It’s been one of those days.

Someone stole my mood ring.  I don’t know how I feel about that.  I broke my scale, a real weighty problem, let me tell you! I couldn’t get my car out of “Park”, so I’ve just been idling all day. And then my joke about letting the air out of my tire fell flat.  Which reminds me, what do you get if you drop a piano down a mine shaft?  Ab minor.  Get it?  Ab, that is musical symbols for A-flat? And the minor chord? So, a flat miner, like someone who works in a … oh, never mind.  See? What did I tell you about my lack of timing today?  It’s been going on since I lost my watch…

Sigh.

Paraphrasing an old Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (I do that a lot…):

C: I’ve always wondered about human’s sense of humor.  We laugh at the ridiculous and the absurd.  When we see nonsense, we laugh at it.  Isn’t it odd that we laugh at the incomprehensible?  What does it benefit us?  Why did we evolve that way?
H: I don’t know.  I guess if we couldn’t laugh at things that didn’t make sense, we wouldn’t know how to cope with most of life.
C: (long pause) I don’t know if I find that extremely funny or extremely scary…

Yeah, we don’t know if we should laugh or cry, so we choose to laugh.

Or at least I do ;)

And this week I have read a lot of jokes and seen a lot of cartoons.  A few weeks ago, I tried my hand at creating a cartoon about social isolation, though I don’t know how many people thought it was funny.  I did a post that was one big joke. And just a few minutes ago, I saw a picture of the nuns from the movie version of The Sound of Music and immediately thought, “How do you solve a problem like Pandemic?”

It’s out there.

So go find some humor, be it corny and silly, like my first paragraph, or a bit more sophisticated, along the lines of Calvin and Hobbes.

My smile this week was about all of the little jokes, puns, memes, and such that I saw almost constantly.  As they say, laughter is the best medicine.  Or at least it is for “social isolation” :)

What made you smile?

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Come on, I’m sure you smiled at least once last week.  Why don’t you share it?  I hope you can join in!

Here is list of “rules” and guiding ideas.  If you don’t have time to read it right now, just remember that this is an exercise to spread positivity.  Don’t smile about the misfortune of others.  Don’t smile in a way to excludes others.  Make sure a 12 year old can read it.

And remember, the Smile can be anything, large or small.  Nothing, nothing at all is too small for a Smile!  Sometimes taking time to notice those small, every day smiles is more important than those once in a lifetime huge ones :)

To join in, write a post to share your smile and then leave a comment on this post with a link to your smile.  Or, if you prefer, do a pingback to this post (pingback = have a link from your post to this one) (Note – pingbacks have been very inconsistent – please leave a comment :) ).   You can post any time until next Sunday evening (to be simple, I will say midnight GMT, which is 7 PM Sunday for me).   Next week I will compile all of the Smiles and do a separate post of them on Monday morning just before the smile.  (I will shoot for around 7 AM EST).

Try to use the hashtag #WeeklySmile when you use Twitter or other social media that uses hashtags. I searched Twitter and found that #weeklysmile had been used only a handful of times back in 2012 and 2013. It hasn’t been used since. So it’s ours! I also registered it on Twubs.

You can use the graphic at the top. It is the official graphic for the event.

Now go out there and find something to smile about! :)