laughed till I cried

Shades of Close Encounters. Squid's daughter Iz, tonight, sculpting her bowl of pale, non-kraft, organic macaroni and cheese: "Look! I made Gondor!" (It actually kind of did look like Gondor - white city... towers...walls... on a hill... etc. We turn and attempt not to be seen laughing. Our shoulders shake.) "Look! Now I made Barad-dur! And here's Orthanc!"

I was reminded of the first time I ate dinner at my boyfriend's house in high school. We were in the hand holding stage but rapidly progressed to making out in his backyard hot tub. The other main activity I remember doing with him was creating weird fake questionnaires, putting them on clipboards, and accosting people in the mall to answer the questions. It was the best use of the mall! We tried starting with reasonable questions and progressing gradually to insulting, crazy, and offensive.

Anyway, at the table with his family, I suddenly noticed that, with a crazed look in his eyes, he was silently sculpting his mashed potatoes into the Devil's Tower. That was it for me... I couldn't stop laughing... no one else seemed to get it, or care, and there was a horrible stony silence from them all as I laughed uncontrollably for really long time and he continued sculpting, finally quitting to crack up at me.