I love schedule pickup and finding out my kids’ schedules, teachers and subjects even though I won’t know one teacher from the next. (Well, except my daughter happily got the same teacher again for math.)

I loved creating schedules like I did for high school and college. The only time it didn’t go well was during my freshman year of college. All the good courses were taken and I ended up taking a class that I wish I had never taken. I liked figuring out what courses I needed to satisfy my graduation requirements.

My daughter’s high school does it differently than mine did. She doesn’t get to pick her teachers. At my high school, seniors would go register first. Then juniors, and so on. We’d go into the cafeteria where the teachers were sitting by subject area and we’d go sign up with them. Of course, that wouldn’t work well in my daughter’s school of 2600 kids in 11th and 12th grade. Crazy.

The only thing I don’t know is who will be my youngest’ teacher. We’ll find out next week. That’s probably the most exciting one because I know many of the teachers at his elementary school. (We’ve been with this school since 2000 as the older two went through it.) He’s had a good track record in being assigned to the right teacher.

With schedule pick up comes buying school supplies, checking out spirit wear, joining PTA and going in shock in how much we’re spending in one week for all of this. And we didn’t have much spirit wear in high school. I had none in elementary or middle school. The only thing I had was a letter jacket. High school — I recall having a senior shirt, a sweatshirt for a senior girls’ group and a letter jacket. Yearbooks? That was a high school only thing.

And my parents had to shop for all of my school supplies. I’m grateful to the PTA for making that the easiest part of all this. The PTA works with school supply companies to order things in bulk. We just select the grade, write the check (of course, 3rd and 7th grade have the most expensive supplies in both schools!) and it’s done. Thank goodness, high school doesn’t have school supplies. The kids get what the teacher recommends or pickup what they need like folders, paper, writing instrument

I love back to school time. Yes, I do! It’ll be great to get back on a regular schedule. What’s your favorite thing about this time of the year?

Brain food…

• Quixey: Find apps that do what you want.
• 7 Ways for Marketers to Maximize Google+ Now. I like the tips in this one. Ironic, though. I couldn’t find the author’s social media links on his company website. Make sure yours links to your social media IDs.
• How to Write Better Using Humor. Crackers. Quixote. Cargo. Did I make you laugh? In editing an article, I noticed the author used sarcasm — in the same way I would. Except, it struck me as mean not funny. I better watch that!
• The Little Productivity Tip of a Zen Master. I love this one. I tend to do this — address things on the spot, unless it takes more time than I have. If I don’t, I fear forgetting and don’t always think to make it a task. Same concept as going through mail as soon as you get it.

For fun because we’re allowed…

• Angry Birds Superheroes: Who needs ordinary when you get the Avian Torch!
• 12 Coolest Things Inspired by Harry Potter. That dog! Too cute and funny. Those cupcakes. Yum!
• 62 Ways to Show Love. “I love you always works.” It’s nice to surprise and show in other ways.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Meryl Evans

Yee haw! (I can say that because I was born and bred in Texas!) Welcome to meryl’s notes blog (this here place you’re lookin’ at) in Plano, Texas. We’re honored to be a stop in Mary Lynn Archibald‘s WOW! Women On Writing Blog tour. We’re giving away a copy of her book, Accidental Cowgirl: Six Cows, No Horse, No Clue. Read on to see how you can win.

About Mary Lynn Archibald: Mary Lynn Archibald is a freelance editor and copywriter, and the author of two books: Briarhopper: A History, a memoir of one woman’s life from 1913-1945, and Accidental Cowgirl: Six Cows, No Horse and No Clue, a lighthearted personal memoir of a greenhorn’s life on a small cattle ranch. Her forthcoming memoir, due out in early 2011, deals in part with her life as a San Francisco chorus girl.

Finding Humor in Life by Mary Lynn Archibald

Well, it all depends on how you look at it, of course. I find humor in strange places, but then, I had a great teacher.

My father could make most anything seem funny, and the devices he used were: exaggeration, silly words, surprises, and statements that were so utterly ridiculous, you had to at least smile.

Sure, life is very often not funny. Still, mine has often been filled with slapstick comedy. Why? Well one reason that’s obvious to those who know me is that I’m terribly clumsy. That’s not necessarily funny, but after I pick myself up off the floor, there’s not much else to do but laugh.

I often sprinkle my writing with these silly anecdotes.

Consider the time I drove through my garage door. It was a Friday afternoon, and I’d just gotten home from the end-of-the-year party teachers faithfully attended every June, where I’d had a drink or so to celebrate my impending summer’s freedom. I was feeling fine, I thought, and had lots of time for the alcohol to wear off before I needed to make a two-hour drive south in order to attend my brother’s high school graduation.

I just needed to round up my two kids, take a brief nap, change clothes and hit the road in plenty of time to get there for the evening ceremony.

I should probably mention here that there is a 15-year gap between my brother and me, but my parents swore he was not an afterthought, and I wasn’t going to argue that fact with them. Anyway, there I was at 33, headed off to see him just making it out of high school.

Problem was that I had left the sprinkler going on the front lawn, parked my car with the driver’s side window down, and discovered this fact too late. The driver’s seat was somewhat soggy, so I decided I’d back the car out of the driveway and into the sun where the seat would dry faster, as a bath towel was only a temporary solution.

That was not really a problem, I thought, as I could just sit on the passenger side of the car and work the brake and steering from there.

But then the fatal flaw in my thinking asserted itself, as I quickly found I was unable to work the gas, or the brakes, or steer, from the right side of the car.

I did manage to let off the brake, put the car in gear, and step on the gas. What I hadn’t realized however, was that instead of putting the car in reverse, I had put it in drive, and by the time I knew what had happened I was sitting in my garage, noticing that the front end of my car had severely dented my electric dryer, which was the only thing that had stopped the car from ending up in the kitchen.

That was funny enough, but when I got out, I noticed that the garage door was now sitting on top of the car.

I thought that was hilarious, and when the neighbors arrived, alerted by the sound of the crash, I was standing there, surveying the scene of carnage and laughing my head off.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to do. But you’ll be happy to know I was subsequently quite sobered by the event, especially when I remembered I had a $1000 deductible insurance policy on the car.

Win: For a chance to win a copy of Accidental Cowgirl: Six Cows, No Horse, No Clue, please leave a comment at least 50 words long about a clumsy or humorous moment — sure, it can be both clumsy and humorous. You have until 11:59pm on August 16, 2010 to qualify for the drawing. The unbiased and robotic Random.org has the honor of picking the winner.

Like Mary Lynn, I’ve driven into the garage door… TWICE. The first time, I had all my kids with me and pulled into the garage too fast that it scraped the top of my big honkin’ Expedition. (Car: 1. Garage door: 0.) The second time: I pass the garage door opening when I walk to my car and usually open it before I get in. That said, I’m used to the door being open and ready when I start the car. Well, I opened the garage door and backed up. (Car: 2. Garage door: 0.) After two repair bills, I hope I don’t do this a third time. I pick damaging the garage door over the car — thank goodness for that!

Share your clumsy or humorous moment. Of course, it can qualify as both.

• 100 Most Common English Words: How many can you get in five minutes? I only got 55. Pooh. [Link: Dawn]
• How to Feed the Innovation Pipeline.
• Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web: Hard to find digital images…
• The Secrets of Storytelling [Link: Copyblogger]
• Hated sentence diagramming in school and don’t think I benefited. However, the activity helps some that learn better through this process.
• What are you chewing? Check out the brand name pencils.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• Wired looks at history’s greatest gadgets.
• Comics Curmudgeon: Comments on and analyzes the latest comics… funny snarky stuff.
• Weird Olympic images with humorous captions.
• iPhone Magic Tricks: Creative!
• Fantastic Contraption: Indeed! An online physics game where you add wheels and
• Recycle electronics at a spot near you.

The prize of the day is from Ted Demopoulos: Secrets of a Successful Blogging System digital audiobook with What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting (in which Meryl appears). Leave a comment with at least 30 words (to ensure they provide value) by June 7 and you’ll get an entry to win this cool prize.

Our guest blogger is Jamie Grove of How Not to Write. However, he means the opposite… he knows how to write and does it well as you can tell from this entry. Thank you, Jamie. We’ve known each other a short time, but it feels longer as he’s easy to talk to and get to know.

Write Funny: 3 Timeless Rules of Comedy That Every Writer Should Learn

“The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.”
- Mark Twain

When people say I’m funny they generally mean one of two things…

“You should read some of his work. It will make you laugh.”

- or -

“You should watch him get out of the shower. It will make you laugh.”

This poor example demonstrates that deliberately trying to be funny is often the surest route to not being funny. However, the point was to provide a basis for a relatively simple example of the three timeless principles of comedic writing: Inversion, Repetition, and Reciprocal Interference. While learning the fundamentals of these these principles, you will also learn that in trying to describe comedy by disassembling a joke we often render it completely unfunny.

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) Author, Philosopher, Nobel Laureate… Decidedly not funny, though perhaps he plays better in Swedish. From the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature: “In recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented.”

In 1900, French philosopher Henri Bergson published the unfunniest book ever written on the nature of comedy and the human condition, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Here’s a rather impenetrable sample typical of Bergson:

“Life presents itself to us as evolution in time and complexity in space. Regarded in time, it is the continuous evolution of a being ever growing older; it never goes backwards and never repeats anything. Considered in space, it exhibits certain coexisting elements so closely interdependent, so exclusively made for one another, that not one of them could, at the same time, belong to two different organisms: each living being is a closed system of phenomena, incapable of interfering with other systems. A continual change of aspect, the irreversibility of the order of phenomena, the perfect individuality of a perfectly self-contained series: such, then, are the outward characteristics–whether real or apparent is of little moment–which distinguish the living from the merely mechanical. Let us take the counterpart of each of these: we shall obtain three processes which might be called REPETITION, INVERSION, and RECIPROCAL INTERFERENCE OF SERIES. Now, it is easy to see that these are also the methods of light comedy, and that no others are possible.”

I tried my best to find a shorter sample, but Bergson goes on like this for about 42,000 words. If he hadn’t been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, you’d swear his book was a parody. In any case, I’ll spare you further pain of trying to figure out what “reciprocal interference of series” means and simply call it comedic paradox.

According to Bergson, a comedic paradox is any situation which exists simultaneously within two independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time. While according to my wife, there is no question that my second example is far superior to the first, because it is obvious to her that a body like mine was designed by someone with a fine sense of humor.

(Note: That was a demonstration of Comedic Paradox.)

In the paragraph above, I reintroduced the opening joke and bolted it onto the intellectual discourse of Henri Bergson. Bergson would probably argue that this isn’t truly comedic paradox, but I disagree. Comedic paradox makes us laugh because our brains fail to sort out the confusion inherent in the change of context. Eventually, there is little choice but give up and laugh.

Stand-up comedians also leverage comedic paradox. During a set, the same joke will appear several times but worked into different situations. Comedians do this because it’s easy to make an audience laugh at the same joke twice. I prove this to the world every morning when I get out of the shower.

(Note: That was a demonstration of Repetition.)

Of course, the key to creating the joke in the first place is inversion. Inversion is the reversal of expected roles. For example, the quote from Mark Twain at the start of this article is funny because he reverses the first half of the phrase in the second half. Unfortunately, when applied to my running joke, I do find that inversion is what put me in this awkward situation in the first place.

(Note: That was a demonstration of Inversion, Repetition and a stretch for Comedic Paradox.)

Speaking of repetition, here are the basic rules in non-Bergson speak:

1. Inversion – To find the funny, flip the idea backwards. It’s easy once you practice.

2. Repetition – Once you find the funny, make with it again and again until it is no longer funny. You’ll be surprised how long you can go if you apply inversion.

3. Comedic Paradox – Mash up the funny with the not so funny to create a third funny, which technically should not exist. Sometimes this works and sometimes not. Paradoxes are like that.

Best of luck! Be sure to show me the funny!