my blogging for books entry

This is my entry for blogging for books from the Zero Boss. It's 619 words, and really, it made a liar out of me from my last post where I said I'd be inactive on the blog for a couple of days...

For this month's Blogging for Books, choose one of the three "starter sentences" listed below, and use it as the beginning of a blog post totalling no more than 2,000 words:
- Just when I thought my life couldn't get any crazier...
- Before I had kids, I thought ...
- I enjoy reading the stories in your magazine each month, but I never thought something like that could happen to me until a few nights ago, when...

And now for my entry:

Just when I thought my life couldn’t get any crazier I started laughing, that was how I learned to cope. They say laughing is a stress reliever and releases a lot of the same stuff as crying. I guess that’s where the saying “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry” comes from. So, my crazy life led me to laugh.

I was fifteen and convinced that I was carrying the world on my shoulders, what I didn’t realise was that all the other fifteen year olds in the world were also carrying it on their shoulders, so in relative terms it was pretty light. So, with blinders fully intact I was convinced that life couldn’t get any harder than this and I couldn’t wait until I was an adult and I could do whatever I wanted. No matter how many times you tell a fifteen year old that becoming an adult doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want, they will never believe you. Adults don’t have to do homework. Adults can drive cars. Adults don’t have a bedtime. Adults always seem to have money to buy whatever they want. Obviously being an adult is where it’s at. But I digress…

In the midst of all my teenage woes, that seemed earth shatteringly important at the time, but that I can barely remember now, there were moments of pure joy in my life. And these moments of pure joy often involved my brother. My brother is seven years older than me but managed to put up with having his little sister hanging on his coat tails wherever he went and remain cool at the same time. He’s a talented fella is that brother of mine…

Right, back to moments of pure joy, well, many of them involved just hanging out in his room, going to say something to him at seven o’clock or so and staying in there just talking and laughing and reading and listening to music until eleven or sometimes even midnight. But this one, this one in particular I can see with vivid clarity.

We were sitting at the dining room table. It was dark out. It was after dinner, but the dinner dishes weren’t on the table anymore. We were eating peanuts, shelling them and putting the shells in a bowl, which was sitting in front of me. I was drinking milk. Can you see where this is going yet?

It all started innocently enough, as we sat there talking about nothing in particular, my brother started to make jokes, as he was wont to do. I laughed, as I was wont to do. The part that makes this story different than all the other times is the inclusion of milk and peanut shells into the equation. I laughed so hard milk actually came out my nose. Well, this amused my brother to no end (and truth be told me too, but I would never have admitted it through my mock anger). As the evening progressed every time I thought it was save to take a drink of milk, my brother would make me laugh. This went on for quite a while, likely a couple of hours, and I am fairly certain that I didn’t swallow a drop of that glass of milk.
The end result? Sides aching from unbridled laughter, milk dripping off my chin, and a bowl full of peanut shells swimming in milk providing us an image of what would be the most disgusting cereal ever (although chalk full of regularity producing fibre though no doubt). But best of all, a memory I will carry with me always.

I love you Scotty, thank you for all the moments of pure joy.