I was sitting in a meeting earlier this week when I suddenly heard my mother's voice giving that familiar warning, "You'd better watch out or your face will freeze like that."
Like what? I wouldn't want my face to freeze the way it looks when I'm sitting silently in a meeting that's going on too long without getting anywhere, or the way it looks when I'm glued to my computer screen sorting through message after message after message, or the way it looks when I've been reading too many student drafts one after another without a break.
When I sit too long, I need to get up and stretch my legs; when my face gets plastered into one unpleasant look for too long, I need to give it some exercise. That's when it's time to laugh. There's nothing like a deep-down belly laugh to wipe that dreadful look off my face.
It's easy enough to find an excuse to laugh when I'm in my office; I just have to browse the titles on my humor shelf or click on a link (like this one that one my daughter send me today, which offers an amusing variation on the "I Before E" spelling rule). But I can't break out YouTube in the middle of a meeting with my colleagues or whip out a little P.G. Wodehouse while conferring with the college trustees, can I? "Excuse me, I know this whole budget thing is kind of important, but my facial muscles require a brief respite so would you mind if I were to read aloud the passage where Edwin the Boy Scout wallops Bertie Wooster over the head with a hockey stick?"
No, sometimes laughter is not the best medicine. Those situations call for a different prescription, an alternative method to fight frozen-face syndrome--but what other exercise would stretch the facial muscles far outside their normal confines?
Excuse me, but this post is so boring I just can't stop yawning.
1 comment:
lool this put a smile on my face.
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