McKenna's Laughter Blog

I would like to take this post to give a shoutout to moms. Moms are great. They are all different, but they are the kind of people that give me hope in humanity. They have an extremely high capacity for empathy, and I am more grateful for that everyday. I have many interactions with moms (most notably my mom and my friends’ moms), and I had a great one this past weekend. Last Friday I drove down to San Antonio to attend the finals of the San Antonio Stock Show and Rodeo with my best friend from England, Chennya, and her boyfriend, Jarrod (both of whom I work with at summer camp). We three stayed with Jarrod’s mom who lives outside of San Antonio in a little southern town called Gonzalez. It was the most stereotypical small southern town I’ve ever spent a chunk of time in, and Jarrod’s mom Paige made my stay significantly better. Since Chennya and Jarrod are both good friends of mine, I am often their third wheel as I was this weekend, and Paige made this weekend’s third wheeling so muc...

I wouldn’t consider myself a YouTuber and I don’t often go on YouTube, but yesterday I was curled up in my bed for my sick day and fell into the trap. I started on Twitter, but decided to reminisce upon the wonderful days of Vine (pre-Tik Tok). There are many Vine compilations on YouTube, and yesterday I picked the one entitled “Vines That Keep Me From Ending It All.” Yes, the title is a little sinister, but it’s a great video. While I was watching this 14-minute video, there were more than a few times I broke out into uncontrollable laughter. What makes this laughter session different from others, specifically, is that I was alone in my room. I didn’t have anyone to laugh with or at, but I was still literally LOLing. For the rest of this post I’m going to describe a few of my favorite Vines from the video and try to understand why I laugh so hard at them. My all time favorite Vine is a guy driving a car who passes a “Road Work Ahead” sign and says “Road Work Ahead? Uh, yeah I sure ho...

"It cannot be denied that in the long run laughter and reason and nature have mastered every single one of these great teachers of an aim. In the end, the brief tragedy always turned back into the eternal comedy of existence, and the ‘waves of uncountable laughter,’ to use Aeschylus’ expression, must finally crash over even the greatest of these tragedians. But despite all this corrective laughing, human nature has nevertheless been changed, on the whole, by this constant reappearance of these teachers of aim of existence... The most careful friend of humanity will add, ‘Not only laughter and gay wisdom, but also the tragic with all its sublime unreason, belongs to the means and necessities of preserving the species!’" Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Gay Science.” Existentialism: Basic Writings, edited by Charles B. Guignon and Derk Pereboom, Second ed., Hackett, 2001, pp. 131.  This quote is a small part of the longer work by Friedrich Nietzsche entitled The Gay Science ...

One of my favorite pastimes is making fun of my boyfriend, my friends’ boyfriends, or really any of the male species for their shared, weird habits. Men think that women are hard to understand, but I think that we have logic behind our weird habits at the very least. Men on the other hand? Most of the time they can’t even justify their actions because they know they’re ludicrous, and a prime example of this left my friend Rachel and I in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I’m going to recount to you this story that I have entitled Laundry Laughter. About a week ago I was FaceTiming my boyfriend Matt who was on his 16th full day of having mono when he told me he had a confession for me. Instantly my mind went to all the terrible things he might be confessing like wanting to break up with me, but what he confessed was even better. He said, “McKenna, I’m not going to lie to you - I’ve been wearing dirty underwear for over a week now, because I don’t want to get out of bed long enough to do...

I’m only taking four classes this semester, and for my first journal entry I wanted to highlight my favorite one so far which is titled Literature of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA): Minority Literatures. In this class we’re focusing on a select few minority populations within the very vague Arab World region of the Middle East and North Africa, generally characterized as countries that have Arabic as one of their official, primary languages. Coming into this class, I knew pretty much nothing about the Arab World, so I learn so much every single class. So far, I’ve learned about the incredibly arbitrary splitting up of the Arab states after both World War I and World War II. I’ve learned how colonial powers treated the people in their Arab World colonies as second class citizens needing to be Christianized and civilized. I’ve learned that even within Arab controlled, independent countries in the MENA region, minorities are treated as second-class citizens and often have the...