You had to be there....

Sometimes I only get the chance to blog once a week. And since I can't always get up the motivation to think of a topic, it's nice to have other friends to blog with so we can take turns. I enjoy being challenged to write about stuff that might not normally come to mind and also reading everyone else's thoughts on the same topic. Blog Project 3.0 has been going on for about a year now, even though one of the group members changed after a few months. I love blogging with this group and I hope we can continue to inspire each other.

This week Froggie chose the topic: Those that get it will understand.

First, read what everyone else had to share on this topic:
Darwin Shrugged
Froggie
Moma Rock

Before I go on, I wanted to share links to some posts I saw recently where I felt like people had access to my mind.

*A recent post about motherhood by Scary Mommy. (Warning: There's a swear word in the title, so don't open with kids around)

*A song by Garfunkel and Oates about wishing people "Happy Birthday" on Facebook when you don't really know them.

What Froggie's topic really made me think of, though, is inside jokes. Oddly enough, Moma Rock inspired this post idea, as well. Her recent post about friendship, along with a post about her new kitten (and the joke has nothing to do with that), got me thinking about this even more.

Most of my friends and I can find stuff to laugh about together. And I'll send things to certain friends that I know will specifically interest them. However, most people would understand that stuff I'm sharing with these particular friends. And then there are friends with whom I have inside jokes that no one else would ever understand except the two of us.

My BFF and I have some inside jokes. Twenty-seven plus years of friendship is bound to generate a bunch of them. I think ours are more in the sarcastic way we respond to each other and some of the silly things we do during our Google hangout sessions. (Like I'll message her the next day that I "might" forgive her cat for interrupting our conversation or we'll take pictures of each other's face on our screens. And our "sign" offs to each other are classic and can't be forgotten at the end of each hangout!) Aside from our humorous moments, we also share a mutual understanding, especially now that she's having some experiences in her life that allow us to relate to each other even more. Even so, she's the only one who truly appreciates the Ed Debevic's radio commercial I made in sixth grade.

When I met my friend A.S. at a Jewish youth retreat during freshman year of high school, we instantly had inside jokes. We'd send each other drawings and tape recordings that made sense to only us. Most of our jokes revolved around Barbie and McDonald's, as well as people who annoyed us. I can still post random stuff on her Facebook page and she'll remember exactly what it's related to. When we got together this past May, we had so much to laugh about.

There are certain jokes I have with some friends from both high school and college. We still find these things funny. I shared some great inside jokes with the friends I lived with in my last semester before graduating and fondly look back upon the night we spent carrying an old grandfather clock (that was lighter than we ever expected) into different rooms of my condo so we could take weird pictures of it. There's also Mr. Aah. A lot of the laughter in college came from my junior year, when another close friend and I would talk about Lino all the time.

The cake my friends from college got me for my
birthday because of Waiting for Guffman.

"Will" and I still have a lot of random inside jokes from high school and beyond. He can tease me about my nickname for IHOP while I can tease him about his bicycle stationery. Later on, our inside jokes came from experiences at the gay clubs or at some of the Pride Parades we attended. ("Rod! You're so cute! I voted for you!") And there's the never-ending debate over whether Buffalo (a restaurant in the Chicago suburbs) should have an "s" at the end or not. I haven't seen him in person in over five years, but our inside jokes keep us close.

I have the most inside jokes with my husband, hands down. I keep lists of our jokes and will look back on them sometimes and laugh all over again. He totally gets my sense of humor and knows how to make me laugh so hard that I can't even see straight. I'll admit that I can make him laugh too, but he's just the master of comedy in our house. He always tells me that he could only be a comedian if I were cloned many times to make up an entire audience. A lot of our inside jokes come from our favorite shows and movies. He also does great imitations. No one would be able to make sense of most of the stuff we joke about. Sometimes we'll have inside jokes with our kids and they love laughing with us. One of my recent favorites is when I put a picture of the Fonz on a bottle of lotion because the brand was related to a pyramid scheme, which we equated with a Ponzi scheme....and Fonzie rhymes with Ponzi. It took him almost a day to notice the lotion bottle and then he posted on Facebook about it instead of saying something to me first.

I've started to form inside jokes with some of the friends I've made since I moved to Maryland, as well as some I met through my book blog. It's cool to know that there are some people who just "get" me without ever having met me in person or even having known me a long time.