I'm posting now with my eyes brimming with tears. I'm starting to lose control, that wonderful, terrifying experience when you start really caring for someone and realize that they have the ability to completely destroy you if they'd like. That unfortunately, your happiness now depends on them being around, liking you, and you'll jump through all the hoops you have to. Right now my heart hurts from this realization, which of course came couched in a moment of painful confrontation, but that's not why I'm posting. I'm posting because once, I used to be good at it, and I want to be good at it again.

On Monday I was renting a movie with a friend of mine and I endured the social equivalent of fingernails across a blackboard. We were renting The Day After Tomorrow, which despite having cast members who I usually like, was not a good movie, and the video clerk guy (one of the faceless masses employed at a chain, instead of the independent minded, honest employees of the Mom and Pop place I usually go to, who never would have let me rent it) told us it was due back on Wednesday. So I look at my companion and to the clerk and say loudly in a 'making a bad joke' voice 'oh, the Day After Tomorrow, Har. Har. Har.'

I made a bad joke. But I did it on PURPOSE and clearly highlighted that fact by making a stupid fake laugh and throwing my head back in an exagerrated manner. When I righted my head to look at the clerk and Jen to get there reaction, I was met with stone cold silence. Nothing. They didn't even grin. Both of them allowed my attempt at levity to fall flat and unacknowledged.

The humorless clerk gave me my receipt and we left, and then I quickly started berating Jen for being a horrible friend, and while her excuse, which was that she knew that by not laughing we'd get much more mileage out of the joke than had she sympathetically smiled or chuckled, was pretty good, I still am reeling by the fact that she left me twisting in the wind. Embarassed, in front of a ROGERS employee! The shame!

Now 'Mark' or 'Andrew' or whatever boring replaceable name this guy was saddled with since birth has only one impression of me, and that's that I make bad jokes. I DON'T! Well, I do, but I do it out of IRONY which makes me so much more complex than that! This event has drawn my attention to every time I fake laughed at a joke at the restaurant, only to walk away rolling my eyes. Maybe all those bad-joke tellers were doing it to test my resolve. To see if I'd pander to them and laugh at their unfunny jokes. Maybe I was the one who'd failed, by lowering my standards and laughing at sub-par humour. Maybe the joke's on ME!

Regardless, I'm going to be much more sensitive to lame parent humour from now on. And I'm never EVER telling a bad joke ever again. Even for effect. Lesson learned.