Might As Well Call Them Public Parts, Sir

I frequently see people begin blog posts with an apology for being a shitty blogger and not keeping up with it.  I'm not going to do that.  Let’s jump in.

I moved to Chicago earlier this year for work and more school (my employer might as well just send my paycheck directly to Northwestern) and it's been an interesting transition to city life.  People walk fast, you get odd looks for saying "hello," and the last time I saw anyone smile in public was when I got lost and a homeless man without lips asked me for a quarter. 

It took me a while to get used to not saying "hi" to people.  I take a criminally long train ride to work every morning (actually it's two but its faster to say I only take one) and I originally thought that I would be able to make some commute buddies.  But every time I tried to start a conversation with someone, they'd snap back to reality like a drown victim sputtering up brine and taking their first few gasping breaths of a new beginning.  Only instead of a new lease on life, they had a redhead standing a little too close and asking earnestly how their day was going so far.

I actually had a woman give me a scared "oh my goodness, please don't stab me" look and change cars after I said, and I quote: "I like your sweater."

I DIDN'T SAY I WANTED TO USE YOUR SKULL AS A CEREAL BOWL, I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT I NOTICED YOUR SWEATER BECAUSE NOT EVERYONE CAN PULL OFF LIME GREEN IN NOVEMBER, YOU PARANOID DICK.

"Oh my god Gerald, just talk to me for a second.  I know you're in a meeting, but just stay on the phone with me.  I almost died just now!  A...a man on the train made a brief comment to me in passing.
-Indistinct sobbing-  Oh god he was so red!"

Relax, lady.

The day I found out that alcohol was allowed on the trains was a glorious one. 

There's a bar conveniently placed next to the train station and I go get a few bottles for the ride home some days.  The only downside is the 300 year old dude who sits at the corner of the bar (he has literally been there every time I go in) drinking what looks to be whiskey and smelling intensely of urine.  He takes the same train I do, and sitting in the same car as him is like being in the urology wing of a hospital that only serves asparagus.  He walks like a 300 year old too.  He has a general backward slope to his lower body, but his shoulders are hunched over like a predatory feline stalking wildebeest.  His slow, two inch steps indicate that perhaps the pee smell is due to the fact that every time he has to go the bathroom, he doesn't quite make it in time.

Speaking of piss, three beers and a violently vibrating traincar is a powerful combination.  I generally have an emergency on my hands after every game of "trainbeer."

One afternoon, when I had a particularly imminent situation, I scurried to the bathroom as soon as the train stopped at the station.  As I turned the corner into the bathroom, I saw a man standing in front of one of the urinals, peeing.  Only, this man must have been far-sighted because he was standing about two and a half feet away from the wall, dick in hand, lobbing a long arc of piss into the distant toilet.  This is not hyperbole.  This man was standing so far away from the urinal that it looked like his pee was doing an Evel Knievel stunt.

I still had to go pretty badly, so I walked AROUND this dude and peed in a urinal down the row standing at a normal, human-person distance from the wall.  Once I was settled in, I turned to see a third guy entering the restroom.  He looked confusedly at the dude standing basically in the center of the room.  Then he looked down and the confusion rapidly transformed into a cringe of disgust.  His eyes darted away and he walked toward the stalls.  Before he entered the stall, he turned back and looked for about four seconds in disbelief.  It was hysterical.

Six more guys walked in and had the exact same reaction.  One guy saw it, gasped, and immediately about-faced out of the restroom.  I swear another guy dry heaved a little bit.

Jesus Died for My Allowance

Growing up I never wanted for much- if I asked for something, within reason, I usually got it.  I had my own little childhood expense account that I used to get Legos and Gameboy games.  I was happy with this system until I entered public school and discovered that some of the other kids and their families used an allowance system.  Some of my classmates would talk about how their parents gave them up to $25 a week.

When I approached my parents about switching my expense account into a weekly payment plan, they were initially dubious so I made some concessions.

They balked at my request that they match my classmates at the industry standard of $25 per week citing that “no child needs that much money.”  When they submitted their counter offer of $3 per week I found it offensive.  I knew I was worth more than that, they were just trying to send a message.  That evening at dinner I tried to unionize with my sister but our lack of leverage proved fatal to the cause.

With no foreseeable recourse, I resigned myself to a meager, allowanceless existence.  Needless to say, I was irate when I noticed my mom writing a $40 check at church the next Sunday.

“WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!?”  I shouted over the offertory music.

“Honey, be quiet,” my mom said.  “I’m writing a check to the church, like I do every week.”

“YOU DO THIS EVERY WE-“ my mother shot me a stern look.  “You do this every week?”  I said again with a hiss.

“Yes.  Jesus said those who have faith should tithe or give back to the church.  This is our tithe.”  She held up the completed check for me to see before placing in the tray that was being passed down our pew.  I watched in horror as a somber gentleman in a bad toupee carried away the heaping dish of cash and checks.

“If Jesus needs money so bad, why doesn’t he ask his parents?  He’s got three of them after all!  I only ask for 25 dollars and you give him 40?  Cast out the money changers!  Where’s a table, I’m gonna overturn a table.”  My mom grabbed me and held me down as I squirmed in my seat.  People were starting to look at us.  “You know dad works here, right?  Where do you think that $2000 bonus at the end of the year comes from, mother?  That’s not new money, that’s just a tax return!  BREHARAHRHAHHHRAH!”

My mom had to drag me out of the church.  My outburst won me a month without television and I definitely wasn’t any closer to getting an allowance. 

This past Easter, just like she does every Sunday now, my mother wrote a check and handed it to me to put in the tray as it passed by.  Just to remind me that Jesus died for my allowance.

More CATFACTS!

IN 1966, SCIENTISTS BELIVED THEY HAD ISOLATED THE GENE THAT MAKES CATS SHED. IT TURNED OUT THERE WAS JUST CAT HAIR IN THE MICROSCOPE. TO UNSUB REPLY: “shedhappens”

DID YOU KNOW THAT IF YOU CUT A CAT IN HALF, IT WILL FORM TWO NEW CATS? TRY IT OUT AT HOME! TO UNSUB REPLY: “MOMMYCOMEQUICKKITTYISLEAKING”

DID YOU KNOW BABY CATS ARE IN EGGS INSIDE THE MOTHER’S WOMB? BUT SINCE KITTIES DON’T HAVE BEAKS, THE MOTHER ROLLS AROUND ON HER STOMACH BEFORE THE BIRTH, BREAKING THE SHELLS FOR THEM! TO UNSUB REPLY: “tomakeacatyouhavetocracksomeeggs”

DID YOU KNOW THAT THE ONLY REASON YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO GIVE YOUR AT CHOCOLATE IS TO KEEP HIM FROM GETTING JEALOUS OF PEOPLE FOOD? TO UNSUB REPLY: “kittenvy”

DID YOU KNOW THAT CATS HAVE ACCENTS? JAPANESE CATS ACTUALLY SAY “PULL” BUT SINCE THEY HAVE A HARD TIME WITH Ls IT COMES OUT “PURR.” TO UNSUB REPLY: “carico”

I have so many more of these, but I feel guilty pretending like these are worth a blog post.

CATFACTS

So instead of writing, I accidentally played video games for 3 months.  It's not as if I have writer's block- I have ideas to write about, I'm just really bad at not playing video games.

Anyhoo, my friend Aaron signed a group of us up for a text chat service to help us keep in touch (since we've all moved to different places).  It's pretty neat, it's like a text chatroom where we can all contribute.  It would have been useful, but I took this as an opportunity to be a dick and immediately starting spamming "CATFACTS" messages to everyone.  Here are some of them:


DID YOU KNOW THAT THE OLDEST LIVING CAT IS 31 YEARS OLD?
TO UNSUBSCRIBE REPLY: "ittybittykittytitty"


DID YOU KNOW THAT BOILED CAT MUCUS IS A POWERFUL PARALYTIC THAT WAS USED FREQUENTLY BY FRENCH ASSASSINS IN THE 14TH CENTURY?
TO UNSUB REPLY: "kittysneezes"


DID YOU KNOW CATS ARE IMAGINARY? ALL CATS ARE FABRICATED IN THE MINDS OF THEIR OWNERS- SO CRAZY CAT LADIES ARE APTLY LABELLED.
TO UNSUB REPLY: "catzophrenic"


DID YOU KNOW THAT A CAT HAS FOUR SETS OF EYELIDS? THE INNERMOST CAN BE PULLED OVER THE EYE TO ENABLE THE CAT TO SEE GHOSTS!
TO UNSUB REPLY: "spookitty"


TWO YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, A CAT NAMED BUTTERCUP OF DENVER, CO BECAME THE FIRST EVER TO SEND A TEXT MESSAGE! SHE SENT: "fgghj&*ngh"
TO UNSUB REPLY: "fgghj&*ngh"

A Growing Boy With A Growing Vocabulary

One morning in First Grade, when I was deeply engrossed in an intricate crayon drawing of an underground ant colony, my table-mate, Bryan, interrupted me.

“Hey, what are you doing?”  He asked, peering over my shoulder.

“I’m drawing an ant col-”

“Oh, that’s cool.  Hey, so do you want to hear a bad word?”  Clearly Bryan didn’t really care to find out what I was doing.  He had his own agenda.

“A bad word?  What, you mean like saying ‘their’ instead of ‘there’?”

“No, no.”  Bryan shook his head dismissively.  “Do you want to hear a bad word- like a word you aren’t supposed to say?”

“Not particularly.” 

“You sure?”

“Why would I want to know a word if I’m not allowed to use it?  That doesn’t make any sense.  I’d rather live a life of simple ignorance, thank you.”

I turned back to my project.  I was half-way through drawing the queen’s mandibles and I wanted to be sure to get them right. I had to focus because the only brown crayon I had been able to find was really dull now.  I should have waited to draw the trees until after I was done with the ants.  It was a stupid mistake, and now if I screwed up and made the queen’s mandibles too big, the anatomical correctness would be off and this whole drawing would be shot to hell.

“It’s a really bad one,” he whispered, moving his face inches from mine.

                                                                                                                                     

“MY GOD, BRYAN.  Yes, let’s hear this word.  I want to hear it so badly now.  Please tell me.”  I threw my crayon into the big bucket in the center of the table in exasperation.  Casey, who had been picking her nose all day reached in with her boogery hand and picked up my crayon.  Marvelous.  She noticed my frown and extended the promise:  “I’ll give it right back."  No thank you, Casey.  That can be yours forever now.

I turned to fully face Bryan, opening my eyes widely in sarcastic anticipation.

Bryan shifted in his seat.  “Well I don’t want to say it.  It’s a bad word.”

At first I stared blankly in disbelief.  A few moments later, he was still blushing at the prospect of saying this word.  I became inquisitive.  “Bryan, what was your game plan here?  Remember, you sought me out for this.  How did you envision this transaction occurring?”

Bryan looked crestfallen for a bit but then suddenly he perked up.  “I can spell it out for you!” he yelped excitedly.  He grabbed a purple crayon from the tub in the center of the table and flipped my drawing over.  Before I could stop him, he had scrawled the word “SHIT” in enormous letters across the back of my drawing. 

He pushed the paper toward me.  “There.  That’s the bad word,” he said, obviously very proud of himself. 

“Shit?”  I said, seeking some sort of affirmation.  I had never heard this word before and was curious to how it was pronounced.  I was also skeptical that it was “bad” since I had never heard it before.  If this was indeed a bad word, I’m sure someone would have told me by now.

Bryan’s expression immediately changed to one of horror and disgust.  He recoiled from me while muttering in a hushed tone “you said it…you said it.”

I was still unconvinced.  “Shit isn’t a bad word.  I’ve never heard of it before.”  I played with the word, trying different ways to say it.  “Shit.  Shit.  It sounds stupid.”

Bryan was covering his ears while looking at me with the widest-eyed terror that I have ever seen.  It was as if he thought that the word he had just taught me was an ancient incantation which was going to cause a sputtering volcano to sprout up in the middle of our tiny, windowless classroom.  If he was going to be so offended by me saying it, then he shouldn’t have taught it to me.  That’s like buying your kids a bunch of Nerf guns and then grounding them for shooting at the dog.

“I- I- I’m gonna tell on you!”  Bryan stammered.

“Shit’s not a bad word.  Go for it.”  I said.  I watched as Bryan ran over to our teacher and tugged on her sleeve.  He returned with her shortly.

“Bryan tells me you’ve been saying…bad words.”  My teacher trailed off as she looked down to see a big, purple “SHIT” gleaming up at her from the paper in front of me.

“Shit isn’t a bad word, is it?”  I asked.

“SEE, HE SAID IT AGAIN!”  Bryan exclaimed, pointing at me and jumping up and down.

My teacher dragged me out of the classroom, Bryan jeering behind us.  She took me straight to the principal to whom I tried to articulate the situation.  It didn’t go super well.  I was in his office for so long that I missed lunch, and when he finally allowed me to go back to my class, my ant drawing was gone from my desk.  My teacher had presumably collected it as a worthy addition to my disciplinary file to wave in front of my parents’ faces when they came in for conferences.

I’m not sure where my drawing ended up, but if I ever find it, I’m going to finish the queen ant and then frame it.  Shit side out.

Reejus Fillbun

My family moved from North Carolina to Virginia when I was half-way through 5^th grade.  On paper, it was a good decision because the secondary school system in Virginia was vastly superior and had activities to keep a curious adolescent amused other than petty-theft and teenage pregnancy.  The day-to-day reality of the situation was, however, that I was thrust in a school where social niches had been festering for six years.  This made it very difficult to fit in.  Well that and the fact that God had gifted me with an industrial-strength dose of social awkwardness.

I was even less popular than the girl who was born without sweat glands.  She couldn’t go outside because she would overheat if she was out in the elements for too long.  This gained her an understandable amount of sympathy, but her skin was weirdly shiny and inflexible like an exoskeleton.  It looked like someone had dressed a giant ant in Aeropostale.  I never really got to meet her, but I’m sure she had a terrific personality.  She must have, because she had about infinity times more friends than I did.  Infinity, of course, being the number you reach when you divide by zero.

I tried my hardest to act like everybody else in the hopes that one day people would forget how weird I was, but it seemed like at least once a week I would accidentally find a new and exciting way to not fit in.

One fateful day, when our class was lined up to go into the Cafegymatorium for lunch, I was listening to a group of guys talking- they didn’t mind if I stood nearby and listened as long as I didn’t say anything.  They were having a conversation about television which I was struggling to follow when one of the guys said some nonsense sound that made the rest of the guys laugh.  He had said something like “Regis Philbin,” which did not register as anything to me, but for some reason had been hilarious to the rest of the guys.  Was it a place?  Did Angelina Jolie go to Regis Philbin and eat some bad shellfish?  What was going on?

“What’s a ‘Reejus Fillbun’?”  I asked quietly.  All of the guys in the group suddenly stopped talking, their heads slowly pivoting to face me.

“What did you say?”

“Where is ‘Reeeejussss Fiilllllbunnnn’?”  I said trying to enunciate the syllables.  “Is that in Argentina?  I think I heard about a recall on tuna from there or something.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”  One kid said.  “Are you trying to say Regis Philbin?”

I shrugged.  “I guess…you guys were talking about it earlier.  What is it?”

“Wait.  You don’t know who Regis Philbin is?”  Another kid asked me, his face twisted into a mocking sneer.

“Oh, it’s a person?  What kind of a name is Regis Philbin?  Is that Turkish?”  I muttered.

“How is that possible?”  A third kid asked with disdain.  “Are you retarded?  Don’t you watch any television?”

“Well, not really.  I like cartoons, but most of the time I read books.”  I was speaking too quietly for anyone to hear.  All the guys had now turned away from me and were talking about how stupid someone must be to not know who Regis Philbin was.  Within 20 seconds, they had moved onto a new topic and we resumed our usual dynamic of me listening to snippets of their conversation as I stood quietly nearby.

For the rest of the day, I thought about this interaction.  Why DIDN’T I know who this Regis Philbin guy was?  Someone should have told me!  Why had no one in ten years ever told me who Regis Philbin was so that I could have avoided this embarrassment?  Who would do that to a child?

When my Mom picked me up from school, she got really confused really fast.

“WHY HAVE YOU NEVER TOLD ME WHO REGIS PHILBIN IS?”  I shrieked as I threw my backpack violently into the backseat of the car.  “WHAT KIND OF MOTHER ARE YOU?!”

“Honey…what?  Regis Philbin?”

“YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE!  DON’T PLAY COY WITH ME!  I KNOW YOUR GAMES YOU CONNIVING HARPY!”  I jumped into the car after my backpack, sobbing loudly into my hands.  My Mom looked back at me as I kicked in my seat trying both to figure out where I had learned the word “harpy” and what part a TV talkshow host had to play in all of this.

I was inconsolable for most of the night.  I was convinced that my parents had intentionally kept the identity of Regis Philbin from me with malicious intent.  It wasn’t until the next day that I had settled down enough for my Mom to explain to me who Regis Philbin was.  Never before in the history of anything has there ever been a more anticlimactic moment than this one.

Basically it amounted to this: 

“Oh.”

And then I went back to reading “The Phantom Tollbooth.”

For Whom The Kettlebell Tolls

I received an Amazon.com gift card for Christmas. 

A couple weeks after the New Year, when I write thank you notes, I usually try to tell people how I’ve been enjoying the presents they gave me to ground my appreciation in something tangible.  So, instead of trying to convince my relatives that my gift card was accruing interest (a thing no gift card does), I decided to go on the hunt for an impulse buy.

I was sitting slumped in front of my computer, browsing through the bulk candy section when my stomach started itching.  I absent-mindedly scratched at it, salivating at the 10 pound bag of Twizzlers on my computer screen.  While scratching around my belt line, I felt something that was cause for alarm.  It was a pouch of flesh lolling droopily out over the drawstring of my sweatpants.  Surely this wasn’t…a muffin top.

WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?  I used to run every day in high school!  It seems like some people get better with time, but I’ve aged like an HP-laptop.  I once was full of energy and blazingly fast, but now it’s four years later and I can barely make it through a half a game of spider solitaire before I crash.

  

I spent the next few minutes frowning and kneading my extra stomach flaps disappointedly.

Suddenly imbued with the desire to no longer look like a baked good crammed indelicately into an undersized cupcake tray, I navigated away from the candy section and toward the free-weights.  After rooting around a bit, I stumbled upon something called a “kettlebell,” an object appearing to be the invention of someone so whacked out on cough syrup and amphetamines that they thought it would be a neat idea to add a handle to a cannonball.  The user-comments and product description lauded the kettlebell for its proficiency in “building a strong core and keeping tummies in check.” 

Tummy checking.  That’s what I needed.  I wished it sounded a little more masculine, but whatever.

I tried to narrow down the field of kettlebells by what I arbitrarily decided would be fair price.  The only thing wrong with this strategy was that the various models spanned a wide range of weights.  Also, most of them were measured in kilograms which meant that, because of Dwight “The Hipster” Eisenhower, I had no frame of reference for how much these things actually weighed.

Unsure of myself, I headed over to youtube and found a video of a guy in a blue headband talking about what size kettlebell would be appropriate for different people.  He was kneeling on the padded floor of a gym behind what seemed to be about forty kettlebells arranged from shortest to tallest in front of him.  The smallest one to his left looked like a handbag designed for an anemic mouse while the rightmost could have easily been the stunt double for an industrial water heater.  He went on to talk about how the lighter 90% of the weights were intended for women and children and stroke victims and how real men should use one of the three heaviest models.

I decided to go with the 18 kilogram kettlebell that he described as “for men who have really let themselves go.”  I thought this was a conservative middle-ground.

Two days later (because amazon is amazing), I drove home from work to find a package waiting at my doorstep.  After pulling into the garage and coming through the house, I opened the front door and leaned over to bring the package inside.  I grabbed the sides of the surprisingly small box and tried to lift.  It didn’t budge.  I tried again, but now using more of the “man strength” that I’d tricked myself in to believing that I possessed.  Again, nothing.

I took my jacket off and stepped out of the house to tackle this beast from the front.  I squatted low, wrapped my arms around the box firmly, and strained against the weight.  DID THE UPS GUY GLUE THE BOX TO THE PORCH?  I couldn’t get this stupid thing off the ground.  The best I could do was push against the side until it rolled onto a new face.  Apparently “18 kilograms” was the European equivalent of what we refer to as “a million fucking pounds.”

My ego bruised, I now had to resort to simple machines.  I went inside and looked for something I could use to make a ramp.  I needed something that wouldn’t buckle under the strain of this kettlebell that someone, for some reason, had designed to be the density of a dying sun. 

In the kitchen, my eyes settled on the wrought-iron stovetop griddle that I used to make grilled cheese sandwiches.  I grabbed it and walked back out to where my indignant new kettlebell waited to be broken like a wild mustang.

I set up the griddle in an angle between the porch and the stoop of my front door and rolled the kettlebell in a 5-point turn into place at the base of my impromptu ramp.  With great exertion, I was able to roll/scoot the box up the inclined plane into my house.

Dripping sweat and gasping for air, I was sprawled halfway in and halfway out of my house.  After a few minutes I gathered the remainder of my strength and climbed to my feet.  As I turned to close my front door, the UPS truck drove by as it was now leaving my neighborhood.  The tiny, Chinese woman driving the truck smiled and waved as she passed. 

I’m returning this damn kettlebell.

Man vs. Wild: Goldfish Edition

Throughout my elementary school years, my parents would sign me up for day camps at the local 4H center.  These were generally fun and sometimes even taught useful skills.  For instance I still, to this day, know how to make peanut butter from scratch; that art can be made from a hammer, a nail, and a foil pie-tin; and that a rainstick can be used to not only simulate the sound of a rainstorm, but also to bludgeon the booger-faced kid who made fun of your “gay” foil pie-tin drawing.

One day, my parents dropped me off at the 4H center to learn how to take care of pets.  They didn’t just drop me off hoping I’d figure it out, there was a program being led on the subject. 

Six hours later, when my Dad came back to pick me up, he walked into the building to see a ponytailed gentleman handing me a bewildered looking goldfish in a thin, plastic bag.  Upon seeing this, my Dad jogged up to the dude.

“Hey, hey- what is this?”

“Woah, easy man.”  The guy threw his hands in the air and took a step back.  “We’re giving them to all the kids.”

My Dad looked around to see every individual in the room below the age of ten toting around bagged goldfish in various stages of bewilderment.  Suddenly his tone shifted from suspicion to annoyance.

“Really?  A goldfish?”

“Don’t worry.  They only live like a week or so,” he reassured. 

I, of course, didn’t hear this.  I was too busy poking at my new bag o’ fish and saying sternly “look at me when I’m talking to you.”

It’s not that my Dad didn’t like fish- he was actually weirdly into them.  We had an aquarium at home that he built and stocked himself.  It had an expensive vacuum filter, aquarium rocks chemically designed to combat the formation of algae, and a model of a sunken ship submerged in the center to lend occasional shelter to the $40 dollar fish swimming around inside the tank.  He definitely liked fish.  But this goldfish, this “county fish” as he called it, was too pedestrian.

In his defense, it wasn’t a very pretty fish.  This thing looked like Steve Buscemi with flippers. 

My Dad dug out an old fishbowl from storage and we cleaned it out for little Steve.  Dad even used his fancy pH balancer on the water so that Steve could swim without… unbalanced pH I suppose.

The rest of that first day and about half way into the next, I sat by Steve’s bowl and played with him.  “Playing” isn’t really the best term for it, though.  There are really only so many games you can play with a goldfish, and after winning 35 rounds of checkers in a row, you start to wonder if it’s even trying.

Pretty soon, a week had gone by and much to my father’s dismay, Steve was still alive and still ugly.  By this time, it had been days since I had forgotten that Steve even existed.  My attention span rivaled the goldfish’s in brevity and soon Steve’s wellbeing became my father’s onus. 

Dad wasn’t too upset after the first week that Steve continued to exist.  But when week three rolled around and Steve was still doing little fishy laps in his tiny fish condoquarium, my Dad really started to get annoyed.

“That damn county fish won’t die!” my Dad growled to my mother.  They both stood in front of the fishbowl, arms crossed. 

“Well, Patrick loves it, so thank you for taking care of it,” my Mom said, giving my father a smooch on the cheek and walking out into the hall.  

               

“Maybe if I put it in the big tank with the other fish, they’ll kill that little bastard,” my Dad muttered, his mouth twisting into a grinchly smirk.

When I got back from school that day, Steve had been transplanted into the big aquarium with the rest of our fish.  I wasn’t sure why my Dad had integrated the schools, but I was happy that my goldfish was going to have more room to do his fish activities.  It took Steve a while to adjust, though, and for the first few days he continued to swim in tiny little circles in the corner of the big tank.  Steve may have been ugly and now verifiably dumb, but he was a hell of a survivor.

Shortly after introducing my goldfish to his aquarium, my Dad’s expensive fish started to die.  The first to go was the big, white and yellow angelfish that we found floating upside down, half cooked by the lamp.  Soon after that, we found one of the small neon fish that glowed in the dark bobbing on the surface of the water.  Sometimes two or three fish would die in a single day.  Not Steve though; ole’ Buscemi was still kicking.

My Dad was irate.  In his plan to off my fish, he had made a horrible miscalculation.  He had hoped that his exotic fish would see how ugly my goldfish was and put it out of its misery in a totally justifiable mercy killing.  He had not counted on the fact that my fish would be so exceedingly ugly that its mere presence would drive his flock to suicide.  Steve was clearly not aware of his effect on the other fish as he swam merrily around the tank, dodging carcasses as he went.

Pretty soon, my goldfish was the only fish left in my Dad’s tank.  He tried to introduce new fancy ones but none of them even lasted a week, which ironically is how long my “county fish” was intended to last.

A year and half later, my goldfish died, overstepping his seven day expiration date by 10400%.  I didn’t find my fish dead, I simply came home one day and he was gone.  My Dad said that he had died and that his body had been sacrificed to the mighty porcelain throne while I was at school.

I’m not convinced that Steve actually died.  Knowing Steve, he probably would have outlived us; I should have named him Methuselah.  What probably happened is that my Dad just finally snapped and flushed my fish.

I wasn’t too torn up because the only time I remembered that I even had a fish was when I was looking directly at it.

In retrospect, though, I’d like to think that Steve is still alive somewhere and that after Shawshanking his way through North Carolina’s sewer system he found his way to a beach in Mexico where people don’t care about how ugly he is.  

Santa Claus: Your Friendly, Neighborhood Home Intruder

Santa is a big part of the Christmas tradition in my family.

We try to make his visit as comfortable as possible as per the requirements delineated in his manifesto: “Twas Night Before Christmas.” We leave him cookies and milk; we put out a carrot for Rudolf (or whichever Reindeer is the most worthy); and most importantly we open the flue in the fireplace to make his squeeze down the chimney easier.

Santa has an odd procedure for using what we leave out for him. He feels it necessary, for reasons that elude me, to leave remnants of the cookies and carrots as if to prove that he’s visited even though he just left presents under the tree. Up to fifty percent of the cookies remain as if, instead of ingesting them, Santa prefers to crumble up the cookies and snort them, allowing the Christmas Cheer a faster path to his blood stream. A thousand years at a job, and you figure out some shortcuts. Also, he leaves a mangled half-carrot next to the plate. This means he takes the carrot up to the reindeer, teases one with it, and then brings it back down into our house covered in saliva and disappointment. Or he brings the reindeer in the house, which would mean Prancer framed my dog with that Christmas morning turd on the living room rug.

Along with the presents and the powderized cookies, Santa would leave my sister and me a note. We would tumble down the stairs Christmas morning to find this message outlining why he’d found us worthy of gifts and placed us on his fabled “Nice List.” He would know very intimate details of our behavior at school and at home. Perhaps most children would be comforted, but I felt surveilled. I stopped believing in Santa when, after weeks of searching, I couldn’t find any video cameras in dark nooks or bugs in our phones. In Sunday School, I was taught to believe that only God was omnipotent, so the thought that Santa would be able to see me without a vast network of audio and video equipment maintained by a neck-bearded elf in a white van outside my house didn’t ring true. It was also a tip off that Santa’s handwriting was so similar to my father’s.

Some time in the mid-nineties, my family purchased our first home computer. We were Mac people when it wasn’t cool to be Mac people. We had a giant, whirring monstrosity that took five minutes to boot and another thirty seconds to open the primitive word processing software. It was slow by today’s standards, but back then it was amazing- and even more enigmatic to old people.

The next Christmas, Santa embraced the changing times and wrote his note on our new computer. This was a pretty big leap for Santa, I thought. My grandfather who was around 70 at the time could barely use a computer, but Santa, who was easily a dozen times that old, seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He was even savvy enough to crack the login password to my parents’ account and change the font of the note to big, swirly, Santa-esque letters. Between the spy vans and the computer skills, Santa has a super villain's resume.

A Long Story I Wrote

Fair warning, this is a long story. It's gonna be quite the emotional and physical investment. No seriously, it's like 17 pages long. I'm sorry to do this to you, but I hope you like it. If you like it, hooray! If you hate it, leave me a long angry comment expounding upon why I suck.

Here's a picture because I feel guilty for making this story so long:

Okay, enjoy.

Chloë Is Typing…

Peter’s face was dimly lit by his computer’s screen as he sat tented under the comforter on his bed. He liked to sit like this when he talked to girls he liked; for some reason it made him feel safe.

Except Peter wasn’t talking to girls that he liked. He was staring at a blank chat window that he had opened eighteen minutes ago. Ever since Chloë had come online, he had been desperately trying to do two things: one, think of something disarming to say to get their conversation off to a good start; and two, try not to talk to her so soon after she logged on that she would think that he had just been sitting like a gargoyle in front of his computer waiting for her to appear for the last two and a half hours. He didn’t want her to think this, even though it was the truth.

Peter was almost fourteen now and had finally learned a thing or two about women. You couldn’t just come out and say you liked a girl. The courting process was a complicated and arduous dance in which both sides wrestled bitterly for power until, out of exhaustion, the girl would finally concede and let the boy date her. Not only was the process lengthy, but any false step along the way would result in spooking the flighty creatures. Talking to a girl, even online where the stakes were a little lower, was like walking a barbed-wire tightrope over a vat of eternal virginity.

“Have you talked to her yet?” a different chat window inquired. “She came online like eighteen minutes ago.”

“I know, Glenn. I have to wait and be smooth. I can’t just ambush her like a gorilla as soon as she comes online,” Peter responded. Glenn was so clueless. He knew even less about girls than Peter. I’ll take him under my wing and teach him someday, Peter thought.

“So, have you been working on your hotkeys?” Glenn asked. “You know the raid is in like three hours and you’re going to be our only healer.”

“I know. Don’t worry about me, I’m the highest level of all of you anyway.”

“Yeah, like 37 is high. You don’t even know Divine Shield yet.” Glenn had once had an even higher level Paladin than Peter, but lost all his progress when the server he liked to play on was damaged by a lightning storm in Japan.

Peter didn’t respond. He was too distracted by the clock in the corner of his monitor that seemed to be frozen. Only a few more minutes and then it would be safe to talk to Chloë. Peter held his breath, hoping that somehow that would accelerate time.

---

Chloë looked great in her track uniform. The shorts that the girls had to wear were far shorter than anything allowable by the school dress code and Peter was thankful for the loophole. He would like to use track practice as an excuse to talk to her, but he didn’t always have the opportunity. It didn’t help that she ran short distance and he ran long distance. He was always a little jealous of the short distance people because the girls and guys got to hang out around the track together. In long distance running, the girls and guys would split up and go on separate hour long runs.

He would return to the track after a nine-mile run to see that the short distance people had long since completed their workout and were chatting in groups or playing Frisbee on the football practice field. Chloë usually liked to hang out near the stairs that led up to the bleachers. Guys would gather there to try to impress her, jockeying for position and clashing antlers in loud displays of dominance.

Worse yet, the short distance team was mainly composed of out-of-season soccer and lacrosse players who wanted to stay in shape for the sport that they actually cared about. These guys, for whatever reason, seemed cooler to Peter than the average track runner and thus were more threatening to his chances with Chloë.

Peter ran by the cluster on his way to the locker room. “Hey Chloë,” he offered. No one heard him. Oh well, it’s not as though she was going to be able to talk to him anyway, not with all of those Neanderthals bickering noisily about which NFL teams were going to make it to the playoffs this year.

---

Seventeen minutes. Peter’s feet were falling asleep. He was still waiting for the perfect moment to start his conversation with Chloë. He had pretty much narrowed the perfect entrance down to “hey, what’s up?” First of all, “hello” and “hi” were unusable because they weren’t nearly as cool as the industry standard of flirtatious conversation: “hey.” And just saying “hey” by itself would be too open ended. He had learned these essential tidbits over the years. Also, he knew to never capitalize letters. Girls hate capitalization.

He had also been trying to think of a cute nickname to call Chloë so that they could bond over it. He had come up with “Umlaut” in the shower a couple of weeks ago after he had discovered that her name had one over the “e.” He was pretty sold on the nickname, but he just hadn’t found the right opportunity to warm her up to it yet.

Suddenly he was tired of waiting. It had been nearly eighteen minutes! Surely that was long enough. Eighteen minutes is plenty of time to appear casual and cool like those soccer players with the ankle deep gene pool. He was about to hit enter and send the message he had prepared when his mom called from the kitchen a floor below.

“Peter! Can you please come take out the trash for me?”

“Mom, can I do it in a second? I’m kind of in the middle of something,” he yelled down to her.

“What?” She couldn’t hear him. He sounded muffled.

Peter pulled the comforter off of his head and leaned toward his door. “Can I do it in a second?”

“I’d really prefer if you did it now. I don’t want you to do it after it gets dark.”

Ugh. How old was he going to have to be before his mom stopped treating him like a child? He climbed out of his bed and put on his Tigger slippers. He jogged downstairs and grabbed the trash bag from his mother.

“Don’t get lost up there. Dinner’s going to be ready soon.”

“Okay Mom, I won’t,” he said, not really listening.

He ran outside, trash bag in tow. Technically he wasn’t supposed to wear his slippers outside, so he just ran on his tiptoes as if that would make them less dirty. He put the bag into the metal receptacle and shut the lid with a loud clang. Peter was back inside before the can was done reverberating. He ran directly up to his room, kicked off his slippers, and jumped back under the comforter.

When he opened his laptop again to finally send the message to Chloë, he noticed that her chat window had turned gray and contained a notification in small letters: Chloë has signed off.

“SON OF A-“ he yelled but cut himself off. Peter punched the mattress beneath him. The message he had so thoroughly considered was still waiting dumbly in the bottom of Chloë’s chat box. He removed it with loud bangs on the delete key.

“She just logged off,” Glenn wrote, his message arriving on Peter’s screen with a ping.

“I KNOW. THANK YOU,” Peter responded dryly.

“Well did you talk to her? Is that why she left?”

“No, Glenn. I didn’t get a chance.”

“She was online for almost 20 minutes…”

“I KNOW. JUST FORGET ABOUT IT AND FOCUS ON THE RAID TONIGHT. I know for a fact that you haven’t conjured those mana potions that you promised that you would have ready.”

“Ugh,” Glenn responded. Soon afterward, he changed his status to “busy” and his icon turned red.

---

Chloë always brought the most interesting lunch. Yesterday she had brought pita bread, hummus, and some kind of Indian soup. She had told him what it was, but it had a weird name and he had forgotten. Today, her lunch consisted of grapes, raspberries, and strawberries accompanied by slivers of several different types of cheese that Peter could not readily identify.

Peter and Chloë didn’t sit at the same table, he usually just made his observations from across the cafeteria. He used to sit with her, but he got frustrated by the storm of testosterone that followed her to her table. He would try to talk to her, but who could even hear themselves think over that rabble. The funny thing was, as he watched her (discretely of course, he wasn’t a weirdo) he noticed that she never really seemed to contribute to conversations. She just sat quietly and ate her food. Whenever she did decide to say something, the guys at her table would be suddenly still, listening in rapt attention for her to finish her statement at which point they would burst into raucous laughter as if the one who laughed the loudest was most worthy of her affection.

He kind of hated lunch. Glenn was his best friend but they weren’t scheduled to have lunch at the same time. This charged Peter with the awkward task of deciding which group of periphery friends he wanted to sit with. He was friends with a group of guys that sat at a table in the back corner of the cafeteria, but they played “Magic: The Gathering” at lunch. They would sit and eat and battle each other using cards bearing Goblins and Orcs. Peter thought it was pretty entertaining, but he didn’t want Chloë, or any other girl for that matter, to associate him with nerdy fantasy games. Today he was sitting with the drama geeks. They were probably even louder than Chloë’s table. They were always grotesquely over-emoting some poorly remembered monologue to one another or yell-singing songs and playing loud guitar accompaniment. For some reason it seemed as though these kids thought that being an actor was synonymous with having an insatiable hunger for negative attention.

 Peter sat in silence, eating his lunch and watching how everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves. He liked to look down on these cliquey ecosystems as inferior but sometimes he just wished he could be as comfortable with himself as they seemed to be.

BBBBBRRRRRRRNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnn! The school’s bell sounded like a repurposed Cold War missile defense warning system. Its ring heralded the end of Peter’s lunch period. He put his Tupperware sandwich container back into his lunchbox and crumpled all of his foil and plastic trash into a ball. All of the drama kids who bought their lunch simply stood up with their trays and walked toward the door. This moment of clean-up hesitation made Peter look like he had been eating lunch alone at the table, but he never remembered to gather his trash beforehand so he could get up with the rest of them.

When he finally stood to head out with the massive lunch exodus, he glanced back toward Chloë’s deserted table. Under it, he noticed something that looked like a duffel bag. Forgetting his ball of trash, he picked up his lunch box and walked over. He crouched down and tried to pull the bag out, but one of its straps had become entangled in the legs of a chair. After taking way too long to wrestle it free, he pulled it the whole way out from under the table. A tag on the handle of the bag read, “Chloë.”

This was Chloë’s track bag! He looked up sharply, scanning the cafeteria to see if she had already left. He didn’t see her. He grabbed the bag and his lunch box and jogged for the door to the cafeteria. He wasn’t sure which class she had next, so he had to see if he could catch her before she got too far away. He was about to climb the stairs to the cafeteria exit when Chloë appeared at the top of them.

“Oh, hey. You, um. You forgot your-“ Peter lifted her track bag up in front of him.

“I know! I was coming back to get it. Thank you for keeping it safe for me!” Chloë smiled at him, still standing at the top of the stairs.

Peter stood below her, holding out her bag.

“So, are you-“ she started.

“Oh yeah, right. Of course,” he said, finally understanding that she was waiting for him to come up the stairs. He climbed up and handed her the bag. There was a short pause where they were both silent before a group of about eight guys appeared on the other side of the door with puzzled looks on their faces. They beckoned for Chloë. As she walked through the door, she looked back at Peter and smiled. This tiny moment made Peter’s whole week.

---

An alert went off in Peter’s Gchat. It made the “Ka-Ching!” sound like a cash register opening. Peter had set up this alert to go off every time Chloë signed in. The sound itself was a little crass, but Peter liked to know when she got on so that he could begin waiting to talk to her. Waiting, though, had not paid off like he had hoped this last time, and he was worried that he might miss his opportunity again. He retyped the message that earlier he had so carefully crafted and sent it to her: “hey, what’s up?” Now it was just a waiting game. He hoped that she had come back online with the intent to stay for a while and would be able to talk. Pretty soon the message “Chloë is typing…” appeared at the bottom of the chat window. Peter’s adrenaline spiked.

“hey,” she wrote. “nothing much, just watching tv. what have you been up to?”

“oh, you know, watching the game,” he lied. He wasn’t sure if there even was a game on right now. After a minute or so, she replied.

“so I’ve spent the past two hours watching the food network.”

“naturally.” He hoped she would think he was funny.

Suddenly another chat window popped up. It was Glenn again. “Alright, mana pots are good to go. Also, I remembered that I forgot to equip that Blackvenom Blade that we found last week in the Redridge Mountains. I’m gonna try that baby out tonight.”

Ignoring Glenn for the moment, Peter followed up with Chloë, worried that she would misinterpret what he had typed. He didn’t really have anything good to talk about or know what she was interested in, so he just pursued the last thing she had said.

“learn any good recipes?” Ugh, this was horrible. He wished he knew of anything that they might have in common to talk about. He opened a new tab in his browser and navigated to her Facebook page, hoping to find something usable in her “Interests” section. Chloë must have recently changed her privacy settings, because Peter wasn’t able to see her Wall, her Info, or any of her pictures. He’d never sent her a friend request up until this point primarily because he was too nervous but also because previously he was already able to see all of her information anyway without having to reveal himself. Now, he wasn’t sure what to do. He had begun this dead-end conversation with a girl he liked and wanted to impress and he had no leads.

“Dinner!” shouted Peter’s mother from downstairs. Now not only was this conversation dead in the water, but now he wasn’t even going to have an opportunity to try to fix it. This was a disaster.

“So, what do you think? Should I go DPS tonight and try to work on my berserker build with the new sword? Or should I go back to the mage build that I’ve been using?” Glenn asked.

“Just equip the Blackvenom Blade on that level 14 Dark Elf that you started and we’ll get him a couple quick levels.”

Peter sighed. He wasn’t even hungry but “dinner time is family time!” as his mother liked to say.

“What?” was the response. But it came from Chloë.

Why was Chloë reacting to the message he had sent to Glenn? How could she…Oh no, he thought. He hadn’t switched windows before responding. He had sent that last message to Chloë by accident! His brain was scrambling desperately to create a believable excuse when Chloë signed off.

Well that was it. That was the end of any chance Peter was ever going to have of a relationship with Chloë. Now she knew he was a nerd because he had literally sent her the proof. Then Peter noticed that Glenn as well as everyone else in his chat list had signed off. He tried to go to Google in his browser, but the page wouldn’t load. The internet must have gone out! Chloë might still be online! He might have a chance to explain away that errant message. Maybe he could tell her that he had a computer virus.

---

Mrs. Carlisle dropped Peter’s graded homework on his desk during her trip around the room. There was a large, red “100” emblazoned across the top of his stapled stack of papers, but Peter wasn’t particularly excited. Lots of people got one hundreds on their homework in Mrs. Carlisle’s class. She graded purely on completion and when the class learned that this was the criteria upon which their work would be assessed, all effort to generate correct answers vanished and was replaced by putting down anything that might be vaguely construed as Chemistry. This was the sixth or seventh homework assignment on which Peter had earned a one-hundred for complete gibberish and he was becoming more bold with each passing assignment. For this most recent homework, he had simply answered “Argon” for every single question. Obviously this was not helping him learn the material, but he hoped in vain that perhaps the final would be graded on completion as well.

Peter looked over at Chloë. She was wearing earmuffs even though they were indoors and it was a relatively warm day for mid February. Sure Chloë was quirky, but that’s what Peter liked about her. She was so unique that deep down he worried that he might someday discover that they, in fact, had nothing in common. Mrs. Carlisle handed Chloë her homework. A small smile crept across her face. Peter wondered if anyone in the class had gotten less than a perfect score. Her stack of papers gone, Mrs. Carlisle marched to the front of the class.

“Alright everyone, we’re going to start group projects today. I’m going to tell you all who you’re going to be paired with in just a second. I have the list right...here.” Mrs. Carlisle shuffled around some papers on her desk. “I would let you pick your own groups, but I fear the worst when Dylan and Curtis are allowed to be together.” Dylan and Curtis simulated a high five from across the room and shouted “Air-Five, Bro!” They had been separated in the first week of class and sequestered to opposite corners of the room because they were distracting when they were together. But, even separated by twenty-five feet, they still found a way to talk to each other.

“Alright so the pairs are as follows…” Mrs. Carlisle began reading off the list. Peter realized there was a chance that he might be paired with Chloë and almost swallowed his gum. “Daniel and Mark, Martha and Cal, Brandon and Tanya, Bernice and Thomas, Chloë and Peter, Bryan and…” Wait. Wait, did she just say “Chloë and Peter?” Where they actually paired up for the group project? The Gods had smiled on him! He was going to get to do the project with Chloë and she was going to see what a great guy he was and they were going to fall in love and raise a family and grow old together and buy wicker furniture! His wish had come true!

“Oh, I’m sorry. Peter, you’re with Curtis. I thought something sounded funny. Is that okay? You don’t mind if I split up you and Chloë, do you?”

No. Surely the Gods weren’t this capricious. They couldn’t toy with him like this. Peter was crying on the inside, but what could he do? Say that it, in fact, wasn’t okay and that she was totally sabotaging any chance that he and Chloë might have at mutual happiness? “Sure, that’d be fine.” Peter responded, completely deflated. He looked over at Curtis. Curtis mouthed “High Five, Bro!” and held up his hand.

---

Peter leapt out from under his comforter and ran out of his room, past his slippers. He clomped down the first flight of stairs to the kitchen, but he would have one floor to go after this; the modem for the internet was in the basement. He scrambled past his family members who were seated at the kitchen table, waiting to start the meal. “Where are you going?” his father asked. Peter mumbled something incoherent and hurried down the basement stairs.

When Peter reached the modem, he found it blinking confusedly with the internet light unlit at he suspected. He unplugged the modem, hoping that the usual fix of unplug and replug would do the trick.

“Peter, what are you doing? We’re waiting for you!” Peter’s mom yelled down to him.

“I’m fixing something! I’ll be up in just a second!” He knew you were supposed to wait thirty seconds before plugging the modem back in to let it have enough time to fully reset, but Peter didn’t have that kind of time. He mashed the power cord back into the modem and shook it impatiently as the lights on the front slowly became lit again. Soon, the modem seemed to indicate that all systems were go and that the internet, theoretically, should be restored. He jumped back to his feet and ran back toward the door of the basement, kicking his left big toe hard against the leg of the couch as he took the turn too closely.

Pain shot up from his toe through his whole body and resonated in his teeth. Sweet mother of God, the internet better be working now, he thought to himself as he limped up the stairs. His family was still seated around the kitchen table as he had left them. They looked up at him blankly. He continued his limp-run up to his room. His mother and father called angrily after him but he yelled back, “start without me!”

---

The ice bath was freezing. Peter was sitting waist deep in a briskly circulating tub of 45 degree water in the corner of the trainer’s room and was naked except for his running shorts. His knuckles were white as he gripped the side of the tub. He hated this, but his coach had been making him do it once a week ever since Peter had started complaining about his hip. He should have just kept quiet and waited until it either went away or his leg fell off. His teeth were chattering loudly when he looked up to see Chloë enter the trainer’s room. Peter tried to slowly relax and appear comfortable in the ice tub so that she wouldn’t think he was a wimp. Every tiny movement sent ice daggers into his bones.

The only way Peter could get his teeth to stop chattering was to hum to himself. Over his own humming, Peter could barely make out that Chloë was suffering from a cramp in her hamstring and needed the trainer to stretch it out. Chloë climbed onto the trainer’s bench and lied on her back. The trainer leaned over her and pushed Chloë’s leg toward her face. Peter realized he was staring and turned his focus to his knees, which were blue.

Peter checked the timer. There were only twenty-five seconds left in the fifteen minutes that he was required to do, but maybe if he stuck around a little bit longer, he would be able to leave with Chloë. Everyone else would be gone by now and he could be suave and walk her to her car. He would have to time it perfectly.

Peter sat in the tub, edging silently closer to the brink of hypothermia while watching Chloë out of the corner of his eye. It was hard to tell how much stretching the trainer was going to do, but he’d better hurry up because Peter was pretty sure that he was dying.

Suddenly the trainer released Chloë and said that she was free to go. Peter jolted in the tub, sending a small wave crashing over the side. They stopped and shot him a confused glance. He was unaware that they had been this close to finishing. He shakily pulled himself out of the tub while Chloë and the trainer talked about stretches she could do at home and how to apply heat and cold correctly. Peter’s knees screamed out in agony as he shuffled toward his towel and clothes. He looked like a baby foal taking its first few balance-less steps.

Chloë walked out of the door just as Peter finished putting on his shoes. They were still untied, but he had no time. He thanked the trainer as he gimped out of the door after Chloë. She was already on her way to the parking lot. Peter had to jog to catch up with her. This made every joint in his lower body hurt so much that a whimpered laugh was the only thing keeping him from crying. He reached Chloë out of breath and very unsteady.

“Hey.”

“Hey! Are you okay?” she asked, concerned about how Peter’s knees were pointed so violently inward.

“Me? Oh yeah, I’m fine. The ice bath’s a little rough, though.”

“Yeah it looks like it.” There was a pause after she said this. He thought that she must be expecting him to say something since he had started the conversation. Surely there must be some reason for him to get her attention. Nope. He hadn’t thought it this far through yet. He had to think of something quick. What did guys always talk about with Chloë? They were always going on about sports, but he didn’t know anything about sports. He needed something though, anything.

“So how about those Knicks?” Peter mumbled.

“The Knicks?”

“Yeah, basketball. The Knicks are a basketball team…in the NBA.” Peter tried to say this like it wasn’t a question, but he wasn’t totally sure that he was stating facts.

“Right, no I know who the Knicks are.” She said. “What about them? Did they play recently?”

“Yeah...sure did.”

She looked at him like he was trying to sell her steamboat insurance. “Okay…so how’d they do?”

“Pretty good. They- they won. The game they were playing, they won it. By a lot of…uh…baskets. Or points, I guess points they won by. A lot of them.” She stared at him blankly. “It was a good game.” He felt like such an idiot.

“I wish I had seen it.” She said not looking at him. “Well, I’m gonna head over this way. I see my dad’s car, he’s parked in the upper lot. Talk to you later!”

“Okay, bye! Don’t miss the next game! I’ll quiz you!” He called after her.

I’LL QUIZ YOU? He was immediately furious with himself. He shoved his hands into his pockets and clenched them until they hurt. WHY DON’T YOU KNOW ANYTHING SPORTS OR AT LEAST COME UP WITH A TOPIC YOU KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT BEFOREHAND? YOUR HEAD WASN’T UNDER COLD WATER TOO, WAS IT? When he reached his mom’s idling car, he jumped up and down, punishing himself with the icy tendrils of pain that shot up from his knees as he landed.

---

When Peter finally made it back up to his room, he didn’t fling himself under the comforter like he normally would, there wasn’t enough time for that. He sat on his bed, toe still throbbing, and refreshed Gchat. Mercifully, it loaded and Chloë’s name appeared; she was still online! Peter was composing a wildly false message for Chloë about a malicious virus that had commandeered his computer with the intent to defame him in front of females when she sent him a message before he could finish.

“what was that?” she asked.

The cursor in the chat window blinked at Peter, waiting for him to type something. Before Peter could come up with a convincing enough lie, Chloë sent the second half of her thought.

“a dark elf can’t wield a blackvenom blade. especially one that’s only level 17.”

Peter sat slack jawed, staring at his computer screen.

“the blackvenom blade is an alliance weapon and you need to be at least level 20 or something to use it”

“how do you…” Peter typed, dumbstruck.

“how do I what?”

“how do you know that?! do you play World of Warcraft?”

“yeah, I’ve played since last Christmas. my brother got me into it.”

“I had no idea you played…”

“I had no idea YOU played. why didn’t you say something?”

“I don’t know.” Peter suddenly became aware that his mouth was still hanging open. He closed it and blinked to try to clear his mind. He didn’t know what to say. He finally had something in common with the girl of his dreams and that commonality was somehow making her seem even more attractive. There were so many competing things he wanted to tell her simultaneously that he was crippled by all of the options. After a pause, she continued.

“Well, I have to go eat dinner.”

“yeah, I do too,” Peter said, remembering that his food was, at this moment, growing cold next to his gradually angering parents.

“well, will you be online later?”

“Gchat?”

“no, World of Warcraft”

“oh, yeah. I will.”

“cool, me too. my name is Umlaut96. see you then?”

“see you then,” Peter typed.

“can’t wait :)”

Peter closed his laptop, but it didn’t feel like he was controlling his own actions. He felt like he was watching himself in the third person from above the same way he would later watch his character in World of Warcraft as he and Chloë slayed swamp trolls together until the wee hours of the morning.

Christmas Town

I've done a lot of posts about my childhood and recently I’ve been thinking that it would be fun to write about a more current event.  Here are selected highlights from my trip to Busch Gardens, Christmas Town Edition that I took yesterday with some of my friends.

You know that ride that has the chairs hanging from a spinning column that little kids like to go on?  I got kicked off of that. 

One of my friends suggested that we go on the chair ride and try to kick each other in succession to make a sort of chain reaction that would send the final rider careening out in a much wider arc than he would normally go.  I misinterpreted this as just grabbing each other’s chairs and flinging them haphazardly in random directions.  It really wasn’t that big of a deal or that distracting I don’t think, but after 45 seconds or so, the ride manager came over the PA system saying “Attention!  The ride is not over!”  even though the ride had begun to slow down.

I turned to one of my friends and said “Ah, damn.  They’re kicking us off aren’t they.”  That turned out to be exactly what they were doing. 

In retrospect, the real reason they shut down the ride may have been the fact that, as I was propelled forward by my friend’s kicks to my chair, I pretended to reach out for the little girl in the chair in front of me.  This girl was like 8 years old.  I was just imagining that I was a Ring Wraith reaching out for Frodo as Arwen  rode him toward Rivendell.  Anyway the point is that I was joking.  I WAS JOKING, ANONYMOUS PARENT.  I DIDN’T ACTUALLY WANT TO GRAB YOUR LITTLE KID.  Also, I’m sorry I freaked you out. 

This is what I thought I looked like:

This must be what you saw:

The best part, though, was when my friends and I were getting escorted off of the ride, a chunky, middle-aged woman yelled out, “Ho ho ho- losers!”

We went straight from the exit of this ride to the entrance of the nearby freefall ride. 

I’d never been on a freefall thing like this before and one of my friends said that you could hold out a penny in your palm and when the ride dropped you, the penny would float above your hand.  I rooted around in my pocket and found a quarter.  It was bigger than a penny, but I figured it would work just as well.

I hid the quarter in my fist as we were seated and a guy in a vest checked to make sure that our harnesses were ratcheted down tightly enough.  When he pushed on mine, it locked my arm in a really awkward position.  I wriggled as I tried to give myself enough range of motion to hold my arm out for the quarter experiment. 

The ride started and we were slowly dragged high into the air.  I continued to try to finagle my hand into a suitable position.  By the time the ride got to maximum height, I had found a highly uncomfortable position which let me hold out the quarter on my palm.  My arm was mushed through the small gap between the plastic harness and the seat and twisted like a withered flower, but the quarter was all ready to go.  I was excited to see that bitch float.

Suddenly the ride started and the quarter flew out of my hand like a priest releasing a dove at a wedding.  It shot out immediately into the inky darkness and I lost sight of it.  We plummeted toward the earth.  I was surprised at how fast we accelerated and consequently how short the ride was.  Soon the braking system engaged and we began to slow. 

                                                                         

A loud “TING!” rang out from a place below me that I couldn’t see.  It was really, really loud.  It took me an embarrassingly long time to piece together that what I had heard was the sound of the quarter hitting the ground with probably near-fatal velocity, and that by letting that coin fly out of my hands I was probably as close as I have ever been to the overdramatic intro of a CSI-type show.

Well, it looks like our victim ... just couldn’t handle change.  YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Later I almost killed myself trying to jump onto this wall without using my hands.  I misjudged how high it was or something and flipped clean over it, landing on my head.  That is why I am behind the wall in this picture.

To cap off the evening, the girls in the group thought that it would be fun to see a penguin exhibit.  I didn’t know where we were going and followed them blindly until we reached the end of an obscenely long line.  After about four minutes of waiting in the line dumbly without asking why this was happening to me, I was informed that we were waiting to see this penguin thing.  I immediately started to bitch and complain.  I was being really unlikable and hard to be around.  I regret acting that way now and I regretted it in the moment, but I really don’t like delayed gratification. 

Once we were in the exhibit I continued to be an ass.

In a room filled with children and tired parents, there was a tiny case in which three penguins were uncomfortably mashed.  There wasn’t even space enough for the penguins to walk around.  They just had to stand there while a thousand little disgusting kids pointed and smeared their snotty noses on the glass.  I don’t have a bleeding heart and I’m not typically overly sympathetic, but it was plain to see that the lives of these penguins really just sucked.  Looking at these penguins I said loudly, “So are these the ones that haven’t killed themselves yet?”  There were a few parents who looked up in displeasure.  To which I responded:  “What kind of turtles are these?”  My friends ushered me quickly into the next room.

In the next room there were penguins playing in a larger enclosure with a little tank of water that was sealed so you could see the them as they were swimming under the water.  Some of the penguins were mottled with black spots on their tummies.  When there was a lull in the din of the exhibit, I said to the kids in front of me, “You see those black spots?  Each one is a dream that didn’t come true.”  Again the parents looked unhappy, but the kids laughed. 

Then we left the park and I ate a Triple Steak Stack at Taco Bell.  It was a weird Taco Bell, KFC hybrid where the kitchen was open and you could see them preparing your food, which was a huge turnoff for this particular establishment.  Also, never order the Triple Steak Stack.  It tastes like orphan thumbs stuffed messily into a pita shell made from cadaver flesh…with cheese.