Unsupervised Laughter

When you laugh so hard and so much that your abs start to contract and flex, that’s how you know it’s a good night. Or that you’re up so late and tired that everything happening around you is hysterical. These are the times that I look for and I desire. Even if it’s something as serious as a leadership program being held at a college that you have to stay at for a whole week, and it’s only the first day and you decide to have a concert with a left-on mic and a room full of 11th graders with no supervision.

Last year I went to a leadership program at Thomas College in June. When I first arrived at Thomas I was directed to the gym and inside were multiple tables set up. I went table to table giving information according to the questions, like my name, school, and shirt size. At the last table, I was handed my room key and a bag full of items. I went to my dorm to unpack and see what was in my bag. I undraw the string bag and dump it onto the desk next to my bed, items spill everywhere on the desk. The first thing I see is a booklet and I remember them saying something about the booklet at the table, I stare blankly at the booklet trying to remember what they said. And so I start flipping through the pages trying to remember and then it hits me this booklet tells me everything I need to know and I must keep it on me the whole time. I see pages with days and times on them and I notice it’s my schedule for the week, it tells me all the times for each event and where I must be at each moment in time. It was packed full of events and the only breaks we had was early mourning when we woke up, lunch, and after dinner when we went back to our dorms to fall asleep. This meant that there was no time to do anything else except what they told us to do. They brought us into the auditorium and told us everything that was gonna happen and what everything meant. We were in the auditorium for hours and it was starting to get late, everyone was getting exhausted. They told us to sit tight while the counselors figured out a voting process, this meant most of the counselors were gone and there was a room full of kids being almost completely unsupervised. We started off getting louder because everyone was talking amongst ourselves trying to be louder for the person next to us to hear. Then we started to walk around the auditorium just trying to stretch and move to stay awake. Then out of nowhere two kids got on the stage one had a phone and the other just stood next to the other, they walked together up to the mic that was being used earlier by the counselors. They tapped the mic and everyone heard the tap on the mic and through the speakers. everyone looked up at the stage and you could see the joy and shock on the faces of the two on stage, everyone stared as one of them started playing music on his phone and put it next to the mic and the other took the mic in hand. Almost everyone instantly recognized the music I want it that way by the backstreet boys. She takes the mic and starts singing and after a few seconds of singing I grab my phone and jump onto the stage and get in the center, I put my flashlight on and raise my phone over my head waving it for the whole auditorium to see and follow along to. We all start waving our phones and singing along. The counselors come in and see us all singing along and just stand there doing nothing just watching us, we continue singing along as if they aren’t even there. We make it almost to the end of the song and the girl singing is starting to lose her voice and becomes almost raspy you can hear her skipping notes and not on purpose. I was exhausted and started hearing her voice skip and started to laugh a little but kept waving my phone as if nothing happened, and then she skipped again and again, after the fourth time, she skipped the notes I started laughing harder. Eventually, I started laughing so hard that I had to put my phone down and I fell to the floor dying of laughter. I couldn’t stop laughing I just stayed on the floor laughing as she continued singing, and after a while, I was still laughing so I needed water so I started crawling on the ground while laughing and get to my water bottle. I made it to my water while continuously laughing I sat down and opened my water, raising it to my mouth about to take a sip I hear her skip another note and I immediately start laughing so hard that I physically can’t bring my water to my mouth. I continue laughing so hard while holding my water almost to the ground. The song then ends and everyone starts clapping and I stop laughing enough that I can finally drink my water.

I physically couldn’t stop laughing so much that I was rolling and crawling on the ground, I couldn’t even drink my water at all. And to make everything even better while all of this was happening someone in the crowd was recording. So I have a video of me laughing so hard on the ground and struggling to bring my water to my mouth. And thankfully we didn’t get yelled at or in trouble for doing any of this. And these are the times that I love and that I desire to have all the time. And I continue to have the times of laughing so much.

“Jayantii Laughing” by premasagar is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.