Who's Laughing Now? (Probably Still Only Me)

I feel like I used to be really, really funny. Seriously - my last blog was hilarious. I used to re-read it and laugh hysterically at my own jokes in my free time. (I wish I could lie and alter your perception of me from the person I really am, but I'm pretty sure I'd slip up eventually and I'd rather be an honest pompous bastard than a lying one.)

I started blogging my senior year of high school when my writing was kind of painful to read. It wasn't necessarily bad; I used correct grammar and I could tell stories really well. But I wrote like a person who had just discovered a thesaurus, throwing as much flowery language into my prose as I could. The phrasing was bad. The adjectives were bad. The stories were good, but everything else was just...bad. Still, it was definitely funny. I know because it made me laugh, and it's really hard to make me laugh if I don't feel like laughing. (I do laugh often, but usually it's an ironic laugh and I'm the only person who knows it's ironic.)

When I started college, my writing improved tenfold. Suddenly I could structure my words in a way that didn't make people question why exactly I had been given the resources to express myself through writing while other people have had their hands ripped off by chimpanzees. (Gideon and I were talking about animal attacks on the way back from Texas yesterday and he started researching it and discovered that the woman who had been attacked by a chimpanzee years ago - the really famous case - had actually had her hands ripped off in the attack. It disturbed me enough that I remember it. I'm hoping that if I unload it here, it'll weigh on your conscience and not mine, exempting me from painfully remembering it on the 25 minute drive home from work.)

My writing improved, but somehow it cut out a lot of my humor. I'm not sure what it was about the flowery language that ignited my inner comedian. Maybe you can't grasp subject-verb agreement and comedy at the same time? Someone should do research on this. Not me, because the word "research" reminds me way too much of science and I hate science nearly as much as I hate Dawn Ostroff, the woman who canceled Veronica Mars in 2007 and will forever receive hate mail from me when I feel like writing hate mail to someone. (I'm aware that, as a reporter, I do tons of research daily. I try not to think about it.)

This is the face of a woman who supported the TV show Gossip Girl but didn't "get" the appeal of the critically acclaimed Veronica Mars. Photo is blurry because I can't physically handle looking at her face without some added pixels.

 So now I'm trying to balance writing humor and writing well. How am I doing? Are you laughing? I'll take even a small, patronizing laugh. No? Okay. I'll work on it.