Humor abounds everywhere you look. Okay, maybe not when I happen to look down at certain parts of my body and note how crepey-looking the skin gets if I don't work out for a while.

Let's go with “most everywhere,” as is evidenced even in the world of paper.

This column has come about due to the fact that 99.9% of the time I begin any writing I create a draft the first time through, “old school style.”

That means I set pen to paper, corralling my thoughts into some sort of tangible format and write me a little something-something.

Oh, sure, sometimes I get wild and grab a pencil, just for old time's sake, but I like those cutting edge rock and roller ball pens those crazy kids use.

Recently, I was trawling the shelves of a college bookstore and I espied some politically correct paper that is made out of recycled hummingbird feathers or some such material. (Sure, we all know that feathers don't go into paper, but this stuff was really soft and my reference is inserted in an attempt to elicit a chuckle from you, rather than provide you with a disturbing visual whereby someone is plucking out hummingbird feathers.)

Now contrary to what it may seem, politically correct paper is not paper that is found on either the right side or the left side of the shelf. It's recycled paper and that's where the funny part comes in.

The previously unknown to me word, “bagasse” appeared in a write-up about the paper. That's right. My recycled paper rated a biography. Now that's just a funny word, isn't it? No, silly, not biography, the word bagasse. Try to stay focused.

And like those people you meet, who never seem to look like their name, bagasse doesn't look like what it should be either. And what, by gosh, is bagasse? Plant waste. Yep, it's true.

I bet you didn't even know that plants had waste, did you? It was sure a newsflash to me. It got me to wondering if I had been absent at the end of that photosynthesis unit when I would have learned, “thus plants produce their own food and then you must move them behind a tree, so they may dispose of their own waste.”

Actually, I'm being silly since a plant would never hide behind a tree because that would be redundant. Plants don't have waste that needs to be disposed of, per se, so much as channeled into worthy, environment-friendly projects like my paper.

In fact, according to the bagasse blurb on the inside cover of my plain, brown notebook, bagasse is “what remains after sugarcane is processed and crushed to make the sugar.” Ohhhhhh?! It's a specific kind of plant waste, not emanating from just any ‘ole ficus, philodendron, or fern.

I don't know about you, but I really like getting my sugar – and maybe its byproduct – the natural way – out of a box. I realize this generation of cane aftermath is great for the environment and, thus, me, but I don't relish the visual that would have me dipping a sheet of bagasse into my coffee in order to attain that level of sweetness I require to enhance my elixir of the gods.

Just give me paper that finds its way to me in the most ordinary of ways, sheered right off a tree, yanked from a near-to-extinct forest which formerly housed several endangered species, as milled by chimney-bellowing factories that reside near once pristine rivers where nothing is left the worse for wear and tear.

I wonder if I can order bagasse by the case?

Diane Dean-Epps is a comedienne and writer. Contact her at www.dianedeanepps.com.