Quilt Enthusiast

Reggae Night

2010-03-09T13:28:00.005-05:00

I walked home from VCU yesterday night. Walking up Main Street, I looked into the windows of the different bars and stores, dividing my attention between the store windows, reflections over what I had heard in class that afternoon, and keeping a general lookout for potential muggers.
As I walked past the Martini Kitchen and Bubble Bar just before Meadow, a black man with dreadlocks was standing outside smoking a cigarette. I smiled and nodded at him, so that he could see I was one of the cool white people, and he smiled back. As I went around the corner he called out to me.
"Monday night is reggae night."
Awkwardly, I turned back a moment to respond, but without knowing what to say.
"No cover," he said cheerfully, just as I was about to say no. I tried quickly to come up with something else to say to him, and just before I could get it out he spoke again:
"No dress code either."
I looked at my jeans and brown hooded sweatshirt, unsure of what a dress code would have to do with someone dressed as dapperly as myself.
"Yeah, I'm on my way to pick up some Chinese food," I told him sheepishly, "maybe next time."

Self-Portrait

2010-03-08T14:06:00.000-05:00

I like to draw at work. The other day in homework time none of my kids needed help, so I drew a picture of them doing their homework. I knew this was a mistake as I did it, but I didn't care. I was bored, and homework time was almost over anyway. Many of them were sitting around drawing themselves. Sure enough, as I drew each person a number of them crowded around to see what I was doing.
"Who is that?"
"Is that me?"
"No, that's Stacy. See, she's got glasses."
"Oh, I bet that one's Frank."
"Who's that supposed to be?" one particularly loud kid said into my ear.
The figure I was drawing as taller than the others, and had a beard.
"Duh, Terrell, he's drawing himself now!"
"Is that you?" asked Terrell. I nodded.
"Dude, you got way more eyebrows than that," said Terrell.
He was right, so I thickened up the eyebrows, and he smiled his approval.

With an S

2010-03-06T13:59:00.003-05:00

"Please fold your index card in half, and then write your name on both sides, like this," says the professor.
We follow his directions, as he goes on, "In a class like this it's very important to know everyone's name. So, the name cards will help with that, but let's go around the room and just quickly introduce ourselves."
"My name is Michael, and I work with special needs children."
"My name is Rachel and I want to teach high school math."
"My name is Megs and I am elementary ed."
"Thank you, Meg" says the professor.
Her hand goes up.
"Oh, yes, I'm sorry, did I say it wrong?"
"Yeah, I go by 'Megs."
"Meg?"
"Megs. With an S. That's what all my friends call me, and I just prefer it."
I can't tell if the professor is confused or irritated.
"Okay, thank you Meg, let's hear from Jonathon!"

Service

2010-01-31T20:20:00.003-05:00

I frequently identify with cashiers. I think about what it was like when I worked at Barnes & Noble several years ago. I remember the boredom that would set in after hours behind the counter, and how I would quietly judge the people who came through my line. I would look at their clothes, their hair, the way they carried themselves, what they were buying, but most importantly, I judged their manners. Did they treat me like a servant or a person? If I helped them did they take it for granted or were they appropriately grateful? That stuff mattered to me, and I always try to be the sort of customer I would have liked.

Here's something I wrote about cashiering back in 2005, shortly before I left Barns-ez Nobobo:

Two observations after 8 hours of cashiering:

1. Exact Change
slows me down, and is unneeded as I am capable of basic mathematics. If you insist on giving a cashier exact change please don't pretend like you are doing your cashier a favor. Be honest with the cashier and with yourself: you're not doing it to save anyone time, you're doing it to get the pennies out of your wallet. While you fish around for loose pennies the people behind you are waiting impatiently. As am I. You selfish asshole.

2. Do you want a bag?
is a question I ask any customer with only one item, and I have noticed something about the responses I get:
Most business men and college students don't like bags, and most old women and black people do.
Broad theories as to why this is:
Business men don't want to be bothered with an extra piece of trash.
College students are enviromentally aware.
Old women like to save bags and use them around the house.
Black people are used to living in a racist society and would prefer not to be accused of stealing.

Slogans

2010-01-26T12:26:00.004-05:00

Another semester has started, and with it come fresh feelings of contempt for my peers.

In one class a boring professor started off by assigning group work in which students wrote down answers to broad questions like "What is effective teaching?" and then wrote answers on the board to discuss with the class. In response to this one girl wrote the words, "REACH TO TEACH."
When asked what this meant she replied, "It's a saying I made up. It just means, you know, you can't teach'em if you can't reach'em!"
"Do you reach them?" asked boring professor.
"Yeah, I think so." said the girl.
"How far do you reach?" asked the professor.
"As far as I need to," said the girl.
They exchanged meaningful glances.

In my experience, one thing that most education classes have in common is a fondness for bad slogans. Every concept needs its own memorable catch phrase, preferably one that is short, and involves either rhyming or alliteration. Last semester I participated in a group presentation on Linda Albert's "Cooperative Discipline," a theory of classroom management that involved "The 3 C's," "The 5 A's," "The 6 R's," and God knows how many others. I could barely discuss it straight-faced.

So while my first reaction to "Reach to Teach!" was one of disdain, I feel as though I know where it comes from. This girl has no doubt been to as many education classes as I have, she's internalized all this slogan making, and, having concluded that this is what the education game is about, she has decided to play along. In the moment where she and the professor exchanged meaningful looks, I thought I knew what the professor was thinking. I thought she was thinking, "Dear God, this girl is going to work with children." However, less than thirty minutes later when this same professor showed us a video that included the phrase, "Engage them, don't enrage them!" I changed my mind.
Now I think that in that pregnant pause the professor was likely thinking, "Reach to teach.... Can I steal that?"

Puritan indeed.

2010-01-08T09:03:00.009-05:00

This is exactly what I should have said to the woman behind the counter at Puritan Cleaners on Robinson when I was there Monday. What I actually said was something the long the lines of "That's too bad, thanks for your time." Manners may be classy, but they're rarely fun.

Ma'am, please do not look at me like that. I am not insane. What I have asked you to do is very reasonable, considering that you operate a dry cleaners. Where else would you suggest I go with a pair of vomit-encrusted tuxedo pants? It's not as if I am capable of cleaning them myself. This is lucky for you, because it keeps you in business.
Perhaps you think I should just discard the pants-- write them off as a loss. Well, I am sure that even though you most likely do not own a tuxedo yourself, you recognize that they are not cheap. Perhaps with the lavish income you make here at Puritan Cleaners you feel okay casually throwing away expensive garments that get a little vomit on them, but I am not in that sort of financial position.

Perhaps your expression is one of moral judgement-- you understand my need to save the pants, but are appalled by the picture that vomit on tuxedo pants paints in your mind. You imagine some sort of depraved bacchanal, with booze pouring freely early in the evening, vomit flowing freely at its end. Well. I would hope that you might remember that this past Thursday night was New Year's Eve. Many people host fancy parties on New Year's Eve, parties with dress codes, and yes, most of these people serve alcohol. And yes, I overindulged at one such party, ending up on the floor of a bathroom where I got vomit on my pants. Perhaps this is all foreign to you, you don't understand it, and you feel comfortable making a moral judgment of me based on this one piece of information. That is fine as long as you keep such thoughts to yourself. Making nasty faces at a customer is immensely unprofessional, and if you hope to run any sort of a successful business you should probably refrain from so openly judging your clientele.

Finally, after glaring at me, you tell me you cannot clean my pants. You say they pose a danger to you, that they possibly contain "airborne pathogens, and stuff like that." Your expression, not mine. You say these potential pathogens mean you are not allowed to take my pants. It's forbidden, and out of your control.
Well, then now it would be my turn to question your sanity. You work at a dry cleaners. I can only imagine the many disgusting things that are brought to you for cleaning on a daily basis, and I have to think that vomit is on the tamer end of the spectrum. Airborne pathogens? Forgive me ma'am, but that sounds like bullshit. I wish you could have done me the courtesy of at least being honest. In an alternate world where you are not a judgmental phony I might have brought you my pants, and instead of this airborne pathogens nonsense you would have said, "Oh gross, I'm sorry. I don't want to deal with that. We don't send our cleaning out, we do it here, and I don't personally want to deal with vomit-encrusted pants. Sorry. Maybe the cleaners down the road could help you?" And although I would have questioned your work ethic, I would respect it a lot more than that stupid sneering face you just made at me.

Now good evening to you, I need to go spread some negative word-of-mouth.

Puritan Cleaners is located on the 200 block of Robinson Street in the Fan, between Grove and Hanover.

Silver Lining

2010-01-03T17:44:00.000-05:00

The day before New Year's Eve my daycare went ice skating. I had never done this before, and as many of the children we brought glided out onto the ice, moving effortlessly with speed and grace, I held tightly to the wall, trying to walk, allowing myself to skate smoothly only for a few seconds at a time before losing my balance and lunging back to the wall.
"You're walking, Mr. E!" a girl told me. She and a friend skated over to help me.
"You have to push one leg forward, and then the other, like this." She demonstrated; kids love to demonstrate when giving instructions, partially I think because they don't know how to communicate clearly what they want for you to do, and partially because they enjoy the attention.
I tried to follow this kid's lead, but after slipping and falling several times I took a short break. A few minutes later I tried to skate again, hoping I could figure it out better on my own, only to find the same two girls skating up to me trying to help.
"Here, hold my hand. I'll hold you up."
"Gail, I weigh at least twice as much as you, I don't think you could do much to stop my fall."
"Really? Twice? I weigh seventy pounds."
"Oh, okay then, three times as much."
The girls silently did the math, and then looked at me wide-eyed, astonished that their svelte and handsome teacher was secretly so heavy.
"Don't worry Mr. E," one of them said, "it's a good thing. Someday, when you have a girlfriend, you can give her bear-hugs."

Found in a Child's Locker

2010-01-02T00:01:00.001-05:00

The following was written on a piece of white paper in pink magic marker. It was placed by a seven-year-old girl in her best friend's locker.

When we get a fieldtrip I will put another sumthing in your locker to prove I am a vampire
from Lizzie
Love you
Write back.

New Year's Resolution

2010-01-01T00:03:00.002-05:00

On the playground last week I observed Emily, an eight-year-old, playing with her friends.
One was lying on her back doing sit-ups, while another held her feet.
Emily stood over both of them, fists clenched and at her sides, yelling at them. Though she has a speech impediment, the words were clear.
"YOU'VE GOT TO WANT IT! YOU'VE GOT TO WANT IT!"

Like Old Times

2009-12-27T09:37:00.000-05:00

The other day at work I was approached by a second grader named Terrell. Terrell has some respect issues, and some anger issues, but we're working on it.
One of the areas where he gets in trouble sometimes is the football field. He loves football, and he's good at it, but he's working on the whole sportsmanship thing. He gets frustrated easily, which leads to yelling, obscenity, pushing and shoving, general fighting. He has, however, made progress since he enrolled, and I have hopes for him to one day go through an afternoon on the playground without sitting in time out.
For whatever reason, Terrell likes me. At first I couldn't believe this. I am constantly putting him in time out or lecturing him, but still he seeks me out on the playground. He gets excited when I throw the ball to him. If I make a joke, he slaps me on the back and laughs and goes, "Yeah Mr. E! HA! Good one!" This is a little awkward, but cool.
The other day I was explaining to him why I couldn't go get the football from the other side of the fence for the second time in one day, when we had the following interaction.
"You know, Mr. E., you kind of talk like old times."
"What do you mean?" I asked him.
So he repeated what I had said to him just a minute before, annunciating absurdly for effect--a black person trying to sound like a goofy white nerd.
"'Are - You - All - Right? What - Is - The - Matter?' See, like old times."

A Comment on the movie Big.

2009-12-09T13:16:00.003-05:00

It's finals week, and I am almost finished with the semester. I have one exam left, so in keeping with tradition, I am watching movies on cable to prepare for it. I was enjoying this a lot, until a moment ago. I was preparing some spaghetti for my lunch (I'm loading up on carbs to get ready for this half-marathon I'm running this weekend) when I heard some tinkly, ultra-sensitive sounding, new-age style piano music coming the television. I knew without looking what it was. It was the scene in Big where the ten-year-old boy in a man's body has sex with a grown woman.
How the hell did that ever get into a mainstream Hollywood movie? And in such a particularly creepy way. There's no real evidence that the makers of the movie really considered the weight of that particular plot point. He's ten. He has sex with a thirty-ish business woman. Do you know what kind of therapy they both would need after that? Jesus Christ. That scene at the end of the movie, where Elizabeth Perkins looks wistfully down the street as the ten year old she's been banging goes back to his mom's house? How is she not tearing her hair out at that point? She accidentally fucked a little boy. And instead of being horrified, the audience is supposed to be sad that it didn't work out for them to be together. Gross and weird.

Outage

2009-12-02T09:02:00.003-05:00

Monday I was sitting in my apartment doing homework, and I heard a small explosion outside, immediately after which the lights went out. I knew what had happened- there is a transformer close by, and squirrels have been climbing into it and causing it it to blow. It usually takes a few hours for the power company to come out and set everything right again.
I couldn't finish my school work in the dark, so I got dressed for work in the dark and decided to head in early. Going down the stairs to leave, I ran into two maintenance men with flashlights talking to my downstairs neighbor (This is the old woman who yells to her cat Rusty at all hours. 12:30 am: "RUUUUUUUSSSSSTTTTTYYY! RUSTY! RUSTY GET IN HERE.")
"Squirrel blew the transformer again?" I asked.
"Yeah, you got it," said the first maintenance guy.
"Yes, but it didn't kill him!" said the old woman.
The first maintenance man looked at his feet. The other shook his head and mouthed the word "Dead."
"That's wonderful," I said, and headed to work.
"That's wonderful," is something I say to kids a lot. "That's wonderful," and it's counterpart, "I'm sorry to hear that," are what you say when presented with a situation you don't know how to respond to. A kid holds up a picture of blue and black scribbling that she is obviously proud of? "That's wonderful!" A kid comes to tell you that Brian is going down the slide backwards, and you don't feel like going into an explanation of tattling and why it's a bad idea? "I'm sorry to hear that." A crazy old woman who loves animals a little bit too much mistakenly believes that a squirrel survived electrocution by a transformer? "That's wonderful!"

Letter From My Mother

2009-10-26T00:03:00.003-04:00

Recently my computer died. This was bad for a lot of reasons, but the one thing I was particularly scared of was losing some files that contained writing by now-deceased mother. The good people at the Apple Store saved them, and I was re-reading some of them just now. I felt like sharing.

April 15, 2000
10:34 pm

Dear Andrew,

Your father and I went to the symphony this past Saturday.

We started with dinner at Joe's Inn. We got a table right away, amazingly enough. We usually have to wait at least 20 minutes. The waitress was very slow arriving at our table, however. So slow that one of the managers came over and took our drink order. After we had had our drinks for what seemed a lengthy period of time, the waitress came over and thanked us for being patient with her. We placed our order - I substituted a baked potato for the rice.
We waited for another lengthy period of time. Someone other than the waitress eventually brought us our food - minus the baked potato. He said that it was not on the order, but he brought me one. We were eating when the waitress showed up to refill our drinks. She poured water into your father's iced tea. When he pointed out the
error, she apologized and went to get him another glass of tea. Awhile later, when we were close to finishing the meal, she returned to box up the rest of your father's food. She dropped his fork on the floor, picked it up and continued to use it to shovel his leftover food into the box. When he pointed out that she had just dropped the fork on the floor and shouldn't use it for that, she stopped - apologized and put the fork in the middle of the food on my plate which I had not finished eating.
We left the restaurant, and I’m pleased to say that we have not contracted any diseases as of yet.

I had not really wanted to go to the symphony, but thought that hearing Beethoven's 7th symphony performed live would be worth the effort. When we took our seats and opened our programs, we discovered that the we would not be hearing the 7th. Instead, the Egmont, the 3rd piano concerto and the 6th symphony would be played. The 7th was played earlier this month.
The lights dimmed. The concertmaster came out to warm everyone up. We clapped for him. The orchestra warmed up. The conductor came out and we clapped for him. Have you noticed how we clap for people when they haven't done anything yet?
Finally, we heard the Egmont. Familiar and not too bad. Short.

Then the piano concerto. We clapped for a new person who had not done anything. Concertgoers have great faith in the performers.
The first movement began. Not too bad but fairly long.
Fanny fatigue was starting to settle in. I noticed that the pianist played with only one hand fairly often. It seems that they did not dock his pay for this. I noticed that the other orchestra members consistently played with two hands.
The first movement went on for quite some time and finally ended fairly loudly. I hoped that it was the end of the entire
concerto. Not so. The orchestra took a little break so that the pianist could mop his face with his handkerchief while the conductor stared at him . At this point the audience did not clap. Apparently the protocol is to clap for people before they start playing and when they finish playing, but not during the breaks in the middle. This is different from your school concerts that we used to attend. There the 14 parents in audience used to applaud anytime the performers drew breath. They regarded it as their parental responsibility to provide applause at every opportunity.

The second movement was slow, dreary, boring and interminable. I do believe Beethoven was on sedatives when he wrote it.
Then there was the 3rd movement. I have noticed that Beethoven is fond of the fast, slow, fast pattern. The third movement might not have been so bad if I hadn't just had to sit through the second.
At last it was over. I could not have been more relieved. The audience seemed thrilled with Beethoven, the pianist and the orchestra. They clapped at length. Many people stood up. One woman leaned over the front row of the balcony waving her arms. After about four curtain calls, they brought the lights back up. It was intermission.

I picked up my coat and umbrella and told your father I really needed to leave. He was disappointed to not to hear the 6th. I was disappointed that they had not played the 6th first. I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more. On the other hand, Beethoven's notes about each movement of the 6th symphony in the program went like this -

The Awakening of cheerful Feelings at the Arrival in the country
Scene at the Brook
Merry Gathering of the Peasants
Storm
Shepherd's Song: Joyful Thankful Feelings after the Storm

It is a good thing Beethoven wrote music and not poetry. It would also help if he would stay away from the sedatives.

I think that all in all the orchestra is to be commended. At least no one threw up on stage. This happened during the concert at the last PTA program at my school. A girl in the front row threw up all over the floor. The chorus kept right on singing while a teacher hustled her off the stage and the custodian came up with the mop to clean it up.
Also, none of the performers threw instruments across the stage. Remember when you played the chimes at the PTA meeting in elementary school and hurled them across the floor.

Your father says that when we go to the next concert he is not leaving during intermission because Mahler is the second half. I told him I was sure you would want to go to that one with him.

Looking forward to seeing you at home for the Mahler.

love, Mom

Kids Say The Damnedest Things #437

2009-10-07T13:58:00.008-04:00

A five year old girl with curly blonde hair and big blue eyes stands at the water fountain for a moment, drinking. She has just started kindergarten, and with it my after-school program. She stands back from the fountain, scrunches her face, and when asked what's the matter answers,
"That water tastes like vaginas."

Awesome Crazy Radical Outlandish Super-Terrific Intelligently Created Poems!

2009-10-07T10:10:00.005-04:00

The first day of the fall semester this year I walked into a classroom and saw it covered in acrostic poems, written I assume by education students at VCU. Education programs like to make prospective teachers engage in activities that they will later give to their students. I agree with this idea, but I do not agree with acrostic poems. I have no evidence to back me up, but I suspect that writing an acrostic poem makes you dumber.

Magical
Energetic
Good helper
Active
Nuts

Oh Megan, I feel as if I know you.

Brainy
Real
Intelligent
Attitude, good
Nice to hang out with

Let's not get full of ourselves, Brian

Another Joke Safely Defused

2009-07-17T23:44:00.004-04:00

My sister was in town the other day, and tried to tell me a joke.
"Hey Andy, what's the difference between jam and jelly?"
"Uh, well Sarah, jelly is made with juice and jam is made with fruit."
"Oh. I was gonna say, 'I can't jelly my dick up your ass,' but that's cool."

Fudge and the Freedom Trail

2009-07-07T16:32:00.004-04:00

The summer after I graduated elementary school my family had a bit more money than was usual and took a trip to New England. We went first to Danbury, Connecticut to see the grave of my father’s hero Charles Ives. I still have a picture of my mother, her face full of comic over-sincerity, standing beside my father, who had his arm around her and looked more genuinely moved. My father has always loved Charles Ives, and the trip was something of a pilgrimage for him. We saw the grave, we saw the site of a reproduction of the cottage he grew up in that was not due to open for several years, and we went to New Haven, Connecticut so dad could look through original Charles Ives manuscripts. This was a special thrill for the old man—Ives was notoriously messy, and left ink blotches all over the page, scratched through things, and left little notes to his editor in the margins saying things like, “Don’t change a goddamn thing.”
I later grew to like Charles Ives too, but at the time of our vacation the whole thing was baffling. His music is difficult even for adults, and even though I tried to like it for my dad’s sake I didn’t get very far. I was more taken with the stories of Mr. Ives screaming at airplanes as they passed over his house and calling his audiences “old ladies.” Anecdotes aside, the trips to Danbury and New Haven were only a distraction from what really mattered to me: the four days we spent in Boston.
Back in the early nineties I was a diehard Red Sox fans. For some reason a station in Norfolk carried all their games, and I watched them whenever they were on. I knew all the players names and positions, I collected their baseball cards, and I wore t-shirt with a picture of Roger Clemens pitching above the legend- “Rocket Roger!” The highlight of the vacation for me was seeing Rocket Roger pitch against Juan Guzman and the hated Blue Jays. That night a player I can’t remember stole home plate, and for the rest of our trip my father told many passing strangers about it, and that “you only see that once in a blue moon!!” I had yet to cross over into adolescent embarrassment of my parents, and the remark seemed full of wisdom to me, and worth repeating.
The day after the game was our last in the city, and after doing seeing lots of Boston Common and Quincy Market in the morning, my sister’s legs gave out on her that afternoon. Growing up, my sister often had a problem with her legs. If she stood for too long the blood would collect in them, she would become light-headed, and pass out. We discovered this in church one Sunday when, after repeatedly pleading with my mother to be allowed to sit down, she collapsed, smacking her head on the pew on the way down. She never had to stand in church again, and many was the Sunday that I looked at her jealously, certain the entire thing was an elaborate ploy to make the Nicene Creed more bearable.
Now she was tired of walking around Boston, and she declared that if she went any further she would pass out. My mother, taking this very seriously and also fairly tired herself, volunteered to stay with Sarah while I went with dad for the afternoon’s business—a long walk to the Old North Church and the Bunker Hill Memorial. I was delighted. Let these women sit and fan themselves! The men were not tired, and we would undertake a serious visit to very important historical landmarks that would improve our knowledge of the Revolutionary War.
My dad’s legs were, of course, significantly longer than mine, and once we got under way his stride was hard to keep up with. I spent much of the time running behind him, too embarrassed for long intervals to ask him to slow down. I was winded quickly from this, and maybe my dad noticed, because he suggested we stop and buy some fudge. This was almost too much for me. First, I get to go on a special man trip, and now fudge? My father’s generosity overwhelmed me, particularly when I saw how much he bought me: two pounds!
Well, we started walking again, and while two pounds of peanut butter fudge was a lot even for the chubby ten-year-old version of myself, I willed myself to eat it all. Every bit. It took roughly ten minutes, and I was running behind my father the entire time desperate to keep up, and afterwards I felt fairly sick, but I couldn’t do something so ungrateful as to not finish my father’s gift, to throw it away. What would he say? So I wolfed the entire package, and struggled to keep up.
We were approaching the famous statue of Paul Revere on his horse when my father said from several feet in front of me, “How about some of that fudge, Andy?”
“What about it, Dad?” I asked tentatively, confused. “It was really good.”
“Can I have a piece of it?” he asked, not breaking stride.
And then I realized that I had eaten all of what was supposed to be for our entire family. I don't exactly know how it happened-- maybe he had underestimated the rate at which his son could eat, maybe he had given instructions on how much I could have and I couldn’t hear him from his position several feet in front of me. Whatever the reason, there had been failure to communicate, and I was miserable over it. I apologized several times. Dad was nice about it and said “Don’t worry,” but he couldn’t completely hide the look in his eyes that said, “Holy shit, my kid is disgusting.” I felt it keenly, and as we headed towards Bunker Hill the afternoon was soured for me.
I think I was still able to eat dinner later.

I'm wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn.

2009-04-19T20:00:00.002-04:00

My freshman year of college I lived with my best friend from high school, Nick Bognar. He'll correct me on the accuracy of this story, but as I remember it, one Saturday night we decided to take a break from our many drunken parties with the attendant new friends and hook-ups with hot girls, to spend a little quality "us" time. Nick suggested we go to the library and play Gin Rummy. I suggested we play pool instead.
"Only if we gamble," said Nick, who even at this early age was showing signs of the sickness that would haunt his late twenties (Have you seen The Gambler with James Caan? That's pretty much Nick. Shit is sad.)
So we headed out into the bustling metropolis that is Fredricksburg, and found ourselves a pool hall. We were both exceptionally fine pool players, and after we had been there for a few minutes we were surrounded by a crowd of regulars, all of whom wanted to catch a glimpse of our epic eight-ball battle, and I told them all that Nick liked to go by the nickname "Fats."
We had each won a game, when the song "Torn" (a haunting pop ballad that never fails to move me to tears) as covered by Natalie Imbruglia (one of the great unappreciated talents of the late nineties, the owner of a haunting voice and flawless sense of musicianship) came on the jukebox. I was not yet a fan, however, and as it played I derided the song. I might have used the word "retarded." I may even have implied that Ms. Imbruglia was not a singer, but merely an attractive young woman attempting to parlay her looks into a music career. I shudder to think of it, but I think that is what I said.
"Alright," said Nick, interrupting my remarks, "If you win the next game, I will give you my car."
I was shocked.
"I would certainly love to drive your beautiful eggplant-colored Ford Taurus," I said to him, "it is as fine a vehicle as e'er I've seen. But what would I give up if I didn't win, as unlikely as that might seem?"
"If you lost you would have to promise that for the rest of your life whenever this song was played, you would have to talk about how wonderful it is and what a genius you think Natalie Imbruglia is."
"It's a bet!" said I.
You may infer for yourself how the game went.

At Least They Can't Make Me Go To Church

2009-04-18T09:48:00.010-04:00

1) We were comparing the working conditions of 19th century factories to those of our modern day, and my professor was making a point that was way too interesting for a 200 level history class:
"We tend to think of ourselves as free, being at liberty to do what we want. But think about the ways that people's jobs control them. Think about the hours that some people work. Has anyone here ever had to pee into a cup for their employer? Isn't that a control of your leisure time? Has anyone here ever worked a job where they took home a pager or a cell phone? My husband wears a cell phone and has to answer it whenever it rings; he basically works all the time. That's not to say that our working conditions are in any way comparable to what people faced during the Industrial Revolution, only to say that before we start thinking, 'Oh I would never work a job that treated me that way,' we need to reconsider some of the things people do today for their employers."
I pondered this as a girl on the other side of the auditorium raised her hand to point out that her boss didn't regulate her morality, as employers in the 1800s often did by forcing workers to go to church on Sundays, firing them if they drank, etc.
I raised my hand.
"I know my circumstances might be unusual, but I work at a daycare and I definitely feel like my morality effects my work," I said.
"If I got a DUI I think I would lose my job. And I have to be extremely careful about what I say-- I work at a place where if I said the words "shut up" it would be a big deal."

2) "LIIIIIIIIIIKE A BRIIIIDDDGE OOOOVER TROUBLED WAAATER, I WILL LAAAAAAAAAYY ME DOOOOWWWWN, LIIIIKE A BRIIIIIDDGE OOOOOVER TROOOOOUUBLED WAAATEEERRRRR, I WILL LAY ME DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWN."
We were playing a game at work where the kids were on two teams, each sending up a representative to compete in a sort of musical Family Feud. My boss would say a word, perhaps 'world,' and the first person to start singing "You Get the Best of Both Worlds" would win the round. In the event of a tie, the person who sang the most of the song the loudest would win. The kids had a great time with it, but then my boss called up the teachers to participate. I was facing off against a co-worker, and the word was 'bridge,' and Simon and Garfunkle was the first thing I thought of. She started singing some song I never heard of that is apparently on the radio and much better known than 'Bridge over Troubled Water.' Wanting to win, I was forced to sing most of the song as loud as I could, and when I got to the end I started over, hoping nobody would notice I was repeating myself. I think the other teacher did the same thing. Eventually my boss called it a tie.
I am a very competitive person, and this tie got under my skin. I was feeling particularly frustrated because I was no good at this game, and was losing badly. "Bridge" had been one of the few words I had a song for, and I all I could get for it was a tie.
"Okay," said my boss, "This is the last round, and our two teams are tied. So the winner of this round will win it all!!" The kids all screamed and cheered. My old boss was good at building this sort of thing up and making the kids scream a lot.
There were four teachers standing in front of a crowd of roughly sixty children, who finally fell silent as the last word was about to be called. There was palpable tension in the room. And then my boss said "Home."
I thought for a second too long, and another teacher started singing "Home, home on the range," and, completely forgetting myself, I stomped my foot and said loudly and clearly, "FUCK!"
Immediately recognizing what I had done, I clamped a hand over my mouth. I looked around the room, expecting to see mouths open in horror, kindergartners crying, third graders laughing and saying "Fuck," over and over, but somehow nobody noticed. Even though I had practically yelled the word, I had yelled it while the kids were cheering the teacher who sang "Home on the Range," their enthusiasm masking my tumble into profanity. The only person who caught it was my boss, and I saw her eyes practically bug out of her head as we exchanged a series of glances that said the following:
"Am I fired?"
"No, but only because nobody else heard you."
Later my favorite kid ( the girl who farts) would come to me and ask why I had covered my mouth and acted so embarrassed. I would tell her I was ashamed of losing, and she would laugh at me, and remind me of how often I tell kids not to take games too seriously.

Imaginary Conversation I Will Never Actually Have With My Downstairs Neighbor

2009-02-17T22:05:00.012-05:00

Me (possibly taking out my trash): Hey, how's it going?
The Old Lady Downstairs: Oh hello! Wonderful weather we're having!
Me: Yes, it is.
The OLD: Sometimes when it gets warmer like this you need to take the trash out more often.
Me: Yes, I believe you're right. You know, I've been thinking. Sometimes I play my violin, or even just my stereo, and I think too myself, 'Wow, I hope this music isn't bothering anyone else. I would hate it if I found out I was in anyway irritating those who lived around me.' I think that. You know what I mean?
The OLD: Oh don't worry, I love when you play the violin. You play beautifully.
Me (perhaps blushing a little bit): Oh well, thank you.
The OLD: And don't worry, I don't think I've ever heard your stereo.
Me: Well, good. That's a load off of my mind. (Frustrated, I start to walk to the dumpster, but stop and turn back.) Can I ask you something ma'am?
The OLD: Well I don't see why not. (Smiles toothily.)
Me: Who is Rusty?
The OLD: Rusty? Rusty is one of my cats.
Me: That's kind of what I thought. I know you have a few cats.
The OLD: Well they aren't all mine. A few of them are strays.
Me: But you feed them all, and you love them, I can tell.
The OLD: Oh yes. (Smiles again, extra toothily.)
Me: Perhaps you don't get out much, don't know many people, and these cats fill some of that void for you.
The OLD: I guess you could say that.
Me: Can I ask, why is it that at 6 or 7 am every morning you come out your door and yell at the top of your lungs, "RUUUUSTY! RUUUUSSSSTY!!" What is that?
The OLD: Well, I wake up around 5:30 every morning, and I like to make some coffee, and then have breakfast with my kittees. I pour a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, and I put dry food out for the cats. And a lot of times Rusty is off chasing a squirrel, or birdy, or maybe hiding in a sewer grate, so I have to yell RUUUUUSSTY! so he can know it's breakfast time.
Me: And why do you yell to him again at around 11:30 pm every night?
The OLD (beams): Well, I like to hug him goodnight before I go to bed.
Me: Okay. Well awesome, you've answered all my questions now. I guess I'll take my trash out. Thanks.
(I head to the dumpster, smiling awkwardly at the neighbor when I come back. Even in a fantasy like this I don't seem able to tell a nice old lady to be more considerate and to please refrain from yelling to her cat early in the morning. )

Up at 4

2009-02-07T04:16:00.006-05:00

I awoke at a little before 4 o'clock this morning to the sounds of a woman's pained screams and the sounds of a struggle. It dawned on me that I had to be listening to a rape, and that it must be going on in the alley below my window. Horrified, I went to the window to investigate, phone in hand and ready to call the police. Several months ago I had heard gunshots outside in the early morning, but this was much much worse. My heart raced as I looked for the woman struggling to fend off her attacker, but I saw nothing. Within moments the sounds grew muffled, and I began to think they were moving away from me. I debated whether I should call the police. Should I go outside to help her? But why would they be moving away from me?
The grunting and slapping returned to full volume as I headed back across the room to my bed, and I realized then, to my relief and disgust, that what I was hearing were the sounds of my next-door neighbor having sex. Irritated and still not entirely awake, I got a glass of water and turned on the television. The grunting and hollering continued into the wee small hours, and I tossed and turned, wondering what I'll do if this becomes a recurring problem.

Learning and Growing Together in the Trust Circle

2009-02-03T00:10:00.000-05:00

I'm in school so that I can become a teacher, and so, as one might expect, I am taking education classes. So far I don't like education classes, possibly because over the years I have become accustomed to learning things from the classes that I take. Education classes, ironically enough, don't involve much learning. What they do involve is a lot of jargon dressing up common sense to make it look less familiar, ten question surveys about your individual "learning style" (I'm aural/reading and writing!), in-depth class discussion about alcohol killing brain cells, earnest requests for feedback on assignments which nobody seems to care if you turn in, sweet but frustratingly vague and disorganized professors who refuse to give guidelines on length for papers, completely open-ended paper topics apparently designed to prevent anyone from scoring less than a ninety, and classrooms full of slow-witted girls in their early twenties who nevertheless manage to scores seventies on these papers.
Today in class we reviewed for a test that is coming up in a couple of days. The instructor tells us to always call them "tests" and not "exams." Apparently the word "exam" stresses people out.
One of my learning-buddies ("classmates" seems too austere for an education class, too close to the world of "exams") raised her hand to ask the question,
"What about that movie about the girl, is that gonna be on the test?"
"No," said my knowledge-sherpa, "you don't need to worry about the film. I would never put a film we watched in class on a test. I wouldn't want to penalize anyone who didn't come to class the day I showed it."
I stared in disbelief. I think two guys in the back of the room high-fived.

Routine

2009-02-02T22:37:00.004-05:00

Today on the playground I spotted a seven-year-old girl whom I know well-- alone, crawling on all fours, and periodically gnashing her teeth.
"What animal are you today, Emily?" I called to her.
"A cougar," she answered.
"Great, don't get your knees too muddy," I called back.

Trouble in Mind

2009-01-26T20:07:00.004-05:00

I haven't posted in awhile, in part because I've been under a lot of stress. The VCU Financial Aid office took away my financial aid, and for a week I didn't thinK I was getting it back. That caused me to start having panic attacks. I was pretty sure I knew they were panic attacks, but I was freaked out anyway-- afraid I would die or have to drop out of school or both. I had chest pain, arm pain, thigh pain, ear pain, neck pain, light-headedness, all of which seemed attributable to anxiety, but in my less rational moments I was picturing my funeral and wondering which of my friends and family would end up with my belongings when I fell dead from a heart attack. Worse still were fantasies where I suffered a stroke and was left paralyzed in bed for the rest of my life, possibly writing a book by blinking my left eyelid.
Today, after some health insurance related delays, I finally saw a nurse practitioner, had some blood drawn and an EKG, and found out I was pretty much fine. They gave me a pamphlet about managing the stress of college life.

Feeling better, I headed to work. There on the playground I ran into a six-year-old roaming the mulch in an oversized pink coat. She had a headband pushed halfway back her head, and stray hairs were coming out from under it and going in all directions. Her face was splotched with dirt, and for some reason she kept scratching at her tongue with her fingernails.
"My tastebuds are coming off," she told me. "That's when your taste buds fall off your tongue. I'm pretty sure it's because of my toothbrush."
Not at all upset, she bopped off to the sandbox, and I reflected on how this girl, whom I'd always pegged for crazy, suddenly seemed marginally sane.

"Bookends, Baby! Don't do it!"

2008-12-21T11:41:00.003-05:00

Just now I turned on ESPN's NFL Countdown for the second or third time all season and saw Cris Carter and Keyshawn Johnson discussing the Detroit Lions.
As you may or may not know, the Detroit Lions are in the running for the title of "The Worst NFL Team in History." In the fifteenth week of a seventeen week season they have yet to win a game, and their chances for going 0-17 are looking solid. The question posed to Messieurs Carter and Johnson: How would you fix the Lions for next season and turn them into a winning team?
Mr. Johnson fielded the question, saying he would hire a great new general manager and fire everyone currently associated with the team including the security guards. As he elaborated on the rest of his plans, his remarks were punctuated by Mr. Carter's periodic interjections--
"Don't get a pair of bookends like us," he said, alluding to the fact that Messieurs Johnson and Carter are both former star wide receivers. "Don't forget this is Middle America. These are hard-working blue collar fans, and they wanna see hard working men on the field. You need to build the running game and the defense so these fans can have something they can relate to."
For those of you not familiar with football, this might be meaningless and boring, but he was in essence saying that working people would rather watch slow moving games where lots of people get hit, instead of up-tempo games with lots of passing and high scores.
Mr. Carter strikes me as out-of-touch with the thoughts and feelings of Middle America, and I wish that he would refrain from speaking for people with whom he is unfamiliar.

Economics! Hurray!

2008-12-04T09:46:00.004-05:00

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. The end of the semester is here, and I'm waist deep in economics tests, papers about the election, papers about post-colonial West Africa, and the like.
This is perhaps old news, but if you haven't heard This American Life's two episodes on the economic crisis they are more than worth your time:
The Giant Pool of Money
Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Thanksgiving!

2008-11-20T21:02:00.002-05:00

This, my only Thanksgiving post, goes back to 2004, the first year of my blog. This week Dad and I will head down to see Grandma yet again. I'm not sure yet what the food situation will be-- will she put out some lunch meats and cheese, will I cook, will we go to an over-priced restaurant-- all that is certain is that i will hate it.

He Shall Speak Peace Unto the Vegan
For Thanksgiving dinner my sister and father and I drove two hours to visit my Grandmother in Chesapeake.
"Pick a nice restaurant," we told her, "the sky's the limit!"
So Grandma picked a place called the Founder's Inn.
It turns out that the Founder's Inn is owned and operated by Pat Robertson.
I was unhappy that my father's $150 was going to such a person, as I'm sure he was, but the restaurant was actually very nice. The waitress didn't try to share the good news with us, and the food was no less delicious for the proprietor's craziness. There was a large buffet, with normal Thanksgiving food like stuffing, and also less common things like oysters, which I tried and liked. There was a bit of a line, but Grandma and I both enjoyed the buffet thoroughly. Dad enjoyed it a little less, because it was overpriced and he was paying. Sarah enjoyed it not at all, because she is a vegan.

We knew this ahead of time, of course. Dad got a copy of the menu in advance to make sure it was vegan-friendly.
"Look, succotash. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad. This should be fine right?"
Not being vegans, or even vegetarians, neither of us thought about things like chicken stock in the succotash, or cheese in the salad.
These things leapt out at Sarah though, who sat down after her first trip through the line with a plate of fruit and two rolls. My Grandmother, who was not paying, began whining and complaining about how if we were being charged such a large sum Sarah ought to have something more substantial to eat.
"No, don't worry about it," said Sarah. "I'm used to places like this never having anything for me. If we told them I was vegan they wouldn't even know what that meant. I'll eat something later."
But Grandma wouldn't shut up, and I tried to calm her down.
"Grandma, Sarah's used to this, don't worry. It's alright."
"Sure, it's alright for you," she said, and got up to get herself a plate of free roast beef and mashed potatoes. Partly for Sarah, partly for Grandma, I went and asked a server if they could make something vegan for my sister.
"She's a vegan, so no animal products. No meat, no milk, no butter, no cheese."
"What about eggs?"
"Nope."
"Chef Gerald, this is Dave, do you copy?" the man said into his walkie-talkie. "We've got a situation here with a guest who can't eat any meat or dairy. Yeah. I know. Could we do something for her?"
Ten minutes later the nice man brought my sister a plate of over-seasoned asparagus and charred peppers. Grandma, Dad and I all beamed at Sarah.
"Look at that!"
"That looks great!"
"How wonderful!"
The man smiled and wished us a Happy Thanksgiving, glad, in the spirit of the season, to have humored a hippie freak. My Grandmother finally stopped complaining about how Sarah had nothing to eat and began complaining that our cousin had married a Mexican. Sarah pretended to like her food. "It's awfully salty," she frowned, but, noticing that we were frowning back, added, "but I really like it!"

A Revolutionary New Strategy For Winning 'The Culture War'

2008-11-17T21:24:00.006-05:00

Driving with my friend Lynsey this evening, politics came up. It does sometimes.
Lynsey said: "I hate when people say they want the government not to interfere with their lives economically, and then ask for it to regulate everyone's beliefs. That makes my head explode."
I thought about this, and had what I think is a extraordinary idea.
"That's because they want the government to force everyone to believe what they believe, so government interventon becomes okay to them. And we (liberals, moderates, people with compassion, people who think) have been fighting back the wrong way. We've been saying 'Keep the government out of our personal lives,' and it hasn't worked. We need to go further, Lynsey."
"Surely, you don't mean!"
"Yes! We need the government to force fundamentalist Christians to become gay!"
I really think this could work- the Christian Right would immediately start railing against government social intervention, and then the left would stand back and say, "Alright by us." Government would be out of people's personal lives, and we, the righteous and the sane, would win.
I'm writing my Congressman tomorrow, and I hope you do likewise.

Okay Nick: Yay Obama! Yay!

2008-11-12T08:56:00.004-05:00

Long-time reader Nick Bognar writes:
Wow, four hundred reactions to your professor, and yet the most important presidential election of the last hundred years doesn't merit a blog entry. Bigot.

Really Nick? More important than 1932? More important than 1968? The election was important surely, but let's not indulge in CNN-style hackery that throws all historical perspective out the window in the name of making current events more "exciting." God I hate that crap.

I wrote about my experience at the polls on election day. You want more? Okay, I'm excited to have a President who gives a good speech, but a little afraid that people, myself included, are going to end up disappointed and more cynical than ever.
It makes me warm inside that creationists everywhere are frustrated and angry and quoting Bible verses in their efforts to cope with the "scary direction our nation is headed in."
And I remember talking to a black coworker named Maurice last January, and how he said that white people would never let a black man be President ever. I wish he hadn't quit so I could engage him in a "See-my race-isn't-so-bad-after-all" conversation, even though I still kind of believe that my race might be that bad, in spite of who our President is about to be.

Election Day

2008-11-04T09:11:00.008-05:00

1. By 9 o'clock the lines were not bad at the polls, and I didn't have to wait at all. On the way in I passed a few people soliciting.
"Would you like a Democratic ballot?" they asked.
"Oh no thank you," I said, "I am well-informed and don't vote at the whim of some party. I am the part of the system that works."
Emboldened, I continued down the sidewalk towards my polling place, prepared to turn away two more chipper looking young professionals in raincoats. I began to say "No thank you," but was cut off.
"I'm Kim Gray and I'm asking for your vote today," said the one, pressing a pamphlet into my hand.
"Charles Samuels, asking for your vote," said the second.
I'd never met actual politicians who wanted me to vote for them before. And I had not prepared as well as I'd thought. I'd done no research at all for the school board and city council races that these two wet and friendly people were participating in.
I entered the hospital to vote, found the lines pleasingly small, and went right into a booth with a touch-screen, another first for me. I made all the choices I'd researched, and then stared for a minute or two at the choices for City Council and School Board. The thought of them smiling at me in the rain seemed to represent a fine thing about our system- that people wanting political power should first be made to grovel. Maybe if these people were willing to dress up in nice clothes and stand in the rain for hours smiling at people they deserved my vote. On the other hand, I had no idea what either of them stood for, and not wanting to give my support to someone who for all I knew could support feeding stray cats to the homeless I left those two boxes unchecked. Or untouched, or whatever it is you would say in a digital age. Then I went to see if Starbucks would make good on an offer for free coffee on election day.

2. Picking the kids up from school the other day I heard two first graders discussing the Presidential race:
"McCain is bad cause he wants to destroy the environment."
"Yeah. Baracka Obama has the most votes."
"Yeah, if Obama gets any more votes he will win."
"If I was countiing votes, I'd be like 'McCain, a thousand votes. Forty votes. six hundred votes.' Then I'd be like, Baracka Obama, infinity times a million google votes!"
"Hahaha yeah."
Then a kindergartner on the second row told everyone that Obama was not a Christian, putting me in an awkward spot.
"I don't want to hear any talk like that."
"But it's true, he isn't."
"No, that's a lie," I told him knowing full well I probably just called his Dad a liar, "people say mean things that aren't true sometimes about candidates because they don't want them to win, but that's bad. If you disagree with someone that's fine, but you have to be honest."
I then kicked myself for the next two days for talking about not being a Christian as though it were a bad thing. If I ever have kids they're gonna believe in Santa way longer than they believe in Jesus.

Mugging Part 2

2008-10-19T10:49:00.003-04:00

"What did he look like?" asked the police officer. He was anxious to start chasing after the guy who had robbed me, and I could hear his dogs barking in the back of his police SUV.
"Well, he was black," I felt uncomfortable saying that, ""and he had dreads. I mean braids."
"Was his skin dark?"
"No, but not light either. Kinda in between."
"What was he wearing?"
"I don't know, a baggy coat?"
"What did the gun look like?"
"It wasn't a revolver. And it was shiny."
"How long ago was this??"
I looked at my phone.
"Fifteen minutes at this point."
"Fifteen?!" he exclaimed, and stormed off in the direction the mugger had run.
I called the bank before I called the police. I assumed my wallet was gone, that the most important thing was to keep him from getting at the money in my bank account. So I called Wachovia, and then the cops, who sent 7 cars in less than a minute and brought those angry dogs in the SUV. Now they were annoyed with me for being a stupid civilian and waiting to call them.
"Always call the cops first," said another, nicer cop who was taking my statement.
"Getting here quickly is our best chance of catching these idiots," said another.
"Yeah, sorry about that. I guess I fucked up."
"Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm a cop," he said. "I would know what to do. But if I wasn't a cop, if I was just an normal person like you, I'd probably have done the same thing. Don't feel bad."
I finished filling out my statement and headed back to the strangers' porch where I had stopped to use the phone. They had hidden their beer because they were underaged. They offered me a ride home, but I told them I wanted to walk the rest of the way. "It's not like I have anything left to steal," I told them.
I like walking in the Fan, and I don't think I'm going to stop. I'll just be more nervous while I do it.

"You Get Your Shit Took."

2008-10-15T23:26:00.007-04:00

I was walking home from my friends' house tonight, as I often do, when I heard a voice behind me and turned to see who it was. It was a man with a gun.
"What do you have in your pockets?" he asked.
So I started to get things out of my pockets, but he was impatient.
"Give me your wallet," he said.
I fumbled with this, so he stuck the gun in my face to make sure I would do it. I did.
"Get down on the ground," he told me.
"Okay!" I said, hoping not to get shot.
"Stay there, don't get up," he said. I did not get up.
When he was gone, I went down the street, and stopped at some strangers' porch to breath and tell them about being mugged. They were really nice about it, and when I called the cops roughly the entire Richmond police department showed up. They had dogs and everything. I told a lot of people what had happened, and they all agreed that I had not called soon enough, and that my ability to describe the mugger was poor. Then I went home and started worrying about credit fraud.

"White People Are Nuts"

2008-10-14T21:38:00.002-04:00

Saturday my friend Kelsey and I found a woman’s purse in the parking lot at Kroger. Being decent people, we decided to try to get it back to its owner. I opened the wallet to find the owner’s name and address, while Kelsey got the cell phone out and started trying to find a good number to call.
As we did this, a middle-aged black woman pulled her car up next to us.
“What are you doing with a woman’s purse?” she said, angrily.
“It was abandoned in this shopping cart,” I said.
“We’re trying to find information so we can get it back to the owner,” said Kelsey.
The woman eyed us suspiciously.
“Just going through a woman’s wallet, mm mm mm,” she said, shaking her head.
“I would want someone to go through my wallet,” I said, “if it meant I got my wallet back.” I was mad. I felt that I was doing a nice thing, and that this lady who suspected me of being a thief was a stupid bitch. Kelsey dealt with the situation much better:
“Maybe we should just take this into the service desk,” he said.
“You better do that,” said the woman, as though she would call the police if we didn’t.
Kelsey took the purse inside, and I stayed outside with the groceries, while the rude woman drove away.

I thought about how suspicious she had been. I remembered a co-worker, Genesa, and a conversation in which she told me she was afraid of white men.
“Black people are more likely to rob you, sure,” she said, “but that’s all they do. You get your shit took. Big deal. Now a white man, if he pulls a gun on you, you don’t know what kinda weird shit he’s going to do to you. You might end up with your teeth in a maracca and your balls stapled to a tree—it could be anything. White people are nuts.”
I also seem to remember that conversation started with her saying I reminded her of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Someday I hope I can be judged by the content of my character, and not by my the color of my skin/scraggliness of my beard.

Aphorism

2008-10-06T12:42:00.003-04:00

Just now my economics professor uttered the following:
"In the long run we should all be happy; it's getting to the long run that we have to suffer through. You'll know the long run when you get there."

Sandwich Lady

2008-10-03T11:29:00.003-04:00

Just now I was waiting for my sandwich, and the woman behind the counter, who is cross-eyed, shouted to a girl next to me. She was holding the girl's order slip, which had extra instructions scribbled in the margin.
"Hey excuse me! Does this say 'No cheese,' or 'Mo' cheese?" asked the sandwich lady, not exactly rude but clearly in a hurry.
"No cheese," said the girl.
"Okay," said the sandwich lady.
She makes good sandwiches.

People Watching

2008-09-22T11:56:00.005-04:00

One thing I never realized I missed about school is that it exposes you to all kinds of interesting people you would never meet otherwise.
Just now as I waited to go into a class I saw a girl in a shirt that said "Fashion is not a luxury" explaining casually to a friend that over the weekend she got angry at her boyfriend and sprayed him in the face with a can of air freshener. How does one witness such a thing and then go focus on economics?

David Foster Wallace Knew Why I Was Angry

2008-09-15T21:36:00.005-04:00

On Sunday I found out that David Foster Wallace had killed himself while I was eating stuffed peppers and watching professional football at Jon’s house. I was upset by this, but I tried not to let it bother me. I was in a social setting after all, and the aforementioned peppers were really good, and it was easy to focus on the brighter side of things, though I will say I think I was noticeably grumpier for the rest of the afternoon. To say someone's death made me "grumpy" sounds horrible, but there it is. It's not like I knew the man.

A couple of hours and several beers later we were watching the post-game show on CBS, and I was re-expressing my oft-expressed wish that the cast of CBS’s NFL Sunday would get sucked into a black hole. They were all slapping each other on their backs, and smirking, and pretending to have just the best time anyone ever had, and I hated them for it. I always hate them for it. And I expressed that angry wish, and I guess I’d been expressing a lot of angry wishes that afternoon, because Jon said something along the lines of “I wish you wouldn’t get so angry all the time about what is really nothing at all.” And I didn’t know what to say, because I knew that on a level he was right, but I also knew that on another level I was right. I just didn’t know how to express why it is that the CBS NFL Sunday cast makes me so angry. So I conceded the point and tried to cheer up.

Today I was looking at Slate.com, as is my wont, and reading their obituary of Mr. Wallace, and I came across a quote from the first book I ever read by him, on an airplane to LA in 2003, and it perfectly expressed what I should have said about Boomer Esiason, Shannon Sharpe, et al. I went home and looked it up-- in the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again,”-- a passage about what Mr. Wallace referred to as “the Professional Smile,” which I think most football fans would have to agree runs rampant most Sunday afternoons on CBS and Fox.

“An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

I wish I could write something that good.

Crazy Andrew

2008-09-14T23:31:00.009-04:00

Recently I talk to myself-- the by-product of living alone. Perhaps I am slicing onions, and I think of something a co-worker did that irritated me, and perhaps I say "What a stupid asshole" to no one in particular.
Or maybe I am watching football, and I think of something embarrassing I did in the seventh grade. And maybe I voice this embarrassment with a loud, "What a fucking stupid little kid I was."
This happens with alarming frequency, and has become enough of a habit that I forget when I am doing it. More than once I've taken a walk and emerged from a reverie to realize I'd been muttering to myself as the passing homeless eye me with suspicion. I don't know if this means I am crazy, but I do wonder about the future. Maybe when I'm seventy the neighborhood kids will be too afraid to trick-or-treat at my house.
I remember an old schizophrenic man who lived in my neighborhood when I was a boy, who the kids all called "Crazy George." He lived in a ramshackle old house with peeling paint and once when my father parked a car near him he exploded at us, then muttered something barely intelligible about "Motherfuckers and their cars. Shit-- cars. Horses. Fuck." This could be me, in perhaps as little as twenty years.

The other day I was dining at Carytown Burger and saw one of my sister's friends. Friendly guy that he is, he came over to my table to say hello. We spoke for a few minutes, and I said it was good to see him, and he said the same and went on his way.
Awhile later I had finished my meal, and stopped by his table on the way out.
"Hey, it was good seeing you man," I said to him and stuck my hand out.
I guess he's not much for handshaking because he stuck his hand up in the air in a sort of awkward half-wave and grinned.
Taken aback by this unusual gesture, I gave him a high five. Nobody knew what to say after that, so I turned to leave. As I did so, I heard myself say aloud, "I feel weird." The table erupted with laughter as I walked away. Motherfuckers and their handshakes. Shit-- high-fives. Fuck.

Bias

2008-09-12T11:14:00.007-04:00

I was in the midst of a class discussion, but I had yet to speak. We were talking about a legend from West Africa that has been passed down orally for hundreds of years, and the question being put to us concerned it's reliability as an historical document. Having sworn an oath to participate in class discussions, I raised my hand and was called on.
"I had serious problems thinking of this as an historical record," I said, trying my best to sound like I wasn't an idiot. "How can you believe something that is passed down orally like this? Even if people are trying to be as honest as they can, everyone has a bias that's going to creep in. And over generations, don't biases just build on top of each other? How can we know that any of this is true at all? And all that stuff about shooting someone with an arrow tipped in a white rooster's comb. Am I supposed to take that to be historical fact?"
Someone else raised her hand and pointed out to me that I was missing the symbolism of the story, which I'll grant her even though I noticed she didn't seem to know what the rooster's comb symbolized anymore than I do.
But now discussion was picking up, and people were starting to rebut what I had said, and I stopped raising my hand before responding.
"There are lots of instances of this sort of legend being used as historical evidence. The Odyssey for example. Archaeologists have found Troy."
"Yes," I said, "but nobody believes that Odysseus actually fought a Cyclops."
"A lot of people take the Bible literally," someone else said.
"Yes, and those people are crazy," I said without thinking.

"You really said that?" my friend Cara asked me later when I told her the story. "What happened? What did people say?"
"There was some nervous laughter, and the Professor kind of smiled uncomfortably, and then class was sort of over anyway, so we all left."
"Weren't you afraid of offending anyone?"
The truth is that I didn't think before I spoke and the moment after I called fundamentalists crazy I did get very nervous that I had offended someone. But I didn't say that to my friends.
"I guess I assumed that nobody who would be offended would be in the room. I guess I figured fundamentalists don't take classes. It's not like they have any interest in learning or rational thought."
And another friend abruptly changed the subject, without looking at me. I realized that she was offended that I was being a bigot, and I further realized that I had been perfectly aware that I was being one. It occurred to me that being aware of it didn't make it okay.

New Weekly Series: The Simple Homespun Wisdom of Professor Johnson

2008-09-04T23:17:00.009-04:00

Tonight I had another in a series of exceptional political science classes with a Professor Johnson. After last week's class in which he uttered several memorable lines including, "It's easy to romanticize the Indians now that they aren't scalping people," I decided that his many insights were worth sharing with the general public. I am, after all, paying tens of thousands of dollars for this education. The least I can do is share.

Notes from September 4, 2008

7:35 pm
Professor Johnson highly recommends the book Hardball by Chris Matthews. It is full of “funny anecdotes.”

7:56 pm
Professor Johnson thinks we should abandon New Orleans because “Mother Nature is taking it back."
Nobody wants to blame Mother Nature, because “you can’t vote her out of office.”

8:03 pm
Professor Johnson wants to know “what kind of freak doesn’t have health insurance?”

8:12 pm
“New York has 17 million people. If a few get shot, hey, what’s the big deal?”

8:50 pm
“In rural areas you shoot somebody cause they slept with your wife.”

8:52 pm
“It’s 2 am, you’re in the house, you weren’t invited. What are you doing here? Oh, you must be here to get shot.”

9:02 pm
As a small boy, Professor Johnson had a dog named Tiny.

More next week!

PS- In the interest of not failing this particular class, I'm giving the man an alias. Professors love Google I'm told.

YOUR BUSINESS IS REJOICING!

2008-08-21T17:04:00.002-04:00

A Thursday morning last fall found me in a middle school auditorium, reliving painful adolescent experiences of alienation. Once a year our company gathers its many employees together to bestow awards, listen to a motivational speaker, and of course pray. This year’s big inspirational to-do took the form of a mock pep rally, something the planners no doubt thought would be fun and kitschy. We all wore colored shirts to represent our different sites (mine was orange!), and we drove out to a middle school in the West End where my bosses took the stage and led cheers, which I was told it was important I participate in no matter how silly or degraded I might feel because company morale depended on my positive attitude, and so I stood, teeth clenched in a half-smile, plastic megaphone at my lips, hollering in a way I hoped was sincere. Hollering stuff like, “WE’VE GOT SPIRIT YES WE DO, WE’VE GOT SPIRIT HOW ‘BOUT YOU?!?!?!”
Abruptly, a young woman took the stage and began to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a cappella and badly. A hush fell over the auditorium as she sang, and, while her thin, unappealing voice struggled to keep on pitch, the sound of my group’s snorts and sobs was hard to miss. We sat shuddering, heads bowed and faces covered, trying desperately not to look at one another. We knew full well that if we did look at one another we would be overcome with laughter, and that this poor girl on stage might burst into tears and run away. Not laughing at her was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I only half succeeded. As I shuddered, tears streaming down my face, a new employee who was sitting next to me gently touched my arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked me, genuinely concerned. I nodded that I was, but couldn’t speak for fear of what might come out. She seemed like she might put her arm around me, but I held up my hand to stop her, and we both listened to the bit about the pretty little bluebirds awkwardly.
If “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” weren’t bad enough, it was followed by a very solemn and completely indecipherable prayer—an earnest mumbling that began with a request for bowed heads and ended bizarrely with the words “It is finished.”
At this point the President herself took the stage and proclaimed excitedly, “Today is all about you!” She seemed very pleased and excited by this idea, and, as she went on talking her passionate management-speak, I tried to decide whether she was manipulative or just extremely out of touch. I was sitting in a middle school auditorium dressed in an orange baseball shirt with my name on the back. I had yelled into a plastic megaphone that I had “spirit.” Later I would listen to a minister give a talk about his folksy personal philosophy about overcoming adversity and it’s roots in Popeye cartoons that he was sure most of us were too young to remember. As I listened to him earnestly declaim, “I yam what I yam,” I couldn’t help but think that I had never spent two hours that were less about me.

It's Not a Shovel

2008-08-16T16:26:00.000-04:00

When I was fifteen or so my parents went away for a week in July and left my sister and I with an old woman named Jeanette. I railed hard against this, to no avail.
“Sarah’s too young to be left alone for a week,” they said, “Jeanette’s coming mostly for her sake.”
Mostly.
Jeanette, like many older people, believed that the only manners that mattered were those of others: other drivers, other church-goers, other restaurant patrons, other people whose respect she had earned because she was born a substantial amount of time before them. Her own manners she neglected. Something about not having much time left makes people feel entitled to spend what time they have thinking exclusively about themselves—only one reason of many why people over sixty should be barred from holding public office, but I digress.

At fifteen I began learning how to cook, and one night while we were with Jeanette I made dinner. I microwaved frozen corn, baked some potatoes, and pan-fried some pork chops. I put garlic powder and salt and pepper on the pork chops, the way I always did, and because they were thick I cooked them slowly over low heat.
As I cooked, Jeanette watched. She didn’t trust me, and when she saw how I was cooking the pork chops she adjusted the heat on the stove for me.
“You’ll never get those cooked without some sizzle in the pan,” she told me.
“No, you’ll burn them,” I told her.
“Young man, you aren’t going to make me sick with undercooked pig flesh,” she said, and set the knob to high heat.
Later at the dinner table Jeanette admitted that the pork chops were burned, which made me feel a little better. Then, as though to make up for the lapse, she told me to stop using my fork like it was a shovel.
“But I’m growing,” I said, defusing the situation as best I could.
“Growing sideways, maybe,” said Jeanette.
It’s amazing how I can forget so much about childhood, but still remember that conversation perfectly. I remember where I was sitting, and I remember the look on her face as she spoke. It wasn’t a mean look. Most people don’t try to be mean, they do it by accident, by failing to think about things outside of themselves. At the time I didn’t know that, and I looked carefully at Jeanette’s face to find some hint of dislike or anger. All I saw was a stupid old woman, just like millions of others, only this one was friends with my parents. Seeing that she spoke not out of anger but unable to recognize the motive, and being too stupid myself to know better, I put my fork down and forced myself not to eat anymore. It was burnt pork anyway.
She did many nice things for me after that, but I don’t remember many of them. If I saw her on the street tomorrow, I don’t know if I would be civil.

From the Shores of Cape Hatteras

2008-08-15T18:53:00.006-04:00

I was drinking a beer on the beach, as is the custom, feet a-propped, borrowed umbrella fending off the harsh ultra-violet rays, a fine and gentle breeze caressing the old cheek, when I was confronted not unexpectedly by one of man’s basest urges. I rose from my seat.
“What’s up, Andrew?” inquired a near-by friend, she who lent the umbrella.
“I have to pee,” I told her, “and I don’t like the looks of the ocean.”
The natural thing to do, of course, when at the beach and needing to relieve ones self, is to head out into the sea and let your micturition disperse there. Everyone does this. I had done it myself the three days before this, and all had been well. But now, as I mentioned to my friend, the sea was a good deal angrier than in days past. It was with a good deal of apprehension that I approached the surf..

It wasn’t bad at first. I got a few feet out, and the waves were a little strong, but nothing unmanageable. I headed a little further out, and my head went under a couple of times, but I bobbed back up, and was soon far enough in to lower the old swimmers’ trunks.
I had brought one pair of trunks only, you see, and had no desire to piss into them. So I lowered the trunks, exposing the necessary apparatus, and began getting down to business. Only the business refused to be got down to.
One has to be relaxed if business is to be got down to, and relaxation doesn’t come naturally when every ten seconds or so another great honking wave is bearing down on you and you have to doggy paddle like crazy to keep your head above surface. Add to that lowered trunks, an exposed apparatus, and the close proximity of young ladies in bikinis, and relaxation becomes well nigh impossible. What if some great surge of water up-ended me, exposing God knows what to the eyes of total strangers, all of whom would know doubt point me out to their friends. I’d be discussed at dinner, “that stupid bearded jerk,” whose “huge pale ass” seared itself onto their mind’s eye, making causal dining at the Froggy Dog impossible even three hours later. It was as I imagined this particular scenario that the big one hit me.
My head was not merely pushed under, but pushed to the ocean floor, upon which I slammed my chin, thus prompting me to open my mouth and take in several gulps of salt water. As I struggled to right myself, to little effect, I remembered the words of my friend Allison on the trip down. Getting off the phone with her family, she said, “My dad wanted everyone to be sure to watch out for the undertow.” We'd laughed at this—Oh concerned parents, HA!—but now the irony struck me as unbearable. I'd never encountered an undertow before, but this was surely it, and soon my lungs would fill with water and I'd be some sad story that Gene Cox would report to an uncaring Richmond, Virginia on Channel 12.
But it was no undertow, and moments later I did right myself, maybe thirty seconds later but it felt far longer. I also managed somehow to hold onto my trunks, and I staggered out of the ocean clutching them as though some new wave might come up onto the sand and try to rip them from me.
“Are you ok?” the friends asked.
I don’t remember what I said. Not stopping to towel off, I limped off in the direction of the beach house: hair mussed, nose be-snotted, desperate for some calm indoor facility where I might relieve myself without drowning.

When the Bug Hits, That's the Time to Scratch It

2008-08-14T17:06:00.001-04:00

I was tired from a day with my sister and her husband (then boyfriend) in their town of Blacksburg. He was a graduate student there, and she lived with him, and they both hated it. As we drove down the street we would point out to each other the various morons and idiots of Blacksburg, with explanations of what was particularly moronic or idiotic about them. She showed me the places she liked to go, the store where she worked, the people she was friends with, and I tried my best to take in all these things and to be polite and friendly, which is always more effort than anyone wants to admit.
Lying down to sleep on the air mattress, I was just beginning to doze when I felt a tickle on my right ear. I moved to scratch it. There was another tickle. I put a finger to my ear to examine the situation further, and without meaning to pushed a beetle deep into my ear canal. I then began to scream.
“SARAH!” I screamed, “SOMETHING'S IN MY EAR! SOMETHING'S IN MY EAR!”
My sister was really very good-natured and helpful for a person who has just been woken by a brother running into her bedroom at 2 in the morning, yelling something unintelligible about his ear. She calmly listened to what I had to say, my head all the while tilted to the right and twitching manically, my whole body shuddering with each movement of the bug against my eardrum.
“Do you know what ear-candling is?” she asked me.
“NO, WHAT THE FUCK, I DON’T, ARRRGH, KNOW WHAT IT, FUCK, IS,” I hollered at her as nicely as I was able.
Ear-candling is, as my sister explained to me, a process by which ‘toxins’ are removed from the ear using a hollow candle made from paper coated in wax. You put the small end in your ear and light the other end, the idea being that somehow the burning creates some sort of vacuum that draws things out of your ear. Later I would research this further to find that the ‘toxins’ which accumulate at the bottom of the candle are actually the ashes of the candle itself, that the process removes nothing from your ear whatsoever, and furthermore risks dripping hot wax into your ear and is therefore quite unhealthy, but at the time my sister knew only that ear-candles were supposed to suck unwanted things out of your ear. I was skeptical, but in no position to argue.
I laid down on my side, right ear up, and my sister inserted the ear candle and set it aflame.
“I DON’T, FUCKCRAP, THINK THIS IS WORKING” I told her.
“Hold still!” said Sarah, “It won’t work if you don’t stay still and let it burn.”
“GODDAMN, IT’S HARD TO LAY, FUCK, STILL WITH THIS BUG IN MY HEAD, HOLYCHRIST,” I told her.
The ear-candle burned down. My sister cut it open and showed me the ashes that were supposedly toxins from inside my ear, but no bugs. The powerful ear-candle vacuum had proved no match against this mighty beetle, his six legs still dancing a gigue on my eardrum. Quackery exhausted, we proceeded to the hospital.

I sat in the waiting room for what felt like several days. It is understandable now why a hospital would see “bug in ear” as a relatively low priority, but at the time, with the filthy little bastard still wriggling away in my head, the holdup seemed like criminal negligence.
I watched as some upset frat boys came rushing in to check on a friend with alcohol poisoning. They were refused admittance to their friend’s room, and so began to call the nurse who had refused them a bitch and a whore and the probably one or two other misogynistic words they knew. My sister whispered something cutting about how members of Greek organizations are somehow less capable of showing emotion in their voices than normal people, how they might say “My friend died in a car crash” with the exact same inflections as “I burned the steaks.” But I was in no mood to appreciate her wit.

Finally, I was shown to an exam room where an awkward man calling himself Dr. Livingstone examined me.
“Well,” he said, looking into my head with his standard doctor’s ear inspection device, “that’s a great big bug you’ve got in there.”
He left and came back with some water.
“This is going to be wet,” he said.
I lay down on my side, and he filled my ear with water. A few minutes later, the bug was still doing cartwheels, and I was still shuddering and yelling stuff like “MOTHERFUCKING ASSFUCK” and “HOLY FUCKING COCKSHIT,” so Dr. Livingstone upped the ante and filled my ear with hydrogen peroxide. This time the bug crawled out, and Dr. Livingstone flicked my ear with his finger in a most un-scientific way, sending the little guy sailing across the room.
“You can stomp on him if you like,” he said.
The bug was indeed big, much bigger than I had thought. We put him into a Ziploc bag so I could show my sister, who was asleep in the waiting room.
While Dr. Livingstone wrote out a prescription for ear drops I noticed a pair of tweezers lying on the counter.
“Was that the next step?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “but we try not to go that route. Sometimes the bug’ll grab hold of your eardrum when we do that, and there’s a good chance he’ll rip it.”
I didn’t stamp on the bug—my sister set it free, “the right thing to do” she said. Fucking vegetarians. She took a picture though, my bug on the sidewalk next to a quarter to give it scale. It looked harmless enough sitting there, and the pain in my head was gone. I felt as if I'd awoken from a nightmare, excited to tell bored friends about some crazy shit that had happened in my sleep.

Last night I dreamt of Randy Moss.

2008-08-13T16:23:00.000-04:00

I dreamt it was the eighth round of my fantasy football draft, and somehow nobody had taken Randy Moss, or incredibly, Tom Brady. I was the only one to realize this, and found myself trying to pick between the two. My great dilemma, I remember vividly, was trying to think of a way to get both. I knew that since they were on the same team, I couldn’t take one without alerting my friends to the availability of the other. Was there some way I could get both, some cunning stratagem I could use to secure both the best fantasy football quarterback and the best fantasy wide receiver? Perhaps wait and make my pick when everyone else went to the bathroom, which they apparently might do as a group, this being a dream. Before I could make my decision I was confronted with some child from work who had a problem I barely remember, but which probably had to do with crayons and pinching.
Looking back on it, I obviously should have taken Brady.

Sleepover Diary—Wrap-Up

2008-08-12T16:22:00.001-04:00

I fell asleep around 5 am. I was back up at 6, before all my lame-ass co-workers who went to bed at 12. Parents started picking kids up shortly thereafter, and I helped them find their kids, their kids’ shoes, their kids’ sleeping bag covers, whatever needed finding. An older girl who had gone to bed with her hair curled like she was headed to some sort of elementary school prom stumbled out to meet her mom bleary-eyed, half awake, her hair now poofed out in a great frizzy white-girl afro. A little boy limped up to his mom on one flip-flop, blue goo stuck in his hair, and wrapped his arms around her waist. Parents walked up to shake my hand, asking,
“Awake yet?”
“Have fun?”
“When’d they finally turn in?”
“Late night?”
Many of them actually said thank you, which was unexpected, but gratifying.
After they left my co-workers and I spent half an hour putting the building back together, and then went to Cracker Barrel for breakfast. Then I went home and slept for six hours, waking up at four and feeling like a vampire.

Sleepover Diary 4

2008-08-02T04:05:00.000-04:00

4:05 am
The quiet is broken only by a single cricket who somehow got inside and is chirping to himself. That, and the sound of a six year old hitting his friend in the head over and over with a large inflatable bat that he won as a carnival prize. I take the bat away, but the cricket chirps on.

Sleepover Diary 3

2008-08-02T03:33:00.000-04:00

3:30 am
The green on light of the coffee pot is staring at me, daring me to have another cup. I'm debating it, unsure if I'll want to give in and sleep later. It reminds me of the first time I tried to pull an all-nighter, in college.

I put off a paper until the last minute, and found myself calling the professor to ask for an extension. I planned to use my grandfather's recent death as an excuse- callous maybe, but I told myself grandpa wouldn't mind and I was probably right. But the professor didn't care. "You weren't in class for the discussion on Monday, " he says, "no extension."
So I resolved to stay up all night and finish it. I locked myself into the music lab where I wrote all my papers, and sat down with a 24 ounce coffee from 7 eleven. I never drank coffee, and I poured in lots of Irish Cream sweetener to make it palatable.
After fifteen minutes or so the coffee was gone, and half an hour after that I was yawning. And hell, I felt like a break anyway, so I walked back to 7 eleven for another 24 ounce coffee.
And an hour later another. 72 ounces of coffee now in me, I sat down to work in earnest, only to find that I couldn't keep a single thought in my head, they seemed to be coming in packs of five. At one point I re-read what I had typed and found a sentence with no articles that seemed vaguely to be about tuna salad. So I gave up, and decided to sleep. Ah, but 72 ounces coffee will brook no sleep, and I lay in bed sweating, listening to my heart race until about 5:30, when I fell asleep. I woke four hours later, and when I urinated it smelled like Irish cream.

In spite of all of that, I am going to have another cup.

Sleepover Diary 2

2008-08-02T03:01:00.001-04:00

3:00 am
"I've already told you three times, if I come back you are all coming out to the green to sleep separately. Now whisper. You know how to whisper? Whisper. I mean it. Or else."
And I move on to the next room, where a girl is pretending to snore, loudly.
"SNOOOORRRRRRGHHHH....... SHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWW.... SNOOOOORRRRRRRGHHHH.....SHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEWWWWW...."
I stand there for five minutes to see how long she will do it, and for five minutes she doesn't stop. When I walk away I hear giggling.

From the Archives: What Happens When I Try To Write Fiction

2008-07-18T16:03:00.003-04:00

This is a fragment of a story I wrote several years ago. I was hanging out at my friend's Katie and Cara's apartment, and they stepped out to go to the store. I stayed behind, and wrote a story to pass the time. When they got back I read it to them. As I recall, Katie laughed, but Cara didn't really say much.

Rather than fry his bananas, he elected to give them to Goodwill where they would be of use. He was sad when the Goodwill truck came around and told him that they didn’t trade in foodstuffs.
“If you have any old furniture or clothing we could take that.” said the buxom truck driver.
“Well, I do have this chair I don’t really want.”
He invited her in, and they dined on tea and bananas until late in the evening when he tried to put the moves on her, but she declined.
“I feel kind of full, and might be sick,” she told him.
So they met the following evening, and this time they had sex before they ate, and he was pleased. She was kind of non-plussed, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so she kept quiet about it.
After the sex they went to the park and bought some hotdogs, which they ate with sauerkraut, not because they liked it but because it was German. They then stumbled over to the local art museum to look at paintings and found it closed. So they sat down to chat.

“I don’t know how they expect to stay open if they are going to be closed on Mondays.”
“They don’t charge for admission really, it’s kind of a state-funded thing.”
“That is no excuse.”
‘”I blame the Republicans. They are always cutting funding for things.”
“My aunt is Republican.”
“Really?”
“Oh don’t worry, I’m not one. I’m an independent.”
“Most of the independents I know are too ill-informed, whether due to stupidity or laziness, to form an opinion about political issues.”
There was a long silence interrupted only by a small dog that ran by at full speed barking it’s head off.
“I wonder what his problem is.”
Following the dog a moment later was a man on a bicycle riding fast and screaming. They couldn’t make out much of what he said, but the word “allegorical” was clear. As the man crossed the street he was struck by a VW Bug. The man flew high into the air, and pieces of his bicycle flew all over the street. Katie got out of the car and started to apologize, but the man took off running after the dog. He called something back. It was also hard to make out, but the word “allegorical” was still clear. He mispronounced it the same way he had the first time.
She looked at him, and he shrugged.
“He mispronounces allegorical.”
“Yeah.”
“The other day I was at work, and there was a man buying hot cereal, and he told me that I reminded him of his cousin. Jonathan. That was his cousin’s name.”
“That’s so great.”
He walked her home, not knowing he would never see her again. The next day she stowed away aboard a whaling vessel headed up the Mississippi toward the Great Lakes where, the Captain maintained, a large population of clever whales had been hiding for many years.

Enemies

2008-07-17T16:35:00.002-04:00

I was not popular in middle school. I was a nerdy little boy, always trying to endear myself to a teacher, or proclaiming my indifference to what other people thought, or talking about the violin. I only listened to classical music, a source of great tension with my peer group. I remember one nice girl trying to understand my musical taste: “Have you heard the theme song to Fresh Prince of Bel Air? You’d probably like that—there’s violins in it.”
Yes, I fell into a trap that my parents, like so many other well-meaning adults, had set for me. I was convinced that if I would only “be myself,” then friends would follow. In truth, this strategy doesn’t apply to middle school. Nobody is themselves, and those that try are mercilessly torn down until they conform.

Early in my middle school career, before I’d been beaten into a certain amount of conformity, I knew a boy named Jermaine, and we hated each other. Jermaine was in my gifted class, and he would roll his eyes at every word I spoke, and I would do the same. When I sucked up to our teacher he would call out to the class that I was doing it. When he asked to go to the water fountain in order to go to his locker and get a piece of candy, I would announce his true intention to the teacher. To him I was a sniveling little ass-kisser, and he called me “Fat-ass.” To me he was a bad kid, a rule-breaking future criminal who probably stole from the school store, and I called him “Douchebag,” something I heard my father say while he drove sometimes.
Our class took a field trip to Baltimore to visit some ridiculous seminar for sixth graders at Johns Hopkins University. The trip involved a stay at a hotel in Baltimore’s inner harbor, and Jermaine was put down as my roommate, to our mutual dismay.
We approached our hotel room bickering and arguing about petty things, tired and cranky from a long bus ride. Before I turned on the light Jermaine ran in and jumped on the bed, and immediately cried out.
“What is it?!” I cried, turning on the lights.
The bed he had jumped on was soaked in urine.
We found our teacher, who secured us a new room, and while we waited discussed what a shitty hotel we were staying in.
“What kind of hotel has pee on the beds?” I asked him.
“A crappy-ass hotel, that’s what kind,” he answered.
Crappy-ass. I liked that.
Later, in our new room Jermaine let me see an X-Men comic he had bought after dinner.
“Wow, did that guy just kill Magneto?” I asked him.
“Nah, they always try to make you think somebody died but they always come back like an issue later,” he told me.
We discussed video games, television, movies, and discovered we had lots of mutual interests. Then Jermaine went to the phone. Before I could ask what he was doing, he picked up the receiver and punched in four random numbers. There was a pause while it rang, and then a voice said “Hello?”
“BIAAAHTCH!” yelled Jermaine and hung up.
This was the greatest thing I had seen in my entire life. We didn’t stop laughing for several minutes, and then I had to try it. Four random numbers, and--
“BIAAAHTCH!” I yelled.
We rolled on the floor.
“BIAAAHTCH!!” we yelled into the empty stairwell.
“BIAAAHTCH!!!” we yelled running down the hall past open doors.
“BIAAAHTCH!!!!” we called out on the bus the next day.
How we didn’t get in trouble for doing this is a mystery to me, but we didn’t.
When we got back to Norfolk we said good-bye, and went our separate ways.
The next Monday at school I saw him in the hall. Neither of us said hello, but we grinned at each other, and though we were never exactly friends, we didn’t hate each other either. I would kiss the teacher’s ass, and he said nothing. He would go to his locker for candy, and I said nothing. And when his friends started to pick on me, he changed the target to someone else. Friendship might have been unrealistic, but peace was enough.

Out of Touch

2008-07-03T13:35:00.000-04:00

Walking down the street toward Strawberry St. Market, I crossed paths with two young men going in the opposite direction. They didn’t notice me, as they were deeply involved in their own conversation. One was distraught, and his friend was consoling him.
“Man, I couldn’t believe it,” said the one, “I made out with a fat chick, and I didn’t even fuck her!”
“I know man. It’s okay. You’ll get her next time,” said the other.
Bewildered, I got my coffee, all the while wondering—“Is that normal? Is that how people are and I just don’t know it?”

In Memory of Nick Bognar

2008-07-02T08:59:00.002-04:00

I called my friend Nick to talk about Clay and his horrendous poem the other day. Nick was in the same speech class with me where Clay wowed us with his line about patriotism, and he remembered the poem “The Game of Life.” We chatted awhile and reminisced about days gone by, and Nick said if anyone ever wrote a poem like that about him he hoped he would be dead and wouldn’t have to hear it. I said, “Shit, Nick—I’ll write that poem right now!” To which he replied, “Awesome, nothing would make me prouder!”
It was decided that the poem would be about Nick’s new cat and the cat allergies Nick has been struggling with since acquiring it. The poem presupposes that Nick has died from his allergies, choking to death in the night for the cat that he loves.

Coughing, coughing through the day
I love my kitty anyway

My kitty’s dander makes me sick
A sick that makes my mucus thick

He nuzzles me, his coat is soft
His purring sets my heart aloft

Coughing, coughing through the night
I love my cat with all my might

I love my cat with a love that’s true,
But I’m dead now, my face is blue

From choking on my own thick snot
My kitty’s love I still have got

Jesus walks beside me now
And when he talks it sounds like “Meow.”

Alex Ross = The Shizznit

2008-06-30T12:41:00.002-04:00

You should go here and read this. It made me wish I wrote it: therestisnoise.com
And then you should go buy the book, cause that rules too.

The Game of Life

2008-06-30T12:32:00.001-04:00

“Patriotism… is the essence of identity,” said the boy in the wheelchair at the front of the classroom. “Can anyone tell me who said that?”
He didn’t realize that the rules of the assignment did not allow for questioning the audience. The audience knew it though, and nobody answered.
“Does anybody know?” he asked.
“Uh, no, I don’t know,” said one boy. The rest of us shook our heads.
I think Clay, the boy at the front of the room whose cerebral palsy confined him to a wheelchair, had expected a chorus of wrong answers—“Churchill!” “Benjamin Franklin!” “Thomas Paine!” “Jefferson! It must be Jefferson!” – and the lack of enthusiasm seemed to discourage him.
“I said it,” he finally said, proudly.
We all looked at each other. “I guess I should have figured that,” I whispered to a friend nearby.
Clay was an awkward case. On the one hand, he had a terrible disability and was certainly rising above it the best way he knew how. He was active in a number of clubs and extra-curricular activities, extremely opinionated, a personality around the school that was easily recognized by upper and lower classmen alike. On the other hand, he was also a total prick. His outspoken opinions frequently bordered on fascist, and “Patriotism is the essence of identity” was fairly typical, though only hinting at the militant xenophobia I had come to expect from him. Furthermore, and I know how terrible this sounds, he was constantly holding up his disability to those around him and asking to be congratulated for it.
“Yes,” his speech went on, “You might not think of it to look at me, but in spite of my physical disabilities I do a lot of thinking, and that quote is by me. That’s a thought that I had. And if you are willing to give life your all, you can have great thoughts of your own.”
After the speech was over Clay asked us what we thought, and we told him we didn’t think question and answer was allowed in the body of the speech, that maybe he should keep his questions rhetorical. He didn’t seem to know what rhetorical meant, and didn’t want to bother with it.
“But what did you think of the quote?” he wanted to know, “Weren’t you surprised that I came up with that?”
“Well, it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense,” someone ventured. “Isn’t identity kind of a personal thing? And I know that for a lot of people patriotism doesn’t enter into their sense of identity at all. And should it? Isn’t saying that your country defines who you are kind of dangerous?””
Clay got a little mad at this point, and there was a bit of heated discussion before our teacher brought us back on task.

Later that year, a basketball coach at our school died of cancer. There was a memorial one day in the gym, which was renamed in the coach’s honor. His widow was there, and several members of the school board, and the superintendent of schools spoke. Naturally our principal spoke too, and as he did I saw Clay’s mechanized wheelchair hum to a stop behind him.
“And now,” our principal announced, “The student council president will read a special poem by one of our own students, dedicated to the memory of Coach ______.”
And the SCA president stepped up and read Clay’s poem, “The Game of Life.”

“Here we go full court press
Oh no, I have to rest

I cannot rest now, I have a game
A game that might build our fame

On me my kids depend
This GAME I don’t want to end

I have to win this fight
I have to make it through the night

This is hard its true
But somehow I’ll get through

Here we go full court press
Oh no, I have to rest

I am tired, I fought to the end
On the Lord I now depend.”

And everyone solemnly bowed their heads. Few would have admitted it, but I believe a lot of people left that gym thinking differently about cerebral palsy.
“Why does a disability give you a right to have your doggerel read into a microphone at someone’s memorial service?” I imagine them thinking., “And why didn’t they find someone from the school literary magazine to write a poem? Aren’t they at least marginally more qualified?”
That’s certainly what I was thinking, but some thoughts aren’t appropriate to share. Clay taught me that. That, and that patriotism is the essence of identity.

I Suppose YOUR Favorite Movie is Titanic

2008-06-27T10:13:00.003-04:00

Recently I was at my friends’ house, drinking a beer and trying too hard to be funny, when my friend Amy handed me a copy of Entertainment Weekly.
“Here,” she said, “you’ll think this is interesting.”
This issue of Entertainment Weekly ranked the top 100 everything of the last 25 years—top 100 TV shows, top 100 albums, top 100 books, top 100 plays, videogames, movies, etc. As is always the case with such things, I found myself howling at certain choices the editors had made. For example the greatest television program in the history of television programs was rated #11, behind the likes of Lost and Friends. I shook my fist and gnashed my teeth, and other people in the room decided to go get another drink or see how the grill was doing.
But then of course, there were the things I felt they had got right. Among these, Pulp Fiction was rated as the number one movie of the last 25 years.
“Can’t argue with that!” I thought, tipping my imaginary cap to the editors.
It reminded me of an anecdote from several years ago, when I went to purchase that excellent movie on VHS. I had received some horrible over-sized sweater from my grandmother, and had taken it back to Target for store credit. Target’s always got some great deals on movies, and I found Pulp Fiction, most important movie of the last 25 years, for the low low price of $9.99. Giddy with the thrill of a bargain well hunted, I approached the register.
“I’d like to purchase this video please!” I told the cashier, my eyes full of the innocence and sugar plums.
“Alright then,” said the cashier, a woman not unlike Lunch-Lady Doris. She regarded my purchase. She held it up at arm’s length, looking over her spectacles.
“Hmmm,” she said, “I don’t hold with this trash.”
(I realize I am taking creative liberties with the story, but I want to stress that she actually called my purchase ‘trash.’)
I looked back at her, agape. She returned my gaze, a look of certainty in her wrinkly eye-balls.
“Trash,” she said.
“It’s not trash actually. I don’t buy trash.” I told her.
Unimpressed, she bagged my purchase, and I fantasized about reporting her to her supervisor, but knowing all the while I wouldn’t follow through. I hope that somewhere she is looking at Entertainment Weekly right now, high arbiter of popular culture, and reconsidering her opinion.
“Trash.” What a stupid bitch.

Championship Fun Team

2008-06-25T11:17:00.002-04:00

The children have four weeks of school left, and that means my day care will become a day camp. The foundation of day camp is the small group—each teacher has fifteen or so children that they are personally responsible for, and these fifteen eat lunch together, have quiet time together, sit together through announcements, and compete together for points. Yes, we have competitions, and the kids answer trivia questions, run relay races, and build model skyscrapers to earn points for their team. The team with the most points at the end of the summer is the winner, and receives an extravagant prize, in addition to the glory that winning your daycare’s summer contest brings.
One of the first acts of summer camp is picking your team’s name, and many people let their kids do this. The kids get together and brainstorm names, and then vote on the one they like best. This results in team names like “The Shining Stars,” “The Super Stars,” and “The Star Olympics,” all of which were team names my first summer. I can’t deal with a star-based name, so I help the kids out. I brainstorm the names, and then they pick which one they like best. They still get input, and they end with a way cooler name. Like “The Ninja-Pirates” my team’s name from my first summer.
Here now, a list of ideas for this summer’s team of champions:

The Vampire-Samurai
The Zombie-Bears
The Jedi-Donkeys
The Sumo-Dwarves
The Mongol-Sharks
Captain Ahab’s Surf-Nazis
Revenge of the Belligerent Hummingbird
Velociraptor MBAs
The Sullen Pre-Adolescents
The Doctors of Philosophy
The Cobra Kai
Team Jesus
Benji Compson’s Freedom Commandos
Championship Fun Team

Postscript--
My team didn't like my choices. They decided to go with the name "Chapter Imagination." I'm kind of embarassed, but letting them pick their name was the right thing.

God Weighs Like A Thousand Pounds

2008-03-08T11:45:00.002-05:00

There is a boy in my program, aged eight, who is a terrible know-it-all, but who also lacks any self-confidence. He's always telling people things that he knows, and then repeating them over and over saying "Right? Right? The Sun is like a million degrees hot, right? Isn't it? Don't you know that? You know it, right?"

There is a girl in my program, aged six, who is repeating kindergarten and who is almost completely detatched from reality. Last year this girl composed and performed a song for our entire program with the lyrics, "I like fish/ in my dish/ MY NAME IS CHRISTOPHER ROBIN!" (you have to shout the last part). She is sweet, but also exceptionally dirty. You'll watch her dig her hand down her pants, and then she'll run up to you and try to put same hand on your face. You recoil, but at the same time you worry that you're hurting her feelings by shunning her.

This boy and this girl were discussing theology earlier this week when I picked them up from school.
"What?" the boy said, "You don't know about God? He's like the most best person ever. If you don't like him, it means you like the devil. God's really big, and he knows everything, and he's really really good and can do anything he wants."
"Yeah," said the little girl, her hair tangled, her face a mask of dirt and snot, "and he can turn himself into a tiger."

Trivia Time

2008-02-17T12:24:00.000-05:00

Everyday we meet in the main commons area for announcements. Our director tells the kids about upcoming events—days off from school, field trips, art classes—and gives stern warnings about pulling the nets off the soccer goals, flushing plastic cups down the toilet, and so on. Then she dismisses the kids by group for homework. Most days she does this with a trivia game based on the children’s t-shirts.
For example, she calls a boy up who is wearing a Pokemon t-shirt. She asks if anyone in the group can identify the Pokemon pictured on the shirt. The child who successfully does this gets dismissed with his group to homework. It’s a small thing, but it gives them a feeling of accomplishment.
The other day my director was off, and I did announcements. When the time came to dismiss I tried the trivia game. I looked out on the sea of children with their hands up, half of them making an eager hooting noise and coming up off the ground onto their knees, so desperately did they want their t-shirt to be chosen. I looked them over, desperate for something I could make trivia of.
My eyes lit on a particularly well-behaved girl, and picked her. She’s a good kid, and it made me happy to see her face light up when I called her name.
Her shirt had the word “Gymnast” written across it.
I thought as everyone waited for my question. Nothing came to mind.
“Who…, uhm, who…, who can name a famous gymnast?” It was the best I could think of, and I instantly wished I’d done better. What adult can name a famous gymnast, let alone a bunch of elementary aged children? Still, maybe someone would luck out and remember Mary Lou Retton.
“Trevor?” I called, and Trevor put his hand down and a look came over his face that I recognized as the look of someone who wanted the spotlight but had nothing to say. After a few seconds I called another named.
“Balance beam?” queried a little girl.
“No, I’m sorry, I meant a person not an event,” I explained.
Hands were dropping as kids realized the question was too hard, the opportunity for success unmasked as an opportunity for embarrassment. I began thinking of how to change questions gracefully, but a kindergarten girl raised her hand and I called on her.
“Abraham Lincoln,” she said confidently.
I thanked her for trying, and ended up letting her group go for sitting nicely. You’ve got to take what you can get.

Stare Down

2008-02-14T11:59:00.000-05:00

Another morning, another group of pro-life advocates outside the local abortion clinic. I stopped at the usual light there at the corner of Grove and Boulevard and saw them talking to one another.
“When is Bill getting here with the large posters of the bloody fetuses?” one of them was no doubt saying.
“Oh, anytime,” replied the other. “He had to egg his lesbian neighbors house first, but he said it wouldn’t take long.”
One of them noticed me staring, and caught my gaze. We frowned at each other for a moment, and I shook my head. I’m sure he cared deeply. As the light turned green, I reflected on how much better I was than him. You know-- cause he’s a judgemental prick, and I’m really open-minded and accepting of other people’s differences.
It’s wonderful to be sure of one’s self.

Some Wounds Never Heal

2008-01-31T12:29:00.001-05:00

I had an idea for my dorm’s t-shirt. On the bulletin board in the hallway, just inside the main entrance to the building, our dormitory council would post the minutes from its weekly meetings, and occasionally post announcements. On this bulletin board had been posted a flier asking for t-shirt ideas, and I had a damn good one and submitted it. All my friends agreed with me how damn good it was, and since many of them lived in my buildiing I figured I had a decent shot at making my idea a reality.
The name of our dormitory was Custis Hall, after Mary Custis, our first president’s something or other.
My idea was for a simple black shirt, across the front printed the slogan “CUSTIS IS THE BUSTIS.”
I loved this idea, and lobbied it hard with all the appropriate people, as well as some of the inappropriate ones.

“Kate!” I yelled to my high school friend and dormitory council president, “Kate! I need to ask you about the t-shirt!”
“We haven’t decided yet, Andrew.”
“Well do you have any alternative ideas?”
“Yes, Krista suggested a top ten list.”
“Oh Jesus fucking Christ, Kate, that’s ridiculous. Really? A top ten list? We’re gonna be another shirt with a top ten list? You can’t be serious. I refuse to believe that you are serious. If you are serious I will take my underwear off over my head. Sincerely. Holy Christ, that’s dumb.”
“Well, Andrew, I appreciate that you fell strongly about this, but some of us on the council feel that your idea might be too, well, simple.”
“Simple?!”
“And nonsensical.”
“Excuse me please, I’m going to my room to drink a bottle of vodka.”

That week I went from door to door in our little building trying to muster support for my shirt.
“It’s a plain black t-shirt, and across the front it says: ‘CUSTIS IS THE BUSTIS!’”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, it doesn’t exactly make sense, that's why it's good. It sounds like it means something positive, but it’s just nonsense really. It also rhymes.”
"Alright, thanks- we’re gonna get back to watching Titanic.”

I wasn’t there when the council met, I found out from the minutes posted on the bulletin board-- they decided on a top ten list. Not only that, they bastardized my idea and named their shitty top ten list, “The Top 10 Reasons Custis is the Bustis.” They seemed to think this was a compromise, but I was outraged. “CUSTIS IS THE BUSTIS,” was the complete antithesis of a top ten list-- it was a proud declaration of absurdity and silliness, a bold statement that our dorm thought for itself, a joke that felt inside but wasn’t, good and pure and hilarious on a dozen different levels, and they had taken my precious gift, wiped their unimaginative, mediocre asses on it, and gone back to watching Titanic.
With a sharpie I wrote across the minutes, “CUSTIS IS UNJUSTIS,” and stormed off to the campus center for an overpriced chicken sandwich.

Steven Soderbergh and the Second Degree Burn

2008-01-26T15:32:00.000-05:00

“Jon, I’ve burned my hand.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Jon.
“What should I do?”
“Have you run it under cold water?”
“Yes.”
“Is it blistering?”
“I don’t know, maybe?”
“See if it blisters, and if it does a lot, then you should probably go to the emergency room. If no blistering, or not much, then don’t.”
“Thanks, Jon.”

I put the phone down, and picked up my bag of frozen peas. When I first burned myself I’d used frozen blackberries, but they had thawed, and I switched to peas. With my good hand I picked up my fork and resumed eating the dinner I had burned myself making.
I un-paused the DVD and began again to watch Andie MacDowell flail about James Spader’s tiny, sparsely-furnished apartment. She thought James Spader was a pervert, and she was unhappy about it.
As I watched I gnawed at chicken thighs, alternating with forkfuls of mashed potatoes. My hand began to get cold, so I put down the peas, leading my hand to burn and sting, so I picked the peas back up, only to put them down again a minute later. As Andie MacDowell left James Spader in an awkward huff, I went to my wallet for my insurance card. I found the number I wanted on the back, dialed it, and soon was speaking to a registered nurse with a Mid-Western accent.
“What have you done to treat your burn?” she asked me, and I told her in detail.
“Take the frozen veggies off,” she told me, “I know they feel good but they cut off the circulation to your hand and might cause more harm than good.”
The nice lady told me I could soak my hand in cool water for up to fifteen minutes at a time, “for comfort.” I should then keep it out of the water for a half-hour, to let the blood circulate. I thanked her and returned to Andie MacDowell, whose bushy-eye-browed husband was sleeping with her sister.
I was able to follow the movie while my hand soaked, but when my fifteen minutes expired, and I dumped the water, I couldn’t think of anything but my hand, which felt like I was still holding the 400 degree panhandle from two hours previous. I was vaguely aware that Ms. MacDowell’s character was divorcing her husband.
I considered chopping my hand off.
There was some fighting; not sure between whom.
With my good hand, I began smacking myself in the head.
James Spader was onscreen again, looking uncomfortable, presumably because he could see what kind of pain I was in. I looked at the clock to see that it had been less than ten minutes since I took my hand out of the water.
“I could call someone,” I thought. “Call them and talk about what, how much your hand hurts?”
Back on the TV there was about to be sex, but I didn’t care at all. It had only been fifteen minutes, but I decided I’d had my fill of blood circulating, and refilled the bowl with cold water in time to see the closing moments of the movie I’d barely followed. Things appeared to have worked out. I turned on David Letterman and waited for the pain to go away so I could sleep.
The next day I had a hell of a blister. I showed it off to many gratifying “Oohs,” “Aahs,” and “Oh sicks.” It isn’t much by way of compensation, but it's better than nothing at all.

2:30 pm

2008-01-25T13:27:00.000-05:00

The other day I was standing outside an elementary school talking to my co-worker Yolanda while we waited for the kids to be released from school. Our conversations usually run something like this:
“Hey, Yolanda. (sigh).”
“What’s wrong, Andrew?”
“Oh nothing. (sigh).”
“Andrew."
“Okay, you’re right I am unhappy, and it’s because of this long, involved story that isn’t really all that awful, but I am overly sensitive and frequently take things more personally than I should.”
“You’re silly Andrew. Here is some helpful common sense advice that is applicable to your story.”
“Thanks, Yolanda. Oh look, here comes a kid.”

The kids trickle out one and two at a time, and the first one this particular day was a smart, red-headed second grader who’s good at getting away with doing things he shouldn’t. His friends will all get sent to timeout, or a phone call to mom, or whatever, and this boy will slip through everytime, his wide blue eyes full of innocence and this kind of "Aw shucks, I wish I could have stopped Trevor from being SO bad, but I'm only seven," look that you believe until about five minutes after it's too late to go back and punish him. Yolanda and I helped the little escape artist onto the van and continued our conversation in a more child-friendly vein, making attempts to include him.
“How was school today?” Yolanda asked him.
“Oh fine,” he said, distracted by his book.
“What’s that you’re reading?” I asked.
The boy looked up from his book, looked me dead in the eye, and said quite seriously:
“In the future, I’m your father.”
Yolanda turned to hide her laughter, but I stared back at him agape.
“Do you mean reincarnation?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“When you die and come back as someone else. Or something else sometimes.”
“I dunno. What’s for snack?”
“French toast sticks.”
“Yay, I like those.”
“You’re a freak,” I told him, and headed back to my own van to help other, less crazy children into their booster seats.

You Can't Stop Them Growing Up

2007-12-21T09:32:00.000-05:00

Monday I found out that my favorite kid, the one who farts, is going to start staying home after school. I spent a quarter of an hour or so talking to her mom about it, and managed to remain professional and keep a good face. On the way home I got quite sad, and stopped off to buy groceries. I discovered afterwards that the check I’d deposited earlier in the day hadn’t gone through yet and that my groceries had overdrawn my account, but I didn’t care. You can only feel down about so many things at once.
While walking toward my apartment building with two plastic bags and a case of beer I was approached by a young man asking for spare change. I felt for a couple quarters, but there weren’t any. On an impulse I offered him a beer instead.
“Yeah,” he said happily, “That’ll work!”
So I opened my twelve pack of Sam Adams and pulled one out.
“I’m sorry it’s not twist off,” I said. “Do you know how to open it on the curb?”
“No,” he said awkwardly. We stared at one another. It was becoming a hassle, but I couldn’t take back what I’d offered.
“Stay put,” I said, and ran upstairs for a bottle opener.
When I got back we opened it and he took a swig.
“Thank you,” he said, “and Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas,” I answered back, but whatever feeling of warmth I’d been hoping for didn’t come. Lonely, I went upstairs, killed a few roaches, and started making dinner.

What I'm Thankful For

2007-11-12T18:59:00.000-05:00

Another teacher at work did a project today where she had kids write poems about what they were thankful for. Cats and dogs across the metropolitan area were celebrated, as were moms and dads, the occaisional younger sibling, and Pop-Tarts. Of course I wrote one. Of course I am posting it.

drive without end to grandma's for bland and soggy veg
tears- coffee that kept me awake now swells my bladder.
the exit signs pass as i approach home too slowly, a crawl, like
molasses running a marathon backwards through the rainforest.
expectation comes with the gravel of the driveway
a silent engine
sprinting
relief
Thanksgiving

A Passage to Excitement!

2007-11-10T15:42:00.000-05:00

I took a small vacation this week, and, since the concert I had planned to see in North Carolina was canceled, spent the time reading A Passage to India. It’s a good book, and I like E.M. Forster very much, but just now as I was coming to its end something alarming happened. For reasons I can’t explain I began to imagine that every sentence ended in an exclamation point. Accordingly, the voice in my mind’s ear that pronounced the words, a voice that had been decent, wise and insightful until this point, suddenly turned into that of an anchor on Entertainment Tonight.

A slim, tall eight-sided building stood at the top of the slope, among some bushes! This was the Shrine of the Head! It had not been roofed, and was indeed merely a screen! Inside it crouched a humble dome, and inside that, visible through a grille, was a truncated gravestone, swathed in calico!

This is too good a book to be marred by such insanity, and I am going to take a walk, perhaps gas up my car (if my bank account will permit) and come back later when, hopefully, I can resume reading with the punctuation that Mr. Forster intended.

Highs, Lows, and a Sense of Self-Worth Affected by a Videogame In Which I Pretend to Play Guitar

2007-11-05T11:45:00.000-05:00

Every week at work we have a staff meeting, and most staff meetings begin with something called “Highs and Lows.” We go around the room and everyone says what their high point and low point for the week were. This can be anything: professional or personal, big or small, a death or a TV cancellation, a birth or a successful casserole. Many people don’t put much thought into it, and since staff meetings are always on a Friday many people choose to say week after week that their high is "that it's Friday." Those people frustrate me somewhat, but I understand- sharing feelings isn’t for everyone. I don’t have much of a problem with it though.
“This week my low was last night. I was playing Guitar Hero III, which as you all know I just bought at the beginning of this week and expected to beat within a day or two. This seemed to be going to plan, until I reached the eighth and final mini-set, which some of you weird born-again-Christians in the room might be alarmed to hear is played in Hell. Yeah, there’s a lot of creepy imagery, but appropriate for this week, right? Am I right? HA. Oh Halloween. What a joy. Anyway, I got to this final set, and it was really hard. I mean, I’m pretty fucking awesome at Guitar Hero, but these songs make "Beast and the Harlot" look like "Smoke on the Water," if you catch my drift. I kept failing song after song, until I reached the moment of crisis that is this week’s low. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, and I thought ‘What am I good at? Why am I here? I underachieved in school, and then after I graduated I underachieved in the jobs that I went after, and I underachieved in my free time which is what led me to be playing this ridiculous game in the frst place, but at least I thought I was really good at it. And now if I can’t even beat "Cliffs of Dover" by Eric fucking Johnson then what good am I? Aren’t I just a big failure, period?’ I tell you, it was a low if ever there was one.
"Well, I took a long walk, which isn’t entirely safe in the fan, but I was feeling reckless, and I resolved to keep trying. And maybe I just needed a break, because I got back to the apartment, opened a new beer and damn if I didn’t beat "Cliffs of Dover," "Number of the Beast," and "One" in less than an hour! And that was my high! Now I only need to beat "Raining Blood," and I’ll unlock the final boss battle, and nobody will ever call me a loser again!”
“Ok,” said my boss who had been checking her watch, “Lauren, how about you?”

Sure enough, the next day I finally beat "Raining Blood," and felt very good about it.
“Hey, I beat Raining Blood!” I told my friend Jon when I went over to watch football.
“Hey, great,” he said, unenthused.
“Hey Amy!” I said to Amy when she came in half an hour later, “I beat Raining Blood!”
“I’m very happy for you,” she said, and smiled as one might smile at a retarded boy who just drew a picture of you.
Later my friends Cara and Allison came over, and I told Cara my good news.
“You know Andrew,” she said, “I feel like our interests are diverging. You’re into all these fake things. You play fake guitar. You have a fake football team. You’re even sort of a fake teacher. Soon we’re not going to have anything in common.”
It was my low for the weekend.

An Afternoon Wrapped in Bacon

2007-11-05T11:42:00.000-05:00

Sunday I watched football with friend and loyal reader Jon Biscoe, as well as his girlfriend, the Amy. We are all members of the same fantasy football league, and as we watched we discussed our chances in our week 7 match-ups.
“Steven Jackson is still out this week,” I said. Jon and the Amy nodded sagely.
“Defense wins championships,” said the Amy. She knows a lot about football for a vegan.
Later, as we munched on a tasty Indian tofu/rice dish that the Amy had made, we checked our scores.
“Frank is winning,,” said Jon.
“That disappoints me,” I said, “because I hate Frank.” Jon and the Amy nodded, sagely.
Hall-of-Fame-Quarterback-turned-FOX-Analyst Troy Aikman made an odd remark about a linebacker rushing the passer.
“Troy Aikman just said he was ‘coming on his backside,’” said Jon. “Do you believe Troy Aikman to be homosexual?”
“Perhaps,” said the Amy. I nodded sagely.
Jon and I read comic books.
A football player who had performed particularly successfully made the claim that he had done nothing-- that his performance should be attributed to God.
“If God is still available in our fantasy league I will draft him,” I said.
“You are stupid,” said Jon.
“You are fat,” I said.
“You are both fat and stupid,” said the Amy. “It’s because you drink too much beer.”
Jon and I nodded. Sagely.

Jesus Would Tell You To Shut the Fuck Up

2007-10-18T09:54:00.000-04:00

Right now I am parked outside of a clinic that performs abortions watching some crazy people exploit their children. They are dressed like they came from church, they're singing hymns, and the children are holding up signs that say things like "Roe is saved!" and "Every life is a gift!"
Boy, do I hate these people. I have decided to protest them. I'm going to make some signs that say things like, "That Kid Should Be in School Learning About Evolution," "Stop Raising Self-Righteous Assholes," and "God Does Make Trash, and It's Standing Over There," and I'm going to come down here and sing hymns and act like I'm praying for these peoples' souls.
I say "act"," because I don't believe in God. That said- I do like to think that if there were a God he'd hate these people as much as I do.

Back in the TV Saddle

2007-10-16T12:10:00.000-04:00

Recently I borrowed an antennae from my father so that I could watch TV. For the last two years I have used my TV exclusively to watch movies and play video games-- I couldn't afford cable and I didn't think network TV was worth the effort. The football season changed my mind about the antennae, but once I let the networks into my home I foudn it difficult to limit my viewing to Sundays.
Last night I watched a program on PBS about the human heart. I saw a man have all the blood drained out of his body and replaced with ice water. I saw a young man with a defibrillator implanted in his chest- programmed to restart his heart if it began to fail.
“Wow,” I thought, “this stuff is amazing! Why didn’t I get an antennae for this TV sooner?”
I changed the channel to CBS, and saw the tail end of a police procedural where a young man was explaining that he and his girlfriend had entered into a suicide pact because of their outstanding credit card debt.
“Oh,” I thought, “now I remember why.”

Peace can be Unsatisfying

2007-08-11T11:22:00.000-04:00

At about 9:30 on a Wednesday night I was already in bed, watching The Larry Sanders Show on DVD. The children had taken my energy from me and used it to tear apart the art room, pieces of string hanging from the ceiling, the caps taken off of alll the markers and used to make some sort of elaborate marker-top-castle where Lilly the Puffball Queen (a purple cottonball with glued on googly eyes) lived with Prince George the Popsicle Stick on a carpet of shredded construction paper and needlessly straightened paper clips. Beer and Garry Shandling were helping me to forget when my phone rang and a new acquaintence from the day before invited me to go swimming at Brown's Island. And I thought, "Why let the children turn me into an old man before I am thirty?" So I went.
I knew one person there pretty well, but everyone else I had just met. I had also (don't mock me) never been to Brown's Island, and there was a feeling of new life, as though by doing something outside my routine I was defeating the children, taking my energy back from them and putting them in their place. It was like I had caught all 150 of them running and made them collectively go back and walk.
As we approached the river we heard hooting. A voice with a bit of a drawl yelled out "YEAH JUMP MOTHERFUCKER! WOO WOO!"
When we got closer we saw a group of half a dozen rednecks were there ahead of us, and that they were drunk. We could tell they were drunk because they were yelling things like, "WOO! I AM SO FUCKING DRUNK YOU NIGGER FAGGOT! HOOOOOWWEEEEE." They were something.
We decided to put off swimming in hopes that this group would leave soon. They did not, so we sat on the beach and made conversation and drank our own beer.
After fifteen minutes or so another group arrived wearing full-length black trenchcoats. One of them had a really long beard, and another was carrying a walking stick that I mistook for a sword. As they positioned themselves in a row by the water smoking cigarettes one of my new acquaintences pointed out that they looked like the back cover of an album by a death metal band. And then the rednecks, which was to our left, started yelling to the death metal band, which was to our right. For a moment, I thought we would be caught in a crossfire between them, but the Death Metal band failed to rise to the bait. They started to leave. As they did so a redneck yelled out "Silly faggot, dicks are for chicks!" Apparently because they had long hair. Everyone knows gay people grow their hair out because they want to look like girls. It's common knowledge.

Now I consider myself a peaceful person, and have in the past have been irritatingly smug and self-satisfied about it. I have looked at other people, people much mor reasonable than these rednecks, and thought, "They have no understanding of current events. They are narrow and cruelly self-interested. And blood thirsty. They think they can solve all their problems by bombing people. I'm so glad I am better than that." How strange then to find myself feeling disappointed to find out the sword was a walking stick, that there would be no blood shed. I was actually let down that the rednecks were just full of a lot of beer and epithets but basically harmless, let down that the young men in trenchcoats, while dressed unusually for a hot July evening, were sensible enough to avoid a conflict with someone who equates long hair with buggery. For a brief moment I had a great story to tell- "Yeah, it was insane, the redneck was swinging this broken beer bottle and this dude with a beard like Gandalf sliced him open with a samurai sword (no really, a SAMURAI SWORD) and we all had to run for it! I still don't know what heppened to that guy Kevin- I hope he made it out okay."- and then it evaporated in a cloud of reason and maturity. Life was once more boring. The children were running again, and my calls to them went unheeded.

Work is Hard

2007-08-04T15:38:00.000-04:00

When I wrote this it was July tenth and I was having a bad day at work. I didn't finish it, but I just looked at it again and it so summed up the last few weeks of work that I thought I would post it as a fragment. Muster your courage before you look at it.

It's a bad day at work.
The children couldn't go outside earlier because of the heat, and their pent-up energy is coming out of them in screams and shouts and crazy running running running through the bathrooms and hallways, toilet paper clinging to their shoes and always screaming running screaming

Mixed emotions

2007-07-09T16:02:00.001-04:00

Slate recently had a competition to see which of its readers could come up with the best action-movie style one-liner, something in the mold of "Do you feel lucky, punk?" and "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker." The winner was "Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, pissant." I know for a fact I have said those words (back me up here Nick), and I am left feeling both unhappy with my lack of originality and pleased that someone else in the world is operating on my wavelength. I'm not special, but I'm also not alone. Life is confusing.

Greetings Friends!

2007-06-24T11:51:00.001-04:00

The other day I received three seperate requests that I update my blog. "Wow," I thought, "And these people don't even know each other! I'm awesome!"

Recently I have had difficulties updating the blog. This is mainly because I no longer have internet access except at work and at my Dad's house. I also have become dissatisfied with the quality of my work. My thoughts are unorganized and there are lots of typos and frequently I don't really have anything to say.

But damnit, I am going to try to doo better. If that means proofreading my work and writing rough drafts and making special trips to coffee bars where I pay for internet and overpriced espresso drinks, well then so be it!

If in three days there are no new posts following this one you can probably assume that I have forgotten all about this again.

Forgive us our trespasses, and forgive those who trespass against us.

2007-04-13T13:51:00.000-04:00

The other day at work I was in a bad mood. I was sleepy, my head hurt, and the children were being much louder than I was wanted. A co-worker noticed me snap at a child, and asked me what was wrong.
I told her I didn't get enough sleep, and that I felt bad for being less patient with the children than I ought to be. She said that this happened to her sometimes, but that this week she was focusing on trying to keep a postive outlook, and that it was working for her so far. I spoke derisively of the power of postivie thinking. She said that she also turned to God for strength to help her when she was unhappy, but that she knew that this wasn't my thing. I told her I was no more comforted by God than I was by the Tooth Fairy. She made a face, and I asked if I had offended her. She told me that no, I hadn't, but that I might have offended God. I told her I hoped that both God and the Tooth Fairy would forgive me in time for my harsh words. We bowed our heads in silent prayer to our respective deities, and later when I got to have Chipotle for dinner, I knew that the Tooth Fairy had listened, and that I had found favor in her sight.
Praise the Tooth Fairy, for she is great, and with her anything is possible.

The lows to which we have collectively sunk.

2007-04-13T13:48:00.000-04:00

"Where is the Subway?" a woman asks.
"Prime Rib is the uber-meat," chirps a scruffy overweight young man.
"It's got a lot of meat, and that's what real women need!" giggles a young woman.
I will never eat in a Quizno's again.

The Nicest Person I Know

2007-04-12T11:21:00.000-04:00

I am on the playground, talking to a seven year old girl with a severe speech impediment. It is difficult to describe her speech problem because it is so complicated. That she pronounces her K's as T's, as in the Buckwheat-ian "Otay" is but one small component of the problem. Another is her horrible grammar, stuff like "Him are eating gum." It has taken me a long time to be able to talk with this girl, and am now able to only because she is making such good progress in her speech therapy. We are talking about bugs, specifically a new group of them that have infiltrated the sandbox, keeping this girl from her favorite part of the playground. She is not angry though. She is almost never angry, and then usually for short periods of time. She wishes she could be in the sandbox, but she doesn't blame the bugs. Neither does she blame me for making her stay away from the bugs. She has moved on. For someone with so many difficulties she is surprisingly mature.
"Prudence stepped on a bug," she tells me.
"That was mean. Why did she?"
"I don't know. She didn't like him I guess. She shouldn't have done it."
"When did she do that?"
"Before snack, on the sidewalk. I told her not to, but she doesn't listen."
"No, Prudence doesn't listen much. Nor, for that matter, do you."
"I know."
"Why is that?" I ask her, "Why is it that right now we can have a nice talk, but then when I make announcements to the group later you won't listen? You lie on your back and kick your feet in the air. Why do you do that?"
She doesn't have to think for more than a second.
"Because I don't care."
"About what I'm saying?"
"About games, or going first."
"Do you think you could pretend to care? You don't have to really care, just pretend so I won't get my feelings hurt?"
"Okay."
And she hugs me and runs away. Later as I announce what rooms are open I see her in the back of the room sitting quietly with her hands in her lap. She cares more about hurting my feelings than going first.

Spring Break

2007-04-11T11:14:00.000-04:00

It is Spring Break, and the children run every where, screaming, giddy, snot-bedecked. Somewhere a little girl is crying.
"What is wrong, Little Girl?"
"Becky won't let me be the pony. She said I had to be the pony's mother, and I want to be the pony."
"No child, you are not the pony's mother. You are her friend, the much better looking, more popular pony who makes the first pony secretly jealous and ashamed. You are a show pony. Becky, as soon as she is old enough, will be hitched to a plow and spend the rest of her life tilling the fertile soil so that her master may earn a meager living from the sweat of her brow."
"What is fertile soil?"
"Dirt with poop in it."
"Oh."
As the little girl runs to tell Becky about the new rules they will play by I look over the rest of the playground, the sun setting tranquilly behind the swings. "It's good for children to cry," I think. "Crying builds character."

Hail to the Chief

2007-02-01T13:29:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. President,

How are things? It's been too long. It seems like yesterday I was asking you to buy me a case of Miller High Life, and you were all, "Boys will be boys, I'd rather I know about it so I can make sure you're safe, that's what yer Daddy'd want, just make sure the girl's drunk enough she won't remember it later and charge you with assault, blah blah blah." I miss those days.
Anyway, I was just wondering where you stood on this year's Super Bowl; will you be supporting the Colts or the Bears? My thought was that you'd be for the Colts, they being the more rural of the two teams. Sure, Chicago is in the midwest too, but it's decidedly more metropolitan I'm sure you'll agree, and you were always a Red State, tobacco chewing, brush clearing sort of a guy. The game's this weekend, as I'm sure you know, so please get back to me soon. I'd hate to cheer against my President's team.

Tell Hungry-like-the-Wolfowitz I said what's up.
Andrew

The start of a short-story?

2007-01-31T09:57:00.000-05:00

It was noon, and Harold was four hours late for work. Wading through the murky bogs of the Florida Everglades he mused about where things had gone wrong. Had it been his failure to change the bedding of his pregnant rabbit, Floyd? The ammonia fumes from the accumulated urine had killed her and her unborn bunnies, her stiff leporine corpse discovered the next day by his three-year-old nephew Hyundai. The little boy had gone into fits, screaming and spitting, and in his terror at the first grim confrontation with mortality had knocked over the television that had been playing the Lakers/Suns game, and an angry room of Laker fans in Kobe Bryant jerseys set upon the boy, giving him a darn good spanking.

You don't even have to cook it!

2007-01-27T14:19:00.000-05:00

Since June I've been stealing my wireless internet from the girl down the hall. Recently she changed up and protected her wireless internet with a password, leaving me feeling cut off from the world.
Today I write from my father's dining room. Earlier I made a steak sandwich and watched Giada de Laurentis on Food Network, a woman who describes nearly everything she cooks as tender and grins at her cutting board like a jack-o-lantern while she works. Today she took five minutes of her show to show us a vibrant appetizer of beautiful sun-dried tomatos (she likes sun-dried tomatos because of their beautiful color, because they're tender, and because they burst with a vibrant sort of flavor) tender fresh basil leaves and some beautifully white and sweaty fresh mozzerella (pronounced MUTT-zer-EL-la), all of it put on skewers. "You don't even have to cook it!" she cried.
Giada made these tender and vibrant kabobs for a small gathering she was hosting. Some "friends" were coming over to watch "the big game." At the end of the show her friends came into the kitchen, laughing and slapping each other on the back.
"Okay everybody," cried Giada, "Take two kabobs!"
And her friends took two kabobs.
"Now take a sandwich! Everybody take a sandwich!"
And they took sandwichs. Carl took two, that scamp.
"Now go to the living room! Everybody, living room! Go! Now!"
And they did. It was surreal watching a person act this way on camera with no apparent shame. One can only assume that she saw nothing wrong with ordering her friends around the kitchen, barking to them what they are allowed to eat. It was bizarre, but refreshingly sincere. I felt I had caught glimpse of Ms. de Laurentis's everyday life.
"Maybe after the big game I'll have some help cleaning up!" she winked to the camera. I have a feeling Carl paid through the nose for his extra sandwich.

Pink Eye III

2007-01-15T23:14:00.000-05:00

The doors opened, sparing me my ambivalence, and another overly-friendly person, this a nurse in her mid-twenties, cheerfully called us all "hon" and "sweetie" as we came in to the waiting room. Moments later I was giving insurance information to a woman something like a cross between Kelly Rippa and Ruth's hippie sister on Six Feet Under. When she asked me what was wrong with me she did it in a pre-school teacher sort of voice, as though I were a toddler who fell while learning to walk, and she stuck out her lower lip in a pouty sort of a cartoon frown. I told Her I had pink eye.
"Yef, I cun see yo eye iss pwetty eewa-tated,"
I felt mocked.
Back with overly-friendly nurse 1 (Patient First's customer service maybe cloyingly sweet and insincere but they do get points for speed), I stepped onto a scale and shocked her with my weight.

Pink Eye II

2007-01-12T09:41:00.000-05:00

If you want to avoid a wait at Patient First you've got to get there early. Not 4 am early, but well before 8 when they actually open. I showed up at five 'til, and was fifth in line at the front door with four strangers in front of me pretending that they and I did not exist. A thirty-ish woman in front of me noticed me smiling at the awkwardness of it and frowned, perceiving my smile to be I-know-not-what.
The silence was broken by stranger number six whose eye was, like my own, swollen and red, only more so. He was feeling down but friendly nevertheless.
"I got cast-iron in my eye," he told me.
"Jesus man, is it still in there?" I asked, instantly won over by the Youellian air of casual intimacy.
"Something's in there. Can you see it?" and he turned so I could get a good look.
He then told me about his long history of eye ailments, beginning when he was in elementary school and was stuck in the eye with a wire hanger (a la Michael Myers), and culminating in a horrific soldering accident two years back. He was laying on his back, soldering, and a piece of solder (that is to say, molten metal alloy used to join other solid metals) fell into his eye. I wondered that he could still see at all.
"Eye's the most resilient organ in the human body," he told me. "My wife had vlasic and she was able to see fine in less than two weeks."
"Holy shit," I said, half wishing to become friends, half worried that this was going to end like Enduring Love.
"Yeah, I guess at some point you'd think I'd learn. Ha."
"Yeah, you'd think." He grimaced when I said that, and I wished I said something more tactful, like, "Oh no, I too frequently injure myself in stupid ways! Oh goodness me!"
I let him in front of me, and we didn't really talk after that. I hope he's ok.

Pink Eye

2007-01-12T06:12:00.000-05:00

I woke up early this morning with strep throat and conjunctivitis. The strep throat I knew about, I've been putting off going to the doctor all week, but the conjunctivitis was a surprise.
"Might as well go get it taken care of now," was my thought, so I put on some shoes and a hoodie and, not being familiar with their business hours, headed over to Patient First where I figured the wait would be brief and I could get my two prescriptions and move on to the 24 hour Walgreens across the street. It turns out Patient First isn't open at 4 am. I thought it was a 24 hour sort of operation, like an emergency room but cheaper. Apparently I was very wrong.
Up now and unable to fall back asleep I decided to do what I normally do at such times and put on a bad movie (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) and check the internet for things that might have gotten by me recently. I corresponded with two people I've been out of touch with, read an extended conversation on Slate about the playoffs this weekend, discovered that George Bush was sending more troops to Iraq (embarrassing to be so far behind), and left a comment on someone's myspace that quoted a Times review of a new Justin Timberlake movie. Apparently Alpha Dog provides "the same entertainment value you get from watching monkeys fling scat at one another in a zoo." Chew on that, Hollywood!

Resolutions

2007-01-05T09:05:00.000-05:00

The new year finds me depressed and sick, playing Guitar Hero alone in my room. My recent loss in my fantasy football league's championship game has hit me hard, and I'm planning on becoming an alcoholic on the order of Faulkner or Fitzgerald only not a good writer.
In the brief moments of 2007 when I shall be sober I plan to run a 10 k and write a novel about a young orphan girl's struggle to raise a blind puppy in the Australian outback. I'm thinking she's going to fail, her puppy will be bitten by one of Australia's many poisonous snakes, and she will turn to a life of intravenous drug use. I'm hoping I could win a Newbery medal.
Happy 2007!

Penis Grow Patch Rx loves my work!

2006-12-23T16:59:00.000-05:00

Recently I've been having a lot of people leave comments like this:

Hello Author,
Thanks for your site. Is interesting.
Friends, I should like to divide you a new preparation which was helped me.
If not they - me already was not live.
Advise all gain Penis Growth Patch Rx.
Keep writing!

At first I though I'd found a following in the Portugese adult film industry, but soon discovered that these posts are merely a new way for companies to advertise. This didn't sit well- if my site's going to advertise I'd like to be paid for it, and I'd like to associate myself with companies of my own choosing, companies that meet a high standard of quality and better the community. Wal-Mart for example.
From now on when you comment you'll have to type some letters and numbers in a box to show that you are a person and not some super hi-tech spam-computer peddling Viagra. I hope it doesn't discourage you from leaving comments.
Merry Christmas!
Andrew

Ask a New Orleans Saints Fan

2006-12-17T14:16:00.000-05:00

I'm watching the Redskins/Saints game on FOX, and just now the guy doing color commentary was saying,
"It's great what this team is doing for the city. You go down to the French Quarter and you see the restaurants doing more business, and the people are just as friendly as ever, and they're happy to have you sample the gumbo, and it just does your heart good to see the good times starting to come back."

At the same time rosy color commentator is saying this, there is a struggle going on in the courts to force FEMA to restore housing benefits to about 11,000 households who lost their homes to the hurricane. Let's ask a member of one such household how he feels about the New Orleans Saints:

"Well, I think Drew Brees is just having a monster of a season, really reminiscent of Dan Marino back in his prime. And it's exciting to finally see Reggie Bush realizing some of his potential. It feels great to see this perennially disappointing franchise making good after so long. Yeah, I guess you could say that the Saints first playoff season since 2000 has really distracted me from the fact that it's Christmas time and my family is out on the street because the government doesn't feel like it needs to help us. I stroll through the rubble of the yet-to-be-rebuilt neighborhoods I used to know so well and think, "Man, the coaching staff has certainly risen to the challenge of finding ways to utilize both Bush and Deuce McAllister. Shit, my stomach is growling. I wish I could afford some gumbo."

Preventative Maintenance

2006-12-01T11:35:00.000-05:00

This morning after I put the children on the bus I headed down to Larry Green's Tire & Exhaust for an oil change. I waited in a nearby diner where I drank five or so cups of coffee and read One Man's Meat (A wonderful book with an unfortunate title that inspires most people my age to giggle and think of penises). After about an hour I went back to settle up.
"How's school going?" asked the man behind the morbidly obese man behind the counter.
This is always awkward. It's understandable that this man, who has seen my father pay for work on my car more often than not, would think I was still in school, and being honest with him means telling him that I am a bum.
"Actually I'm not in school right now. I need to go back to get some teaching credentials. Wish I could just teach without them. Ha ha."
The man looked at my shirt, which has my daycare's logo on the left breast, and furrowed his brow.
"Tell your dad hi for me," he said.
"What no Bush joke today?" I asked.
"What?" asked a nearby woman who had been reading and apprently eavesdropping as well.
"Oh, Cecil likes to tease my dad abut being a liberal, and he normally says somethign about Bush to him," I told her.
"I can't imagine why anybody wouldn't like Bush," she said, daring me.
"Yeah, uh, there are some reasons but you know, whatever."
"I mean, if Kerry or Gore was President I'd have had to move," she said, looking back down at her book.
"Yeah, well," I said lamely. "It's good to be able to imagine other people's point of view."
Getting into my freshly lubed car I thought about all the things I could have said to her and wondered why I had settled for self-righteous condecension.
I think it's because I work with children. It seems to me that people who work with children get too used to explaining basic concepts and principles of moral behavior. "Imagine what it's like to be someone else," is something I say at least three times a week, usually because Cody just punched Jack for taking his ball. Cody needs to learn to consider other people's feelings, as does Jack. But at Larry Green's Tire & Exhaust I couldn't hope to educate anyone; this woman was too far gone. Here I said it only as a means to save face without engaing in a pointless political debate with a mentally handicapped woman twenty yards away from a group of thick-necked mechanics who were all going to agree with her.
Maybe my words changed her. Maybe she's in the midst of internal dialogue right now, forcing herself to consider some of the myriad opinions heretofore left untouched by her too easily appeased brain. Probably not, but I'll never know. I said it with my back to her, already half out the door and ashamed of my arrogance-- still dependent on my father and talking to a middle-aged woman like I was Atticus Finch.

I SWEAR IT'S NOT REALLY FOOTBALL DON'T SKIP IT

2006-11-15T12:26:00.000-05:00

Feedback from one would-be reader in Durham, North Carolina:
"I took a look at it, cause Jocelyn said it was funny. But then all it was a bunch of football stuff, so I didn't read much of it."

I think a lot of people do this with my blog, and it frustrates me. If these people didn't automatically shut off at the sight of the word "football," they would soon see that I don't actually write about football at all. Sure, I use some player names, I make reference to events from the world of sports, but I don't spend time talking about football games. Have I ever written a word about who I think will win the Super Bowl this year, or what I think of the Colts' run defense, or whether I like Larry Johnson more than LaDanian Tomlinson? No, never. Of course, most of you didn't get to read the words "No, never," because when you read the words "Colts' run defense" you closed your browser window. And I think you suck.

What sparks this tantrum? Well, today I read this on ESPN.com:
"Randy Moss blamed his penchant for dropped passes on the fact that he is unhappy and his focus level tends to go down when he is in a bad mood, the Oakland Tribune reports."
and I thought, "That's just like me! When I am unhappy my focus level goes down, and I lose my patience more quickly and yell at kids when I shouldn't! Randy Moss and I have something in common!"
I think that's really interesting, when I discover common ground with millionaire athletes with pronounced character flaws. Finding a little bit of yourself in another person, particularly someone vilified in the media, gives you insight into yourself as well as into that other person. I find myself saying, "Gee, no matter what our station in life we all have similar problems. Everyone has a rough time at work now and then," and "Oh Jesus, when I am being sullen at work do I come off like Randy Moss? Holy shit I need to watch that."
Maybe I could have posted that in a way that was a little subtler, a little wittier, but I didn't really think it would be worth the effort since most of you would never read the fucking thing since it is, in part, about a football player. What a bunch of closed-minded douchebags you are.

Nobody Understands Me! I'm So Complicated!

2006-11-11T20:16:00.000-05:00

Wednesday night found me saying completely straight-faced to a room of my friends: "Did you ever see Ramona or Avonlea on the Disney Channel?" I was trying to share a disturbing anecdote about child actress turned indie director Sarah Polley, who starred in both of those programs. I was laughed at, and it was pointed out that frequently I say things that are not very masculine. Speculation occurred as to whether I had a vagina.
On my way home I remembered an exchange I'd had six months ago with my old roomate JC. One day JC passed through as I watched a man having his throat cut on The Wire (best show to ever air on American television). JC had also seen me watch some other similarly grim, hard-boiled things about cops and poverty and the drug trade and socialism, not to mention the big gun fight in the second half of Heat. And JC said, "Andrew, it seems like you're such a sweet natured peaceful guy, but you sure do watch some depressing, violent stuff on television."
It's amazing how different people know you in different ways. I don't know if my friends who laughed over Avonlea would ever call me "sweet-natured," but they have long questioned my masculinity on the basis that I watch thirtysomething. JC didn't know me as well at all, but I much prefer his view of me as the "lovable teddy-bear masking a bloodthirsty avenger of societal wrongs," to my friends' version, the "whiny, opinionated, and sullen douchebag with the tastes of a twelve year-old-girl."
JC also didn't think it necessary to involve genitalia, which I thought was classy of him. I think I might call him up and see if he wants to hang out.

Up At 3

2006-11-08T05:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday my state voted a marriage amendment into law that would, I told my friend Amy, "keep her from getting her live-in boyfriend imprisoned when he beat her," a crass joke that feels like one thousands of strangers are all making independently of one another at roughly the same time.
In other election news, the Democratic Party reclaimed the House of Representatives and it seems likely that Nancy Pelosi will become the new Speaker of the House, something which inexplicably angers my father. Not that its unimaginable to dislike Nancy Pelosi, he is just literally unable to explain why when I ask.
"I just don't think she knows anything," I think were his words.

Yesterday was also the day I decided to eat a ton of crappy food: pot roast and mashed potatoes, a pot pie, three or four donuts, a cupcake, lots of coffee, a few tootsie roll pops, several beers, several sodas, and a large piece of vegan birthday cake. I woke up at three in the morning sweating with terrible heartburn, wondering what was wrong with me, and in the hours that I've been up since I've attributed it to what I ate. I have also repeatedly checked election returns, showered and shaved, watched half of The American President (which I knew was stupid but has less charm than I remembered) and half of The Shawshank Redemption (still good).
In my late night session of surfing the internets I stumbled on a Slate.com article about Sadam Hussein's February hanging. It tells of "drop tables," charts that tell executioners how far to drop the person they are hanging. Drop them too far and their head will pop off; drop them not far enough and their neck won't break and they strangle to death. This is all based on weight: skinny people need to drop further than fat people, and the drop table is calculated accordingly. Which sets up the following:

The Army drop table turned out to be inadequate for Mitchell Rupe, a Washington inmate who was supposed to hang in 1994. On death row, Rupe refused all exercise and ate junk food nonstop. By the time of his execution he'd reached 409 pounds, well above the table's maximum listed weight. According to Army regulations, anyone heavier than 220 pounds would get a 5-foot drop. The Washington authorities made an exception and cut Rupe's planned drop to 3.5 feet. Rupe appealed his case, and a federal judge ruled that the risk of decapitation was still too high. Rupe died in a prison hospital this past February..

As I write this post, The Shawshank Redemption plays on in the background. Coincidentally, I just saw the scene where Brooks hangs himself. Right now it's the scene where Andy plays the Mozart aria over the prison public address system. It reminds me of my friend Katie.
Once when Katie had been drinking she and Cara and I went to the Village, and I played Mozart on the juke box. As I returned from a trip to the bathroom my song came on, and drunk Katie, remembering the scene I mention above, started yelling "SHAWSHANK, MOTHERFUCKER! SHAWSHANK! YOU SHAWSHANKED THAT SHIT!"
I miss Katie.

It's been a month- oops.

2006-11-03T10:17:00.000-05:00

Does anyone still read this? I feel like most people have given it up at this point, and it makes me sad. Biscoe, I know you're still there. I've got like five half written things I need to write the other half of, and I just never seem to get around to it.
Possibly the problem is that I've become too ambitious, and it's gotten to the point where nothing is good enough. Well, no more. Ambition is for douchebags.

Today I want to take a moment to hype up Bravo's new season of Top Chef, which if you didn't know is a "Reality" tv show where a group of chefs take part in different food related challenges, with the worst cook each week being jettisoned until the one remaining contestant is given some new cookware and an expenses paid trip to action-packed Pigeon Forge. It's reality TV so it's stupid by nature, but this past week really sold me on the series and I think I'm now commited to watching the entire season. Consider the following incidents from Wednesday night's episode:

1. The following exchange between contestant and judge:
Judge: Food is for eating!
Contestant: I agree with you one hundred percent.

2. The contestants were given a $100 each to buy ingredients for the week's ELIMINATION CHALLENGE. One young man named Michael, who is obviously a raging alcoholic, used $8 of that money to buy himself some beer, and discovering at the register that he was over budget declined to put the beer back, electing to ditch his cheese instead. His dish? A steak and cheese sandwich.
Later in the episode, afraid he would be voted off, Michael was seen pounding a can of beer and then declaring he would fight head judge Tom Colicchio.

Mike's worth watching all by himself. Throw in a guy who looks like Wolverine only with a squeaky voice, and you've got something truly special.

The Cheese Stands Alone

2006-10-03T11:02:00.000-04:00

Today at my father's house I was trying to think of something inexpensive to eat. I went to the fridge, spied some eggs on the bottom shelf, and heard in my mind's ear the voice of Alton Brown whisper: "Eggs, like pasta, are a great way to use up scraps you might otherwise throw away." Thrilled by the idea of an omelet to go with the piece of pork tenderloin on the middle shelf, I set about sweating onions and chopping tomatoes, finding the Worcestershire sauce and the rosemary and grating the parmesan cheese. Everything ready, I at last started cracking eggs. The first one was blood red on the inside, with a mottled white and purple yoke that almost made me throw up. I threw it down the drain and quickly hit the disposal switch.
"My dad needs to stop getting eggs from Food Lion," I thought.
Determined not to lose my appetite, I picked up another egg and cracked it. This one was shit-brown with a mustard-yellow white that ran all over the counter. Gagging, I finally checked the carton and found out the eggs expired back in March.
Few everyday experiences are so upsetting as a failed cooking project. The onions and the tomatoes look pathetic in their bowl, waiting to be in an omelet that will never happen, like they've been stood up on a date. What point does this shredded cheese have now? Sure it can go back to the refrigerator and wait for pasta that may or may not be cooked later this week. Most likely it will go in the trash, and while it makes no sense to empathize with cheese, it's kind of where I'm at this morning.

Favorites

2006-09-21T10:04:00.000-04:00

We are not supposed to have favorites at work, but we do anyway and it's kind of obvious who they are. We try to act impartial, we try to be strict with them, but the children know, as do we, that certain kids get away with stuff because we sort of, please don't tell anyone cause feelings could get hurt, like them better than everyone else.

My favorite kid left at the end of the summer. She is starting kindergarten this year, and because she has a hard time with change her mom, quite rightly I think, decided to pull her out of our after-school program until she adjusted.
I miss her. She was a lot of work, and she could be hard to deal with, but when something upset her she would walk past three other teachers on her way to me, sobbing "Mistuh Evaton!"
"What's wrong?" I would say, sincerely worried.
"I can't find my card!"
"What?"
"My card!"
"I don't understand you. Your card?"
"MY CENTER CARD YOU MANIAC!"
The kids all have what we call a "license," which is a card with a magnet on it that they put on a board to help us keep track of what room they are in. So I would scoop her up and take her off to find her card, and once it was found, I'd turn her upside down and spin her around in circles for a few minutes until she was dizzy and giggling and yelling "STOP IT YOU MANIAC" and then we'd go draw pictures of crabs, something that she wanted desperately to do just right and would scream when she was unable to start out with a perfect red circle.
"Don't worry, it looks nice" I would say.
"No, it looks stupid," she would say, and waste another piece of paper, making another imperfect red circle, and then another, and then another, until she was again crying and throwing her marker, and I would have to come over and tickle her to cheer her up, and maybe cross my eyes or something, and then her mom would come and she would leave and I would wonder why it is I love a little kid who is such a pain in my ass.

Post-Game Interview

2006-09-19T00:27:00.000-04:00

Reporter: Andrew, how does this week's emotional fantasy loss to the Hell Freaks effect you and the team, and how do you bounce back from it?

Andrew: Well, you know, it's really discouraging. The guys thought we were gonna pull this one out, and I did too honestly, but in the end we just didn't get the performances that we needed. Some of us just phoned it in, and I think Jason Whitten, Jamal Lewis and Muhsin Muhammad know what I'm talking about.

Reporter: Is it particularly discouraging that the score was so close?

Andrew: Yeah, any time you come within one point of winning, well that's gonna be a real let down. But you know, we're just taking things one week at a time, and we've gone out and got some new players with funny names, and we're gonna see if those guys make the difference.

Reporter: Are you referring to New York Jets wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery?

Andrew: Yeah, I am.

Reporter: When you see the numbers that some of your bench players like Cotchery or DeAngelo Williams put up, and you think, "Hey, one of them would have won the game for us," how does that feel?

Andrew: Well that's always infuriating, but you can't second guess yourself like that. I mean, the Raiders really suck this year, and you figure if the Chargers can put up like 200 rushing yards against them last week, well so can Jamal Lewis, right? That seemed like a really good call, and I don't think too many people would have disagreed. But the thing I and a lot of other people lost sight of is this: Jamal Lewis ain't LaDanian Tomlinson. Not by a damn sight.

Reporter: You can say that again. One last question: Has the play of first overall pick Larry Johnson been disappointing to you, and are you going to trade him?

Andrew: Well, Larry's been getting a respectable number of yards, but he's not getting to the endzone, and yeah, I'm pretty pissed off right now. Obviously I can't trade him, he's too important, but when you think that if he had just scored one touchdown this week and one last week we might have won both of those games, well, I mean, what can you say? "Fuck that douchebag" I guess about sums it up.

Why Doesn't Anyone Else Care About This Stuff?

2006-09-17T10:44:00.000-04:00

I've been sick for two weeks with some sort of sinus infection that my doctor described as "one of those bugs." He smirked when he said this, and went on to tell me that it was good that I had come in, that my weekend was going to be horrible, but that he would try to "head it off at the pass." He then handed me a prescription for augmentin and three free samples of decongestant medication his office is being paid to advertise by pharmaceutical companies.
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Louis Chisholm! That will be $20!
In the middle of this illness I found solace in two completely unrelated, rather small events that, though trivial, raised me from my gloom. Head held high, I blew the fluid from my nose, looked that small army of hyperactive children in the eyes, and said "Here you children, though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, thou art not so!"

1. This week HBO renewed The Wire for a fifth and final season.
and
2. Someone in my fantasy football league traded me Carson Palmer for Corey Dillon and Laurence Maroney.

It is in my nature to share the things that make me happy with those around me, and I told all my coworkers and friends about my good fortune. After being humored in different degrees by several, it was as I told my boss about Carson Palmer that I realized that my happiness, while important to me, is inherently boring to others. My boss put a good face on it, smiled and congratulated me on my trade and my favorite tv show, but in her eyes I could see the blank stare of courtesy. She's too nice a person to tell me to go away.

RE: The Wire
I've been meaning to write about The Wire, greatest show in the history of television, for a long time, and I will put it off yet again so as not to shortchange it. For now I'll suffice to say that hearing it had been renewed, in spite of low ratings, shocked me in the best possible way: apparently people aren't always motivated by greed, and sometimes things do work out the way we want them to.

RE: Fantasy Football--
My first week of fantasy football did not go well, and I would like to put it in terms that people unfamiliar with fantasy sports or football in general can understand.
Imagine that a movie was coming out that starred Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Murray, Meryl Streep, Toni Collete, Michael Caine, Flava Flave (who turns out to be BRILLIANT), and the somehow resuscitated corpse of Jimmy Stewart. Suspend disbelief a second further and pretend that this cast existed, somehow worked well together, and that the movie was getting great word of mouth from people you respected. And then you saw it and found out you had somehow missed that this was a remake of Cannonball Run II.
That was my first week of fantasy football: lots of hype, a lot of players who were supposed to be amazing, and none of them did a goddamn thing. I lost to my friend Jon, who I was watching the games with, and he spent the afternoon half-heartedly making fun of me. I think part of him wanted to enjoy the win, but the other half felt too sorry for me to really get into it. We ate burgers, and I yelled "GODDAMN YOU LARRY JOHNSON" and things of that nature, and I went home angry with a headache, too sick to drink the beer I thought might have made things better.
On Tuesday when Traci wrote to ask if I wanted Carson Palmer in exchange for two of my back-up players, it seemed like a chance for a fresh start. Again the movie comparison: this is equivalent to getting Edward Norton in exchange for Cuba Gooding Jr. and Ricky Jay. After some complications, the trade has gone through, and I will be starting my new quarterback today against Chuck's Hell Freaks. In spite of my new acquisition I fully expect to lose again, and I'll probably tell my boss about it.
"That's too bad Andrew, really. I'm sure Carmen will do better next week. How are you feeling? Better? Glad to hear it. Now can you head next door and make me some copies?"

Troubling Postscript to Recent Post About Secondhand Lions

2006-08-27T10:24:00.000-04:00

A lot of superstitious people follow sports: there's the Sports Illustrated curse (in which an athlete who appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated is said to be jinxed and will suffer a slump or injury or some other ill luck), the Madden curse (which says basically the same thing about football players appearing on the cover of Madden Football), the well-known "Dirty Underwear/Unsightly Facial Hair/Not Having Sex/Eating Only Gruel will Keep My Streak Unbroken and Bring Me Success in the Playoffs" Myth, and God knows what others that irrational sports fans/players have come up with to explain things in their lives that are in anyway not obvious.
(Is it coincidence that so many NFL players are also born-again Christians? You decide.)
Then in the light of Mr. Gibson's and Mr. Osment's recent troubles, is this the beginning of a Shyamalan Curse? Will stars of M. Night Shyamalan movies from now on abuse alcohol and drive their cars under the influence? Let's not wait to check this out when it's too late: after Joaquin Phoenix or Paul Giammatti has died in some drunk driving accident or Bryce Dallas Howard has publicly called the Iraqi people "sand niggers." No, let's get to work on this now-- set up some sort of elite task force of scientists and ninja-commandos and see if they can figure out how to stop this thing before it leaves Hollywood in ruins.

Drinking as it Relates to Depression Derived from a Career Scuttled by Puberty

2006-08-24T08:13:00.000-04:00

Recently both Mel Gibson and Haley Joel Osment were arrested for driving while intoxicated. Mr. Gibson’s transgression is much the more widely reported offense due to his greater fame, power, and his spectacular ability to say just the right thing to law enforcement, but I was more interested in the troubles of young Mr. Osment, whose career has fallen on hard times since his voice cracked and he was seen in the appalling Secondhand Lions (which Daniel Neman probably reviewed under some hilarious headline like “Secondhand Movie!" What a sparkling wiit that guy is.).
I remember going to see Secondhand Lions with my dad in the aftermath of Hurricane Isabelle. Like the rest of Richmond we were without power and running water, and the idea of going somewhere with lights and air conditioning was appealing, and Robert Duval and Michael Caine are both actors of a certain reputation, and we though, “What the hell? It can’t be worse than sitting here in the dark picking our noses.” We were wrong.
I remember walking out of the Carmike movie theater feeling relieved to be back admist the destruction, and also feeling certain that Mr. Osment was on his way out. Being the sharp, insightful person that I am, violinist Sir Yehudi Menhuin came to mind, and how his bow arm went to shit once he hit his twenties. This seems to be the way of child prodigies: they achieve success on instinct alone, only to fail later when they get a little older and start over-thinking things. Then they get drunk and wreck their Prius. Or turn to Eastern philosophy if you are Yehudi Menuhin.

You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do

2006-08-18T18:04:00.000-04:00

This morning on my way to work I stopped by the local gas station to redeem a coupon, one of those frequent customer cards where the cashier punches a hole everytime you buy something. I got all my coffee there for a few weeks, and the cashier recognized me when I came in. So did the man making the sausage biscuits. He waved, I waved back, and went to add the cream and sugar.
I looked up from my half and half to see the biscuit man come around the counter to say hello.
"You find what you need?" he asked me.
"Oh sure," said I, "found it fine."
"Lord I am exhausted," said the biscuit man, hands on hips. "These two jobs I work have me wore out."
"Yeah, two jobs'll do that to you," I said.
"Yeah. I got this here management position, and then I got my own business for myself. Make more money on that."
I knew what was coming, I've been here before. "I'm looking for some quality people to help me with my business, maybe you'd be interested?" And then he'd try to have me sell knives or help people refinance their mortgages or sell amway.
"Yeah, I work here, and then I make movies."
"Oh," I said, unsettled, "that's really great. You must be proud."
"Well, they're all X rated," he said. "I don't tell my mama."
"Uh huh," I nodded. "I guess you don't."
"Good money though, and in these times we livin' in..."
"Yeah, gotta do what you gotta do."
"Yeah, I sure am exhausted though." He wiped sweat from his brow, smiled and said, "You have a good day now!"

Football is Fast Upon Us

2006-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

1. Recently I dreamt that Heisman Trophy winning running back Reggie Bush was violently murdered during a football game and that Sportscenter kept replaying the clip over and over again. Reggie had "broken a big one" as Madden might say, and was shedding tackles on his way to a touchdown when suddenly a defensive back layed a monster hit on him, knocking him flat on his back. This defensive back then stuck his head under Reggie Bush's jersey and began disemboweling him with his teeth. ESPN captured all of this in stunning detail, and it was Chris Berman's "Play of the Week." In my dream, I wasn't disturbed by this so much as I was inexplicably saddened. It felt just like when Dale Earnhardt died: I knew that being disemboweled by Troy Polamolu was a risk every football player takes, but I hated to see it happen, particularly to someone so full of talent and so admired by so many people I felt superior to. I awoke in a cold sweat, and quickly checked ESPN.com to make sure it wasn't true.

2. Speaking of ESPN.com, I have joined a fantasy football league. I do not expect to be good at fantasy football-- in fact a minute ago I was planning on using the fact that I am not good at fantasy football to somehow make my decision seem cooler to people who hate sports (9/10ths of all my friends; that most of them still read the blog even though I insist on writing about this stuff moves me to tears). The fact that I momentarily planned to use incompetence as a rationalization for doing something I am occasionally ashamed of seems possibly the most pathetic thing I've ever heard of, and were I in a different mood I would probably try to turn this into a bit about the rest of the country and its culture/politics and where I fit in that scheme. But I am not in that mood (my four readers collectively exhale a sigh of relief).
I have named my team The Ninja-Pirates, after my group of kids at work who go by that name, and I spend at least fifteen minutes each day debating whether I want Shaun Alexander in my top five. (On the one hand it seems like a smart idea to put him in my top five because he is really good and everyone on ESPN.com says to do that, on the other hand I just don't like Shaun Alexander, possibly because I dislike the Seahawks in general. If I said this was because of their team name and their uniforms you would question my masculinity, so let's pretend it has something to do with their wide receivers.)
Also, I take issue with ESPN for censoring my posts in our league's web forum, something that seems a tad inconsistent in light of the fat that I designed a team helmet that says "Fuck Your Mom" on it. In this way, ESPN resembles every boss I've ever had.

3. I would like to give a shout out to Jon Biscoe, who put the whole Fantasy thing together and at whose house I plan to spend most Sundays for the next five months, watching games and gorging myself on beer and whatever has been most recently barbecued. We did this last football season and I had a really good time, which probably means that when I am forty I will look back on it as one of the defining moments of twenties and wonder why nothing is ever as much fun as that was. If my blog is still up then I would like to remind my future self that even though this was a lot of fun, sometimes I did drink too much and pass out in the recliner. Also there was the time when I broke Jon's girlfriend Amy's patio furniture. So it wasn't all sunshine and lollipops.