaired or -disabled i sort of give myself permission to accept the impairment or disability as if it were written in stone. when i label myself as -challenged, it has the opposite effect. so today i've changed my label. i may be humor-challenged, but i'm still looking for a laugh.

when i did a brief stint in toastmasters, i discovered some important lessons about my own humor strengths/weaknesses. if i try to "tell a joke" it rarely works. but when i tell a story (especially at my own expense), the laugh lines work. like the time i went to the first day of speech class in college with my dress completely unzipped. . . but that's a blog for another day.