Thursday, October 14, 2004

Back to school

Since I started almost a month ago (yikes) at UCLA, a good amount of my time has been spent in training or orientation classes. It's sort of like being back in school: not college, where I was in classes I had chosen out of interest, but high school, where every class was chosen for me and I had nothing to do but sit, tired and bored, trying to think of something interesting to think about and usually failing.

So what I've been doing these classes is just trying to imagine ridiculous things happening, things that would completely break the stoic, academic, businesslike mood.

I'll give you an example. Today I was sitting for about two and a half hours in a training class learning how to do online expense reports. And as the instructor was introducing herself, trying to ingratiate herself and gain our trust or whatever, I thought it would be really funny if right then, I started vomiting explosively and then my entire body exploded. I don't know if that's funny to anyone other than me. But it was funny enough to me that I had to stifle a giggle, and kept stifling it, and then I did one of those things where you're holding in your laughter for a long time and then someone says something only slightly funny and you just burst out laughing because it's your only chance to, but the level of laughter coming out of you is completely inappropriate to the joke that wasn't even supposed to be that funny.

I have really thick veins on my feet. What if I get cut there? Will I hemhorrage uncontrollably?

Speaking of hemhorraging uncontrollably (am I not the king of segues?), I'm donating platelets on Saturday morning at the UCLA blood donation center. They'll siphon a bunch of blood out of me, then separate out the platelets, then pour the platelet-less blood back into me. And all the while, I'm strapped into a chair watching a movie. Just like this guy. But at the end, I get four hours of vacation time credited to me, and also a cookie. It should really be ten cookies, since donating platelets takes ten times as long as donating blood and they give you a cookie for donating blood, but I'll take what I can get.

Now I really need to turn my attention back to The Apprentice.

2 comments:

Myasorubka said...

oh my god that happens to me ALL THE TIME!!!! But for me, it's MUCH WORSE because it usually happens when I'm talking to someone one-on-one and then something mildly entertaining walks across my mind and I try SO HARD to suppress that first innocent giggle but I can't. I just lose it. I start laughing and the other person thinks I'm an asshole and in the end, whatever caused it wasn't so funny anyway.....

....like the other day I was in the hospital. My dad started talking about Leonardo Da Vinci and his life in a very vague and seemingly metaphoric manner. I noticed that my grandfather, whose mouth is open because he was on a respirator, was moving his tongue and for some reason his tongue reminded me of a little sea cucumber. Or an eel moving through corals. Not funny, right?

....or this one time we were all having pizza for lunch in the office. I wasn't really into the crust so I put the crust in a plastic cup so I could throw it away later. Cassie started telling me about some new CDs she wanted me to listen to, and suddenly I realized that without the pizza attached, the crusts are just breadsticks. Breadsticks!! Cassie noticed me suppressing a giggle and got offended and asked what was so funny. Could I really tell her it was breadsticks??

So anyway. At least a) you only do this in a crowd and b) actually funny things trigger it.

Karri Bowman said...

i have seen rossanna go through what you've described. it's not pretty.

but i, personally, think that in an academic environment someone puking until they exploded would be very very funny.