My roomie Sarah and I drove to Emigrant Lake at 9pm on a Sunday night because we were cranky from being cooped up inside and were aware that we needed to get some fresh air. Not that we really wanted fresh air. You know when you’re pissy from lounging around after work and you don’t want to do anything or go anywhere, but you know you need to do something or go somewhere, so you force yourself to do something, but for a while that makes you even crankier?
I do that a lot.
The car ride over was a little stuffy and miserable – the better Sarah started feeling (saying things like, “Wow, I feel so much better already; I’m so glad we did this,") the more aware I became that I wasn’t feeling any better, which annoyed me, honestly, because I was the one driving this Honda Civic struggle bus, and who said she got to be in a good mood while I remained in a shit mood?
Luckily, the stormy rain cloud hovering over my head started to lift once we were sitting on the dock under the stars. There’s something about looking up at the stars that makes you realize how small and ridiculous you are in comparison to the rest of the world. You watch the sky turn its fading shades of blue into black, you see the glimmers of light dotting the blanket of sky, and you can’t help but be amazed. There’s a Calvin and Hobbes quote where Calvin says that people would be a lot different if they spent more time looking up at the stars, and it’s true.
Sarah looked at me, in my black sweatshirt with the hood up, and then over at herself, with a backwards baseball cap on. We were huddled together, sharing my blanket as we sat at the end of the dock. It was totally isolated. Well, except for a couple of bats that were flitting by every now and then. “You know,” she said, “this might be better with dates.”
We became sillier and sillier, giggling to full on belly laughing as we talked about boys, the gross weirdness of kissing, and how I totally have a type (tall, lanky, and not extremely motivated). Most of our conversation was about pointless, immature stuff, but it just felt good to honestly laugh and not fake a single bit of it (like you have to do when your friend shows you a YouTube video about a man naming and singing to an ear of corn and you just don’t get it. Yes, Haley, there’s no one else I could possibly be talking about right now).
The longer we were out there, the closer those bats started swooping around. Sarah hadn’t been concerned about them until I said that bats could have rabies, which I think alerted her to the fact that they have teeth. We were both wary, but we tried to ignore them. Still, I kept my eye on those fuckers just in case.
By this point I was feeling great. I started thinking more about why that was, and I had to conclude that having a genuine laugh completely restored me. When I get these philosophical thoughts that I think are super deep but that probably aren’t all that impressive, I like to share them with Sarah (or whoever else will listen) and write them down. At the time, only option one was available to me, so I started rambling to Sarah. My rant went something like this.
“I think that laughter is the truest form of self. When someone laughs, they are revealing their most genuine thoughts and feelings. Laughing is a vulnerable state; it breaks down barriers. Laughing with other people is one of the purest forms of genuine human connection—“
“Aaghghghghghghhhhhhhhhhh!”
I broke away from my poetic monologue to the stars and whipped around to look at Sarah, who had the blanket pulled over her head, writhing on the dock.
A whoosh, and the bats swooped over my head for round two.
I was sure Sarah was infected with rabies. What would I do? Can you suck out rabies like you can rattlesnake poison?
“Are you OK?!”
She poked her head out of the blanket, backwards baseball cap disheveled. “I’m fine, but it was right by my ear!”
“What?”
“It attacked me!”
We stared up at the bats in horror. They seemed to be circling us in patterns, nosediving back and forth, doing some sort of dance.
“Are they mating?”
We exchanged glances and hightailed it out of there, pulling the blanket over our heads for protection as we ran toward the getaway vehicle.
It wasn’t until we reached the safety of the car that we looked at each other again. Sarah’s lip twitched. “So, what were you saying about genuine human connection?”
Humor: Either it’s the authentic form of self, genuine human connection or a wake-up call to stop being such a prick.
