I realize I haven’t written in a while, and it’s probably because life hasn’t been all that funny in at least a week. Well, it has been funny, but I find life to be a whole lot funnier when I’m not the one being laughed at. I got dizzy and fell down at work and everyone laughed at the surveillance camera replay; not all that funny. For some reason I own a coffee cup with a rhinoceros head built into the handle and I forgot and took a drink too quickly and that rhino horn poked me in the eye; not really funny. I got sixteen new followers on Twitter but they were all from Asian mail order bride websites for some reason and now I’m afraid to check my email; really not all that funny. Somebody gave my eight-year-old a harmonica and then showed her how it works; not funny.

I’m sure somebody, probably you, is laughing. And I guess I should be, too. But it’s not happening today.

I was waiting for a guard to transport my inmates out of my classroom the other day and while we waited we were chatting about nothing important, which somehow got us on the subject of Facebook. One of the inmates became very angry and said, “Do you know why I hate Facebook? Because people post up on there something about how they’re driving to the mall, and they’re just shocked that I broke into their house after they announced to the whole internet that they wasn’t home!” I found that funny, but he wasn’t very happy about it. I guess this funny-not-funny thing is a two-way street.

I’m trying really hard to figure out who would find the government shutdown funny, but so far I’ve come up with nothing. Surely Conan O’Brian and Bill Mahr will somehow make it humorous, and that’s why they get paid the big bucks. There was nothing funny about an earthquake followed by a tsunami followed by a nuclear reactor disaster followed by another earthquake, and there was really nothing funny about people who make big money to sit on their fat asses on TV and make erroneous claims about people in the earthquake/flood/nuclear disaster area incurring the wrath of God for something they must have done. I’m still waiting for that one to look brighter in the morning.

So how does a person keep her sense of humor in times like these? Yup. With a dance off. Squaring off against neighborhood ten-year-olds in the Wii version of the club scene from Saturday Night Fever, upstaging those little beasties in a battle of the hip-shaking finest. A good dance off death match never fails to make people laugh. But eventually the batteries in the remote fail and one has to face reality again, but for a brief stolen moment of time there is laughter and an impossibly altituded BeeGees soundtrack and a bunch of children who only know John Travolta as the voice of the dog in the movie Bolt.

I win this round, Universe. I’ll see you in a dance off.