AndrewBrunelle.com

Laughter is something you can either embrace or resist.  It’s so strange because there’s been studies done that shows the average child laughs about 200 times a day and the average adult laughs maybe five times a day.  What happened to all those laughs?  We all had to grow up and forget about our sense of umor or what?  I feel that having a sense of humor is the only thing that keeps some people sane.  Take that away from them and they’re a lunatic. 

So why the hell don’t we laugh as much as we get older?  Society conditions us to take the world seriously, with all those threats to your survival, all those depressing news stories, and propaganda to keep us all in fear.  I remember when I was a kid, I would watch the news with my mom and I would immediately say how boring it was.  Always talking about dead people or explosions or massacres.  It was neve anything that made me want to ever watch it again.  How can you laugh when you are aware of so much suffering.  It’s a known fact that around 150,000 people die a day.  It’s a condition of the Earth.  So why do we need to be so depressed about it all the time?  Why does the news media have to shove it down our throats while not feeding us the good news most of the time?

Growing up means you have to get serious about your life.  You have to meet deadlines and all that.  There’s always something you have to do.  There’s not as much time to laugh.  You have more worries, more deadlines, more bills to pay.  But I don’t think that should stop you from laughing, at least on a semi-regular basis.  I mean, it’s not going to kill you.

So, my advice to you to to try what I call a laughter meditation.  It’s where you put all your problems aside, forget completely about them, and just laugh.  Laugh at the things you find funny.  Do it for five, ten minutes and just enjoy those moments like they’re solid gold wrapped in gold-plated silver.  It will allow you to relax yourself and feel good, at least for the time you are laughing. 

Have a sense of humor, too.  You can joke about your financial situation, your car breaking down, or your house being repossessed.  Don’t take life so seriously.  I find the people with the best attitudes towards life have a sense of humor and they usually thrive because of it.  People are drawn to humor, not drawn to depression and angst, although those tools can be great for humor.  Humor and laughter are tension release.  Some comedians refer to stand-up comedy as their “therapy.”  And I agree, to a certain extent.  Having other people laugh at your life, which you think is also funny, is really just a wonderful way to feel good.

I’m sure you read my previous post on how I got through a brain tumor using laughter through the whole surgery process, the whole radiation process, the hair loss, everthing.  And I emerged victorious.  Not just because the treatment worked, but because I had a positive attitude through all the laughter I was getting frome everyday life.

So, when life gets rough, just put yourself apart of it for maybe ten minutes and laugh it off.  When you’re done, I’m sure you’ll feel much better.  I know I do.  If that doesn’t work then try yoga or something.

The most important part of a joke is the punchline.  We all know that, but you have to realize that more than 95 percent of what you’re saying aren’t punchlines.  The rest is basically setups and just standing there waiting for the audience to stop laughing or crying, depending on how well you’re doing.  But it’s not how many punchlines you have as to where you put them.  Where you put punchlines can be the difference between big laughs and no laughs.  Here’s a formula I tend to use regularly:

I go through all my jokes and look at where the punch word is.  That’s the word that gives surprise.  The word that makes the audience go, “Ha, ha, ha.”  And I take it out of the joke and move it to the last possible word without disrupting the thought of the joke.  For example, here’s a joke I had and performed five or six times one way:

I don’t do drugs because I’m high on life…that cereal is amazing. 

Notice the bold word cereal.  That’s where the joke takes its turn.  The only problem is that there are two words after the punchline.  So what I did was this.  I changed the second sentence to “I love that cereal,” so that cereal is the last word and it allows for maximum laugh potential.  But you may be asking, “Why do this?”  I’ll tell you.  If you tell a joke and the audience laughs and you continue to talk while they’re laughing, they’ll stop.  And if you continue to do this, eventually you’ll condition the audience to stop laughing and then even if what you say is really funny, they’ll be too afraid to laugh.  Why?  Because they don’t want to miss your next joke.  It’s part word placement and part timing.

People often ask what to do while the audience is laughing.  “Do you just stand there?”  No, you don’t just stand there.  Body language is very important in comedy.  Have the same body language you had while telling the joke and you can even tag the emotion by mumbling to yourself or shaking your head.  It’s all a process.  You don’t want to just stand there.  That’s the worst thing you can do.  You’ll start your next joke with no momentum and it will be like every joke you tell is the first one you tell onstage, which means you’ll have to tell e

You remember when you were a kid and some other kid got something that you didn’t, and you would retaliate by saying, “That’s not fair!” and some adult would say, “Well, life’s not fair.” that’s kind of a cop-out isn’t it? They did nothing to rectify the situation. They just outright said, “Get used to being treated unfairly. That’s life.” And we’re instilled with this belief that life’s not fair. And we grow up like that. “How come that guy has a bigger house than us?” “Because life’s not fair, son.” But what if life was fair? What if we all were treated equally in the eyes of the world? What if we all had the same opportunities that the rich people get and the successful people have? What kind of world would that be?

It would be a terrible world. Nobody would want to be a janitor or a plumber. They’d all be doing things like climbing mountains, starting in big movies, being famous, and selling insurance at big profits. Nobody would be working at McDonald’s for five dollars an hour or selling clothes in retails stores. Nobody’s passionate about that stuff. Nobody wants to do things like that, so it wouldn’t get done. There would be no more garbage man, so we’d all have to take our own garbage to the dump. Nobody would grow much food because it’s not exactly the best things to be a farmer. No one would ever clean up public bathrooms, so they’d be filthy. It would be a terrible, chaotic world.

But I think we need a little of that. We need to experience some sort of chaos in our lifetimes. We need to stir thing sup a bit. It’s for our own good. We all lead these lives of security. Get a job, get a house, work until we’re sixty or seventy, then retire and do meaningless activities as we wait to die. And what’s it all for? Most people don’t have a purpose for going to work besides meeting their survival needs. If they got free food and free housing, there would be no jobs. There wouldn’t be a need. And we’d all live in perfect harmony with one another. I think we need to go back to the barter system. We each have something of value to give to one another. Let’s say there’s a farmer who needs a roof put on his house. So you fix his roof for one year’s supply of food. And if you cobble his shoes correctly, you can marry his daughter. It’s the way of the old world.

But eventually, that would all collapse, too because some people would want more and some people would think they’re getting screwed. How can you measure how many carrots it takes to equal one ox? You can’t, but there would have to be some sort of exchange rate set up, which would indefinitely lead us back to using money again. And in order to have money, you’ve got to get a job, and to get a job you have to act like a total conformist to the job’s values, which in turn has you die a little inside. But that’s the way it goes. You can never really be yourself at a job because there’s always that threat of losing your job if you say or do the wrong thing. So it’s all these low-volume gossip sessions I’ve been seeing. This is where all the workers, mostly low-level workers will gather in a circle and say bad things about the people in charge, their own fellow co-workers, in fear that if that particular co-worker heard this, they’d all be out of a job.

And I really think people get pleasure from bad-mouthing their boss and other follow co-workers because it allows them to all agree on who’s good and who’s bad. But the people they’re talking about really don’t know that they’re being talked about because they’re never around when it happens, so they remain oblivious to the fact that everyone hates them. I think most of the people who gossip about other workers are jealous that the others are in charge, which leads us back to the unfairness paradigm.

It’s human nature to want control over a situation and when you go to work, you really don’t have much control unless you’re the boss. If you’re not, you have to do what somebody else says is best for you. You really don’t have much of a say in that, and if you want changes, they never happen right away. There’s always a delay for the whole store to shuffle around and retool everything. So without direct control, it makes us feel powerless at our jobs, which in turn leads to getting depressed about the job, feeling like you’re going nowhere.

And we envy the people in charge because we wish we had that power, but we don’t. It usually takes years to earn that type of respect, and if and when we finally get it, we realize we didn’t even want it. Nobody wants to be responsible. You know why? Because whenever something bad happens, somebody asks, “Who’s responsible for this?” And if it’s you, you’re in a world of hurt.

Usually, when viewing things from the outside in you really don’t get the whole picture. You could look at someone doing a job and say, “hey, I could do that.” But if you were to try it, you’d see the job from a whole different perspective, the inside out. And it’s a whole different paradigm that really will change the way you think about it. But at least I’ll never have to worry about that stuff. I’m not planning to climb my way up any corporate ladder because it could be leaning against the wrong building.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to clarify that life can be fair if you view it in that light. You can see it in the best way possible, or you can loathe those who have it better than you. But it’s when you appreciate what you have and just try to make the best of it that you really realize who has the better life. A bigger house and more money isn’t going to make you happier. It’ll just make you more of who you already are. Until next time, I’m Ed Bradley.

Supposedly those are the three most important things to making your blog work.  Traffic, traffic, and traffic.  I need traffic.  There’s no denying it.  I need to get more traffic.  Because without traffic, there’s no impact.  And without impact, there’s no reason to post.  So I have to do something to increase traffic.  Maybe do some sort of promotion or something or more advertising.  I don’t know.  I really just want to get my name out there and into the public eye.  I just want to help people as well as make them laugh, and I’m sure as hell trying like mad to do that.  So I guess it’s come down to this:  Either start putting my actual stand-up material up here or actually put my ideas for either a show or a screenplay up here so I can somehow express myself in a more concise and eloquent manner.  So I just have to do it.  Do it now.  That’s the quote of a lifetime.  Get the shit done.  That’s all I have to do.  That’s all I need to do.  So I’m going to do it…now. 

I just wish I had more capabilities on this blog.  There’s not really much of a vein in the sense of audio and I guess you can upload videos, but I really would like to put up some of my audio voices and stuff because I find a lot of them very interesting and I’ll just have to figure out a way to do that or convert this blog into a full website along with other elements.  I’m just really trying to move this to the next level.  If I can do that, I’m sure the visitors will come.  So here’s the plan.  In the next two months, my goal is to post at least 100 to 200 times, in different categories, with different themes and to be able to express my comedy the best way I can.  It’s all about providing the best value that I am capable of.  I’m not going to cut back at all.  I’m not going to fuck around, I’ll get right to the point. I’m capable of it and I will adhere to this task. 

So what should you expect to see?  Here’s a list of what I would like to include in the near future:

• Audio recordings
• Artwork
• Comics
• Partial Scripts
• Theories
• Conversations
• Things I Find Funny

There may be more additions, but it’s really up to me.  I am the captain of this ship, and it’s my duty to bring her to her destination.  So wish me luck along this journey and behold my immense power as I steer myself into comedy gold.  Just be careful about those barnacles.  I know I sure will.  Until next time, happy trails.

I’m sure you know of a comedian named Steven Wright if you’re at all a comedy fan.  He’s a very obscure comedian who did much performing in the ’80s and ’90s and he still goes places today, but not as much.  I’d like to give a tribute to him and list some of my favorite jokes of his.  Here they are, in no particular order:

•  A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I’m afraid of widths.
• Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.
• I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the day cause I know it’s gonna be up all night.
• How young can you die of old age?
• I bought some batteries, but they weren’t included.
• I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.
• I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.
• I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world… perhaps you’ve seen it.
• I met this wonderful girl at Macy’s. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
• I think God’s going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.
• I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.
• If you shoot at mimes, should you use a silencer?
• In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.
• There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators.
•  You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?
• So I began hitching.  I got picked up by this huge trailer truck carrying twenty brand new cars.  I climbed up the side of the cab and he said, “there’s no room in here, why don’t you get in one of the cars in the back?”  So I did.  And he was really into picking up people cause he picked up nineteen more.  We all had our own cars.  Then he went 90 miles an hour, we all go speeding tickets.
• I went to the drive in in a cab.  The movie cost me 95 dollars.
• I was skiing in England. I went up in a lift with this guy I never met.  We went halfway up the mountain without saying a word to each other.  Then he said, “You know, this is the first time I’ve been skiing in ten years?”  I said, “Really, why’s that?”  He said, “I was in jail.  You wanna know why?”  I said, “No not really.”  Then i said, “You’d better tell me why.”  He said, “I pushed a total stranger off of a ferris wheel.”  I said, “I remember you.”
• When I have a child, I’m going to get one of those strollers for twins.  I’m gonna tell him he was a twin, too.  “You were a twin and your brother didn’t listen to me.”
• I’m Caesarian born.  Can’t really tell.  Although whenever I leave the house, I go out through the window.
• Whenever I pick up hitchikers, I like to wait a few minutes before I say anything to them.  Then I say, “So how far did you think you were going?  Put your seatbelt on, I wanna try something.  I saw it in a cartoon once, but I”m pretty sure I can do it.”
• I just got back from the hospital.  I was in a speed reading accident.  I hit a bookmark, flew across the room.

I guess that’s all I really find notable, but I’m sure there’s more.  He does this one bit where he’s on a elevator and this other guy gets on and they ride the elevator to Phoenix and they go out into the desert and the phone rings and it’s Steven’s loan officer from his bank.  I find him to be abolutely hillarious.  I didn’t mention every joke because I want you to experience him for yourself.  He’s very surreal, but still, very funny.  He’s one of my favorites and I hope you enjoy him as well.  Check out his website, you won’t regret it.

The Internet where I live has been so unreliable lately. It’s just terrible. And I’m starting to wonder why I even have it in the first place. Is this constant frustration worth $39.95 a month or am I just supposed to accept it? It took more than twenty minutes for me to go from the Wordpress homepage to the place where I post blogs. I actually typed most of this in a Notepad document. It’s just getting to the point where I may just get rid of this so-called Internet and maybe just do blog posts at my public library. I’m just sick of having to wait for everything to work. It’s a Cable Internet, too, so it’s supposed to be fast all the time.

All I know is that my computer is starting to act like a regular person more and more every day. It wakes up groggy when I turn it on. It’s very slow for the first hour or so of operation. It also can’t be left on all night or it suffers a very slow reaction, just like someone who went the whole night without sleeping. It’s just crazy. I don’t know what I can possibly do to make this thing run better. I’ve tried everything: defragmenting, freeing up disk space, restarting it, but it still doesn’t want to work. I’ve even tried yelling at it, but to no avail. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, but it really just makes us more frustrated at how much more complicated things get. The only thing I praise the Internet for was making research papers that much easier, but besides that, it’s more of a waste of time than anything else.

I’m sure we’ve all been in the situation where you’re online and all of the sudden, your connection goes dead or evertying freezes. And let’s say you were having a conversation with someone or you were doing a project and you didn’t save it, and now your coputer is unresponsive, no matter what you do.

I am getting really pissed off with all of this shit. It just doesn’t end. Every day, my computer amazes me in breaking down in some capacity. My AOL is working like it is retarded. Every time I run it, all these error messages keep popping up and they keep popping up after I close them and it happens for like six minutes straight, then stops for two minutes, then starts up again and there’s nothing I can do to correct them because it won’t tell me what the error is. I may just get another computer and build it from scratch because I want one that will be efficient and also have certain qualities about it that will allow for massive storage and less errors.

An update on the Wordpress Page not loading. I have to now restart my computer because it still hasn’t loaded. Don’t you just love technology? It’s such a wonderful thing. I just restarted my computer, tried to log into Wordpress, and guess what happened? Error on Wordpress! Is anything more wonderful than technology? The only thing that comes close is the DMV, or as I like to call it, the Waiting Decathalon. It’s almost as if the world has come to an end. Because that’s what will happen if the Internet doesn’t start working. Imagine, no computers work anywhere, we’re all just wandering around now that we don’t have the resources to buy something on eBay.

Sometimes I think I should just throw my computer out the window. It will be easy, it being a laptop and all. But you know, I learned something today. The only thing you can actually trust is your own mind. And if you can’t do that, you’re screwed. Sure, a computer is nice because it can store million of letters of information, but that doesn’t mean your memory can’t either. I still haven’t gotten to the Wordpress posting template yet and it’s been about forty minutes. Usually, it takes about one to two minutes. On a good day. There must be some kind of problem with the Internet, but whatever. I really just want to get this on the web so people can read it. I’m not going to go websurfing after this. So please work, Wordpress. I’ll be good to you, I promise. I’ll post every day. Sometimes twice a day. I promise…

Well, it doesn’t look like it’s gong to work, and if it ever does, this will be on the web, unedited as usual and I really hope you enjoy it, if you ever get a chance to read it. Hey!!! It just started getting up. Finally, I can copy and paste it into the box. I sure hope those features are working today.  Now let’s see what happens when I press the publish button.  I hope it doesn’t suddenly suck my computer into a black hole.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed

I would love to start going audo blogs, but I’m not sure how to do them yet. I’m sure it would be more beneficial to some extent as it would be easier to listen to them while you do other things, like clean your computer desk or make love to your spouse. But I really don’t know how to do it yet. It’s just something I have to work on to perfect my blogmanship. I know that’s not a word, but it has been put into my dictionary of words that aren’t but should be. I’m looking forward to possibly doing podcasts as well, but it’s all a means of finding the skills necessary to do so.

A second project I want to add to this blog is some sort of comic strip I’m working on that’s going to be really funny. I also would like to turn this comic into an animation. It will not be easy, but I’m willing to invest the time and effort to make it happen. I just feel it will be a very rewarding project to work on, both for my humorous goals and for your enjoyment. I’ll just have to create some preliminary pictures using Paint or something so that I can work from some sort of groundwork. I’m doing this to express my comedy further to a larger audience and making sure I can become someone who has multiple resources to make people laugh. It’s all about creating things that are real to me. I’m not going to make things that aren’t funny to me just because they might be popular. It’s all about self-expression. And this is why I hope to one day have nice things. It might take me ten years, but the nice things will come. They’re on their way, it’s just a matter of time. But I just thought I’d check in and update what I’m working on. Thank you.

I read this article on Steve Pavlina’s blog called 8 Changes I Experienced After Giving Up TV.  So I decided to try it myself.  It’s been a little over a week since then and so far, so good.  I haven’t watched any TV whatsoever.  What it’s done for me is it’s allowed me to tap into my creativity more often and I feel like I have more time to do the things I feel I never have time to do.  Like I wanted to start an exercise program before, but I would alsays think, “I don’t have enough time.”  Now that TV viewing is out of my daily routine, I find I have more time to do it.

Also, I feel like not watching TV has really improved my overall thinking skills.  It’s probably because I’m not really doing any passive activities anymore.  By passive, I mean both my mind and my body are inactive.  For the most part, TV is a very passive activity.  Now that my mind is working 24/7, I find its skills are building up at a faster rate.  I’m much more witty and can think better on my toes than I could watching TV all the time.  It’s almost like my mind has expanded outside of the box, the TV box.  You know, I could never figure out how they could fit all those people in there anyway.  It must be awful crouwded.

Another thing I’ve been noticing is that my creativity has become much more sufficient.  It’s almost like I can think of a very abstract joke and turn it into gold much quicker.  I’ve been able to concentrate better on the task at hand as well.  This is probably due to no distractions.  It’s been really interesting because I’ve been able to work really hard for extended periods of time without worrying what’s on at 9:30.  Time has become less meaningless.  The only reason I keep track of it at all is so I’m not late for work.  But besides that, it’s utterly meaningless to me now. 

I’ve been doing some reading lately as well.  I read a book devoted to juice fasting and detoxification and I also read a book written by Jerry Seinfeld called Seinlanguage.  It’s a good read.  I’m going to start reading much more.  I’ll probably end up becoming more of a reader than anything else besides a comedian.  I’d rather expand my mind with reading than with utter nonsense reality shows like Survivor (not even worth supplying a link). 

I didn’t really watch that much TV in the first place.  Sometimes I would watch South Park and King of the Hill and maybe every once in awhile, The Simpsons.  But I started to change my viewing habits.  I started watching Law and Order: SVU and CI.  Don’t ask me why, but I just did.  Then I went to Court TV, with all those Forensic shows.  And I became fascinated in them to the point where I would stay up until four in the morning watching these shows that had absolutely nothing to do with me.  Sometimes I would come to my senses and say, “Why do I care about this?”  But often I just stayed up all night watching these meaningless shows. 

This kind of new behavior without TV has really made me feel more ambitious and more inclined to be outdoors than indoors.  I find life so much more excitng than passively sitting in front of a television set, waiting for my eyelids to close.  It’s jsut something you have to do to experience.  Let me ask you something:  How much TV do you watch each day?  How much time is that in a year?  If you calculate that, you’ll realize that you’ll probably have almost a waking week worth of TV watching each month.  And it’s time that could be better spent doing things you enjoy. 

This is why when I go about this for a year, I highly doubt I’ll even have a TV.  If I do, it will be like a really old one that probably won’t even work.  I may get a DVD player though, because I do enjoy movies because a lot of them provoke deep thought and there’s no commercials.  But I really find it’s much better to be without it than with it.  And it’s not like I’m even thinking about how much I’m losing.  I know I’m gaining in doing this.  And you should give it a try.  You’ll thank me for the time.  Time isn’t something you can get back, so start saving it today.

Why is it whenver someone offers something free, everyone jumps to get it?  It doesn’t matter what it is, everyone wants it.  I’ve never seen anything like twenty-thousand men lined up to get a free tampon.  It’s amazing, it really is.  But if a particular store has some sort of promotion where you get a free hat with purchase, you’ll see thousands of people there just for the hat.  It’s like, “Well, I figured I’d get my free hat along with my purchase of $150 in merchandise.”  And the merchandise isn’t even something the person wanted.  It’s just the hat. 

The word “free” has so much power.  It can turn normal, law-abiding citizens into a mass mob running towards the free hot dog stand.  It’s insane.  I guess its appeal is that if something is free, even if you don’t like it, there’s no risk.  The only thing you lose is your time.  I guess people don’t value time as much as money, except for maybe the people who say, “Time is money.”  But it seems like if something isn’t going to cost us anything, then no amount of time is too much to justify receiving a free gift.  Why do you think companies offer a free gift with purchase of certain things?  They know that if you need to spend $45 to get a free paperweight, then you’ll do anything to meet that criteria.

What scares me is Wal*Mart.  You see, they’re always rolling back prices.  You never hear about them raising prices, so you know one day, it’s all going down to zero.  Everything at Wal*Mart will be free.  And you think it’s busy now.  I can imagine the second that Wal*Mart goes down to zero on everything in the store, the next second, everything will be gone.  The employees’ uniforms stripped off their bodies.  Bathroom stalls gone.  The gigantic letters on the outside of the building.  Gone.  And the employees will be looking around, thinking, “Where did everything go?” 

Which is why we must try and resist free stuff.  Free stuff is not really free.  It’s free in the sense that you don’t have to pay, but is it really worth the hassle of standing next to two thousand other people who are also trying to get their piece of the free pie?  I say it isn’t.  I will pay full price just so I don’t have to deal with another screaming mob.  That’s why I never shop at Wal*Mart.  Sure you’ll pay more at other places, but you don’t have to deal with all the people. 

Then there’s the people who say, “The best things in life are free.”  Yeah, I”m sure that Girls Gone Wild T-shirt you earned when you lifted up your shirt is one of your prized possessions.  Or that “Save the Tiger” T-shirt you got in fifth grade for going on a nature walk.  I’m sure that’s up on the mantle with your Emmy Award and Congressional Medal of Honor.  The best things in life cost something.  They either cost time or money or make you sacrifice something else in your life.  Sure, handouts are great, but they’re nowhere close to the best things in life.

This is why I think we need to start charging people for air.  We can charge anything we want, people will pay.  Because if they don’t, they’ll suffocate.  It’s almost like the rising gas prices we had this summer.  You can complain all you want, but the onlly way you’re going to stop is to stop driving.  And no one was ready to do that.  Nobody dusted off their bikes or anything, so they paid.  Then all these promotions came out for free gas.  Free this, free that, what I need is some free time.  None of this time share crap.  I want my own time free.  Peace out, everyone.

I’m not a morning person.  Some people are.  Some people wake up feeling energized and why shouldn’t they?  They’ve spend the last eight or so hours resting.  But that doesn’t mean you should have to deal with them at the office, on the bus to work, or at the coffee shop.  You ever been really tired or had a headeache and you’re at work and one of these “morning people” comes by, all full of energy and laughing it up and you’re like, “Could you tone it down a little?  I’m kind of groggy.”  There are two solutions to this problem and let’s get right down to it:

The first solution is to avoid them all-together.  Lock the door of your office or simply don’t show up to work until you’r enot groggy.  Who cares what your boss thinks?  He’s not the boss of you.  You are the ultimate boss in your life.  Another thing you could do is just not respond to the morning people.  What you do if you see them passing in the hall is to just snub them.  And they’ll naturally say, “Is anything wrong?” but don’t fall into that trap.  Just keep walking.  That’s bring their little happy trip down about three notches.  These people are like energy vaccuums.  They take the little energy you have and use it to exhaust you to the point of not return.  But total outright avoidance is pretty good.  I recommend it.

Another tactic is to become a morning person.  Here’s how you do it.  Let’s say you’re groggy for the first two hours at work.  So wake up two hours earlier and maybe go to bed an hour later and you’ll be a little more energetic.  You may not be able to be as peppy as Jim from accounting, but maybe you’ll be able to withstand their barrage of, “Tony! How are you?!  It’s so great to see you!!!”  Or you could come up with a witty remark about them.  You’ll probably have a little more of your timing back, seeing as you woke up a couple hours earier, so you could say something that makes them question why they’re so damn happy in the morning.  Maybe that will shut them up.  Probably not.

A third and alternative option is for the people who have had it completely.  Just throw all the morning people down a flight of stairs.  That’s all.  Let them know that  you don’t mess around.  You get right to the point.  And when they haul you off to jail, you’ll have some other types of people to deal with.  The morning rapists.  But at least they you won’t have to sit through another, ‘How are you?  O wonderful!” seminar.  I haven’t tried this approach personally, but I’m sure it works pretty well. 

I’m not trying to offend morning people.  I really think that’s great if that’s the way you are.  But even if you feel really good in the morning, keep in mind that around four or five P.M., when you’re starting to lose that energy, an afternoon person might stop on by and do the same thing to you, leaving you for dead, in energy of course.  That’s why I always try and concserve my energy until around four.  That way I can get my revenge and then I’ll be beaming on the way home from work.