Recap: When we last left Jill's dad, he had just shared with the family his decision to walk across South Dakota. The state.

It's hard, I think, to pinpoint exactly where the crazy starts.

It's not just the fact that my father walked across South Dakota. It's more the fact that he walked across South Dakota for no reason.

No no. That's not quite right. It's not just the fact that he walked across South Dakota for no reason. It's the fact that he walked across South Dakota whilst listening to a Walkman.

Nope, not there yet. Let's try again. It's not just the fact that he walked across South Dakota for no reason whilst listening to a Walkman. It's the fact that he only brought ONE TAPE.

Yes, that's it.

Two-hundred miles across South Dakota.

One tape.

John Phillip Sousa marches.

Do you feel my pain?

Things I learned today:

1) When a dentist is so confident in his abilities that he watches Good Morning America whilst performing a root canal on your tooth, there is a good chance you're going to end up in pain.

2) Even if you have the best comedy set EVER, if you are performing at a gay club, a drag queen singing "I Will Survive" will always get more applause than you.

3) Glitter is hard to wash off.

4) Sometimes getting a root canal is the good part of your day.

I just joined a new gym.

Not surprisingly, I have concerns:

1) When I signed up for the gym, I got a free t-shirt. The lady at the desk informed me that the t-shirts only come in extra large.

That, I think, does not bode well for the effectiveness of the gym.

2) The gym has an entire row of handicapped parking at the front of the parking lot. The gym itself is on the second floor.

Who, I ask, are the particular handicapped individuals who cannot walk from one side of the parking lot to the other, yet have no problem walking up the stairs to the gym and then doing cardio?

3) Two words: TANNING BEDS. Seriously? Do people still do that?

4) My last gym had only women. So I'm a little concerned about running into giant men and having them scowl at me whilst I move the little thingy on the weight machine from three hundred pounds, down to eleven pounds.

Yes. I feel sure that giant tan men in extra large t-shirts will laugh and laugh at me until I am forced to punch them in the face.

And then they will have to park in the handicapped spots.

Imagine being twenty-three years old, still under the illusion that your parents are sane, and receiving THIS phone call one Saturday morning:

Me: Hello?

Dad: Hey, it’s Dad. I’m going to walk across South Dakota.

Now let’s just pause here for a moment. Let it sink in a little, if you will.

South Dakota, for those of you that are unaware, is a state. Of land, not of mind.

Now if my father had decided to walk across, say, Rhode Island, that would be one thing. (From the way it looks on the map, I can only assume that people walk across Rhode Island every morning when they cross the street to buy coffee. I suspect that if you have allergies in Rhode Island, you quite regularly sneeze yourself right into Massachusetts.)

But South Dakota is quite a different story. It's BIG.

Me: Did you just say you’re going to walk ....

Dad: Across South Dakota. Yes.

Me: Why would you do that?

Dad: I read an article about a woman who walked across the United States for political reasons.

Me: Oh. Do you have political reasons?

Dad: Nope.

I should point out that by this point in my life, I thought I was used to bouts of endearing-madness from my father. When I was seven he made our family move from Montana to Idaho in a cattle truck. Another time he convinced me to help round up a herd of buffalo. The man has been known to duck hunt by dressing up like a duck.

But walking across South Dakota opened up a whole new dimension of crazy.....

(TO BE CONTINUED....)

My voice teacher informed me today that I have beautiful hands and he thinks I should be a hand model.

Which, I suppose, tells you a lot about what he thinks of my singing….

Sometimes, late at night, I worry about underachieving kanga-babies.

When they can't get a job after college, do they have to return to the pouch?

People Who Have Theorems:

1) Pythagoras

2) Descartes

3) That girl from "The Wonder Years"**

People Who Do Not Have Theorems:

1) Me

People Who Want a Damn Theorem:

1) Me

Possibilities I Am Considering for the Twiss Theorem:

1) IF Person A spends a lot to time with Person B,
AND Persons A and B get along splendidly,
AND Persons A and B seem to have a mutual attraction,
AND Person A is Jill Twiss,
THEN it will be about 47 minutes until Person B announces he is gay.

Please feel free to introduce other possibilities.

**No, it is not called the Winnie Cooper Theorem. I checked.

(This is an article I wrote months ago in response to this article. I never posted it, because it seemed a little, well, whiny. But the issue comes up again and again, so I thought I'd post the article here. Oh, and the google part. Not quite true anymore. Score one for us.)

WHY MEN AREN’T FUNNY

Men, as a gender, are not funny.

Please don’t pretend not to know what I’m talking about.

They try, God-bless-‘em, but humor just isn’t their strong point. Every gender has its strengths. Men are good at chopping wood and peeing standing up, and women are good at telling jokes.

We can’t blame the men, though. There are biological reasons why men aren’t funny. Physiologically, the male mind is created with one purpose: to pursue sex to propagate the species. With all the time and energy that takes the male brain, it’s virtually impossible for it to pursue the sort of high-order thinking that true humor entails.

Thus men are forced to resort to “cheap” physical humor like fart jokes and Adam Sandler movies. Again, it’s not their fault; it’s just the way that men are built.

That’s certainly not to say that men are never funny. It’s just the exception, rather than the rule. Attend any comedy show at all and you are sure to see far more unfunny males than you will unfunny females. It’s....

We now interrupt this article for a word from our author:

Ok, friends, I give up. Do you know how EXHAUSTING it is to think and write in bad stereotypes? How much work it takes to find obscure reasons why one race or gender or religion is inherently less good at something than another?

Amazing how some people manage to do it regularly with hardly any effort at all.

Did you know that when you do a google search for “Why men aren’t funny,” there are zero results? Not a single one. You can type in "sheep jumping over fence on cake" and get at least ONE result. But, apparently, not a single person in the entire history of the interweb has ever said that men aren’t funny.

Ironically, if you remove the quotes from the google search, it gives you over one-million articles on why WOMEN aren’t funny.

Charming.

I’m a comedienne. I write and tell jokes for money and I aspire to be very very good at it.

Yet every single day in some subtle or not-at-all-subtle way, I get to hear about how women aren’t funny. Some days, it’s even in the form of a compliment: “You know, I don’t like female comics. But you? You’re funny.” Thank you, friend, for implying that I’m either not funny, or not female. Much appreciated.

Every other female comedian I know seems to be able to handle these slices-of-crappiness in an I’m-above-worrying-about-that-sort-of-thing way. They joke about it. They say something brilliantly funny that, in a terribly mature-and-insightful way, shows that women ARE funny. It’s splendidly grown-up and genius-like and not a bit like me.

Me? I just get upset. Horribly, awfully upset.

Why, you ask, do I let these things bother me so? Comedy is, after all, a tough business for everyone. What makes my problem so special?

Well, imagine this: What if there was this Thing that you wanted to do more than any other Thing in the whole world? Really, it was the Thing that made you happy. ‘Twas the Thing you dreamed about at night and the Thing you woke up thinking about in the morning.

Yet nearly every day a person that you may or may not know would approach you and inform you that you can never truly be good at this Thing. “What? Why can’t I be good at it again?” you’d ask. “Because of who you are.” “Oh yes, that’s right. Because of who I am. I keep forgetting.”

Could you see how that might start to wear down your soul just a teensy bit? Maybe not the first three-hundred times you hear it, but eventually, after months of tip-tapping their way at your heart, don’t you think the doubts might actually make it inside?

Yes. Well, that’s where I am at this moment. A giant ball of unfunny emotions, who’s just TIRED of hearing other people’s opinion about the humor capabilities of my gender So if people could give it a rest for a while, I’d be eternally grateful.

Thanks, chums.

Oh. And should you ever want to read this article again? Just google “Why men aren’t funny.” It’ll be the only one that comes up

An Ohio kindergartener was suspended from school this week for having a Mowhawk haircut, which his mother claimed was the boy’s way of expressing his individuality.

Administrative officials responded by saying, “At our educational facilities, we prefer that students express their individuality through school-shootings.”

My apartment floor is HOT.

I do not mean that in the complimentary way. When you say, “Man, that girl is HOT,” you probably do not mean that she burns your feet if you don’t wear thick socks when you walk on her. Or if you do mean that, then I would not like to know about it.

I have deduced two possible reasons for the hotness of my floor:

1) There are hot water pipes located under my apartment..

2) I live directly above hell.

Of the two, I think the second seems the most realistic and/or promising.

So if hell happens to freeze over, my feet will be the first to know.