It was my first year attending Education Week at BYU. The few years previous I had stayed at our friends house, babysitting, while my parents left before dawn and came home looking like they had finally been voted off the island. For some unknown reason I found this terribly appealing and I anxiously awaited the year that I turned 14 and was eligible to attend. For those of you who have not been fortunate enough to attend Education Week, let me explain one thing; Education Week, while wonderful and uplifting, has the innate side effect of sucking a persons will to live. It's what your week would be like if you tried taking 40 credits each semester. It's like the tour de France of classes, but without the shorts. It's like that scene in the Matrix where Keanu "learns" kung fu, except that you don't know kung fu. You don't even know your own name. And by the end of the day, all your capable of is slinking back to your car and praying that your auto-pilot will take you someplace with a recliner.
Most of the week had been spent listening to analogies about dating and football, and scribbling illegible notes in a water damaged notebook. On a whim my Mom and I attended a class together, what it was actually about I have no earthly idea, but apparently it sounded enticing at the time. What I do remember is a story the speaker told about a support group that uses laughter as therapy. But instead of watching funny movies or telling jokes, they participated in a group activity guaranteed to produce loud, obnoxious, unrestrained laughter for the enjoyment of all. Sitting in a circle, the would in unison recite the mantra "Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. . . " until the entire group had broken form and were laughing of their own volition.
Needless to say I found this wildly funny, and in my Education-Week-induced-delirium I spent the next several minutes trying (unsuccessful) to muffle the sound of my hysteria. For a few moments I was under the misapprehension that I might get away with it, but It wasn't long before my Mom realized that I wasn't having a seizure. After trying (unsuccessfully) to shush me without attracting too much attention, the inevitable happened. It only took one sideways glance at each other, and soon we were both shaking with full 6.0 magnitude. Somehow, despite our obvious knack for inconspicuousness we attracted the attention of several other students surrounding us, and just as an earthquake begins at the epicenter, so did the ripples of laughter begin with our inability to contain ourselves. It started in the back corner of a classroom that holds 900 people, and within seconds it had traveled all the way to the podium where the speaker was forced to pause in her dialogue and question (unsuccessfully) what was happening. That did nothing to quell our fits of giggles, and in the end we had to mutually agree not to look at each other throughout the remainder of the class for fear of an aftershock. We were unsuccessful.
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