Life in MS Paint

A Creative Use for a Hamper

2011-12-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

I grew up with an evil genius. My older sister. She was sharp as a tack and her brain was lightning fast. I didn't stand a chance against her powers, especially considering the fact that my family collectively referred to me as "Captain Slow."

She carried out one of her most evil plots before I learned how to read. She saw my inability to discern words from letter combinations as an exploitable weakness. Therefore, she handed me a pair of scissors and directed me to a mattress.

I obliged. Then she read it aloud.

And then she gave me some legal advice.

I reacted to this sudden change in the course of my life about as well as one would expect.

Mercifully, my sister offered to save my life by stuffing me in a hamper where the cops couldn't find me.

For added protection, she wedged the door side of the hamper against the back wall of the closet in the guest room (the room that got the least foot traffic in the house), and then wandered off. It was kinda like a Ping the duck type situation.

Several hours later, my mom miraculously went into the closet to put something away. This next part is hazy for me, but she says she heard muffled sobs coming from the back of the closet. Upon investigating, she found me red in the face, hot and sweaty, pleading that she shut the hamper door so I didn't get sent to the clink.

It was absolute heaven when she explained I wasn't going to be incarcerated.

I got my sister back several years later when I threw all her dry clean only clothes in the pool.

Say Cheese

2011-12-11T14:39:00.000-08:00

I'll admit I don't have the most sophisticated palette. I like pizza, tacos, and Oreo McFlurries. When I studied abroad in France, I went on a wine tasting tour in Bordeaux. It's safe to I say was a little out of my element.

I've been known to make some strange flavor associations as well.

When I first started a new job, I went out to dinner with some of my co-workers. We ended up at a restaurant that was a little pricey, so I decided to order from the appetizer menu. An interesting but more reasonable option was to order a cheese plate. They had a variety of cheeses from which to choose. I was lost.

I made my choices, and soon, the platter arrived. It was great! I began tasting each cheese, determining which was which. Each one was better than the next. Until the last one.

The cheese was pretty bad, but the odd thing was that it also tasted pretty familiar. I knew I had tasted it before, but I couldn't place it. This drove me nuts, so I kept eating it. It was soft, and creamy, and weird tasting. I ate about half of it, each bite more familiar than the next.

I still couldn't determine what it was. I decided to ask the server.

I was eating the butter. What a great first impression.

Ulcerative Colitis, or UC and Me

2011-11-28T14:21:00.000-08:00

It's my 100th post! Let's talk about bowels.

Ever since I was a teenager, I have always had GI troubles (or as my dad calls it, a "busted gut"). Perhaps going on Accutane wasn't the best idea. Research shows it'll pretty much destroy you from the inside out (but your skin will look fantastic!).

A while ago, I experienced a new feeling.

Soon, it happened again.

It began happening more and more often.

(I've never had to say anything as professional as "profit margin" in my job, but I can dream.)

When I lost about 10 pounds in a week despite maintaining normal eating habits, experienced internal bleeding, maintained a constant fever, and had some other unpleasant symptoms...

...I decided it was time to go to the doctor.

Who unfortunately decided I was in need of a colonoscopy.

Nothing says "day off from work!" like having your innards inspected while under heavy sedation.

The trip to the hospital was an adventure. I checked in at the Texas Medical Center - the world's largest collection of medical facilities (hospitals, research facilities, labs, medical and nursing schools), all connected by sky-walks, tunnels, parking garages, and Starbucks. The medical center literally forms a skyline one might find downtown in a midsized U.S. city. People call it the TMC. I call it a moving tribute to American innovation. Or needle city. But that's just me.

A friend had to drive me at 6:00 in the morning. We were both groggy and confused.

We ended up wandering around a parking garage until we locked ourselves in a industrial looking stairwell. Finally, we found ourselves in a building that looked medical in nature.

Soon, I was in a gown, under a warmed blanket, and hooked up to an IV bag. As the nurse was inserting the needle, I heard her say "Hey! We've got a spurter!" I looked down just as she commanded that I not.

Soon it was time for me to say goodbye to my friend (including several jokes about it possibly being a permanent goodbye) and I was wheeled off to my procedure. As the nurse rolled the bed down the hallway, I couldn't help but sing the Darth Vader theme song. She didn't quite think that was as funny as I did. A fellow patient to whom I called out, "see you in heaven!" didn't think I was quite so funny either.

The events that followed are a little hazy. And by a little hazy, I mean I sort of recall the staff trying in vain to rouse me and then eventually giving in to the fact that I was going to take a few hours longer than normal to fully wake. Apparently, the doctor explained his findings to my friend and me, but I didn't quite follow.

As I staggered out of the hospital and back into the rusty stairwell, I had one heck of a case of the hiccups, which was probably my favorite part.

Later that afternoon, as the grogginess wore off, I began reading through the pamphlets the doctor sent home with me, as well as my medical report. (My favorite part of the pamphlet was that a lot of the pages had "Notes" sections, with empty lines where I could jot down who knows what.)

Ulcerative Colitis.

An inflammation of the large intestine that is lifelong, affecting about 500,000 people in the U.S. Symptoms can be managed in many cases, but removal of the colon is the only known cure.

Ulcerative Colitis.

I said it out loud several times, as if getting used to a new scar or tattoo.

There are several kinds: one that affects just the lower part of the intestine, one that affects the left side of it, and then the bad one that affects the whole dang thing. Pancolitis. I looked at my medical report. "Pan" was pretty much written all over it. Uh oh.

The pamphlet also had pictures of people looking calm but slightly uneasy.

I wondered if maybe I should start looking deep in thought too.

Probably not.

When I spread the word among family and friends, everyone soon became an expert on how to manage this.

The fact that medical research supports that uclerative colitis is mostly unaffected by diet didn't seem to slow any of them down from dishing out advice. I suppose it felt good to be loved.

When the first treatment of heavy medication didn't work, the doctor put me on a second drug - a steroid that makes you feel like you've had about 90 cups of coffee, makes you ravenous, and cranky. I actually didn't have too many of the side effects, but there were some.

Currently, I have yet to make any real progress in treatment, but feeling wired all the time is actually pretty fun. Plus, I'm saving so much money on coffee. And I get to make unnerving jokes about being a walking skeleton. Things could be way worse, and in my book, that's pretty good.

Old Denim

2011-09-20T11:18:00.000-07:00

After graduating from high school, I traveled to Australia for the summer and spent some time on a cattle ranch. It wasn't some tourist type thing; it was the real deal. It was as if I thought I were actually cool enough to do something of this nature. Turns out, I wasn't.

The flight was about a million hours long and I sat next to a lady who lost her glasses about 15 minutes into the trip. She made me help her look for them the entire time.

I was really excited when the plane landed, both to see Australia and to get away from the lady.

Once on the cattle station, I became entranced by the differences in Australia. For one thing, the birds in Australia don't exactly chirp. They kinda sound like a human laughing.

Also, they put beets on their burgers unless you request otherwise.

There really were kangaroos just like, living there. All over the place. That didn't stop the zoo from having them as an exhibit.

Startling.

I learned from the zookeeper that a kangaroo's pouch is not just an exterior fanny pack type deal. It actually connects to their insides at the bottom.

Thus began my complete aversion to kangaroos and marsupials in general.

On that cattle station, I helped with a number of ranching activities that were foreign to me. One of these tasks was to help drive the cattle along the many acres of the farm. There I was, in the outback, driving a horse and corralling steer. I would have felt really tough and rugged were it not for my horse. Because I was new to the whole equestrian thing, the ranchers decided to put me on Old Denim, a horse that was about a zillion years old, partially deaf, a bit slow and a lot unsteady. He was loyal at best and at least alive.

Old Denim actually did a fairly good job of keeping up with the herd, but the experience of riding him wasn't without incident. At one point, Denim charged up a hill to make sure he could make it to the top. He didn't care that there was a low hanging branch in our path.

He was also prone to dozing off at unpredictable times.

The biggest challenge for Old Denim and me came after a long day of riding. The ranchers had dropped the cattle where they needed to be and we were riding together back to the station. I started to feel Old Denim's legs buckle and tremble a bit, but he kept going. I figured I was just imagining things. Just as I was starting to feel a little guilty for doubting the old horse, he reached his breaking point. Old Denim very quietly fell forward onto his own head.

I didn't know what to do, so I leaned back as and squeezed my legs tight to stay on his back. It actually kinda worked.

Silently, Old Denim got back to his feet and ambled on like nothing had ever happened. No one seemed to notice.

Also, being on a cattle station, the meat was always super fresh.

Toward the end of my trip in Australia, a gentleman offered to take my picture as I held a koala for five bucks. I figured, "When in Rome," and agreed. Turns out, koalas aren't the docile, bleary eyed, eucalyptus-drugged, cuddly animals you might think they are.

I wouldn't recommend holding the koalas.

Food Runner (Like Blade Runner, Only Less Cool)

2011-07-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

One summer when I was a teenager, I gained part-time employment in a restaurant. Though this may seem like a typical adolescent experience, it was anything but normal, as I became completely incapable of doing anything right once I set foot in the establishment.

During my first week on the job, a magazine featured the owner/my boss as one of south Florida's most eligible bachelors, complete with a full pictorial. Suddenly, the place became a local hot-spot and was always jammed.

Being in a chaotic and new environment caused me to forget some important and basic restaurant principles. On one of my first evenings, someone asked for extra lemon.

I just handed her some. Apparently I needed to deliver several neatly sliced wedges on a clean, white, saucer. That made sense.

On another particularly crowded evening, the bachelor boss sent me out to get 12 cartons of cigarettes. I marched down the street in the pouring rain to a nearby gas station and acted like I knew what I was doing purchasing tobacco products.

Things went south pretty quickly.

I didn't even know that was an option. I didn't recall the boss saying anything about any filters, so I ordered 12 cartons of unfiltered Marlboro Reds.

I walked back in the rain the with the goods. The rain caused most of the boxes to warp beyond being able to ever return them. When I arrived and proudly presented the loot to the boss, he was not pleased. I figured when he looked at me like I was too stupid to live that he had wanted filters.

The coup de grace of my performance in the restaurant happened when I inadvertently held the veal saltimbocca over a customer and accidentally tilted it a bit.

I apologized so many times that she actually asked me to stop. I then asked her if there was anything I could do. Her response was only to say the words "Grey" and "Goose."

Though I look back at my restaurant experience and laugh, I'd be lying if I said that thinking about the poor lady dowsed in hot meat gravy didn't horrify me somewhat still today.

I suppose that's a normal reaction.

The French Dinner

2011-06-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

What is it about French teachers that make middle school and high school students want to torture them with bad classroom behavior? They naturally transmit some sort of signal to young students that says "go absolutely bonkers in my class." It's like spilling a drop of blood in a shark tank, inducing what can best be described as a sort of French class feeding frenzy. I'm not sure I've identified the quality common to all French teachers that causes this; perhaps it is having a big heart.

No matter the unjustified (but very real) cause of said bad behavior, my classmates and I were 100% susceptible to it. The most well-behaved and the most depraved students couldn't help but go crazy each time we set foot in the French room.

Take, for example, the 7th grade French dinner. Our teacher arranged for each of us to cook a French meal and bring it to school one evening so that we could learn about French cuisine. All week we prepared decorations. One of the assignments was to draw a French themed place mat for the event. Things were already going south at this stage of the game.

My friend, Katie, was in charge of bringing the French onion soup. Very exotic. She and her friend Liz were running late, so she decided to be responsible and leave a voicemail for Madame.

I believe she actually said "Click."

Katie and Liz were, of course, perfectly fine, just stuck in traffic.

(Note: I realize how bad this is, but isn't it kind of hilarious that a middle schooler wouldn't know better?)

Well we all got mighty impatient waiting for the soup, so we planned to jump out and yell "Where were you!?" as Katie walked in the door. The problem was, Katie startled easily, so when we jumped out, she screamed and dumped the entire crock pot of soup onto herself.

The dinner spiraled out of control from there. I believe we ultimately made jokes about Madame's recent gall stone removal procedure and then began launching crepes out the window at passersby.

In high school, one might think we had matured and could carry ourselves in a more civilized manner. Not so. Once, when a giant dragon-fly flew into the room, we all used it as an opportunity to act panicked, as though a B52 bomber was swooping around overhead. It was a most immediate descent into madness.

When someone trapped the insect in a cabinet drawer, we could still hear its wings buzzing.

Quite often, our teacher needed a mental break from us, so a lady named Mrs. Chen would come in and substitute. She didn't know a lick of French. Every time we had her, she would threaten that if we didn't behave, she would make us watch West Side Story as our punishment. She must have loved that movie because even before we could act up, she was popping that tape in and pressing play.

We must have seen that movie at least 30 times.

When our teacher was preparing us for the AP French exam, she asked that we take a practice test. Before we began, she reminded us not to have "wandering eyes," meaning no sneaking a peak at anyone else's test. That's when John piped up with an honest question.

He had a point. None of us knew any French.

If you know any middle or high school French teachers, give them a hug the next time you see them. They probably need it.

First Impressions

2011-06-06T12:43:00.000-07:00

Soon after I accepted my offer of admission to college, I started getting mail from my institution about an opportunity to go on a week-long camping/hiking trip with some future classmates. What better way to get to know your new peers than to not bathe in the woods for a week with some of them?

Wanting to get a head start making friends at a new school, I submitted my registration forms and began gathering equipment. In south Florida, being outside generally meant going to the beach, so Carolina mountain gear was pretty foreign to me.

One of the registration forms asked that I share an interesting fact about myself for my upperclassmen trip leaders. I was told this would be kept confidential. Naturally, I took it seriously.

Toward the end of the summer, I packed my bags and headed north into the wilderness. My group of fellow campers was a hodge-podge collection of kids from all types of locations and backgrounds. As soon as we started chatting, I knew I was in for a good week.

I really took to the mountainy outdoors. For one thing, my hair mysteriously got all big, soft, and poofy.

I also told lots of good jokes and my group thought I was really funny, which is what really mattered to me.

I suppose that the interesting hair situation and the good jokes had me feeling pretty confident. Confidence on me is akin to wearing a suit that is three sizes to big. It doesn't quite fit. I belong in the goofy-thus-approachable zone.

One evening, several groups had gathered at a camp site, so we were all enjoying time getting to know more future classmates. I was on fire with good jokes. Someone pulled out a frisbee and we began tossing it around. Eventually, someone accidentally threw it into a tree. Wanting to continue my streak of being impressive, I volunteered to climb the tree and get the disc.

I landed on nature's most dense gathering of thorns.

The scene was pretty bloody. I ended up standing in the middle of about 20 kids who were plucking thorns out of my body. This was not how I wanted to identify myself in college - as that bloody kid who took a face plant from a tree into a mess of thorns.

But alas. I was.

At the end of the trip, we drove directly from the last campsite into Orientation at the college. As many well-dressed students and families roamed the campus, my group trudged in covered in mud, sweat, and in my case, dried blood. We were instructed that we could shower and change in the Student Rec Center. On the way in, I opened the wrong door and set off the world's loudest alarm, calling more unfortunate attention to myself.

Once Campus Police got the alarm turned off and I got cleaned up, I met up with my parents and we headed over to the Dean's welcome address for the entire freshman class and their families. Of course my parents made us sit in the very front row. Part of this speech was about the amazing accomplishments of certain members of the class. All that stuff like starting an orphanage abroad or being a world champion at something like cup stacking or alpaca farming. The Dean concluded with a final point.

"There are also a few students you may want to watch out for. For example, look for student with a huge dent in his forehead. He sneezed so hard he blew his head into the microwave door. This is one of your future classmates!"

Startled, I jumped up about a mile in my chair. He actually leaned down and said:

Apparently, those forms weren't so confidential.

Good or bad, I had certainly made a first impression in college.

Texas!

2011-05-23T09:21:00.000-07:00

Almost two years ago, it became apparent that I was going to be moving from the East Coast to Texas. No one was more surprised by this fact than I was. Living in Texas was about as high on my list of life goals as contracting rabies. Still, I found myself packing my bags and heading for the only state with an x in its name.

My original plan was to resist the fanatical cult-like obsession most people here have with the state.

But there really is a lot to like here in Houston. Take the beef, for instance. It seems that red meat is a necessary but not sufficient means of hospitality. Everywhere you go, you can't avoid being offered steak.

Most bars here don't regularly serve food, but once a week, they will have a steak night. They just wheel out a grill and start cooking slabs of beef. It's an idea both simple and beautiful.

I have a friend who is a vegetarian, which is about the equivalent of being a communist here.

Then there are the roads. In Texas, they love their 12 lane highways. It's very common to find yourself on an overpass where at least 900 major highways are intersecting. You always feel like 8 million cars are careening into your face.

They also have feeder roads that run the entire distance of the highways, but just parallel to them. All I'd every known were on- and off-ramps. Remarkable!

It's important to note that there is a distinct country western theme here. Despite the city being very modern and metropolitan, it's still Texas. The other day, I was walking along a city street with a friend when she exclaimed:

I'm telling you, you don't have the opportunity to say that where I'm from.

To be fair, Houston is also home to the world's largest medical center (so it's a great place to study medicine or to break your leg), the second most Fortune 500 companies headquartered in a city, the most restaurants per capita of any city in the U.S., one of the nation's largest shipping channels, 4 standing performing arts companies, and a vibrant arts scene.

But so what when you're home to the world's largest rodeo? The term "world's largest rodeo" is no joke. Imagine sitting in a giant arena, watching children cling desperately to the backs of sheep that are cantering through a giant pit of dirt (an event called "Mutton Busters").

Next, you see what must be the world's largest American flag unfurl above you as troops repel from the ceiling amidst indoor fireworks.

Then, because it's Tejano night, the arena transforms into a giant stage where a popular Mexican musical group performs entirely in Spanish to a crowd that sings along to every word.

It is mind-blowingly awesome (and around here, kinda viewed as normal - I recently mentioned how weird the rodeo is to a Houstonian friend, and he looked at me and asked, "What's weird about it?").

In Houston, there is also the issue of no-zoning. This means that virtually anything can be built anywhere.

You never know what you're going to get as you drive along.

As I mentioned before, my original idea was to resist falling in love with the great state of Texas. I am somewhat disturbed to report that despite maintaining a healthy sense of humor about this place, I haven't been entirely successful in sticking to the plan. I don't know. There's just something about standing up in the 7th inning stretch of an Astros baseball game and joining an entire stadium of fans in singing "Deep in the Heart of Texas..."

...that makes you feel at home.

The Perfect Picture

2011-05-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

One day at my parents house, I noticed that a rather large cabinet filled with fine china was slowly sliding down the wall.

I alerted my dad.

We decided that the best immediate course of action was to grab bricks from outside and stack them under the cabinet's wooden frame to keep it from sliding completely off the wall.

My mom didn't take the news so well.

It was fun.

My aunt came over to help prepare for the party. Because I was conned into serving as the wait staff, she gave me a very thorough lesson about how to pour the champagne.

We made sure to warn my aunt not to go too near the cabinet because it could fall on her.

A little while later, I decided to document the festivities by snapping some pre-party pictures.

I approached my aunt, who was in the kitchen where the cabinet was. I asked her to smile for the camera. She held up her hands and flashed a big grin.

I pressed down the shutter button. There is a slight delay on many cheap digital cameras between pressing the button and an actual picture being taken. In that brief instant, someone on the other side of the kitchen dropped a pan, which clattered loudly onto the ground. Because my aunt had been warned about the possibility of the cabinet crashing down upon her, she immediately assumed this was what was happening. With a look of sheer terror, she turned to the cabinet, waved her hands frantically, and screamed loudly. That's exactly when the camera snapped the picture.

She was so far away from the cabinet.

I captured the best picture I will ever take: pure, honest terror of impending death on my aunt's face. Every once in a while, I like to dig around on my dad's computer, find the photo, and email it to everyone in the family. My aunt really appreciates it.

Mom's Mistake

2011-04-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

My mom is a saint. She's a pure angel who floats on a cloud, gives out compliments, treats everyone nicely, and gives mean people the benefit of the doubt. It drives my dad crazy.

Her compassion and benevolence often caused my sister to cry at the dinner table.

We had to institute a no-sad-story-at-the-dinner-table policy on behalf of my sister, whose sobs routinely turned to gagging fits. This seemed to be a policy to which my mom never quite adhered.

As a child, my mom was so perfect that I can't get any good stories about her out of my grandparents. When I asked them what the worst thing she ever did was, their honest answer was that when she was in first grade, she ran out into the street chasing a squirrel without looking both ways. I had been hoping for some dirt like a story about how she ran off with the teenage son of the local mob don, changed her name to Harmony, and served as a drug mule in the 70's. Turns out, she never even puffed a cigarette.

But she did make a mistake involving a pelican once.

We were out on a dock on the intercoastal waterway, unloading the unused bait from a fishing trip, when a large pelican swooped down and landed on one of the pilings. He waited atop the barnacled post, watching us work and eyeing the frozen fish. That's when my mom got an idea.

She explained it to me with enthusiasm.

I had some concerns.

She continued to endorse the plan. She said it would be fine. She had never lied to me before, so I held up the fish, ever so tentatively.

I cried out in anguish, partially from the pain of my shredded hand caused by the sea beast's razor beak, partially from my all too close encounter with a disease infested sky demon, and partially from my loss of innocence resulting from the shattered facade that parents were always right.

My mom never got over her guilt. To this day, when she sees a pelican, she dies a little inside.

On the plus side, I did get a sweet scar out of it.

A Bad Homecoming Habit, or Nun of Your Business

2011-04-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

As a member of the student council in high school, I felt that we spent more time trying to build floats on boat trailers than we did fostering a democratic system of self governing. Though I had envisioned tackling school-wide issues such as getting Coke instead of Pepsi in the vending machines, I quickly became somewhat disenchanted with the program.

Despite the trivial nature of the work, I was lured back into service each year by a combination of power hunger and the need to affirm that I was well liked through a formal election process. I also got pretty good at giving speeches, so running for office was usually pretty fun.

The trivial nature of student government activity was remedied by the collective intelligence and sense of humor of my classmates. We quickly realized that the zeal for winning goofy homecoming week competitions displayed by the other grades wasn't quite our thing.

This gave birth to a sort of anti-competition campaign in which we tried to lose each event as ridiculously and wonderfully as possible. I won't even get into how the boys in the male cheerleading competition lost, but let's just say the plug was pulled on the music before the dance number ended due to behavior unbecoming of the institution.

We tried to start a movement to get the cleverly titled "Homecoming Week" changed to "Semana Spectacular," but that was squashed by the administration. We also tried to substitute the usual tricycle riding contest with an ultimate jousting competition in which students battled teachers while balancing above a giant kiddie pool filled with Aveno bath. We actually did get the jousting, but the Aveno bath was nixed.

Senior year was our coup de grace. Tired of building floats to drag like mules onto the football field at halftime while the athletes pointed and laughed, we decided to pick a class theme for the year that would minimize the amount of work and effort involved. That's how we chose to become the "Boat Trailer Seniors." The float would be completed before we had even started it. We could just drag one of the empty trailers onto the field. We even had t-shirts made with a poorly drawn boat trailer on it.

The problem was, we were too immature for our own immaturity. We began to modify the original idea, once beautiful in its simplicity. New concepts spun wildly out of control. The results were phenomenal.

The boat trailer, which was originally supposed to be dragged out by listless, apathetic seniors, was now slated to be pulled by monks to the 2001 Space Odyssey theme song. Then, pirates would come running and screaming from behind the big hill past the end zone, pillage and steal the trailer, and leave a trail of monk bodies in their wake.

As you can see above, not everyone got the pirate costumes just right.

The biggest problem was that the order of monk robes got mixed up and the costume company delivered nun habits. We adhered to the adage, "the show must go on," and carried out our plan. The last minute costume change exacerbated the the violence and offensiveness of the scene. (Note: most of the nuns were actually guys in habits, and a lot of the pirates were girls, so that seemed to help - and added to the humor, I think.)

The weirdest part was that we didn't come in last place. The seniors were pretty bummed and the administration never invited that year's panel of judges to return.

Since then, homecoming rules have been amended. I guess it's understandable.

The Prom

2011-02-05T11:18:00.000-08:00

Throughout my life, I have never been able to do anything with dignity.

Even during many of my life's major milestones, my supposed moments to shine, I have somehow ended up with egg on my face. Take the first and last Annual Extended Family Talent Show, for example. As a six year-old, it seemed like a very big deal, so I rehearsed my act for weeks in advance. When the day of the big show finally came, I stood in the middle of the living room with my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and that creepy boyfriend my older cousin had inappropriately invited, waiting for my cue. I was so excited that I was bouncing around like a maniac. That's when, as per usual, things took a turn for the embarrassing. My dad delivered the fatal blow. ce

That ended up being the entirety of my act that year.

Sadly, my dad was actually correct.

I also thought my high school graduation might be a time of potential dignity. Not so. Despite having practiced my speech for weeks, and despite delivering it with great aplomb, I ended up falling flat on may face.

Literally, I ended up falling flat on my face.

So when the senior prom came along, why did I ever think it would be a normal, American, teenage rite-of-passage?

It all started when I picked up my date, Tammy, at her house. Her family waved as we drove off. Of course, her little 8 year-old sister chased after a ball and dashed into the driveway in front of the car.

It was an awkward departure. Next, Tammy and I headed to the pre-party at my friend's house. We had to park down the street and then walk along the sidewalk toward his home, me in my tuxedo and she in her dress.

You know how people tend to gawk at prom kids? Well one woman driving down the street did it for a little too long and failed to see the truck stopped in front of her.

She had been traveling at about 35 mph and so the airbag deployed. There was a lot of smoke. Some bystanders had to drag her unconscious body out of the car.

We turned to walk up the driveway to the party to find that everyone was outside.

Apparently, nothing kills a pre-party like a little face-slamming-into-airbag-at-high-velocity action.

Things picked back up when the cops arrived and let us pose in handcuffs by the squad car. Our pictures ended up looking something like this:

It wasn't your typical pre-prom shoot. Finally, it was time to go. That's when we realized that we were missing something.

We waited and waited. After a while, a limo actually did pass the house. Thinking it was our limo that had simply gotten lost, Tammy took off down the street after it.
space

In a cruel twist of fate, that wasn't our limo. My friend John called and learned that they had no record of our reservation...despite the DEPOSIT WE HAD PAID!!!

We ended up calling a cab and cramming our whole group into it like one of those clown cars at the circus. When we arrived at the entrance of the prom, we just tumbled out into the street.

The prom itself was great! Tammy was a huge hit.

After the prom, everyone climbed into their spacious limos to be whisked away to the after-party. My group stuffed itself into another cab. On the plus side, as we rode to the party, Tammy made friends with the driver.

At the after-party, an intoxicated football player became drunk-obsessed with throwing me in the pool, so I basically spent the evening ducking behind pillars and clawing at the at the patio tiles. It was actually a really fun night.

No dignity, but lots of fun. It was pretty standard.

An Investigative Report

2010-12-21T14:28:00.000-08:00

Paradox: Nothing could be more nightmarish than ending up on a reality-t.v.-adventure-dating show, whereas nothing could be more heavenly than getting to experience the audition.

But sometimes things have a way of working out.

A friend discovered that NBC would be holding auditions nearby for a reality show and wanted nothing more than to "check out the clientele." That was all I needed to hear. I was in.

A group of us arrived at the bar and found a lot of trendy young people who looked like this:

And this:

Next, we found the NBC folks taking people's information and giving out audition numbers.

That seemed about right.

I decided not to register because I really just wanted to chat with prospective fame junkies. I played dumb and pretended that I had accidentally stumbled upon all this, asking people what it was all about. Most looked embarrassed and mumbled something about a reality show.

"About what!?" I did probe.

The response usually consisted of a lot of ashamed mumbling and staring at the floor. People said things like, "It's like adventure and travel...and dating I guess. It's stupid."

My favorite was a guy we called "Head Shot." He acted like he didn't care and claimed his friend made him try out, but then when we asked what was in his manila folder...

Head shots and an acting resume! Jackpot!

When he came out of the audition he was reticent to say too much because we were potential competition. Those were his words, not mine. Well, he didn't use the word "reticent" but you get the idea. Visual scans of the crowd revealed that NBC wasn't going to have a productive night. No one was model-y enough, especially the old biker guy with the long gray hair and a ZZ Top beard.

He was awesome, but not exactly the island-love-romp type. Maybe more of an "American Choppers" kid of guy.

There was one blond girl with a headband around her whole head and we all agreed she had the best shot. She looked like someone more interested in flirtinis than in multivariate calculus, but that's perfect for these types of things.

Soon it was time for my cadre to enter the group audition. I was standing next my pals when the guy waved us in. I protested that I had not registered and was just there for moral/comedic support, but that didn't seem to matter.

The casting lady inside was so bored with us from the start that she failed to notice I didn't even have a number. About six of us sat down and got to field important questions like "What you do all think about celebrity cheating?" My response didn't exactly win me any points.

Then we were asked about the most romantic thing we'd ever done. Again, my answer was unsatisfactory.

They really seemed to like the girl who said that Eva Longoria was her 11th cousin or something, but when I asked if she had ever met Eva and she said no, the casting professionals became less interested. I actually had to apologize for blowing it for her.

I always kinda wondered how they find these reality stars, and now I know. In high school I helped my dad film an audition video for the first season ever of Survivor where he pretended to eat our pet parrot. He got tapped for an interview but showed up in Miami with a 103 degree fever and to this day he isn't sure what happened in there except a decent amount of sweating.

It was a productive night.

Coupon Caper: A Delicious Debacle

2010-12-17T12:48:00.000-08:00

Recently, two of my friends scored an awesome Restaurant.com coupon to a trendy restaurant in town. Being that our friendship is based primarily on cheapness and a common yearning for a good deal, the three of us were in a terrific mood.
spance

All we had to do was spend $35 to get $25 off the bill. We arrived at the restaurant and immediately began calculating how to spend the exact amount of money that would yield the maximum amount of savings.

It was all about the numbers. What we actually wanted didn't matter so much.

Approximately one hour later we were ready to order. Despite having taken our sweet time to decide, we begged the server to let us have the happy hour appetizer price even though it was one minute too late. She pitied us and obliged.

Spirits were sky high, on account of all the savings. We were living the high life, but all that changed when the server returned with some important news. We had misread the coupon and actually needed to spend $50 for the discount. This was dramatic and funny. I decided to be macho and solve the problem.

Normally we would never indulge in restaurant dessert, so we were feeling pretty high class. All of this was mitigated by the fact that the deal wasn't looking quite so good anymore, but the mood was still jovial.

That's when the server returned with more bad news - Happy hour appetisers didn't count toward the $50 total. We handled the news with maturity and grace.

We ordered more cakes. This time, it was of the to-go variety, as we could hardly handle any more food. Once it arrived, we learned that to-go items didn't count toward the $50 minimum. This was too much to handle.

I suggested that they bring the cakes out on a plate, we could each take a bite, and then we'd ask for a doggy bag. That seemed to appeal to their logic and the plan was set in motion.

The cakes and coffees were really starting to pile up, but we had to keep spending in order to save. I think the sever felt bad, because when she came back with our bill, she also brought one heck of a great story.

"You see the man in the blue shirt over there? Well, he's the owner. The other day, he brought his six-year-old son to the restaurant and the kid was being loud and acting up. He poured sugar all over the table and then..."

It was an enchanting evening.

(To read about another adventure involving this trio, visit http://leemar.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/ye-olde-blog-post/. It's about the time we patronized the World's Largest Renaissance Festival (using discounted tickets, of course).)

Mon Pere. Tu Me Manques.

2010-12-14T14:54:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school I thought everything was funny. Honestly, I think I just walked around for four years snorting and wheezing at just about any form of novel external stimulus.

A math teacher once dropped the eraser and made a little noise like "urp!" and I laughed so hard I choked on my own saliva and nearly hacked up a lung right there in the front row. And those serious National Honor Society inductions where we all had to act somber and stand in front of a crowd on the risers? Forget it.

I miss those days of life before I became an adult (of sorts).

Anyway, having the propensity to laugh despite situational appropriateness had its down side. Boy did it.

One day in the tenth grade, our French teacher took the class to the theater to see a production about international travel geared toward students learning French. They would do a scene in French and then repeat the scene in English. We all expected it to be trash, but it was actually a high class show. I thought it was pretty funny, how good the show was, so I was already feeling a bit goofy early on.

As fate would have it, I was seated with some friends in the front row on the left side of the stage. We were awfully close, but we were off to the side. Therefore, my stifled laughter wasn't going to be too much of a problem. At least not until they took one of the scenes, the serious graveyard scene, directly to the edge of the right side of the stage. This is where things went afoul.

Out of nowhere, this happy-go-lucky show of traveling young adult tourists took a detour for the dramatic. One of the characters got off the train in Normandy to visit the grave of his dead father. He kneeled in front of the grave, and consequently right in my face, and began speaking/crying to his dad. It basically looked like this:

I was doing ok holding it in until I heard just the slightest inhale-after-a-quiet-laugh from my friend sitting next to me. It was too much for me to handle.

Right there, in front of a theater full of teenagers, I laughed in the face of a man saying goodbye to his deceased father. Of course, this had the dreaded ripple effect, and soon the whole audience was having a good chuckle.

I looked up at the actor through by bleary eyes and felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. Not enough to be able to stop laughing, but guilt nonetheless. I then looked back at my French teacher.

I really did feel terrible. This laughter wasn't out of malice or disrespect. I knew better. I just couldn't do anything about it.

I freaking loved high school.

Important Advice: Don't Follow the Blinking Martini Glass

2010-11-27T09:01:00.000-08:00

My college once hired a hypnotist to perform for the student body. I had always been incredibly curious about what it was like to be hypnotised, but I also had reservations about being made a fool in front my peers. That was a job I usually reserved for myself.

Most hypnosis volunteers I had seen in the past ended up like this:

I was especially nervous because I secretly find Cameron Diaz funny and once laughed a little too hard during a screening of "The Holiday." In the end, curiosity won out and I bum rushed the stage when the guy asked for participants. He told us that anyone who wanted to volunteer could come up, but for some reason everyone got needlessly competitive about getting up there.

The hypnotist looked ridiculous...

...but the first thing he did was make fun of my plaid shorts. This was ironic but also probably somewhat fair.

Finally, it was time for him to do his voodoo magic. This is when things went terribly wrong.

He started with small tricks like making us believe that we could not separate our clasped hands. The crowd chuckled as we tried to pry them apart. But then he made us "sleep." When he snapped his fingers, we all slumped over. He began giving us instructions about how we would believe we were driving race cars at top speeds. When he snapped his fingers, everyone on stage was going wild.

Everyone but me, that is. I was somehow rendered completely incapable of speech, movement, cognition, or non-zombie-like behavior.

I just sat there uselessly. Several photos taken from the audience revealed that my pupils were dilated to the size of dinner plates. At first everyone thought it was pretty funny.

But as the show continued and the hypnotist created new, hilarious scenarios, I remained in a drooling, baby-like state. People started getting nervous, not sure if this was normal.

I could hear and see everything that was happening, but I was simply unable to react properly to stimuli. I started to notice that even the hypnotist was looking at me a little worriedly. I would have become upset, but nothing really seemed to matter in my morphine-like condition. Not even the drool that was collecting around my chair.

Finally, when he snapped us all out of it, I kinda came back to. People crowded around telling me they were relieved and asking me what had happened. I really couldn't explain. I think I was still in a bit of a daze, like after one of those naps that lasts too long and stays with you for a while.

A few days later, I overheard someone I didn't know point me out to his friends and say, "That's that kid on drugs." I was disturbed but figured I had misunderstood. Then it happened again. And then a third time. I learned that everyone who didn't know me on campus assumed that I was addicted to heavy narcotics based on the hypnotist show. Apparently being hypnotised wasn't a logical enough explanation.

And that's the unlikely story of how I got street cred.

Little League Chew

2010-11-18T14:19:00.000-08:00

When I was seven years old my parents signed me up for little league. I was reluctant to say the least. It was my understanding that you had to wear long pants for baseball. If there was one thing I hated, it was long pants. And there were so many other sports that didn't require long pants! Swimming, for instance, was virtually impossible in long pants. Nonetheless, we were Americans so I found myself in long stretchy pants, spiky shoes, and a mouth full of Big League Chew.

Lacking keen depth perception, I was the perfect choice for second string right fielder.

It was usually pretty quiet in the outfield, being that we were seven an all. My dad would routinely slap his hand over his closed eyes tell me for the last time not to sit down in the grass. I needed to focus. Come to think of it, paying attention during a game was not easy for any of us Pirates.

Our record was pretty bleak. This all came to a head during one particular practice. Coach noticed that all of us were staring off into space while someone was batting, and a warning was in order. He hollered for us to bring it in, so naturally we ambled toward him. Hustling wasn't really our thing.

“I can’t have you all staring into space. Not while someone is batting. You have to pay attention at all times or a stray ball could nail you. Is that clear?”

“Yeeees.”

“Okay. Now hustle back out there.”

I loped back out to right field and immediately resumed staring into space. The next pitch, the very next pitch, a kid on our team did something none of us had ever done before.

Of all the places in the entire universe where that ball could have landed:

It ended up right on my nose. I never saw it coming. I heard a loud crack somewhere deep inside my skull, stumbled back into the grass, and saw my shirt turn from white to red.

I still wasn’t sure what had happened when the whole team crowded around. Everything looked all weird and shimmery.

“Now this is exactly what I was talking about!" barked Coach. Do you all see why you can’t stare off into space?! Do you see?!”

I practically expected him to dip his finger in my blood and write“PAY ATTENTION” on my forehead. I looked up to see my mom tearing onto the field. She swooped me out of the crowd and into the car. I started realizing that this was a pretty good deal. It didn’t really hurt all that badly (on account of the shock), I got to look at a whole lot of my own blood, and most importantly, I got to get out of my long pants early.

That wasn’t the only bloodshed I was involved in that Little League season. A few days before one of our games, sickness spread throughout half the team. Suddenly I became the second baseman. I was terrified. Everyone looked so much bigger closer up.

Soon, a runner was headed toward second base and someone chucked me the ball. God made it so that the ball landed in my mitt and stayed there. I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I remembered learning that you tagged people to get them out once you had the ball. As the runner approached, I took the ball and hit him with it, right in the face.

He went down like a rock and I started jumping up and down. The crowd came running, but I began to notice that they were not crowding around me to congratulate me. They ran toward the other kid who was grunting on the ground. There was blood all over his face. Wasn't this just a part of the game? One of the parents looked at me angrily. “Why did you do that?!” Baseball made NO sense.

And that's how I came to love soccer.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2010-11-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

Oodles of Noodles

2010-11-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

I have never been the political activist type. In college, I recall that some people I knew drove up to D.C for a rally to end hunger and homelessness. I didn't really know what all that entailed, but I pictured that they got out of the car, joined a mob, and proceeded to yell and shake their fists in the direction of official looking buildings.

I guess I'm just not emotional enough for that kind of thing. I never really understood the whole being passionate concept.

Then one day, I accidentally stumbled into the middle of a controversy of which I still, to this day, am not exactly sure what the message was.

It was spring semester of my freshman year when our art professor told us we needed to do an impactful installation art piece, no drawings or paintings allowed. I sat down with my art partner, a pretty, sophomore girl, and we started brainstorming. Then we presented our top ideas to the professor. I suggested we wrap an entire tree on campus in tin foil. The professor asked what that would express. Well I sure as heck didn't know so I stammered something about industry injecting itself into the inner xylem and phloem of our society or some crap. Plus, it would look cool. He wasn't buying it so we went back to the drawing board. That's when we came up with the best idea.

We would build a giant, to-scale place setting of spaghetti and meatballs! This didn't really symbolize anything either, but it was cool so we picked it.

We snuck into the kitchen of a frat house to cook about 80 pounds of spaghetti. It made me glad that I didn't regularly eat there.

We boiled as many industrial sized pots of water as we could and dumped in the pasta. One thing we hadn't counted on was the fact that the pasta was going to be a lot heavier once it was cooked. It also expanded a whole lot. We dumped it into several trash bags and dragged them up the hill to my dorm room.

Next we baked two humongous blobs of meat to make giant sized meatballs. The outside sure cooked fast, while the inside remained raw. I had envisioned them cooking all the way through, but the smoke alarm in the building prevented that.

This wasn't even my dorm, so everyone was extra mad.

Next, it was time to set up the display at the entrance to the student union.

Finally, it was time to take pictures. We sure looked small next to the place setting.

Up to this point everything seemed harmless, aside from the whole smoke alarm thing. But then, this happened:

I was confused. Was this person upset because we had blocked the entrance? You could still get into the union, really. Then, it happened again. What was this strange reaction?

Turns out, we had set up this display on the same day they were hosting the OXFAM dinner in the union - an internationally sponsored dinner to bring awareness to world hunger. And here we stood, next to one of the most colossal wastes of food any of us had ever seen. It was like some sort of strange opposition to an anti-hunger campaign, and who is against ending hunger, really? It was like we were taking the side of the French aristocracy during the revolution. To make matters worse, I had to stand next to the display all day in order to shoo birds and squirrels away who kept trying to eat it. Not only had I enraged the socially conscious, but I also had to run around like an idiot shaking a branch at the local fauna as they tried to sneak past me.

The good news was that I was suffering for my art! I was a martyr - something passionate people dream about! After being yelled at a third and a fourth time, I was feeling pretty good. I also got smart and began recording people's reactions so that when we presented a summary of our project to the class, we could show our professor the intense reactions we evoked. Artists love that sort of thing. This actually made the passersby even more angry.

When we finally presented the project, it was a huge hit. The professor loved the way we evoked an ironic sense of passion among typically complacent consumers, a concept that we readily went along with as if it were our intention. We ended up getting an A-, which, to be honest, left me a little miffed considering the girl who filmed herself going to the bathroom got an actual A. The professor mentioned something about how she had challenged gender stereotypes while at the same time questioning the taboo norms of our modern culture.

I was bummed we were outdone, but man, it was one epic bowl of pasta. And I was an accidental artist. Let them eat pasta.

Boy on Fire

2010-10-18T06:15:00.000-07:00

Being Presbyterian while attending a Presbyterian college had its perks. When I was a freshman member of the Presbyterian student group, I was invited to have dinner with the president of the college. My friend and I excitedly walked over to the fellowship hall, eager to make a good impression on our leader. We had a small student group, so we were looking forward to some quality schmoozing with him.

Imagine our disappointment when we walked in and saw that a bunch of adults, church elders mostly, had been invited.

Well, elders were actually pretty fun. Soon, my friend Meagan and I were chatting it up and entertaining some old ladies.

Then came time to get our food. It was buffet style, so we all got our paper plates, plastic silverware and napkins, and began making our way down the line. Meagan and I hung back to let the elders go first. (That last sentence sounds like something straight out of Avatar, by the way.)When it was my turn, I put the napkin under my plate and the plate in my hand, freeing up the other hand for ladling and serving.

Just as I was slopping some gravy onto my food, I noticed the plate was rapidly getting hotter and hotter. I thought it was from the warm food. Little did I know I was holding my plate directly over an open flame from a candle that was strategically hidden amongst the dishes
by some sadist, most likely.

Puzzled by this uncomfortable sensation, I looked down at the plate, wondering how the food was heating up so fast. That's when my plate, hand, and arm went like this:

When I saw the flames licking the side of the plate and traveling up my arm, I became startled by this vision of hell on earth and immediately flung the contents of the gravy ladle across the buffet line. Then I began waving my plate wildly in the air to try to put out the flames. Remarkably, because I was in the back of the line and managed to stay relatively quiet throughout the ordeal by biting the crap out of my lip, no one but Meagan really seemed to notice. It must have looked something like this:

Finally, Meagan beat out the flames with her sweater while I shook the charred napkin loose from my searing flesh. Just as its burnt remains fluttered to the ground, the president addressed the crowd.

I shoved my hand in a vase of flowers as Meagan and I shook our heads emphatically and smiled. I wanted to say "Yes, it's me, and I am in so much pain that I am praying for death," but I decided to keep my mouth shut.

That evening, I placed a call to the nurse on duty in the health center. "Is any part of your hand black or dead?" she inquired. When I said no, there were only exploding blisters and searing red marks all over it with stabbing pain, she said, "Oh, in that case, just call whoever in the morning."

I had to sleep with my hand in a bowl of water. It was awful.

But then again, who hasn't caught on fire at a dinner party at some point, right?

The Best Worst Vacation Ever

2010-09-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

When I was in middle school, I experienced the best worst vacation ever. I went with one of my best friends and his family to the Cheeka Lodge in the Florida Keys. It had everything: tennis courts, a golf course, a swimming pool, and it was located right on the water!

The first day was great. My friend, Phil, and I wandered the premises, scoping out what we wanted to do. We swam in the pool, played a little tennis, had a great lunch, and got excited about testing his new water skis on the boat the next day. We decided to spend the afternoon snorkeling.

Now, at this point in the story, we made a decision I really can't explain or defend. We stepped outside and surveyed the scene. Before us lay two bodies of water: the beautiful azure ocean, warm and inviting, and a bog-swamp slush pond that, looking back, clearly wasn't made for swimming.

Somehow, we ended up in the sludge pond. As we paddled around, resort guests stared at us like we were nuts, but our middle school brains really didn't think much of it. There was nothing to see through our masks.

It was kinda cool, I guess. After we swam, we decided to play a little golf. When we got out on the course, I was feeling fine, but Phil started to get a little queasy. We couldn't figure out why.

Phil started feeling worse and worse, so we headed back to the hotel. It was time for dinner and his family was getting ready to head out the door. I did what any good friend would do. I joined his family for some grub and left Phil groaning in hotel room.

When we got back to the hotel, Phil was looking a little green. He had spent the evening running between his bed and the bathroom. I got into my bed for the night and offered him some words of sympathy and encouragement.

Phil couldn't sleep, on account of all the vomiting, so after a while we decided to turn on the t.v. There was bad news.

"Phil, I had no idea you liked Princess Diana," I replied.

"I don't, but my mom does. Have you seen her haircut?"

I didn't really know what Princess Diana looked like, so I was puzzled.

"My mom adores her and modeled her hairstyle after Diana's. She's going to be devastated."

From that moment on, every time anyone mentioned Princess Diana, I could only picture Phil's mom with a crown on. Anyway, Phil was right about one thing. His mom was beside herself. She could hardly say a word at breakfast, she was so upset. Phil was still vomiting and his mom was in mourning, so his dad, brother, sister, and I decided the only logical thing to do was to break in Phil's new water skis on the boat. They worked great.

That evening, on the trip home, Phil was still feeling very ill. He sat in the car complaining. He's probably the best complainer I know. I loved it when Phil got mad at something because it was always hilarious. When we pulled over to get him some over-the-counter medicine to settle his stomach, he launched into a Phil-quality rant.

Phil loved coke!

That made him feel a little better for the rest of the trip home. The next day, I learned that Phil was admitted to the hospital. Apparently several days straight of vomiting will do that to you. In fact, he ended up staying for almost an entire week, something he is very proud of to this day.

Apparently, one night in the hospital Phil was woken at about 3:00 am to some strange noises. He turned over to see that his mom had turned on the live broadcast of Princess Diana's funeral.

They never quite figured out what kind of coffin virus he picked up in that cesspool, but the moral of the story here is pretty clear. When faced with the option of swimming in a bacteria infested sludge pond...try to keep your mouth closed.

Oink! Oink! Oink!

2010-09-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

In the sixth grade, our teachers got the bright idea to change the class trip from a visit to an awesome city, to a trek out into the backwoods of central Florida. We were all pretty bummed when we learned that we were going to stay at some rustic hippie conservationist camp that barely passed the state health inspection test.

I can only imagine what the conservative parents of our private prep school thought about having their kids brainwashed in some bog-swamp cult camp with radical ideas about recycling, chemical free soap, free-trade coffee, and the benefits of a bartering system. I doubt it went over well, considering some of the experiences I'd had interacting with my classmates' parents in their homes.

Despite the complaints, into the woods we went! We learned how to use a compass. We learned how to identify indigenous flora and fauna. We learned that our parents' money came from the devil who disguises himself as capitalism. It was really something.

The most interesting part of each day always came around meal time. They served us cafeteria style camp slop with a side of conservationist berating. What bothered us wasn't so much the guilt ridden lessons about wasting food. It was really their delivery. The first night, after we had all gone through the cafeteria line, selected our food, and finished eating, the staff asked us all to scrape everything we hadn't finished off our plates into a bucket that sat next to a scale. We immediately knew this wouldn't be good.

They pulled up a poor, unsuspecting sixth-grader from a table near the front, and before she could fully process what was happening, they put big glasses and a pig snout on her face, as well as a curly tail around her waist. Then they began singing.

I'll never forget that tune: Pig, pig, pig, pigetty, OINK! OINK! OINK! To this day, as I am doing chores, grocery shopping, or driving in the car, I'll realize this tune is looping through my head.

At each meal, they continued this fulmination, selecting a new victim to harangue. Then, they would weigh our waste and encourage us to get the weight down more and more each meal. Apparently, public humiliation worked, because the bucket of slop got lighter and lighter. They kept pumping us up for our final dinner weigh-in, going on and on about how low it was going to be.

Each meal, it went over a little worse with us than it had the meal before. Our waste weight may have been lessening, but so was our patience.

Finally, by the last night, we decided to band together. Word spread throughout the cafeteria to take as much food as possible and to eat as little of it as we could. We scraped our plates into the bucket. Finally the staff leader excitedly headed to the front to weigh the uneaten food. "This is going to be our least wasteful meal yet! You all are on the road to being conscious of the environment! Let's see how we did!" She went to lift the bucket.

We had wasted more food than ever before. It was a mammoth amount. Her face fell as we all began chanting, "Pig! Pig! Pig! Pigetty! OINK! OINK! OINK!"

It may have felt like a victory, but really, in this scenario, everyone loses.

Except me, of course, because I got to blog about it.

The Tube

2010-08-25T16:30:00.000-07:00

Who plans and designs playgrounds? Do they have backgrounds in construction, architecture, child psychology? Because I'd really like to shake the hand of the genius who created "The Tube," made popular on playgrounds in the mid-nineties. And by shake his hand I mean punch him in the neck.

If you're from my generation, you'll know what I am talking about. The concept really isn't all that complicated. It's literally a metal tube (usually green) resting horizontally on bars so that you can crawl through it. Seems innocent enough, right? Well, yes, if you disregard children and their need to mercilessly torture one another. For many little kids, this Tube was a site of some horrifying playground atrocities.

One of the favorite pastimes of third and fourth graders was to stuff as many preschoolers and kindergartners as possible into The Tube. They would get two big bullies, known as "Cloggers," to press their butts up against each end, sealing it off from freedom, dignity, and an adequate air supply. Meanwhile, "Collectors" would go around the playground grabbing the little kids by the neck and dragging them toward this cylindrical prison. You could be in the middle of doing anything on the playground when they would spot you and "take you downtown."

Once you arrived at The Tube, The Clogger would move to the side just enough to create an opening so that you could be stuffed in. Once inside, it was very dark and cramped.

Every once in a while, we little kids would organize an effort to break free. I learned that you could grip your fingers on one of the seams where the metal pieces connected and violently swing your legs into the Clogger's backside. As soon as it bumped him forward a bit, little kids would squeeze as much of their bodies out the opening and try to squirm to freedom. The Clogger would then slam his back side into the opening over and over to cram people back inside. I can't imagine why the teachers never intervened when they saw this:

Around third grade, The Tube took on another type of sinister. The Tube was taken over by The Kissy Girls. This gang of tough-as-nails floozies got its power in numbers. Hundeds of them would swarm an unsuspecting little boy like puckering piranhas, drag him into The Tube, and smooch him all over with their cootie lips. It was so bad, the boys had to set up a clinic by the monkey bars, giving out free cootie shots to emotionally and physically scarred survivors.

I did my share of time in The Tube. This concept, so simple yet so complex, changed the lives of millions of millennials forever. What a stupid idea.

A Helmet of Hair Makes a Mediocre Nest

2010-08-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Around the time I started 7th grade, my dad ruined my life by bringing home a sassy female parrot named Alfred. Alfred and I had only two things in common. We both kinda looked liked birds, and we both hated one another.

Alfred came to us from our cousin's house. My Aunt was intelligent enough to get rid of this demon bird who never shut up. My dad, who doesn't really like animals but is randomly a bird lover, was naieve enough to take her in. She came with some baggage, including a hatred for teenaged males and the ability to verbalize a range of annoying words and phrases. Having a talking pet that hates certain people causes some strange complications. First of all, whenever I entered a room, Alfred would go bonkers, swooping around trying to peck my eyes out.

Also, her voice sounded strikingly simillar to my mom's.

We missed approximately one half of our phone calls.

Once, the guy who rented the apartment over our garage knocked on our door to ask a question. Alfred called out, "Hello?" so the man assumed he should enter.

Other favorite phrases of Alfred's included saying "Oh my gosh" over and over in a gutteral voice (I think she got this from my teenaged girl-cousin), as well as repeating the name "Lou Bega" over and over again. Of all the musicians out there...

I think the worst part about Alfred was how much she and my dad loved each other. It was gross.

One morning before school, my mom was fixing her lunch for work. She had her makeup on and her usual perfect helmet of hair sprayed into place. My dad was reading the paper and had let Alfred out on her perch by the table. Then I rounded the corner to get some breakfast.

Alfred went homicidal. She launched herself into the air in full attack mode, only I ducked and she missed. She didn't know what to do next. There was no place to land, so she panicked and began swooping around, skwaking wildly. Finally, Alfred spotted the largest surface she could find, my mom's hair, and with her claws-out, went in for the landing. This didn't really suit her, as my mom kept moving, screaming and swatting at her, so she tried to take off again. The problem was that her talons were all tangled in my mom's hair. She kept skwaking and flapping about, trying to break free, while my mom screamed angrily at my dad for letting the bird out. The more Alfred wriggled, the more her talons became tangled. She just kept flopping up and down, yanking my mom's head around, while feathers rained down around the kitchen.

Finally, Alfred broke free, leaving my mom stunned, disheveled, and out of breath.

Alfred ended up going nuts a few years later and bit about half of my dad's hand off. The next day she had mysteriously "died of a disease," but I was suspicious.

Some questions are better left unanswered.

Mexican Lasagna

2010-07-30T14:37:00.000-07:00

When I first arrived at college, I enjoyed meeting new people, taking new classes, joining new clubs and organizations, and living my own independent life. What enchanted me most, however, was the dining experience. Three times a day, I was allowed to walk into a veritable restaurant with dozens of options and go hog wild. My favorite part was the endless amount of soda I could drink.

This actually caused me some serious problems. Lack of sleep in the dorms, coupled with my intense love for carbonated beverages, lead to my habit of drinking coke all day every day. When I wasn't sucking down the sugary, bubbly, caffeinated mead, I was running to and from the bathroom. This unsustainable lifestyle caught up with me one day in the computer lab. I was typing a paper when suddenly my chest felt something like this:

This kinda kept happening. I called my doctor/cousin to ask if I was going to die.

Cutting back immediately cured the problem:

But caffeine wasn't the only thing that brought me joy in the college dining experience. I all but fell in love with a dish called the Mexican Lasagna. It was so deliciously unhealthy that eating it made me feel blissfully alive and peacefully dead at the same time. Each day that I entered the commons and saw it on the menu was like Christmas and Cinco de Mayo all rolled into one.

Then, one fateful day, the Mexican Lasagna disappeared. It vanished from the menu. Even more disturbingly, no one was talking about it. There were no protests. No riots. No marching in the streets (really there was just one street but we could have marched in it).

I went into a state of physical and emotional withdrawal.

Every Monday of my sophomore year, I sent the same email to the people in the commons.

By the fall of junior year, I had all but given up hope. I still sent the emails as a matter of principle, but my heart wasn't in the fight anymore. Time had dulled my fury and my desire. Then, one cold and rainy Monday in September, I got a call from a strange and mysterious voice.

"Get down to the commons. Now."

The student didn't identify himself, but he sounded excited. Imagine my elation when I looked down at the menu. Mexican Lasagna!

Don't get excited. This story doesn't have a happy ending. One week after the return of the M.L., the commons put out a student survey asking for everyone's favorite and least favorite dishes. Mexican Lasagna was hands-down voted the school's least favorite dish and consequently was banished from the menu forever. It wasn't even a multiple choice deal. Among the hundreds of dishes served, students thought to write it down in overwhelming majority.

It's a cruel, cruel world.

Step Up 3D

2010-07-29T06:36:00.000-07:00

Spoiler Alert if you have not yet seen Step Up 3D (which you haven't by the date of this post because I went to a sneak premiere, sucka!)

I love the fact that I have included a spoiler alert for a Step Up movie, as if plot matters. What am I going to give away, that they did this?:

Allow me to set the scene for this premiere. I have a friend who is real scrappy, and she scored us some free passes. A group of us walked into the theater, only to be accosted by loud crunk music and free t-shirts that said BFABB. We weren't sure what that meant. It turned out to mean "Born From A Boom Box," which we discovered was a deep and emotional concept in the movie for dancers. Yo.

We found our seats, then heard some important announcements from the Box, 97.9 FM guy:

Then came the live dancers. First up was a guy who was in the top 25 of "So You Think You Can Dance," meaning no one had any clue who he was. He got up and gyrated while some assistant held up a small boom box/cd player toward the crowd. We cheered, especially when we figured out we were sitting RIGHT NEXT TO HIS MOM!

Then came the dance troupe. I have to say that they were very good. They invited audience members to come to the front and learn a small routine that they clearly hadn't planned out beforehand. Some of my friends went up. They did well, but they were chumpified by a fly little 7-year-old B Girl who was mad twisted, which I think is the hip-hop-dancer-lingo way to say that she was one talented little girl who showed them up.

One of the dancers ended up stepping on her, which was a highlight of the night.

One grueling but entertaining hour later, the movie started. They weren't stingey with themes or plot lines, which included love and betrayal, dance versus education, an exploration of the blurry lines between friendship and love, following your dreams to film school, family loyalty, a home and legacy at stake, loss of loved ones, sick dance battles, and a few other ideas. All in 3D.

The best part about the movie was that a woman next to us was actually crying throughout the entire movie. Let me say that again: A human being was crying during the emotional parts of Step Up 3D.

Several plot resoultions and one strange Slurpee scene later, the movie ended and we left. This is how we felt:

It was a magical night.

B.I.L.

2010-07-28T06:23:00.000-07:00

Growing up, my sister always had an innate proclivity for low to moderate levels of rebellion. The occasional cigarette, a fake i.d., a tattoo here or there, etc. This nature played itself out in her dating life. The southern, truck driving, farmer guy was a deliberate contradiction to her high society upbringing in Palm Beach.

The ultra religious youth group leader was her way saying "Screw you. You can't predict me" to all who thought they had her pegged.

Then came the fun-loving, fraternity, homecoming king who...well, he was actually a pretty predictable selection.

(Drawing hats clearly posed a challenge for me.)

When it came time for her to choose a husband, she outdid herself once again by bringing my brother-in-law (or B.I.L. as I like to call him) into our lives.

My first encounter with this strange and wondrous enigma appropriately set the scene for how he would rock our little family's world. I had flown to South Florida for Easter to meet up with my parents, sister, and her new fiance. We all met at her apartment before driving to dinner. B.I.L. said hello as if he didn't care.

This, coupled with his visible tattoos and his mouthful of dip made me know that the events that were about to transpire were going to be good. I was not disappointed. What happened next would define B.I.L's role in our lives forever.

My mom and I were assigned to ride with him to the restaurant while my father and sister would ride in another car. Soon into the drive, a car cut us off. Well, B.I.L. would have none of that. He forced that car right off the road and did this:

I looked over at my mom and saw this:

It was like watching a firework, soaring up into the night sky only to explode forever in a blaze of glory and self destruction. Right then and there I prayed this relationship would last.

I don't mean to give the impression that it was all smooth sailing between me and B.I.L. I was a little concerned when I saw this:

Then there was the time B.I.L wasn't so happy with me. He was teaching me how to play the most awesome video game, "Left 4 Dead." I am terrible at video games, so he kept looking back and forth between split screens to maneuver his own character while also giving me advice for what to do with mine. You know, for maximum zombie fragging. This resulted in two days worth of vertigo and this:

I tried to make it up to B.I.L. by helping him with some yard work at the house. B.I.L. got a little distracted when he found some extra gasoline for the hedge trimmer. He poured it out on the drive, yelled to me, "watch this!," lit a match, and then danced around the gas fire. It didn't really end well for B.I.L.

Though it's fun to point out all the bad-to-the-bone characteristics of B.I.L., I must concede that he is an awesome guy. He's a great husband, father, friend, and of course, B.I.L. And he's hilarious, into sci fi, and rents jet skis.

All in all, B.I.L. has been an excellent addition to our family. What I admire most is his life philosophy:

There's just so much to learn from B.I.L.

From B to A

2010-07-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

Though I may not be good at sports, I have always loved them. Kinda. Well, I've always really enjoyed them at times.

The first goal I ever scored in a soccer game was an accident. I didn't even know I had scored. My usual tactic was to begin kicking wildly when the ball came by until it was no longer near me. Then I would look up and pray that it had gone in a somewhat appropriate direction. In this particular instance, I kicked, looked up, and then someone got in my way. I figured another player had intercepted it and play had continued. But then everyone started lining up at the center of the field. Someone even gave me a high five.

In middle school, our soccer team was divided into the A Team (the good players) and the B Team (the decent to terrible players). My friend and I were on the A Team! Just kidding, we were on the B Team. But that was soon to change.

Jack was voted best hair in our senior yearbook.

Our chance came just after winter break. During our time off from school, our coach decided to hold a practice but hardly anyone showed up because school was not in session. The coach was mad and said that as punishment to the A Team, he was going to start Jack and me in the next game. It was insulting, but we didn't complain. We took our A Team jerseys and reported to the bus pick-up before the next game.

This is when I noticed a very important detail. When we got there, the coach seemed to have forgotten that we didn't belong. He didn't do a very good job keeping track of his players, so I think he just figured we belonged for real. He played me the whole game!

After the game, he never asked for our jerseys back, so we kept 'em. When it came time to report to the bus for the next A-Team game, I again turned to Jack.

We sat on the bus in our uniforms, reassuring the other suspicious A Team players that we were supposed to be there. That's when one of the star players arrived and tried to get on the bus, but it was full. Jack and I got real nervous.

The coach actually denied this player entrance on the bus because it was full. We made it!

We continued playing in all the A games, as well as the B games. We had successfully snuck onto the better team despite our lack of talent. At the end of the season, you'll never guess that happened.

And that's how I got my only award ever in sports. Through deceit.

North Carolina

2010-07-22T07:21:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, my parents always took me to the mountains of North Carolina for the summer. It had everything you could want: mountains to climb on, forests to romp through, lakes to swim in, rope swings to get your leg tangled in so you accidentally do some sort of fumbled bungee jump before smacking into the rocks on shore... I loved everything about it. Everything except...camp.

Other than that, the summers were great. They were also a bit dangerous. Several incidents stick out in my mind.

I always enjoyed hanging out with my cousin. He was older, taller, stronger, and pretty much better than me at everything.

On one occasion, we were climbing a tree. Of course, he made it up the tree faster and higher than I did, so on the way down I tried to shimmy down the trunk a little too quickly in a vain attempt to prove my worth. I ended up falling off the tree.

I had the continued good fortune of landing directly on a wasps' nest. Those suckers got all up in my shorts and stung me repeatedly while I ran around in circles screaming like a fool.

I was stung so many times and had so much poison in my system that I hallucinated.

It was so awesome. When I was a bit older, my younger cousin and I got lost in the woods for several hours. I tried to keep her from panicking.

Finally, there was the time I took a dare to swing off the rope swing without my bathing suit on, only to be stopped by a jet ski carrying a father and his two daughters. They asked for directions immediately after I hit the water. I tried to stir up the mud around me while pointing him toward the north part of the lake, when my cousin thought it would be a good idea to toss my bathing suit to me.

North Carolina was great!

The Trouble With Pets Is That They're Always All Dead And Stuff

2010-06-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

My family never had much luck with pets. When it came to cats, dogs, rabbits, turtles, parrots, and fish, their time was numbered. Try as we might, we couldn't seem to keep the suckers alive. We learned never to become too attached

When I was really little, we weren't allowed to have pets because of the "Incident of Jake In The Driveway," when my dad accidentally ran over my sister's cat with a suburban right in front of her. My mother felt that having her husband emotionally scar her daughter for life was enough to put a ban on owning animals.

Finally, my mom broke down and allowed us to get an orange kitten named Marmalade who had an affinity for crawling into the dishwasher. Surprisingly, this was not how Marmalade died. Instead, he went crazy (this was the medical term the vet used to explain his condition). He would run to the neighbor's house and urinate all over himself. This situation was exacerbated by the fact that the neighbor's adult live-in daughter was also crazy. She would dress in 80's exercise clothes, put sunscreen all over her lips, and dance by herself on their back deck, which was visible from our backyard.

One day I opened the door to this:

And then I did this:

And then my mom did this:

Then we got Jack, the Old English Sheepdog, who also met and untimely death. To learn more about how he died, and about how my mother gently broke the news of his passing, go here: http://jordiepaints.blogspot.com/2010/06/cake.html

Next, we got Bunnicula, a white rabbit with red vampire eyes. Bunnicula lived in a hutch outside. At that time, we lived on the intercoastal waterway. One morning we stepped outside to find a little girl from the neighborhood scooping up the rabbit pellets beneath the cage with her bare hands and tossing them into the water. She thought we kept fish food under the rabbit's cage, so my mom had to go out and set her straight. She ran home crying (understandably).

One day I went out to feed Bunnicula only to find that raccoons had pried open his cage, dragged him out on the lawn, and then proceeded to tear him into a bloody pulp. When my mom found me on the lawn, she instituted another pet ban.

This ban was broken a few months later when we found an abandoned kitten starving in the bushes. Of course, the cat turned out to be a human-hating-wild-anaconda-banshee that would attack the back of her legs as she fearfully snuck around the house.

I really loved that cat. He lasted pretty long, but one evening we went for a walk in the neighborhood when I noticed something odd in a box by the side of the road. I peered in to find our cat dead with a note scotch taped to his forehead that read, "I'm sorry I hit your cat with my car. I'm sure he was a nice pet."

My mom kicked herself for having once again lifted the animal ban. I think her own sense of guilt made the whole thing harder on her than it was on any of the kids.

Little did she know then that there would be more pets that would die brutal deaths in our future. The turtle we found would wind up going for a dip in the pool on the day my dad chlorinated. The eel (that always bit my mom during feedings while my dad was out of town) would eventually leap out of the tank and dry up on the living room floor, and our parrot would suffer a neurological disorder that gave it a thirst for flesh, as well as fatal seizures.

Our bad luck with animals would extend into our adulthoods. Once in college, my lawyer/sister called me all hysterical. "She's dead! She's dead! She's freaking dead!"

"Who!? Who!?" I demanded in terror as I clutched my heart.

Oh well, pets are dirty anyway.

Fog: Too Much, Or Lack Thereof?

2010-06-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

During my senior year of high school, I decided to try out for the school musical despite the fact that I couldn't sing a note. I landed a role in Grease under one condition: I had to agree to mouth all the words during the songs. It was fun, especially when I got a little too into it and sang out once in a while, ruining everything.

One interesting phenomenon about the musical was a little girl from India named Aartie. Aartie had skipped several grades and looked young for her age, so it was as if a ten-year-old was walking around your high school. Though she auditioned, poor Aartie hadn't been cast in the musical. This didn't stop her from showing up in a poodle skirt to nearly every rehearsal. I'm not sure she quite understood that she wasn't supposed to be there.

Mostly, she would just appear backsage, but every so often during a scene she would kinda drift on stage, stay a while, and then drift back off. It seemed to annoy some people, but I thought it was really something.

That year, drama club decided to blow nearly all its budget for the year on a fog machine for the Teen Angel scene. I loved the idea that every other aspect of the play would have to be super crappy in order for us to afford this one special effect. I was all in favor.

On opening night, everyone was excited, especially for the big fog-and-black-light scene. I watched from backstage as the curtains opened for the big moment. There stood Teen Angel and his background singers, posed and ready to go. But there was no fog. Everyone kinda waited a moment, looking around for any hint of a swirl of white.

None came, so the band struck up the first note and the song began. Finally, Teen Angel sang the final note and the actors exited. Then, as soon as the cast members in the next scene entered the stage and uttered their first lines, a huge burst of fog exploded onto the scene. It enveloped the actors and half the audience. Everyone was squinting and coughing as the actors groped around trying to find one another while delivering lines.

It turned out that Aartie had been backstage in her poodle skirt watching Teen Angel while standing on the fog machine hose. After taking in the number, she had casually walked away, stepped of the hose, and released all the fog that had been building for the past five minutes in a giant, all encompasing puff of whiteness.

And that's how Aartie made it the best high school musical ever.

Detox Center

2010-06-23T13:54:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I graduated from college. I didn't have a job lined up so I moved home and got a job working with drug and alcohol addicts in a detoxification center. It was the logical choice.

This job lead to many interesting situations. One of my favorite parts of the job was checking patients in. This included...

Strip searching them:

Going through their belongings searching for hidden drugs:

And administering urine drug tests:

I also had to ask patients a series of questions about their personal and health related histories. You never knew what you were going to get.

I came up with this response on the spot based on what I'd seen on t.v.

Another one of my responsibilities included checking patients' vital signs (breathing rate, blood pressure, pulse, etc.) before they could get their medication. This medication mimicked the effects of their drugs of choice, and getting this medicine relied on some of their vital statistics. For example, a higher blood pressure sometimes meant a higher dosage of klonopin. Therefore, they would go on the patio and smoke ten cigarettes, run in circles in the bathroom, and then shove their way to the front of the line to get their blood pressure measured. It was great!

During this period of my life, I happened to be studying for the GRE. I had a lot of vocabulary words I needed to memorize and not a lot of free time, so I used to make the patients call me vocab words from my list before I would take their vitals. This always made them a bit agitated since they were desperate for their meds. It usually went kinda like this:

Once, a patient got so mad he tried to stab me in the face with a fork. I didn't see it coming, so I didn't flinch. The patients mistook my lack of reaction for toughness, and I instantly gained street cred within the community.

The staff at the center was just about as wacky as the patients were. One of my favorite stories from the detox center was the time we learned about what to do in the case of a fire. We even had a fire drill with the patients. The last thing a bunch of folks going through withdrawal need is a bunch of bells and sirens going off as they are herded down the hall. After the drill, the staff had a couple questions.

There was also some confusion.

Overall, working in the detoxification center was a valuable experience. I learned a lot about drugs, gained street cred, boosted my GRE score, and made friends with a bunch of drug addicts. It was a nice time.

Careful! This One's About Vomit.

2010-06-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

All names have been changed to protect future employers from being humiliated that they actually hired any of us.

One weekend in college, my roommates and I hosted a party in our on-campus apartment. We were all acting in our typical fashions. Craig was making Ultimate Frisbee freshmen chug beers out of discs, Tom was holed up in his room talking about philosophy, I was nervously putting cups under coasters and cleaning up after everyone, and Corey had jumped ship and wandered upstairs to visit his girlfriend. Or so I thought.

As the party was winding down, I was entering my usual mode of "I'm stressed that people are still here because I should be in bed right now on account of all the homework I need to do tomorrow," while pretending to have a good time.

Then I found out Corey was not upstairs.

I was trying to subtly tire out a guest - "I love Sealy Posturepedic mattresses. I love it when it's late and you're tired and you can just crawl into bed and sleep for hours and then you can pass all your classes because you are so well rested..." - when Jeb tapped me on the shoulder.

"I have a question," he said. "Why did Corey just walk out of his bedroom, walk directly into your room, and close the door behind him?"

I really didn't know why, so I lead the charge to my room. I stood outside the door wondering, "Do I knock on my own door? I don't want to be rude. I guess I should knock. " I tapped on the door and called out his name. Nothing. I knocked again and cracked open the door, cautiously peering in.

It didn't look like my room anymore. It looked like someone had played paintball in what used to be my room using bright red paint balls, only the paint was kind of chunky and smelled like rotting fish guts and cherries. Then I saw Corey crouching like a little abandoned kitty in the corner wearing only his boxers. His eyes were watery and confused and there was some of the cherry fish paint running down his chin.

Confused, he looked up at us, pleading for answers. We had none. My first thought was of the time, when I was a child, that I found an abandoned kitten starving in the bushes and wanted it to live so I shoved a huge chunk of doughnut down its throat, only for it to be hacked up a few minutes later.

This memory made me realize that Corey had puked everywhere. Apparently he had drunk too much of some sticky, sweet, cherry and sugar and giggles flavored alcoholic beverage at his girlfriend's party upstairs and now it was all over my room in vom form. I later learned that he had, in a drunken haze, mistaken my room for the bathroom. My emerging face was his first lucid memory of the incident. The slop was everywhere - on my bed, on the window, dripping off the window sill, running down the walls, even in the light socket. Somehow, by the grace of God, the splatter went all around my desk but perfectly missed my computer in the shape of an angel.

By this time, all my roommates were standing in the hall. Corey stumbled out past everyone and bumbled into the real bathroom. I just turned and closed the bedroom door behind me. The cherry fish vomit was of the most horrifyingly pungent variety, and the scent had begun to drift into the hall. Sensing a situation that required some form of actual responsibility, most of the party guests made their way for the door.

Finally, Tom decided that something must be done. He marched out to the kitchen and returned with an empty trash can and some cleaning supplies. "We have to fix this right now. It's going to stink up the whole apartment. I'm already gagging."

"No way!" the rest of us pleaded. We can't open the door again. It's too gross and it will release the smell.

This was a real dilemma. On the one hand, we could hold our breath and try to slosh around as much bleach as possible. On the other hand, that's gross and maybe if we just kept the door closed we could pretend like nothing had happened. I could forfeit all my belongings and move into the common room and we would never open the door or talk about it again.

I was all for the latter option, when Tom decided he was going in to at least open the window in the room for ventilation. With the way we carried on, you would have thought he was sacrificing himself to the explosives on the meteor in Armageddon like Bruce Willis. We begged him not to go. Finally, he looked back at us as if to say goodbye, swiftly opened the door, and disappeared.

We all waited in disbelief (and to be honest a little relief because none of us wanted to go in there). This is what we heard: "Ugh! Ergh! Mmmmmph!" Bang!, Bang! "Damn it! Ugh! Gag!" The window was stuck. (I actually knew it was stuck shut but I forgot.)

Finally, the door flew back open. Tom took one step out, closed the door behind him, leaned forward, and puked into the trashcan. Once he had emptied the contents of his gullet, he looked up and said, "The smell was too much. I couldn't take it." The rest of us squealed with delight.

At this point, Corey had emerged from the bathroom and in a drunken haze of shame, went into a furious cleaning mode. I'm telling you, he staggered into that room and made it spotless. It was incredible.

Meanwhile, Tom had brought the trashcan of his own vomit out onto the porch. He was sitting next to it, talking to a friend, when Jeb returned. He had left the party before we found Corey crouched in my room and was unaware of what had transpired. Apparently, Tom decided to jokingly insult Jeb for leaving the party. Jeb, having no clue about the contents of the trashcan, did what anyone would do in this situation. He dumped that trashcan right on Tom's head. Imagine his surprise when Tom's very own vomit came oozing down on him. Jeb immediately sensed that he was in for it and turned to run. Tom was chasing after him, threatening to give him a big vomit covered hug. They ran off screaming into the night.

The next morning, I woke up and immediately realized that I had set my alarm for the exact time I was supposed to arrive at work. I had a job in the welcome center and I was supposed to stand in the student union to greet prospective students and their families as they arrived for an on-campus event. I grabbed my pile of dress clothes and screamed into the hallway for Tom to fire up the Impala. Tom sat up in bed and, no questions asked, picked up his keys and headed straight for the parking lot.

In a panic, I scooped up my clothes, shoes, and socks, and made a dash for the front door. As I sprinted out onto the lawn in front of the apartment, I felt my foot hit something squishy and slid out from underneath me. Laying face up in the grass, a familiar smell helped me realize that I had slipped in the vomit from the overturned trashcan and I now lay in it. There was no time for anything, so I rolled around in a cleaner spot of grass, jumped in Tom's car as it pulled up to the curb, and threw on my clothes as we sped off toward the union.

Later that day, as I was serving on a student panel for prospective students, one kid in the back raised his hand and asked, "Does everyone just do homework at this school, or do people like party and stuff?"

"If it makes you feel any better," I responded "I'm currently wearing my roommate's vomit from last night."

He was pretty satisfied with that.

The Crow

2010-06-21T11:32:00.001-07:00

I once got a bird stuck in my flip flop.

I was walking to the library after dinner in my usual outfit:

As I neared the entrance, I sensed that something was wedged beneath my foot. Thinking it was probably just a large wood chip or a pine cone, I shook my foot to loosen the debris and kept walking. A few steps later, I was irritated that it was still there. I shook my foot again, but the item was still stuck.

That's when I looked down and saw a big dead black crow wedged under my foot, it's beak poking out sharply from between my toes.

I immediately emitted a noise that sounded something like "Ngggghhhhuuuuggghhh" and began violenty shaking my foot in the air. The stiff bird just kept flapping up and down.

Finally, I shook it loose. Rigor mortis had set in, so when the bird hit the pavement, it rolled across the courtyard in front of the library entrance. There was no dignity in its death.

In disgust and shame, I looked around to see who had spotted me basically playing hackey sac with a crow carcass. Amazingly, it was business as usual. I had gotten an actual bird stuck in my flip flop and no one had seemed to notice.

I was relieved and disappointed. I washed my foot off in the bathroom sink.

The Time I Lost a Rat

2010-06-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

Animals are weird. They are living, breathing things with ambiguous cognitive abilities. They can think, but one can never be sure to what extent. Once I was changing and my mom's cat looked at me. At first I thought nothing of it. It's a cat. But then we made eye contact and I realized I was naked in front of something that could form memories and may even be able to communicate with other cats.

All this to say that I don't dislike animals, but they kind of unnerve me.

In college I made the mistake of working in a neuroscience rat lab as part of a psychology course. I'm not too bothered by animals that are typically considered creepy (snakes, spiders, rats, bats, rabies-ananconda-banshees, etc.) when they are in controlled scientific environments. If I see them in the natural world I recognize that they are unpredictable and could unwantedly brush up against you.

On the first day, when we received our rats, our professor gave us a VERY stern lecture about how rats are living creatures and we should treat them humanely and blah blah blah. I was distracted by watching the white furry lumps with their red eyes crawl all over each other in their cages. I snapped to attention when I heard our professor say something about grades. "If you kill or lose either of your rats, you fail the class." I quickly thought up about 300 possible excuses for a dead rat - It bit me and then choked on my blood so it's not my fault; It was suffering so I completed a mercy kill; You can't prove this wasn't a suicide - things along those lines. I didn't want a creature to die, but I REALLY didn't want to fail a class.

Well our first task was to starve the suckers. The hungrier they were, the more motivated they would be by food to press buttons and levers. We had to weigh the rats, subtract a percentage of body weight in grams, and then adjust their food to get them good and hungry. The key element here was that you couldn't get your two rats mixed up because you could inadvertantly WAY over-starve one rat and under-starve the other. The solution was, no lie, to write their names on their tails in permanent marker. This presented a unique dilemma for me. I wanted to pick good names that would fit on their tails. Naturally, I began envisioning my rodents as rat-hotel tycoons, and appropriately named them Rat-ison Suites and Rats Carlton.

After writing their names on their squirmy tails, I began to withhold their food. Imagine my concern later in the semester when I noticed that the ink had rubbed off and I had no idea who should be starved to what extent. I kept this little secret to myself.

The other thing we had to do right away was acclimate the rats to human contact, a process called "Gentling," so that our presence would not be a factor in their performance in the lab. This name, "gentling," slayed me. It sounded downright perverse. The professor would remind us, "Class, you need to be gentling your rats twice a day. Gentle them in the morning and in the afrernoon. And remember to gentle them on the weekends as well." It was too much. I joked with my lab partner that if she ever started a successful band, her first breakout single as a solo artist should be titled "Ooh Ooh Baby, You Gentled Me."

Later in the semester, all seemed to be going well, aside from the little rat mix-up, and my hotel-tycoon-rats were learning and performing their tasks just fine. One day, I went to get Rats Carlton out of the experiment chamber. To my horror, the glass box was empty. I immediately began to panic about failing the class. I had been so busy coming up with excuses about a dead rodent that I had neglected to come up with ideas for what to say about a runaway rat.

Soon I had the whole lab class scouring the buildling looking for this missing rat. We crawled under tables and chairs, through electrical wires, behind computers and down hallways. "Try not to look suspicious." I cautioned. "We don't want the professor getting the right idea." After nearly an hour of searching, an F was looming lover my transcript. I assumed all hope was lost. Finally, one of my classmates said, "Hey, there's a rat in this other chamber. Did you put yours in the wrong one?" I looked at the Skinner box. "Oh, yeah," I said, "That's him."

My rats eventually graduated and went on to participate in experiments in the Advanced Neuroscience class. At some point during the next semester, I made the mistake of checking on their progress with a neuro student. "Oh, you mean Rats Carleton?," she said. "Well, he didn't do so well. We put him to sleep for his brain surgery, but in the middle, he woke up. We had to stop the surgery and staple his head back together. Finally, when he was strong enough to have the second surgery, it happened again. I think he's dead."

Sometimes, he haunts my dreams.

And that pretty much sums up my lab rat experience.

Surviving the Weather

2010-06-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

In my high school, it was somewhat of a tradition to torture our French teachers. I can't exactly explain why it was French teachers in particular. I think we discovered them to be quite resilient and pretty lenient, so we took full advantage. Once in middle school, when our French teacher leaned over my friend's desk to see that he had not done his homework, he actually patted her on the cheek twice, mimed putting money down her shirt, and said, "Let's just pretend none of this ever happened, alright?"

One high school example that stands out as being particularly hilarious involved an assignment to give a ten minute instructional speech in French for the rest of the class. The idea was that it would be about "How to [fill in the blank with any sort of task]." We quickly wore the teacher down to letting us film a ten minute instructional video as long as it featured ten minutes of continuous speaking, which quickly evolved into us trying to create hilarious videos with funny editing and very little French.

My friends John and Katie came over on the Sunday before the due date to help me film my video. Naturally, I picked the topic "How to Cover Your Tracks When You Accidentally Run Someone Over With Your Car." We spent all day staging the accident. One of the best and most graphic frames, ended up looking like this:

And of course, there was this:

And finally:

It was about 9:00 pm when we were able to officially say "That's a wrap." Katie went home and then we realized that we had spent all day on my project and never made a video for John. We had to put something together fast, which didn't bode well for the quality of the video.

We decided to do something simple: "How to Survive Severe Weather." This was a good idea because John was terrible at French but seemed to have a knack for remembering vocabulary words about "les temps." He figured he would only have to say words like "la pluie" for rain, and "la grele" for hail while we flashed images of these conditions on the screen. The problem was, we really didn't have images of these things. That's when we got the brilliant idea to get our parents involved.

The idea was that each of our parents would dress up like a certain type of weather. John's mom would be the Duchess of Hail, his father the Rain Knight. I'm still not exactly sure what my dad was supposed to be, but I recall that my mother played the Wind Queen.

The crazy thing was that they actually agreed to it. Keep in mind that our parents are successful, respectable, upstanding members of their communities. John's father is recognized as a top attorney, my mother is the head of counseling at a prep school, and my dad ran a successful company selling medical supply products. But here they were, dressed in bathrobes with weapons made out of construction paper, attacking John as he tried to survive the weather.

The plot was basic. John walked around my living room encountering attacks from the different elements (our parents). Looking into the camera, he would explain what one should do. For example, as he rounded the couch, his mother came out screaming "La Grele! La Grele!" like an angry witch-banshee while smashing him in the head with an ice cube. Then, in broken French, John looked at the camera and said something about needing to put a helmet on.

The grand finale was when I hit play on the stereo, blasting the "Fight Club" theme song, and all the parents attacked at once while chanting "Les Temps! Les Temps!" They swarmed him and spun around him in a circle until he busted free from the middle with his fist as they scattered and spun away in all directions. The idea was that they would spin out of the frame and John could end the scene by saying "And that's how you survive the weather" in English (because we weren't sure how to say that in French), but of course my mom was still in the frame without realizing it, just sort of looking at the camera and waiting for it to be over. We thought this was the best part of the whole video, and it was late, so we called it a wrap and everyone went home.

The next day the teacher confiscated both our videos.

I Got Misdemeanors You Don't Even Know About, Toots

2010-06-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

One summer I drove from south Florida to Vermont. In keeping with my life's typical theme, this trip, which should have been a normal adventure, spiraled into a grand debacle that ultimately involved a court date and a lawyer named Rocco Columbus.

I had safely made my way through Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina when I entered what I now refer to as the State of Unfairness and Death, or Virgina if you're nasty.

I rarely speed when I drive. In fact, I've been called a granny driver on multiple occasions. But as I drove through good ole VA, I was listening to a book on tape. It was some idiotic murder mystery about a killer who referred to himself as an Owl (lame) and who was taking people out left and right at his high school reunion.

The story was really heating up, and as I passed through that fateful strip of highway, the narrator began the ascent into revealing the killer's identity. I got so nervous and wrapped up in the story that I inadvertently laid on the gas pedal and was doing 85 in a 70 without realizing it. That's when the unmarked police car burst out from the bushes and pulled me over.

I had never been pulled over before, on account of the granny driving, so I was really nervous. Luckily, I had the good sense to turn off the cd player, because the White, male narrator was doing the voice of a sassy, Black female character, and taken out of context this would have been downright offensive emanating from a motor vehicle. In the end, I didn't really look at the ticket, or argue the charge, or even question the part where he said something about a court date. I think I just stammered thank you as he walked away. It wasn't until I was back on the road that I noticed what was written on it:

That's right, I had been issued a written arrest and a Reckless Driving charge, which is not a traffic violation but an actual criminal offense. My Lawyer Sister didn't make me feel any better by proclaiming, "When employers see that, they assume it means a D.U.I. that got plead down in court! You're screwed." Soon I was setting up appointments with lawyers in the county. I was pulled over in a more rural part of the state, so naturally my only choices for this type of representation were "Butts and Butts," or "Rocco Columbus." I decided to go with Rocco because this is what I imagined:

Rocco turned out to be the maverick I had envisioned. Whether he argued a great case in court or called in a favor with the mob, I'll never know, but somehow history was rewritten and my speed was magically reduced to 75 in a 70. This demoted me from "misdemeanor" level to "minor traffic violation" level, as long as I paid a HUGE fine (this, on top of my lawyer fees) and attended driving school. I sat through six hours of the online traffic program, passed the final exam, clicked submit, only to see the screen go from this:

To this:

I called the school's IT people, who basically said, "Oh, just tell us your score and we'll put it in the system." I really could have done this in the first place. Throughout this stressful process, I think my friend gave me the best perspective. He told me, "Look at it this way, when you're married and the relationship gets a little dull, you can just tell your wife, 'I've got misdemeanors in states you don't even know about, toots.' That oughtta spice things up."

That is one heck of a silver lining.

Lazy 5 Ranch

2010-06-09T06:48:00.000-07:00

When I first heard that there was a "drive-through zoo on some guy's farm in rural Mooresville, North Carolina" I wasn't expecting much. I was thinking there may be some ducks, goats, pigs, and a couple of pregnant dogs. One trip to the ranch and several zebra chomps later, I realized I couldn't have been more wrong.

My parents had driven up from Florida for a visit and I thought that a trip to the "Lazy 5 Ranch" would be a nice way to spend the afternoon. As we pulled up to the front gates in my mother's newly cleaned SUV, the sight of a giant camel laying on the front lawn should have tipped me off that this was not going to be a rinky dink farm animal operation.

We pulled up to a small shed with a window where a tired looking country gal barely made eye contact with us as she held out two buckets of feed and said "Hi Y'all. Welcuum to the Lay-zee fahve raynch. It's teeyun dollars fower the car and tew dollars fower the feed buckets. Don't exit yer veehikle under inny circumstances. Please drahve forwerd." This was all the instruction we received for the whole thing. My dad paid the woman and off we went.

It was like the quiet before the storm as we drove forward with our windows down. In the distance we saw a zebra spot the car and begin heading in our direction. "Oh! Look at the zebra! Wow!" I naively exclaimed. "It's coming closer!" The zebra moved onto the path in front of the car and waited.

If you've ever seen Jurassic Park, you'll remember the scene in which the one raptor waits in front of the hunter as a distraction so that another can flank the guy and begin devouring his insides. This was just like that. From nowhere, another Zebra and about five million sharp-beaked emus swarmed the car. Before we knew it, they were aggressively ramming their heads inside the vehicle chomping at our buckets of food. I heard my parents screaming in the front seats as I desperately tried to dodge emu pecks. I actually had to push them out of the way with my bare hands while yelling "They're everywhere! Omygosh I'm touching it's neck! Roll up the windows! Roll up the windows! Auuggghhh!"

Finally, a zebra bit down on the food bucket, pulled it out of the window, and began violently thrashing it in the air as food pellets rained down. All the emus hissed and went for the scraps.

Well, this didn't sit well with my dad. He had paid one whole dollar for that bucket and was not about to lose it to a zebra. "Darn it! Try to hold onto the bucket, Susan!" he huffed as he opened his door and ignored the only rule we had been given. As soon as his foot hit the ground, all the animals took off in a stampede. Pigs, emus, zebras, and the like started running in a frenzy. My dad scooped up what was left of the food and got back in. Instantly, the beasts were back, and this time they were even more riled up. "You've angered them, dad," I said in a low voice as they circled the car. Suddenly we heard my mom yelp. "Aaah! He did it again!" The zebra had once again bested her and taken the bucket, this time bringing a chunk of her finger nail with it.

"I told you to hold on to the thing!" my dad complained. She looked at him in all seriousness, shook her head from side to side, and somberly declared, "He was too strong." We tried to collect ourselves as we cautiously drove on. A bit further ahead, we saw a pair of giraffes. We pulled up to them and my dad opened the sun roof. "Stand on the seat and hold the bucket up. See if he puts his face in it." I was hesitant, but it was a pretty good idea. To my delight, the giraffe bent his giant neck down and began eating. I looked up at its majestic face, and as I did, he removed is head, looked down and me, and drooled. Giant giraffe drool all over my face.

I slowly sat back down and requested that we continue on. Next we found a rhinoceros pit, which is pretty much a huge pit with a rhinoceros in it. My dad kept driving the car extremely close to the edge, causing my mom to scream in terror "George! George! Stop! Stoooop! That's not funny! We're going to fall in! Stoooooop!"

Then we spotted a water buffalo. I was taking pictures when I noticed it was walking toward me. It's giant head just kept getting bigger and bigger with each photo I took:

Note: These are actual pictures, not MS Paint drawings. I wanted to clarify in case you thought I suddenly became frighteningly talented at this.

I was alarmed, to say the least, when it began wedging its giant face right into my dad's window. I was even more alarmed when it stuck out 's giant arm sized tongue and began waving it around, as if it were searching for something. "Aaaah! What does it want?" My dad yelped, trying to dodge the wet, gray tongue.

As calm as a cucumber, my mom suggested that we "dump the rest of the food bucket in the buffalo's mouth." There was buffalo drool with bits of food and grass oozing down the inside of the car door. It was amazing.

By this time, we decided we had had enough. (Well, this was after my dad tried to run down a few wild pigs with his front tire.) We left pretty frazzled. We agreed it had been an exceptionally successful afternoon. I later learned that a couple of college students had driven through the ranch. They tried to roll up with window as a horned-bison-type-thing stuck its head in. As soon as the glass touched its neck, the creature went bonkers, violently thrashing its horns around until it shattered the window, dented the car, and ripped off the rear view mirror. Apparently the thing "donkey kicked" the side of the car before stomping off. Moral of the story: Go to the Lazy 5 Ranch if you're ever in Mooresville, NC.

Cake!

2010-06-04T15:58:00.000-07:00

To celebrate my confirmation into the church, my parents gave me a pat on the head. To celebrate my sister's confirmation, they threw a lavish party. One of the best and most ridiculous aspects of the party was a giant Bible shaped cake. I'm not exactly sure whether my mom saw this cake at the store and decided she wanted it for the party, or if she actually dreamed this up herself and then ordered it (which would be even more hilarious). Either way, it looked something like this:

Just before the celebration was to start, my family engaged in our usual pre-party argument. I hadn't done what I'd been asked, my mom was edgy because her head was hot from all the rollers in it, my dad was in trouble because he was refusing to shower and change, and my sister didn't want us all to embarrass her. I was delicately sneaking around the house trying to avoid everyone's pre-party wrath.

Then I heard my mom scream in the dining room. Her yelping, "YaAaAaAaAa!," usually meant she had seen a roach, but this time was different. Our Old English Sheep Dog, Jack, was causing the commotion.

Let me say a little about this dog. Imagine a giant sheep dog living in the south Florida heat, with bad hips, fleas, and an internal organ problem that caused him to smell like Doritos all the time. Before he was put to sleep, the vet told us that the smell was due to the fact that his organs had been rotting slowly over the years. (The quack never mentioned this at any of Jack's previous visits.) After they put him down, my mom called me aside and gently broke the news:

Anyway, when I heard my mom screaming, I rounded the corner only to see Jack with his front paws up on the table, eating the Bible. That dog was just gnawing through First Corinthians as fast and irreverently as he could. Frosting was everwhere. It was like some kind of unholy communion.

The site of my mom clutching her heart while sugary Bible verses smeared and crumbled under dog snout was too much to take. I think I passed out due to extreme elation, because all I can really remember after that was this last minute mess of a back-up plan:

Dear Jack,

Thanks for all the memories. Getting fleas that one time from you was worth it.

RIP

La Pharmacia Latina

2010-06-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

As I write this, my left eye is currently the size of a grapefruit and it's all red and itchy. I recently took some expired pills whose instructions are entirely in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. Sadly, I've been here before.

Last January, I woke up with a swollen and itchy right eye. I called Cousin-Doctor who told me that I needed to get it checked out because "It's on the face." I'm not sure whether it being "on the face" meant something like, it's close to your brain and something could burst and cause it to catch on fire, or if it was like, don't mangle your best asset, but I figured either was worth my attention, especially the latter.

The dilemma was that I was new to a giant city and new to my insurance policy. I started out by doing what any true millennial would do. I turned to Google. People my age could be in the middle of getting stabbed in the throat by a maniac and, before calling the police, would crawl bloodily to the computer and Google “cauterizing a stab wound with kitchen appliances” or “fun bars near Richmond Avenue.” My Google search included something like:

After playing around with search terms, I located the nearest walk-in clinic, La Pharmacia Latina. So what if the name suggested I might need a translator? It took my insurance! I arrived to find myself in a small waiting room crammed with people coughing and hacking everywhere. As a natural germ-a-phobe, I was just trying not to come completely undone. I was actually convincing myself not to run out the door when a coughing child licked the door handle. That’s when I knew I would never be able to leave unless they had some emergency exit in the back.

Finally, when my name was called, I made my way to the back. In the patient room, I waited as several people in scrubs looked at my face and talked excitedly to one another in Spanish. You know its bad when one guy points at you and says something with the word “gringo” in it and then they all start laughing. Finally, they exited the room and a lady returned with a giant needle. Another bad sign.

She was amazing. I couldn’t even feel a thing. I was actually a bit worried that I hadn’t really had the shot. I tried to tell her how impressed I was by waiving my arms around in the air, pointing to the injection site on my butt, and then giving the umpire signal for “safe” in baseball in order to indicate no pain. She kinda just looked at me.

Then, to my horror, she took the used needle and stuck it into my chair like a pin cushion while she applied the bandages. Suddenly I wished I was not sitting on that chair. I cannot say with any real confidence that I don’t have aids right now.

When she was done I mumbled “gracias” and headed for the door. I bathed in their hand sanitizer at the counter before taking my pills, heading for the exit, and doing a strange dance to try to get the door open without touching the ebola handle. Eventually the swelling and itching subsided and I saved the pills in case of another similar situation. Now, as I sit here with one eye itching and stuck shut again, I am thankful for my forethought to stash some of this medication in order to avoid another trip to La Pharmacia Latina. So what if the pills have expired?

Ki-Wee

2010-05-13T15:02:00.001-07:00

Cheer Yourself Up!

2010-05-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

A Bad Gift

2010-05-06T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Importance of Context

2010-05-06T19:38:00.000-07:00

Happy Easter

2010-03-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

Not Texas Enough

2010-03-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

Technology

2009-06-02T12:59:00.001-07:00

Last Day of Work

2009-05-08T06:43:00.000-07:00

Tort Law

2009-04-27T09:55:00.000-07:00

McNulty's

2009-03-07T08:19:00.000-08:00

Bladder Infection

2009-03-06T07:51:00.000-08:00

Guest Cartoon: Independence Day

2009-03-02T06:53:00.001-08:00

Here is a guest cartoon from friend, Megan Ledell:

CSI

2008-12-09T10:03:00.001-08:00

High Crime

2008-12-04T08:30:00.001-08:00

REAL Holiday Headlines

2008-12-03T07:02:00.001-08:00

Dog House

2008-12-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

Queen's Committee

2008-11-25T09:59:00.000-08:00

Snow Monkey

2008-11-11T07:28:00.000-08:00

Guest Cartoon! My friend felt that her relationship might not be doing so well. So, to remedy the situation, she sent her boyfriend this drawing she made of a snow monkey. If this does not work, I don't know what will...

A Haiku

2008-11-07T06:59:00.000-08:00

Free Dress

2008-10-31T10:20:00.001-07:00

Halloween Public Service Announcement

2008-10-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

E-Harmony Commercial

2008-08-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

South Florida Bag Boy

2008-05-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

Things Not OK To Say To Me

2008-05-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

Placebo

2008-05-05T10:05:00.001-07:00

Seriously

2008-04-21T08:52:00.000-07:00

Miss Guided

2008-04-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

The Adventures of Captain Grammar

2008-04-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

What's Sky Diving Among Friends?

2008-04-07T09:41:00.000-07:00

Based on a true story

Reality Television

2008-04-04T09:13:00.001-07:00

Bad News

2008-04-01T13:23:00.001-07:00

Nintendo Wii

2008-03-31T10:24:00.000-07:00

Analogy

2008-03-26T14:50:00.000-07:00

It's true on many levels.

Q and A

2008-03-25T09:22:00.000-07:00

Sweet Home Alabama

2008-03-24T10:13:00.001-07:00

Sweet 16

2008-03-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

This took forever but it was worth it.

The Day the Mouse Broke

2008-03-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

Cheater

2008-03-05T09:28:00.001-08:00

Giles Kitty

2008-03-04T15:24:00.001-08:00

Tree Hugger

2008-02-28T10:59:00.000-08:00

The Trouble with Facebook

2008-02-25T07:38:00.000-08:00

Miss Universe Pageant

2008-02-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

Job Interview II

2008-02-20T09:05:00.001-08:00

Mastodon

2008-02-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

Indecent Proposal

2008-02-18T09:36:00.000-08:00

Job Interview

2008-02-15T13:37:00.000-08:00

T.G.I. Friday's

2008-02-14T11:36:00.001-08:00

College Application

2008-02-14T10:16:00.000-08:00

This is from when Peter applied to the University of Catan

Medical School

2008-02-14T07:47:00.000-08:00

Once again, the x-rays totally undermined Dr. Mendoza's lesson.

TV on DVD

2008-02-13T09:02:00.000-08:00

It's the best way to watch.

Happy Valentine's Day

2008-02-11T10:12:00.001-08:00

The Toughest Season Yet

2008-02-08T08:46:00.000-08:00

A Public Service Announcement

2008-02-07T13:08:00.000-08:00

Mezmar of Mezmeron

2008-02-07T09:28:00.000-08:00

(adapted from the short story, "Mezmar of Mezmeron," by Alan Mellish and John Henry)

"I AM MEZMAR OF MEZMERON!" said the Sphere in a deep primeval rumble. Jim Shatbutt tightened his grip on the XR-29 Hand Cannon once again…

Fundraising

2008-02-07T07:07:00.000-08:00

The Problem with Drive Through Zoos (in rural Mooresville, NC)

2008-02-07T06:59:00.000-08:00

This is my mom, and this actually happened twice.

Spy Story

2008-02-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

This is how the double agent broke his camera.

Public Transportation

2008-02-06T18:22:00.000-08:00

As the bus lurched forward, I fell onto a goth girl's lap. She was nice about it I think.

Internship

2008-02-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

This is when my friend interned for Senator Bill Nelson

Get Well Card

2008-02-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

When a coworker had knee surgery, I was put in charge of making her a Get Well for the office. The inside of the card read, "It was nice working with you."