Busy Busy Busy by Jacob Divett

Brian Wolcott and the Court of Unrequited Love (PART 2 of 5)

2012-01-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

If you need to catch up, you can read Part 1 over here.

Brian looked over the maintenance man'sshoulder as he peered into the circuit breaker box. The maintenanceman murmured to himself. He looked at Brian, then at the breakers,then back to Brian.

“The lights just went out, you say?”

Brian was irritated, mostly because hisinevitable racquetball victory had been snatched from him, but partly because thismaintenance man wasn't taking this seriously. He looked at the namepatch on the maintenance man's uniform disdainfully.

“Yeah, that's what I say, Bob.”

Bob looked thoughtful for a moment andsaid, “Well, none of the breakers are tripped. I don't know why thelights would've suddenly gone out.”

“Well they did,”Brian said without attempting to hide his frustration.

“Maybeit's the bulbs,” Bob said, closing the breaker box panel andavoiding Brian's intense gaze. They walked around to the front of thebuilding and opened the door to the court.

“Wellwell well,” said Bob, looking over at Brian with a intentionallyneutral smile. “It would seem that the lights are working fine to me, Mr.Wolcott.”

For the first timeduring the exchange, Brian was speechless. He simply stared up at thelights, which were now shining brightly.

Brian spluttered helplessly. “But...but...”

“Havea nice day, Mr. Wolcott,” Bob said.

Matt had hastilyshouted their apartment number as he left to care for theinjured Kurt, and Brian stopped by on his way home. He carried Mattand Kurt's forgotten racquets and tubes of spare racquetballs. Mattanswered the door.

“Hey!”he said cheerfully and ushered Brian in. “Thanks for bringing ourstuff by. Did they get the lights fixed?”

“Whenthe maintenance guy came to look, they were fine,” Brian said,shaking his head. “Not sure what that was about.”

“Didn'tmatter to me,” said Kurt, seated on the couch. “Someonehad already declared war on my eyeball, so I didn't see anythinganyway.”

Kurt sat with hisfeet elevated on a footstool and held a package of bacon against hisinjured eye. Brian sat in a threadbare armchair and shrugged. He looked at Kurt quizzically.

“Stop looking at my bacon!” Kurt yelled.

Matt plopped downon the opposite end of the couch from Kurt.

“Hesearched for 'what do do when you've been hit in the eye with aracquetball' on the internet,” Matt said, grinning. “That's whatthe internet said to do, and you should always trust the internet.”

Kurt shot Matt amenacing look and said, “The top search result said to put a coldsteak on it, but we don't have any steak.”

Matt tried tostifle a fit of laughter unsuccessfully which made Brian smile in spite of hisfoul mood. Kurt pouted quietly.

“Imade Kurt an appointment with the ophthalmologist for tomorrowmorning and he'll be fine,” Matt said to Brian. “And anyway, whendo you want to play again?”

Brian perked up andstarted to say, “How about-”

“What?!”Kurt exclaimed. He sat up on the couch and glared at Brian and Mattwith his one good eye. He pointed an accusing finger at Matt.

“You're going to play racquetball withoutme? Me, your roommate of three semesters!”

Matt made a sourface and laughed bitterly.

“Ofcourse I am playing without you,” he said scornfully. “I've beentelling you to wear goggles for forever and I'm not going to let yourstupid face stop me. So how about tomorrow at three?”

Brian agreed.

Ali pedaled wearilyup to the mailboxes. It was late, she was tired and she squinted inthe darkness. She found their mailbox, unlocked it and sighed as sheplaced the enclosed bills into her backpack. She heard shuffling footstepsbehind her and she turned around abruptly.

“Oh,Mrs. Berman,” she breathed. “It's you. You scared me!”

“Sorry,”said Mrs. Berman is squeaky voice. “Why are you checking mail solate?”

“Justgot done with work. You weren't out running this late, were you?”

Mrs. Berman hadbeen Ali and Brian's downstairs neighbor for the past few years.Tonight she was clad in light colored running tights and jacket, herthin white hair in a ponytail. Ali guessed that Mrs. Berman wasaround 90 years old, but she was constantly running and taught a hotyoga class at the senior center.

Mrs. Bermanshrugged innocently. “I'm old, I can't sleep,” she lied.

“Mrs.Berman, I told you not to go running at night anymore!” Ali said,clucking her disapproval. “Someone is going to run your ancientbutt over.”

The two womenlaughed. Mrs. Berman unlocked her mailbox and extracted a small stackof envelopes.

“Ihave my flashing safety light,” said Mrs. Berman, locking the mailbox. “Andyou should mind your business. If it's my time to go, then I'll go.I've been around a long time.”

Ali laughed andthen paused for a moment, thinking.

“Hey,Mrs. Berman,” she said. “You've lived in the complex for a lot ofyears, right?”

“Thirty.I'd have moved away long ago when the complex went to crap but I'm ona fixed income, see.”

Mrs. Berman wassorting through her mail and Ali asked, “Do you remember when theracquetball court closed?”

Mrs. Berman lookedup abruptly, her eyes wide. The bill she had been holding slippedfrom her hand and fluttered to the ground. Ali bent to pick it up andhanded it back to Mrs. Berman, who was shaking.

“Yes,”Mrs. Berman said in a quavering voice. “June 13. The complex was new then,I had just moved in.”

“Whydid it close?”

Mrs. Berman wassilent and she looked more than a little afraid.

“Oh,I can't say I recall,” she murmured. “It think it was bad...flooring.”

“Mrs. Berman,”Ali said in a stern voice, attempting to fix Mrs. Berman with anequally stern look. Mrs. Berman wouldn't meet her eyes.

“Asbestos? I think it was asbestos,”mumbled Mrs. Berman. “Lead paint, too. Most dangerous racquetballcourt ever.”

Aliput her hands on her hips. “Mrs. Berman, why did they close theracquetball court thirty years ago?”

“I'vegot to go now, Ali,” Mrs. Berman said with a dismissive wave of herwrinkled hand. “I have to go drink my protein shake,”

Andwith that, Mrs. Berman shuffled off into the night, leaving Alistanding alone by the mailboxes.

Tune in next week for more adventures...

Please tell me what you think of the story so far! Leave a comment or suggestion, if you please. If you really want to endear yourself to me, you could post a link to this on your Facebook or Twitter.

Brian Wolcott and the Court of Unrequited Love (PART 1 of 5)

2012-01-15T19:17:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,
I'm going to be trying something a little different for the next few weeks. I'm writing a short story and I'm going to post it in parts as I go along. Here is Part 1 of 5. It's a lot longer than what I usually post, so don't say I didn't warn you. Thanks!
-Jacob

Brian's grin filled the tiny kitchen. He hugged the newsletter to hischest while Ali ate, waiting for her to ask him about it. She didn't.Instead she gulped mouthfuls of milk and cereal and tried not to lookat Brian lest he be encouraged. He thrust the crinkled piece paper infront of her face.

“Did you see the apartment complexnewsletter?” he asked, grinning.

Ali gave him an annoyedlook. “I have now.”

He sat down beside her at thekitchen table but she got up.

“Can't talk now, baby. I gottago to class,” she said, dropping her bowl in the tiny kitchen sink.She hurried toward the front door, grabbing a backpack as she went.Brian followed her out into the cool winter morning, still clutchingthe newsletter.

“Racquetball court,” he saidhappily.

“Huh?” Ali said as she unchained her bike.

“Ourapartment complex is opening a racquetball court.”

“Youmean they're building one?” Ali asked.

“No, they'rere-opening an old one here in the complex. Newsletter says it's beenclosed for years.”

“Really?” Ali said. She straddled thebike and looked at Brian quizzically. “How come we've never seen itbefore?”

Brian shrugged. “I think it's back behind thepool that's behind the laundromat.”

For the first time inthe conversation Ali paused.

“I never knew anything was backthere,” she murmured. “Why did it close in the first place? Howmany years has it been closed?”

Brian was smiling, and Alicould tell from his expression that he didn't care. He shruggedagain.

“Don't you play enough at school?” she asked.“You've taken a racquetball class every semester since you were afreshman, and we both know you're not in any danger ofgraduating.”

Brian laughed. “You can never play enoughracquetball, and it'll be nice to have a court here in thecomplex.”

“Who will you play with?”

“You?”Brian said hopefully.

Ali snorted. “Not likely. You're toocompetitive, and whenever I win, you don't speak to me fordays.”

Brian pressed on. “It opens this afternoon so I'mgonna go over and I'll probably meet some other players there. It's ahuge complex and there's bound to be some.”

*

Briandressed carefully in his racquetball shorts. He added a headband,wristband and goggles. Last of all he reverently put on hisracquetball gloves. He looked at his reflection in the tiny bathroommirror and found it satisfactory. Brian put a new tube ofracquetballs under his arm, collected his racquet and headed acrossthe complex.

He threaded through the complex's roving pack ofunsupervised seven-year-olds and walked past the mailboxes. Sunfiltered through the bare winter trees that grew there and Brianwalked happily though the web of shadows they cast. He passed thenearly-empty pool and through the dingy light the building thathoused the racquetball court came into view. Two maintenance workerswere still cutting through the ivy that had previously covered thebuilding. Brian imagined that was why he never noticed it before.They had cleared away the door area and were working steadily downone wall.

Brian went inside and noted how new everythinglooked. The floor was new, and the lines and walls had been freshlypainted. Two young men roughly Brian's age standing inside. Heintroduced himself.

“I'm Kurt, and this is my roommateMatt,” said the taller of the two. “We weren't sure anyone wouldcome. Wanna play cutthroat?”

Brian adjusted his goggles andcarefully looked the pair over. He smiled inwardly but tried to keepa straight face. He had a better racquet, better gloves and Kurtwasn’t even wearing goggles. Beating them should be easy.

“Let's do it,” he said, smiling.“But don't you need some goggles there Kurt?”

Kurt laughed. “No, man,” hesneered. “I've been playing racquetball without goggles for yearsand I've never had any problems.”

Matt shook his head. “You've had someclose calls,” he said. “That one time I almost got you.”

“Did not!”

“I tell him all the time that heneeds to wear goggles,” Matt said earnestly. “The racquetballteacher at school says that a racquetball is perfectly shaped to fitinside the human eye socket and if it hits you just right it willsuck your eyeball right out of your head!”

Kurt laughed scornfully. “So are wegoing to play or what?”

The trio set their spare racquetballsin the back corner of the court and Brian served first. He threw theracquetball up into the air and smacked it toward the front wall. Ithit with great force and the crash of the impact echoed throughcourt. Kurt and Matt both awkwardly dived toward the racquetball asit bounced off the front wall and Brian smiled to himself. This wasgoing to be too easy.

Matt caught the racquetball with the edge of his racquet and itwobbled back toward the front wall. Brian walked leisurely to a spotand watched as the poorly-hit blue ball floated back toward him in aslow, easy arc. He swung his racquet confidently.

And all at once Kurt was writhing on thefloor and screaming, “Me eye! My eye!” Matt knelt on the floorand tried to calm him. He looked at Brian as if he were a stone coldmurderer. Kurt continued to yell.

“I didn't mean to!” Brianexclaimed, his racquet dangling limply at his side. “Did hiseyeball, uh, get sucked out?”

“Not sure,” Matt said over Kurt'scries. “He's got them shut.”

Matt appeared to scan the floor forloose eyeballs. Brian had started to do the same when the lights wentout and plunged them into darkness.

continued next week...

Please tell me what you think of the story so far. Leave a comment or suggestion, if you please.

High hopes for 2012

2012-01-08T13:49:00.002-07:00

Well, the holidays are over and it'sofficial: I'm old.

For instance, when I was a kid Icouldn't wait to get up on Christmas morning, but this year I refusedto get up.

“It's a day off,” I told my wife.“That means sleeping in.”

So sheput Junior in the bed with us and he proceeded to drool all over meand bite me on the face. At that point I had to get up to avoidbecoming a human teething ring and getting gnawed to death.

Weopened presents and mine were all awesome. Some were fun and somewere practical, but later in the day I saw my younger siblingsrunning around with lightsabers and darts guns and Legos and I gotsad. I love all my adult presents, but sometimes I just want a goodlightsaber.

How Ireally knew I was old was when I was talking to my younger brotherwho is in middle school. I asked him what he was doing for his twoweek break and he said, “Oh, just taking it easy.” And before I knew what was happening I heard myself whining, “Well enjoy 'takingit easy' now while you still can! When you're old like me you have towork for a living. Youdon't get any vacations and even if you wanted to take time off youcan't 'cause all your co-workers with more seniority already gotChristmas off so you have to stay and work and it's just you and youhave to run everything by yourself and...”

MerryChristmas, little bro. Cynicism and bitterness are the Christmasgifts that keep on giving.

All inall, the holidays were tons of fun. Tons of family, and, moreimportantly, tons of food.Also, my son got a hugepile of stuff, which is easy to do when you have grandparents, unclesand aunts on both sides who love to spoil you.

Butnow all the fun times are over, which brings us to January,possibly the bleakest month ever. The holidays are over, it's cold,it's boring and you have to try and lose all the weight you gainedfrom eating nothing but fattycakes since Thanksgiving (or maybethat's just me). The only bright spot is Martin Luther King Day, butI don't get Presidents Day off so there are no more holidays untilMemorial Day.

Even though January is a drag, I think2012 is going to be my year.

You're not a real parent until you take a mouthful of mashed peas to the face

2011-12-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

Junior has been doing solid food forover two months now but he hasn't gotten any better at it.

Now that he has teeth, he likes tochomp down on the spoon and not let go, so we spend most of feedingtime trying to pry the spoon out of his mouth.

But his favorite thing to do lately isget a big mouthful of something and sneeze, spraying it all overwhoever is feeding him. Especially if we are planning to go outafterward. Especially if I'm the one feeding him. When Junior sees uswearing clean clothes, he sees them as a fresh new canvas.

Doing laundry is kind of like strollingthrough a baby art museum: “And here we see a white dress shirtfrom Junior's Carrot Period. As we move through this wing you willsee the museum's exclusive collection of green bean neck ties. Andnext we will see the 'Pants With Spit Up On The Crotch' exhibit.”

Junior also likes to paint himself.Here are some of Junior's looks:

I'm not doing so well with solid foodmyself. I'm eating too much of it, and Christmas time is a terribletime for trying to eat in moderation. The Top Christmas Activitiesare: 1. Eating and 2. Taking Pictures, a terrible combination for one's selfesteem.

At my job someone has put chocolatesand cookies in just about every available room: the mail room, thecopier room, the break room, the front desk.

I hope Santa Claus brings me willpower forChristmas.

Anyone else having problems feeding baby? Or feeding themselves? Leave a comment if you please.

Worst Christmas Songs EVER

2011-12-11T20:56:00.001-07:00

It's Christmas time and I'm hearing alot of Christmas music, and not all of it is good. I put together apanel consisting of me, my wife and Brennan and Sara of Stop Their Frequency to determine the worst Christmas songs of all time. Wefound that terrible Christmas songs generally fall into the followingthree categories:

1. No effort

2. Creepy

3. Annoying

No effort: These songs are terriblebecause of the lack of effort or caring on the part of the artists.These artists simply just phone in a generic substandard song, slap a“Christmas” label on it and then kick back and wait for the moneyto start rolling in. Take Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” with its idiotic lyrics and mind numbing repetition.Sir Paul should be ashamed of himself for selling people rubbishsongs under the guise of Christmas music. He’s a knight for cryingout loud! The same goes for “Christmastime” by Smashing Pumpkins: samestupidity and repetition, plus the song is creepier than JacobMarley's ghost thanks to the ghoulish voice of Billy Corgan.

Creepy:A lot of terrible Christmas songs fall into this category. The firstthat comes to mind is “Baby, It's Cold Outside,” also known as“The Date Rape Song.” If you don't believe us, just look at thelyrics. The guy is pouring her drinks andpersuading her to stay, and the woman finally catches on and asks, “Say,what's in this drink?” Ah, Christmas.

A surefire way to get your song ontothe “creepy” list is to place Santa Claus into some kinky holidayscenario. “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin'” and “Backdoor Santa”are just two examples of these.

Annoying: “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” is a perfect example. Did it need to be written? No. Howdid it get popular? No idea. Does it hurt your spine every time youhear it? Yes. Will you hear it at least one million times during theChristmas season? Certainly.

Thenthere's “Mele Kalikimaka,” which might be a little more palatableif it was written – or ever sung – by actual Hawaiians. Cloying,slightly racist, and repetitive to boot. Fly to Hawaii right now andcomb every island and I am pretty sure you will not find one nativeHawaiian singing “Mele Kalikimaka.”

“Christmas Shoes” rounds out the Annoying list for being didactic in theextreme. It takes a boy buying his dying mother some shoes on Christmas Eveto teach the singer the true meaning of Christmas? Comeon.

What does your list of Worst Christmas Songs look like? Leave it in a comment if you please.

Our vegas vacation

2011-12-04T18:46:00.001-07:00

Before TMZ breaks the story I want toclear the air: I allowed some nude photos to be taken of me recently,but it never would have happened if the Transportation SecurityAdministration wasn't racist.

That's right, I got full body scanned.I've never had to go through a full body scanner before, but thispast weekend my wife and I flew to Las Vegas and airport securitywere full body scanning everyone with even remotely brown skin. Thiswas our first time flying together and my wife is Latina, so I wasguilty by association. They took one look at her and herded both ofus through the full body scanner. I had never been scanned before butmy wife said she gets scanned almost every time. As I sat putting myshoes and belt back on I watched the people that were getting scannedand they all happened to be minorities or people traveling withminorities, like myself. And if you had any kind of head covering orlong beard, they swabbed all of your personal items for traces ofexplosives.

The TSA might have nude pictures of meand my wife, but the joke is on them because I snuck .6 extra ouncesof contact solution onto the plane. We eventually made it Vegas,stayed for two nights and had the time of our lives. We left our babywith his maternal grandparents, so we got a full night's sleep forthe first time in six months (longer for my wife). It was beautiful.I almost cried.

The second night we hit all thesedestinations:

That's A through L, friends. We wereparty animals and stayed out all night. This means the we've stillgot it. We're still cool. We're not succumbing to being old, boring parents.

That's a nice idea but truth be told we didn't mean to stayout all night. We just got lost and by the time we found our way backto the hotel it was time to go to the airport.

Does anyone else have cool vacation plans? Had any run-ins with the TSA?

"It's always something"

2011-11-20T18:09:00.001-07:00

Whenever things are going badly my momalways says, “Well, it's always something.”It's kind of her mantra.

She explains it like this: “Say yourcar is broken. Once you get your car fixed then your roof will beleaking. Once you get the roof fixed then your kid will be throwingup. And if your kid isn't throwing up then you need to go try andstart your car 'cause it's probably broken again. That's life.”

I used to think she was just old andcynical, but now I'm starting to suspect she's right. For example,Junior had just started to sleep longer at night but this weekhe started teething and he's up all night again.

We couldn't figure out why he wouldn'tsleep at first but then he started to show other symptoms ofteething. For one, he started drooling enough gallons per hour topower a hydroelectric dam. Next, he developed an insatiable appetite for human flesh, a deep love of bitinganyone who got within 20 feet of him, especially me. Once we had ruled outthe possibility of him being a baby zombie, we put two and twotogether.

All of this makes me realize that he'sgetting older, and fast. Sometimes he will give me a stern look andhe reminds me of my father-in-law. Granted, they do share a lot ofgenes, but it's still freaky.

He's also starting solid food. Itwasn't easy at first, but it's getting better. Now I can feed himabout a half bottle of baby food in one sitting. I feel pretty gooduntil I realize most of the food ended up on the outside of him andme. These days I wear sweet potato colored clothing so when he inevitablyspits all over me it doesn't show up so much. My kid can makea mouthful of pureed vegetables go pretty far.

All this growing up makes my wife sad,but I don't mind. She's worried about missing all his cute littlebaby moments but I'm like, “Psh, let's skip to the part where hesleeps through the night.”

But then we're back to “It's alwayssomething” because I'm sure that once he sleeps through the night he'llstart doing something else that makes us lose sleep. Before too long I'll have to givehim “the talk,” which I am not looking forward to.

I guess it's OK if he stays a baby a little longer.

Anyone have any philosophies about wishing time away? Or know how to handle teething, carnivorous babies? Leave a comment if you please.

Numi Numi

2011-11-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

The other night Wifey was watching TVwhen she suddenly fell out of her chair cackling like anescaped mental patient. “This is it,” I thought. “She's finallylost it. Motherhood and being married to me have finally driven herover the edge.”

But when she finally calmed down (andit took a long time) she explained that she was laughing abouta commercial for a “super toilet.” I watched the commercialmyself and I had to agree that it was hilarious and a bit creepy.

Just hanging out with our toilet.

It's hilarious because the advertisershave gone to great lengths to make the toilet look sexy.That's right. And they even gave it a name. It's called“Numi.” Do toilets normally havenames? Model numbers, maybe, but names?

Robots in disguise.

It's creepy because it's essentially arobot. It looks like a small, unassuming white porcelain box but whenyou get close it senses your presence and transforms like OptimusPrime into a full-size toilet. I'm uncomfortable with something thatsophisticated in my bathroom. It's only a matter of time until itbecomes self aware and leads theother robot toilets in a cybernetic restroom revolt, and I don't wantto be sitting on it when it does.

Also, it's just so darn considerate.When it senses you coming it remembers how warm you like the toiletseat and heats the seat up for you. And when you're sitting on thetoilet it blows warm air on your feet. It remembers your birthday andasks about your day. It's as if your best friend got on an evilwizard's bad side and was turned into a robot toilet.

And what bothers me the most is it'sjust so... frivolous. For example, it plays music. I don'tknow where the sound comes from, though, and I don't really want to.You can also create playlists,so you can have a mix for #1 and #2. And it'll only run you $6400.

I guess rich people have boughteverything imaginable and have run out of things to spend money on.

What do you think of "Numi?" Leave a comment if you please.

Halloween is Junior's time to shine

2011-10-30T02:28:00.002-06:00

Halloweenis a new parent's favorite holiday for lots of reasons.

Youget to take your already adorable child and dress him up in a cutelittle costume that multiplies his adorableness factor by onemillion. I don't know what it is about a miniature costume but it canturn an ugly baby into a cute one and a cute baby into adevastatingly attractive one.

Andthen – once your child has reached the pinnacle of cuteness - youget show him off to everyone in the neighborhood. Everyone knows anew parent likes nothing better than to show off his baby to assertthat his baby is the cutest.

Whenyou're a new parent out with your baby and you run into anotherparent with his baby it turns into a kind of baby battle. You ask howold the opposing baby is and exchange some small talk but reallyyou're just trying to determine whose baby is cuter. It'slike a baby turf war, and the winner gets to say, “Take your dumpybaby and get out of here! And I don't want to see you in the cerealaisle ever again!”

Andlet me just make it very clear that our kid is the epitome of adorability. If you want to challenge us you had better have a darncute baby. Some of these kids are like bringing a knife to gunfight. “All of your genes and this is the best you could come upwith?” I sneer at rival parents. “Come on! Give us a challenge.”

Halloweencostumes make babies cuter, but they don't have the same effect onadults. Even so, there are a bunch of adults who still loveto dress up and they get superannoyed with those who don't. I fall into the latter group, but myboss is adamantly pro-costume. She was totally scandalized when shefound out I wasn't dressing up and told me so.

Idon't have anything against adults dressing up, but personally Idon't have any reason to dress up anymore. I'm grown and I can buycandy.

Do you dress up for Halloween as an adult? If you have a baby, what are you dressing him or her up as? Leave a comment if you please.

Still ballin' like a mother and father

2011-10-23T19:14:00.001-06:00

We'vebeen in our new apartment now for almost one month and I've decidedit might not be as classy as I first thought. Here's how Iknow:

Everyonehas a pit bull except us. I don't know what it is that makes peoplewho live in ridiculously small apartments want to get huge,potentially vicious dogs but our complex is crawling with them. Ithink there are more pit bulls than people that live here. Accordingto the census the pit bull to human ratio is approximately seven toone in our complex.

Theother day two pit bulls belonging to two separate owners got into afight with a homeless lady who takes naps on the apartment lawn. Iwasn't sure what it was about but I think they ganged up on her totry and steal the Filet of Fish sandwich she was eating. When thedust had cleared two pit bulls with one half of a Filet of Fish eachwere seen hurriedly leaving the scene before anyone had a chance tocall animal control and the homeless woman hasn't been seen since.Hopefully she has found more hospitable lawns to nap upon.

Thenwe have our next door neighbor who I have affectionately dubbed“Super Bass.” Nuclear missiles could be falling on a marchingband riding Harley Davidsons outside but we wouldn't be able to hearit over the sound of his music. It rattles dishes off the shelf,knocks pictures off the wall and wakes the baby.

Underneathus lives a sweet old cat lady. She's cute because every day she getson her bike and wobbles off to goodness knows where with two or morecats following along behind her. This was all very precious until onefateful day in the complex laundromat when I accidentally used thedryer after her and all our clothes smelled like a cat convention.Now you will see me carefully sniffing the inside of each dryerbefore I put any clothes in.

It'snot all bad, though. We have a 24-hour doughnut place within a milefrom our apartment and... OK, that's also a bad thing. I fear we'rebecoming regulars, and every time I go in and try to order a fewdoughnuts they try to talk me into getting a dozen. They always say,“It's only a few dollars more, sir. It's a much better value, sir.”And then I say, “Yeah, but are you going to wake me up tomorrowmorning and make me go jogging? Are you gonna buy me somesweat pants when the rest of my pants stop fitting? Then get controlof that doughnut enthusiasm, please.”

Allthis aside, we're very happy here. The main perk of living in our newplace is that the complex basketball court is situated right behindour apartment. Whenever we're bored we go and shoot some hoops, butinevitably a bunch of teenagers come and hover around waiting for usto leave. We always invite them to join our game, but so far theynever have.

Iguess they think a game of “Horse” with a baby in a baby carrierstrapped to an overweight white guy and his 4'10” wife isnot enough of a challenge.

Anybody have strange or loud neighbors? Leave a comment if you please.

Glorious Tales of Parent Derring-Do

2011-10-16T23:58:00.003-06:00

I’veonly been a parent for a short amount of time but it hasn’t takenme long to decide the following: Old school parents are the worst.

“Oldschool parents” are any parents who have been parenting longer thanyou have and think they have the right and social responsibility todrown you in unwanted parenting advice. Their advice always heavilyimplies that you’re only having problems simply because you’redoing it wrong. The way tosolve all of your problems is to simply listen to the sagewisdom they are always bestowing upon you without being asked.

Oldschool parents love to ask you about your parenting problems. Theydon't care about your parenting problems, but they do want tohear them so they can top them with their own glorious tales ofparent derring-do.

Oldschool parent: “So are you having any problems with Junior?”

Me:“Well he's really fussy and wakes up a lot in the night.”

Oldschool parent: “Ha! Try having three kids in diapers, two inelementary school, three in junior high, three in high school, two incollege and one living in your basement playing World of Warcraft allday and mooching all your money. Now that's tough!”

Me:“Wait, so you have, like, 14 kids? I thought you had two.”

Oldschool parent: “How dare you question me, Mr. OneChild!”

Buteven worse than old school parents are non-parents. I need parentingadvice from people who have never been parents like I need a blackmarket colonoscopy that is performed in a dark alley. First andforemost, the advice is useless, and second, it's insulting. Someone who hasnever had children giving advice to someone who has children is asabsurd as me trying to give advice to a racehorse on how he might winthe Kentucky Derby.

Itpains me to say it but I fear that in the past when I had no kids Imay have given out unsolicited, useless parenting advice. Iapologize, and knowing what I know now I want to go back in time and beat my pastself with a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting.

Ifyou ever find yourself starting a sentence like this, “I don't haveany kids of my own but I think you should...” stop talkingimmediately.

What do you say to politely tell people you don't really need their opinion on your child? Leave a comment if you please.

Cookie monster is my alter ego

2011-10-09T16:35:00.000-06:00

Iran into a friend at the store the other day and he was like, “Ihaven’t seen you in ages! Did you fall off the face of the earth?”I explained to my friend that I hadn’t but I had been blessed witha new baby, which is about the same as falling off the face of theearth in terms of how much social interaction you have.

Mycurious friend wanted to know what I’ve been up to besides babywrangling and the following is what I told him. I apologize inadvance because it all feels a bit rant-y. Maybe I should start oneof those YouTube rant vlogs, where I just look into the camera andsay stuff like, “You know what I hate? Leprechauns.”

First,I lost a tube of Chapstick and I'm afraid of where it will show up,most of all that it will find its way into the dryer with my clothes.When I was younger we would wash all the kids’ clothes together. Ihave a lot of brothers and sisters so when the laundry was done, we’dinevitably find that someone had left Chapstick, pens or gum in theirpockets. We'd all accuse each other with no way of telling who thereal culprit was but ultimately we spent a good portion of ourchildhoods walking around looking like squid attack victims, theundersides of school lunchroom tables and wax statue death scenes.

Inother news, I took the GRE last week. This means that I spent alllast month studying which means I have a bunch of overly largevocabulary words in my head. This also means I accidentally use themin casual conversation unnecessarily and end up sounding like apretentious jerk. Or should I say a magniloquent fustianprofligate.

Also,we moved into a new apartment and I have high hopes for our newplace. I think we’ve moved up in the world because our neighborshave doormats, and everyone knows that doormats are a sign ofcivility and sophistication. Nobody had doormats at our old complexbecause they always got stolen. The downside to the new place is thatall of the lights on our landing are burned out and maintenance istaking their sweet time to put in new ones. It’s pitch black when Iget home at night and a whole gang of thieves could hide out thereand I wouldn’t even know it. They could jump out and steal bothdollars that are in my wallet and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

Andfinally, does anyone know what has happened to all the Double StufOreos? I went to the store and when they didn’t have any I aboutchoked a guy. I was livid. I’ve checked a couple of placesnow and I haven’t seen them. I’ve only seen Football shaped Oreosand orange-y Halloween Oreos and I have use for neither. Have DoubleStufs been discontinued? They better not have been, or Nabisco isgoing have a bunch of angry fatties like myself storming theircorporate headquarters demanding their second Stuf. I’ve alreadymade my picket sign.

Itsays: “One Stuf is not Enuf.”

For reals: Is anyone else having problems finding Double Stuf Oreos? Leave a comment if you please.

I colic like I see it

2011-10-02T21:31:00.003-06:00

I’ve been trying to sit down and write for a while now but I’m losing the ability to string thoughts and words together in a coherent manner. Have you ever had a car that needed a tune up real bad? That’s my brain right now. It won’t start, it coughs, it backfires, and it stalls out at awkward times.

A big part of my mental decline is lack of sleep. Since Junior is three months old, that means I haven’t gotten a good nights sleep in over three months. No wonder I’m a mess. I should be grateful because it’s been even longer for my wife. I was sleeping like a narcoleptic rock the whole time she was pregnant and tossing and turning.

The main reason is that Junior loves to scream. Loves it. If he had an eHarmony profile it would say, “My name is Junior and I like long walks on the beach, pooping and screaming inconsolably for extended periods of time for no discernible reason.” We calculated it and he spends about 75 percent of his waking hours screaming bloody murder, 15 percent eating and the remaining 10 percent being adorable.

We don't know exactly why Junior is so screamy because he is in really good health. We decided to feed him the devil’s elixir and he is gaining weight like a champ. The doctor said he probably has “colic” and went on to explain that colic is a condition where a baby is in a foul mood and screams a lot for no reason, and doctors don't have an explanation for it and there's not really any treatment either.

My first thought was: In a foul mood and screaming for no reason? I know a lot of adults with colic. My second thought was: Lamest diagnosis EVER! Fortunately the doctor assured us that it would last only four to six months.

Four to six months? I don’t know if I can make it that long, doc! There's supposed to be no treatment but we'll try anything for five minutes of peace and quiet. “Give your baby a shot of vodka.” OK. "Strap your baby to the roof of your car and drive real fast.” Sure thing.

We've started using gas drops and they help some but the last time we went to the store they were out. We spotted some organic herbal vegan gas drops and bought them in desperation. We might as well have been giving him sausage gravy mixed with grape Kool Aid for all the good the organic herbal vegan drops did him. Stupid hippies.

And then I made a weird discovery a few nights ago. Junior was screeching away and nothing I was doing was helping. I had stuff to do so I just set him in his swing and started cleaning. As soon as I switched on the vacuum cleaner he passed right out. I was so excited I felt like I had discovered electricity. I immediately recorded myself vacuuming for a while and then burned it onto a CD. Now we play “Hoover's Greatest Hits” for him.

Babies should come with warning labels that say, “SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Babies are 90% work and only 10% fun. Please reproduce responsibly.”

How is my work to cuteness ratio? Is it accurate? Leave a comment if you please.

Saving money and looking foolish

2011-09-04T20:00:00.000-06:00

I just got my hair cut at the local beauty college for $2 and I definitely got what I paid for. Now my hair looks like this:

It all started with me getting a sweet job transfer. Starting this week I get to do my same job, but at a different office that is 50 miles closer to my house. That means no more commute! So I am pretty happy and I wanted to look all clean and make a good first impression when I start at my new office.

Since our baby has been born money has been tight so I went to the local beauty college for “$2 Tuesday.” That was a mistake. “$2 Tuesdays” are fine for fried chicken and getting into the zoo, but when it comes to haircuts I now know it's best not to skimp.

When I first walked in the first thing I saw was about 10 severed heads mounted on tripods. I was startled and thought I had accidentally stumbled into the camp of a tribe of headhunting barbers. Each severed head had immaculate hair and and upon closer inspection I realized they were mannequin heads. The students used them to practice hairstyling when real people weren't around, I was told later. Nevertheless, it was still very unsettling and made the place feel like some kind of Haunted Supercuts.

Maybe the woman who cut my hair just misunderstood what I said. Perhaps the haircut I wanted was lost in translation because describing what you want in a haircut is hard. I've thought about bringing in a picture but that makes me feel like a metro diva.

I thought about getting out the clippers and trying to even it up myself. I think I'd end up having to buzz most of it off to get it even, and my wife said it would be better for me to look like a dork on my first day than a skinhead.

Ultimately, getting your hair cut at a beauty college is kind of like gambling. Sometimes you win and you get your hair cut by the school valedictorian, and sometimes you lose and get the class clown.

Anyone else had problems getting a decent haircut?

Money worries

2011-08-14T23:36:00.003-06:00

When I was in college, I wanted to save the world and I chose my major accordingly. Unfortunately, it turns out saving the world doesn’t pay all that well.

Everyone warned me that I would be broke but I didn’t listen. “It’s ok, man,” I’d tell them. “I’m from the suburbs, I went to college and I listen to all this political music, man. The feeling of helping other people and contributing to a cause is worth more than money to me, man. My ideals and self-righteousness will pay my bills. My hybrid car doesn’t use much gas, either. I don’t eat meat, which saves a lot of money.”

I knew the field I had chosen paid very little, but I didn’t realize just how little. When you’re an undergrad student trying to plan for a career and an academic advisor tells you that you’ll probably be making around X dollars per year, it doesn’t really mean a whole lot to you. Such numbers are very abstract to a college student who has been working part-time and paying for everything with student loans and credit cards. My advisor might’ve told me how many honeydew melons and hockey pucks my salary would buy and it would’ve meant about the same to me.

Now I’m out in the cold cruel Real World. I don't have much money, and the everyone is after the money I do have. It's like my wallet has a bullseye on it or something. For instance, the air conditioning in my car broke right as summer was really heating up. I got it looked at and it would cost $1,000 to fix, which means I now drive with the windows down. Apparently car air conditioner parts are made out of gold, diamonds and caviar.

And the organization who wants my money the worst is my health insurance company. Those people don’t want to cover anything, and then I wind up on the “customer care” hotline arguing charges with them.

“I see here that during labor your wife drank an apple juice,” they say. “And your current plan only covers orange juice.”

“Ok, fine,” I sigh. “But I see here on my bill that I was also charged for an orange juice.”

“That’s because after labor your wife also had an orange juice with pulp,” they reply. “Pulp, Mr. Divett. We do not cover pulp of any kind. You should know that, it's explicitly stated on an obscure benefits information page on our website that you'll never be able to find.”

“Ok, fine,” I concede. “How much are the two juices going to cost me?”

“$4,000.”

“What?!”

“Per juice. Now about these other charges...”

So forth an so on until I got so tired of fighting them that I agreed to have all of my paychecks direct deposited to my insurance company until Junior turns 18.

I’m not sure I'm going to do, but I think I need to switch careers and get into the health insurance business.

Anyone else finding that their ideals are not paying the the bills? Suggestions on how to actually make some good money? Leave a comment if you please.

Our baby is the lightweight champion of the world

2011-07-31T16:18:00.002-06:00

Things are going well for us these days except the doctor says Junior is too small and is not gaining weight fast enough. We're doing the best we can but the doctor chastised us like we are stopping our child from gaining weight on purpose, like we have him on some kind of baby Hollywood Summer Beach Body diet cleanse or got him baby lipo.

The doctor told us to basically feed him as much as he wants whenever he wants, and I'd love to be in his place. My doctor, on the other hand, is telling me I need to lose weight. When I mention to people that my baby is small and having trouble gaining weight, they look me up and down and their eyes fill with skepticisim. I keep telling Junior that this is pretty much the only time in his life that people will be telling him to gain as much weight as possible and he should take advantage of it.

Now we're constantly worried if he's getting enough to eat and we constantly want to weigh him to see if he's gaining weight. We don't have a scale so we thought about weighing him on a produce scale at the neighborhood grocery store. It would be hard to do, but my wife could create a distraction so the other customers wouldn't notice me putting a naked infant into the produce scale and start to protest. "I can't weigh my kumquats in there now!"

After much consideration we decided against it because it didn't seem like the most sanitary idea for our baby and for the people who might use the scale afterward.

The tricky thing is that the doctor is telling us to give him formula to supplement the breastmilk, but the lactation consultant is telling us that our baby would be better served by a quart of 10W-30 motor oil because formula is the devil in lactic form, a wolf in milk's clothing. What is a parent to do? Who do we believe?

Ultimately I decided to feed him a lot of Double Stuf Oreos and let him watch too much Netflix because I have found quite a bit of success gaining weight by this method.

Any thoughts on formula, for or against? Leave a comment if you please.

How did we get here?

2011-07-10T20:48:00.005-06:00

Junior is one month old tomorrow and we are finally getting into the groove of our new parental lifestyle. We understand that every two hours we have to drop everything and attend to the needs of this five pound party-crasher who is now running the show.

We're realizing sleep is a thing of the past and are getting used to walking around like Mom and Dad of the Dead. By now I could probably sleep until 2017 no problem if I just had some quiet.

We know that stress and worry come with the territory. We're always worrying: Is he eating enough? Is he sleeping enough? Is he supposed to poop that much or is there something wrong with his baby bowels?

We also know that our full-time job is essentially putting stuff into our baby and then cleaning up what comes out. I swear way more comes out than goes in. Our life is full of the Three Ps of Parenting: pee, poop and puke.

Diaper changing is a combination of art form and competitive sport. Once that diaper is open it's a race against time to get him cleaned off and put another diaper on before he pees all over everything within a 20 foot radius. It's so intense that I feel like I'm defusing a bomb, and sometimes I know I'm not gonna make it in time. Knowing the inevitable, I plead with him like I'm at gunpoint: “You don't have to do this! Just point that somewhere else and we'll talk this over.” But you can't negotiate with a loaded baby.

Keeping our baby clean is like playing “Whack-a-Mole.” Once we get one excretion cleaned up, another one pops up. For instance, the other day I was changing his diaper. I was slow on the draw and he peed all over himself. I picked him up and bathed him but he pooped in the towel when I was drying him off. I bathed him again and he puked all over himself during drying. I cleaned up the puke and started to put a diaper on him only to have him pee all over himself again.

At this point I demanded that my wife tell me why we had wanted to have a baby in the first place. She said she couldn't remember.

Did anyone else have a hard time with the transition? Leave a comment if you please.

No sleep 'til FOREVER

2011-06-26T14:20:00.001-06:00

Dasd asdlasd kad asl vzxpq mrf mrf mrf yowp. Nurf blat asid meeeeefrof tootledofflo.Mijmaxd.

That's all that came out when I tried to write about our son in the first week after he was born. Sleep deprivation is a scary thing, man.

Where to begin? I guess let me say first that some people in the medical profession are angels, and others are the exact opposite. I've speculated about the nature of hell in the past, but now I know for certain that the innermost circle of hell is being stuck in a hospital.

And not to be cheesy but my wife weathered the whole delivery ordeal like a champ. I was in awe of her courage.

I had some serious buyer's remorse in the first few days. Many and crazy were the thoughts that ran through my fevered brain. Maybe there is a return policy, I thought frantically. We kept the receipt and he's barely been used, they'll take him back. Or maybe we can exchange him for one that sleeps.

I slept so little that I felt like a tortured prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. Did you know that a baby can be dry, fed, clean and burped and still inexplicably screech bloody murder all night long? On a baby crying scale from 1 to 10 (1 being a whimper and 10 being a vocal-cord-shredding blood-curdling wake-the-dead shriek) our baby will go from sleeping peacefully to a 10 instantly for no apparent reason. My nerves are shot.

“Your mother and I had a pretty good thing going before you got here,” I told him one night at 4 a.m. “We were nice and invited you here and you're technically our guest so you should really be on your best behavior. We gave you life and the least you could do is show a little appreciation and go to sleep!”

Babies are a lot of things of but reasonable is not one of them.

Everyone told us how hard it was going to be and we listened carefully and tried to prepare ourselves. But nothing can really prepare you for how hard it really is, except actually having a baby, but by then you're locked into an 18 year minimum commitment.

It's not all stressful. We, like, love him and stuff. We're happy he's here. He's also kind of cute, although at this stage he's still a little wrinkly. He looks kind of like a cross between an old man, Yoda and a gnome, in the most adorable way possible.

Anyone have advice for a new father? Had a rough time with your first baby? Leave a comment if you please.

Ready or not, here I come

2011-06-13T11:35:00.003-06:00

So the doctors think Junior is taking too long and my wife is scheduled to be induced tonight.

On the upside we know exactly when my wife will start labor, and an approximate range of time when she'll deliver. It’s like “Baby-On-Demand.”

On the downside we know that for this new part of our lives to start, the old, semi-carefree part has to come to an end. It's just hard to say goodbye to some of the things we've grown accustomed to that will be going away, such as: money, sleeping, time alone together, etc. Now we’ll have to reference everything as B.B. (Before Baby Era) and A.B. (After Baby Era).

For one last hurrah we went out and ate at one of our favorite places because we know with surety that our time as amateur foodies is coming to an abrupt and violent end once the baby is here. We did the math and all of our money that is not going to paying hospital bills will be going to pay for diapers.

Next, we went to the arcade with some friends, won a bunch of tickets and scored some sweet mood rings. We put them on and the color on both rings was stuck between “happy” and “despair.” Spot on.

Don't misunderstand: we're super happy and excited, but every time a new part of my life starts I have to whine about how “the good times are over!” It's what I do.

There are tons of things I'm looking forward to, though. I get to play with all his toys and teach him manly skills like unstopping toilets, changing car oil and firesetting.

And there will be other opportunities for me. I've already mentioned how my wife feels about drugs: she loves them. The pregnancy kind, that is. (She would want me to specify that.) She is eager to take as many as she can get her hands on during the delivery, so afterward she'll be a bit fuzzy and I'm going to trick her into all kinds of things.

I'm definitely gonna ask her if I can buy a motorcycle and she'll probably say yes. You might think it's messed up to trick your wife when she's at her most vulnerable, but she has refused to let me buy one when she's sober and doesn't understand that speed (and speeding tickets) are in my blood. She says I can buy one if she gets to do something equally dangerous as motorcycle riding, such as intravenous drug use with shared needles or bear wrestling.

We're headed into the hospital right now. I though about tweeting a labor play-by-play at @ourbabyisbetterthanyourbaby, but I think my wife would get annoyed.

“You're doing great, babe, keep pushing! I'll be right back after I post an update and some pictures!”

Baby is on his way and hopefully he's not ugly

2011-06-05T18:59:00.002-06:00

Our baby will be popping out any minute now and consequently my wife and I are freaking out.

It doesn't help any that he keeps flipping back and forth. He thinks he's some kind of eggplant-sized gymnast in there. Sometimes we go into the midwife and she says, “He's head down, you're good!” and the next time she's saying, “He's breech and you're gonna need a cesarean.” He is grounded the minute he comes out for all the stress he's caused us. This kid is ornery, and I know exactly where he gets it from: his mother.

And speaking of his mother: she is dying to meet him. Most of all she wants to see what he looks like. She is consumed with an unhealthy curiosity about this, and admit I am a little interested myself.

For one, we're not sure how tall the baby will be. My wife is 4'10” (she tries to add on some fractions but don't you believe it) and I'm 6'2”.

My wife is also worried that the baby will be ugly, but I keep telling her that if the baby is in fact ugly, we will be the last ones to know. Every couple thinks their baby is the cutest and most adorable, which is a result of evolutionary processes that help the human race survive. I guess a species is less likely to eat their young if they are too busy showing baby pictures to everyone.

I've also heard there are other evolutionary processes at work. A baby looks like the father for the first few months and this makes the father more likely to stick around and provide for the baby. Men are pretty vain, I guess. And if it looks like him, he knows the kid is his. Sounds like men are insecure as well.

Anyway, my wife was so curious that she uploaded pictures of the two of us into a sketchy, virus-ridden website that claimed it could show us what our baby will look like. I had a bad feeling about the whole business, and not just because of all the pop-ups.

“No good will come of this,” I warned.

But my wife is terminally stubborn and did it anyway. Soon there appeared on the screen an image so inhuman and horrifying that it looked like a cross between an evil gnome and Steven Tyler. I'd post it here but after seeing it my wife and I fled in terror and haven't been back to our apartment since.

Ultimately, I'm fairly certain this kid will will be ridiculously attractive. I mean, look at his parents. Hottest. Couple. Ever.

Has anyone else tried those babymaker websites? Don't lie! Leave a comment if you please.

Down with disposable diapers

2011-05-22T17:59:00.004-06:00

Babies are cool in theory but when it comes right down to the gory process of getting one here my wife and I start to freak out. Our baby is going to be born in one month and to help us be less nervous about the delivery we enrolled in a childbirth class and so far it has been educational.

More or less.

Our class is taught by two hippie doulas and we suspected things were going to be a little “different” when they showed up to class with plastic baby dolls strapped to themselves by way of awkward baby slings. We were right. The class consists of approximately 75 percent good information and about 25 percent hippie agenda.

For example, in Class #3 they were telling the women that in order to have a successful delivery they must give themselves positive affirmations like, “I will stretch beautifully.” That’s what they said! I had to try so hard not to laugh out loud that I think I strained something.

Class #2 was basically a doula advertisement. Our teachers love to state “facts” without citing any sources, such as “Having a doula with you at your delivery decreases your risk of a cesarean by 50 percent.” I can accept that but who says? What study? What peer-reviewed journal was it published in? They never say. And then they say, “My business cards are on the table if you want to reduce your risk of cesarean. For a small fee of $900.”

They are huge proponents of “natural” childbirth and speak of epidurals and any other drugs other than marijuana with barely-restrained contempt. It’s the twenty-first century and if we have the drugs to stop pain, I think it’s OK to use them. It’s like a guy about to get his appendix cut out saying, “I don’t want any anesthesia ‘cause I want to experience it, man.”

They’ve also said that disposable diapers are the new bottled water and back that claim up with more mystery stats such as “25 percent of landfills are made up of disposable diapers.” My wife and I agreed that we are not about to fool around with cloth diapers. My wife suggested we counter their argument with some imaginary data of our own, such as “The water used to wash cloth diapers displaces 2 million baby seals every month” or “90 percent of cloth diapers are woven and sewn in sweatshops by children who have never been hugged. Ever.”

I love the environment, but the environment is gonna have to take one for the team on this one.

Don’t get me wrong. I sometimes shop at Trader Joe’s. I enjoy organic produce. I burn some incense every now and again. I’m as liberal as the next white kid from the suburbs who went to college.

But I think some of these new school hippies seriously need to chill.

Has anyone else had adventures in baby class? Any opinions on doulas, cloth diapers or natural childbirth? Leave a comment if you please.

Oh, it burns!

2011-05-08T17:14:00.002-06:00

My wife and I just celebrated an anniversary, and even though things are going well I have noticed a few differences between she and I that cause us to have “discussions.”

1. The sun. My wife can be outside all day in the middle of summer and she gets a beautiful tan with no ill effects. Not so with me. The other day we went on a picnic and I realized I forgot to bring a hat or sunscreen so I started to panic.

“We have to find some shade quick!” I said anxiously. “Hurry, give me your shirt and let me put it over my head!”

We had only been out for 30 minutes, which for me is about 29 minutes too long. I had already started to blister, burn and peel. My wife could hardly comprehend it.

2. The Thermostat Wars. My wife likes it at a muggy 82º, while I prefer a cool 66º. I'm not sure why we have a 16 degree temperature gap. I can only think of two possible explanations: I'm fatter than she is, and my ancestors come from cold snowy climates while hers come from warm tropical ones.

3. The kind of dead animals we will and won't eat. I love friend chicken but my wife can't eat it because it comes on the bone. However, she can sit in a seafood restaurant with a huge smile on her face and dismember a crab with little metal implements. This is very disturbing to me because it's like she's performing and autopsy on the crab.

“The victim was killed by getting boiled alive, cracked open and having all of his innards scooped out by a little tiny fork and sprinkled with lemon juice. We're dealing with a very disturbed killer!”

4. Preparedness. My wife likes to prepare for things waaaaaaaaay in advance, and I like to take things as they come a.k.a. procrastinate. As I've mentioned, we're expecting a baby so my wife sent me a link to pictures of the 31 flavors of baby poop and detailed descriptions of what each specific type says about your baby's health.

I was understandably horrified, but my wife said sternly, “We need to know this stuff.” I love my wife but I am not about to memorize the different colors and shapes of baby poop. I'll worry about that when the baby gets here.

5. School. I hated college, and when I graduated I didn't even stick around for the graduation ceremony. My wife loved college, and wishes she could go back. When fall rolls around and all the stores are full of school supplies, my wife just sighs and gazes longingly at the protractors and notebooks. I think that's just perverted and sick.

However, despite our small differences, we are still having lots of fun. Hopefully the baby coming doesn't mess that up.

Anyone else have funny spouse/partner differences? Leave a comment if you please.

Fried chicken butter pizza

2011-04-24T16:58:00.000-06:00

I just turned 29 and since that is just one year away from The Big 3-0, I went in for a checkup. My doctor looked at me like a veterinarian looks at a horse with a broken leg. The prognosis was – unsurprisingly – not good.

I know I've gained a little weight recently. My wife also says it's normal for a husband to gain weight during his wife's pregnancy, but I suspect she is only trying to make me feel better. Why my wife's pregnancy would make me get fatter is anyone's guess. Perhaps it is because on any given evening you can find us driving around town on a quest to find some random food that she is craving, and when she is eating cheeseburgers, potato chips or banana popsicles, a few might accidentally make their way into my mouth through no fault of my own. It can't be helped.

Whatever the reason, it got me sent to the “Nutrition and Exercise Counselor,” which felt a lot like getting sent to the principal's office. I'm grown and not in elementary school anymore, but I was similarly terrified. She clucked to herself while reading my charts and I cowered in a chair across the desk from her.

“Do you know why you're here today?” she asked eventually.

“I'm fat?” I ventured.

“Right. I can tell from your blood work that you don’t exercise at all.”

“That’s not true!” I protested.

“Moving hand to mouth doesn’t count as ‘exercise.’”

Oooooh she was evil. But she was right. Next she told me that what I was eating was also part of the problem.

“For example, how often do you eat pizza?” she said.

“Once a week,” I said proudly, thinking this was a small and reasonable amount.

“Once a week!” she exclaimed. “That’s way too much!”

“Seriously?” I asked, dumfounded. “I ate pizza, like, every single day while I was in college.”

“Yeah but you aren’t in college anymore, now are you?”

Thoroughly beaten, I couldn't do anything but sit and listen as she explained with a straight face that HDL is “happy” cholesterol and LDL is “lousy” cholesterol. She also gave me color coded lists of foods: green meaning “go ahead and eat,” yellow meaning “eat with caution” and read meaning “don't eat.” I really was in elementary school.

At one point she leaned over to show me something on one of the lists and I realized she smelled very strongly of cigarette smoke, which made me furious. All I could think was, Girl, I know you did not just come up in here trying to tell me about “healthy lifestyle choices” when you are smelling like you just smoked seven packs of Marlboros! I could sit on my butt and eat pizza topped with fried chicken and butter all day every day and I would still outlive your smarmy cigarette-smoking hide!

But of course I didn't say any of that to her. I just listened, in case there was a test on it later.

Any other husbands/boyfriends/partners gaining weight with their pregnant wives? Comment if you like.

PS - I guest blogged at WTF Is Up With My Love Life and you can read it here.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

2011-04-10T21:09:00.003-06:00

I'm becoming my father. I knew it was happening when I started to tell long rambling stories and forgot the point of the story before I completed the telling. I really knew it was happening when my wife would politely tell me that I had already told said story at least 50 times before and not to worry because she remembered the point of the story and could easily finish it for me.

Yikes.

It's not so bad. My dad is a good guy. I have come to like him so much I want to name our soon-to-be-born son after him. It is funny, though.

In addition to the rambling stories, I have noticed how cheap I am becoming. When we were kids we used to leave the lights on all over the house and my dad would follow behind us flipping them off and saying, “Do you think I work hard all day so that you can light empty rooms, leave the TV on when you're not watching and leave the refrigerator door open? Do you think electricity grows on trees?”

“No, dad,” we'd say. “Electricity comes from the Hoover Dam.”

“Yes,” he'd reply. “And thanks to you it takes the whole Hoover Dam to power this house!”

Now I do the same thing, watching those light switches like a hawk and lecturing my wife on where electricity comes from.

The cheapness manifests itself in other ways, too. My wife was going to throw out some expired lunch meat, but I told her that was $3 worth of meat and it was still good. I promptly made myself a sandwich and took it to work the next day. When I ate the sandwich on my lunchbreak I promptly got dizzy and hallucinated that my co-workers looked like fish and my boss looked like Poseidon, God of the Ocean. Then I threw up. These are just a few examples.

I used to wonder: Why is my dad so cranky? I guess it was because he was trying to raise a bunch of kids and make a living too. He was supposed to be able to fix everything that broke, make sure his kids didn't turn into serial killers and give money to everyone who asked for it, and there were a lot of people asking for it. And all the while he was supposed to pretend like he had the whole thing under control.

Now that responsibility is knocking at my door, I am starting to see how it could easily make a man lose his sense of humor. I'm not ready to be a dad! I can't possibly do all the things that are being asked of me! I still need my own dad. I constantly ask him for help whenever something goes wrong, especially with my car. I get on the phone and describe the problem to him.

“See, when it's in third gear it makes a noise like 'rowr rowr wub wub wub,'” I say. “And then when I shift up to fourth it's like, 'reeeeee-ow-ow-ow-ow-wooooooooooooo.'”

Then my poor dad has to try to diagnose my car problems from that mess.

“Well it sounds like you've got a hyena in your transmission, and then possibly a parakeet in your electrical system.”

Being an adult is so hard. I take some consolation in the fact that my wife is turning into her mother, and it is also hilarious.

Fighting a losing battle to stay sane

2011-03-13T18:44:00.001-06:00

I’ve not written for a bit because I’ve been trying without success to write something that is NOT about our adventures in reproduction. So besides stressing about babies, here are just a few of the wild and crazy things I do:

Work. And don’t worry, nothing has changed. Hard work is still being punished severely. Once I finish my work, I get assigned a second batch of work made up of things my co-workers were supposed to do in their first batch but never did. They never get a second batch.

Get a fish. Surprising myself, I got a betta fish and put him in a bowl in my office to keep me company. In a fit of nerdity I named him “Malcolm Reynolds.” While I'm doing paperwork at my desk he will start banging his head repeatedly against the side of his bowl and it makes a sound like a tiny bell tolling off in the distance. I look at him banging his head and think, “That is exactly how I feel.”

Watch TV. This is fun but it makes me realize I am getting older. Our favorite thing to watch right now is the Late Late Show, but we are usually in bed by 10 p.m. so we watch it the day after it airs by streaming it on the internet. Day old jokes are still funny, and we just can’t party like we used to. We are, like, 100 years old.

Play Nintendo for cheap. That’s right, while everyone else is playing their expensive Wiis, I went on Craigslist and scored a Nintendo 64 for pocket change. Now my nights are filled with Mario Kart and Dr. Mario.

Gain baby weight. My wife’s belly is growing because she is having a baby, while mine is growing because of too much pizza, Ben & Jerry’s and Dr. Pepper. I have Papa John’s phone number programmed into my phone! How did it come to this? If they ultrasounded me, they would tell me that I am giving birth to a large pepperoni and sausage pizza.

Speaking of which, at my wife’s most recent appointment her doctor was cautioning her about gaining too much weight in these last few months of pregnancy. My wife is Latina, and without asking her anything about what she eats the doctor told her, “Now don’t be eating too many tortillas, because they have a lot of carbs.” The doctor didn’t mention bread, cereal, pasta, cinnamon rolls, donuts, bagels, cheese danishes or Cheetos, all of which also have a lot of carbs. Just tortillas. Pretty racist, right? That’s like telling an Asian American mother to cut back on rice, or and African American mother to cut back on chicken, or an Italian American mother to cut back on spaghetti.

My wife doesn’t eat that many tortillas anyway.

Having a baby and unable to talk about anything else? Ever been racially stereotyped by your obstetrician? Leave a comment if you please.

My mother-in-law takes a stand OR A boy, my foot!

2011-02-14T03:03:00.022-07:00

We went in for The Big Ultrasound last week and what we found out has been the source of much contention and has divided our family.

First, let me say that the ultrasound tech took forever in revealing the gender. She asked us if we wanted to know, saw the eagerness in our eyes and then made sure that gender was the last thing she revealed. She tediously showed us the baby’s heart, brain, lungs, stomach, arms, legs, eyes, face, hands, feet, kneecaps, knuckles and bladder first.

According to the tech our baby was hiding behind the placenta, which is a disgusting place to hide if you ask me. She kept jabbing my wife with the ultrasound thingy, trying to coax the baby out of hiding. When the baby refused to budge she started saying things like, “Ooh, your baby is a brat! Your baby is very bad!” I started getting mad, like any parent who is told that their child is not the perfect angel that they think he is, especially because my wife immediately volunteered, “The baby gets that from his father.”

So I was already annoyed when the ultrasound tech added insult to injury by saying, “Ooh, he’s got a big head. Well, just look at his dad! I guess we know where he got the big head from.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “we came here for an ultrasound, not amateur comedy hour.”

Not a huge fan of the ultrasound tech. Anyway, a half hour and a bunch of organs later she made the anti-climactic announcement of:

“It’s a boy! There’s his peepee!”

Seriously? She has all this training and she’s calling it a “peepee”? Come on! Are we in the first grade? For our trouble we got six grainy ultrasound pictures. We called everyone and told them our news and everyone was happy for us except my mother-in-law, who spent the last four and a half months swearing that the baby is a girl. After scrutinizing the ultrasound pictures for a good long time my mother-in-law declared that the ultrasound tech did the ultrasound wrong and the controversial organ is actually a foot.

What?

My mother-in-law also tried to get a bunch of people on her side. After an intense campaign with many impassioned, stirring speeches she got my brother-in-law and a couple other people to believe her foot theory.

I, on the other hand, like to think that the ultrasound tech was trained well enough to know the difference, but what do I know? I’m going to show the ultrasound pictures to some other people and see if they want to weigh in on the debate.

I feel bad for my son because everyone is scrutinizing his “peepee.” Awkward.

Has anyone had an ultrasound tech steer you wrong? (Or insult the size of your head?) Leave a comment if you please.

This baby brought to you by...

2011-01-31T05:51:00.012-07:00

On Wednesday we go in for The Big Ultrasound. You know, the one that tells our friends what color the presents they bring to the baby shower should be. According to the plethora of pregnancy/baby info sites all of the important stuff is formed by 20 weeks, so all that's left to do now is pay an ultrasound tech to take a good hard look.

Yikes! is all I have to say. Is it that time already? Seems like only yesterday my wife was hysterically waving that little stick with its ominous dual lines in front of my face, and I was saying, “Didn't you just pee on that? Get that away from me! Just tell me what it says.” But now our baby is approximately the size of an ornery cantaloupe and keeps my wife awake with all of his or her kicking and punching.

All I can say is I hope we’re having a boy because we’ve already agreed on a boy name. We can’t seem to come up with anything for a girl name. When we do come up with something, my mother-in-law inevitably hates it passionately, but we try not to listen to her anyway.

So I figure we are having a girl since we have picked out a boy name but can't agree on a girl name to save our lives. Life just seems to work that way, doesn't it?

I keep suggesting cool names, and since I love music a lot of them come from musicians, like Ani, Greta, Yadira and Dia. My wife is not a huge fan and says, “Do you really want to tell your daughter she's named after some rock star?” I don't mind because I think that's way better than telling her she was named after some random name we found out of a baby name book.

As you can see, we are getting nowhere fast. One thing we might try is telling our friends that the baby's name is up for grabs and they can submit an essay outlining why we should name our baby after them and how much they love us. Then we'll simply to have to name her after whichever friend writes the best essay.

I also have another fantastic idea, but I'm certain Wifey won't go for it. The more I think about it, the more I realize that having a baby is going to be fantastically expensive, so to offset the cost, we can offer to name her after any corporation that wants to “sponsor” our baby, kind of like selling ad space. I am a genius. Shoot me an e-mail if you want a piece of my baby.

I'm sure she won't like growing up with a name like “Nike Verizon Hyundai Divett,” but she'll forgive us when she gets a free car and smart phone from her corporate sponsor.

Any name suggestions? Leave a comment, if you please.

Also, I finished a new short story and you can read it here on Scribd. Let me know what you think, if you have time. You can e-mail suggestions, complaints and/or typos to: divettj (at) gmail.com

Future fathers take note: A pickle juice smoothie is not the same as a pickle juice snow cone

2011-01-24T06:33:00.030-07:00

I've been very busy lately finishing a short story and maintaining a pregnant woman. Have you ever tried to feed a pregnant woman? This is how it usually goes:

Wife: “I'm starving!”

Me: “OK, what sounds good?”

Wife: “Nothing.”

And when she can eat it’s usually something weird. The other night she was craving a pickle juice snow cone, which to me sounds about as appetizing as a motor oil snow cone, or a Listerine snow cone. Luckily, we couldn’t find a pickle juice snow cone anywhere. My wife swears they are real and she had them all the time growing up, but I think her baby-addled brain is playing tricks on her, poor woman. I offered to take some pickle juice from our pickles at home and throw it into the blender with some ice cubes, but she said that would be a pickle juice smoothie and she has no interest in those.

Her food cravings seem to come from totally opposite ends of the food spectrum. One end is “super healthy” and the other is “devoid of any nutritional value whatsoever.” For example, in a given evening my wife might desire a pizza smothered in nacho cheese sprinkled with French fries and organic broccoli, asparagus spears and a grapefruit.

Lately she has really been craving beef: hamburgers, roast beef sandwiches, pot roast, steak. If it used to be part of a cow, she can't get enough of it. She even stirs a little ground beef into her yogurt every morning. My sister said it's because a woman's blood volume doubles when they are pregnant, and the iron found in beef helps to accomplish this. That's one explanation, but I think my wife might have always had a secret appetite for steak and hamburgers. She used to order salads or pasta to try and maintain some dainty image, but now that she’s pregnant and has an excuse to eat all the red meat she wants.

My wife also has to take pre-natal vitamins now, which she is not thrilled about. We even bought her gummy vitamins, but she doesn’t like them any better. I, on the other hand, think the gummy vitamins are delicious and steal them all the time. I have enough folic acid in my system now to birth three babies.

And you will be happy to know that her super olfactory senses are still going strong. The other night she said to me, “Do you smell bacon?”

“Are you quoting Wayne's World?” I asked. “Is that a thing we do now? If it is, we shouldn't because that movie wasn't funny in 1992, and it's not any funnier now.”

“No seriously, I smell bacon!”

I couldn't smell anything, but upon further investigation it turns out someone was cooking bacon two floors up and her super senses picked it up.

Scary, I know.

Has anyone else ever heard of a pickle juice snow cone? If you've been pregnant, what stuff did you crave? Leave a comment if you please.

For reals this time: the good times are over

2011-01-10T06:35:00.004-07:00

I’ve been terrified to write lately because of a paralyzing fear that I’m turning into a “mommy blogger.” I used to write about funny stuff and take cheap shots at exes, bosses and teachers, but everything I write these days is “baby, baby, baby” and I can’t stop it!

I guess a baby is the next logical step because I've already chronicled my adventures in dating, graduate school, graduating, getting my first real job, getting engaged and getting married. Now this step is so big that it is taking over my life, like it or not. I know it’s really bad because the other day I actually asked someone, “Do you want to see our ultrasound picture?” That is just awful because I used to hate hate hate looking at unsolicited ultrasound pictures.

Still, I can't get over the feeling that the good times are really over this time. As I said before, we planned on this little person coming into our lives, but now that he/she is really in the chute I am having a super hard time not resenting him/her. For instance, my wife just bought me my sixth guitar this Christmas (if you don’t already understand why someone needs that many guitars, don't ask because you wouldn't understand) but with all our time, money and energy now going towards The Kid I fear this may be the last guitar I ever get.

In the past, my wife and I have enjoyed going camping with friends but I know that will also go the way of sleeping in. Even when The Kid gets old enough to go it won’t be the same. We’ll spend the whole trip trying to make sure The Kid doesn’t fall into the fire/water/poison oak or get poked with sticks/marshmallow skewers/tent poles.

To be honest, The Kid is already ruining my life. My wife and I used to do cool stuff together all the time, weeknights and everything! But now my wife is too sick and too tired to do anything, so all we can do now is watch NCIS and try and brainstorm things she can eat that won’t make her sick.

What I’m saying is I might mention babies from time to time because having a baby consumes your whole life, so I apologize in advance. However, I will not become a mommy blogger, and one thing I promise I will never do is overshare. For example, one of my friends recently tweeted: “36 week checkup went great today. No dilation yet but the cervix is softening up. Good sign!” I read that mess and I’ll be darned if I didn’t just about throw up everything I have ever eaten ever. I solemnly promise to never write about cervixes, not that I have anything against them, but I know not everyone wants a play-by-play.

In some ways I wish I could become a mommy blogger because the fancy ones have corporate sponsors, merchandise and giveaways. Ideally I could be sponsored by Panda Express, Ben & Jerry’s and Epiphone Guitars, and I could sell a cookbook entitled “Busy Busy Busy” In The Kitchen.

I can see it now.

Being pregnant stinks OR If your wife is pregnant, good luck trying to eat anything

2010-12-27T06:19:00.032-07:00

Pregnancy has turned my wife into a super-powered mutant. Her sense of smell is so heightened that she can smell tater tots up to 10 miles away.

I say tater tots because, in addition to super mutant olfactory senses, my wife also now cannot stand the smell of all kinds of things that don't bother normal people, like tater tots. Tater tots seem innocuous enough, but to a pregnant woman you might as well be putting ketchup on a skunk dipped in sewage.

Speaking of which, do you know what makes my mouth water? The smell of spicy chicken curry. Do you know what makes a pregnant woman retch and reach for the closest thing she can puke into? The smell of spicy chicken curry.

When I get home from the gym I must hop directly into the shower before my wife starts gagging. Once my wife got pregnant she promptly decided that her body wash smelled almost as putrid as chicken curry, so she started stealing mine. This confused me quite a bit, because I was like, “Hey, that’s new! You smell like... me? Wait a minute!”

I didn't want her perfectly good body wash to go to waste and she was using mine up, so I tried using her old stuff. Not very well thought out, I know. The minute I was out of the shower and dressed she said, “Get away! Get away!” like she was Dracula and I was the biggest clove of garlic in all of Transylvania. I had to go shower all over again.

My wife also cannot stand the smell of bathrooms, even clean ones. At first it was just public restrooms, but now she can't stand the smell of our bathroom at home, which is relatively clean. We tried cleaning everything in it with Lysol but the smell of Lysol makes her gag even more, so it looks like she just might have to hold it until the baby is born, poor woman.

The upside is that I now have an extra stream of income because I contract my wife out to law enforcement agencies to help them track fugitives. We’re undercutting all the bloodhounds in town on prices and making a fortune.

Pregnant or no, are there certain smells that make you gag? Leave a comment if you please.

A little potato for Christmas

2010-12-20T05:30:00.026-07:00

My wife contracted a parasite that is making her violently sick. It’s leeching nutrients from her body, growing rapidly and is currently the size of a lemon. That’s right, clever reader, as a good friend of ours used to say, my wife caught “baby.” There’s no time like the present to reproduce, I always say.

For those of you who are unsettled by the thought of a little Jacob running around just remember that it is only half me, so you can all breathe a sigh of relief.

When Wifey called people to tell them our good news they kept saying, “Aren’t you so excited?” She was excited, but she felt guilty for being afraid too. She also felt guilty for being a little grossed out by the whole process.

“There’s, like, a little thing growing in there!” she said to me. “It’s like some sci-fi movie where the alien thing grows inside the human host and then violently bursts out covered in blood and guts!”

She has a good point, but all joking aside, we are very happy. However, what a lot of expectant parents won’t tell you - but we will - is that with the happiness also comes a fair amount of pure terror. I think paralyzing fear is an intelligent and appropriate response to finding out you are going to become a parent. We wanted and planned for a baby, but now that it’s actually under construction we are scared to death.

My face has broken out like never before, and sometimes I wake up in middle of the night thinking, “How are we going to afford a baby? What if we make sucky parents? What if our baby turns out to be a bratty troll child?”

Sometimes I think, This is crazy! Maybe I just dreamed that we were going to have a baby. And just when I had convinced myself it was a dream my wife got her first ultrasound, which was pretty clear proof that something was in there. An ultrasound doesn't have a lot of details, you see. It basically looked like someone had tried to photocopy a potato or a chicken nugget.

“That’s a baby?” I asked the ultrasound tech. “Are you sure?”

She assured me that it was a baby and politely labeled the head and bottom, which was good because I wasn't sure which was which.

For parents: How did you feel when you got the big news?
For non-parents: Do you plan on having kids? Why or why not?
Leave a comment if you please.

A Merry Christmas is just not in the cards

2010-12-13T06:12:00.016-07:00

I dislike Christmas cards, or rather I dislike sending out Christmas cards. It is not my idea of fun to spend my holiday season rounding up addresses, trying to think of something meaningful to write in each card, addressing envelopes and licking stamps. Now if people sent money after receiving your Christmas card, like a graduation or wedding announcement, I’d be all for it. But they don’t, and I’m not.

Therefore when my wife announced she would be sending out Christmas cards I groaned within myself. I tried to talk her out of it. I tried to deter her by saying that if we were going to send out Christmas cards we would have to include a family newsletter called the “Divett Dispatch” that details everything we have done this year along with a color photo of ourselves in festive sweaters. It was a bluff, of course, but it only made her more determined to send out Christmas cards and very angry.

Here I will pause and ask a question: when two women argue, who wins? I ask because it has been well documented that when a man and a woman argue, the man will lose every time. But if two women argue, will the argument go on indefinitely until one of them dies of starvation because there is no man around to lose said argument? But I digress.

As you may have gathered, we’re sending out Christmas cards. I told my wife not to bother with my side of the family or my friends because I communicate with them regularly throughout the year and I say that is good enough. We don't need to get Hallmark involved. Plus, they would be suspicious if they started getting Christmas cards from me all of a sudden.

“I already sent him money when he graduated and when he got married!” they would say. “What more does he want?”

I dislike Christmas cards so much because they are one of many sinister things that put unnecessary stress into a season that should be calm and happy. I get sad when I hear people complaining about how the holidays are so stressful. If Christmas is stressful for you it is because you are making it stressful and you need to chill the heck out and stop trying to do everything.

Here are no-stress ideas on how to handle common holiday tasks:

Christmas cards: E-mail. (You will save a fortune on cards, postage and holiday sweaters.)

Shopping: Gift cards. Or cash. And purge a few people from your shopping list.

Baking: Pillsbury.

Dinners: Chinese take-out.

Parties: Skype.

See? It’s as easy as that. You can thank me later.

Is anyone else anti-Christmas card? Do you have other ways to de-stress for the holidays? Leave a comment if you please.

It's just as I feared, my beard has disappeared

2010-12-06T06:10:00.001-07:00

Well, I have shaved off my beard, and, after a sufficient period of mourning, I have found the courage to write about it.

Don’t blame my wife because it isn’t her fault. My wife is very sweet and told me that I am a grown person, can groom myself however I want and if I want to look like a homeless drifter it is my business. That is fortunate, because if she had demanded that I shave I would have grown the beard longer just to spite her. I am a man and I am in control of my own face! More or less.

I decided shaving was in my best interest (see the “Spousal Kisses versus Beardity” graph) so I just got out the shaving cream, cried a little and did the deed. I don’t miss it too terribly, but it is strange to see my own face again. Plus, shaving a beard adds, like, 30 pounds to your face. And my face always feels cold now.

Not only did my wife hate to kiss me when I was bearded, but she is also half-Cuban and believes that all bearded men are communists. (Fidel and Che ruined it for everyone. Thanks for nothing, fellas!) My wife got this deep-seated political beard belief from her mother, who fled Cuba in the ‘60s to escape Castro’s regime. As you can imagine, the beard made my mother-in-law very uneasy.

But now the beard is gone and family relations are once again firing on all cylinders. It’s not over, though. I told my wife that she hadn’t seen the last of The Beard, and it would likely return when she least expected it like some villain in a bad movie sequel. I told my wife I will probably re-grow it when we’ve been married a long time, are bored of each other and aren’t kissing anyway.

Problem solved.

Have you ever done something you didn't want to do for love? Leave a comment, if you please.

Pardon me, I'm a turkey

2010-11-25T00:41:00.000-07:00

Today is Thanksgiving where I’m at and I've had one question nagging at me: Why turkey? Why not meatloaf or fried chicken or a big crown of broccoli? Why did turkeys get selected to be the sacrificial celebration animal? Is it because they are ugly and the pilgrims figured no one would miss them if they cooked them to extinction?

Some people say there was an abundance of wild turkeys in the Plymouth Colony. This explains how turkey got on the menu, but not how it came to be the central food, the Thanksgiving MVP, if you will. I’ve googled and googled without a satisfactory answer, but I did come across some interesting stuff.

For instance, my good friend Rush Limbaugh says that when you are saying grace over your Thanksgiving feast there is one thing and one thing only that you should be grateful for and that is: free enterprise. That's right, he claims that the “real” story of Thanksgiving starts with the pilgrims having a socialist economy where they shared everything, which caused them to starve because no one had motivation to work. Then someone got the bright idea to switch to a free enterprise system and suddenly everyone had food to spare, so they threw a party to celebrate free enterprise and this is what we now know as the First Thanksgiving. I don't know if I believe this because it sounds like everyone ate, and that's not a very conservative way of doing things.

I also found out that since 1947 the National Turkey Federation (yes, there is such an organization) has presented the President of the United States with several turkeys in a ceremony known as the “National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation” (yes, there is such a ceremony). Past presidents have simply eaten their turkeys, but in recent years presidents have been pardoning the turkeys, as if they were guilty of something other than being ugly. After the turkeys are pardoned they go on to become the grand marshal in a Thanksgiving parade and then get sent into turkey retirement at Disneyland. Seriously!

All of this turkey talk is making me hungry, which makes me glad that my turkey did not get pardoned.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Does anyone know how turkey came to play such a central role in American Thanksgiving? Or if you live someplace other than the U.S. do you celebrate Thanksgiving and how is it different? Leave a comment if you please.

"The Haunted Treadmill" and other weird tales OR Sweat Ghost Coast to Coast

2010-11-18T06:20:00.029-07:00

I went to the gym the other day and I came back looking like this:

Can you see it? Can you see the sweat on my shirt that forms a terrifying face? My wife discovered it when I came home.

“You have a face on you shirt!” she said in a panicky voice. “A face! A face! Get away!”

I looked in the mirror and conceded she was right. I thought it was totally cool, but she was terrified. This was because she had just been watching trailers for scary movies, one of her favorite things to do. She's too squeamish to watch the actual movies, so she just watches tons of scary movie trailers instead. Then I wake up in the middle of the night with her on my side of the bed, latched onto me like a octopus.

I've had experiences with ghosts before, so I figure what happened was a guy got killed at the gym in a treadmill accident (it happens!) but the gym covered it up because they didn't want to lose business. Now the sweaty spirit of this poor spectral jogger inhabits the treadmill where he died, hoping some chubby guy who is trying to get back into shape will bring his sad story to light. When I was running he manifested himself through my, uh, sweat stains. Gross, I know, but he's a ghost and he just wants to get closure in any way he can.

Currently the ghost is haunting my laundry hamper. What do you use to get ghost out of your laundry? Shout? Club soda? Maybe you just wash them in really hot water, like you do to get rid of bedbugs.

It's creepy, and it gives me an excuse to stay away from the gym for awhile.

Has anyone else had ghost problems lately? Or does anyone have any scary trailer recommendations for my wife? Leave a comment if you please.

The Stealth Beard

2010-11-15T06:14:00.015-07:00

As you may know, I really like beards. My wife, however, is not a big fan. The other night she was watching an episode of Bones that featured Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top sporting his trademark waist-length beard. Knowing my affinity for beards she promptly read my mind and said, "Don't get any ideas!" without even looking away from the TV.

But I figure it's my turn now. We've been married now for six months and I've been clean shaven the whole time, not to mention all the time before that while we were dating. I figure we can have joint custody of my face: six months clean shaven, six months bearded. Everybody wins.

When my wife went to Alaska for a week to visit family I immediately stopped shaving, and when she got back the beard was already pretty well established and there wasn't a whole lot she could do about it. Pretty stealthy, eh? Plus, I told her that she agreed in her marriage vows to accept me, beard and all. She didn't question it because a marriage ceremony is so long and has lots of unintelligible flowery language. Who knows what all they said in there.

So the beard is here to stay, at least for a while. I've gotten a few compliments on the beard, but I always unintentionally make it awkward. Here are a few of my poorly worded responses:

"Thanks, I'm saving a fortune on shaving cream."

"Thanks, if there's one thing I do well, it's grow hair."

"Thanks, it's kind of blond around my upper lip and chin so it looks like I've spilled something on my face, but other than that I like it too."

"Thanks, you too!" (To a woman)

The downside is I think the beard is hurting my game. From this graph we find that my wife kisses me less when I have the beard.

Maybe this is because she's been sick since she got back from Alaska, or maybe she just hates the beard.

I wish I had paid more attention in my college research class.

Anti-beard or pro beard? Leave a comment if you please.

"Exercise" and "discouragement" are often used in the same sentence

2010-11-08T00:12:00.004-07:00

Tonight a friend told me, “Hey, you've lost some weight!” and it was bittersweet. Sweet because, yeah, I really have lost some weight, and bitter because, yeah, I used to be a lot fatter than this. I've struggled with weight for a while now and it was nice to get some recognition.

If you too want to look... uh, less fat, just follow my simple step-by-step instructions and see pitifully small results that don't seem proportional to the amount of effort you're putting in, and only after several weeks and months of hard work! It's easy and fun!

Step 1: Grow a beard, which goes a long way toward covering up a double chin. (If you are a woman or a sissy man skip to step 2.)

Step 2: Stop consuming soda, candy, ice cream, fast food, etc. A good rule of thumb is, “If it tastes good, don't eat it.”

Step 3: Make yourself exercise. One of the best things you can do is join a gym because once you begin paying handsomely for the privilege you will be much more likely to work out. That's what motivates me, anyway.

One of my preferred (the one I hate the least) exercises is running. I prefer to run outdoors, but this time of year it is too cold to do so and now I have to run on a treadmill, which I hate for the following reasons. First, treadmills are merciless, feel no pity and if you can't keep up they will buck you right off; and second, once you get done running on a treadmill your top half still feels like it is moving forward at running speed while your bottom half feels like it is wading through peach Jello with Mandarin oranges imprisoned in it.

At my gym the treadmills are placed near a large window that overlooks the pool and I know it's only a matter of time until I get thrown off, crash through the window and land on the unsuspecting people swimming laps.

How is everyone else doing on their physical fitness? Making any headway? Or are you one of those no good, low down, dirty, rotten people who can eat whatever they want, never exercise and stay skinny? Leave a comment if you please.

And you might be interested to know that our upstairs neighbor continues to increase in creepiness and we've decided he might be the West Mesa Bone Collector.

Money talks, but when my co-workers get a hold of it all it ever says is "goodbye!"

2010-11-02T22:32:00.003-06:00

My coworkers are robbing me naked. I can't go to work one day without somebody hitting me up for money.

The worst are the people who treat their co-workers as a captive audience. You know the kind, the ones who are always hustling raffle tickets, cookies, candy bars, coupon books, wrapping paper, crappy jewelry, makeup and so forth and so on to infinity. And I think it's really unfair when a person in a position of authority over you asks you for money. What can you really say to someone who has the power to promote and/or fire you? I usually end up saying something like this:

“I'd like to advance my career, so of course I'll buy the Girl Scout cookies you are selling for your granddaughter!”

Or “You're about to give me my annual performance review, so of course I will buy an expensive raffle ticket to support your pet cause!”

Birthdays are also a huge drain on my wallet. Someone says, “It's Coworker's birthday tomorrow so we need to pitch in and take her out to lunch, buy her a card, buy her a cake and buy her a gift card for that one place we think she probably likes.”

Can't we just do one of those? Maybe just lunch, or maybe just a nice card. Must we do all four? I know I hate shelling out money for birthdays, so I tried to lighten the financial load on my co-workers. I told them they did not have to get me anything for my birthday, but that did not go over well.

“So you're trying to weasel out of birthdays now, is that it?” they accused. “You think by saying that now you don't have to buy us stuff on our birthdays? Think again, sucker, 'cause on our birthdays we still demand cake, card, lunch and gift certificate. We'll just take the money we were going to spend on your birthday and put it towards ours.”

And last but not least is The Moral Committee. They meant “Morale,” but state employees can't spell, so now it's the “Moral” Committee, which sounds like some kind of religious group. They raise funds by asking us to “donate” food, turning around and putting it up for sale and then asking us to buy it back from them. This is to improve morale. The profits then go towards an office party, which I never wanted in the first place. I see my co-workers enough as it is. I do not want to see them at an extra, after-hours party.

I come to work to make money, but I'm just barely breaking even.

Is anyone else getting swindled by their co-workers? Pressured by their superiors to buy things? Leave a comment, if you please.

Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend

2010-10-25T06:15:00.002-06:00

Last Halloween I splurged and bought tons of good candy to give out to trick-or-treaters. I had some dream of being that house that kids want to come to because the candy is so plentiful and delicious and they tell all their friends. But it was not to be.

One of the first kids to come through looked into his pillowcase after I had given him the candy and said, “Ugh, I don't want that!” So I said, “Fine! Be that way. Next year it's Smarties for everyone.”

This year I'm not spending a dime. A metric ton of Smarties costs about as much as a few potatoes (which I also considered giving out, just to spite the little punks) and that's all I'm willing to spend on these ungrateful brats.

Trick-or-treater: “Hey, what happened to the good candy from last year? What's up with all the Smarties?”

Me: “Well you can thank Mr. Bad Manners over there for ruining it for everyone. You're lucky I'm not giving out toothbrushes!”

If any kids give me attitude this year I'm going to take them to some Republicans and say, “This kid was asking for a handout.” That kid won't stand a chance.

Honestly, it's all for the best. If I have a bowlful of nasty candy, I am much less likely to eat it myself. Last year I almost ran out of candy and I blamed it on greedy kids. However, if I am completely honest I must admit that I ate a fair amount of it myself.

Miniature Snickers are like crack cocaine.

Am I overreacting? Smarties were the bane of my childhood trick-or-treating but does anyone else like them? Leave a comment if you please.

He's just being neighborly

2010-10-14T08:56:00.001-06:00

I've been withholding judgment for a while but now I've come to the certain conclusion that our upstairs neighbor is a serial killer. Don't believe me? Here is the evidence:

First, he lives one the third floor, we live on the second and he is always sitting out on his balcony and smoking. Sitting on a balcony and smoking is not creepy in an of itself, but he watches us from the minute we get out of our car to the minute we go inside. It's not a flattering type of watching like, "Look at that attractive couple," or even a mocking sort of watching like, "Look at that funny-looking couple." Instead it's a creepy kind of watching, like, "After they go missing, I wonder how long until someone calls the cops?" or "I wonder what I would look like wearing his skin as a suit" or "I'd like their eyeballs for my collection, I believe I have room in my freezer."

Second, any time I get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom or get a drink of water I always hear him moving around upstairs. It's not regular steps, either. It's more like dull thuds, heavy footfalls and slow, creaky shuffling. What is he doing at that late hour? Oh, I don't know, maybe disposing of a body! What else would someone be doing at 3 a.m.?

Lastly, he starts playing his music at top volume at 6:30 a.m., even on weekends. That doesn't sound like a hardcore serial killer trait, but it does show his psychopathic disregard for other people. It is clearly sadistic behavior to wake people up on a Saturday morning with a muffled "Kiss On My List" by Hall and Oates coming through the ceiling, along with other classic hits.

In my half-asleep state I start playing "Name That Tune" and it drives my wife nuts.

"'Wheel in the Sky?' Is that Kansas?" I will ask my wife.

"No," she will say. "Journey. You always get those mixed up. Now go back to sleep!"

Now you have the evidence, so you be the judge. All I'm saying is if I quit posting, you'll know whose freezer to look in.

Anyone else have creepy neighbors? Annoying neighbors? Leave a comment if you please.

Candy candy candy

2010-10-10T12:31:00.005-06:00

As I've mentioned, I'm pretty excited about Halloween, specifically the candy part of Halloween. I bought some the instant I saw it on shelves, which gave me an idea for an ingenious experiment.

I didn't think of the experiment right away, though. It was September 15 and I had a HUGE stash of Halloween candy. I knew I had better do something or I'd eat it all myself, so I bought a candy dish and put it on my desk at work with the hope that my coworkers would eat it all for me.

Once my supervisor spotted the dish he started coming into my office more frequently. Much more frequently. He would come and chat personally about things he used to e-mail me about, all while helping himself to giant fistfuls of candy. While my co-workers were getting photocopied memos delivered to their mailboxes, I was getting personal visits from the boss, and he was getting all of my Mr. Goodbars. I tracked how often he came in and came up with this highly scientific graph:

As a side note, more and more employees are getting candy dishes now that we are in October. Since then, I've busted my boss sneaking into their offices while they weren't there to raid their candy dishes, no joke! As the boss he has a key to all the offices and he is breaking into offices to steal candy. I know he must do that to my dish also because my candy practically evaporates and I can't refill it fast enough. I think he has a candy problem and I should stop enabling him.

Anyway, I put apples in my candy dish just to see what would happen. So far I have not seen hide nor hair of my boss.

Is anyone else a candy addict or a candy enabler? Leave a comment, if you please.

This might be an overshare but...

2010-10-04T18:15:00.000-06:00

It is super easy to get fat but it is pure agony to try and get un-fat, and I may just quit trying.

I guess I don’t quite consider myself “fat” just yet. I like to think of myself as “chubby,” but I know with depressing certainty that “Chubby” is just a rest stop on the highway to Fatty Acres. It’s a super slippery slope because they road into Fatty Acres is paved with delicious things like donuts, pizza and ice cream; whereas the road out of Fatty Acres is bristling with miseries like exercising, sweating and healthy eating. It’s no wonder a lot of people arrive in Fatty Acres and retire there. It’s like the Hotel California.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to discover that it is not easy changing lifelong habits. Currently I’m on the road to Healthier Living but it is horrendously bumpy and my willpower keeps breaking down. I really miss all my friends back in Fatty Acres, too. Little Caesar doesn’t call as often as he used to. I send Ben and Jerry letters sometimes. Dr. Pepper still texts me now and again but it’s not the same.

Despite all this, my wife says she loves me just the way I am. The only reason people get skinny is to find a partner, and I’ve already got one locked in for forever. If my wife loves me the way I am, then why do I need to keep trying to be fit? Nobody likes an overachiever.

I think my reasoning is quite sound.

Revenge of the nerds: This time it's personal

2010-09-27T07:15:00.000-06:00

I got a virus on my computer and went to a local electronics chain to see about getting it removed. There I found a bunch of nerds nursing decades-old indignities and exacting revenge by overcharging people for even the most routine of computorial tasks.

“Remove a ‘virus’? Are you sure it’s even a true virus? Perhaps instead it is a Trojan, worm, rootkit or just spyware.” the Chief of the nerds said in a successful attempt to make me feel monumentally ignorant. “Either way, that’ll be $200 bucks to fix it. Make it $250 because I don’t like the look of you. Maybe more depending on my mood.”

“Whaaaaaaaaaaat?” I swooned. “Isn’t that, uh, really high?”

“You should have thought of that before you mistreated people like us in high school,” he sneered, as his fellow nerds chuckled and egged him on. “Who’s laughing now, cool guy?”

“But I’m one of you guys!” I tried to say. “I have contact lenses now, but I’m still one of you! Back in high school you were nerds of the computer persuasion, and I was a nerd of the marching band persuasion. I guarantee we got the same amount of butt-kickings, though. I’m a brother, a friend!”

The nerds grumbled amongst themselves in technological nerd-speak.

“I never bullied you, I promise!” I whined. “Now I’m a social worker and I get even less respect than I did in the marching band! Why don’t you overcharge that former jock over there and give me the fellow-nerd discount?”

They would not lower their prices, so I did what any good man would do and told them I was going to take it home and fix it myself, never mind that I had no idea how to do it and would probably make it worse. Why pay someone to do something when you can probably maybe sort of most likely do it yourself for free? The nerds let me go on my way, laughing amongst themselves about how I would certainly return sheepishly a few days.

And I probably would have gone crawling back in a few days but I found a website run by kinder nerds who are less stingy - or perhaps still seeking acceptance - and it had step-by-step instructions on how to fix my problem. I wanted to go back to the nerds at the store and say something like, “In your face! I did it myself! D.I.Y., we neva die!”

But I don’t want to burn my nerd bridges as you never know when you might need a nerd to save you.

Mental dental torture

2010-09-21T20:56:00.000-06:00

Today I went to the dentist for my bi-annual cleaning and I felt like a spy being tortured. They sat me in that chair and put that light in my face and started asking me all those questions, such as, "How often do you floss? What kind of toothbrush do you use? What is the secret formula? What are the access codes? Talk! Talk!"

Unlike the stolid spies in the movies I crack immediately and blubber, "I skip flossing occasionally! I have a huge bag of *Halloween candy sitting on my passenger seat right now! One time I fell asleep without brushing! Now leave me alone, I've told you all I know!"

In my defense, dentists break you down psychologically. Guantánamo Bay has got nothing on my dentist. Each dentist's office is kept at a mean temperature of 33 degrees faranheit, just warm enough to keep the Novacaine from freezing. The first thing they do is put a bib on you, a grown person, and you sit there feeling like at any moment someone is going to start spooning strained peas into your mouth while making airplane sounds. Then they ask you questions while they have both hands in your mouth and you are powerless to anything but mumble or gurgle incoherently in response. Then they put you in a heavy lead vest and make you bite down on painful plastic things that cut into your mouth and take 5,000 x-rays, agonizingly changing the position of the plastic things for each x-ray.

And all the while the interrogator aka "hygienist" is sitting there with her tray of torture implements.

"If you don't tell me what I want to know you're going to meet my little friend The Iron Hook."

And of course my gums immediately retract in fear and I tell them what they want to know.

* Yes, it's true. I've already bought Halloween candy.

And I noticed that I've written a ton of blogs about dentists. Creepy.

If anyone else asks me to play Santa Claus somebody is getting hurt

2010-09-16T06:59:00.004-06:00

I know it is way too early to talk about Santa Claus, but at a recent staff meeting my co-workers were discussing the upcoming office Christmas party. The issue of who would play Santa Claus came up and the role of Santa was offered to me with the following justification:

“Jacob, you have to play Santa because Male Co-worker and Other Male Co-worker are too skinny. You have the, uh, right build.”

Rude! Asking a man if he would like to play Santa Claus is like asking a woman if she is pregnant. It is impolite and should not be done under any circumstances.

Furthermore, am I the only was who was horrified to find out about - as I like to call it - The Santa Claus Conspiracy? At a tender age I started to realize that the whole Santa Claus story didn’t add up and angrily confronted my parents.

“Just what are you trying to pull here?” I demanded.

My parents – who never once suspected I was onto them - spilled the red and green Christmas beans and I was mortified, speechless with horror. Parents, relatives, made-for-TV-movies, the rest of the media at large and adults in general had conspired against me my whole life to make me to believe that an obese elderly man in festive red attire would land his livestock on my roof and bring me free stuff, asking nothing in return. I should’ve known the story was fake all along because nobody does anything nice without expecting something in return!

After Santa Claus was debunked, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Great Pumpkin, Albuquerque Turkey, Kermit the Frog and all of their contemporaries fell in short succession. What else had my parents and everyone else lied about? What other dark conspiracies were there, and how deep did they go? Did the President of the United States, the Pope or Oprah know about Santa Claus and similar frauds, and, if so, why weren’t they taking actions to stem the large-scale deception of children?

It will be a long time before my wife and I are foolhardy enough to have children, but when we do we will have to decide whether or not we carry on the treacherous tradition of Santa Claus. Obviously I am avidly Anti-Santa but my wife is a staunch Santa sympathizer and advocates lying to little children. I sense we have a heated debate in our future.

I, of course, refused to play Santa for moral reasons as I cannot in good conscience take part in perpetuating this holiday hoax.

And it’s insulting. “The right build” indeed!

If you are the Christmas celebrating type, are you Pro-Santa or Anti-Santa and why? Will you do Santa Claus with your children? Leave a comment if you please.

Pandora's box is full of knives, sharp pencils and fat jokes

2010-09-03T11:50:00.002-06:00

I think I might be the last person to discover it, but you can stream TV shows on Netflix! Netflix + WiFi + Laptop = Me watching The Office in my bathroom.

Weird and too much information, I know, but what a discovery! It’s been kind of like opening Pandora’s box, not because it has taken over my life, but because I am watching something no matter what I’m doing and that has proven to be extremely problematic.

For instance, I was loading the dishwasher while simultaneously watching The X-Files. I distractedly put a very large and very pointy knife in the utensil basket-thingy with the point facing out. I continued loading dishes, the knife long since forgotten, when all of a sudden I became a foul-mouthed stigmatic, blood flowing profusely from a knife wound in the palm of my hand and profanity flowing profusely from my mouth. Distracted dish washing is no joke, people! Take it from me.

Later, I went home to see my family. Having forgotten the sharpened pencil in his hand, my younger brother put his arm around me to show that he was almost as tall as me and accidentally jabbed the pencil into the back of my head.

Bleeding from the palm and head, however, was nothing compared to what was coming. The pencil-stabbing incident coincided with a little family get-together to celebrate a third brother moving back to New Mexico after he had lived in Cleveland for two years. He went down the line congratulating all my other siblings on how good they looked, but when he got to me he said, “You look, um, heavier.”

What he had wanted to say was “fat,” but I give him points for attempted tact. I knew about the fat thing already and had taken steps to remedy it. I’ve always had an on-again, off-again relationship with exercising and eating healthy. Fortunately, I’m currently in an “on-again” phase, and after that little “heavier” comment I have committed to redouble my efforts.

They say you can’t go home again, but you totally can. Just be prepared for what you might encounter there.

My narrow escape

2010-08-28T20:42:00.003-06:00

The other night my wife and I went out to dinner where I ordered a “bottomless” lemonade and got my money's worth of free refills. After dinner we went up to Sandia Crest to see the wonderful view of the city of Albuquerque and the surrounding area. The drive up to the top of the mountain takes a little over an hour and we arrived at the top in good spirits, took in the view and prepared to drive back down.

Part way through the drive down I realized I had drunk one lemonade too many.

“I think I need to pull over and 'use the restroom,'” I announced to my wife.

To my surprise she was horrified.

“You can't just wander off into the mountain wilderness and expect to come back alive!” she said. “Haven't you seen any movies?”

I told her I had, in fact, seen some movies.

“Then you know that when you gallivant out there a killer, monster or mutant will kill you in a horrific fashion. Then I have to call for you awhile, be really scared and then go out looking for you, only to get killed in a similar manner. Or maybe the monster will initially bypass you and devour me first because I'm Latina, and everyone knows that minorities die first. So you better just hold it because I'm not getting eviscerated tonight because you don't know when to stop drinking lemonade.”

I had to admit she had a valid point, so I had to hold it all the way down the mountain. All in all, a very fun trip.

* This post was "clipped" by Hippest Snippets, which makes me happy.

Eggs and all of my false hopes

2010-08-27T11:43:00.001-06:00

You know that Mitch Hedberg joke about cinnamon roll incense? Well one of my co-workers has achieved it! Except this raggedy chump uses cinnamon raisin toast scents to mess with me. He has this air-freshener-wax-melter device that smells precisely like hot, buttered cinnamon raisin toast and never fails to make my mouth water for some every time I walk past his office. My nose deceives me every single time and my senses are thrown into tailspin.

My nose: “Cinnamon Raisin Toooooooooooooooast!”
My brain: “No, no! It’s that one air freshener, remember? How many times must we have to go through this?”
My stomach: “Stop messing with me! I can’t take much more of this!”

I wanted to make some cinnamon raisin toast, so I went to the store to buy eggs. I carefully opened several cartons and scrupulously examined each egg until I found a carton with the perfect dozen. I have broken many an egg accidentally by setting the milk or another heavy grocery item atop them, so with my raisin toast in mind I carefully set the carton of eggs in the baby seat of grocery cart.

I paid for my groceries but knew I was not out of the woods yet and I was still in the egg danger zone. I’ve broken lots more eggs by recklessly placing them in my trunk with the other groceries, and when I take a turn too fast the eggs become a trunk omelet and turn my trunk and other groceries into a yolky mess.

This time I carefully placed the eggs on the roof of my car while I loaded all of the other groceries into the trunk. I had every intention of moving the eggs from the roof into the passenger seat and buckling them up for safety, but I totally forgot and drove off. I don’t know what became of my eggs as I did not realize this until I was halfway home, but I assume the eggs promptly fell off the roof and splattered all over the highway somewhere.

So I guess the smell of cinnamon raisin toast is as close as I will get for now.

Slowing down but not quite signing off

2010-08-09T00:00:00.006-06:00

I regret to inform you that I will no longer be posting weekly. I'll still blog periodically when I think of something funny, just not every week. The reason is a few other things are demanding my attention:

1. I am trying to learn Spanish.
2. I am trying to write short stories and -as silly as it sounds- a novel.
3. Starcraft II just came out and ohmygoodnessitisAWESOME!

Like many of you, I have found that there are just not enough hours in the day. Free time is kind of scarce and even though it only takes a few hours per week to research, write and edit a blog, I think I would like to put those hours toward other things. And truth be told I am having a hard time coming up with stuff to blog about anymore.

I started my blog right after I graduated with my bachelor's degree because I had so much fun writing for the university paper and I wanted to keep up my writing momentum. After over two years and 116 posts I think I have kept up that momentum and now wish to transfer it to the aforementioned short stories. Perhaps I will post them here at a later date if no one buys them.

Maybe I'll start vlogging, or start a new blog about recipes, fashion, popular TV shows or my ultra-conservative right wing political views. I'm kidding.

Anyway, if you haven't already, please download the most recent Avenge Apollo (the band I'm in) album for free. (One last plug.)

Thanks to everyone who has read and commented over these last two years! Stay tuned for random posts.

Just say "no" to toads OR Making money in a really weird way

2010-08-02T00:00:00.005-06:00

America has lost the “War on Drugs,” and if you don't think we have, just ask my parents’ dachshund.

Her name is Holly, and she’s not even a full dachshund. She’s what cutesy dog breeders call a “Dorky” because she is a cross between a Dachshund and a “Yorkie” (Yorkshire Terrier). My parents don’t even like dogs, but they still have children at home and feel obligated to have dogs for their kids to play with. And picking up dog poop builds character.

My parents live near the Rio Grande river, so toads are always making their way into our yard and into Holly’s mouth. Toads have poisonous skin and after biting one Holly will immediately foam at the mouth like a rabid, furry sausage. Other dogs have had run-ins with toads, but they usually learn after the first time. Not Holly. As far as we can tell, she seeks out toads and tries to bite them and is foaming at the mouth more often than not.

We just assumed Holly was the stupidest dog ever and that her doggie brain was a few sizes too small, but then my mom found an article saying that dogs can get addicted to the hallucinogenic effects of biting toads, no joke!

"I can't help myself."

It must be true. I know Holly has formed a habit because now she's dealing. I've seen her on the corner slangin' toads. I can hear her saying, in a low voice, “I got them toads, I got them toads. I got Colorado River toads, Sonoran Desert toads. Way stronger than the ones I sold you last week.”

If it gets much worse, we’re going to have to have a puppy intervention, and it won’t be pretty.

Parents: Holly, we’ve brought you here tonight to talk about your toad problem.

Holly: I don’t have a toad problem. I can quit whenever I want and I'm not hurting anyone. It's my life! So what if I want to go an bite a toad from time to time? Doesn't everyone?

Perhaps there is dog rehab. They have salons, spas and resorts for overly moneyed people to take their child-substitute dogs to, so why not doggie rehab? If there isn’t one, I will found the first Canine Drug Rehabilitation facility –which would also treat cats with catnip problems– and become rich beyond my wildest dreams.

Since I’ve been paying so much attention to my parents foaming, delinquent puppy lately my wife has accused me of being a “dog lover,” which is just uncalled for. I think she is afraid I’m going to bring a puppy home without asking her, but she should know that I never do anything that might get me in trouble without assessing her reaction first using the Jacob Divett Marital Anger Scale. It goes from 1 to 10, with 1 being something I will get forgiven for pretty quickly and 10 being divorce court. For example, I might say, “How mad would you be if I pushed you into this pond/used our savings to buy a killer guitar/quit my job to play Starcraft II full-time?” Then she tells me her number, and I decide if it’s worth it.

Wifey doesn’t need to worry because I only like dogs right up to the point where I have to pick up poop.

Beard, Bathrooms and Bears, Oh my!

2010-07-26T00:00:00.004-06:00

Every time I use the men's restroom at work and go to wash my hands I am greeted by a light dusting of gray beard trimmings all over the sink. This means that one of my co-workers trims their beard in the public restroom and doesn't even have the decency to clean up their beard shavings.

I hate washing my hands with beard everywhere, but mostly I hate being reminded that I share the space with about 15 other people. I like to pretend that I'm the only one who uses it but when confronted with castoff facial hair or an un-flushed toilet this illusion quickly evaporates.

Everyone knows that public restrooms are unsanitary. Dr. Dipak Chatterjee of India even said that public toilets are so unsanitary that it's better to use adult diapers, but most of us have to use them out of necessity. I just can't hold it a whole work day.

So I do my best to get by. First, I've tried to track down the beard trimming guy, but out of the 15 men that work in my office, 11 have gray beards, meaning there are 11 suspects. I now hold the clean shaven and dark bearded guys in higher esteem because they are follicularly responsible.

Also, let me say that the little paper “seat protectors,” so called, are a joke. I can't go while I'm sitting on a piece of wax paper. I feel as if I will slide right off the seat.

The most important thing a person can do when using a public restroom is lock the door or stall. At my work it seems like someone is always trying to open the door while I go. I guess we all feel the urge at the same time. They don't just gingerly try the knob, either. They try and break the door down like they are some horror movie monster and I'm the stupid teenager who picked a poor hiding place.

At one office building I spent time at each restroom was unisex and sealed with an electronic lock that all the employees knew the code to, so anyone could get into any restroom at anytime. Each restroom had a two-sided sign with one side colored green and the other colored red. To prevent awkwardness, people were supposed to flip the sign to red when they were using the restroom and green when it was vacant. However, people were always forgetting to flip the sign appropriately and walking in on each other (Yikes! Hey, Boss.) or waiting patiently at the door of an unoccupied restroom.

The good news is people are taking matters into their own hands. Jack Sims of Singapore has founded the World Toilet Organization which has a mission to improve toilet and sanitation conditions worldwide. He also has started the World Toilet College to provide training in toilet design, maintenance and sustainable sanitation.

I'm going to write the WTO and see if they can do something about my work restroom and I request a World Toilet Organization bumper sticker.

I believe in a thing called duct tape

2010-07-19T00:00:00.004-06:00

I had my heart broken this week. I thought it was Friday but it was really Wednesday, which was heartbreaking.

I was at work and people were yelling at me and making all kinds of demands, but I was calm and serene because in my head I was like, “Yell and demand all you want, suckers, tomorrow is Saturday.”

Only it wasn't. After that, it felt like Saturday was never going to come. And just like that, my heart was broken.

I wasn't able to fix my broken heart, but there was some other broken stuff I was able to fix. Let me first say that I believe in the power of duct tape. When my wife's car window broke, I used duct tape to fix it, and later my music recording device went bad but I duct taped it back health.
Duct tape is an American institution, like apple pie, overly large cars and credit card debt. I once used duct tape and JB weld to fix a friend's carburetor on his '72 Ford Maverick, no joke. I estimate that between my father and I we have used approximately enough duct tape to stretch from the earth to the Planet Formerly Known As Pluto and back, so I wanted to research duct tape a little.

As it turns out, “duct” tape is a misnomer and duct tape is actually really not meant for use on ductwork, go figure. Duct tape scholars assert that “duct tape” derives from “duck tape,” which was the products' supposed name shortly after it was invented around World War II because it repelled water. Say it ain't so, duct tape.

There is a “Duck” tape club, and every year, “Duck” brand duct tape holds a contest in which high-school students create prom dresses out of duct tape, which sounds like way more fun than I had at my prom. The winner receives a $3,000 scholarship for college. I would have loved to go to college on a Duck tape prom dress scholarship.

Duct tape can be used to cure warts, although – like all medical discoveries – that fact is disputed. Duct tape has been used in the NASA space program and on the space station, so I feel totally legit using it to fix my Geo Prizm.

Springfield, Missouri, is the unofficial Duct Tape Capital of the World, because it claims to have sold more duct tape per capita than any other place in the world. I get a hunch there's not a whole lot going on in Springfield, Missouri.

Things I've used duct tape to fix: bike, chair, shoe, headphones, flip-flops, car stereo, toaster oven, refrigerator, relationship, clock radio. If you combine duct tape with JB weld and WD40 you have, like, the Triumvirate of DIY Fixing Power.

And, um... can you tell that I couldn't think of anything to blog about? Does it show that bad?

The moral of the story is that duct tape can fix everything, except this blog.

Placenta. It's what's for dinner

2010-07-12T00:00:00.004-06:00

I set out to write about eating lethal amounts of frozen custard but I ended up writing about eating placentas. Strange, I know.

Here's the story: Chillz, a local custard place offers a “challenge,” which is to eat eight scoops of frozen custard, eight toppings and eight waffles. If you do it in 30 minutes they take your picture and you get it free. If you can't do it, you have to pay $25 for it. I jokingly mentioned this to my brother and he seriously suggested we try it. Now I knew it was a stupid idea, but when I'm around my brother my competitive side comes out and I agreed to do it.

We knew we were out of our depth when we arrived at Chillz. We announced that we were here to do the challenge and the girl behind the counter said, “Have you been training?”

Training?

“You know, like going to all-you-can-eat places for several weeks, drinking several gallons of water in a sitting, eating drills. Stuff like that.”

Uh-oh. As you can imagine it was pretty much downhill from there. As my brother and I tried to kill ourselves with custard, the owner of Chillz talked a lot about “competitive eating,” where there are leagues and people stretch out their stomachs on purpose and compete to eat ridiculously large quantities of food in ridiculously short quantities of time. Competitive eaters run the risk of stomach paralysis and stomach perforations. “Competitive eating” is basically a cool name for Binge Eating Disorder that sounds better on ESPN2. The perversity of it all was too much for me to bear.

And speaking of perverse eating habits, around this same time my wife was doing a little research and was horrified to discover “placentophagy,” which – not unlike “competitive eating” – is a fancy word for something disgusting.

Placentophagy means “mammals eating the placenta of their young after childbirth,” which is fine if you are a goat, cat or woodchuck, but there are human women who advocate a mother eating her own placenta to prevent postpartum depression, no joke. Supposedly the practice has its roots in ancient eastern medicine, and if there's one thing hippies love, it's eastern medicine.

We had a lot of questions about placentophagy. For example, does a pregnant woman go to the delivery with a doggie-bag and say to the doctor, “Can you wrap this up for me, Doctor? I'd like to save this to eat later.” What if they mixed up the placentas and accidentally give you someone else's placenta to eat? Has one mother ever said to another, “Are you gonna eat that?”

These placentophagists aren't totally crazy, though. Instead of eating the placenta raw they say to freeze-dry it, grind it up and then put it on pizza or stir it into your coffee. (“How do you take your coffee?” “Cream, sugar, and a spoonful of placenta, if you please.”)

Which begs many more questions: Are there placenta recipe books? Does eating placenta give you “placenta breath”? I would not come within ten feet of someone who had been eating their own placenta, there is not enough mouthwash in the world.

And what do you use to grind up a placenta? A blender? Once you've ground up a placenta in a blender, you can't use it for anything else ever again. Not smoothies, not anything.

One placentophagist argument is that, “All mammals do it, humans are mammals, so humans should do it.” I took an English class in college, and that sure sounds like a “logical fallacy” to me, especially because other mammals live in holes, eat insects and clean themselves with their tongues, and I am not about to do any of those things.

The moral of the story is you are what you eat.

D.I. Why?

2010-07-05T00:00:00.005-06:00

My wife and I are trying to buy a house and I've decided I'd rather live in a cardboard box than go to the trouble of actually buying a house.

The first problem is that buying a house or even just making an offer on a house is death by paperwork. Your realtor locks you in a room stacked floor to ceiling with paperwork and you have to sign your way out and hope that you can sign everything before you die of starvation.

The second problem is that house flipping and home makeover reality shows, in conjunction with the Home Depot, have given a lot of unskilled people the idea that they can turn their average home into a dream castle by themselves. Do-It-Yourself-ing is cool, the only problem is some people really can't “do-it-themselves.” Looking at houses in our area we have seen all kinds of amateur monstrosities, and in order to buy them we'd have to put in a bunch of work to fix what some wannabe has already “fixed.”

For example, one of the homes we looked at was painted “Burning Orange” from floor to ceiling. That's right, someone had used a large quantity of drugs and proceeded to paint every room in their home bright, glaring orange. When I looked at the house I started to bleed from my eyelids due to retinal hemorrhaging.

The third and most irritating problem of all is: mortgage brokers. Mortgage brokers are professionals whose job it is to promise potential homebuyers the moon without a single intention of delivering. Here is a sample question from the Mortgage Broker Certification Exam:

“As a mortgage broker you must be:
A. 10% full of crap
B. 20% full of crap
C. 50% full of crap
D. 100% full of crap, unable to speak the truth under any circumstance”

And of course, the correct response is “D.”

If I sound desperate it's because I am. I want to get into a house so my wife and I can buy a bigger bed. Right now we are sharing a “full” size mattress. It's not luxurious by any means, but it's not too bad when we go to sleep together. We fit the space allotted.

In chemistry the process of “diffusion” will take a group of concentrated particles and distribute them uniformly.
In like manner, if my wife goes to bed before me she will “diffuse” from her side of the bed until she is miraculously taking up every square inch of our bed. And then when I come to bed she is impossible to wake up or move.

I need that new bed, man. I'd even move into an orange house at this point.

Hot dog blog

2010-06-28T00:00:00.006-06:00

It’s summertime, the sun is out and I feel like grilling, which got me thinking: why do men get so excited about barbecuing? Not all men love to grill, but only men love to grill. I’ve never seen a woman get super stoked about grilling up some burgers and dogs. They don’t even get that excited about steaks or ribs. They’ll eat them, but they’re not that interested in cooking them.

(This is my Roswell, NM apron)

Where does Man's primal urge to grill things come from? Like many things, it can probably be explained by evolutionary psychology and dates back to Caveman Times. (“Caveman Times” is a scientific era. Look it up, smarty.)

First of all, in Caveman Times the men were the primary hunters. Back then women didn’t concern themselves much with throwing spears and running herds of animals off cliffs. They were more into shoes and handbags.

Second, the Caveman had just figured out how to make weapons and hunt right around the time he learned to make fire. Throwing a freshly-dead animal on a crackling fire was the pinnacle of caveman civilization up to that point. It kept the Caveman and his family fed, perpetuated the Caveman species and resulted in lots of Caveman high fives. It was evidence that Man was evolving and it was not uncommon to hear a caveman say, “They’ll stop calling me a Neanderthal after they’ve had a taste of my smoky barbecue ribs. The mammoth falls right off the bone.”

Thus, the deep-seated need for men to take raw meat and cook it over an open fire has been passed down through the generations as an evolved psychological mechanism. We have even evolved propane, match light charcoal and the George Foreman Grill.

I received the latter as a wedding present. I like nothing better on a summer evening than to take the George out on my balcony, plug it in and grill me up some sausages made of leftover animal parts. That’s right: hot dogs. Hot dogs are actually made of “meat slurry,” which sounds delicious, don’t you think? I think “meat slurry” is an evasive way of saying, “Seriously, you really don’t want to know and if you research any further you'll be sorry.” I find the best way to eat a hot dog is to not think about what you are eating because you enjoy it a lot more.

Once when I lived in Eugene, Oregon I accidentally stumbled onto a vegan cookout. There was nothing but grills, smoke and vegans as far as the eye could see. It was marvelous. They all had lids on their barbecue grills so I couldn’t see what they were grilling. I was dying to know what it was because it smelled delicious. I chatted politely with the cooks awhile, but none of them volunteered. Finally I had to come right out and ask them what the heck a bunch of vegans could possibly be grilling.

“Eggplant!” several of the cooks responded in unison, as if grilling anything else was ridiculous.

A cruelty-free cookout! You eggplant-eating geniuses. I felt kind of bad for assuming that a cookout had to have meat, like that was kind of racist. Or meatist. Foodist?

You know what I mean.

I'm not on probation anymore OR More talk about getting older

2010-06-21T00:00:00.003-06:00

This week is the one year anniversary of me getting my first “real” job since graduating from graduate school. I approach this momentous occasion with mixed emotions.

(me as a student intern in Fall '08)

The happy emotions are that I am no longer a “probationary” employee. Being on “probation” just makes you feel crappy, you know? You haven't done anything wrong except for being new, but you're on probation like a criminal. Now that I'm not on probation I am 10 times harder to fire. Before they could've just said, “Get out of here!” but now they have to, like, document my mischief and misdeeds, write me up a bunch of times and hold the obligatory overlong bureaucratic meeting before they can even dream of canning me. My how the tables have turned. These days I just strut around the office all cocky, knock things out of peoples hands and say, “Try and fire me now, punk!” My boss isn't thrilled, but what can he do?

(me as a full-fledged employee in my glamorous office)

My job is a good job but still a job. I like what I do, but it's not like I get all excited on Sunday night and think, “Alright! I get to go to work in the morning!” If you get paid to do something, does it automatically become un-fun? I think so. If I got paid to eat Ben & Jerry's and watch Battlestar Galactica on DVD for 40 hours a week plus health and dental, would it cease to be fun? I don't know, but I'm willing to find out. If anyone knows an ice-cream-eating-DVD-watching place that is hiring please let me know and I will get them my resumé.

The sad emotions are that I am getting older. My 10-year high school reunion is coming up next month and I am still not planning on going. My wife wants to go because she thinks it will be hilarious to talk to my old high school friends about what a dork I was in high school. I was toying with the idea but it turns out that it costs $50 per person to go. I didn't want to go when I thought it was free and I am certainly not going to go if it costs money. I am not paying money to remember high school.

Also, my wife keeps finding new gray hairs for me. I don't think they really are coming out of my head. I say she takes one of her gray hairs (which are fewer than mine, but longer) and cuts it up into sections and then plants them on me.

That's not realistic because my wife is sweet and wouldn't do anything like that, but when your vanity is at stake you'll make up any excuse.

Crying over spilled milk

2010-06-14T00:00:00.004-06:00

This past week was the worst of my career. Nothing was going right, nothing I did was good enough and it was time for our monthly office meeting. If I were into crying, I would have cried.

And just when I thought it couldn't get any worse our boss told us that our unit was responsible for bringing food. I got assigned to bring two dozen doughnuts which meant I had to pay money out of my own pocket to feed my co-workers and get bored into a coma in a super useless meeting.

I was feeling pretty low when I arrived at the doughnut shop. Like a true sugar addict and emotional eater I ordered my own little stash of doughnuts to make sure I got some before my co-workers descended on them like so many velociraptors. I also got a bottle of milk to top it off. I was so depressed I splurged and got whole milk.

I loaded everything into my car and headed off to work. While driving I tried to open my milk bottle and it proceeded to rupture and spew milk all over the place like a lactating volcano. Most of the milk landed in my lap and the rest splashed all over the steering wheel, which made steering a tad bit tricky. I was able to keep control of my Geo Prizm and I was ok, but I couldn't say the same for my pants, which had absorbed enough milk to feed a small calf.

After the milk dried my pants smelled like rotten milk. Fortunately this happened at the beginning of the day so I didn't have time to go home and change and I got to go through the day smelling like a cow with udder incontinence.

While I was being bored to smithereens I flashed back to when I was ordering the doughnuts. The doughnut place also sold cupcakes and they had one species called “Ticklebelly” cupcakes. I was really curious what a Ticklebelly cupcake was and what it tasted like, but I wasn't about to order it. I couldn't bring myself to say “I'd also like a Ticklebelly cupcake.” I just couldn't do it. All my manliness would be gone.

Basically I can't order anything that sounds stupid. For example, at IHOP they used to have this one dish called a “Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity” breakfast. Now I don't care how much fruit comes with it or how fresh it is, I would not order a “Fresh and Fruity” breakfast if it were my last meal. I'm not about to say “Can I please have the Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity?” out loud to another person. I just can't.

If I ever spent time in the U.K. I would be up a stump because some traditional English dishes are called Bangers and Mash, Bubble and Squeak and Toad in a Hole.

Maybe I could order some online or over the phone, like a Ticklebelly Toad in a Hole place that delivers. Mmmmm-mmm.

I've got baby fever and the remedy is hermit crabs

2010-06-07T00:00:00.004-06:00

Ok, everyone listen and listen good: Wifey has baby fever for real and I'm panicking. I don't know what to do. I need help.

It's not her fault, really. We're getting more married friends now and a lot of them have babies. When there are copious amounts of babies around you end up holding them and the trap is sprung.

Let's face it: babies are cute. All babies are cute. Even a baby rhinoceros is probably cute.

Yikes. Or not. Most babies are adorable but let's not forget that babies grow up. Nature is the ultimate false advertiser. Talk about a bait-and-switch: cute baby turns into nasty, dirty cranky adult. And the parents have to be there all along the way to clean up after them though all the middle parts.

But baby fever forgets all the “terrible twos” and teenage years. It's kind of like a zombie plague how it infects almost everyone it comes into contact with. Wifey is infected and if I have learned nothing from zombie movies it is that people who are infected take an active role in infecting others, i.e. chasing them down and biting them. Any minute now Wifey will be coming after me, trying to give me baby fever and I am afraid. In movies if your friend gets infected you just have to man up and shoot him in the head, but I think that is a little extreme for this particular situation.

Wifey rated her baby fever as a 3 on a scale of 1 to 10, but I've seen her look at babies and I fear that it is much higher than that. My situation is dire.

The best solution I can think of is to get a pet for us to care for, like a hermit crab or something. Hermit crabs are unique because they fight a lot amongst themselves, which is a lot like kids, isn't it? Breaking up fights and mediating shell disputes would be good practice for parenting, I think. I'm not sure Wifey will go for it because, for one, they aren't cute enough.

Also, they “moult,” meaning they shed their old skin periodically. I don't imagine she'll want to clean up old crab skin, but I say if you can't clean up crab skin then you probably can't hang with poop and vomit either.

Perhaps we could get a baby on a trial basis. We could rent one for a weekend and I bet that would get rid of baby fever right away. The only problem is baby fever comes back.

My brother does child care part-time and he said he'd let my wife come over and hang out with a plethora of snot nosed two-year-olds for about an hour. He thinks that will cure baby fever almost instantly.

Baby buying brings big benefits

2010-05-31T00:00:00.004-06:00

Despite what you may have heard, my wife and I did not, in fact, steal a total stranger’s baby. Certainly we thought about it, but we did not go through with it.

It all started when we were sitting in church. As is often the case, it was a little boring. I was easily distracted by a little baby girl who was sitting a few rows in front of us who kept giving us adorable toothless smiles. Her mother was keeping her quiet by cramming Ritz crackers into her mouth like CDs into a CD player.

She was easily the cutest baby that I had ever seen (sorry relatives). I can say with great certainty that she was abnormally cute because I am NOT a baby person. I don’t like them, as a rule. I am not generally interested in anything that cries, poops and vomits as much as babies do. Even so, I found myself very enamored with this baby. I thought it was just me, but I looked over at my wife and she was a puddle.

Of course, when faced with such cuteness we immediately started to think that we needed a baby. At first we thought about just stealing her. Her mom was always leaving her unattended and she was in a stroller so we could’ve just wheeled her home.

Next, we thought about making a baby, but that seemed like an awful lot of work. We consulted my pregnant cousin and she confirmed that it is, in fact, an awful lot of work.

The obvious alternative is to buy a baby. That could mean adopting if we want to be scrupulous, or the black market if we feel a little less scrupulous, want to save a little cash and avoid all the legal red tape.

In college I had a friend who majored in business and I remembered him talking about a “build versus buy” analysis, which is used to determine whether it is more profitable to build something from scratch or purchase it “off the shelf.”

I went to a business website and found some questions that help a business determine whether to build or buy and answered them in the context of a baby.

Q: Is your development staff large and skilled enough in the technology and standards to build in-house?
A: Yes. I passed health class and I think we have the right equipment.

Q: Are your resources best spent developing a homegrown product?
A: No. We’d rather spend those nine months relaxing, reading books and watching The Office.

Q: Is the business need unique?
A: No. Lots of people want babies and lots of young couples have baby fever.

Q: Do any off-the-shelf products exist for this business function?
A: Yes. There are babies all over the place.

Q: Can the off-the-shelf product perform the same functions as a custom, in-house build?
A: Yes. One baby is as good as the next, right?

Q: Does an off-the-shelf product cost the same or less than building you own?
A: Yes. I figure the cost of buying a baby is roughly equivalent to the cost of buying the weird food that pregnant women crave and medical bills.

So it would seem, after this analysis, that “buying” is our best option, but after much thought and consideration we have decided to wait a while.

(We want to save up and get a really awesome baby.)

Scrabbling for two OR Denver on my mind

2010-05-24T00:00:00.009-06:00

I’ve been married for about a month now and the number one question that people ask me is, “How is married life?”

That’s good, because for the longest time the number one question was, “When are you going to get married?”

When people ask me how married life is, I invariably reply, “Great,” because it is. After I say that, though, a lot of people have something derisive to say about marriage, like, “Great? Well that won’t last long. I give you about a year,” or “You’ve only been married a month.”

There are two schools of thought: pro-marriage and anti-marriage. Pro-marriage people are cheesy and annoying but I prefer them to the anti-marriage people, who take a kind of perverse pleasure in raining on your marital parade and telling you how naïve you are.

I don’t know why. It’s not so bad, I promise! They are like the Grinch, only they hate marriage and they’d steal it if they could.

“And the Marriage Grinch snarled with a sneer,

‘All the cakes that they bake and the pictures they take!

I say it’s a mistake and it makes my head ache!

I like ice skating and I like snow sledding

But the best thing to do is stop people from wedding.’”

I think some people have had a bad experience and are understandably disenchanted, but their bad experience doesn’t mean I will have a bad experience also. Them hating on my marriage is kind of like this:

“Hey I heard you were going to Denver for the weekend and I just wanted to tell you that I went to Denver once and it sucked.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah I had to go to the bathroom and we were stuck in rush hour traffic and I had to hold it for three hours. Then we went to a restaurant and I got a cockroach leg in my menudo and an antennae in my chorizo.”

“So that’s gonna happen to me if I go?”

“Most likely. Denver is just really ugly and stupid and 3Oh!3 are from near there. What more can I say?”

Being married is awesome for lots of reasons, most of which I will not go into here at the risk of being corny. One of the unexpected perks of being married is that when my wife and I play team Scrabble we dominate. With our powers combined we are unstoppable. When I was single I was pretty good at Scrabble, but now that I'm married it's like Me + Wifey = UNDEFEATED. We are like supervillains in some summer comic book movie. We wield Zs and Qs with devastating effect.

However, marriage is not all beating everyone at Scrabble and making them feel bad about themselves. Recently we have been engaged in the labor intensive task of buying a house, which is weird. It feels like an awesome new beginning but also a violent, gory end, like, “Wow, my youthful carefree days are SO over. Here are 1,000 square feet of proof.”

But the triple word scores make it all worthwhile.

Horror movies, fruit snacks and chocolate chip waffles

2010-05-17T00:00:00.004-06:00

I have a secret: the other night I ate SEVEN packets of fruit snacks.

That means I have a problem with fruit snacks and have hit rock bottom. Rock bottom is when you can finish the better part of a whole box of fruit snacks and not even flinch. I need to go to a 12-step fruit snack program and get a fruit snack sponsor. Can somebody be my sponsor?

Actually, the problem is whenever I'm doing something AND eating, I always end up eating approximately 10 times what I would normally eat. If I am watching television I will eat whatever is in front of me and anything that wanders into my line of sight.

When I consumed my seven packets of fruit snacks I was putting a vacuum together. By the time it was finished I realized I had eaten all the fruit snacks in the house. When I tried to go to sleep all of the fruit snacks congealed in my stomach into one giant fruit snack about the size of a football. I had eaten a seven layer burrito earlier in the day and together with the ball of fruitsnack it boiled and seethed and turned my stomach into seven layers of gastrointestinal rage.

I took some Tums and they started to fight the Fruitsnack/Burrito Axis of Evil. The Tums were winning, but the battlefield was my stomach and the Tums victory was hard won, let me tell you. I thought I was going to die.

Thankfully I'm not the only one with stomach problems. My wife, all of my immediate family and all of my friends have gotten some kind of puking stomach flu. I haven't gotten it yet and that makes me like the last surviving teenager in a horror movie. It's only a matter of time until the killer/monster comes for me.

Some squeamish people can't handle vomit and they say it makes them sick to even see it. Throw up is kind of a part of life, especially if you're from a big family like me. When I was growing up it seemed like somebody was always puking, so vomit is not a big deal, nor is cleaning it up. So cheer up, get your mop and try not to think about it.

How do I ward off a nasty stomach flu that makes you throw up for several days? I don't know, but I'm very open to suggestions. I figure I need to boost my immune system with lots of sleep and healthy food. I started off by making myself a plate of syrup-drenched chocolate chip waffles because chocolate has, like, antioxidants and crap, right? It is practically a stomach flu vaccine.

More importantly, chocolate chips make everything taste better. Chocolate chips would even make liver and onions taste better.

Yuck. Speaking of puking...

Going back to work is scary OR This is what it sounds like when your appliances are inhabited by evil spirits

2010-05-10T00:00:00.008-06:00

I just got back from a week-and-a-half long vacation and the adjustment from not working to working is the worst. After sleeping in every day for 10 straight days, the sound of an alarm clock is the most blood-curdling, stomach-ulcerating, liver-gelatinizing sound that has ever befallen my tender ears. It was awful.

I came in to work and tried to lay low for a while. I figured they had gotten used to me being gone and wouldn’t notice I was back. My hope was that they would leave me alone for a day or two so I could ease back into work life, but no such luck. A supervisor spotted me in the first 15 minutes and loaded me up with work like a sturdy pack mule. It also turns out that they had been assigning me things to do while I was gone, so I had a bunch of overdue assignments greeting me upon my return.

It’s great to be back.

Other employees wasted no time telling me how much work it was to cover for me while I was gone. They thought they deserved a Presidential Medal of Honor, Purple Heart and a Grammy, even though it is only fair because I always cover for them when they go on vacation. “Keep whining and I’ll go on vacation again!” I told them. It quieted them down, but was totally a bluff because I used up every drop of my leave and I am not going anywhere for quite some time.

The real problem is my attitude: I hate working. I tried not working for a while and it really suits me. I had a real talent for it. I just need to find a way to not work for a living.

On the upside, I got new shoes. Back on the downside, when I walk one of the insoles makes a sound like heavy breathing, like someone is prank calling my foot. Depending on how fast I walk my shoes also can sound like a depressed sigh or an out of shape person climbing stairs. It’s kind of embarrassing.

Also, since I’ve returned to the office an evil spirit has inhabited my CD player. I’ll be listening to a CD and my CD player will randomly change songs. I thought that the CD was scratched but I checked and it was flawless. I’ve tried other CDs and they change tracks too. I think the CD Player Poltergeist is just picky about what it wants to listen to and changes tracks according to its mood, like some kind of Phantom DJ.

This is not my first experience with haunted appliances, though. In one of my old apartments the fridge used to make noises that sounded like the beat for “When Doves Cry” by Prince. I tried to call Ghost Hunters to get them to document and investigate my icebox haunting but they said they don’t cover musical appliance phenomena.

“Does it also play ‘Little Red Corvette’?” they asked.

“No one likes a smart aleck,” I replied. “And no, the fridge only plays songs from the Purple Rain album. ‘Little Red Corvette’ is from 1999.”

“What about songs from when Prince was ‘The Artist’?”

“No! Just Purple Rain, man! Listen to what I’m saying!”

“Well, call back if it starts playing ‘Let's Pretend We're Married.’ I love that song.”

Ghost Hunters think they’re so clever.

Getting married and getting old OR Phones stress me out

2010-05-03T00:00:00.004-06:00

I'm back and all the wedding stuff was great. Our wedding reception crowd was made up of four types of people: 1) family 2) friends, 3) our parents' friends and 4) people who came for free food. Add that all together and you get a heck of a party.

We got tons of presents, gift cards and cash from almost everyone and it really amounted to lots of stuff. We had quite a pile of loot. Getting married is very lucrative, as long as you don't think about what you and your parents paid for dresses, suits, flowers, cakes, food, music, decorations, etc.

Our honeymoon was excellent. I kept trying to get stuff for free by telling people we were on our honeymoon, like, “We're on our honeymoon, can we get this pizza for free?” It didn't work, but when a receptionist at the Art Museum was rude to us my wife told her that we were on our honeymoon and she had to be nice to us from then on.

We went to the New Mexico history museum and learned how Spaniards and other fair skinned people killed absolutely every indigenous person they could get their hands on.

What we did most was EAT, or at least that's what I did most. We ate at some pretty nice places, and I just ate everything the waiter suggested: bread, huge entrees, drinks, desserts. At one restaurant we discovered “cinnamon roll french toast,” which is probably in the Top 5 Most Delicious Things I Have Ever Tasted. Whoever thought of putting a cinnamon roll in batter, frying it and covering it in syrup is a Nobel Prize-worthy genius in my eyes.

I think I gained some weight, and not in an attention-seeking-bulimic-cheerleader kind of way. I REALLY gained weight. I know because we took a bunch of pictures. When we came home and finished sorting through our gifts we got some Ben and Jerry's. I was eating some “Chubby Hubby” and thought, “It's an ice cream flavor and my identity too.”

Coming home was good too, except we had a bunch of errands to run. We went to the Verizon store and tried to get me a new phone. Everything they had came with internet, hoverboard and teleporter, none of which I need nor can I afford. I asked the salesman if I could just get a regular phone and he pointed me toward a sad little corner with three sad, cobweb-covered little phones. He said, “Sorry there are not a lot of options. The only people who really buy those phones are old people.”

I think he was partially speaking the truth (all of the phones said “hearing aid compatible”) and partially trying to shame me into buying a much more expensive phone with all the bells and whistles in some misguided attempt to feel younger. I could see him mentally spending his commission.

The rest of our time off was spent trying to defraud the Motor Vehicle Division. My wife was getting a new license and had failed the vision test. She could've just put her glasses on, passed the test and received a “corrective lenses” restriction on her license, but pride and vanity wouldn't let her do it. Instead we drove around to several different Motor Vehicle Division offices until someone was sloppy enough in administering the test to pass her. With a little squinting (actually it was a LOT of squinting, but don't tell her I said that) she passed with no restriction, but it sure was a lot of work.

We're only 28 and 25, but after this week we feel much older.

It's a card knock life for me OR These rewards are not that rewarding

2010-04-26T00:00:00.006-06:00

As you read this I am honeymooning in culturally rich and relatively inexpensive New Mexico, but don’t worry. I wrote this post a few days before my wedding and set it up so the Blogger robots would post it at the regular time, so don’t think I’m blogging on my honeymoon. I think that would annoy my wife. (Yikes! I have a wife!)

Anyway, what I want to say this week is that “rewards” cards are OUT OF CONTROL. Everyone has a stupid card! Music stores, bookstores, oil change places, auto parts stores, clothing stores, replacement hip stores, black market baby sellers. It must be The Next Big Thing in business.

They say, “All you have to do is carry this card around and let us spam your e-mail. After you buy 37 of these and 92 of these you get a coupon for a free keychain with purchase. After you spend $750 dollars you get $5 off your next purchase.”

I get especially frustrated when it's places I rarely go that are trying to get me on their program. When I bought my suit from the suit store the people there wanted me to get rewards card from them. Honestly, I don’t buy suits that often, guys. This is the last suit I’m going to buy in, well, forever. OK, maybe not forever, but in the foreseeable future I will not be purchasing a suit or suit accessories. The next time will be when someone dies and I need to go to the funeral, or when I die and need a suit to be buried in, but I imagine someone else will be buying that suit for me.

(this picture is terrifying, and it's credit cards, but you get the idea)

If I seriously signed up for every rewards program that was offered to me I would be carrying around about 20 pounds of plastic cards, but when I’ve declined to sign up some of the sales clerks have gotten very sad and others have gotten angry. What I really can’t stand, though, is sales clerk reward card skulduggery, where they try to trick me into signing up.

“What’s your e-mail address?” they’ll say nonchalanty in the process of ringing me up.

“It’s ‘Supercool82’ at… wait, why are you asking?” I say.

“I’m just signing you up for our rewards program.”

“Did you ask me if I wanted to sign up?”

“No. Everyone is doing it. Don’t you want to?”

“No!”

“OK. So what’s your e-mail address?”

I feel like a 28-year-old crotchety old man. I just don’t want to carry around a million plastic cards and get spam e-mails, is that too much to ask? I give you some money, you give me some goods or services. That’s all I need from you. Let’s keep cards and sucky, useless “rewards” out of this.

Now if they had a Panda Express rewards card I’d be all over it. I'd be getting rewards left and right. I’m sure they’ll jump on the bandwagon eventually, but unfortunately they don’t have a rewards program at the moment.

Right now the only reward I get for eating there all the time is increased cholesterol.

Has anyone else had problems with rewards cards?

In defense of Bridezilla

2010-04-19T00:00:00.006-06:00

This is my 101st consecutive blog and it is about weddings, specifically mine, which happens this Friday. It’s ironic because my very first blog ever was about weddings, and here I am getting married.

My fiancée and I discussed it and she knew when I asked her to marry me that our engagement came with a built-in exit clause, meaning that I reserved the right to call it off if she went crazy, and she had a right to call it off if I went crazy. I put that in there because I’ve seen many a sane woman go absolutely mad with power because someone was stupid enough to buy her a diamond.

When we were buying the ring our diamond salesman was showing her different rings and going on and on about cut, color, clarity and a great many other things that were way over my head. My wallet and I were bracing for impact but my fiancée said, “Do you have something smaller and simpler?” With great pride and relief I thought, “I have asked a good woman to marry me.”

My fiancée has had the diamond for many months now and has yet to turn crazy, so I am pretty happy. Everyone kept warning me that she was going to turn into Bridezilla, and I was so busy keeping an eye on her that I was totally taken by surprise when our parents turned into marital terrorists who wanted to hijack the wedding.

“We demand such-and-such!” they said.

“But it’s OUR wedding!” we said, stupid and naive.

“But we’re paying for it,” they said.

Touché.

My cousin recently got married and afterwards she made the following observation. When a couple gets married their parents swoop in and take over everything. Robbed of “their” wedding, the married couple nurses their indignation for years until their own children get married. Then they swoop in, take over the wedding and put on the wedding their own parents prevented them from having, whether their children want it or not. Thus the cycle repeats forever and ever and you don’t actually get the wedding you want until you force it on your children.

On the whole it hasn’t been too bad. Our parents are only moderately crazy and I know other couples who have had it way worse. What’s really bothering me these days is that obnoxious people keep asking us about babies, like, “When are you going to start a family? How many kids are you planning on having?”

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Slow down! We aren’t even married yet and those are very personal questions! You don’t see me prying into your reproductive agenda, do you? What a terrible thing to ask a couple! Perhaps one of us is out of order and we can’t have kids, or perhaps we aren’t yet masochistic enough to subject ourselves to parental servitude. Either way, it’s no business of yours.

You are, however, welcome to come to our wedding reception and give us presents. Waffle irons are nice, and we’ll give you some cake for your trouble.

A window of cadaveric opportunity OR I love the smell of formaldehyde in the morning

2010-04-12T00:00:00.002-06:00

Last week I was at work and a crackly voice came on the intercom and said, “There is, um, a sniper with a high powered rifle in the area. There have been some shots fired and law enforcement has cautioned us not to leave the building and to stay away from the windows and exits.”

When the announcement was made I was sitting in a less-than-interesting meeting and the guy leading the meeting went straight to a window, pressed his face to the glass and said, “A sniper? Where?”

As I’ve mentioned, the meeting was really boring and I had already been daydreaming. When this fool went to the window I started to daydream about the sniper firing through the window and shooting him.

I didn’t want him to get killed or anything. I just wanted the sniper to get him in the arm or the leg or graze his earlobe or something because that would make for the coolest story ever. People would gather from all around because the story of my day would top everyone else’s and I would be Story King for a day.

Don’t think I’m a bad person. First, this guy was asking for it. Second, my job is oftentimes very boring and if someone has to get hurt to liven things up, so be it. It’s a worthy sacrifice.

We all went in the conference room and they told us that the police were evacuating us out the back way and we got to go home two and a half hours early! Hooray for snipers!

After the police caught him and no one was hurt, The Sniper kind of became an office hero. In the days that followed my co-workers and I found ourselves missing the guy. In staff meetings you could hear people wishing Sniper would come back, and right before a deadline you could hear people praying for snipers.

Since no one was hurt I had a much less exciting story to tell, but that didn’t stop me from telling it to anyone who would listen. After he heard it one guy said, “Yeah, well you should be glad you didn’t get shot.”

I guess it never occurred to me that I could’ve been shot, and this new thought took a little of the wind out of my Sniper sails. How would I have told my cool story then?

Soon I was in another boring meeting, daydreaming about what I would want done with my remains if I had died. Burial? Cremation? Neither of those final resting places had quite enough style for me and I decided that I would like to donate my body to science and become a cadaver, one of the preserved bodies that med students have to look at and dissect. It would be kind of cool to be immortalized in formaldehyde and spend my dead days smelling weird and weeding out students with stomachs too weak to practice medicine.

Then I researched cadavers and learned that if you want to donate your body to medical science
you need to be very specific about which branch. Some cadavers get used in “body farms,” places where scientists sprinkle dead bodies over a few open acres of land and study how they rot. I don’t think I would like to be that kind of cadaver, but on second thought, I would be dead and when you're dead you can't be too picky about your accommodations.

I guess a body farm is as good a place to cadaver as any.

Feel the sting of my jelly bean black licorice whip OR A feminist critique of Easter Monday

2010-04-05T00:00:00.007-06:00

Merry Easter Monday everyone! That's right, in some places the Easter celebration carries over from Sunday into Monday and in reality Easter Monday just might be the best part of Easter.

I'd like to say that although I've been doing a lot of holiday-themed blogs (I can't wait for the Arbor Day blog to drop) I feel justified in doing another one because:
1. I discovered Easter Monday and it is rad.
2. I couldn't think of any other blog topics.

I already liked Easter to begin with, before I even found out about Easter Monday. Any holiday that is closely associated with candy is alright with me, and Easter ranks pretty high on the holiday candy scale. Halloween is number one (thus it is my favorite holiday), and Easter is a close second. My favorite Easter candy is a Cadbury Cream Egg, but I can only eat one. If I eat more than one I always regret it because I never fail to get some kind of cream overdose and end up wishing the Easter Bunny had never darkened my door.

I kind of have a thing for weird holidays, and it turns out that Easter Monday derives from a religious celebration with feasts and eggs blah blah blah. Boring. The interesting part of Easter Monday is that historically it is also known as “Dyngus Day” or “Wet Monday.” Traditionally in Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic the boys would wake up the girls early in the morning by pouring buckets of water over their heads and whipping them on the legs with long thin twigs or willow switches.

Why? Like a lot of traditions, the original pure intent of soaking someone and whipping them has become lost in time. Some say it derives from pagan rituals and others from Christian ceremonies. At one time it was also related to courtship, and only young, marriageable girls got doused and whipped. That's cute. Perhaps as Wet Monday approached young men would talk to the girls they liked and say things like, “Hey baby, I've got a switch with your name on it.” And then after Wet Monday was over the girls would gather and brag about who whipped them.

If you didn't get lashed it meant you were unattractive, so basically on Wet Monday a woman got whipped or humiliated by being branded undesirable, which makes it sound like a lose-lose holiday for women.

Luckily, modern observances of Wet Monday have eschewed the practice of whipping women and are now mostly just giant, awesome post-Easter waterfights. All in all, Wet Monday is way cooler than Good Friday, Black Friday and Sunday Bloody Sunday put together. Unfortunately, there are no Wet Monday celebrations in my area so I think I will just eat jelly beans.

By the way, did you know that black jellybeans repel women? My fiancee hates them (which I think is a little racist) and she wouldn't come within 20 feet of me when I was eating some. She said I had licorice-flavored black bean breath. I told her that it could've been much worse. I could've been trying to pour water on her and whip her.

Some people just don't realize how good they have it.

This blog starts out with me complaining about dating (no real surprise there) and ends with me lying face down on an operating table

2010-03-29T00:00:00.011-06:00

There were times in the past when dating sucked so bad that I thought to myself, “I am just going to marry any old raggedy trainwreck of a woman who is agreeable, just so I don't have to date anymore.” That's right, I was going to settle!

Fortunately, the right woman came along, I realized it and convinced her to marry me. The good news is I don't have to settle after all, the bad news is I have to plan a wedding.

I'm excited for the marriage, just not the wedding, see? Really I'm not too worried because there is really no pressure on me as the groom. Don't get me wrong, I do my part, but if the wedding ends up looking unbeautiful or unglamorous, no one is really looking at me. My friends and family won't show up and say stuff like, “Look at these awful colors and decorations! I don't know what Jacob was thinking.”

It's true, it's true. The bride gets all the credit and/or all the blame. And while the most of the decisions, responsibility and freaking out fall to the bride, the groom has the extremely crucial but oft-overlooked duty of keeping the bride from falling to pieces.

A groom must be steady, sensitive and have a large supply of Kleenex on hand at all times. In these responsibilities he must never falter, and truth be told planning a wedding is a little stressful, even for a groom.

Which brings me to pimples. My acne level always spikes during important events in my life. Stress causes me to break out, and my forehead could serve as a big shiny indicator of my stress level. Thus, the closer we get to the wedding, the more zits show up for the services.

I had always imagined that by the time I was 28 my skin would be really clear, but I had also imagined that by the time I was 28 life would be a lot less complicated. So much for all of that.

I figured I better take care of my growing acne problem before the wedding because at weddings they take approximately 4,000,000 pictures and I didn't want to be extremely pimply in every one of them. I didn't want my grandkids to look at our wedding pictures and say, “Grandpa, what was wrong with your face?” That sounds vain, but, unlike my fiancee, I won't have an army corp of best friends putting makeup on me the day of the wedding.

So I went to the dermatologist and he prescribed me some meds. While I was in there I asked him to look at a mark on my shoulder. He did so and announced that I had a spot of skin cancer and he would gladly cut it out for me.

Before he could start cutting he had to numb the area and pretty soon he was coming at me with a large syringe filled with local anesthetic. Most doctors say some rubbish like, “This might pinch a little,” or “You're going to feel a little 'pressure.'” I love my dermatologist because he told me, “This is going to hurt, and there's just no getting around that.”

And it did hurt. Oh man, did it ever. In comparison, planning a wedding isn't so bad.

Does anyone have any wedding plan tips for me? Groom secrets?

Three things you should never say in the work place (Not about sexual harassment)

2010-03-22T00:00:00.009-06:00

In the English language there are a lot of things you have to be careful about saying, like “I love you,” or “I do.” You have to think long and hard before you use these, but they aren’t the scariest things you could say, especially in the workplace. Here are the top three things you should never say at work.

The first is “Anytime,” which turns a grateful person into an entitled person. I recently did a favor for a co-worker. He said he was really behind and could I just take care of this one thing for him. It was such a sad, pitiful story. I cried a little and agreed to do it. Once the task was done he thanked me enthusiastically. I carelessly said, “Anytime,” not thinking of the possible repercussions. There are always repercussions.

After I let “Anytime” slip this co-worker started coming around on a regular basis, asking for more and more favors. “I know it’s a lot,” he said, “but you said ‘anytime’, right?” He really said that!

How could I respond to that? It was true, I had said it, but now I wanted to say, “‘Anytime’ is just an expression, like saying ‘You’re welcome’ but less formally. Like ‘no problem’ or ‘de nada.’ I didn’t really mean that any time you have something you don’t want to do that I will do it. I thought everyone knew that. I’m sorry you had to hear it from me.”

One thing I’ve learned from my foray into adult career-hood is that if you are caught up on your own work you will inevitably be saddled with someone else’s. Around here hard work is punished, not rewarded. I suspect my “Anytime” friend has already figured that out and knows how to work the system. Why work hard when it will only get you more work to do? Better to do just enough to not get fired. Genius!

The second statement you have to be careful about is, “How’s it going?” It is generally used as a polite greeting. The proper response is, “Well,” but not everyone knows that. I have a co-worker who thinks that when I say, “How’s it going?” as I pass her in the hall it means, “Tell me your life story.” I’ve even tried switching up my greeting, using “Hello” or “Good morning” but I always get the life story. Now I just hide in the mail room when I see her coming and wait until she passes.

The third and trickiest set of words is “I’ll get back to you” and “I’ll look into that.” If you do not actually get back to someone, or you do not actually look into something, these words will brand you as a flake, unless you are a supervisor. If anyone asks a question or voices a concern, a supervisor can say, “I'll look into that,” which is essentially saying, “Trouble me not with these trifling matters, subordinate.”

Along with books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Good to Great, I suspect a lot of managers also read a management book called Shutting Your Employees Up By Telling Them What They Want To Hear With No Intention Of Ever Following Through.

I don’t know for sure, though, so I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Are there other things you shouldn't say at work that I have failed to mention?

Saint Patrick kills snakes OR Green is the color of your energy

2010-03-15T00:00:00.006-06:00

Saint Patrick's Day is this week and I don't even know what Saint Patrick's Day is supposed to be celebrating. The color green? Cabbage? Ireland? Guinness?

Other holidays are pretty straightforward. Valentine's Day celebrates love, Easter celebrates eggs, Halloween celebrates candy and Christmas celebrates buying stuff.

So what does Saint Patrick's Day celebrate? I looked up some Patrician info and was shocked and scandalized by what I found.

First of all, Saint Patrick wasn't even Irish, nor was his name Patrick. His real name is “Maewyn Succat” and he lived in Britain and spoke Welsh. How confusing is that? When he was 16 he was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Ireland. Maewyn eventually escaped, returned to Britain and became a priest. Once he had waxed clergical he changed his name to Patrick, kind of like when Malcolm Little became Malcolm X or when Cat Stevens became Yusuf Islam.

The newly re-christened Patrick returned to Ireland and spent the rest of his life trying to teach Irish pagans about Christianity. For this Saint Patrick got his own day, even though he wasn't a martyr like fellow holiday saint Valentine.

I had also heard that Saint Patrick had rid Ireland of snakes. Supposedly he stood on a hill and used a staff to herd all of Ireland's snakes into the sea like some kind of corned-beef-and-cabbage-eating pied piper. This makes Saint Patrick a very controversial figure indeed because he single-handedly perpetrated a country-wide reptilicide. I'm sure that any day now PETA will start protesting Saint Patrick's Day with a gimmicky campaign of attractive women draped in snakes holding signs that say “Saint Patrick is unlucky for snakes” or “Saint Patrick is a flake spake the snake.”

The most scandalous thing I learned is that Saint Patrick was originally associated with blue and not green. Say it ain't so! There's even a shade of blue called “Saint Patrick's Blue.” What happened was Saint Patrick used the shamrock, a three-leaf clover, to explain the Christian concept of the Trinity to the Irish people. I suppose the greenness of the clover and the greenness of Ireland itself eventually ousted the traditional blue. So it goes. Being a holiday color is a cutthroat business.

I wonder if saint Patrick would be annoyed if he knew that his day has devolved into wearing green and drinking copious amounts of beer in hokey places named “O'Hara's.” He's rolling over in his grave thinking, “I preached my little heart out and all they can think about is beer. That's just great.”

All I'm saying is that we really need to give Saint Patrick more credit. Teaching polytheistic Irish pagans of old was probably a tough job. I imagine it went like this:

Saint Patrick: Hey Frank. You should join my church and become a Christian.

Pagan: Are you Mormon or something? Just give me your book and leave me alone. Can't you see I'm happily Pagan?

Saint Patrick: But our God is like this clover, see?

Pagan: Yeah, but we have a bunch of gods. And Stonehenge. What have you got?

Saint Patrick: Um, the Pope?

Pagan: Ha! Sacrifice some virgins and then we'll talk. Meanwhile, take your snakes and get out of here.

Now you sea me, now you don't OR Monster sea, monster do

2010-03-08T00:00:00.005-07:00

I was trying to think of a blog topic for this week but over the weekend a topic found me. I was driving along, minding my own business, when I drove right smack into a sea monster.

Sea monsters are not indigenous to the greater Albuquerque metropolitan area but I saw one just the same. It was late at night and my fiancee and I were driving in a part of town we don't usually frequent. It was very dark and I saw the spiny coils of the monster rising in the distance. As we drove closer I determined that it was actually a statue of a sea monster, a very accurate representation. It really captured the essence of what a sea monster is all about, which is menacing ships, eating sailors, etc. It was an awesome sight to behold.

However, as I was beholding, I drove right into the curb. It felt like I had just run over a medium-sized rhinoceros, but I kept driving and my tire ran out of air shortly thereafter.

Luckily the tire waited to deflate until we were in the sketchiest possible part of town. We limped to a stop at the seediest hotel I have ever seen. I was scared but I had to put on a brave face for my fiancee and got out and started changing the flat. I soon found out that the place that had put my tires on had cross-threaded two of the lugnuts, which promptly snapped off as I strained to get them loose. Since my fiancee was with me I had to try and do all this with minimal profanity, which slowed down the process immensely.

A pimp and a crack dealer sauntered over and offered to help but by that time I had the surviving two bolts on the spare. We drove off into the night, hoping the tire didn't fall off.

The next morning I had to take my car to the tire store and explain to the tire salesman why I needed a new tire.

Tire salesman: So you were looking at a sea monster and you-

Me: Statue. Sea monster statue.

Tire salesman: Right. So you were looking at a sea monster statue and hit a curb?

Me: Correct.

Tire salesman: I think you're crazy but I'd like to take your money.

The challenge with buying anything these days is not getting sold tons of extra stuff. The tire salesman wanted to sell me four new aluminum rims, so I had to remind him that I actually just needed one tire and zero rims, thank you very much.

There was also a happy alcoholic next to me and he was asking his tire salesman how long it would be until his car was finished because he had a 15 pack of beer he wanted to get home to.

“I love the 15 pack. They just invented it,” he said. “It has three more beers than a 12 pack. It's AWESOME.”

Then the happy alcoholic seemed to realize he had been a mite too enthusiastic.

“It usually takes me a week or so to get through one of those,” he said. “It depends on the week, though. Some weeks require more beer than others.”

His tire salesman looked like he could use a beer himself. He cheered up quickly because apparently the happy alcoholic had already broken into the 15 pack and was only too willing to buy 4 brand new aluminum rims

Which goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining. And every sea monster.

Hands free is the way to be OR Wave 'em like you just don't care

2010-03-01T00:00:00.003-07:00

I know I say this about every other week but the good times are officially over! Wanna know how I know? Because I just bought a “hands free” device for my cell phone. Good times = SO OVER.

Everyone knows that only annoying, self-important adults use hands free devices, but I didn't know what else to do! It's illegal to talk on your cell phone while driving where I live and I spend a ridiculous amount of my time commuting. And then once I get to work I usually jump in a company car and drive around for a good portion of the day. Sometimes I have to talk on the phone while I'm driving. I really feel like I didn't have much of a choice in the matter.

Sherman Alexie said white people invented commuting, and if that's true then I am ashamed. I guess white people also invented atomic weapons, “American Idol” and disco, so I shouldn't be surprised. I think white people invented suburbs, so it follows logically that they invented commuting.

Believe me when I say that if I ever figure out exactly which white person invented commuting, they are getting punched in the face, no questions asked. I don't know who it is, but they probably live in Portland, work at Starbucks and drive a Subaru with lots of bumper stickers, so they’ll be easy to find. Perhaps I will run into them at an ugly sweater party or a Vampire Weekend concert.

But don't worry, I didn't get a Bluetooth or anything. I have a long history of talking trash on Bluetooth users dating back to the first time I saw a man having a really animated conversation with himself and decided he was having a psychotic break. I couldn’t very well go out and buy a Bluetooth, now could I? It would severely tarnish my reputation and smudge my self respect.

While looking at other hands free options I saw a little device called a “Jawbone.” Who is naming these things anyway? They sound like World of Warcraft avatars or fantasy novel characters, like “Jawbone the Warrior” or “Bluetooth the Mage.”

I am not an authority of hands free devices, nor am I an authority on being cool. However, I do not believe that hands free devices are cool, and if you think you look cool you need to stop and take a good hard look at yourself. I do believe that hands free devices are permissible inside of a car and maybe an office but nowhere else. Ever. Here are some examples:

Bluetooth at a restaurant = hands free faux pas
Bluetooth in the store = hands free faux pas
Bluetooth in church = hands free faux pas
Bluetooth while using a urinal in a public restroom = hands free faux pas

Basically, a hands free faux pas is any situation where other people who are not part of your conversation are forced to hear your conversation.

Having said all of that, I still bought one. It was only $9, it plugs into my phone and I never use it outside of the car. I promise! What frightens me is: if I'm buying a hands free telephone device, what's to stop me from getting other adult items like a child, an unhappy marriage or a car payment I can't afford? The frail threads to my disappearing youth are steadily being severed one by one and I don't know how I-

Gotta go, I have to take this call.

Heavy traffic in the metro area OR Men are conditioned to be dirty

2010-02-22T00:00:00.002-07:00

I have kind of a tumultuous relationship with conditioner and other hair products. It’s kind of like a forbidden romance.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not, like, passionate about hair products. Mostly you could describe my main hair product emotion as “conflicted.” I didn’t use them much until several years ago. I was getting my hair cut one day and the hair cutting person (I don’t know what to call her, and I don’t want to call her a “stylist”) told me that my hair was frizzy and that I needed to start using conditioner and “product.”

“First things first,” I said. “What the heck is ‘product’?”

She explained product to me and sent me on my way. I started using conditioner and felt OK about it. A couple of years later female friend started making fun of me for it and told me that using conditioner is girly and “metro.” Yeah, but a girl told me to do it! It's not like I'm trying to get better “shine” or “bounce” or anything.

So which is it? Should I be Pro-Conditioner or Anti-Conditioner? It’s what I like to call “The Conditioner Conundrum.”

Perhaps it is a problem with how we perceive sexuality and hygiene. Anything gross and messy is masculine and anything nice and orderly is feminine, right? So then unibrows are technically manly because they are, like, wild and untamed, and it would be “metro” to buy tweezers and try to make two eyebrows out of one.

But women don’t want gross and messy, nor do they want nice and orderly. Men need to walk a fine and ever-shifting line between complete and utter sloppiness and being “metrosexual.” It is very confusing.

Urbandictionary.com has several definitions for the word “metrosexual.” Most of the entries were similar to this one, which says, “a heterosexual male who has an impeccable sense of style, belief in designer hygiene and a willingness to emote.”

The designer hygiene thing cracks me up because the “belief” part makes it sound like a religion or something, like these men belong to the First Church of Clothes, Cologne and Product of Saint Ryan Seacrest.

Other definitions are comical in the amount of detail they contain, like this one which says, “an urban male who takes care of his appearance from head to toe by bodybuilding, styling his hair, waxing his eyebrows, using lotions, wearing perfume and tanning. Has a keen interest in fashion, cooking, brand names, interior decorating and nice cars, especially convertibles.”

Women seem to be simultaneously desirous and fearful of these “dapper” men. On the one hand women are attracted to men with good style, but these same women are also unsettled by the fact that the men they are attracted to have a better handle on fashion and hair than they do and are kind of jealous and intimidated. Thus women continue to have a love/hate relationship with metrosexual men.

I don’t consider myself metrosexual by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm not really that into hair. However, I don’t really think it’s fair that heterosexual men aren’t allowed to use conditioner.

Why can’t men be into hair and fashion? And why can’t women be into, say, power tools? And why are men supposed to be into power tools? And why are women supposed to be into hair and fashion? Around and around we go!

I think “The Conditioner Conundrum” will continue to puzzle sociologists, philosophers and hairstylists for years to come.