C - Cat Scans and Lab Reports

I love puns and jokes and anything funny, weird, or strange. So it should come as no surprise that I write humor - a lot. If I can make you laugh then my day is complete.

I didn't originally know that I could be funny. Then I wrote a Christmas letter in which I included the
tale of my being charged by an eight-point buck while raking leaves that fall. Then people started telling me that it was the best and funniest Christmas letter that they had ever received.

That set me on a mission to figure out if I could write funny intentionally. It turns out I can, but I do need to get into that portion of my brain where I'm just a little bit twisted. Or maybe a lot. It's hard to tell sometimes. It is the area of the brain where I make honest observations and let them out unedited.

My first attempt was a poem about having a bad hair day and wanting to shave my head to deal with it. It won first place in a light verse contest.

From there I chose to pitch a humor column to the newspaper I was working for at the time. They accepted and I found myself pulling the humor from life and putting it on paper regularly. I found that being self-effacing was very effective at getting people to laugh. So I wrote a great deal of my ineptitude and follies in life -- such as my almost nonexistent athletic ability and my insistence on trying to do things that scare me.

One of my favorite columns was for Women's History Month. For that one I reviewed the women I am descended from and told a few tales of them. For example, the time my grandmother accidentally fed my mother's boyfriend cat food. Or the time that my mother accidentally shut the cat in the dryer and switched it on. It took her a moment to figure out what that thumping noise was. I, of course, have kept up this womanly tradition in many ways, from finding a snake in my bathtub one evening, to my cat throwing a dead mouse in my face.

Cats do seem to keep cropping up, and they will continue to do so for I am a cat person. Not one of those little old ladies with 45 cats -- I just have the one.  And she is worth 45 all in her furry little self.

But that is another post.