On a completely self-fulfilling note…this is my 100th post. Celebrate!

I can’t decide if I think vomit is a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, it’s smelly, chunky, bile ridden sludge that looks like cottage cheese mixed with toxic snot. On the other, it’s kinda funny. Like many other embarrassing or gross things, the defining line between funny and horrible is proximity. Guy pukes on himself in the subway, funny. Guy pukes on you, not nearly as funny. You are the guy, big fat zero on the funny scale.

Since the conflict for me is fierce, I’m going to talk about throwing up as if I had never done it.

For instance, I’m going to forget that it was a green shirt wearing me who threw up in the hallway on St. Patrick’s day when I was in the 2nd grade. I’m going to assume it was someone else’s vomit that was cleaned up, as if we went to school in a barn, by the simple application of sawdust. If I were that kid, I’m sure I would have learned the ultimate lesson in embarrassment that day as every kid in the school walked to their next class laughing at the kid holding a wet nap by the pile of sawdust. How does sawdust clean vomit off of the floor, you might ask? Well, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. I think it’s a way for janitors to teach kids to think twice before pulling the rip-cord on the floor ever again. If I had ever puked on the floor, I’m sure I would have rather put my head in a wood chipper than vomit on the floor again.

I’m also going to assume that what comes shooting out of people’s mouths (and occasionally out of their noses) is equivalent to the physical embodiment of bunny smiles. Ok, that might not be an apt comparison, but let’s just assume it’s that slime stuff from Nickelodeon’s You Can’t Do That on Television.

For instance, I’m not going to gag when I think about the time Ferman Mandel asked if I wanted to see a trick after announcing he didn’t feel good. I learned that day that the worst thing you can hear a kid say after they tell you they don’t feel good is, “Do you want to see a trick?” In my experience, when you hear that, it means that Ferman Mandel is going to tilt his head back and puke straight up into the air like he’s a fountain. What made Ferman’s projecting display more horrible was that it happened on a school bus and I was the poor sucker sitting next to him who had just said, “I love tricks!” Man I got slimed with bunny smiles that day.

While it’s hard to convince someone that the puddle on the carpet or the action of watching it shoot out of someone’s body in a, “I’m breaking through this door!” way is funny, it’s impossible to not laugh at the language of puke.

When you say the phrase – “I threw up,” you’re really saying something different all together. You’re saying, “I went too far,” “I’m officially sick,” “I’m pregnant,” or “I shouldn’t have eaten sushi from a gas station.” If my experience is universal, then it also can mean, “Bacardi 151 isn’t something I should drink straight to impress a girl,” or “I ate 5 donuts out of a dumpster because I didn’t want to spend the $2 for non-rancid ones and the first four tasted funny and I wanted to end on a good note.”

Even the various names we give to throwing up makes me laugh. People can vomit, barf, puke, up chuck, worship the porcelain god, spew, hurl, blow chunks, bark at the ants (which don’t make no sense to me), boot, toss your cookies, do the Technicolor yawn, Ralph, yack and (my favorite) sell the Buick (who would ever say this?). Is there any other thing we do that has as many slang terms associated with it? It’s not like when you sneeze people go, “Harry needs a tissue because he Snibbed,” or “Harry just took his aunt to the glue factory.” They just say sneezed. How pedestrian.

Unfortunately, in the end, it’s not funny when you’re the one directly involved. I wasn’t laughing when I had to turn my shirt inside out to hide the dribble stains in that grade school hallway. I wasn’t chuckling when my mother made me stand outside while she hooked up the hose after my bus ride with Ferman. I was disgusted, embarrassed and confused as to why our bodies would do something so gross and horrible. When I think of laying on a cold linoleum floor or wrapping my hands around a toilet, I feel no comfort from how funny it is to call puking the Technicolor Yawn. At that point, it’s just gross.