The Relevant Details of my Life

Worst. Commute. Ever.

2011-07-11T13:15:00.000-07:00

July 11, 2011 - The City of Chicago endures a storm that lasts all of about 15 minutes and blows down some tree limbs. Effing chaos ensues for the Chicago Transit Authority. The following is my experience of the events, with all times a.m.

8:10 – It’s suddenly dark out. It was not dark out moments ago. That doesn’t seem good. I’d better get to the bus stop soon.

8:15 – It’s raining so loudly that I thought somebody had dumped gravel down my air conditioner or something. Awesome, this will be fun weather in which to walk to the bus stop. CTA bus tracker is not working. It says there are no busses anywhere. That seems improbable.

8:17 – It’s pouring sideways. In my best Forrest Gump voice, I say, “side-ways rain” to nobody at all and make my way to the bus stop. I have an umbrella, but that doesn’t prevent me from getting drenched from the waist down.

8:19 - Just watched a pigeon fly off a balcony, encounter the wind and rain, and turn back immediately. Then I looked into the Salvation Army store and watched what I hope was a small dog but was probably a rat scurry between clothing racks. The store is open and there are people in there. The end is nigh.

8:28 - Now on the bus, where the lady in front of me tried to scan her credit card instead of her bus pass, then took a solid 5 minutes to find the pass, gather herself, and close her umbrella.

8:33 - A lady who looks like a bigger Queen Latifah (yes, I meant bigger) got on and she is just dripping wet. She has what appears to be a shopping bag full of water, and is purposely dripping it over her forearm and hand. Actually...not so sure it isn't milk. So far, best commute ever.

8:40 - I get to the station at Loyola and a kid with headphones grabs me by the arm as I walk into the station and says, "No trains running." That is terrible for your mood, the opposite effect of when you hear "Long Train Running" by the Doobie Brothers, which just makes everything awesome.

8:48 – I’ve been watching train tracker on my phone, and I think there will be trains soon. I decide to take a bus north to the Howard stop so that I can catch an originating train and not stand at Loyola and watch overcrowded trains go by with no more room for me.

8:58 - Nearly did a coffee spit take because of the girl in front of me, whose keychain reads, "My parents told me I could be anything I wanted, so I became a lesbian."

9:15 – At the Howard station. There is a CTA employee in a camo hat telling everyone there are no trains and we will all have to take the bus. Why is he wearing a camo hat? Because judging by the weather, we all woke up in ‘nam today.

9:20 – I’m getting on a bus that claims to be the replacement for the purple line. I, along with many others, skip the formality of trying to scan our passes and go in the back door of the bus. Nobody tries to stop us. I think they’re probably just glad we aren’t flipping it over and lighting it ablaze.

9:30 – This bus is moving so slowly that I could literally get out and walk faster.

9:35 – The bus is moving faster. North, faster. I got on a bus going in the wrong effing direction. This is what I get for trusting other people and following them. I’m well into Evanston.

9:47 – The bus driver is lost. People up front are shouting directions at him. I will not be at work any time soon. I should have been there 20 minutes ago.

9:53 – People are exiting the bus like rats from a sinking ship. Every time it stops, they want out. I have no effing clue where we are, I'm not sure the passengers exiting know, and obviously the driver doesn't, either. There are downed tree limbs everywhere. The road ahead is blocked by a large branch and a lone Jeep Wrangler, presumably with the Dilophosaur-mangled corpse of Dennis Nedry inside. That's right, it's a Jurassic Park reference.

10:00 – I’m on a street called Green Bay, most likely because by now I’m in Goddamn Wisconsin. That’s fine; I’ve always wanted to see Lambeau.

10:02 – The bus in front of us has attempted a bus-impossible turn and is now blocking the whole intersection. Our driver gets out to go help. We’re next to a Metra station…I should really go take the Metra.

10:05 – The other bus has aborted the turn and pulled away, and our driver comes back. He attempts the same turn. We don’t make it…the first time. On the second try, he gets it, and the passengers applaud.

10:07 – We pull over outside Northwestern’s football stadium. For some reason, we have approached it from the West, even though we’re supposed to be following the Purple Line, which runs east of said stadium. Whatever. Many Northwestern students eagerly exit the bus. I am tempted to join them, but I resist. Northwestern is a good school, the students could probably guide me to a train, but this is getting too funny to quit on it now.

10:10 – Guess we missed a turn, because the bus just backed ½ a block down the street in order to make a left.

10:12 – Finally arrive at the northernmost stop on the Purple Line. FML.

10:13 – There are no trains running here. Why? Because there is no electricity. A man informs me that I’ll have to take a bus back down to Howard, which is precisely the opposite of what I just accidentally did. At least it’s not raining any more.

10:19 – I’m on another bus. I should have gone straight home from Loyola. There are downed tree limbs all over the place. Somebody has placed one of those orange construction “hurdles” with the light on top in front of a freaking huge tree branch that is blocking ¾ of the street. Yeah, thanks, we see it. Chicagoans seem to have a love affair with seemingly-unnecessary signage. I really hope the person who put it there did so because they ran into quite unexpectedly. "Boy, sure sounded like it rained hard a bit ago, huh? I love my new M Class. I just need to plug my phone in...whoops, almost spilled my Starbucks...Hey what the HELL?!? Who put a huge fucking tree branch in the middle of the street? I mean, there should really be a sign or something..."

10:26 – The bus is stopped at a 4-way intersection. The driver seems paralyzed with indecision because the road ahead is closed. An old man stops cleaning sticks out of his yard to come over and give the driver directions. To the right, there is a street sweeper operating. The street looks no different for its efforts.

10:30 – I’m trying to ponder why stucco is so popular in Evanston so that I won’t focus on my rising bladder pressure. I had a huge mug of coffee around 8:20 and have not encountered a bathroom since.

10:34 – I kinda like the houses in Evanston. Might be talked into living there someday.

10:39 – Hey! We just drove past my State Farm agent’s office. Like a good neighbor, State Farm there…with heavy narcotics to make me not hate this! There’s an L train running alongside us on the purple line track. It has all signage rolled to “Not In Service.” Yeah, thanks, we’re aware.

10:42 – Basically if somebody waves or makes a gesture like they want on the bus, the driver picks them up, regardless of our proximity to any kind of logical stopping point. Fortunately, so far that’s only 3 people. A dude with epic dreadlocks gets on.

10:43 – Epic dread guy immediately regretted his decision to get on the bus, evidently. After like a block he saw fit to pull the emergency open handle on the back door and go running off the bus. This triggered some kind of alarm bell that 1) Is annoying 2) won’t stop and 3) won’t allow the bus to move. The driver is trying to tell me to do something to make it stop, but he is so Middle Eastern that I can’t really understand him. He tries shutting some things off and on, including the bus itself. Still ringing. He comes back and messes with the emergency handle. Still ringing. Defeated, he says through his heavy accent, “You have to walk.” Those must have been the magic words, because the bell stops and the bus begins to move again.

10:45 – I’m back at Howard. I desperately need a restroom, but the L stations don’t have restrooms. Probably for the better most times, but right now I wish they had some. I set out in search of a business that will have a public restroom.

10:50 – I have used the restroom in a Subway shop, in spite of myriad signs that say they’re for customers only. As a gesture of good faith, I decide I’ll buy a cookie. I walk up to the cashier and begin browsing the cookies. The cashier, though not helping anyone else, does not acknowledge me whatsoever. I leave.

10:57 – I’m on a Red Line train, an hour and a half after I originally got to the Loyola station. Oh boy, only another hour and I’ll be at work!

11:04 – I finally get around to opening my newspaper. On the front pages is a story about a massive train derailment in India that killed over 30 people and wounded many more. Could be worse, I guess. It smells enough like piss on the red line that I could have skipped Subway and pissed right on the train and nobody would likely have noticed. The CTA Red Line: Rail transit by day, piss-soaked hobo lodging by night.

11:27 – A man is leaving the train wearing a jacket on just one of his arms…presumably because he was only half cold.

11:55 – I’m finally at work, and only just shy of 3 hours after I left. Thanks, CTA! Another great job!

The Chicago Chronicles: Entry 4

2009-02-08T20:45:00.000-08:00

I have come to realize how people gradually, over time, become white trash. Much akin to going bald, becoming white trash is often a gradual process that works its way first through oblivion and then through denial, until one day you take a good look at yourself and say, "Well that's not very becoming, is it?" For some this is not the case. Some are born and raised as white trash, not because of their socioeconomic status per se, but because of the patterns of behavior they are encouraged to (or perhaps not prohibited from) display...ing. Forgive me, I parenthesized myself into a corner just then and I'm not sure which verb tense I should have used. For others, they are born somewhere, some way else. They are born into classiness if not wealth and later in life find themselves in a slow, downward spiral. One day, they've either unwillingly or unwittingly (or both) amassed too many checks on the list of white trash experiences and must admit that maybe it's time to start calling Wal-Mart "the store." For me, that day was Saturday, February 7th, 2009.

It started out as a better than an average day. I slept late and woke up to find that the cold snap had snapped and given way to weather that was springlike and beautiful. There were children playing in the park and there was sunshine streaming in the windows. I cleaned up around the apartment and got some laundry done. Anything seemed possible. Next, I started checking boxes on the white trash list without even knowing it. Now I warn you, there's a fine line between "white trash" and "hippie" so you'll need to pay close attention. The warning signs are basically the same, but for hippies add "because you spent all your money on weed" to the end of each indicator. The next thing I did with my day involved driving, which brought me to white trash check box number one:

You own a vehicle that requires nothing less than prayer to start.

I have a car that was once very nice. It's still...kinda nice...on the inside...if I clean it out. As of late, it has become less a car and more a collection of minor malfunctions. Its peculiaries include the following:

A rear passenger lock that is stuck down for reasons unknown.
A new right front tire that replaced the flat mini-spare in the trunk that replaced the flat tire originally on the wheel.
A cracked water pump that only pumps coolant through the engine when I rev it up beyond 1.75 on the tach.
A steering wheel that is in the process of what I can only describe as "humidity-induced molting."
A tail light that collects rainwater and then dumps it out in a slow, tepid stream when the trunk is opened.
A headlight that does not light the ahead.
A hood ornament that rides in the trunk rather than on the hood.
A crack in the windshield that started as a rock chip and continues to spread like a glass infection.
A battery that never has enough juice to operate the power locks, but somehow always just enough juice to start the car.

I'd probably get my car fixed so that it was less quirky, but here's box number two:

You rely exclusively or almost exclusively on your feet and public transportation for your travel needs.

If I didn't live in Chicago this would be a more glaring sign. The fact of the matter is there's noplace to park in this city and the CTA really does go pretty much everywhere, often in better time that I could make if I drove. Plus, if you think constantly having to rev your engine so that it doesn't overheat while you're in stop and go traffic isn't really annoying, you're wrong. Still, though, those who have enough money own cars that run as smoothly as when they were brand new, and they park downtown anyhow because they can afford to shell out thousands a year just for parking. If I had the money I'd probably drive too, because while traffic is annoying, at least you're not sharing your vehicle with 50+ other people, 5 of whom are standing well within your personal "bubble" and a couple of whom are tangibly unaware of social norms related to personal hygiene. Things also probably not located in your vehicle: batshit insane schizophrenic homeless guys shouting conspiracy theories, 3 dudes with their headphones cranked WAY up, or vomit.

Anyhow, getting back to the events of my day...I got in my car, coaxed it into turning over, and headed on down the road. Where, you might ask, was I going? Why, I was going to check off the following box:

You shop at Aldi.

If you live in a region of the country that doesn't have Aldi...you're missing out. The first thing you must know about Aldi is that more essential to what you take away from the store is what you bring to the store. If you do not come to Aldi with backpacks a-plenty and a quarter, woe unto you. You'll need the quarter to unlock your shopping cart, which is chained to all the other shopping carts. This is an anti-theft measure, and it works. The cost of keeping a shopping cart safe from the drunk and/or homeless? One quarter, evidently. You'll need the backpacks because Aldi does not supply you with bags in which to carry your groceries. They have bags, but you have to buy them, and nobody who shops at Aldi is willing to pay for something as frivolous as a shopping bag.

Once inside, you will find a wonderland of cheap shit you never dreamed possible. If I could sum up Aldi in one sentence, it is this: Cross breed the dollar store with Wal-Mart and a thrift store and then make it exclusively for groceries, and you get Aldi. If you've come in search of name brands, you're probably going to leave disappointed. However, you will be THRILLED if you've come to react to food items by mumbling aloud, "Oh wow, look how cheap that is! That's like, 3 meals for $2.30! I wonder if it's as good as (insert name brand here). I wonder why it isn't refridgerated like (insert name brand here). "Also, come to Aldi if you get a kick out of crazy people. Just try not to make eye contact with anyone and for the love of God don't cut in the check out line, or you'll be drawn and quartered by an angry mob of single mothers, immigrants, and cat hoarders.

Do not, and I cannot stress this enough, DO NOT come to Aldi on or immediately after the first of the month. If you need me to explain this to you, you'll never understand, and also you're probably Republican.

I made a jolly little haul at Aldi, took it home in my backpacks-a-plenty, and managed to avoid doing anything particularly white trash until around 11:15 PM. At that point, I charged beyond any warning signs that I might be edging toward white trash status and went straight over the edge. Around 11:15 PM on Saturday, Febrary 7th 2009, I busted out with this little gem:

You've gotten into a heated argument with your neighbors about the trash cans.

Earlier in the day, I walked outside to find that our trash cans were all up close to the back of the house. That in and of itself was not cause for alarm, but that just wasn't where we've ever kept them and there was no reason that my landlady or the upstairs neighbors would have moved them. I thought it a bit mysterious, but ultimately I moved them back to the space in which they've always lived, which is in the alley, up against the park fence.

I came back in and asked my roommate if she knew anything about the trash cans. She indicated that she was aware of their relocation and found it just as odd as I did, but had no further details.

Well, come 11:15 PM, she and her boyfriend were in the living room when I heard her yell, "Somebody is moving our trashcans again!"

Normally I am not a confrontational person. To be honest, I don't even like most reality TV shows because I can't stand all the bickering that goes on. For some reason, though, something within me snapped.

"Oh, fuck that!" I yelled as I leapt up out of my chair and headed down the hall to the back of the house.

Lock one unlocked, door one open. Through the laundry room.

Lock two unlocked, lock three unlocked, door two open.

Lock four unlocked, lock five unlocked, door three open. I stormed outside.

At this point you need to know of a particular vocal talent of mine. I have a yell that is so loud, sharp, and fierce that it stops everyone in their tracks when I turn it loose, regardless of who they are or what they're doing. I have used it successfully as a lifeguard at public pools, as a camp counselor and while wrangling drunk friends downtown. My children will someday come to know and fear this yell.

"HEY!!!"

A middle-aged man of medium height nearly jumps out of his skin and freezes in place, along with the trashcan he was wheeling. His eyes are wide and I can practically see the adrenaline shoot into his system from how badly I've just startled him. So far, so good. I harness the element of surprise and continue my attack.

"What the fuck are you doing?!?"

"I'm putting these trash cans where they belong!"

There is another man with him. The second man is younger, but of smiliar build. He seems immediately concerned that I will kick the first man's ass at any moment and rushes to his side. Normally, it would worry me to be outnumbered in a tense situation. I am not at all threatened by these two, though. I'm not sure why, there's just something that suggests to me that they've never been in a fight in their lives and they're not gonna start now.

It then comes out that these two had taken it upon themselves to move our trash cans from their previous location to a much less convenient location, despite the fact that said cans had been there for as long as anyone can remember. Their reason? There were too many trash cans lined up behind their garage and it caused them difficulty in getting their respective, matching Audis into their garage when the alley got icy after a recent snowstorm. Mind you, our trashcans were not even the ones in front of their garage. Those belonged to somebody else. I'm baffled at the nature of the problem and how they arrived at their preferred solution. They chose not to get a shovel and clear the snow/ice away, not to put some salt down, the best course of action was to eject our trash cans, which sit at the end of the row, from the trash can club so that they could slide all the others down and give themselves another few feet of maneuvering space for Audi one and Audi two.

It was at this point that I decided I didn't care that much about the whole issue, but I'd be damned if I wasn't gonna piss these two off enough that it wouldn't be worth it to them to mess with the trash can arrangement ever again. First I offered them lessons on how to park their Audis, which neither of them seemed to appreciate, especially the first guy. He took a couple steps closer, which prompted guy two to come over and grab him by the jacket and try to move him away from me...but not because there was any indication whatsoever that violence was nigh. Something was a little peculiar, and then he uttered the words, "Tom, let's just go inside. Come on, this isn't worth it, let's just go in."

I detected a bit of a lisp, and then the pieces started coming together. Two middle-aged men live together in Lakeview. They drive matching audis. They don't seem willing or able to use a shovel or a bag of salt. One gets upset and the other tries to soothe him. One wants to argue with the neighbor kid and the other just wants to go inside and go to bed. Yep, we've got gays. No wonder I wasn't afraid of this turning into a fight. Gay guys don't fight, they just throw fits. If they were lesbians, I'd definitely be worried about getting punched in the face, and hard too. Then again, if they were lesbians we wouldn't be having this argument because they'd be able to park their pickups in any weather and they'd have shoveled the whole alley.

Meanwhile, Tom didn't want to come inside. He wanted to call me, among other things, "...an arrogant little shit," presumably because I had moved in some months ago and left our trashcans where I'd found them. In Tom's eyes, I was a real asshole, and I intended to keep it that way. When he upped his attempts to gain my sympathy, I stole a page from my sister's playbook. She has a penchant for busting people's balls when they vent about trivial crap they know doesn't really matter, and the way she does it will make you want to goddamn kill her when she does it to you.

"It was really bad the other night and I couldn't get my car in the garage, I had to park in the street!"
"Awwwwwww, the street? Did you have to park in the street? You poor thing! That must have been so awful for you. I park in the street all the time because I don't have a garage, so I know how hard that can be on a person, to have to park in the street. I bet you worried about your Audi all night!"

Mission accomplished. Both Tom and his partner were furious that I'd mocked their pampered dilemma, partly out of embarassment, but mostly out of how condescending I'd been about it.

"Oh, fuck you! You little...fuck you! You...fuck you!"

From there, the argument continued at least another five minutes and involved a lot of declarations that I was little and arrogant, as well as a shit, and demands that I wake my landlady up even though she's old and it was practically midnight. Tom also threatened to call the police a few times, which seemed to worry his partner a little more every time, despite the fact that it didn't worry me in the slightest. I'm not a lawyer, but I've never seen somebody arrested for telling his neighbors not to come onto his property and move their trashcans around.

Finally, Tom did "just go inside" and I moved the trashcans back to their original home, where they have since remained.

Some minutes later, I came to realize how white trash it was that I'd just been in a shouting match with my neighbors over garbage cans, at which point I launched this investigation into which other areas of my life may also be white trash. So far, I've only come up with one more:

You wear the same one or two pairs of pants to work not because it's a uniform, but because you can't afford more pants.

The Chicago Chronicles: Entry 3

2008-11-05T03:56:00.000-08:00

November 4, 2008

I am sitting in the living room of my Chicago apartment, planted in a hand-me-down recliner. Despite the unseasonable warmth of the evening, I am draped in an old, ratty, Chicago Bulls blanket I have cherished since childhood. Despite the chair’s reclining capabilities, I am literally on the edge of my seat, leaning forward and staring, transfixed, at my television. Despite having heard for weeks that it was likely to occur, I struggle to comprehend the magnitude of what is taking place. I am witnessing live the most momentous speech delivered on American soil since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington nearly half a century ago and proclaimed, “I have a dream.”

My jaw hangs slack with sheer awe at the man who now delivers an equally simple, powerful message. The cameras cut to a crowd of well over a hundred thousand people—people of all ages and colors—who have gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park to hear his words. They stare up at him with the kind of wonder one would expect to see on the faces of children if they caught Santa Claus emerging from their chimney late on Christmas Eve. As the cameras pan across the sea of humanity, many people have tears streaming from their wide eyes as the man in whom a nation has placed its hopes speaks to them the three simple words a terrified nation so desperately needs to hear.

Elsewhere, people who had taken to the streets in droves presently cease their jubilant noisemaking and stand as if rooted immovably to the very earth to hear his message. Some are too young to understand what they are witnessing. Others are too old and have seen too much to have allowed themselves to believe this day could ever come. At this moment, they are all joined in reverent silence, gazing into the sincere eyes of a man who is telling the story of one woman from Atlanta, Georgia.

“She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons -- because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin. And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America -- the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.”

As I hear him speak anew the words he has spoken countless times throughout his campaign, this time they are more than just a slogan. This time, they seem to emanate from somewhere deep in our nation’s tumultuous past. From the very roots of the American dream and struggles of the revolution they originate, and come rushing forth, echoing through the halls of history, until they fall upon my ears with a force that sends chills shooting down my spine.

“At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.”

At once, without prompting, the audience of 125,000 answers him just once, in unison, “Yes we can.” They do not shout, they do not chant. Their words are spoken with the tranquil conviction of a congregation that closes a prayer by saying, “Amen.”

“When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.”

Another chill washes over my body, and my eyes begin to well up with tears. Though I am alone in my apartment, I find myself murmuring in response....

“Yes we can.”

“She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Yes we can.”

“Yes we can.”

“A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.”

“Yes we can.”

Tears stream down my cheeks. Every time he speaks these words, I find something within me brightening that had been dark, and something becoming emboldened that had been fearful.

“America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves -- if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.

This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.”

These have been the words of the first African-American President of the United States of America on the night of his election. In New York, people laugh and embrace in Times Square and Harlem. In front of the White House, they cheer boisterously. Here in Chicago, my upstairs neighbors are applauding in their living room. All around America, people are smiling and dancing in the streets. The network cuts to a live shot of Kenya. People there, too, are dancing and cheering. From my living room, I watch a world united in celebration and realize that I just witnessed one of the single most profound events in American history. Many years from now I will be able to tell my grandchildren that I was alive on this day, and that I was among those who turned out in record numbers to help write the next chapter in our nation’s story.

Although I am only 26 years old, and although I had hoped to be wrong, I had long doubted I would live to see an African-American elected president. Tonight, Barack Obama has shown me that I was wrong to be doubtful, for the reasons that we are the same far outweigh the reasons that we are different, and that the reasons to give up pale in comparison to the reasons to persevere. He has won in a landslide; judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character; not rejected for who he is not, but embraced for who he is.

He is a man who sees a country sick of being divided and reminds us that, “out of many, we are one.” He is a man who hears the fears of the people and reminds us that, “while we breathe, we hope.” Mostly, at a time when millions are realizing the American dream has been rapidly turning into a nightmare, we need to know that we can still be the nation that battles tirelessly against injustice, that we can still be the nation that never stops fighting when times are tough, and that we can still be the nation that bands together to help one another in times of despair.

With confidence in his gaze and conviction in his voice, assures us, “Yes, we can.”

All over the country, people of all ages and races stand shoulder to shoulder with tears in their eyes and faith in their voices and reply in unison, "Yes, we can."

The Chicago Chronicles: Entry 2

2008-08-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

This post has been deleted because it was boring, it wasn't funny, and it sucked.

The Chicago Chronicles: Entry 1

2008-07-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

I’m standing over a cardboard box with an armful of binders and a heart full of excitement and apprehension. This is me, preparing to move away from Nebraska for the first time.

T-minus seven days until Chicago.

I’m going through a closet full of things that I’ve been keeping for a day that will never come. Binders upon binders of academic materials containing everything from astronomy 101 to psychology of perception to a cappella arrangements including “Don’t You Forget About Me” from my days as a Bathtub Dog. I save this stuff for a variety of reasons. The music I save because I have a strong emotional attachment to it, because maybe I’ll perform or teach a cappella music again someday. Even if I never do either, I’ll probably keep that music until I die because it reminds me of the single most fun thing I did in college. It wasn’t the parties, the football games or the girls, it was the moments spent dead sober, crowded around a piano with a bunch of dudes, creating something that UNL never had in its 100+ year history and now has. If in another hundred years the Bathtub Dogs still exist, I may still be remembered as a founding member though I’ll undoubtedly be long dead. That, at least in my mind, makes a binder of music worth hauling to Chicago.

As for the academic materials, astronomy is already in the trash, but the psychology materials are tougher to part with. Pardon me, tougher with which to part. We are, after all, talking about academic materials. For years I’ve been squirreling these things away and waiting for the day I sequestered myself to study for the Psych GRE. I imagined myself spending weeks pouring over all my old texts and notes, becoming a master of information from every corner of the psychological world and assuring such a great test score that grad schools would fairly drool over me. I’d get accepted, become the hot TA that young coeds daydreamed and told their roommates and sorority sisters about, get a PhD, and become the hot professor that young coeds daydreamed and told their roommates and sorority sisters about. I’d teach part time and spend the other time counseling in a suburban clinic, where I’d be the hot doctor that rich, frustrated soccer moms daydreamed and told their fellow soccer moms and former sorority sisters about. A funny thing happened on the way to the collegiate finish line. I realized that I don’t want to go to grad school for psychology, I don’t want to be a TA, I don’t want to be a doctor, and (brace yourself) I don’t need young coeds or soccer moms to daydream about me any more.

No, I didn’t come out of the closet, I just settled down a lot. I lost interest in partying, hooking up, playing the day away, and being a burden on my parents. I realized that I don’t truly want any of the flashy, storybook lives I used to imagine for myself. I just want a life. It doesn’t have to be perfect; I’ll make it happy. I don’t have to have a dream job, whatever that is. I just want a good job. I want a wife who I love and who loves me, kids, a dog, and a place to keep them all warm and dry. If we have food on the table and a vacation once or twice a year, frankly that’s more than I’m given to allowing myself right now.

This move is as much a symbolic journey for me as it is an actual journey. Here I stand, sorting through the remnants of an old life and making two piles, one for old ambitions and one for the practical things I’ll actually take with me and find useful. I’m tossing out metaphorical pipe dreams by the binder-full, and while I do it with a heavy heart today, I know it will grant me lighter shoulders tomorrow. I’ll load a truck, drive 500 miles, unload a truck, and have no choice but to dive headlong into the rest of my life. If I don’t, I’ll be crushed. That’s how the giant-sized grinder of the big city runs, or so I’m told. Keep moving or you’re done before you have time to realize it. For the first time, I’m ready hit the ground at the kind of dead sprint that comes after shuffling your feet for so long you’ve forgotten how good it feels to run. The good news for me is that one can still run with a heavy heart. It's nearly impossible, however, to run with a bunch of old weight on your shoulders.

Will Hunting, Minus the Genius

2008-05-25T01:25:00.000-07:00

5/17/08

It has been six days since the girl I've loved moved away. I loved her sooner and I loved her more deeply than any girl in my sordid past. That being said, I endorsed the entire concept of her moving away. Sometimes, in the deep, stupid recesses of my mind, I used to hope she would take her leave. If my mind was a pasture, our relationship was the grass on which we stood, moving apart from each other was the fence, and on the other side, well...you know what they say about the other side.

In the six days that have passed, I've slept poorly, eaten rarely and cried a lot. When I haven't been actively engaged in weeping or whining, I've been second-guessing every thought I ever had in my entire life. When I haven't been doing that, I've been second-guessing the reported value of every emotional high and low in human history. As the second guesses of original guesses as to how satisfying my life was supposed to be to this point began to reach somewhere into the hundreds of millions of guesses, I stumbled upon the closest thing I've found to a real, true answer in years. Last night, around 11:00 PM as I drove home from my shitty job, the great prophet John Mayer spoke to me and told me that I am not alone in my questioning of the human experience.

As I drove, I was listening to Mayer's song, "Something's Missing", a song I've never liked all that much. At the time I marveled at how a change of emotional state can bring new meaning to a song that never meant much to me, but I forgot all about it shortly after getting out of the car. I went to sleep last night to the sounds of Sportscenter, and awoke this morning, for reasons unknown, with Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" stuck in my head. It should be noted that I have not heard the song since the last time I watched Anchorman, and I never hear that song over the course of a normal day. When I arrived at work this morning, the first song playing in the kitchen was none other than Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight." Just a funny coincidence? Perhaps, but it made me wonder why I would awake with that song stuck in my head and then immediately hear it at work...and why music has always been one of the forces that speaks to me far more than the average person.

As I spent the early parts of this Saturday night exchanging text messages with my departed love and watching a nearly full moon rise in the Nebraska sky, I had a snippet of John Mayer's song "Why Georgia" stuck in my head. It looped in the back of my mind unnoticed--as most of my mental music does--while I lamented my inability to feel "ready" to face the rest of my life, settle down, commit to a long term relationship, etc. I wondered when I'll ever know that I've found whatever it is I want out of life, and why it's so fucking hard to be certain that anything in life is worth doing. Just then...in the forefront of my mind...the doucheag prophet spoke again, and louder.

Might be a quarter life crisis
or just the stirring in my soul.
Either way I wonder sometimes
about the outcome
of a still verdictless life.
Am I living it right?

I rush into my room to have a religious experience. If the douchebag prophet John Mayer has spoken to me, then the all-knowing will be able to answer my burning, new question. I settle myself into my chair and prepare to have an epiphany. I ask the all-knowing to tell me if my suspicions are correct. The all-knowing has not failed me before, and I am confident that it shall reward me once more with the gift of wisdom. Sure enough...the all-knowing, Wikipedia, has an answer for me.

I read the answer.

I am floored.

I wasn't aware.

I hadn't even suspected...but I am caught in the swirl of a maelstrom of existential chaos that I neither could have expected nor prevented.

I'm having a quarter-life crisis.

I read the wiki article in fascinated horror. It draws on allegedly credible sources and tells me, much like the time I found out as a 5th year college senior that I have ADD, any therapist worth two shits could have told me this. I hastily shove aside my sense of irony at having my BA in psychology and not having noticed my own quarter life crisis...or even having known what a quarter life crisis was. There is no time for irony. I'm entirely too relieved. I'm not the only aimless person in the world, or the only one who has doubts and apprehensions and sabotages things for no apparent reason! There are all kinds of people my age who deal with this, and it's so normal that the experts even gave it an unoriginal name! It's so cliché that John Mayer put it in a song! This is a Godsend! Thank you John Mayer! Thank you Starland vocal band! Thank you Wikipedia!

The article tells me that there is nobody more qualified to be labeled mid-quarter-life-crisis than me. A list of the following crisis characteristics is provided:

-feeling "not good enough" because one can't find a job that is at one's academic/intellectual level -frustration with relationships, the working world, and finding a suitable job or career
-confusion of identity
-insecurity regarding the near future
-insecurity concerning long-term plans, life goals
-insecurity regarding present accomplishments
-re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
-disappointment with one's job
-nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life
-tendency to hold stronger opinions
-boredom with social interactions
-loss of closeness to high school and college friends
-financially-rooted stress (overwhelming college loans, unanticipatedly high cost of living, etc.)
-loneliness
-desire to have children
-a sense that everyone is, somehow, doing better than you

If, after reading that list, you're wondering if there's any of those criteria I do not meet, the answer is no. No, I hit each individual criterion out of the park like a steroid-fueled Barry Bonds crushing a baseball gently lobbed by the weakest-armed pitcher in the little league ranks. Let's break down some highlights from that list.

Feeling "not good enough" because one can't find a job that is at one's academic/intellectual level:

At age 25 (soon to be 26), I wait tables. Take a moment and let that sink in. I'm now forced to round my age up to 30, and I am a waiter. Growing up, I was in the "gifted" program at school and scored well above the 90th percentile in everything for which they could standardize a test. Laziness precluded would-be academic success later in life, but it didn't stop me from being kickass at Jeopardy in my spare time or dominating tests for which I had not studied in my scheduled time. To say that waiting tables is not at my academic/intellectual level is to say that the election of George W. Bush to consecutive terms as US president may not have been a bright spot on democracy's resume'. I don't know how much time I'd have to spend in the basement of Lazlo's huffing sterno before it made my job coincide perfectly with the apex of my intellectual potential, but I'd guess it's longer than the expected lifespan of the average male.

Confusion of identity:

I have little or no ability to convince myself that who I am is ok and I can get by for the rest of my life on being basically that same person with situational adjustments. This is because I have a brilliant vision of the man I will someday be. Permit me, if I may, to share that vision with you. I will someday be a fantastically rich, happy, successful man who has an absolute blast 365 days a year along with his supermodel, supergenius wife with whom he never fights and two or three beautiful, perfectly behaved children and two big dogs that conveniently cease to exist (the dogs, not the children) when it's time to go on vacation...which is most of the time. The man I will someday be has the greatest job on earth. That job is simultaneously relaxing and fast-paced, travel-oriented and centered entirely in one city, and also indoors and outdoors. The man I will be cries only at movies because those are the only times he is exposed to sadness, and he lives in a world where nothing is daunting. He also has a harem of beautiful women, and his wife is o.k. with it because she uses it, too, which is hot. Laugh at the above if you like, but read it also with a sense of pity, because it's only somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I have heinously unrealistic expectations about my future, and the weight of those expectations crushes my ability to be confident in who I am or build some sort of normal, logical life, one normal, non-terrifying step at a time.

Insecurity regarding the near future:

Today it was 82 and Sunny out. I wanted to sit by the pool after I got off work, but I didn't. I didn't know if I should read a book by the pool or just lie there, if I'd get "good sun" even though I'm so pale that any sun will make me noticeably darker within 20 minutes, or if the water would be too cold to be refreshing if I was too hot just lying in the sun and wanted to jump in. Additionally, I was unsure as to whether I should wear my sunglasses and risk a raccoon tan or just squint. In the end, I opened the windows and watched TV on my old, uncomfortable futon. Read that paragraph three times and tell me I'm not fucking nuts and ragingly insecure.

I'm supposed to be at a going away party right now. Instead, I'm writing a blog. I'm not sure if I'll have fun there, if there will be enough people I know, or if I should drink any beer or not. I, who have sang for auditoriums full of strangers and delivered an impromptu eulogy at a funeral for a kid I barely knew, am not sure I can handle sitting around at a bar with some friends. If I can't handle this, how am I supposed to handle my...

Insecurity concerning long-term plans, life goals:

For at least three years I've wanted to move to Chicago. I have multiple reasons for wanting to go, and it's the only thing I've ever felt like I *have* to do or I'll regret it. I have absolutely nothing still keeping me in Nebraska. I'm sick of being here, and yet I'm procrastinating the necessary details of setting up the move. What if I don't like it? What if I can't find a roommate and I get my own apartment and stay in all the time not having fun? What if I do find a roommate and we don't get along? What if I can't find a job? Where will I park the truck when I move in? Seriously, my apprehension about finding a place to park the moving truck is probably #2 on my list of worries about moving. I'm not sure what #1 is.

Along with moving out of Nebraska, I'm not sure what I should do for a career or whether I'll ever be unselfish enough to participate in a successful marriage. My fear of a failed marriage is fast becoming epic as I watch the people who rushed into young marriages during their college years realize their misery and get divorced. I feel badly when I know I've caused somebody to sit without a refill for very long. I cannot begin to imagine the remorse I'd face if I knew I'd agreed to marry somebody and then not been able to follow through on the deal.

Boredom with social interactions:

Everyone bores me. I don't care how interesting they reportedly are or actually are, they bore me. The details of their life bore me, the stories of things they've done bore me, and the stories of things they want to do bore me. Whatever anyone feels like doing with their night, odds are I do not feel like doing the same thing. It’s not that they’re bad people, and it’s not that they’re boring. I could not, for the life of me, tell you what I do want to do; I just don't want to do whatever you're doing. I don't know why, but I blame it on Lincoln whenever possible. There's not much to do, and while I never particularly mind whatever I end up doing, I invariably lack enthusiasm for the idea of it. Deep down, though, I know that it's not Lincoln's fault. I'm just bored because I'm boring, and I'm boring because I have unfairly high expectations about how much fun I should be having.

-nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life

My friend Ben and I used to say that our one greatest wish in the world was to wake up tomorrow on the first day of high school, knowing what we know now. I now realize that I do not wish for that any more. I want to wake up on the first day of first grade, knowing what I knew up through...maybe sixth grade. Any time life gets hard, I long desperately for the days when I got up, my mom cooked me breakfast, I went to school, and despite three recesses, 3:30 PM felt like the greatest possible realease to freedom in human history. I would ride the bus home, watch cartoons while eating a snack, and play the rest of the day away until it was time to put on my PJs. After that, I'd watch boxing on the couch with my dad and he'd feed me bites of his ice cream. I'd fall asleep, he'd carry me to bed, and the next day would be the same. I didn't have a real worry in the world. I was afraid of the basement and that was about it. There was no fear of failure, rejection, or mediocrity. I didn't pay for anything, I didn't have to impress anyone, and there was nothing that was so bad that Mommy couldn't fix it with a hug and a chocolate shake. Some might say that it's maladaptive and crazy to want to go back to childhood. I say if you don't wanna be 8 again, you're crazy.

-financially-rooted stress (overwhelming college loans, unanticipatedly high cost of living, etc.)

Gas is $4.00 a fucking gallon. Don't get me started...

-re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships

Now we arrive at the real kicker. I silently, unwittingly fell so easily into my crisis that I never had time to stop and realize that my relationship was being sucked in right along with it. I didn't evaluate my own life and make concrete plans to improve it, I just knew that it sucked and blamed my job and my hometown...or so I thought. As it turns out, the list of people, places or things I unfairly blamed for my own unhappiness was three items long and I didn't know it until last night. Person/place/thing three on that list? My girlfriend.

Back in December, I was feeling pretty good about having finished my last classes and finally finishing college. It was Christmas time and I was making great money at work, and I was deeply in love with my girlfriend. Over the rest of the winter, I made zero attempts to set up my life after college, I got sick of my job, and I started to use my relationship as the be-all, end-all of things that were positive in my life. In fairness to me, I was only following the example my girlfriend had set for me a semester earlier. That's a lot of pressure to put on another person, and it soon became evident that neither of us could handle that pressure infinitely. I became distant, and she became nervous. Her nervousness made her needy. Her neediness made me crazy. When I feel crazy, I need a little distance. See a pattern here? Yeah, well...not any more you don't.

Now she's gone. She's gone and I'm writing at 4:00 in the morning because if I don't stay busy, I'll focus on how much I miss her. I'll watch the battle unfold in my mind one more time as the feeling that I've made a mistake clashes once more with the feeling that neither of us was ready to really settle down and that we both needed to be apart. Time and again they've clashed, and "we need to be apart" wins every time. She and I both know it, but I can't shake the feeling that things might have been okay if I weren't wriggling to escape the grip of this stupid crisis.

I've spent the time since she left thinking about a lot of things, and the only one I've resolved is that there is absolutely no way I can continue to let my life stagnate like this. It's no wonder my relationship was failing, because my whole life right now is a failure. How could I have felt happy? Nothing was right with my life. It's not that I don't feel I've accomplished anything. I have accomplished a lot and I know it. It's that I know I'm not accomplishing anything any more, and that's unacceptable to me. I'm sick to death of being scared of going forward, of having nothing going on but work and television, and of endlessly circling the runway of the rest of my life and I just won't do it any more.

This year, when the leaves start to fall off the trees in Nebraska, I won't be here. When the Huskers take the field, I'll be watching from a sports bar in Chicago. When Lazlo's promotes another server to the coveted title of "head wait", I won't be sitting down across from him to bank out at the end of the night. I've got too much to do. I've got too many dreams, too much desire to be busy, and too much talent to stay here living such a small life. There's nothing wrong with small lives, because they make the world go 'round, but if only for right now, I need something bigger. As I write, Good Will Hunting is playing behind me. I stop long enough to watch a dialogue that suddenly resonates within me all the way to my very core:

Chuckie: Look I’m your best friend so don’t take this the wrong way, but in 20 years if you’re still livin’ here, comin’ over to my house to watch the Patriots game, still workin’ construction I’ll fuckin’ kill you. That’s not a threat I mean that’s a fact. I’ll fuckin’ kill you.
Will: Fuck are you talking about?
Chuckie: Look, you’ve got something none of us have.
Will: Oh come on, why is it always this, I mean I fuckin’ owe it to myself to do this or that, what if I don’t want to—
Chuckie: No, nah nah, fuck you. You don’t owe it to yourself. You owe it to me. ‘Cause tomorrow I’m gonna wake up and I’ll be 50, and I’ll still be doin’ this shit. And that’s alright, that’s fine. You’re sittin’ on a winning lottery ticket. You’re too much of a pussy to cash it in, and that’s bullshit, cause I’d do fuckin’ anything to have what you got. So would any of these fuckin’ guys. It’d be an insult to us if you’re still here in 20 years. Hangin’ around here is a waste of your fuckin’ time.

There it is. I sent the girl I love away with the understanding that I'm not good enough for her unless I can figure my own life out. This isn't about me any more. Now I owe it to her. I made a promise that I would get the hell out of dodge and make something more than a waiter out of myself. Maybe I shouldn't put so much stock in the worlds of Ben Affleck, but I dunno what it is...there's just something about the prophecy of douchebags that really speaks to me lately.

The Anticipation is Worse than the Impact

2008-05-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

4/16/08

I’ve known this was coming for longer than I’ve been willing to admit to myself, let alone to her. I knew it was coming, but somehow all the knowledge in the world doesn’t soften the blow when bad news arrives. Nobody has to spell it out for me. I can say it to myself, loud and clear. “Bad news, sport, you’ve failed.” I’ve failed. I’ve failed myself and worse yet I’ve failed her. My inability to classify yet another phenomenal woman as “girl of my dreams” has subjected her to months of the sinking feeling that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with a man who, when asked if he felt the same, could eventually muster no better than, “I don’t know.”

Those three words spit at me as I read them now. “I don’t know.” I stammered like a scolded child when she finally asked me to stand up and speak like a man. I flash back to every time I did something profoundly stupid as a kid and had some adult question my motive.

“Why did you steal that candy bar?”
“I don’t know.”

“What do you want?”
“…I don’t know.”

Coward. You did too know, and you didn’t have the stones to tell her. You want to leave. You want to go to Chicago. You want to live the big life in the big city, you want to perform, and you want to do it alone. That sound about right? You’re not ready to settle down. You’re not ready to have a routine, a career, a dog, two cars in one garage, two people in one bed, and two souls in one life every day for the rest of your life. Not yet, not her, not now. No matter how amazing she is, how worthy, how sweet or how beautiful she is day in and day out, it’s just not enough for you for some reason. Are we hitting the nail on the head?

At once I am ashamed. The sick realization that I’ve hurt her settles in. I remember why I kept my silence…it’s because I do love her. I truly do love her, I’d lay down my life for hers, and I wanted to be able to do anything else if it meant I wouldn’t have to make her cry. The last thing I want is to make her cry, to make her face the kind of hurt I’ve faced before. I begin to wonder how many hours I’ll spend with The Barenaked Ladies’ “Break Your Heart” cycling over and over in my mind. What else was I supposed to do? She lives with me in my tiny apartment which is located in a town where neither of us has anything more than casual friends and a shitty job. The only difference was that I finished college a semester sooner than she did. She needed to be here, she needed to be safe and she needed to finish school. I couldn’t just throw her out. She had nowhere to go. Certain future or no, I can’t do that to somebody I care about.

Sure enough, here come the lyrics:

…the weakest thing I’ve ever done was to stay right by your side, just like this time…

Before last night I had been excited about the promise of things to come. Spring in Nebraska affects everyone tangibly. People become restless. The streets and sidewalks flood with kids, dogs, and people who you can bet wouldn’t be out running if it were 65 degrees outside every day. Students get distracted, skip glass, and manage to graduate anyhow. You can literally feel everything around you coming back to life after another long, Nebraska winter. Flowers bloom, and then the population of Lincoln plummets in May as scores of college kids leave their college town to do things like farm, lifeguard, or get a “real” job. For the first time in four years, I was going to be one of those kids. I wasn’t going to spend another boring summer in Lincoln. I’d have my diploma, and it would finally be time to get out. As I looked east to greet a sun that rose ever earlier in the April morning, I could imagine the Sears Tower dominating a Chicago skyline and begging me to come get a taste of the constant electricity and opportunity of the big city. The countdown had been on. I had been excited.

Now, a new countdown is on, and it makes every minute feel like 20 and every hour feel like at least two days. If you fancy math, that multiplication is all wrong. If you’ve ever dealt with anything that deserves to be called “heart wrenching” then it makes perfect sense. Our relationship as we know it ends in three weeks when she finishes class and leaves. Truthfully, it ended yesterday with a text message I received at work. All it said was, “FYI, we need to talk.” Just like that, I had drinks to fetch, food to serve, and when I got home, a heart to break. I fetched the drinks, served the food, and broke her heart. We crawled into bed and lamented our inability to fall asleep. Eventually that segued into me lamenting my inability to be for her the perfect man she deserves. How do you tell a great girl who would gladly keep trying that you’re just not perfect for each other?

God love her, she accepted everything with a cool head and an open heart. What an incredible thing to do. What a show of class and maturity from a classy, mature girl. What more could I ask than her calm understanding and unconditional love? What more could I possibly need? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH ME?!?

Frustration washes over me in waves, and each time it crashes down and soaks me in tears, she wipes them away and tells me that I’m going to find somebody who is perfect for me. She kisses me and tells me it’s going to be o.k., which makes me feel even worse because she’s being absolutely amazing and she deserves the very best life has to offer. It makes me feel like a failure because I wanted to be the very best life had to offer her and I couldn’t. I tried to do everything that one is supposed to do to make a relationship work. Anytime things got tough, we talked it out and we worked on it. I didn’t stay out late, I didn’t get drunk, I didn’t fool around with other girls and I didn’t put other aspects of my life ahead of our relationship. I spent time with her, I told her I loved her, I brought her flowers and I scratched her back until she fell asleep. I was a great man to her and she was a great woman to me. Mathematically, it was all correct. Meanwhile, back in the real world, it all adds up to two hearts that are decidedly wrenched.

I suppose some updating is in order. After my last tearful, whiney, self-piteous post, she stayed. She stayed for me. She stayed with me. Although it would have been tough last May to call the whole thing off, we’d have both been fine in very little time at all. As it was, she scrapped whatever plans and agreements she’d made, and she stayed with me to see what we could become. She made a brief trip to take her best friend to the airport, and then returned to move in with me. At first it was a little odd to have a bathroom full of beauty supplies and more shampoos and soaps than my shower could hold, but in time I bought a shower caddy and came to find comfort in the tangible fullness of my apartment. It went well with the tangible fullness of my heart. We went to sporting events together, we cooked meals, we did laundry and we made plans to move out of Nebraska together after she graduated.

Over time, though, something went wrong with me. A full apartment turned to a crowded one in my mind. My full heart sprung a leak somewhere, and despite my best efforts I just couldn’t get it to stop and fill back up again with the unconditional, tireless love I once had for her. At some point the awful realization crept in that it would be a mistake to move away together, and every time I noticed it, it became harder to ignore it again. That Goddamn inner voice that lives only to smash my routines would pipe up:

“This isn’t working.”
“Shut up.”
“She’s not the one.”
“Shut UP! You don’t know that.”
“You’re being selfish because you're comfortable, and it’s not fair to her.”
“…b-but…where would she go?”

Smart girls don’t need to hear your inner routine-smasher to know when something is amiss in a relationship, and strong girls don’t need your pity or your cowardice. We both sensed that something had changed. We both knew our relationship was cracking under the immense pressure generated by two lives with absolutely no direction. Eventually she called me out for avoiding my future—our future, and burying myself in the routine. Eventually, in the heat of an argument, she asked me the question that I needed to have asked and that she needed to have answered.

“Do you even want to move together? What do you want?”

My insides were churning. My mind was racing. My sense of stability and love of all things safe and familiar were screaming at me to say something that would fix us and make it so that she’d never have to worry or feel bad about anything ever again for as long as she lived. My cowardly side begged me to find a cop out, to get mad, to skirt the question, to lie my ass off, or do anything that would prevent me from dealing with that horrifying question. My conscience wouldn’t let me do anything but answer honestly.

"I don’t know.”

She simultaneously hit the floor and the ceiling. Three words had gotten her to stay a year ago. A different three words told her that soon enough she’d be leaving and that it would be for her own good. I watched the weakest three words I could have uttered shatter her already fragile faith in me. She yelled, she cried, I yelled, I cried, and neither of us knew what to do. I tried to settle back down for a few weeks and tried even harder to convince myself that I was making a mistake and this was all repairable, but it couldn’t be done. She tried to settle back down and tried even harder to pretend that she still had a reason to be here if I couldn’t do any better than “I don’t know”, but it couldn’t be done.

As upset as I was that the words, “FYI wee need to talk” came fully three weeks before the outcome of that talk could be finalized, I understood. It was killing her to carry around the doubt and uncertainty. At some point, each of us needs to know that what we’re doing is eventually going to bear some metaphorical fruit. When it came time to talk, she told me what we both already knew; she was going to finish her class and move out. If I couldn’t be her good reason to be in Nebraska and school couldn’t either, that was it. She was out of reasons. I was shocked at how calmly I accepted the news. To be honest, I wanted her to tell me precisely what she had. I just wasn’t ready for the next step.

The next step is where I presently find not only myself, but her as well. We basically broke up two nights ago, but we’re still going to stay together in this little apartment for three weeks. I’ve never done this before. This isn’t how breakups go. We’re not supposed to see the part where the other wakes up in the morning and isn’t sure whether it would be better to spend the day openly crying or trying not to cry, or whether it would hurt more to see the other person or not see them. We’re both sick with cold and fever, and on top if it we’re heartsick. On top of that, we’ve got to watch the other person suffer. She asked me if it would be better for her to stay with somebody else for the final few weeks. I nearly threw up.

The only thing worse than already missing somebody who isn’t gone is already missing somebody who isn’t gone and not being able to see her. I know that there is no "good time" for things like this. I know I'll never be prepared to feel the loss. I’ll never be ready to wake up alone and stumble into my half-empty bathroom. I’ll never be ready to feel the suffocating sensation in my chest every time I find another one of her hairs, or see another car like hers on the street. I’ll never be ready to want to call her and not know if hearing her voice would help more or hurt more. While I still have a choice, I won’t do it. Hey, we already established that I’m a coward. More than any of the above reasons, I won’t let her go through this while she tries to politely camp out on some quasi-friend’s couch for three weeks. She may not be perfect for me, but she still deserves to be cared for and to receive the best I can offer until we part ways...and I’ll always love her, no matter what.

Love and Money, Home and Here

2007-05-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

I know two girls with the same story. Each works in a restaurant in Lincoln, Nebraska. Each has blonde hair and a charming personality. Each is held up before the rest of her respective staff as a shining example of how to serve not only her customers, but her company. Neither of them really belongs here. Each of these blonde, charming girls left the familiar confines of Oklahoma to come to Lincoln, Nebraska and it was all because of some boy. Not being able to see a picture any bigger than young love, each of these girls came to a town that kids from Nebraska only come to because...well...it's in state. For kids from Lincoln, it usually means they couldn't go to college out of town or out of state, so they came to the University, or to Weslyan.

For kids from elsewhere in Nebraska, well, we're here because we wanted out of wherever we're from, but we weren't sure we could afford-either finacially, emotionally, or both-to leave Nebraska. As for kids from out of state, unless they're on atheletic scholarship, the kids from Nebraska can't help but ask them the same question: Why did you come here? Of all the places in the country...why Lincoln? Lincoln is not a place one dreams of going. It's not a place one dreams of staying if one knows any better. It's the kind of town where you need a damn good reason to come here. It's also a town that if you allow yourself to get lulled to sleep by its sneaky, small-town-masquerading-as-a-real-city ways, you'll miss your damn good reason to leave. For these two girls, their reasons for being here disappeared almost as quickly as they must have started as teenagers in a place where nobody batted an eyelash at words like "y'all" and "Boomer Sooner."

I'm a waiter in a Lincoln restaurant. My hair gets kinda blonde in the summer, and sometimes I'm exemplary, sometimes not. Sometimes I'm charming, and sometimes people don't "get" me. I left Omaha and came to Lincoln because, well, there used to be this girl. She still exists, but we do not. Not in the sense of there being an us, anyhow. I wanted to go away to school. Maybe Missouri, maybe Purdue or Colorado State. That's right, any of the bustling metropoli of Columbia, Missouri, Fort Collins, Colorado, or West Lafayette, Indiana. Anywhere other than here...but they say that love changes everything. They don't often say that love itself changes.

My life, it seems, was bound to be intertwined at some point with those of two girls from Oklahoma. One of them is a coworker, and a sweet girl who has no trouble at all understanding how I could fall for a girl who roots for my team's hated rival and still says "mah" instead of "my" after 5 years in Nebraska where there is no accent, especially when she's excited. The other, the one I fell for, went from coworker to love interest sometime after I was swiftly fired from my most recent "last job" last fall. I almost forgot all about how she used to catch my eye until she showed up at a party one night in early February looking like everything I ever wanted: undeniably sexy, but classy, clearly brilliant but a little ditzy (like me) and just aloof enough to almost belie the kind of winning personality that can make people in a small town masquerading as a real city always tip her 20% while the rest of us wonder who thinks five bucks on a 70 dollar meal is an acceptable gratuity. The way she looked sent me the subtle message that I ought not forget that she's beautiful, but that she's not "that kind of girl" either, so if I thought I was after her, I'd better pack a lunch.

It only took me the night to get her number, but it would take me weeks to get her attention. I waited to call her, as is the custom, and she blew me off. She had more important things to do. I wished I did, too, but I couldn't stop thinking about her. I eventually deleted her number from my phone after a couple more failed attempts so that I could avoid embarassing myself by calling her anywhere near as much as I wanted to. The very day I gave up on her and mourned the loss of whatever was not to be, she responded.

So it went. I gradually wore away at her defenses, sometimes by being patient, sometimes by being bold. I brought her roses to work on Valentine's Day, mostly because I wanted her to have them, but partly because I wanted to make sure that she and everyone else at that restaurant knew I was set on having her. "Who are those from?" the girls would all jealously ask. Each time she'd answer, I'd have to cross her mind, and she'd have to explain whether or not we were an item. Along with the roses, I left her a card telling her to clear a date for the Friday after the next when we could allign our busy schedules at least for a night and have dinner. I thought it was all very smooth until I realized that I had brashly sauntered in with my dress shirt, roses, and a card asking her to take the 30th of February off and go out with me.

So it went. Sometimes I was smooth, sometimes I was an idiot. Somehow it worked, and somehow I talked my skittish heart out of ruining the whole thing for me. I have a hard time falling for a girl. I develop crushes easily, but to try fall for somebody, to let them grow into you and become a part of you, is a scary thing. In my mind's eye I could see her heart and mine, slowly spreading roots into one another's. That frightened part of me could see the hole that would be left if hers were ever torn away from mine. The longer we were together, the more we grew into one another, the bigger that hole could be. Night and day, in the back of my mind, almost as loud as the voice that said, "She's amazing" was the voice that warned, "She's going to leave." Always chiming in right behind that second voice was another that retorted, "So are you." It was deja vu. Suddenly the ceaselessly cyclical nature of life had brought me around again, and I was standing at the place on the wheel of life where I stay in Lincoln, Nebraska and wonder how long it will be until the girl I'm crazy about realizes there's no good reason to be here any more and leaves me lagging behind like I always do. While I couldn't block out the realization once it had happened, I could take solace in the fact that she was hellbent on living with her roommate after graduation and her roommate preferred to stay here. If her roommate was here, she was here. I was here either way, so it was fine. I took my solace and fell for her. Then the bottom fell out.

The roommate, a girl of Middle Eastern descent and Canadian citizenship, graduated this weekend. My girl did not graduate, just the way I didn't graduate a while back, and she hated it, just the way that I hated it. The roommate's Canadian/Middle Eastern family all came to see it happen, and to coax their baby home to Toronto. It worked, and I just found out. Just like that, the roommate is moving home, at least for the summer, and my girl from Oklahoma is left to face the possibility of doubling her living expenses while taking summer class in a town she wouldn't be in at all if it weren't for some guy who stopped being a reason to go anywhere 5 years ago. She can't afford it, financially or emotionally. Summer classes exist all over the country, especially at home. Home only exists in one place. Here there's only me, and I have only existed for two and a half months as far as she's concerned. Besides, she's made that mistake once. At home she's got family, friends and another guy who probably lies awake at night thinking about how she'd still be his if not for the inexplicable nature of Lincoln, Nebraska. She still wears his sweatshirt and the mark he left on her heart. The odds are stacked against me, and I can only do my best, which has proven to be less than enough in the past. In the past, I at least knew the girl I was losing would be coming back to Lincoln, so maybe it didn't have to be over. This time, there's no reason to come back to Lincoln. This time has "permanent" written all over it. She has less than a week to decide.

Now it's 6:30 AM on my one day off and I'm wide awake, listening to "Ramona" by Guster over and over. The song is somewhere between sweetly happy and desperately melancholy. The words echo in my head, "Ramona, you're Miss Oklahoma, and you miss Oklahoma..." A couple weeks ago this would have been relatively fine. I was being scared and distant and so was she, and we were both doing some great posturing about potentially toeing the breakup line. It was classic "I'm scared of falling in love with you" stuff, but at that time she could have told me point blank that she was leaving and I would have been arrogant enough to act like I didn't care. I'd have saved the realization and the mourning for later. Then I spent some more time being distant and realized how much my own absence made my heart grow fonder. I missed her, and that meant something. When I saw her again, there was something I hadn't felt with her before, and hadn't felt from another girl in a long, long time. I felt safe. My guard was finally, totally down, and so was hers. We fell in love. I felt it happen, but I thought I'd bide some time before I said anything. I wanted to be sure I meant it if I was going to tell her that I loved her.

Now it seems stupid to ever bide time at all. Now I just want to bury my face in her hair and whisper, "I love you" the thousand times I've thought it since I realized it, as though it will give her any reason other than those three words and the hope of a future with me to stay here. Guster chimes in, "When I was younger and thought of myself, I never dreamed I'd become like this..." A tear rolls down my cheek and I tell myself over and over what I told her as though it were a mantra, "I don't want you to go, but I can't ask you to stay for me." "I just want what's best for you." I whisper it to myself over and over. "I just want what's best for you. I just want what's best for you..." Each time I say it, something that used to be hardened within me cracks, then shatters, then falls away. I'm right back to 2003. Feet in the baby pool, tears down my face. She is being torn away from me. I can see the hole forming in my heart, and the metaphorical bleeding that will take what will seem like forever to stop.

That same voice that warned of her inevitable departure is now at the forefront of my mind and throwing a certifiable tantrum. Kicking, screaming, tears, snot and absolute begging. Pleading. Groveling. Guster again, "...a snap of your fingers, an end to the arguement. Anything for you, love." Now it's me and not a voice in my mind who is begging aloud, if only in the solitary confines of my own room. Doubling over, whimpering, tears, snot, and absolute begging that waited until too late the last time this all happened. No more Guster, just me, "Please just stay until the fall, the winter, the spring, forever. For me? With me. Please, I'll scratch your back for hours. I'll run my fingers through your hair until you fall asleep on my chest every night until forever falls away. Please, I'll do anything. Please...I love you."

The Changing of the Triumvirate

2007-03-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

3/26/07

1:25 PM

"AW SHIT!"

I slam on my brakes. I mash the pedal as far into the floor as it will go. I feel the rapid, machine gun drumming of anti lock brakes. There is no screeching of tires on pavement. It's too wet. I'm sliding. I'm not going to be able to stop. I brace myself against the driver's seat...

3/25/07

3:30 PM

I have just deposited $616.02 in my checking account. This, along with what I make during the coming week, will be more than enough to cover rent and utilities. I am considering this a major victory after having blown all my "extra" money earlier in the month. I could have put a nice dent in my credit card bill and started trying to save up some money to actually make progress toward moving to Chicago rather than just talking about it...but I didn't. I spent it on dumb shit that I don't need.

Dumb shit like the hammock that is awkwardly rigged up on my non-hammock-sized balcony. It looks fairly ridiculous and is only about 60% as comfortable as a hammock ought to be, but I got in one of those moods where, come hell or high water, I was putting it up. When you live with mild Seasonal Affective Disorder, the first nice week of the year makes you want to do a lot of "summery" shit that you just don't need to do. You want things like a grill, a hammock, an ice cream cone, a motorcycle, rollerblades, a dog, pool supplies, etc. Anything that goes well with summer. When you live with a mild case of being an idiot, you get a couple of those things. I stopped the summer themed purchases at the hammock, but managed to knock out about $240 more of random purchases and gambling that left me feeling low on cash and good judgment. I had wasted more money than somebody who waits tables for a living ought to, but I was still doing ok.

3/27/07

1:25 PM

I'm still sliding, both literally and metaphorically. My eyes can see the back end of the blue minivan coming up fast. My mind's eye can see the brick wall of several more points on my insurance policy and a guaranteed rate hike. I crash into both. POP! There goes the all-too-familiar sound of fiberglass, plastic and aluminum colliding at a relatively low rate of speed. I miss the days of steel bumpers and soaring curb weights...

"FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!" I'm pounding my fist into the center console of my car. I am instantly furious with myself. I stop a little short of shattering my fifth metacarpal and slump onto the steering wheel in frustration and disbelief. I crashed precisely because I was looking over into the other lane, at the other rear-end collision, and thinking, "Wow, that poor girl. Sucks for her. OH SHIT!"

I get out expecting that my hood will probably be nice and arched up and that my bumper may or may not still be attached, as the front of my vehicle is pretty much designed to act like a soda can in an accident so that my rate of deceleration as the driver is reduced. If you've ever done the experiment where you throw an egg at a wall, then at a hanging bed sheet, you understand the physics and logic behind such automotive design. If you've ever seen what it costs to replace the front end of such a vehicle after a totally unspectacular crash, you think "Fuck, a mean case of whiplash and a bruise or two would have healed for free."

Maybe it's not as bad as I thought. While my Honda emblem and license plate are lying prostrate on the ground, nobody else is, and the bumper took all of the hit. It's pretty scratched and a little out of place, but nothing needs to be fixed. If you're not looking for it, you can't even tell that her car has been hit at all...but that doesn't mean it won't need to be fixed. My car looked mostly fine after I was rear-ended several months ago in almost precisely the same spot on precisely the same street. Upon further inspection, however, the whole bottom plate needed to be replaced in the trunk and the bumper was also replaced.

"Do you want to just exchange information or call the cops? This is gonna end up being my fault."

"No, I'm calling the polishe. Thish ish a leashed vehicle."

She has a lateral lisp that I'd find absolutely hilarious if I weren't furious right now. Not only will I get an accident at fault on my insurance, I'll also be receiving a ticket. In a later conversation, my friend who writes policies will inform me that, depending on my agency's policy on double penalizing, I'll get up to 8 points. That means a HUGE increase in premium, plus I get to pay the fine for the ticket because I'm a little less than two months away from being able to take defensive driving class.

When I got hit, I just took the guy's information and we got on our merry ways to go see Nebraska beat Missouri. He claimed fault, my car got fixed, everybody was peachy. No need to wait forever for the cops to prove that he did something wrong. We all knew it. This chick, however, is really would up about the condition of the bottom part of the rear bumper on her lovely Dodge Caravan. Why anyone would lease one of these things is beyond me. I pray that she doesn't have children enough to put in that thing, because the idea that somebody might have had sex with her on multiple occasions makes my stomach turn even further than it already has. I can't help but wonder what the dirty talk would sound like.

"Oh yeshhh, sherioushly thatsh amashing...shhhhcrew me!"

Gross.

Officer M. Muff arrives and gives us our respective, lengthy paperwork. He also gives me a $104 citation for negligent driving. I wonder how much he hates his job. I can't imagine driving around from accident to accident all day, dealing with pissed off people with sore necks and then trying to get them to not fuck up paperwork. Ugh. The comic value of Officer Muff issuing a citation to Mr. Beavers is not lost on me, but once again, giggling is a little beyond me right now.

I can already see that I'm not going to be able to afford to have any fun this month, and probably not the next, either. That's $104 on top of my $200+ phone bill, plus another $500 for rent at the end of the month and somewhere in the neighborhood of $150-200 for utilities. Then, when it's time to renew my car insurance in a month, it'll probably around $600 for the quarter. $2,400 a year just in case I get in bad wreck for once. I really wish I lived in a city with actual mass transit. Looks like I'll be taking a much more serious look at those MDS medical studies.

The more I think about it, I can't decide if I want to kick out my passenger side window from where I'm standing, or sit down on the curb and bawl. Ultimately, I do neither.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, that wise little voice that always knows better starts piping up.

"How do you like it? Huh? You were doing great in school, you remember that? You were on the dean's list and you could have gotten involved in some good research and gotten yourself some good references and made it into a decent grad school. You could be well on your way to your PhD by now. Doctors make six figures. But no, you got burned out and quit. You dropped out and decided that some time off feeling the grind of daily life in the lower class would build some character for you. Well, how are you doing? Got enough character in the tank yet, slick? Is it still funny to be only 2 classes shy of your degree and making your living on 15% of whatever you can convince people to eat? The list of people who think you're cool is shrinking, isn't it? I can tell your own name isn't on it any more."

Smug little fucker. He's always right.

Here I am, at 24 years old. I used to hang future on my voice, my ACT score and my six pack abs. They hand out Hollywood careers on the way into town to guys with all those, right? How stupid and shallow. The voice I still have, but it's a lot bigger struggle to sing in tune because I've had a sinus infection for the better part of a year now. I can't afford to go to the doctor at real world prices and get the prescription for the antibiotics I also can't afford that will make it go away. Even if I do, I'll get another one in a few months anyhow. I don't know why. My six pack still looks like it's there, but it's not because I'm muscular and toned anymore. It's because I'm so skinny that the almost complete absence of body fat makes me look "cut" even though I seldom, if ever, work out any more. As for my ACT score, it's funny, I have yet to have anyone ask when filling out my tip after their meal. Nobody ever says, "Boy, you really made that fish special sound good. I bet you got a 34 English, didn't you? You waited our table in such a methodical, logical manner! 32 science? I knew it! Now, I'm gonna guess that even though math wasn't your strongest subject, but I bet you could ballpark me ten percent pretty quickly couldn't you? Oh, good for you! Know what? Ballpark me fifteen percent. You earned it."

The realization hit me this month, as I really took stock of all the things I couldn't do as a result of my lifestyle: I'm just a waiter. In life, there is no prize for what you want to do or what you used to do. There is only the impact of what you are doing. You can try to set it up meticulously, but the unexpected will happen. You can be sure of that. You can be so sure of that, you might as well call it "the unwillingly expected." When it happens and you're a waiter, it sucks way more than it sucks when it happens and you're a physician's assistant. This is how credit cards get maxed out. This is how you get phone calls at 9:00 AM on your day off because you owe somebody money and the collectors had a much easier time finding you than the people who tried to send you your W-2 form.

This is why if you don't tip 20%, you're an asshole. I guess I'm letting my locus of control become externalized. This is why I'm really starting to think about grad school. This is why, for the first time, I'm jealous of my friend with the shitty job that pays him $50K a year. He's jealous of me because I have more fun. The grass is always greener...

I have to admit that while in the past tense that statement is true, I had more fun, I'm not so sure that this is fun anymore. I'm no longer in that phase of life where my parents take care of all the "real" stuff and my job is for the sake of earning me enough money to buy things like video games and beer. I'm in that phase where my job needs to cover everything. My parents have my back on health insurance and emergencies, and that's about it. There's nothing fun about thinking that I'm finally getting some money saved up and then somehow still ending up flat broke at the end of each month. There's nothing fun about pretending I don't want to go out when really I can't afford to go out. There's nothing fun about one meal a day, especially when it's potatoes.

This, evidently, is what I couldn't grasp in all my years growing up as a doctor's son. My dad has plenty of stories about spending long hours in sweltering heat and numbing cold alike, digging graves all through his youth. He grew up with a firsthand knowledge of what poor means. He grew up in the area and era of Omaha where you were as likely to hear German, Polish or Czech spoken as you were English. He grew up poor with the children of immigrants and built his whole world, brick by brick, and held it together with a metaphorical mortar made out of hard work and spite. His mother drank, and his father didn't believe in him. When he went to college, he had a son and he had a fire in his stomach. I grew up in the one neighborhood in Omaha where you could say the name of it and immediately people knew you were rich. My mother scratched my back until I fell asleep and my father supported me unconditionally even if he didn't understand what the hell I was thinking. When I went to college, I had a shiny car that had already been crashed twice and no idea about the value of a potato. The voice pipes up again.

"That's what this is about, isn't it? You didn't know what it is to want success. You wanted it, but you wanted it the way a kid wants some ice cream. You didn't want it the way a dying man wants a priest. You can operate within the social boundaries of the lifestyle you grew up with, but you can't appreciate what it takes to get there. This is you learning. This is you growing up. This is you eating macaroni and frozen pizza because you have to so that you can understand how good a steak really tastes when you eat it because you can."

Smug little fucker. He's right again.

This is me having a life changing experience. This is me realizing that whether or not I ever have a career in comedy, I need to have a career. I've got a great girl now, and if things were to work out in the long run, I damn sure couldn't let her marry a waiter. I'm going to have kids someday, and I can't feed them on $3 two-tops. It's time to finish school. Not tell people I finished so they stop asking, actually finish. It's time to have a degree and a reason why somebody should pay me a lot of money. It's time to have a reason why I should be proud of what I'm doing with my life. It's time to switch from emphasizing ACT score, abs and a voice to emphasizing a degree, a drive and the knowledge that I'm not going to go back to staring hungrily at an empty fridge. It's time to find a new application for my triumvirate of ACT, abs and voice. The ACT hopefully means that I'll be smart enough to do my job better than other people so that I can push for pay increases that run in the thousands per year, not the cents per hour. What do with the abs and the voice? You know, I just might use them on keeping that great girl...

The Last Gift of Love

2006-10-13T11:54:00.000-07:00

10/13/06

I have been known to sound vaguely profound from time to time. I often say of my activities, "Sometimes I get to do what I want to do, and most times I do what I need to do." I more-or-less stole that from Gladiator. Where the things we want to do and the things we need to do cross over, life gets tricky. Sometimes in that crossover range lie difficult decisions, or rather, decisions that are perfectly clear and yet take some measure of courage to carry out. Where the decision involves some one or something we love, the decision becomes substantially more difficult to "make", even though its correctness may be totally inherent.

My mother called me yesterday to tell me of the worsening condition of our dog, Keiko. I didn't need to hear any information on my puppy's condition, I could hear in her voice that this call was to tell me that it was time to say goodbye to my childhood pet.

When I was 10 years old in the spring of 1992, I convinced my mother to drive me and my sister to the pet store to look at puppies. Dana and I were on a mission to get a puppy, and while we had been unsuccessful at convincing my mother to let us have one for several months, it didn't dampen my enthusiasm for going to pet stores and playing with puppies. I had called The Pet Lodge that day and learned that they had Cocker Spaniel/Poodle mix puppies, affectionately known to the dog breeding world as "Cockapoos". If the name of the breed is ridiculous, and it is, then the dogs themselves are ridiculously cute. We arrived to find a litter of coal black puppies with big eyes, round little faces and various white markings. While I busied myself playing and roughhousing with most of the males of the litter, my sister picked out a coal black female with a lone white tuft on her chest and went about cradling her for the duration of our visit. Within 10 minutes, the puppy was resting her head on my sister's shoulder, and I looked up to see my mom lock eyes with the puppy. Mom looked at me, I looked at the puppy, I looked at mom, and her famous last words were spoken: "Do you guys really want this dog?" We did, and so we at last had our puppy.

My father was less than lovestruck upon first sight of our jet black little puffball with the white tufted chest, but over the years even he was melted by the dog who would nuzzle his arm and tug at his shirtsleeve each night after he sat back from his dinner until he agreed to pet her. My sister and I spent hours reading over pet training books and teaching our dog to be a graceful member of our family. Over the years she grew from palm-sized to 14 pounds, and I grew from 4'8" to 6'1" and moved away to Lincoln for college. The look of our home changed, my sister moved to Nashville and came home, the Nebraska weather varied as always, but one thing was static: There was always a great, excited 14 pounds of wriggling, whimpering dog there to greet me when I came home. As always, she would not be denied until I had shared in the excitement of the reunion by getting down on the floor and saying hello. No matter what has gone wrong on any given day or in any stretch of your life, you feel appreciated when you come home and see a creature that loves you so much and so unconditionally that literally its whole body is consumed with the sheer joy of seeing you return, even if you were only gone a few hours. The color of her fur changed from jet black to gray, but she still loved everyone unconditionally and won over 100% of visitors to our home with adoroable face and classy demeanor.

Over the last few months, that demeanor changed. My dog no longer consistently noticed when I entered the house. Indeed, she no longer consistently noticed much but the movements of my mother and the sound of M&M's rattling in the candy dish. Her fur got thinner every time I came home, and her wheezing spells that onced happened only when she ran around too much were now a common occurrance. Mom informed me that on top of my pet's hazy mental state and respiratory difficulties, she had begun having blackouts that caused her to crash into things and lose control of her limbs and bladder. I needed to hear no more about my puppy's suffering. She had always loved me, and if I had always loved her, it was time to honor that exchanged by putting a quick end to her suffering. I told my mom to schedule the appointment at the vet as soon as possible. She called me back later to tell me that we would go to the vet at 11:45 the next morning.

When I arrived the next morning, I walked into a quiet house. Keiko had not noticed the opening garage door as she always had before, or if she had, she couldn't muster the strength to see who was home. I walked into my parents' room to find my dog asleep under the bench that sits at the end of the bed. I walked right up to her, but she took no notice. I tapped my foot on the floor to let her know I was there. At this, she got up, walked over to the hallway and looked a minute at my mom as if to confirm her location, and then returned to her spot, laid back down and began to cough. As sad as it was to see, this response was a confirmation of what needed to be done. I spent some time petting my dog, and let the tears roll slowly down my face. My mom wasn't yet aware that I was home, but I could hear her sniffle from the next room.

As we prepared to go to the vet, my mom informed me that after we had spoken yesterday, Keiko had another seizure and fell down the stairs. We sat and petted the dog for a while, then gave her some M&M's, which had always been her favorite treat. Her stomach instantly rejected the candy and she vomited it onto the kitched floor along with the rest of her breakfast. As I looked more closely at her, it was clear that she had lost weight. Indeed, it did not need to be made any more clear to me that this was a mere shell of the constant companion who had chased me around our backyard on countless afternoons. Mom cleaned the floor, picked up the dog, and we got in the car to go to the vet.

When we got to the office, I couldn't look anyone in the eye. They knew who we were and why we were coming, and if I saw their sympathy, I wouldn't keep my own composure. I didn't want to shock some child who was walking in the shoes I walked in those 14 years ago to see a grown man with tears streaming down his face and have to ask, "Mommy, why is he crying?" Let the child come to understand that all things happen in time, but for now let him be the child taking his new best friend for a checkup and let me be the man who must take his beloved pet to the doctor one last time.

The vet came in, and I was instantly struck by how old he looked. He introduced himself to me, not remembering that at 17 I had shadowed him at length because at that time I wanted to be a veterinarian myself. Suddenly I felt swept away by the current of change, but there was little time to wax philosophical about the myriad differences between all of our lives then and now. He gave us something of a warm up speech which seemed designed for the purpose of convincing us that we're doing the right thing. While I needed no convincing, I welcomed the distraction. He explained that Keiko would be given a purposeful, drastic overdose of anesthetic which would induce sleep, and then death. We agreed to the proceedure, and he returned with a syringe of pale blue liquid. This, he explained, was a standard dose for a 30 pound dog, so that there would be no doubt. Indeed, I had no doubt that the remaining 10 pounds of my dog would quickly succumb to the drugs. The vet put a tourniquet on Keiko's right forelimb and inserted the syringe. Keiko jumped a little at the stick, but ever well-behaved, held still. The vet then drew back the plunger to get some blood and make sure he had hit the vein. No blood came. He drew the needle back a little and tried again. No blood. He drew the needle back a little, and as I cradled my puppy's head in my hands I could see her discomfort, but she would not fight. Still, though, no blood. Horrible as I felt for my poor dog, I felt worse yet for the vet. It must be hard enough to do something like this, and I'd watched him do it a multitude of times, but my dog was so old and frail that her veins wouldn't serve his purpose.

The vet threw out the first needle, screwed on another, and told us we'd try the other leg. He clipped some hair from Keiko's left forelimb, applied the tournequit, and inserted the syringe. Again, she jumped, but a little more this time. Several times her instinct had been to bite at the hands that kept pressing the needle into her flesh, but too well trained, she would not. This time, though, she struggled and cried. She looked up at me for a moment with pleading eyes and my own welled up with tears. She looked at me a moment longer. One doesn't need the sort of animal intuition that dogs have to see that I didn't want to be putting her through this, but that this was something more than just a routine visit. The vet quickly gave up on the left leg, suggesting that she seemed to be especially defensive of it. I then remembered her fall, and realized that at her age, it was unlikely she had fallen down the stairs and come away without an injury.

He threw away the second syringe and screwed on a third. He applied the tourniquet and tried the right leg again, and this time got a little blood to draw into the syringe. He began to press down on the plunger and administer some of the blue liquid, but it was clear he hadn't quite hit the mark when Keiko began to struggle again at the discomfort of the pressure rather than lose consciousness. At this point, I was starting to feel sick with guilt. I wanted to scoop up my dog and walk out, so that this man would stop sticking my poor puppy with needles, but if I took her home now then it would all be for nothing and she'd still be suffering. Maybe next time she fell she'd really hurt herself. Still, though, my jaw was clenched tightly enough that I believe I might have bitten through steel. The vet apologized and left to get a new syringe of barbituate. From outside the room I could hear him frustratedly call to the techs for the drugs.

When he returned, he told us that he didn't want to have to do this more than once more, so he would inject the solution into Keiko's jugular vein. This, he told us, was far from acceptable if this were a blood sample, but the times seemed to call for the measure. We removed her collar and held her still. The vein was easily found among the patchy fur on her aged neck, and this time the stick was good. He pulled back on the plunger and the light blue liquid turned a deep crimson. He quickly emptied the contents of the syringe into her vein, removed the needle and said, "She'll go to sleep now." Keiko took one last look at me, and then went limp. As I held her head in my left hand and my mom laid her down, she looked once more at Mom, and then lost consciousness.

"Take as much time with her as you like. I'm sorry it didn't go better." the vet said. I could hear the shame and frustration in his voice, and I could only imagine how awful he must feel.

"It's o.k." I stammered. The words forced me to release the breath I'd been holding since the needle went in, and I broke down in tears. Next to me, my mother cried as well. As we petted our dog and wept, Keiko's body gave one last shudder, and then was still. I laid my head on hers and cried. After I lifted my head, Mom and I each looked the body over and petted our beloved pet a moment longer, then prepared to leave. Outside I could hear the sound of a father and his son with their own dog. I waited until I could hear them exit into one of the exam rooms, and then open the door.

For as many times in my life as I've felt beyond my years, I felt 10 years old again when I walked back out into the lobby. I looked up at the vet tech with sad eyes. She looked at me, then at my mother. The sympathy she felt poured out of everything about her, but she knew there were no words that would comfort the man with the quivering lip and empty collar clenched in his first or the mom who had come in holding the last of her "babies" and now held only a purse.

As I left the office, I battled mightly to hold back the tears. As I drove home from Omaha to Lincoln, I realized that the last strands of my boyhood were severed this week. I cleaned out my old bedroom at home, then returned five days later to part ways with my boyhood pet. As I write this, I periodically break into sobs and can no longer see to type. Letting go hurts, even if it is the right thing to do. As I type by feel through a blur of tears and listen, fittingly, to "All Things in Time" by Toad the Wet Sproket, I see that something about this moment is right, even though it is undeniably sad. I owed it to my puppy who always gave me her love to not let her slowly suffer out the last of her days.

The True End of a True Era

2006-08-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how one never really confronts something sad, but rather waits for sadness to initiate the confrontation.

Such is the case for me today. I'd been completely alright with the concept of my roommates/friends moving to California. Hell, I'd even been a little excited about getting a place of my own. The degree to which it signifies the real, tangible end of the "college student" phase of my life failed to sink in until I came home from work today and saw our home being rapidly stripped down to a mere house.

Now I can see visible evidence of the change in all of our lives, and I'm suddenly struggling to bear the weight of the whole situation. Boxes are everywhere, the walls are plain white again, and inappropriately happy swing music is blaring over the stereo. I faced the facts and got boxes of my own to strip down my little corner of our universe. I'm putting away books and clothes, and looking at old pictures in a new way. Suddenly I'm stricken by how young we all look in those pictures we took 5 years ago. I think about where the people in those pictures are now and what they're doing. I think about where I am now and what I'm doing. I think again about my roommates. They are loading up their cars and they are leaving here.

They are loading up their cars and leaving me. They should. They'll all go out to L.A. I'll go to South Lincoln. One of those two locations is exciting, and I'll bet you don't need two guesses to figure out which. For them, this is cool, if a little scary. They have their big swing at big success just over the horizon, but they'll have droves of our friends who have gone before them and now reside in Southern California right there to help them along the way. I'll have Lincoln, Nebraska in the winter and three fewer pillars in my support system. I'd be lying if I said I like that. Am I happy for them? Absolutely. Am I sorry for myself? I don't want to be, but yeah...a little.

I try to sit in the kitchen and watch the girls pack up all our dishes, and I just can't do it. For whatever reason, I feel like I'm 14 years old again watching my sister pack up everything we could fit in the truck and go away to college in Nashville. I cried my fucking eyes out when she left for college, if only in the secrecy of my own room. I knew that day that one of the single greatest forces in my life was going to be out of reach. She would never be out of touch and never totally gone, but the time when I was under her almost constant guidance was at an end. Like it or not, the pen was being forced into my hand and it was time to start writing my own legacy. At the time I hated it so bitterly that I wasn't sure how to react. Now I realize that the four years I spent being very much like an only child taught me lessons I never could have learned without that necessary solitude. I know that eventually I'll look back on this time with great amounts of sage-like wisdom and point out the ways it made me stronger. Right now, I feel more like clutching a pillow and falling asleep so that I don't have to realize this is all happening. Much though it sounds cliche, college really has been the best time of my life, and I'm terrified to move out of that period. I've developed so many deep, true relationships over the last several years and grown in so many ways that I couldn't address them all in a million essays. Regardless of how bright the future may be, it's sad to see the end of that era. Maybe it's sadder still to know the era needs to end and try to ignore it.

I tried to go to the University Health Center today to be treated for my nose/throat/chest/wherever else infection, and was turned away on the grounds that I'm no longer a registered student. While that is totally fair, it's also another way to drive home the point that I'm 24 now, and I'm not one of "them" any more. By "them" I mean college students. They have high school graduation years like '05 and '06. Mine is fully six years prior. They're young, wild and impulsive. I'm slightly less young, relatively grounded, and growing more and more cautious by the day. They're at the beginning of an amazing phase in life. I'm at the end of one, and it's time to say goodbye.

Each season I watch my friends scatter across the country and move on toward bigger and better things. Each season I'm saddened a little bit more that I'm not going with them, so I bury myself in double shifts at whatever restaurant I'm working at that year and try to pretend like it's not happening. Each time I find it harder and harder to justify my still being here. Each time I have to reconstruct a social circle that consists of fellow servers, most of whom are still in college, I find that I fit in a little less. For them, this is just a job while they're in school. Waiting tables is just spending cash to fund their partying. For me, it's getting dangerously close to a career. Each year it's a step closer to being the old guy who thinks he's cool with the young kids, but really is just a walking joke. They'll say things like, "Don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy, but why is he still waiting tables at (insert age here)? Move on with your life, you're not in college any more..." God forbid I should become that guy. Actually, let God rest. I'll forbid it myself.

Not long ago I made a plan for myself, and each season I find my plan working more and more perfectly. I'm presently forced to remind myself that I didn't make a clean finish of college and move straight into grad school for a reason. That reason was precisely that I lacked the motivation to want to get on and do something with my life. I had no drive. I didn't give a shit about school any more, I didn't know what to do with my life, and I had absolutely no sense of urgency about any of it. I suspected that a year or so off to spend working a shitty job and watching people all around me move up in the world and out of Nebraska would burn me hotter and hotter each time. I never could have imagined how right I was. With each friend who "makes it", or at least takes a shot, I have a greater resent for the way I've lived my life until now. With each person who quits waiting tables and gets a real job, I realize how many opportunities I've squandered. Every time a friend of mine gets a part on a TV show or in a movie, I curse myself for being spineless enough to let the faculty bounce me from the acting department when even they weren't sure why they were doing it. The more that resentment grows, the more I let my growing hunger dictate the way I face the present and set up the future.

Each time an opportunity pops up for me, I realize it more. Every time a door opens for me, I really take notice. Every time I get a shot at something along the lines of what I really want from a seemingly obscure location, I wonder more and more if it can be mere coincidence. Each time somebody likes my stand-up set on comedy night, each time somebody tells me they like my voice, each time somebody expresses belief in me and tells me I'm right to want to pack it all up and move out to Chicago or L.A. to take my own shot at entertaining people, I listen with a more open mind. These people aren't blowing smoke at me. It's not like I asked them to say nice things about me, or anything at all. This is unsolicited feedback. Every time I ask for nothing and get everything I realize how stupid I was to expect everything and accept nothing for so many years. Now when I get a chance to develop my talents or prepare myself for whatever my future may be, I take it. Each time I think that something sucks and is a waste of my time, I seek out the upside and find the ways it actually benefits me. Each time I want to curl up and cry out of fear of the unknown, I force myself to take inventory of what I do know, and that knowledge assures me that regardless of what comes my way, I'm going to be just fine.

College is over. At first that terrified me, but the more I think about it, I get this funny sort of grin about it all. I'd be stupid to cling to a phase of life. It can't be done. Holding onto something that is moving unstoppably away from you can only tear you apart...but what if you get behind it and accept the path down which it takes you, regardless of how rough or smooth it may be? If you're following the flow of an unstoppable force through time and focusing on steering it rather than stopping it, wouldn't that make you unstoppable, too?

Rebuffing the Rebuttal

2006-04-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

I've been keeping my little collection of essays, rants and stories almost two years. In those two years, the only negative response has been from "Hostess" of the story that started it all. It all began when I thought on my way home from Minnesota that she probably thought of me as being roughly as vile as a professional kitten puncher. When I thought of the phrase "professional kitten puncher", I knew I had to find a way to share it with the world. I shared not only the phrase, but the story of the weekend that spawned it. She got pissed. People, it seems, often object to the way others perceive them, especially when that perception is particularly unflattering.

For my part, when I become aware of a perception of me that doesn't mesh with my own self-image, I go through something of a four step process:

Step One: Surprise...sometimes.

Step Two: Try to understand what I'm doing that could create such a perception.

Step Three: Decide if I really give a shit. If yes, proceed to step four.

Step Four: Make adjustments for the sake of bettering myself.

For many others, I find that really it's a two-step process. For them, the steps are as follows:

Step One: Get pissed

Step Two: Yell at the person for their perception with the ultimate goal of making them apologize for violating your self-image.

The subconscious psychology behind this process is as clever as it is dysfunctional. It operates on the premise that if you can guilt trip them into apologizing, then they have indirectly forfeited their claim to being right. Thus, you get to avoid going through the emotional effort and cognitive dissonance of changing, regardless of whether they were right in the first place.

"Ok Beav," you say, "you were a psych major. We get it. Where are you going with this?" Well, for the second time in history, the critics have spoken. My surprise factor equals zero, because I knew as soon I set out to write my latest entry that there would be responses from both the girls mentioned.

I awoke today to an IM from the second girl mentioned in my most recent entry. God love her, she was mature and levelheaded and offered an explanation, an apology, and even a scenario of how she could have done things better. She said she hoped I wasn't still mad, even though I can guarantee she already knew I wasn't. I forgave her. While it was frustrating at the time, I'm not going to hold a grudge. We can now both consider the matter closed and continue to be friends. In the future, I'm sure we'll joke about it. This is the type of thing guys mean when they describe a girl as "cool as fuck." I also discovered, however, that I had some feedback under the "comments" section of my blog page...

Anonymous said...

You know I always had the notion that you were an ass, but now you've expressly made it clear.

The first story you get mad because she thinks with her nether regions says she wants to have sex, without thinking. You're so fucking sex driven that you act all pissy as if she agreed to hand you a million dollars and took it back - wtf? It's just sex. She spoke too soon, you asked if she was sure, (which by the way was the right thing to do) and she this time used her brain. You don't like to get teased; no one does, but it wasn't blantant teasing. It was thinking it over. So she shouldn't have spoke too soon, but why would you put so much stock in to that? Why do mostly all your blog entries deal with you getting laid or lack thereof and your self-worth macho-ness revolving around it? The second story the girl was all wrong. Things should have been implicitly said so no mix ups. But getting as angry as you demonstrated is so fucking stupid. You're so wrapped up in getting laid or not. Empty shit. "not such a bad guy" that was a shock to you?

When I read shit like this, a big grin makes its way across my face. Thank you, no, it wasn't a shock. I've encountered thousands of different females in my lifetime, and I've hooked up with less than 0.1% of them. I'm actually quite used to it. All guys are.

I'd give everyone two guesses of who probably wrote that, but that would be insulting the intelligence of the average reader. What the hell, let's believe for fun that it actually was just somebody else who was not a character in the story and just read the entry, and decided to up and sympathize with girl number one. That having been established, let me add a term to our psych lesson. That term is self fulfilling prophecy.

A self fulfilling prophecy is a declaration or scenario that by its nature goes on to ensure its own validity. My favorite example is the fight that we've all either had or seen another couple have. It starts with the girl uttering those fateful words, "Are you mad at me?" The guy then responds (with complete honesty) that he is not mad. The girl then proceeds to not take his word for it and badger him about being mad. Eventually the badgering itself along with the lack of willingness on her part to believe him makes him mad. Once he expresses his newly generated anger the girl says something along the lines of, "See? You are mad! I knew it!"

Also an example is taking the attitude of "I can't do this" about something and then purposely half-assing or just flat out failing basically for the sake of being right. You have fulfilled your own prophecy. The term is also often applied in the context of putting labels on people.

In my case, it has been prophesied that I am an ass. Oh yeah? Well, if you want to cast me in that role, I'm more than capable of playing it...

I have to laugh when I'm lambasted by people who lack a leg to stand on. The main criticism I endure in this "comment" is that my life revolves around sex. The justification given for this is that "mostly all" of my entries are about sex. Poor grammar of that accusation aside, I have written a total of 49 entries. 12 of them involve my sexual identity and/or goings-on as a major theme. That's about 24.48%. If you get a 24.48% on an exam, you did not get "mostly all" of the questions right. In fact, you're not even close to passing your class...and it's probably a math class.

Be that as it may, let's say for the sake of argument that a 12 of my 49 stories being about sex is an unusually high number. Why is 1/4 of my life pure, uncut sex? Why am I such a nymphomaniac? Why do I spend 6 hours of every day trying to get my rocks off? Quite simply, I don't. 1/4 of my stories are about sex, but my body of work does not represent the entirety of my body of living. I only write the stories and essays that I think people might actually want to read.

Don't hold your breath for the blog about the time I unloaded the dishwasher, the story of my night spent playing computer games or an in-depth analysis of what it means to take the dog for a walk. Nobody cares. We all have at least a handful of friends (probably on myspace) who write "blogs" that consist purely of the trite shit they did with their day and a little emoticon to represent their mood. It reads something like, "Today I went to lunch with joanie we went to arbys and i had one of their deli wraps cuz it's lo fat. i thout it would be bad but it was soooo good!! i saw the cuuuuutest dress at this store. i was like joanie isn't that the cutest dress. she was like ya. i wanted it but i didn't get it :'( "

I read literary abominations like this and I think, "Today I read your 'blog.' After I had stumbled through the misspellings, incorrect grammar, punctuation that was either lacking or inappropriate to the sentence type, and total absence of compelling content, I wanted to stab you repeatedly through the hand so that you can't type ever again! You owe me back five minutes of my life." When I first set out to create a blog, I made a promise to myself and to anyone who would ever care enough to read it that I wouldn't waste my time or theirs by writing about boring crap. I write about things that are funny or ridiculous, or otherwise worth reading. I write about sex, fights, relationship drama and major turning points in my life. People care about that stuff. Don't believe me? Break down the typical plot of any successful TV comedy or drama.

Hence, when a life event of mine falls into one of those "interesting" categories, I might write it down. I don't spend all my time being zany or chasing ass. If that's what people want to believe...hey, whatever floats your boat. If it's easy for you believe that about me, then odds are I don't trust you enough to have ever shown you how I really am behind the overconfident facade in the first place. Everyone has his defense mechanisms to prevent people from taking advantage of him. This blog contains a fantastic catalogue of mine. People with a strong sexual identity are intimidating to a lot of other people. Being intimidating is useful.

That's point one. Point two amuses me on levels that I frequently forget I have. "...you act all pissy as if she agreed to hand you a million dollars and took it back - wtf? She spoke too soon, you asked if she was sure, (which by the way was the right thing to do) and she this time used her brain. You don't like to get teased; no one does, but it wasn't blantant teasing."

I don't know where to begin with this statement. Let's not even address the insinuation that this was million dollar pussy. No such thing. Given a choice between money and sex, the amount needed to sway me would probably be in the low hundreds. Moving along, though...how is that not blatant teasing? Last I checked, teasing was leading somebody to believe that you want a piece and then not following through. All the elements seem to be there, so which part of the equation am I forgetting? I guess it's not as ridiculously comical as the time she once told me that if it snowed outside she'd have sex with me, but at least that time each of us was mostly sure she was kidding.

The last argument I consider worth addressing takes a big home-run swing at the point of the whole story and strikes out.

"You're so wrapped up in getting laid or not."

I didn't give a shit about the sex in the first, middle, or last place. Was I willing? Sure, but frankly my interest in the matter was inversely proportionate to my total number of other options. She, meanwhile, couldn't keep her mouth shut about how badly she thought I wanted to fuck her. The point of the story was never that I didn't get laid, it was that there was a widely agreed upon violation of hookup etiquette. I even did research and gathered multiple opinions from multiple females who in theory could or should be sympathetic this girl's cause. They were not sympathetic. Not a one. In the world of hooking up, clarity and promise keeping are absolute musts. Unfortunately tact tends to put a ceiling on clarity beyond a certain point, so the promises become implicit, but people still know how the script is supposed to play out. Spur-of-the-moment mind changing is a violation of the implicit promise, and is punishable by unfavorable reaction from the other involved party.

Regardless of whether you're willing or unwilling to have sex with a person, you know that before any clothes ever come off. There is no such thing as thinking with your "nether regions" for a limited period of time, because we all know who is really in charge. Either your brain runs the show or your genitals do. If you claim that the balance of power ever shifts, you're lying to yourself. You're either ok with fucking or you're not. There's nothing wrong with either option, but when you fail to be honest with yourself and others about it, problems ensue.

If I choose to start messing around with somebody, I'm not doing it with the idea that we're only just going to kinda mess around a little bit. If I'm not into her, then I'm not into her. If I'm into her then I'm willing to be, pardon the pun, into her. I refuse to believe that anyone legitimately endorses a "decide-on-the-fly" philosophy, and I'm sure as hell not going to tell her I want to do something and then decide I no longer feel that way scant seconds later.

Long story a little shorter than it could be, there is one bottom line to the whole scenario:

1) The journey of hooking up is one-way. You either go or you don't. If you decide you want to stop and turn around, don't be surprised if the rest of the people along on that one-way trip are irritated. To draw another parallel, if you go into a restaurant even though you're not hungry, order something because you think it looks good for a second and then don't eat it, they still get to charge you for the food. That's how it fucking works, because it's a restaurant. Hookups have rules, too and they're well established. If you don't like them and won't follow them then don't hook up. Hold out for a relationship. Failing that, shut the hell up. Failing that, make sure to gather your facts so that you're not setting yourself up to look like a moron when you choose to be so *courageously*, anonymously outspoken.

Chivalry Be Damned, I'm Not Taking This Shit

2006-04-20T00:20:00.000-07:00

3/25/06
2:00 PM

I am talking to the other members of my improv comedy troupe about the concept of making implicit promises to an audience. The upshot of the speech is not to establish too many "problems" in a scene or reference too many other events because then the audience wants to see the event or witness the resolution of the problem onstage. If we don't do that, we've broken our implicit promise to the audience. People don't like it when you break promises, implicit or explicit.

Weeks Ago, Late at Night

I'm in bed with a girl, and we’re kissing. Usually it's not like this between us, but sometimes it kinda is. Tonight it definitely is. Things are transitioning somewhere between the "making out" and "foreplay" stages. Certain items of clothing are missing. Breathing is heavy, pulses and blood alcohol levels are high. She looks me in the eyes...

"I want this."

I look back at her with tangible surprise, because it's never like this. By I want "this" she means sex, which has been a much discussed topic between us and has seemed like an inevitability, but which also to this point has proven remarkably evitable indeed.

"Yeah?"

She looks back at me. I can see her start to really think about it.

5 seconds pass.

She shakes her head "no."

Despite the fact that the male in me cannot fathom going from wanting to get laid to not wanting to get laid without an orgasm in between, I react understandingly. I take it lying down...literally. Actually, I'm not surprised. This is not the first time things have gotten sexual between us only to come to a screeching halt. Now she just wants me to hold her. She has no idea how the male brain works, obviously.

I settle in and go to sleep, but somewhere in the back of my mind my inner monologue is absolutely furious at me. I can almost hear it screaming, "WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!? WHO DOES THAT?!? WHAT A GIRL THING TO DO!!!! Let me get this straight, she just said she wanted to have sex, and then not 10 seconds later said that she didn't?!? Are you Goddamn kidding me?!? You're a sick fuck, lady. You're a sick fuck and I think that actually you did that just to see if you could get a rise out of me, *pardon the pun*. Fuck this. This is ridiculous. If you don't want to then fine, but don't fucking say you want to then! This is bullshit, do you hear me? You, guy, need to do something about this. I don't know what, but something must be done, do you hear me?!? Don't go to sleep! HEY! YOU FUCKING LISTEN TO ME FOR ONCE!!!!"

I go to sleep, and we cuddle. Just before I drift off my inner monologue says, "You're a shadow of what you used to be. I hope you know that. You're past your peak, buddy, and you're plummeting down the sexual hill. You wouldn't have put up with this at 20."

I get home the next day and the girls are in the kitchen making lunch. I seek out their female opinion on the subject of what happened the night prior. After they get the story, I am informed that this, in fact, is not a "girl thing to do." It's not a thing to do at all, in their opinions. To my surprise, they're more outraged than I am about the whole incident. They tell me that they haven't ever pulled a move like that, and that furthermore they wouldn't. I'm not sure I believe them, but at least they're not mincing words.

This is all news to me, but I don't consider my roommates to be the stereotypical "girly" girls, so I take their opinions with a couple grains of salt and seek out some more opinions from some more girls. To a man, or rather, a woman, they say the same thing: "That's bullshit." One of my friends even tells me she'd have gotten up and left then and there. She says she'd be pissed if a guy did that to her...but no straight guy would ever do that. Not even to an ugly girl. Where was I? Oh yeah, opinions...

I am astounded. Here I'd thought all along that when a girl gets her second X chromosome it comes with the irrevocable right to be completely fickle at all times and in all arenas and get away with it. Turns out I was wrong. The girls have spoken, and they see pretty much eye-to-eye with guys on this one. If you're gonna tell somebody you want some sex, then dammit, you'd better let them give you some sex. If you're not gonna have sex with them, then don't say shit. End of discussion.

I take my newfound surprise and I let it marinate for a couple weeks. The new flavor, I find, is a lot angrier than the original after the couple weeks. I'm not mad at her per se, but more mad at myself for believing that I had to allow this to happen. I had no idea I was allowed to be pissed! I'm pissed that I didn't get pissed before! I didn't know I didn't have to take this shit, and now I've got some catching up to do. Worse yet, she now takes opportunities to take jabs at me under the assumption that I'm just dying to fuck her and she's the powerful gatekeeper who gets to decide whether or not I get let in, if you will.

With each jab, I see less humor, and the more I think about it, I'm generally not in the mood to be some metaphorical puppy jumping and scratching at the door. Fuck that, it's not so bad outside. I may be ridiculous in a lot of respects, but I do hold certain degrees of pride and dignity. Additionally, there are upsides to being unattached. If I sleep alone I can stay up as late as I like, sleep as late as I like and do dumb guy things like play computer games and look at porn. I’ll grant you, my computer isn't much for cuddling, but it always does what it sets out to do and to this day it has never once given me blue balls. I decide not to force the issue, to cut down drastically on my nights spent at her place, and to not let the whole thing get to me. My anger subsides, and eventually I decide I'm over it. This, I'm sure, has been the exception and not the rule of hooking up. Things will go more smoothly in the future, right? Yeah, well, don't count your chickens before they hatch.

3/25
3:00 AM

I've been partying in Omaha with my friends for most of the night. There is more beer than we can possibly drink, there are games, and there is a jolly crew assembled. Notably, one of my best friends is back in town for a week. Hence, this is a party that I'm enjoying and a party that features people I would like to spend time around, all things being equal. That being said, those who know me know that few things are equal to sex (especially good sex) in my book. Also, let the record show that lots of other people share that opinion. Anyhow, also present at this party is a particular girl. This particular girl and I have particularly fucked on several occasions, and it has been particularly good. Beyond that, really. It has been wild, wake-the-neighbors, dude-what-the-hell-were-you-doing-to-her-in-there sex. Let me frame our history for you:

We met very briefly at a frat house in Ames while I was up visiting my friend Darnkness at ISU. She proceeded to get puking drunk and I proceeded to do other things so I did not see her for the rest of the night. Not long after, she came to an apartment party in Lincoln. We were playing strip poker. She ended up naked, and I ended up massaging her shoulders. Through beer, all things are possible. Scant hours later, she ended up in my bed and we both ended up naked. At the time, she did not know my name. For the record, I knew hers.

Spring break shortly followed, and we drank like fish and fucked like bunnies. You might say that we developed a “friends with benefits” relationship. In fact, we never spent the night together and failed to have sex except for two occasions: On the first occasion, she was on her period. On the second occasion, she spent most of the night dry heaving into a bucket, and I had a girlfriend anyhow.

Why do I tell you all this? I tell you all this to illustrate that it was clearly been “like that” between us, and for quite some time. It seems that tonight, it is still “like that”, because she’s letting slip with some fairly suggestive commentary, as well as some pretty suggestive dancing. This is why I have particular expectations when it gets to be about 3:30 in the morning and she makes a point of telling me a couple different times that she's going home. I study her for a moment and say, “You’re going home alone…or you’re telling me because I’m supposed to come with you?” She replies that I am welcome to come home with her…and that's all I need to hear. I bid farewell to my friends at the party and follow her the many miles back to her apartment, even though neither of us really should be driving.

Since I had planned on staying at my friends’ house, I’ve brought a toothbrush, so I brush away my beer breath and go to the bathroom. By the time I finish, she has changed into shorts and a t-shirt. This strikes me as a little odd…but girls often wear uncomfortable things out for the sake of looking “cute”, so I don’t think much of it when they want to change into something else. She gets into bed, and I strip down to boxers and follow suit, because I’ll be damned if I’m dealing with the pretense of getting into bed with jeans and a tight shirt on. Being drunk and horny, I attempt to get things started.

She then tells me she’s tired and she’s going to sleep because she has an interview in the morning. I think she’s joking. I commence with the second effort.

She then tells me she’s seriously tired and she’s seriously going to sleep. I again think she’s joking, and that this is one of those games of “who wants more than whom” that some girls so love to play. Evidently I have to chase a bit. I commence with the third effort, which is much more direct than the previous two.

She then comes back at me with “No, seriously, I’m fucking tired. You’re not getting any tonight. I have an interview in like 5 hours and I'm going to sleep.” I now cannot believe this is seriously happening. Who the hell invites somebody back to their place and then throws years of precedent out the window for the sake of gaining (at most) an extra hour of sleep? Like the difference between 4:00 AM and 5:00 AM is really gonna give you the edge in that interview? Sorry, but if you cared that much about your precious interview you’d have left the party before 3:30 in the first place. I strongly suspect that the real reason she won't lay me is that she has moved in with her sister and they're just not at that stage of closeness yet where it's cool if little sis is awakened just before dawn by the sounds of her champion screamer of a big sister in the throes of multiple orgasms.

Suddenly, here comes all that back-rage that I thought I was over. This is bullshit, and the dam has broken. The waters of anger that have stood placid for so many years as I respected and even defended the actions of so many girls who sent mixed (if not totally backwards) messages are now rushing forth in a torrent of indignation. My conscience attempts to tell me that it’s ok and I could just roll over and go to sleep, but my temper has been sparked, and now it’s clear that this girl going to get to watch me exorcise all the ghosts of teases past.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“What?”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me. You bring me all the fucking way back here and you’re just gonna fucking go to sleep? Go to sleep by yourself! You don’t need me here to sleep!”

I get out of bed and start dressing. I’ve turned the other cheek plenty of times, but if I’m gonna respect myself, I won’t stand for this shit. Not this flagrantly. Not now.

“Oh, what so now you’re seriously gonna get pissed and leave because I won’t give you a piece of ass?” This from the girl who once expressed disappointment in me for not turning around and driving back once I'd reached Gretna because I actually left Omaha without calling her to hook up when she'd been playing the "I don't want you" game all night.

“You’re GOD DAMN right I am! What the hell did you invite me back for if you’re just going to sleep? Who does that?!?”
“I never said I was gonna give you any if you came back here, I just said you could come if you wanted to.” This one kills me. It is much akin to getting arrested for going into a bank with a gun and then telling the cop, "What?!? I never said I was gonna rob the bank..."

“Oh fuck that. Don’t you try to pull that shit with me. Nobody ever says that shit, it's implicit. You know how this works. You’ve had enough hookups to know that is total bullshit. You don’t take somebody home with you for sleep, especially not from a party. When have we ever just slept? Those were my good friends and I could still be there hanging out with them, but I came back here because you talked all that shit all night and then you kept giving me the ‘I’m going home…’ and waiting to see how I was gonna react. If you’re tired then be tired and go home by yourself and go to sleep. I’m leaving.”

As I get dressed, the argument continues, and I use the word “implicit” a lot. She tries to get mad at me for being mad, but I can see in her eyes that she knows she has violated the hookup codes and is only forcing herself to act mad to save face. As soon as I have my shoes tied, I grab my stuff and I leave.

As I drive back to my friends’ house, I wonder why I chose this time to get pissed about the situation and not all the others, and I realize that it was all about expectations. This was not a girl I’d never been with, and it was not a girl who had never been in a situation like this. This particular scenario was absolutely teeming with precedent and implicit promises. Even just going home alone after being so flirtatious might have fallen a little under the “not cool” category, but inviting someone back after all the flirting and then trying to just go to sleep definitely lands in the realm of the unacceptable.

I couldn’t get mad about the time a different girl once replied to my attempt to unbutton her jeans with the words, “No, I’m such a virgin, you don’t understand.” You just can’t get mad at that…I mean, you can, but you shouldn’t. The best you can do in that situation is keep from laughing (which I somehow did) and find a way to tactfully wind things down and go to sleep before you lead her to do something she didn’t really want to do and wind up with a scared, sobbing virgin on your hands. In that case, tactful escaped me and I followed immediately with, “…yeah, maybe we should just go to sleep then” but the end result was the same. The point of the story is that I didn't push her to do something she wasn't ok with. In the new case, though, I’m pretty sure that leaving was the thing to do. It sure as hell felt a lot better than choking back my pride and engaging in grudging cuddling, that’s for sure. As they saying goes, "a leopard doesn't change its spots." In my case perhaps more fittng would be, "if a leopard is going to try to change its spots, it should not do so at 4:00 in the morning after acting like a damn leopard all night, and if it does you're allowed to be pissed off."

I get back to my friends’ house and vent to those present. They unanimously agree that what transpired was utterly ridiculous and while ballsy, leaving was not a bad choice of actions. Eventually I settle down on the couch and let sleep overtake me. As I drift off, my inner monologue starts a slow clap that turns into a round of thunderous applause from all the parts of me that have ever been disappointed when I let a girl walk all over me. There is a clap for every blow-off, brush-off, tease and copped attitude. The ovation makes for a sweet, sweet lulabye, and I sleep the sleep of the just all through the night.

Beav Has A Hangover, Epiphany

2006-01-24T11:28:00.000-08:00

It's 1:00 on a Tuesday afternoon and I'm sitting in BisonWitches with my friend BrownEyes. We're trying our best to cure our respective, raging hangovers with sandwiches, but it's only sorta working. We're hung over because the night prior was our big, drunken blur of a company "holiday" party. She and I woke up together after only our surpassing intoxication and her smoker's breath stopped us from hooking up the night before. I dare say it was the best sleep I've enjoyed with a girl in years, but that's neither here nor there. Now she's telling me about how she was putting in a good word for me with a gorgeous former coworker of ours. I've drunkenly asked the girl out before, and have hit on her countless other times. She's been kind enough to placate me a little, but even I can see that she's not really interested in being my girlfriend.

"I told her, 'You know, Beavs really likes you. You should give him a chance. He's not such a bad guy.'"

The word such jumps right out from the sentence and slaps me in the ego. Adverbs can hit hard, and it really stings. "He's not such a bad guy." The description of me as a bad guy needed a modifier. Basically, what we've admitted is that I am a bad guy, but in terms of badness I'm overrated. She continues.

"I think you get a bad rap, and you don't really deserve it."

Shit.

This is something I had not considered. I have a bad rap. Deserved or not, this a problem. To be honest, I'm not sure how I didn't notice. It's been obvious for a while now that most of the people I work with are under the false impression that I bang no less than 20 skanks per night, but I somehow failed to catch that this is a bad thing. The double standard, it seems, has a tipping point, and somewhere along the line I tipped. I am no longer perceived as the good guy with a cute little bit of a bad boy persona for defense. I'm not sure I ever was, but that's what I'd like to believe (and what I wish I could still believe) so let's just pretend it's true. If it ever was true, though, it isn't any more. Now I am a different sort of creature altogether. I have crossed the fine line into out-and-out slutdom.

Looking back, I'm not sure when it happened. When I came to college, I'd only been with one girl. After freshman year, only two. Even up through junior year I was only up to four, but sometime after the great breakup and through my fourth, fifth, and fifth-and-a-half years of college, I became rather...prolific. Some of them were girlfriends, but more were not. In most cases, each of us at least knew the other's name. Usually the girl involved was closer than one would expect due to my uncanny ability to mix sexual propaganda, opportunity and alcohol. Don't read that in a "wow, this guy is a date rapist" sort of way. All my sex has been on a voluntary basis; it's just that if opportunity is a window, drunkenness makes it a sliding glass door and then forgets to lock it. In my case, heartbreak led to a period of withdrawal followed by an even more intense period of opportunism. If I took anything away from my relationship with Anna, it was a newfound realization that girls actually can be attracted to me, and that I evidently know my way around the bedroom. Given that I had two forms of exciting new power, I did what any responsible, young college student would do. I abused the shit out of them.

If Anna and I were great together (and we were), then we were at least twice as bad apart. We were each becoming aware that we might have some power over members of the opposite sex, and we were each fully incapable of wielding that power responsibly. We spent our time together being a cute, passionate, loving couple. We spent our time apart shamelessly flirting with anyone and everyone who would allow us to hone our skills at seduction. Early on we would draw the line before anything really "happened" with anyone else. The longer the relationship went on, though, that line got blurry. I developed an alcohol-induced blindness to the line altogether. She at least had the decency to dump me before she fucked anyone else...as far as I know anyhow. The same could not be said for me.

While I learned to hate and avoid the shame of infidelity, I learned to love the joys of sex without the restraints of commitment. I also developed an amazing ability to sow the seeds of curiosity in the minds of female friends and acquaintances. Sometimes my efforts would come to fruition within the night, but sometimes it took years. I'd be lying if I said the delay didn't make it all the more rewarding. I've been in a few relationships since then, and while I don't regret a moment of any of them and they taught me a lot about what it means to be able to love someone without being "in love", I have to confess that the impulsive and immature side of me has had more fun compiling impressive lists of trophy lays and girls I technically should not have slept with in the first place. Those lists often cross over, and for that reason I really can't discuss the details of either, but both can make my guy friends raise their eyebrows in respectful amazement and make my girl friends crinkle their noses in disgusted shock. Of course, they aren't actual lists in the sense that I have all my past sexual partners written down and categorized somewhere. ..that would be impossible. I cannot actually remember the names of all the girls I've been with. This is not to say that I've been with any staggering number of girls, but there is a certain degree of realization that comes with not being able to name all the people one has known in the Biblical sense of the word.

Because of all this, the words "slut", "man-slut", "man-whore" and other similar derogatory nouns are frequently thrown at me. In the past, I would always respond by saying, "Hey! I am not a slut. I'm easy. There's a difference." Lately, though, I've come to terms with the fact that I probably passed easy a few miles back and I have earned my stripes as a full-fledged slut. I was totally alright with that fact until it was brought to my attention that the metaphorical sword of sluttery also has a back edge, and that's the aforementioned rap. Having a reputation as a promiscuous bad-boy is a great way to attract girls who are into casual sex, but it's also a great way to repel girls who are into legitimate romance. Once a girl decides that you're trouble, it's awfully tricky to earn her trust, no matter how many times you assure her that you're very certain that you're HIV negative and have never, not even once, had an STD or a kid.

Now I find myself at something of a crossroads, because my desire for someone to sleep with is waning and my desire for someone to wake up to is decidedly waxing. It seems a simple problem, but it has a complicated solution for me and others like me. While my blood-alcohol content is inversely proportionate to how picky I am about who I'll sleep with, my number of ex-girlfriends is directly proportionate to how picky I am about who I'll date. It is exceedingly rare that I find a girl I'd consider dating, and somewhat rarer that it coincides with willingness on her part to let me date her. I have no doubt that when I do find that certain girl I'll have no trouble settling down and being the sweet, attentive, loyal boyfriend that I know I can be, but it's a tough search that is only made tougher by my new status as a guy with a bad rap.

The whole realization serves to intensify my hangover, but I'm sure that my bloodstream and mind will both clear in time, and I'm also sure that I'll find that girl who will be amazing enough to make me willingly utter the words "forsaking all others." After all, I'm not such a bad guy.

On The Precipice of Coming Full Circle

2005-12-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

"So if the r-value is greater than the r-critical, it's statistically significant...ok. It's 7:00 now, I could go through these and then if I get in by 7:30...God, I can't be ready by then. God, I don't want to be ready. I don't care. I do not fucking care. I'm not re-taking the exam. I don't care what I get for my lecture grade, I don't fucking care. I DON'T FUCKING CARE."

I close the browser windows and stalk out of Andrews Hall. I look across the courtyard at Burnett. My inner monologue kicks in again. This time it's the superego talking.

"You should at least try. How's that going to look on a grad school ap?"

Id butts in.

"Fuck grad school! I don't want to go to grad school. I don't care about this shit, I don't. I don't want to do this and I don't care. If I have to retake the class, so be it. Third time is the fucking charm. I hate this and I want it to be done."

Ego is silent. Just looks at superego as if to say, "He may be right this time."

It's 7:00 PM and it's dark as midnight outside on a cold December night. This is the last week of my undergraduate career and I am sputtering pathetically across the finish line. There is no warrior spirit, no heart of a champion, no "I can do this" attitude. As I pass in between the Temple Building and the Lied Center for Performing Arts, it begins to sleet. This is too fitting. There is anger, there is exhaustion, and there is a growing sense that this is not what I want for myself. Now as I pass between these two buildings that symbolize everything I once thought I would be, there is sleet.

*********************

December, 2003

I'm sitting in the bathroom of an old, drafty house. I am staring at disbelief at a letter in my hand. There, on University of Nebraska letterhead, is my notice that effective immediately, I need to pick a new major. Nay, I need to pick a new direction in life. The acting faculty have put their heads together and come to the conclusion that I am such a bad actor that I'm not even teachable. This stands in stark contrast to the prevailing opinions of my classmates that I'm one of the more talented in our class and I have nothing to worry about as we await the results of "sophomore cuts." For me, it's more of a 4th year cut, since I've previously enjoyed a pre-med debacle of a freshman year followed by two more years of academic agnosticism. I don't know what to do with this fucking letter. I am looking around for anything innaccurate about the details of my surroundings, hoping that if something is weird enough I can write this off as a dream and I can still have all my life goals intact when I wake up. Everything looks the same. I do know what to do with this letter. I'd like to wipe my ass with it, but then I don't want to risk a papercut that would add injury to insult. What the hell am I going to do?

I gather my thoughts for a little bit and call Anna. We've been back together for a few days and if anything can make me feel better right now, it's her. She sounds incredibly distant. Come to think of it, I haven't seen her in a few days. She doesn't seem to feel sorry for me, and she really doesn't want to talk. Oh Christ, she's going to break up with me again. Wow, when it rains, it really fucking pours. Ok, I'm ready to freak out now. I hang up with Anna and call my sister. I can't hold back tears as I tell her the news. Terror washes over me. What the hell am I going to do with my life? For a little while I at least felt like I knew what I wanted to do. In the little airplane of my mind everything is blinking and flashing and an inappropriately calm female voice says "Stall, stall, stall..." The ground is coming up fast.

I lose my shit. I hit rock bottom, as they say. I have no career path and just as I suspected, I've been dumped again. I am a walking case study in major depression with the one exception that I'm totally unwilling to even consider killing myself. In the next three weeks, I rarely move from the futon. My schedule consists of waking up way too early after going to bed way too late and then moving out to the couch in the hopes that the change of venue will allow me a couple more hours of sleep. When it doesn't I watch Sportscenter even though I've already seen it, then eventually switch to Family Guy DVDs. Sometimes friends stop by to spend some time with me. By "friends" I mean "girls", and by "spend some time" I mean "cradle my head in their lap and tell me things will get better."

I end up declaring a new major in psychology, largely because those were the only open classes by the time I was cut and I needed to register for something. I end up doing really well. I get a good GPA for the first time in years. I make Dean's List. Maybe I can do this shit.

*********************
December, 2005

Maybe not.

I'm sulking my way across campus, back to my car. I've quit. I've given up. I'm the guy in the race who falls down and just sits there. I'm thinking back over the last semester. I have pretty much hated my classes. Mind you, they haven't been great classes, but there have only been two of them and I've hated them. I haven't done my homework and I haven't done particularly well on the exams. I'm burned out on going to school and I don't have my head in the right place, or so I think. Now I'm starting to wonder if I have my heart in the right place.

I haven't given up performing entirely. There's still improv, and there's still my a cappella group. Well, scratch the latter now that I'm graduating, but the point is this: The only times I've felt really alive lately have been when I've been able to step on stage and look out at the faces of all the people in the crowd. The only thing I've really looked forward to is when I've gotten up the day of a show and felt that energy swirling all around my body because of the sheer knowledge that I get to go out that night and entertain people. There's a sensation that washes over me, a transition from nervousness to excitement that comes when the house lights go down and adrenaline shoots into my bloodstream. Some people see an audience and freak out. I see an audience and relax. This is home. This is my comfort zone. This is where I can feel my eyes light up and something inside me just starts firing on all cylinders.

I can't watch Saturday Night Live or standup comedy any more without thinking about how badly I want that to be me. I see a Fryer's Club Roast and I think about how someday I want to be in that chair, getting ripped on by comedians who weren't even born yet when I started working. I think back to the 6th grade, when I was voted "Most likely to be on Saturday Night Live." I wanted to be a veterinarian then. They must have known better. I want to be a psychologist now. I should have known better.

The fact of the matter is that I'm not sure I like where I'm going, and the longer I think about the idea of 5 years of grad school to get my PhD in a field I'm not sure I even feel that passionately about, the more it makes me cringe. I tell everyone I'm taking a couple years off to build my resume' for grad school aps because I'm not marketable right now. That's true, but what's also true is that I'm taking the time off because I need it. I don't want grad school. I don't know what the hell I want, but I'm getting an idea. Every time one of my theatre friends tells me I should just move out to Chicago, or just move out to LA and see what I could do, I listen a little more. Every time somebody tells me I should go to the national Undergraduate Professional Theatre Audition, I think, "Why the hell not?" I can sing and I'm not hideously ugly. Somebody would hire me for that alone. I think about being back onstage, acting in musicals. I think about doing standup. I think about doing 2 man improv shows in LA with the guy I succeeded as president of our troupe. I think about living out there with my friends. "Why the hell not?" What am I going to do here? Wait tables and maybe tackle psychos on the overnight shift at the pscyh ward if I'm lucky enough to get a job? There are restaurants everywhere. Every major city in America, from what they tell me. Crazy people in every major metropolitan area, too, if I'm not mistaken.

Id, Ego, Superego.

"Why the hell not?"

Frankly, I don't have a good answer for that. I have a few great ones for, "Why?", though.

My Journey Through The "Feminine Side"

2005-12-04T02:26:00.000-08:00

“Are you going to be cuddly, or are you going to be a bed snob?”
“I’m gonna be a bed snob. Sorry, kiddo.”
“You would…”

It's six in the morning, and it's time to part ways with a pretty girl. We haven't slept (it's not what you think), and my half-drunk, half-serious attempt at finding something better than a pillow to hold while I sleep has been unsuccessful. Before I can pretend to be indignant enough to lay on a fake guilt trip, I'm reminded of a line from Boondock Saints: "Cuddle? What a fag..."

Man, am I really doing this? Far cry from the days when I used to get angry at my then-girlfriend for curling up right behind me and pinning me between her and the edge of the bed when there was plenty of vacant queen-size bed she could be sleeping on. Now I'm giving my roommate shit because she won't spoon with me. Who does that?

We say goodnight, and I assume my usual sleeping post on the living room couch. Before I drift away/pass out, I think back over the night's events.

7:30 PM - I go to a play in which a cast full of males acts out the story of a modern-day, gay Jesus figure. There is a lot of man kissing involved, but there is also an incredibly powerful message. It's a hell of a show. I cry. I give it a standing ovation.

9:30 PM - I come home and drink with my roommates and our mutual friend. We dance around like idiots. They consult my opinion on their choice of outfits. I change into a tight shirt, name brand jeans held up by an even bigger-name brand belt and suede shoes.

11:30 PM - We all pile in the car and sing along to an old No Doubt album. We buy alcohol and go to the cast party, where my roommates and I proceed to get shitty and test our respective abilities to turn each other on in a platonic sort of way...if that makes any sense. There is some light ear-biting and neck-kissing involved. Nothing comes of any of it but a few goosebumps. Theatre people...

4:00 AM - I'm sitting on the couch in the living room of the party house, basking in that phase of a party where most of the people have gone home and the ones who remain at the party are either sleepy, sentimental, or horny. I fit the former two descriptions, as do most of the people in the room. Usually I fit the latter, but tonight, getting laid falls much further down my list of priorities. Maybe it's that fighting back tears while seeing Gay Jesus crucified onstage doesn't put me "in the mood", or maybe I'm just tired. In either case, my attention is focused on the single task of lulling my roommate, who now has her head resting in my lap, to sleep. I used to be good at this...I could probably remember if I tried. Ah yes, one hand runs fingers through the hair, the other gently brushes along the arm...works every time. Within a couple minutes she's sound asleep while I trace my fingertips along the highlights of her hair and criticize my friends on the opposite couch for the awkward-looking cuddling session they're attempting. I warn one of them, our roommate-to-be, that if she can't improve her spooning skills she's not allowed to live with me. She claims to be a "selfish sleeper". I vow to break her of that.

Most any guy would find the idea of having one gorgeous girl asleep in his lap while he tells another about how they're going to sleep together positively fraught with sexual tension. Not me. Not tonight. I find it calming, and when I say that we'll "sleep together" I mean that we'll "be asleep" together. My roommate stirs. She looks up and me and smiles.

"I'm so happy right now."
"Yeah, me too."
"I'm so glad we're roommates."
"So am I."

I smile back and resume stroking her hair. She sighs and drifts off to sleep again. A friend looks at me, at her, and back at me as if to say, "You two?" I smile and shake my head. I've had a close friendship or two that metamorphosed into passion and romance, but this isn't one of them.

"She couldn't handle me," I joke. She stirs again and looks up at me.
"What?"
"Nothing, baby, go back to sleep." She nestles her head between the pillow and my stomach. She's beautiful when she sleeps.
"I love you."
"I love you too, baby." A new arrival to the room gives me another quizzical look. I smile and shake my head again, and close my eyes.

Half an hour later, and it's my turn to be asleep in her lap. I am vaguely aware of the murmur of conversation from somewhere outside the couch, but mostly just of the gradual rise and fall of her stomach under my throw pillow and the faint smell of Lucky You perfume. I feel safe here. I haven't really felt completely resigned and protected like this since...I can't even remember when. No image to maintain, no calculated decisions, no tension or "what if it doesn't work out" scenarios, just warm and quiet.

"I love you."
"I love you, too. You're the best fake boyfriend ever."
"Hah, I was just gonna say that, that you're the best fake girlfriend ever." We refer to ourselves as a fake couple. Might as well, people always assume it when we're out together anyhow. She runs her fingernails through my hair...I'm powerless against it...I fall asleep.

Another 30 minutes and our third roommate has had her fill of dancing or talking or whatever she was doing and wakes us up to take her home. I rise and give her a hug. She fits just under my chin and sort of buries herself into my chest when I hug her. I love that. I go into the bedroom to get my coat, and there lies our soon-to-be roommate, passed out on the bed. I wake her to ask if she wants to come home with us and sleep in her soon-to-be room or stay passed out there and take her chances on what happens when the guy whose room she's in eventually finds her in his bed. She elects to stay there. I can tell she is aware of only the lure of sleep right now, but she'll be fine. She's coherent enough to know what's going on, and given that I'm not intimidated by much and I fear seeing her get really pissed off...yeah, she'll be fine. I give her a parting kiss on the forehead, grab my coat, forget my backpack and our leftover alcohol, and drive the crew to McDonald's.

6:00 AM - I'm back at home, on the couch, alone. I'm thinking back over my night and over the last 7 months since I moved in here. I dare say they've been 7 of the best months of my life. They have been months of quasi-forced exploration into what people like to call my "feminine side." Being quite literally surrounded by girls at all times will do that to you. There are two under our roof and 4 next door. I'd be lying if I said it isn't a welcome contrast to the constant competition for "alpha male" status in which I lived for the previous five years of my live. There's no question who the man of the house is when there's only one man in the house. That whole battle for dominance can get tedious in a hurry. My current residence also offers a nice contrast to the relative squalor in which I previously lived, too. Compared to a frat house, this is Utopia. Our place is not decorated with empty liquor bottles, does not contain any sort of oversized cardboard and/or inflatable beer boxes, has no furniture that was found or stolen, does not smell like a combination of sweat, beer, fart and mold, and is generally clean, pleasant, and well-decorated. I don't have to win a wrestling match or out drink anyone to gain status. There are better meals prepared here than frozen pizza or Ramen. It's a different sort of life, to be sure, and it affects me in different ways, but I wouldn't trade it.

Sometimes I show up with places with long hair stuck to my shirt. Sometimes I show up smelling like perfume because I hugged a roommate too soon after she sprayed it on. People love to insinuate that it's because I "got some" right before I showed up, but I smile, shake my head and tell them, "I live with girls." The same conversation invariably follows:

"Really? How many girls do you live with?"
"Two. Soon to be three."
"Oh man. Does it drive you nuts?"
"Nah, I love my girls."

Sometimes I go see a play about gay guys, cry, dance around the house, dress all metro, sing some No Doubt and go to a party where I platonically cuddle with and profess my love for a girl scant minutes after kissing my gay friend on the cheek. Effeminate? You bet. It doesn't scare me. It doesn't stop me from waking up the next day, shoveling the driveway in my ripped jeans, worn out boots and extra large gloves and then coming inside to watch football all afternoon. I still feel confident in my ability to have sex exclusively with females and enjoy it.

As I lie on the couch and my thoughts slip further and further away, I ponder just how much, over the course of the last 7 months, I've roughened up the girls' metaphorical edges and how much they've frilled and pressed mine. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I may cook, clean, do laundry and (unwillingly) watch Sex and the City with them, but it doesn't mean I can't still fix the furnace, haul up the trash cans, reach all the tall stuff and lift all the heavy stuff, and watch ultimate fighting with a beer in my hand, too. In the long run, it can only benefit me to have been exposed to the girlier side of life on a constant basis.

6:10 AM - Just before I fall asleep, an overwhelming happiness washes over me.

"Does it drive you nuts?"

I smile, shake my head, and drift away...

"Nah, I love my girls."

The Same Old Story About The Same Old Paper

2005-11-11T06:00:00.000-08:00

It's 3:30 AM.

Get up. Get up. Get up, you have to get this shit done. You won't have time later, you were only supposed to sleep until 2:20. GET UP.

Snooze button.

It's 3:45 AM. Reality is slipping into the background and sleep takes my brain away from me.

Need to...what time is it? 3:45...I'll get up at 4:00 maybe, it'll be ok, that gives me...5 hours? 6...no...

Snooze button.

It's 4:00 AM. I'm still in bed. In my mind, I'm not sleeping any more.

What are you doing? Get out of bed, you're just lying here doing...what? What are these? They're not even pillows they're just...hamburgers. You're eating nothing, these hamburgers, you aren't even hungry. You should be writing your paper. Not hamburgers...something else...where...what time is it? One more snooze and I'll get up.

Snooze button.

It's 4:45 AM. I'm face-down on the bed. I never sleep like this. I'm wearing only jeans and a "wifebeater" undershirt and it's 72 degrees in the room. I'm sweating like it's mid-summer. Panic is gripping me. I can feel it. I can literally feel it as though panic is a real person who is really taking hold first of my brainsteam, then down my spine, my legs, my arms. It's hot...I start to sweat.

Get up! Get up there's no time! You won't finish! What about your test, you were going to take your test this morning and it's the last day!!! You won't get your paper done, and if your paper isn't done you can't do your poster, and you won't be done and you can't show up to lab with nothing and if you don't show up (TA) will fail you like she should have months ago and you won't graduate and you won't get into grad school and...

Alarm clock. Reality. Panic lets go for a second. Snooze button.

It's 5:00 am. Panic has me again, but this time I'm wiggling free.

Dude. Seriously. Up. Now. It's 5:00 and you were gonna take a 20 minute nap 3 hours ago. You can't sleep all morning and expect to finish this. You don't have a peer edit of your paper because you did that, now you're gonna turn in first-draft crap that you haven't even given a cold read? Get out of bed. NOW.

I'm up. I'm ashamed of myself. I want to curl up in a ball and cry. I want to sit here and blubber like a spoiled little child and let myself be overwhelmed. I want to say I can't do it and just fail. Just fuck it and fail...but I won't. I can do this, and I will. I've done it before, and I've done it under worse circumstances. I wiggle the mouse of my computer to cancel the screen saver. There is an IM from the AOL System Manager:

"Your AIM session is now logged in from two (2) locations..."

Oh no.

Our router went out again. FUCKING LINKSYS! What the hell is wrong with you people and your shitty router?!? Dear God, tell me I have internet. Tell me I'm jacking enough signal from the neighbors to be able to get online...

My academic career is flashing before my eyes. My TA will never buy this.I click the network connection box...

Signal Strength: Very Low.
Status: Connected.

Thank God. This is a stay of execution. This is the Gods of academics saying, "We had everything fall into place so you could get this done, and you squandered and squandered your opportunities. Do not fuck with us." Point taken. I e-mail my TA about the router, not that she'll care. I list the things I owe her for her mercy, included in which are baked goods and submitting to physical violence. She won't care about the router, but if she'll laugh at the rest. If she laughs, I'm likeable. If I'm likeable, she'll take it easy on me. I need that, because I have my head irrevokably lodged in my ass this semester.

Maybe I could go to support meetings for this.

"Hi, my name is Dan, and I'm a procrastinator. By 'procrastinator' I mean, 'most times, I just flat out don't do shit for no reason other than the fact that I don't wanna.'"

"Hi Dan."

Let's not bullshit though, I'd skip the meetings to play Playstation. Whether it's pure, immature laziness or a complication of the ADD I'm not sure. A lot of both, I think. I thought again last night about how I really should be on medication for my Attention Defecit, but because those are generally stimulants, I don't want to take them because they don't mix well with alcohol.

Ain't that some sad shit? I won't take the medicine to help me get my shit done becasue I wanna get drunk on the weekends during my "celebration" time. Celebrating what, motherfucker? Waiting tables, sleeping through your two classes and then not doing homework all week? Yeah, drink up. A toast to you, ace. Way to get 'em out there.

It's 5:00 AM and I'm sick of always doing this. Every time I say, "This next assignment, I'm gonna do it a little at a time, in advance and it's gonna be A+ quality. This next test, I'm gonna study and..." Yeah right. Who am I kidding? I'll spend at least the rest of the semester hastily throwing shit together at the last minute and settling for the B+ I can manage out of it.

It's 5:00 AM and it's time to finish researching my sources and plug in my data and finish this paper.

Hey, that sequence with the alarm clock would make a great blog lead-in...

It's 6:00 AM and I'm doing it again. The gods of academics are rasing the axe and I'm laying my head on the chopping block, grinning all the while.

"Hi my name is Dan, and..."

Beav Gets A Fat Dose Of Perspective

2005-10-31T01:01:00.000-08:00

Ever have those days where no matter what you try to do, it can't hold your attention more than five minutes before you want to get up and do something else? Those days where you think back and dwell on every strange little detail of shit you haven't thought about in years? That's me today...well, except for the "haven't thought about in years" part. Replace that with "have been thinking about all week" and we've arrived at an accurate description of my mental state at present.

For whatever reason, my brain has decided that this week, my sleep will be reserved for dreams about ex-girlfriends. Not just dreams where they happen to be present, but dreams where we're back together. Dreams where we're sleeping together. Dreams that, when I wake, leave me wondering why I have such an abundance of emotion about these two particular girls turning over in my subconscious. The obvious answer is that I have some sort of poorly hidden desire to be back together with either of them, but this time a cigar just isn't a cigar.

Still, though, the mindfuck lingers. Why the dreams? Perhaps it's just life's little way of jabbing at the soft spot in my almost-brilliant system. Ah, my "system." I fancied myself a genius until that one chink in its armor was exposed. I had very nearly convinced myself that I had found the perfect substitute for being in a relationship.

I've been single for about four months now, and happily single at that. There was that stretch of a few weeks where I went a little nuts while I got used to being unattached again, but since that wore off I've been thoroughly enjoying my bachelor lifestyle. A little drunkenness, a little promiscuity, and a total lack of accountability can be awfully refreshing when you're coming off the kind of relationship where your girlfriend gets so pissed that she won't come over because you made a 10 minute trip to get a sandwich. As I got comfortable walking through life in my "single guy shoes", I unwittingly developed a sort of method by which I managed to simulate most of the elements of an actual romantic relationship without having the relationship itself and thus not having to be committed. How, you ask? Well, it goes a little something like this:

Part One:

I live with girls. Not just any girls. These are attractive, smart, funny, down-to-earth girls who I love spending time with, and I get to see them every day. They baby me, I baby them, and we provide each other with the unique and crucial perspective that only members of the opposite sex can provide. Check female companionship off the list.

Part Two:

I work with girls, and if you've ever worked in a restaurant, you know that you basically do two things there: serve food and sexually harass each other. One fellow server in particular is in her early 30s, is a mother of two, is a certifiable MILF, and amazingly has an even dirtier mind than I do and is an even bigger flirt than I am. Nothing I can say shocks this woman. Generally she just one-ups me. When she's not there (and even when she is) there are also young, attractive hostesses and servers all over the place and none of us are really what you would call "prudish." Check harmless flirtation off the list.

Part Three:

I additionally have what you might call a "friend with benefits", although most of our mutual friends and acquaintances are much fonder of the term "fuck buddy." I find the term a little unflattering, but I can't fault its accuracy. She's hot, she's good in bed, she's not territorial, she's fun to go out with, and she's no more interested in being stuck with a commitment than I am. Check sex off the list, and put another mark beside female companionship. If you want to make a category for "flirtation with serious devious intent", go ahead and make one of those and put a check mark next to it, too.

As far as most guys would be concerned, my bases are covered. Still, though, a particular loneliness still seems to be stealing home while I sleep. It was easily dismissed all week long, but last night my very specific reminder of what is still missing strode coolly down the basement steps of my friend's house and threw open the door to that little room in my heart where nothing is ever forgotten.

Right there in the middle of the party, at a time and place I least expected her, Miss Czech Nebraska herself walked in with her new boyfriend and unwittingly revealed to me precisely what I'm missing. If romance is like a campfire, then I have gathered all the raw materials from various different locations, but my refusal to enter into any one relationship is much like a refusal to strike steel to the flint, and I'm left with no spark. Hence, no fire. I must also say, at risk of overusing the metaphor, that one cannot simply build a fire under any conditions. Sometimes no matter how good your intentions, you're just holding a match to a wet log.

She and I...we had spark. Hell, we were practically nuclear while it was good. Now her arrival stings not because of who she is, who she is with or because I think it would work to try again. It wouldn't. It stings because she is a tangible reminder of the contrast between where I am and where I have been before. When she would wrap me in her arms, I would instantly drift away to that place where everything was quiet and safe, and there was only the sound of her voice and the smell of her hair...the feeling of her fingertips on the back of my neck...the way she would smile and sigh when she woke up in my arms...and the fact that I couldn't help but adore her in her gray hoodie, soccer shorts and knee-high socks.

You can't fabricate that.

It's either there, or it isn't.

There's the rub.

I've got a good thing going to be sure, but it isn't the best I ever had, and life has a way of making me dismount from my high horse right about the time I start thinking I'm pretty fucking slick. Consider my ego checked. As for my restless mind, I guess you could say I'm just gathering kindling.

Beav Gets Paid To Witness The Dirty Underbelly Of Human Nature

2005-10-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

10/19/05

Tonight was, for the most part, uneventful. I picked up a shift for my friend BrownEyes yet again because she was undoubtedly enduring another smallscale personal crisis. I'm starting to wonder how much money I've indirectly made off of her amazing ability to overdramatize life's minor setbacks. Well, that and her amazing array of psychosomatic ailments...but I digress.

I closed the bar tonight, and I find that I far and away prefer the bar to any other section in the restaurant. This is because the people who come and sit in the bar are far and away more laid back and enjoyable to deal with than some of the stoic, rural assholes and crusty, old fucks who demand booths in the main dining room. I still sometimes get the occasional table of white trash who ask for a Busch Lite, but the good outweighs the bad. Tonight, I got to witness one of the more interesting personalities in the catalogue of human archetypes: The real-life desperate housewife.

The first of this particular pair of ladies arrived at around 5:30 when I got to the restaurant. She was waiting for her friend, so she had a pint of Miller Lite. She got through with that and her friend still hadn't arrived, so she had a margarita. Her friend finally arrived, and they moved to a table, where the friend ordered a bottle of chiraz. If I hadn't already, I started laying on the charm at this point because I knew that for the two of them to get through a bottle of wine, they were going to be spending some considerable time with me. The one on the right (who was the first to arrive and is now certifiably sucking down her margarita) wants to know what I recommend, and proceeds to ask me a lot of questions about fairly self-explanatory menu items. I ask if she's been here before, and her reply is "Oh yeah." At this point I realize that they're going to be my chatty table, and that she, in particular, is going to be my chatty customer. She tells me I should sing because I, "have that really nice, low voice." I stop short of informing her that telling me I should sing is like telling Richard Simmons he should be flamboyant, and instead just let her know her that I do sing in a lot of different settings. The charm is coming on extra thick now, and they're eating it up. I always flirt shamelessly with tables of women...because it works. I don't tend to go so far as to touch them or sit down with them like a lot of the girls do with their tables of guys, but I have my methods.

By the time they've gotten through their meals and their bottle of wine, my new friend on the right is noticably tipsy. A beer, a margarita and half a bottle of wine will do that to you, I guess. I tell them about the 800 number they can call if they want to take the survey for a free dessert, and I joke that they can report how badly I abused them. Here's where it starts to get weird.

They give me the standard "Oh, you didn't abuse us..." business that usually follows that joke, but then the lady on the right says, "You can abuse us if you want to." While I am busy trying to keep from clenching my jaw and trying to figure out if she meant that the way I think she meant it, the words, "Our husbands are away for a year" are spoken. I turn to the lady on the left with an expression that silently says, "WHAT?!? Lady, little help here!"

She then speaks the words that not only confirm the fact that I am being hit on by two middle-aged, married women, but that it's pretty much as bad as I can imagine: "Yeah, our husbands are over in Iraq right now and they won't be back for a few more months, so we're treating ourselves tonight..."

Treating yourselves by getting drunk in a franchise restaurant and making vaguely lewd comments to your waiter, who was born about the time you graduated high school.
U-S-A!!! U-S-A!!!

I look back at the woman on the right. Judging by the way she's looking at me, she's getting drunker by the minute and would probably let me screw her in the back of her minivan right now.

I look back at the woman on the left. She's only just buzzed...but she'd do it too, if her friend would.

A smarter man would find a way to parlay this unbridled sexual frustration into a way bigger chunk of tip money, but I'm too mortified by the fact that I'm being savagely eye-fucked by a pair of thirtysomething soldiers' wives to be quick on my feet. Did I mention that neither of these women is especially attractive? That's not adding any to my comfort level.

I manage to escape after being told twice more by the drunken lady on the right that I’m allowed to abuse them and once more by each of them that their husbands are away. All I’m thinking is that I have no desire to be brutally murdered five months from now when two battle-hardened soldiers return home and find that some punk college kid fucked their average looking wives while they were away risking life and limb for…whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish over there. Point is they’d want to kill me, and they’d know how. The negatives in this scenario far outweigh the positives.

For the rest of the night, I ponder the frequency of such events as this, and I come to the conclusion that people are fascinating, if not fucked up creatures. I also come to the conclusion that between the things I’ve seen and the things I’ve done, it would be best if my future wife and I never spend more than about a week apart. Maybe less than that. Maybe I’ll hire some lesbians to escort her at all times, and then if she sleeps with them I won’t mind…but I digress…

My Ongoing Attempt To Be An Academic Martyr, My Ongoing Success At Being A Procrastinating Douchebag

2005-10-08T04:05:00.000-07:00

It's 2:50 AM on a Saturday, and I'm wide awake.

Hook line for an action-packed story? Nope, sorry. Not tonight. It's just another interesting start that leads to the absolute anticlimax that is my life at present. Here's a rundown of my enthralling Friday night:

5:00 - Arrive at work. My idiot server manager (who I suspect smokes a lot of pot in his off-time) has scheduled two people for the same section...again. He's done this probably at least 10-15 times over the last 3 weeks. I don't have a section, so now I have to either talk somebody into leaving or just go home. Only people with crappy sections or people who have to close are willing to trade with me. I'm not in the mood to work a crappy section or be there until 12:15, so I go home. There's at least $70 not going into my pocket tonight.

5:20 - Arrive at home. My keyless entry won't lock my car...again. I try pressing the button a bunch of times, and then I try fidgeting with the casing of the control to see if that somehow brings it to life. No luck. I take a few steps toward the house, and then violently spike my keys on the ground, splaying open the casing to said keyless entry and sending the electronics card skipping across the driveway. I stomp it into the concrete Office Space style.

Evidently I'm cranky about work.

I calmly lock the car the old-fashioned way and go inside. This must be what people mean when they say that even when I'm clearly pissed off, there is still a calm exterior about it that makes the whole situation comical. I guess I have what you would call a calculated sort of rage.

6:00 - I'm finishing the last bites of an entire frozen pizza by myself. Usually I can give half away to the girls, but they're at their performance. I tell myself that I'm going to the rec at 8:00 and that my lifting will justify having just eaten way more food than it takes to run my 163 pound body. Deep down, I know this is bullshit.

7:00 - I fall asleep on the couch.

1:30 - I wake up when my roommates arrive home from the cast party I was going to attend before I fell asleep. I clean up the remnants of my dinner.

2:00 - My roommate's quasi-boyfriend/friend with benefits has arrived. I haven't met him, but I've heard a lot about him...and she neglected to mention that he's a Goddamn man-beast. This guy must be about 6'3" and at least 215 pounds of pure muscle. He's wearing light colored Timberlands and a Phat Farm shirt. Clearly he's a little bit gangsta (hails originally from Washington, D.C.), and in addition, he plays rugby. From these two facts I know that he:

1) Has probably been in real fights as opposed to the near-fights-that-never-quite-were that I've been in.
2) Has no proper understanding of pain or fatigue.

I take one look at him and think, "Well, I'm not the man of the house any more while he's around..." We talk for a minute, and he seems like a pretty nice guy. Still, though, I can't shake the image of him grabbing me by the neck with one massive hand and knocking my head off with the other. He goes upstairs to hook up with my roommate, and I retreat to my room to ponder my new beta male status.

2:30 - I put some clothes in the wash and sit down at the computer. I marvel at the juggernaut of procrastination that is thefacebook.com. I facebook my PSYC 350 lab TA.

Let me restate what time it was and what I did just so how big a loser I am can sink in for you:

At 2:30 on a Friday night/Saturday morning, I did laundry and then facebooked my lab TA.

This brings me to why I didn't go out in the first place; I'm failing lab and I need to do about 5 or 6 old assignments in addition to the rest of the upcoming work so that I can pass. At the time I suddenly had the night off work I thought, "Oh good, I'll get my assignments done and then I won't have to worry about them Sunday after I've worked a double." I've been saying shit like this for the last 2 weeks, and I haven't gone out in 2 weekends because I've told people that I was going to stay in and do homework. Meanwhile, I've intended to do homework and actually ended up doing things like finally getting around to hanging stuff on the walls of my room, moving furniture that I don't really need down from my parents' house in Omaha, getting back in shape, and arranging music for Bathtub Dogs. All of these are worthwhile endeavors, but not when you're failing a class.

Meanwhile, we have my TA. Being the sweet, merciful girl that she is, she didn't fail me outright and kick me out of class (though she easily could have) when I fell behind and skipped a lab. Instead she is allowing me to turn in all my assignments clear the hell beyond their due date so that I can graduate and not have to repeat 350. This creates more work for her, and she's already busy as hell. Every time I see her she offers me a little more unsolicited lenience with the deadline. I finally told her today never to ever do that, ever. Telling a kid with ADD, "If you need a couple more days, that’s ok." is roughly the same as saying "If you want to just push that deadline back and not do shit while you get through one more season of NCAA Football 2006 on your Playstation, that's ok." As of last weekend I wasn't any closer to having any of the assignments done, but I did get a really bitchin' recruiting class.

Once I told her not to be so flexible with me, she straightened up and tried to give me a "tough" speech. There are few things more adorable than a girl who wants nothing more than to be nice to everyone trying to have one of those "or I'll kick your ass" moments. Usually those moments end with me laughing really hard and the girl saying something like, "What?!? I can be tough...sometimes...." but this time I kept a straight face, nodded and said, "Yes ma'am." In a related story, I'm a shameless suck up...and it works.

So now here I sit at 4:00 AM, writing a blog while my homework still goes untouched and unfinished...and it's moments like this that make me realize that I'll always have a much greater passion for creating and entertaining than I'll ever have for the working world or for hard science. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn't intended to be a hippie and I just didn't turn out liberal enough.

Well, no time like the present. Lots of people do homework at 4:10 in the morning on a weekend, right? Christ...that sounds like something a serial killer would do.

The good news, I guess, is that my TA has a great sense of humor and even invited us in class to be funny with the stuff we turn in. Careful what you wish for...you just might have a jackass/aspiring comedian in your class...

...and They Call It "Closure"

2005-09-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

It's a fall day in 2005, and it's shades of nothing I've ever experienced. Here we sit, on the shaded patio of Yia Yia's Pizza. Me and "the" ex. We are exchanging cordial, if not casual conversation and looks which are not so intense and not so avoidant...holy shit. I think we actually made it to 'just friends'. I'm not sure whose guard dropped first, but finally after two years of absolute posturing and unnecessary bitterness, we're just being human with each other again. That, combined with the crisp fall air, have me feeling more refreshed than I have since 2003.

There is something in the way we regard each other today that hasn't ever been present before. We openly acknowledge everything that happened before, but we no longer tiptoe around the core of the issues that have always loomed so large but gone unmentioned. She jabs at me about cheating, I jab at her about the breakup, and we laugh and move on. We discuss our respective and contrasting futures, but we no longer have to defend or apologize for them. We talk about relationships we've had, including our own. We talk about breakups, including our own. It isn't seamless, but it's a hell of a lot more than we've accomplished in prior years, and through it all the things that don't have to be said speak loudest of all.

It's in the tone of our voices, the body language, the timing and the looks we exchange. This is all familiarity and no implication. The thing I can see most clearly is that she is undeniably finished with me, at least in a romantic sense. The thing that surprises me is that today, I'm not smitten either. This is not to say that the writing wasn't on the wall all along, but something in me just didn't believe there was no more chance for us. Call me stubborn...I just had a hard time letting go of the girl I'd loved the most so long as I thought there still might be a chance for us. Today though, we finally had the time to push beyond the boundaries of a five minute interaction and get some bearings, and I see that I stand firmly in the 'friend zone'. I also see that she will be irretrievably gone within a year, and I'd be stupid to think I could keep her here. Hell, at least now I know.

I didn't watch GI Joe as a kid, but I did catch enough to know that knowing is half the battle. I'm not sure what the other half is, but I'm pretty sure it involves me falling for some other girl. Let's hope that part doesn't take two more years. For the moment, I'm just glad we've put all the bullshit behind us and I've got one of the people who really understands me back. The rest is gravy.

Beav Gets Secret Shoppers, A 65%, Written Up

2005-08-26T04:11:00.000-07:00

First of all, fuck secret shoppers. I will begin by saying that this is a tactic employed by companies with anal retentive upper-level management and inept lower-level management…companies such as mine. If your training process is good and your managers are doing their job, you shouldn’t have to frighten your employees into doing their jobs well. Unfortunately, our trainers are terrible and our managers are just o.k. I have no less than six managers. Four of them are worth a shit. Two of them don’t flagrantly sexually harass the employees. Actually…make that one. One is my age, and a former Hooters girl. Needless to say, the leadership can be less than amazing.

Be that as it may, we get secret shoppers on at least one day shift a month and one night shift a month. I got mine at 7:30 on a Sunday night, otherwise known as an hour into the dinner rush. Among the things the douche who shopped my table found to complain about:

The softness of the benches
The level of lighting
My “urgency in serving” them

About the benches and the lights…please shut the fuck up. This guy claimed the menus were hard to read in that light, which they are not. The benches always feel fine to me, but then I usually sit down after several hours on my feet, as I don’t make my money by eating free meals and crying about arbitrary shit. Maybe my ass just isn’t as sensitive as his or maybe my appreciation for the benches is greater. This same brilliant individual also noted that my brown hair was black, and that I stand 5’11” when in fact I am 6’1. My age was also placed in the 26-30 range. I’m 23, and nobody in the free world guesses me anywhere above 22. People still express surprise that I’m at least 21. If I weren't fairly tall and didn't have a deep voice, I could probably go back to high school without anyone noticing.

About my urgency, what the hell are you talking about? Am I supposed to push the pace of your meal and hustle you out as fast as possible? As soon as I did that, I suppose you’d complain that it seemed like I was trying to get rid of you. Maybe to improve I should sprint to and from my tables. Sure it’ll increase the amount of collisions that take place, but I’ll have a clear sense of urgency!

The time it took me to get to their table was 1 minute, 55 seconds. That clocks in a bit above every corporatized restaurant’s goal of 1 minute or less, but anyone who’s served can tell you that sometimes you just can’t get to every table within one minute of their seating, especially during the damn rush. Under two minutes is still pretty good. After that, he did not witness very much enthusiasm in my greet. FUCK YOU. This guy can’t bother asking how I’m doing after I ask him, but I’m unenthusiastic. I’m always nice to my tables when I greet them because I want them to, like, tip me and stuff. Evidently I’m supposed to be Curtis from Office Space for these people…and yet when I do I make less money because they can tell I’m being fake. Catch 22. In my case, catch hell. Sounds like someone had a case of ‘I’m an asshole accountant who works with numbers because I can’t interact with real people’. That or an early case of the Mondays.

This genius also noted that “no debris was ever picked up from the table until the very end when we were done eating.” Could you be just a little bit vaguer? Debris? What the hell does that mean? Am I to understand that I need to pick up your straw wrappers, napkins, and anything else that may not be perfectly in place at all times during the meal? Guess what? I’m your server, not your fucking maid. Other people have the courtesy to put their “debris” on their plates so that I can take it all away at the end of the meal and not have to grope around at their used napkins and wet naps before I go to handle other people’s food, drinks or credit cards, but I guess Prissy McTenderass was a spoiled only child and needs me to clean up after him. Also, way to note that it wasn't picked up until the end of the meal. I should have known to just reach across you while you're eating to get that muffin crumb off the table so you wouldn't have to look at it.

Next we have the butter fiasco. This guy took great pride in pointing out that “We asked Dan for extra butter. This request was honored yet, he did not appear overly happy with this request in that when he came back to our table with it, he pointed out that there was one hidden under part of my wife’s meal. We had received only one pat of butter for both the corn and muffin.”

First of all, the comma goes after “honored” and not after “yet.” Second of all, this guy is fucking lying. He asked me, “Could we get some more butter? My wife didn’t get any with her meal.” Let your wife speak for herself, cock. Also, yes she did get butter, but I said I’d be right back with some more and pointed out that the butter was next to the muffin so that she wouldn't have to wait for me to come back if she wanted butter now. Mind you, that butter was next to the muffin she evidently couldn’t pick up to consider eating before having the butter ready and waiting. I didn’t say that part. I wasn’t a dick about it, and I was nice when I brought them more. Don’t take points away from me to cover for the fact that you’re a dumbass and you had to invent problems for me to solve. By the way, you’re not SUPPOSED to get more than one pat of butter for your muffin and your corn, but way to dock me for that. This guy also sent me to get him a new Diet Coke because the first one “didn’t have any carbonation.” Yes it did, because it comes out the same at all the stations and it was no different when I brought you the second glass, but you liked it better because you expected it to be different. I kissed this dipshit’s ass about the fucking Diet Coke, but he “did not witness a sincere attitude coming from Dan.” In retrospect, I wish I’d have sincerely punched him in the face so that he could know attitude when he sees it.

The next claim was that he had to ask me repeatedly for refills. Well, he didn’t have to actually, but he did because he couldn’t let me walk past the table and see that he was about ready for another one and just bring it before he proudly informed me that he needed another. Generally when a glass is starting to look empty, I get a full one. Common sense, but I guess after *Buttergate* I couldn’t be trusted any more, so this guy took it upon himself to lead me by the dick through the serving process. Great. I also lost points for allegedly not thanking this guy by name when I gave him back his card. This is another boldfaced lie because I mention EVERYONE’S names when I give their cards back. He couldn't shut up and listen to me and I didn't interrupt him and wait for silence, so there's ten points off right there.

Long story short, I got a fucking terrible score. So bad, in fact, that my General Manager got chewed out. I felt bad about that, but mostly it was just because this guy was a dick. I then got a talk for 10 minutes during my dinner shift about how I need to be a better server. While this was happening, my tables had to do without service for around 10 minutes, and two tables were sat. One had to be picked up by another server because they waited so long. The other was clearly annoyed by the time my new asshole and I got back inside…but I need to be a better, more attentive server. I’ll be super happy to be right back with a large plate of irony for you!

The speech I got was a loose paraphrasing of the speech Mike Judge gives in Office Space about, “People can get a cheeseburger anywhere. They come to Tchotchsky’s for the attitude and the atmosphere.” It was all I could do not to say, “So…you want me to wear more flair?” For my troubles and everyone else’s, I was formally written up in a 4 sentence warning that basically says, “Dan needs to spout sunshine from his rectum immediately, or we’re gonna fire him if he gets caught not being a goddamn cheese-dick by a secret shopper again.”

During my shift tonight I decided that if it’s personality they want, it’s personality they shall have. Careful what you fucking wish for. I’m going to formulate a list of goals. These goals will be things I want to actually do at my tables, and will include:

Tell somebody it sounds like they have “a case of the Mondays”. Do it on a non-Monday.

Wait a table while using a random accent or dialect. Tell them I'm from Omaha when they ask where I'm from.

Wait the table next to it with no accent whatsoever. Act confused if my customers ask about it.

Spend an entire shift serving tables as George W. Bush, but don’t tell anyone that’s what I’m doing.

Ask somebody if they want regular or decaf when they order water. Apologize for not asking if they want cream when I bring it back.

Act just effeminate enough to make the customers wonder if I’m gay, but not enough to really decide what they think.

Refer to the check as “the damage report” every time I drop it off. Refer to myself as “damage control” instead of the cashier.

Tell a table they can’t have any dessert until they clean their plates.

Respond to every request with an overly sarcastic “I guess.”

Ask a table if they’d like to hear me make up a menu item and then try to sell it to them.

Serve an entire shift as Harry Carey.

Tell somebody they’re really lucky, because they just got the last one of whatever they ordered, even though we have plenty.

Ask all my tables if they’d like to choose their side items, or if they want me to “surprise” them.

Try to use the Jedi mind trick on somebody.

That’s all I’ve got so far. The funny part will be that customers will eat this shit up if I feed it to them the right way, and they’ll never know that I’m making a giant satire out of the stupid requirements of my job.

I sampled a little bit of the overtly ridiculous enthusiasm, and got a comment card with all perfect marks out of the deal. At the end of my shift I threw the card down in front of my Server Manager and said, “Here. Juxtapose.”

He didn’t know what the word meant.

Everything Old Is New Again

2005-08-22T18:53:00.000-07:00

August of 2005, and somehow it’s shades of that Spring day in 2002. We were only a couple blocks away from where we are now. We were under much different circumstances then, but suddenly I find us having the same conversation: All light subject matter, mixed with my quasi-successful attempts at humor, and her grandiose plans that dwarf my day-to-day, ‘whatever happens next’ style of living. Awkward pauses. Both of us smiling at each other. Both of us scanning the other for any unspoken subtext. That time I couldn’t take my eyes off her. This time I have to fight to pull my eyes from hers, but I manage…sometimes. Thank God for sunglasses. That time, I came to the realization that she felt the same way I did. This time, maybe that same realization. Maybe not. My mind won’t allow for clarity.

Still though, I find myself thinking the exact same thing I did that day, “My God, the way she looks at me makes me feel 15 again. I am completely disarmed.”

That was three and a half years ago, and yet I find myself again struck by the way she holds herself, the way she smiles, the way she dresses, and especially the way those blue eyes cut straight through my every carefully built defense and leave me with only three words in my mind. How ironic that I can charge audiences money to watch me make things up on the spot, but one look from her leaves me stuttering. What started as a casual conversation and my interest in knowing how she’s been suddenly takes a turn, if only in my mind. Suddenly the realization that I’ve been doing a phenomenal job of kidding myself for three years hits me at 500 miles per hour.

Fuck.

I’m still in love with her.

I pull the sunglasses off. I want her to see the way I look at her. There is a flash of relief as she gets her first good view into the windows to my soul, but it is followed by a look of vague concern. She sees it now. I know she sees it. It’s subtle, but she’s unsettled by me looking at her the way I used to. There’s a familiarity about the way we look at each other. It would be so easy to fall back into what we were…and yet the stakes would be so high. Defenses take over. Guards are raised. There’s a change in the dynamic of the conversation. We’re running past the allotted time for a casual, in-passing conversation on 13th Street. I find myself weighing everything we’ve done to each other since Summer 2003, and I find that I’d be willing to make a snap-decision to pitch all the bitterness and bullshit and take her back starting tonight if I could. I also find that this is not a feasible option, for reasons too numerous to list. The number one reason is a cook in the Haymarket and didn’t seem to be my biggest fan the last time I encountered her with him at the bars.

So here we are, looking at each other. Each of us knows what’s on the other’s mind. Here we stand, at opposite ends of a vast expanse of hurdles. To jump, or not to jump? That is the question.

Not to jump, unless you’re meeting me in the middle. Now I get it. Now years of posturing and unnecessarily pointed encounters make a world of sense. We’ve been protecting ourselves from each other. By that same token, we’ve been protecting each other from ourselves. It won’t matter if you never say it, because now that I get a good look at you, you don’t have to. I know how you feel and I know why you did what you did. Now that I stand on the precipice of leaving everything behind, I understand why you kept me at a distance. It was because you did care, and because you knew that neither of us was the kind to be kept waiting. Now I know why I took unnecessary amounts of offense to every real or perceived action you ever made. It’s because eventually I accepted the fact that I wasn’t getting you back, but I never did stop loving you. I realize the latter fact now. I wonder…is the former still fact, or was I just too afraid of fiction?

“Well, I’d better go before you charm me any further.”

I say it. I mean it. This encounter will be burned in my mind for at least the next couple days, and the longer we talk, the hotter the burn. I try to leave things with one of those ‘closing a conversation with an ex’ lines we’ve all used and satirized, “Take care of yourself, don’t be a stranger.” Good one, genius. That wasn’t cliché at all…

“Do you still want to have lunch?”

“Yeah, I do.”

To jump, or not to jump?

Seriously, Why? (hotornot.com)

2005-08-10T16:50:00.000-07:00

Alright, I think I'm beginning to find my calling in life, and it's taking pictures from hotornot.com and making fun of them. The overwhelming response to the last post made me consider trolling for pictures and getting to work, but I didn't. When I saw this picture in Brett's profile, though, I could not keep silent.

http://meetme.hotornot.com/r/?emid=GYNMHSR

I'm not gonna write anything yet. Go back and look at it again.

http://meetme.hotornot.com/r/?emid=GYNMHSR

I think for a moment that this must be a joke photo...but then as I look into the "meet me" stuff, I realize that she's serious. This girl:

http://meetme.hotornot.com/r/?emid=GYNMHSR

She's serious.

Ok. I think I can sum this photo, if not this person in 3 words:

What

The

Fuck?!?

Now, take a moment to breathe in and let's have a look at the photo itself. Ready? Let's begin.

First of all, thank you for drawing an arrow to yourself. I really thought for a minute that you were the drummer in back who is completely obscured by flailing hair and wanted to be rated based on the beats we imagine you to be cranking out, and you threw a horrifying fat chick in there to boost your rating by juxtaposition.

Next, you have a microphone in your hand, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you must be...oh, wait a second...you've used paint to spray-paint/scrawl in that you are in the process of "rockin out". Thanks for taking the guesswork out of it for me, because I'm functionally retarded and could not have surmised what is going on in this photo without that eloquent caption. Also, let me just say that if that is what rockin out looks like, I never, ever, ever in my life want to rock out. Never.

Also, the microphone is off the stand and in your left hand, so why the hell are you holding the stand in your right? Oh, I know! You're using it to poke at the roast pig you've got turning on a spit just off camera, and judging by the look on your face, it's almost done and you're pretty damn excited about it. Also, what vowel sound is that you're singing right now? I'm a trained vocalist, but I'm not sure I recognize that one. Oh wait, I think I can make it out...it's..."Mmmmm, pork..."

As I look over the details of this photo again, I realize that the drummer is actually the most pathetic individual pictured, because he's playing backup to this girl. If this is your gig as a drummer, give up not just drumming, but music.

Ok, now let's talk abut your outfit here, Kara. I like what you've done by dressing your gargantuan, pale body in all black. It gives a nice "killer whale" effect that really comes through nicely in the grayscale photo. They say that black is a slimming color. I say there's not enough black in the world.

Let's have a go at her keywords:

She's got an entire category that I'm not going to touch. Included are: Bible, Christian, Church, God, Jesus, and Love. I think I'm above a lot of things, but God ain't one of them. Really though, how redundant is this list?

She has not turned in a flawless resume', however. We have some problem words in here.

Black. When did black become the official color of painfully stupid teenagers? They should wear a color that accurately reflects them, such as "hunter" orange. It's the color that says "please don't shoot me, even though that may be your first instinct." Much more fitting. Also, if you're so uninteresting that you have to connect with people based on a color, don't leave your room.

Bubble Baths. GOD DAMMIT!!! Why the fuck would you do that to me?!?!?!?!? The last thing in the world I needed was the image of you slipping into a sudsy tub...what kind of sadistic fuck are you? Actually though, now that I think about it, the image of the water washing in a homemade tsunami over the side when she drops that girthous mass into the tub is pretty funny. I also imagine a complex system of ropes and pulleys is employed to get her out of there at bath's end. I also imagine that if I was Mr. Bubble and she wanted to toss me into that bathwater with her, I'd find a way to fucking kill myself.

Chicken. Well, file that under "Things that don't surprise me even a little bit." Twinkies must have finished just off the list.

Cool. Clearly you don't have any idea what cool is, but I'll give you a hint, it's not something:
A) that applies to you
or
B) that should ever be listed by itself on a profile

Cute. See above.

Hilary Duff. That does it; I hereby revoke your right to procreate. If you legitimately idolize Hilary Duff, there is a special place in the "dipshit" section of hell waiting for you when you die.

I Love God. Well you'd better, because he's gotta be the only one capable of loving you. (Side note, my ticket to hell just got a 1st class upgrade with that last comment.)

Losing Weight. Well, you're on the right track here...but you're also lying. If you're one of those Christians who lives by the motto "WWJD?" Then evidently Jesus would single-handedly shut down the Old Country Buffet.

Metal. We've got another raw materials enthusiast on our hands. "I like metal. The oven is made out of metal, and so is the cake pan. They help bring me happiness. Well, them and God."

Rock, Rocker, Rockin' Out. These, respectively, are the missing words to the following sentences:

"I am about as interesting as a _______."

"By the time I'm 20, my knees will be shot from the constant strain of carrying my huge body around, so I will be confined to a ______."

"If the point of music was to utterly confuse and mortify an audience, then I would be _______."

This piece of work has a message for all of us, and it is this:

i like to rock out to hilary duff..she is so rockish!! i love god. im a christian..god is love and love is real..just remember that if there was no god anything would be possible!! my name is kara

I am one sentence in, and already I'm in pain. You've started your message with any oxymoron. Nobody rocks out to Hilary Duff, not even Hilary Duff herself. Her music is absolute pop fluff finished with a thorough coat of shit. Also, "rockish" is not a word. It does, however, sorta rhyme with "nauseous", which is how I'm beginning to feel after realizing that you really mean this shit.

"I love, God. I'm a Christian..God is love and love is real." Holy shit! This girl just formulated a logical syllogism that proves the existence of God! Ladies and Gentlemen, after thousands of years of debate, some fat chick from...somewhere...has just proven the existence of God!!! Well, if you don't get too wrapped up in all that stuff in her first interest, The Bible, which never quite provides a unidirectional and focused picture of God as love...but let's not get into that. This girl just solved so many of the world's problems! Let's all have 2 buckets of KFC apiece to celebrate!

"Just remember that if there was no God anything would be possible." Read that a couple times. That's what she wrote. If there was no God, anything would be possible. Evidently it is only through the existence of God that some things are presently impossible. Strikes me as a hell of a departure from the familiar Christian mantra of "Through Him, all things are possible", but ok. I'll roll with you. So what you're saying is that if we can find a way to get rid of God, I will be able not only to fly, but also to shoot laser beams from my nipples, because anything will be possible?

For those of you who fear that absence of God will mean absence of love, fear not. Her logic did not state that all love was of God, it just said that God was love. Let's break it down.

Premise: All God is love. (A -> B) Valid.
Premise: All love is real (B -> C) Valid.
Conclusion: All God is real (A -> C) Valid.

Draw a Venn diagram. It works. However, we cannot go this way.

Premise: All God is love
Premise: All God is real
Conclusion: Not God, therefore not love. INVALID

It just isn't logically sound. Check this out though:

Premise: Not God, therefore anything. (Accepted)
Premise: Me Sleeping with Natalie Portman is anything. VALID
Conclusion: If not God, then I am sleeping with Natalie Portman...and also love can still exist. I'm having a hard time seeing the downside of this scenario, but maybe that's blasphemous. Let's move on.

Last but not least, your name is Kara. Usually one puts one's name first, but obviously you put God, Hillary Duff, and chicken before yourself. Don't worry, it shows.

I'd like to close by pointing out that by selecting this as her photo, young Kara is essentially saying "Look, world! This is me captured at my finest! This is me at the peak of my game! Tell me what you think!" Need I say more?

Actual Events/Quotes From My Job

2005-08-01T02:35:00.000-07:00

If you've never worked in service or retail...you haven't gotten to truly experience how stupid people are. You may or may not have gotten to hear some of the unbelievable shit that people will say without even meaning it, or the more unbelievable shit people will say and fully mean. I've decided to keep a running post with funny and/or stupid shit that happens to me at work. I'll start with a couple scenarios in which I fortunately was able to leave the table before I busted out laughing.

I come to a couple's table to pre-bus some plates, and the lady is drinking the sauce out of the bottom of her side of apples with a straw.

Beav: Wow, like those apples huh?
Husband: Yeah, she just has to suck every last little drop out of the thing.
Beav: Well.....I'll get these plates out of the way for you and be right back with your check...

(Wanted to say any of the following)

1) Good girl!
2) In that case, let's discuss my tip...
3) Now I know why you married her.

****************

I drop off a garden salad to a college-aged girl sitting in somebody else's section:

Beav: Okay, I've got a salad with ranch for you.
Girl: Oh wow, that's huge! Thank you!
Beav: (Leaving as quickly as possible) Sure thing....

Wanted to say:

1) Well if you think the salad is impressive...
2) Keep those words in mind, you'll use them again later.
3) If I had a dollar for every time a girl has said that to me...
4) Well, size matters.

*******************

Yesterday I waited on a table of two black men. If you're not familiar with black men, they will generally say anything they want to you and not think twice about it. I also find them to be much more vocally homophobic, if only in my experience. Case in point: the guy on the right wanted a margarita, but demanded that I serve it to him in a plastic coke glass with no salt because he did not want, and I quote, "a faggish glass." Having a margarita glass in front of him evidently would have left the door wide open for others to assume he's gay...which would, of course, make it true. The same man would later point out that his friend's mashed potatoes were unacceptable because his friend (who was eating chicken) was a vegetarian, and there was ham in the potatoes. I assumed he was joking, but when I learned that in fact he was serious (his friend was becoming vegetarian in "stages"), I had to explain that what he saw was not ham (which we don't have), but the red potato skins in the "Garlic Redskin Mashed Potatoes". We don't call them that because the founder of the restaurant is Native American, genius. The same table later asked me what I wanted for a tip. I told them $1,000.

***********

A month or so ago, I got a table of pipeliners. 3 of them were from Southern Missouri, and one was from Arkansas. The ones from Missouri made fun of the guy from Arkansas, despite the fact that rural Missouri is home to the dumbest and ugliest people anywhere on earth. Also, the one from Arkansas was the only one with a scrap of class. They looked like stupid white trash, and acted accordingly. They all ordered alcohol, but one didn't have his ID so I wouldn't serve him a Long Island Iced Tea. After giving me a good 5 minutes worth of harassment, including logically flawed scenarios in which they "Went to the truck to (insert air quotes) 'get his ID'" or if one guy slid his ID to the other, they angrily ordered salads with "A fuckin' shitload of ranch and bacon bits." I had to personally make all 4 of the salads, and was sent back twice for more ranch and bacon. While I was gone, they spent their time making lewd comments to the hostesses. Included in this were "Damn, look at the ass on that." and "Shit baby, I wish I could see through them jeans."

If it were up to me, I'd stop serving them then and there and tell them to get the fuck out and never come back if they're going to talk to the girls like that. As it was, our front-of-house manager (Useless) that night was a former Hooters waitress, so she of course talked a lot of shit about what she'd do to them if they talked to her like that, and then ate it up when they did talk to her like that.

Useless: How does the food look tonight guys?
Supid Hick: Not as good as you look. (Side note: she's not that cute)
Useless: (Giggling) You guys are being ornery tonight!

Bitch, please. If you're going to be an attention-seeking, spineless skankbox, then you deserve to be talked to like that. As my co-worker $3 Bill once told her, "If you weren't engaged, you would be such a hoe..."

The one dumb hick sitting closest to me took it upon himself to try to mess with me once I wouldn't serve his dumb hick buddy the Long Island, but sadly he wasn't properly armed to battle wits with me. On one occasion, he asked me for "a side of ass" with his meal. I told him we were fresh out of ass, and that if they'd come in a half hour sooner we'd have had some.

After they had paid out and given me a shitty tip apiece, the spokesman stood up and got a big, stupid grin on his face. Clearly he had what he thought was a great idea. He asked his next question very loudly, so that he might offend everyone in my section and thus hopefully upset me.

Dumb Hick: Hey, you know where the whorehouse is at around here?
Beav: Nope, sorry man. Can't help ya there.

He eyes me for a second, and grins even bigger. Now he's clearly got something *clever* to use on me.

Dumb Hick: You know where the gay whorehouse is?
Beav: Nope, sorry. Can't help you there either. Have a good one...

I somehow didn't laugh in his face for coining the phrase "gay whorehouse". Also amusing was the idea that I'd be such a stupid, insecure homophobe that the insinuation that I might know where the "gay whorehouse" was would get me furious. Moronic guys always think they can get somebody riled by calling them gay or making some other comment to that effect. This doesn't bother me in the least, because I know that I can't be *made gay* by the declaration of one irritated yokel. The thought of giving him a full-on kiss as a response to his last comment crossed my mind, but I figured he might be so horrified that he'd come in and murder me with the 12-gauge he undoubtedly had in his truck.

Among the things I wanted to say to this guy:

1) Sorry, I don't know where the whorehouse is, since I don't have to pay to get laid because I'm not a toothless, needle-dicked, hillbilly dipshit like you. Maybe if you weren't a functionally retarded douche you could get a girl.
2) Gay whorehouse? Alright, just give up before you hurt your brain.
3) You know, I could just tell as soon as you sat down that you'd wanna know where to get some dick around here.
4) No, but your mom does.

As it was I let them walk out and go back to South Bumblefuck, Missouri. The running joke around work for the next week or so was to ask people if they knew where the "gay whorehouse" was if they were annoying you.

Look for more updates to this post the longer I continue to work and interact with morons.

Beav Has To Choke A Bitch

2005-07-26T02:38:00.000-07:00

pro·jec·tion ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-jkshn)n.
8. Psychology.

a. The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others: “Even trained anthropologists have been guilty of unconscious projection of clothing the subjects of their research in theories brought with them into the field” (Alex Shoumatoff).

b. The attribution of one's own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.

********************************

I am not a fighter. I do not get in fights. I have never been in a "real" fight, and I do not seek fights. As nearly as I can tell, there are only 3 reliable ways to get me to take part in any violent goings-on.

1) Directly (and physically) attack me.
2) Directly (and physically) attack my friends or family.
3) Flagrantly disrespect a lady.

It's debatable as to whether consistent acts of jackassery over the course of a night or maybe longer are sufficient to have me ready to throw down...but I'd say they have more of a priming effect than a causal effect.

I've been truly ready to fight about twice in my life. The first time it was method 3 of getting me pissed off. Last night, it was method 2.

7/24/05 11:00 PM

I am on my way to hang out with a bunch of people from work. One of my co-workers, let's call him BirthdayBoy, is turning 25 and we're going to the Villager hotel to celebrate. I'm looking forward to this because I work with cool people (for the most part) and also some hot girls, so those make for good partying. When I get there, lots of the people I work with are sitting around in a little bar and drinking. Nothing especially noteworthy happens in the couple hours that we're all there other than us starting to get drunk.

7/25 1:20 AM

It's time to leave the little tavern where we've been hanging out. We've gotten some kind of ridiculous break on our bar tab, and we've hooked the bartender, who is a friend of BirthdayBoy up for his troubles. Now we're getting a room to have after hours.

3 people are shitty by the time we leave:

1) BithdayBoy (because people keep buying him shots)
2) His girlfriend (because she's small). Let us call her TheGirlfriend.
3) My douchebag co-worker (because he has low self-esteem), who I will call Redneck

Backstory: I haven't liked this kid since day one. Here is a kid who (to the best of my knowledge) has lived in Lincoln all his life, yet talks with a trace of a southern twang, isn't a very good worker, and is generally dumb, ugly and obnoxious. He's that guy who puts a little bit of one-upsmanship in everything he does, because he's ragingly insecure at his core, and it shows. He's that guy who thinks he's an expert on every subject, even though anyone with three brain cells stuck together can tell he's full of shit. I take one look at how drunk this toolbox is and I just know something more will come of it later. In a related story...I'm frequently right.

1:30 AM

TheGirlfriend has rented a hotel room for after-hours. She is shitbombed. She first tells me that we're going to room 443, then proceeds to take us to room 435 and wonder why the keycard won't work. I let her try it about 5 times and then kindly remind her that she told me we had room 443. She proceeds the wrong way down the hall to rectify the situation. I decide to go the right way and wait for her. She comes back down and tries the correct room, and while the card is working, she's having a hard time operating the door. Finally the one sober guy in the whole group does it for her, and we're ready to party.

1:40 AM

Here we go. We have about 12 people hanging out in a room at the Villager, and we're ready to party like rockstars. Everybody has been having a good time up to this point, but things are about to take a turn.

Redneck has been flagrantly hitting on the new girl, but she is obviously unimpressed. He takes this as his cue to step up his attempts to make himself look important. His method of choice up to this point has been bragging about his dubious merits and drinking a shit ton, but now he decides to pick on one of our mild-mannered guy employees (who we'll call 'Son) so that he can look macho in front of the girls. To give you an idea of the physical comparison between these two, Redneck is maybe 5'11 and looks like he goes somewhere in the 160 lbs. range. He isn't fat, but isn't muscular either, and he doesn't look to be in good shape. 'Son is around 6'2, probably about 185 pounds, and is muscular. He played high school football and clearly is in good shape. Personalities aside, this is an unwise choice of persons with whom to fuck.

Reckneck starts slapping 'Son in the chest and shoving him, and then following it by professing that he's "just playing". This is obvious bullshit to any guy who has ever witnessed a fight. The look in Redneck's eyes clearly indicates that he's looking for a throwdown, but he's using the "just playing" line as an alibi so he can avoid being pegged as the instigator. He makes a habit of following his comments about how he's "just playing" with remarks on how if he wasn't playing, 'Son would "know it" because various bad things would happen to him. This continues for around 5 minutes, while everyone in the room grows increasingly uncomfortable.

'Son is a nice guy, and about the last person you'd expect to be involved in a fight, but at the same time, he is not about to be punked by some dipshit in front of the 3 hottest girls we work with. Call it a guy thing, but I don't blame him. He keeps it friendly, but doesn't for a second back down from Redneck's threats, nor does he miss an opportunity to throw Redneck about 10 feet backwards on his ass with one hand during some 'play fighting'. Redneck's own friend repeatedly mocks him for getting tossed. I've been sitting in a chair, sipping my beer and watching this scene play out, but I can see that this particular tinderbox is getting hotter and hotter, and we're a mere spark away from flashpoint. I take my watch off and get up because I'm anticipating Redneck starting a fight and his one remaining friend who came with him jumping in on his behalf, leaving me to back up 'Son to make things 2-on-2. Somehow, though, it doesn't happen.

I decide to go stand in between Redneck and the girls, because if a fight does break out, I'll be damned if I'm letting them get hit in the fray. I'll take one for the team. Redneck now starts up with me, and decides that he's going to make fun of my shirt. I'm wearing the t-shirts made by our improv troupe, The Huge Embarassing Failures. It is a chocolate brown t-shirt that has pink lettering that says "I'm A Huge Embarassing Failure" on in. This shirt speaks for itself, and there's really not a way to make fun of it, but drunken assholes seem to like to try anyhow. All they ever seem to be able to say is "Dude...you're a huge embarssing failure. Your shirt says it all. You're wearing it...so it must be true." It's tough to stand strong in the face of such well-structured and intelligent arguments, but somehow I usually manage. Redneck grabs me and roughhouses a little bit. I push him back and give him a warning look.

"Just playing, right?"
"Yeah man, I'm just playin'."
"Good."

At this point, Redneck goes outside, and I go to the bathroom.

Things stay calm for a while and I drink beer while attempting to reassure 'Son that there's no need to prove that he could wail on this dipshit; it's already obvious to everyone. He is willing to be peaceful, but is obviously agitated, as well he should be. Meanwhile, BirthdayBoy is intermittently vomiting while TheGirlfriend tends to him, my flamboyantly gay co-worker ($3 Bill) and my melodramatic co-worker (BrownEyes) are off having some sort of profound talk about whatever is slightly wrong with her today. The next time I go to the bathroom, $3 Bill and BrownEyes are in there trying to dry his phone off because he dropped it in the courtyard pond and she had to wade in and get it. They decline to leave the bathroom while I go, and somehow I am not bothered by the notion of having my cock out in front of my gay and female co-workers, respectively. This must mean I'm getting pretty well buzzed.

7/25/05 3:00 AM

The girls have left, and 'Son is on his way down to the courtyard area to make his peace with Redneck so that we can all drink and have a good time. I, for one, see where this is headed. BirthdayBoy is down there, but he's so faced that he can't hold a thought, let alone intervene in the fight that will likely begin. Only the 4 of us are down here. 'Son tries to make peace, and Redneck starts again about how he's just playing, and how 'Son is lucky that he's just playing, etc. 'Son isn't hearing any of this bullshit. He is now openly standing up to Reckneck and basically waiting for his cue to fuck him up. More play fighting ensues, but really it's more like the beginnings of real fighting in 5-10 second bursts. During one of these skirmishes, 'Son's head gets turned down and away from Redneck. Redneck rears back and throws a drunken haymaker, which misses.

Oh fuck no.

No fucking cheap shots.

I rush in, grab Redneck's left arm from behind with my left, rip him backwards, lock my right arm around his throat, lock the choke hold in by securing my right hand into the crook of my left arm, shove his head forward with my left forearm, and drop him to the concrete all before 'Son has stood back upright.

Redneck hits the ground with a grunt and starts looking around in complete bewilderment. It takes a good 5 seconds for him to decipher that he is on the ground, and that I am the one who did it. He fails to understand that I could end his life if I wanted to, but I'm being merciful.

Redneck's face increases by about 5 shades of red with each passing second, but I've only got the choke on him at about half-strength. I'm willing to give him a chance to knock it off before I end him.

"You need to settle the fuck down."
"What the fuck? What's your fuckin' problem?"
"You need to fucking settle down, that's my problem."
"Man, me and him was just playin', but you're fuckin' trippin' now. You're fuckin' trippin'. Let fuckin' go of me!"
"You gonna knock it the fuck off?"
"Let fuckin' go of me!"
"I'll let you go, but if you don't knock this shit off, I'll choke your ass out."

The comedy of him having to grunt his threats at me because my bicep is pressing on his larynx is not entirely lost on me, nor are his flailing attempts to hit me with the arm I don't have pinned down. It reminds me a lot of restraining a toddler having a temper tantrum.

I let him up, and he swings at me. This kid is so shithoused that he's about 3 seconds behind the action. His swing doesn't even land in my same zip code. I catch a glimpse of 'Son, and he's grinning from ear to ear. He clearly wants to see me stomp this jackass out...but I just stand my ground. Sometimes I wish I were more violent, but honestly, this is too easy. I step back a few paces into the center of the grass. While relocating, I look to see where BirthdayBoy is.

Somehow in the fray, BirthdayBoy has found the 5' X 5' pond on all this real estate with his right foot and is now calf-deep in mud and staring, utterly baffled, at the muddy, broken flip-flop in his right hand. This spectacle saps most of my rage, and it's all I can do not to bust out laughing then and there, but I'm still aware that I might be attacked by a drunken hick.

Redneck is now attempting to whip himself into a rage, and is propagandizing me with all sorts of information about what I'm in for if he decides to come after me. I inform him that I'm not trying to start fights, but I broke things up because I saw him take a cheap swing at 'Son. He continues to remind me that I'm trippin', and I extend my hand and offer to shake. I'm not gonna ruin my friend's birthday just because somebody needs to be on the losing end of a 2-hit fight so he can learn not to be a dick.

'Son, also negotiating for peace attempts to force Redneck to shake with me, but he won't do it. 'Son gives up after a bit and decides that if Redneck won't show any class, he isn't opposed to watching him get his ass kicked. Redneck resumes talking shit, and says "I ain't shakin' that bitch's hand." I reply with something to the effect of him being the bitch because he's a big enough piece of shit to start fights on his friend's birthday, and probably also add that I've never liked him because he's an idiot. I'm unsure about the details at this point because adrenaline is detrimental to the memory. What happens next is the sort of pure entertainment that only true morons can provide.

Redneck stops, ponders the situation a moment, then looks at me squarely and says, "You know what, man? You got an alcohol problem!"

I break out laughing at this, because I'm in full control of all my capacities, while this twit can't even walk straight. The psych major in me just can't let this one go.

Beav: You know what, (Redneck)? You have a projection problem.

Redneck: Projection problem? What is that, some kind of drama term or something?

Beav: Yeah. Yes it is. Projection is a drama term. You hit the nail right on the head with that one. Wow, you're really smart, (Redneck). Have I ever told you how smart you are?!?

Redneck is able to figure out at this point that I'm mocking him, and I can't remember what he says, but by now I'm tired of standing around and listening to idle threats. I decide that I'm ready to fuck this moron up, and I'm not damaging my favorite shirt in the process. I pull my shirt off, throw it down, and call him out. Seeing this, BirthdayBoy jumps up to intervene, and steps in the pond again. I wish I could be a casual observer watching all this, because it's gotta be quite the spectacle. BirthdayBoy uproots himself from the pond mud a second time and comes scurrying over to me.

"Please don't dude, please don't fight."

These prove to be the words that extinguish my fuse. Redneck or no, BirthdayBoy is one of the nicest guys I've ever hung out with, and if he asks me not to fight on his birthday, I'm not gonna fight. I may be pissed off, but I've still got some class. I walk off down the hallway and the rest of the people left at the party arrive on the scene to remove Redneck from the courtyard. BirthdayBoy begins a campaign to calm me down despite my repeated assurances that I am calm, I was just acting in defense of my friend and then of myself.

Redneck comes around the corner to press the issue, but 'Son steps into his path and BrownEyes takes Redneck by the arm, informs him that he's not fighting anyone, and starts pulling him back toward the hotel room. Redneck shoves her off of him and she reels backwards into a door. I grab BirthdayBoy by the shoulders, turn him around and tell him that he needs to go tend to his boy over there because if he hurts her, I'm giving him a free ticket to the ER. Several of the bystanders take Redneck and drag him off, and I decide that it's probably time put my shirt back on.

In the debriefing that follows, 'Son and I explain to BirthdayBoy and TheGirlfriend what happened. 'Son thanks me for backing him up, promises to do the same for me, and expresses his shock that I of all people would attack somebody with such swift, precise ferocity. Somehow people are always shocked that I'm capable of getting angry, and even moreso that I'm good at it. I guess we all learn something new every day.

SO what did we all learn from this? Well, I learned that next time I've got the choke on some deserving asshole, I might as well squeeze. As it is, I won't have to deal with his stupid ass ever again because, fittingly, he's leaving today to move to Alabama. The general consensus has been that he'll fit right in there.

So This Is How It Feels...

2005-07-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

It’s amazingly hot out, and I’m in an amazingly terrible mood. As I drive toward campus every pore in my skin opens up to buffer my body temperature from the 100 degree heat. I’m driving with the windows down because in the span of 5 minutes, my air conditioning won’t make a dent in the radiating heat of leather in the mid-July sun. I’m on my way to campus because I’ve got to burn some energy. I can’t keep bottling, or there’ll be a price to pay sooner or later.

I get out and make my way toward the Union post office to mail off my health insurance forms. As I stride deliberately through the upstairs hallway, a slender Japanese girl looks at me as though I may very well cross and do her bodily harm at any moment. Heart must be on my sleeve again today…what else is new? I consider my appearance, and I am forced to conclude that I am a picture of unpleasantness. Black shorts, black sleeveless t-shirt, shoulders high and tight, head down, eyes clear and intent on the ground 5 feet in front of me, brow furrowed under a red bandana. The clothes are for the gym. The gym is for the other stuff. Through the halls…down the stairs…close to you…

You’re there somewhere, I can feel it. Somehow I just know, but my eyes are still fixed on the ground so I can’t be sure. Through the door to the market…I can feel eyes on me, but my gaze still doesn’t waver. Up to the counter of the post office, where a haggard-looking girl on a stool looks at me with protesting eyes. Her look says it all. “Don’t make me get up…go away.” I don’t make her get up, I drop my mail and wheel around to leave. Back through the doorway that separates the two parts of the bookstore…I can feel eyes on me. Now it burns. Now I can’t ignore it. My mind gives a sharp command: “Look.” I obey. There you are.

Tabula raza.

I am dumbstruck, and suddenly there isn’t a thought in my mind. I’m still walking in spite of myself. You’re usually—

“Hi.”

Your voice is cold, and suddenly I can’t feel that I’m sweating any more. I’m not aware of any physical sensation, I just feel your eyes burning into me. So this is how it feels to be resented.

You didn’t mean it to sound that way, I know you didn’t mean it…but I’ve been there before, it just happens that way and regret is saved for later.

“Hi.”

My voice is guilty. I want to say something else. I want to tell you I’m sorry, but you gave me clear instructions the last time we talked to stop saying that. I want to ask how you’ve been. I want to tell you I laid awake last night feeling sick about what I’ve done to you. I want to be able to look into your eyes and not see pain.

You look away, and it’s the same principle as somebody just awakened by a blinding light…you want to see, but it hurts to look. There are a hundred things you could say, but I needed a good two seconds of looking into your eyes and I could see a thousand things cross your mind at once, and thousand words almost said, and a thousand possible reactions all drowned in a flood of regret.

My feet are still carrying me away from the encounter, much though I want to stop…but you’re not looking any more. Your co-worker and I are suddenly looking at each other the way two male strangers look at each other when one knows the other broke his friend’s heart. More instructions: “Just go. You’re upsetting her. There’s a time and place, and this is neither. You were the one who quit. Don’t you dare drag her along for your pathetic roller-coaster ride through confusion.”

Head back down. Shoulders higher, tighter. Heart back on my sleeve, or lack thereof. I can’t keep doing this. Something’s got to change today. I need to get my point across and then let you do what you need to do. I need a distraction…I need to get the hell out of Nebraska…I need to shut up and relax and stop over-thinking.

You were right, I was scared.

I still am.

3:00 AM

2005-07-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

I want to call.

I want to hear from you.

I miss you.

I want to know how you are.

I want to be able to be friends.

I can’t. I hate that. I fucking hate that.

I could call you and step back into your life to make myself feel better, but I know that every step back in just steps on your definition of who I am. It’s not fair for me to do that. I know that you need to have nothing to do with me so that you can get back on your feet and get what you deserve. I know that it means I have to be the bad guy. I need to be vilified, not because you really hate me, but just because it’s a step in the process. I could reach out, and blurring the lines would be fine in theory, but blurry lines are too easily crossed. I will not cross you. I will not hurt you more. I will not toy with your emotions so that I can feel better about myself. I have to throw my own desires behind me because I want what’s best for you. What’s best for you somehow became letting go.

I want to be there for you.

I want to protect you.

I want you to know you are cared for.

I want to feel the way that you felt.

There it is. There’s the realization that breaks down my façade of cool indifference. I want to feel the way you felt. Let me rephrase that: I want to feel the way I felt. The sting of defeat is still here. The memory of intense moments where I felt really alive in your arms still stays with me. Those moments come rushing back and the tears well up in my eyes. What the hell happened? Why did it stop for me? What is wrong with me? It scares me to look back because now doubt hangs in an ominous shadow over everything we had. The disconnection took place, and now I can’t seem to reconnect even the pieces of what was good so that I can understand what was genuine. It makes me wonder if everything I felt was a desperate grasp at having the kind of love I used to know. God, tell me I wasn't just stealing reality from you the whole time. I can't decide which is worse: having had something genuine and losing it, or never having had something genuine at all. It makes me wonder if I’m still capable of really being in love, or if I’m just trying so hard that I’ll talk myself into it at the drop of a hat. It makes me afraid to approach someone new. How do you explain that to somebody? “Sorry, it isn’t that you’re not attractive or nice or intelligent, it’s just that my heart was broken once, and I’m not sure I ever put it back together quite right. Nice talking to you.” Here’s where I come to understand people who labor under that old cliché, “It’s not you. It’s me.” Nothing was so irreconcilably wrong. Nothing was shattered. Nothing was beyond repair. Something inside me just stopped. What the fuck?!? Why not be head over heels? What is it in me that is so Goddamn insatiable? Why am I sitting alone, writing about ‘what’s best’ instead of happily curled up the way we used to be? Why did I have no choice but to break your heart?

I wish I could undo it…but undo it honestly.

It wasn’t too much to ask. I wish I’d been willing to grant it…but grant it genuinely.

I wish I knew what happened.

I wish I could fix it.

You deserve that.

You deserve better than this.

You deserve better than me.

Great Ways To Piss Off Your Server

2005-07-12T20:30:00.000-07:00

Well, it's mid-summer, and I'm bored. I spent 45 minutes at work today before I was sent home because nodody wants to sit on the patio and eat when it's 90 and humid outside. For some completely asinine reason, management insists on scheduling a server to show up for lunch and stand around in the bar while secretly hoping nobody sits out on the patio. Sometimes somebody does, and it pisses me off. They should sit in the damn bar because the heat index is 110 out there and it's not worth it to me to sweat off 5 pounds because you couldn't go half an hour without a parliament menthol. "But Beav," you say, "how are they supposed to know what not to do in a restaurant if they've never worked in one?" Well, I'll help everyone out by listing some things that people often do in restaurants that drive servers up a fucking wall:

1) Order without saying hello.

If I had a dollar for every time I've had this conversation:

Beav: "Hi, how are you folks today?"
Crotchety Old Guy (not looking up): "Iced Tea, no lemon, and water. She'll have water. Lemon."

I'd have enough money to skip work so that I don't have to deal with assholes who do this.

First of all, when somebody says hello to you, say hello. I think this was covered in pre-school. If you're too much of an antisocial ass to pay people the most basic of common courtesies, then cook your own fucking food. Secondly, I asked you a question, and it's customary to respond with an answer to the question "How are you today" and not to the unasked question "What would you like to drink, you contemptable old scrotum-face?" Don't start our interaction by treating me like an indentured servant. I'm going to be handling your food, and I'm creative. I know of a lot of things that could "happen" to it that you'd never know about, so smile and say hi back and let me do my job the way I'm supposed to.

2) Order two drinks simultaniously

There are two exceptions to this:

A) You are drinking coffee (which is acceptable only before noon, after you've had dinner, or when you are hung over)
B) You are drinking alcohol.

Otherwise, don't be that guy who gets a pop and a water. What are you, a camel? Do you need 40 oz of beverage on the table at all times? The last thing I need is to make 3 trips to get drinks for 5 people, so pick a beverage and go with it. Refills are free, you don't need to stockpile.

3) Ordering a diet pop with your 3,200 calorie meal.

This is a pet tactic of the morbidly obese, and while it might not irritate most people, the psych major/logical human being in me can't stand the irony. Picture the following order:

"I'll have the rib and meat combo (4 large spare ribs) with rib tips (18oz), and for my sides I'll have fries (12 oz) and a baked potato with everything (butter, sour cream, cheese and bacon on a potato that weighs about a pound) and can I get an extra muffin (in addition to the one muffin and corn on the cob already included with the platter), and can I just have a diet coke to drink?"

Yeah, you can "just have" a diet coke to drink. Way to use the word "just" to emphasize what a keyed-down move it is for you to drink diet. Let me guess, you're gonna lose the extra 150 pounds that forced you to sit at a table instead of a booth one diet soda at a time, right? Or is it that you're already a Type-II diabetic because you have 70% body fat? You just ordered enough food to feed a normal sized human for at least 2 days, you might as well have the coke too. I know damn well you're gonna drink 3 "just diets" and ask me for more butter for your muffins when I come back anyway.

These are the same people who proudly order a salad because salad is considered healthy, even though we load ours with cheese, eggs and bacon and then ask me for an extra side of ranch to drown it in, thus making it approximately 150% more unhealthy than a Big Mac.

Don't get me wrong, I love having fat people at my tables because they order a lot and they love you for bringing them food and will thus be happy and tip well, I just wish they had the honesty that my 300+ pound manager has when he carries his meal to a table to eat and tells me, "Move it or lose it, fat kid needs to eat."

4) Say they're ready to oder without actually reading/understading the menu

This seems to happen exclusively when 3 or more of my other tables need something. If you have questions, that's fine. I'll answer them for you. I'll even suggest menu items, but don't claim to be ready and then start your investigation, especially when I'm clearly busy. He's a sample of conversations that I've not only actually had, but have actually had many times:

Beav: "Are we all set to order, or do you need a couple minutes?"
Moron: "No, we're ready. Now...what's a California burger?"
Beav: "It's just a burger with lettuce and tomato. Just a regular burger."
Moron: (Stares blankly)
Beav: "It's just a normal hamburger like you find anywhere. I honestly don't know why they call it a California burger."
Moron: "So it's got, like...cheese?"
Beav: (Pointing to cheeseburger on menu) "No, our cheeseburger is right here, you can have that with your choice of cheddar, jack, or pepperjack cheese."
Moron: "Oh, no I don't want that, I was just curious as to what a California burger is."
Beav: (Tangibly mustering more patience) "Yeah, it's just a hamburger with lettuce and tomato. Okay...well what would you like?"
Moron: "I'll have that two meat combo." (Long silence)
Beav: "Alright, and what two meats did you want on that?"
Moron: "Well, ok here's my question: Can I do like...ribs on that?"
Beav: (Pointing to Rib & Meat combo on menu) "Yeah, we can do a rib and meat combo for you. What did you want for your other meat?"
Moron: "Oh, ok, I didn't see that. (Long pause) Umm...gimme the chicken."
Beav: "Did you want BBQ, or roast chicken?"
Moron: (Looking at me like I'm stupid) "BBQ."
Beav: "Ok, and that'll come with your choice of two sides."
Moron: (Picking up menu) "Oh, really? Where are all those?"
Beav: (Pointing to any of the 3+ places the sides are listed on the menu right below where it clearly states all platters and what comes with them) "They're right here, you can have fries, baked beans, coleslaw, potato salad, apples..."
Moron: "Uhm.......let's see here.........now...what are drunkin' apples?!?"

This is a question that routinely baffles me. What the hell could they possibly be? There are about 3 total ways on earth to prepare apples, and ultimately they all taste about the same. What fucking difference does it make? Either you like apples or you don't. Don't worry about the stupid buzzwords that were made up when corporate outsourced the menu design to some marketing firm in Minneapolis. Along with this question always comes "What are Wilbur beans?!?" They're one of a jillion possible variations on baked beans that comes out tasting 99% similar to any other baked beans you ever had. Either you like beans or you don't. Don't ask me stupid questions.

Beav: (Gives lengthy description of how apples are prepared) "...they're my favorite, I recommend them."
Moron: "No, I don't want that. Umm.....uhhhhhh....Gimme potatah salad and...a biscuit."

Idiots always pronounce it "potatah". Never fails. However, using this pronunciation does not make one an idiot, it just so happens that all idiots use this pronunciation. Also, we do not have "a biscuit". We have a cornbread muffin, which other than being baked and of similar texture, is nothing like a biscuit.

Beav: "Actually, the platter comes with cornbread muffin and corn on the cob right with it, so would you like to choose another side?"
Moron: (Showing signs of mental exhaustion, turning to idiot wife) "Uhm....will you eat more corn if I get it? Do you want it? Well...wait, I guess you'll get corn with yours too...do you want more corn? Uhm.......just gimme 'slaw I guess. And can we get some extra napkins?"
Beav: "Yeah, actually there's a roll of paper towels on your table there for you, so that should take care of it."

I stand and twirl my pen while looking expectantly at my order book while this all goes on. I should try to act like I don't mind, but if you tell me you are ready, then this means that you understand what you're ordering and what comes with it, and what that entails. If you don't, you ask first and decide on your own time so that I don't have to stand at your table for 5 minutes when I could have spent 20 seconds and gotten back to serving the other 15 people at my tables. When in doubt, read the Goddamn menu. Funny story, restaurants are required to tell you what you get when you order your meal and how much it costs, and they write this all down and give it to you. Don't be fucking lazy and don't waste my time because you can't bothered to do 30 seconds of light reading.

5) Ordering outside the menu

This is probably the most common and most overlooked of all the dick moves in restaurant patronage. There is one exception to this rule, and it's food allergies. Unless you are going to drop dead of anaphalactic shock right there in my section, you can choose to manually exclude the tomato from your cheeseburger yourself, jackass. Pick it off, it takes you 2 seconds of your own time which is clearly not at a premium since you're at a sit-down dinner. It takes me at least 5 times as long to type it in, and if the cooks don't read the ticket right you're gonna take it personally and snidely remind me that you didn't want tomato when your food arrives, either that or I have to send your food back to be remade and you're pissed because it takes 25 minutes.

Here's some tips to help you know if you're making an obnoxious order:

You start your oder with the words "Could I possibly...", "Is there any way to do...", "Would it work to..." or "Is there anything else I could get instead of..."

Find something you like on the menu and order it. If you want to invent food items, open your own restaurant. If you don't like anything, go somewhere else, don't make me spend half the night typing your order in one letter at a time on a touch screen and then going back to explain to the cooks not only what the hell you want, but my theories as to why.

6) Running the server

If you need a side of ranch, another water, a clean fork to replace the one you dropped, and another 4 saltines for your toddler to distribute around the table and floor, you probably know that all at once. Don't ask me for them one trip at at time, because it's fucking annoying. If your drink is empty, say something when I'm on my way to get your friend's drink, don't take a couple gulps while I'm gone and decide that you need one too when I get back with his. Ideally, anticipate your own needs and tell the server when you order. Stream-of-consciousness is for therapy sessions, not lunches.

7) Paying your 4 separate checks with 4 separate credit cards

Assholes. Thank you for not monopolizing both my time and my pens. If you're only paying for yourself, you're gonna pay me $10 even anyhow. Find a way to procure a $10 bill before you come in so that I don't have to stand at the computer for the next 20 minutes running and sorting 4 people's credit cards and cross-referencing them with your order and then spending another 10 closing out all those cards and making sure they match up after you leave. There's a 2 card maximum per table before it gets to be a pain in the ass.

8) Asking, "Could you go ahead and box this up?"

No, but you could, you lazy bastard. One of us is working and the other is sitting around talking. I tell people that I, in fact, cannot box their food for them because of "health codes" and that they must box their own food when they ask me this. What they don't know won't hurt them, but it will save me from going in the back with their plate, putting on gloves, picking up the uneaten food, putting it in the box, taking the gloves off and throwing them away, washing my hands, closing the box, then taking it out to their lazy ass.

9) Being a cheapass.

If you got good service, tip 20%. If you can't do the math, get a tip table. If you "can't afford" to tip, then you "can't afford" to go out to eat. Servers make $2 an hour, so throwing down $50 on your $48.37 ticket and proudly announcing "The rest is yours" is not ok. Also, if you got a discount or used a gift card, you should tip on the total cost of the food before any deductions, not the few bucks left over after you cashed out your $40 gift card.

10) Demanding/selecting a booth when the hostess wants to seat you at a table.

They're all seats. They're all going to be served. Booths are not sacred, and they're not more comfortable, but they probably are in a completely different server's section than the one the hostess is trying to sit you in. Don't fuck up the rotation because you have a need for your seat to be covered in vinyl, and sure as shit don't inform them where you'll be sitting. You wouldn't go to a concert and inform the usher where you want to sit, you'd go where your damn ticket says.

I'm quite sure this list is incomplete, so as I think of more irritating shit that people do, I'll add it on. Meanwhile, if you choose to engage in too many of the above behaviors, pray that your waiter or waitress is very patient and understanding, or you might find that your food has a distinctly kitchen floor-like flavor to it...

2:00 AM

2005-06-26T03:21:00.000-07:00

It’s 2:00 AM after a long Saturday night. I should feel relieved because the thing I’ve been dreading has passed. I reality, I am acutely aware of why I was dreading it. It’s 2:00 AM after a five month relationship, and I just broke her heart. I, ironically, am now crying in the arms of my roommate. It would seem that I should be the one who chalks it up to bad luck or makes some other weak excuse, pulls the covers up, and goes to sleep. Instead I have tears streaming down my face, as no doubt she does. It’s 2:00 AM after a half hour of telling her everything she needed to hear and nothing she wanted to. I wish like hell that there were something else I could have done and still had any self-respect on which to hang my pride, but there just wasn’t. What started as curiosity and became love has taken a turn for me, and I just can’t bring myself to fake my way through and let her fall deeper in love while I remain static. I just couldn’t break down and cry and say, “Baby, I’m sorry, I take it all back. Come back over.” I just couldn’t drag her along for weeks or months more and hurt her a little more each day until I had completely ruined anything we ever had because I didn’t have what it took to tell her that I’ll never be the man she needs. I just couldn’t take the easy way out. I just couldn’t tell her I was still in love and that it wasn’t over.

These were the words that tore both of us open until we each bled from that most vulnerable place.

“Do you love me?”
“Not like you need me to.”

She hung up. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Pain like that travels silently across the human experience and hits with a sickening thud. I knew that with those words I had shattered every ounce of trust she had to give. In a moment the memory of how it felt to be told that the love is gone came rushing back, and my tears came rushing forth. I cried because I know that pain. I cried because I just put that pain on her. I cried because I had to choose what the best time was to hurt her so that it turned out the best for her in the end. I also knew that I owed it to her. I couldn’t let her believe that somehow this was all a riddle that needed only the right words to be solved. I couldn’t do to her what was done to me. For that matter, I couldn’t do to her what I’d done in the past. Across those months she had given me her trust, and now the only thing I could do to honor that was to tear down her world in the name of honesty.

As I wipe away my tears, my roommate tells me that someday I’ll have her respect for having been honest with her. My roommate tells me she respects me for “doing the right thing.” From somewhere inside me, that idealistic child wants to scream out that I deserve no respect, because I used to have love and now it’s gone. There is nothing to be respected about that. If I could have taken adversity and turned it into greater love, that deserves respect. If I could have embraced every moment of pain and tension and used it to understand more and battle less, that deserves respect. If I weren’t one of two people crying at 2:00 AM because a compromise couldn’t be reached, if I still felt on top of the world and if I were still making her feel like the luckiest girl in the world, that would deserve respect. Right now I just feel like the inconsolable kid on the soccer field after a tough loss. Hand me my orange slice and give me the condescending hair tossle and “you’ll get ‘em next time”, but I still just wish we could have won. From somewhere, the frustration starts to seep in. What went wrong this time? Why couldn’t I have fallen hopelessly in love and stayed that way until death did us part? What is it about two people that makes them irreconcilably different when everyone is so remarkably similar to begin with? Why does “doing the right thing” hurt so deeply?

Beav Loses Football Argument With Tucker Max

2005-06-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me well and frequent my AIM profile how no doubt heard of Tucker Max (www.tuckermax.com), from whom I blatantly steal much of the format for this "blog" because he has a good style and if it ain't broke, don't fix it. My writing style is mostly my own, but I've said to friends times that I'd probably be like Tucker if only I could get rid of my conscience...well, that and be a little quicker at ripping people to their faces. That would probably come with practice. The guy pretty much has no soul, but holy shit, he's funny.

Anyhow, long story short, Tucker is planning a whirlwind tour of the nation to see great college football games in the fall, but Nebraska vs Oklahoma in Lincoln was not on the list. He says he won't come to Lincoln, but doesn't say why. Being raised as a die-hard Husker fan, my opinion is totally biased, but I still say there's no way you can not want to see this game if you're a true college football fan. Here was my attempt to sway Tucker's opinion:

**********************

I know you said don't ask...so rather than ask why, I have to just categorize you as "football retarded" for not even considering coming to the Nebraska vs Oklahoma game on Oct. 29th. Strictly from a football standpoint, you're blacklisting one of the perennial top-10 college stadiums as well as one of the greatest sports rivalries of all time.

Wisconsin vs. Illinois shouldn't even be on the radar because Illinois doesn't have a team worth watching, let alone watching in Champaign. Florida vs. Georgia is respectable, but would be better on a year when you can see it Between the Hedges. If you want to experience football, I don't see any way you can justify ignoring Nebraska vs Oklahoma in front of the Sea of Red.

Look at the pros:

Our team isn't that good right now. OU will probably fuck us up on our home turf, which means there will be countless, pissed off Nebraskans (and players at the bars/parties) for you to screw with.

The bars are within easy walking distance of the stadium, and alcohol is cheap here ($1 20oz beers/$2 calls if you know where to go).

It's only October, so the hot freshmen haven't had time to drop out/get fat/catch VD yet.

They shoot hot dogs out of a cannon at games. If you can't make a story happen out of that, I don't know who can.

This whole state bleeds Husker Red. Think about it, what the hell else is there to be proud of, the zoo in Omaha? If you want college football, you can't possibly justify taking Lincoln off the map.

Dan Beavers

P.S. - Don't bother with NU vs Mizzou in Colombia. I've been there...it's not that great. Pick LSU vs Auburn or Bama vs UT.

******************

Not a bad argument. Not stellar, but a start. I did however make one big mistake, and I should have known better than to make a mistake around Tucker Max. Tucker's reply:

"Florida vs. Georgia is respectable, but would be better on a yearwhen you can see it Between the Hedges"

UF/Ga is played EVERY YEAR in Jacksonville. Its NEVER played in Athensor Gainesville. I'm the football retard?

This is why I will never go to Nebraska: Youpeople are too stupid to even see your own stupidity.

***********

He's got me on the Jacksonville thing, and if I were neutral, I'd have a hard time not going to The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party myself. Evidently it's an entire weekend spent in a drunken haze with a football game mixed in there somewhere. I could try to go after him for typos, but he was probably drunk and if that's all I've got, I should just quit anyhow.

As for people in Nebraska being too stupid to know they're stupid...I can't dispute that. I've spent too many years lifeguarding and working in restaurants and encountered too many people to say that this state is not full of total fucking idiots who refuse to acknowledge the concept that they are dipshits and wouldn't have made it past natural selection if smarter people weren't always looking out for them. If we weren't bordered by Iowa, Wyoming and the Dakotas, we'd have nothing to make us feel good about our state. Oh, and don't forget Missouri. I swear everyone between St. Louis and KC is dumb/ugly as hell. We here in Nebraska have football, a good zoo and good steak...and that's about it. We can't even brag about corn any more because everyone has corn. S

till though, I wanted a better reason from Tucker. My reply:

Point, Tucker. Still though 99% of people everywhere are morons. There's got to be a better reason not to come to a game here. You can't tell me that you don't expect to be surrounded by painfully fucking stupid people at an SEC game.

He sent me back another reason I couldn't counter:

Yes, SEC people are stupid, but 1. They know it, and 2. Their girls are hotter.

He's thought this through. The South may be a lot of things, but it isn't dishonest. Southerners know they're a bunch of rednecks, and they're proud of that. They're ass-backwards, classless jackasses, but they'll be the first to admit it...so at least you know what you're getting into. People in most of the rest of the country are neither aware of, nor comfortable with their stupidity. Lots of states that suck know they suck. When I meet people from North Dakota, they know that it sucks there and they don't bullshit. We think Nebraska is a good place to live, and there's something wrong with that. Omaha is ok, and Lincoln is ok only because of UNL, but the rest of the state is fucking flat and boring and we haven't figured it out.

As for the girls being hotter, no contest. I will never forget going to Nashville for my sister's graduation from Vanderbilt and kicking myself all weekend long for not having gotten good enough grades to go someplace like Vandy or Emory instead of settling for Nebraska. Southern girls are WAY hotter than Nebraska girls, and it's not because their genotypes are superior, it's because they try harder. Among the things that are NOT acceptable for a Southern Belle:

1) Not wearing make-up
2) Pajamas
3) Not "doing" their hair
4) Getting fat

And if they forget, their mothers will psychologically assault them until they fall back in line. Basically if you're talking about hotness on a 1-10 scale, southern girls always make sure they're at the top end of their rating, while girls around here are much more comfortable with taking that bottom end of their average out into public. A girl who might be a 6 here is pushed by southern tradition to being an 8 at all times. I've seen it firsthand, and I'm sure it sucks for them, but I love them for it. They dress nicer, they work harder, they are more image-conscious and it shows. Period.

All in all, Tucker has housed me in this argument, and the more I look back on it...I didn't have an argument to begin with. Tucker is not an NU or OU fan, so why would a big game between teams you don't necessarily care about beat out a weekend of debauchery when you grew up with the Big Ten and SEC anyhow? It'd be like somebody from BYU trying to get me to see them play Utah the weekend of the NU-CU game. Not gonna happen. This is why even though Tucker and Maddox (www.maddox.xmission.com) are undeniable assholes; I'll always read them religiously, because they're right.

Beav Gets Into Verbal Altercation With New Landlord

2005-06-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

6/09/05

For those of you who may not be aware, I moved into a new house at the beginning of May. I now live in a duplex with three girls who are friends of mine from when I used to be a theatre major. The place is pretty nice, albeit a little cheaply built. The walls are thin and the water heater is good for maybe 20 minutes of hot water, the washer & dryer are oldschool, etc. Living with the girls has been awesome, but the landlord is pretty much an absent figure. Fine, I guess, so long as nothing goes wrong. I gather that he's some sort of builder or something, and he's probably making a goddamn killing off this duplex that rents for $1200 a month on each half with no more money than he seems to have initially put into it. He's got another single home next door, and probably others around town.

When I moved in, I was told that we had a key to the garage outside, and that we can keep stuff in there if we need to, but we have to pay extra if we want to park in there. My car has lived outside for the last 5 years, I don't see a reason why it needs to stop now, so that's fine. The only thing I keep in there is my grill and a bag of charcoal. No problem, right? Wrong.

I get up one morning to find that the grill is outside next to the air conditioner rather than in the garage where I left it. I ask Jesse if she knows why, and evidently somebody came to the door at about 7:30 in the morning to inform her that the grill could not be kept in the garage, but didn't say why. Fine, the grill has lived outside before, it can do it again. I'll just keep the charcoal in the garage so it stays dry. No problem, right? Wrong.

I should explain at this point that the garage has been the center of much mystery since I moved in. There are a lot of tools and lawnmowers, snowblowers, etc. in there. I figure these must belong to the landlord and he uses them to take care of his properties or whatever. But frequently throughout the day a truck will pull up and some random guy I don't know will get out, go into the garage, come out a little while later and then leave. Frequently it's different guys. A touch on the weird side, but not any more weird than some of the shit that went on in my old neighborhood. I just figure they work for Bill and need to get something out of the garage and/or put something back. No problem, right? Wrong.

Two days ago:

I am starting up the grill to make some burgers, and so I get the charcoal out of the garage. Since I am planning on putting it back no more than 5 minutes later, I leave the door unlocked. In that time, a truck pulls up, and some old (read: 50s or 60s) guy gets out and goes into the garage. I go to put the charcoal back, and find that the door is locked. I get the key out and open the door. As I enter, I hear the sound of liquid falling in a bucket from about waist height. The old guy is standing over a bucket in the corner behind the door...and I pray to myself that he's just wringing out a rag or something. He doesn't greet me, he doesn't introduce himself, he just says "Make sure you keep that door locked." I inform him that I do keep the door locked, but since I was going to put my charcoal back within 5 minutes of using it, I thought it would be okay to leave the door unlocked. I am instantly pissed. I HATE it when people demand things without so much as a greeting, because it's fucking rude. Old people are fond of doing this in restaurants, and it makes me want to grab them by the jowls and shake them while screaming, "YOU WILL TREAT ME WITH THE SAME DECENCY WITH WHICH I TREAT YOU, OR I WILL PULL YOUR DEPENDS OVER YOUR HEAD AND SLAP YOU!!!". But I digress.

I ask the roommates, and they don't know who the guy is. They don't know him, but they do express ample disgust at the possibility that he was pissing in a bucket in a garage, as well they should. If you're that hard up to take a leak, knock on the back door and I'll let you use the bathroom. We're not in Botswana here, we have toilets available. As it is, nobody has any information, and I forget about it for a couple days.

Today I am about to make a trip to the hardware store, and I wonder if I should buy a hose to use if I want to wash my car or if there's one in the garage that I might use. I go look, and there is a hose, and on my way out...there's that bucket. I try to ignore it, but ultimately something within me forces me to go and examine its contents: one cigarette butt and about an inch of yellow liquid. I've pretty much seen what I need to, but call ever the glutton for punishment, I've gotta know for sure. I lean a little closer and smell. Yep, it's piss. That old guy pissed in a bucket in the garage and then left it there.

Now, maybe this is just a "me thing", but if I were a landlord and somebody who worked for me were urinating in a bucket on my property, I'd want to know about it so that I could inform him that big boys use the potty. Being used to formerly having a landlord who was classy and attentive and generally a nice guy, I figure it would be a good idea to call and inform my new landlord of this situation, so I do.

First I introduce myself, and ask if it is okay if I keep the grill in the garage. Bill can't decide if he wants to allow this or not, and generally sounds like he'd rather blow a farm animal than talk to me. I get the immediate impression that his people skills tend not to rate an A+. Ultimately nothing is resolved on the grill issue. I then inform him of the piss bucket situation, and his reaction is precisely the opposite of what I expect. He actually gets mad at me for being in or around the garage and informs me that the garage is their shop for them to use, and it's not intended for me to "be going in and out of there on a daily basis" and that he doesn't get what my "shock" is about his workers pissing in a bucket and dumping it outside. Maybe he'd wonder what the LPD's "shock" about it would be too if they caught somebody dumping urine outside. He then goes on to say in a very annoyed tone, and I quote, "So you got another question or what, because I'm trying to work here *bud*." At this point I'm tempted to flip my shit on him and inform him that he's welcome to stop being an asshole at any time and that he might want to get some loose idea of the concept of a business relationship is, and that we don't pay $1,200 a month for him to treat me like a whiny 5-year-old, but I take the high road and tell him I'm not looking for a confrontation with him and that I was evidently misinformed about the nature of my relationship with the garage, and he proceeds to get more angry and tells me that maybe he just won't allow us to keep anything in there and he should get the key back. He then tells me to call him later because he has work to do.

Fat fucking chance of me calling this guy back, because he strikes me as the type with a lot of balls at a distance but who wouldn't have the spine to mouth off to me like that to my face...but if he and his employees make a habit of being pricks to his tenants all the time, then you can bet that will bite him in the ass sooner or later. In the meantime, I'll be pondering the potential ramifications of getting into a feud with my landlord. I can't decide if it falls into the category of metaphorically shitting where you eat since that one is more reserved for workplace issues, but it's certainly not biting the hand that feeds you. Maybe a modified line from The Wizard of Oz is better: Pay no attention to the man behind the door...you were happier before you knew he was pissing in bucket in your garage.

How To Fail Miserably, Then Succeed In College

2005-05-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

You are about to read an excerpt from the “story” of a college freshman in the fall of 2000. The story begins one cold Saturday night in October, when he found himself in an argument with his ex-girlfriend. The argument stemmed from his feelings that she had shunned him when he needed somebody he could trust to help him get adjusted to college.

************************************************

“I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” she accused, “I mean, yeah, I can see you’ve got a few problems, but it’s not like you can’t overcome it. You don’t need me. You’ve got your fraternity brothers and your friends and your family. It’s not like you’re alone.”

“I’m failing my classes. I’m away from my family, my best friend is 2,000 miles away, and I live in a house full of guys who are supposed to be my brothers, but I can’t talk to them because they don’t know me and I don’t trust them.” His voice began to break as the bleakness of his situation overtook him. “I don’t know anybody here well enough to be able to talk to them. None of these people understand me. I have never been so alone in all my life.”

There, he had said it. For the two and a half months he’d been away at college something had been eating at him. As he sat there, drunk, crying and in the midst of yet another horrible fight with his ex-girlfriend, he finally realized what it was: He was alone, and he was a failure. College, and indeed his entire life, wasn’t at all what he thought it would be. The sudden realization had hit him so hard that it swiftly reduced him to tears.

************************************************

Listen well, high school seniors, prospective and current college students alike. All who are, were, or will be enrolled in college, hear me now. All of you who have seen the movies, read the publicity pamphlets or heard the stories about college, gather ‘round. The story of our lonely freshman is non-fiction. That was me, and more importantly, it could be you.

If you’re not careful, you too might be blindsided by the horrible realization that you’ve squandered away your dreams of college bliss because you had the wrong expectations. I was seduced by the bright, pretty pictures and funny stories about college. I thought I was coming into the land of milk and honey, where life was all fun and games and nobody had a care in the world. It turned out that college was just like the rest of life: If in your collegiate experience you give nothing, you will get nothing. You, the student, cannot expect college to immediately be the way it is in Hollywood, in your big brother’s crazy stories, or in the publicity packets. I have seen the error of my former ways and mastered the art that is the collegiate experience. I have learned how to use the right mindset and output of effort to turn college into the beautiful place I imagined it to be, and be successful at the same time. Lucky for you, I’m about to tell you how on that October night, I began learning the secret of college prosperity.

Once sober and composed, I asked myself the inevitable question: “Where did I go wrong?” Truth be told, my college career was all but doomed well before it began. After conducting my (and I use the term loosely) “search” of the nation’s finest Pre-Veterinary programs, I finally decided that I didn’t want to be a Veterinarian at all. I had no idea what I wanted to be. I settled for enrolling at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I would pursue a major in, as I was fond of saying, “Fermented beverage consumption with a minor in freelance women’s studies.” The real joke in this statement lay in the fact that at some subconscious level, I believed it. After all, in every movie I’d seen about college, hadn’t there been great parties, pranks and sexual fiascos going on at all hours of all days? In all the stories I’d heard, hadn’t the antics and crazy goings-on of drunken buddies been the stuff that makes college “the time of your life”? Didn’t the pamphlets on college life in general and Greek life in particular show that this would be the friend-makin’est, resume-buildin’est, Frisbee-tossin’est best time this side of the Rio Grande?

Oh indeed, college was all this and more…or so I had come to believe. It would be the best time of my life! I’d party, I’d fraternize, I’d toss a football around on the front lawn of my frat, and surely this would bring me countless beautiful and promiscuous women, not to mention a sparkling GPA. In my mental college preview I had not included academics, but rather preferred to assume that the grades would all just fall into place. Somewhere along the line I decided to be a Pre-Med major. The way I figured, before I knew it, I’d be a rich doctor just like George Clooney, and I’d refer to my time at the University as the “good old days.”

It took two months for this sparkling image of the sunny, khaki-pants paradise to lose its luster. It became rapidly apparent that while my outlook on college glimmered, it was not gold. My grades were falling…but not into place, and while I had been plenty successful at getting drunk and it was true that I’d spent a goodly portion of time throwing a football around the front lawn of my fraternity house, for some baffling reason this had failed to bring the boundless happiness and droves of ladies the movies had promised me. I couldn’t throw the football forever, and when the Friday night buzz wore off and alcohol’s depressive effects began to take hold, I needed a source of pride and confidence as a fallback. When those were in short supply, I needed a close friend and confidante to help me straighten things out again. My binge drinking, reclusiveness and class skipping, however, had brought none of these.

College became a gray, oppressive hell from which I could not escape. I gave up all hope of having a good time and became just another face in the crowd. I gave nothing, and in turn, I got nothing. Bad grades turned into worse grades, and ignorant expectations about college gave way to disillusionment and depression. To make a long story short, my first year of college did not see me throw off the burden of increased academic rigors and social pressures. I failed or dropped most of my classes and was placed on level-one academic probation after my first semester of school. After another semester of poor grades and borderline alcoholism, I was on level-two academic probation and certifiably depressed. By the time finals were over, I was 90% sure that upon learning of my scholastic folly, my dad would evict me from the house. I went home for the summer fully expecting that I would be kicked out of my home and forced to join the army while I attempted to figure out what to do with my life. The logic of the course I was on would have dictated that I would slide further into a depressed, pathetic existence. It was then, however, that something unusual happened.

I was leaving my Trigonometry final, and the clouds began to pour down a cold, soaking rain. Over the course of the ten minute walk, I evaluated my life: I had just failed my last final, and my scholastic “efforts” would yield a 1.8 GPA. I was single and lonely, and had been the entire year. I didn’t like my fraternity, I didn’t like my school, and I didn’t like myself. On top of that, I was cold and soaking wet. Some people would have jumped into the creek to drown with the flash flood. Not me. A strange little smile came to my face and somewhere inside my head, that little voice we all have said, “You know what? Fuck this. It’s not going to be like this any more. It changes here, and it changes now.” I decided that I wasn’t going to be depressed about my life any longer. Quite simply, my life sucked, and it was nobody’s fault but my own. The whole scenario reminded me of a motivational speaker I had once heard. The man had slipped into depression after losing his right arm in a farming accident. He related some agricultural wisdom his father had relayed to him at the time.“Son, sometimes life dumps a load of shit on you. When that happens, you have two choices: One is that you can sit there in all that shit and cry and pity yourself, but you’ll still be surrounded by shit and you’ll look and smell shitty to yourself and everyone else. Everything around you will still be shit. The other option is that you can get up, clean yourself off, and use that load of shit like fertilizer to make your life grow.”

Granted, it was a blunt and somewhat vulgar bit of advice, but suddenly it made a world of sense to me. I vowed that I would rise up, clean my life off and start growing. From that time on, I was going to quit pitying myself and wasting my time. I was going to stop treating every minor setback like a major tragedy. I was going to savor the good times, and dispense with the bad. I would approach each new challenge with the attitude that even if I didn’t conquer it, damn it, I would give it my best shot and learn something from the experience. I returned home that May with an inward happiness and an irrepressible sense of optimism. My friends and family were taken aback by change in my attitude. Immediately it began to change my life. Within a month I had a fun job, I was getting into good physical shape, and I had a beautiful girlfriend. Those who knew me for my self-pity and laziness were shocked. Sensing that my newfound outlook on life was an indicator of good things to come, my dad said he would allow me another semester at college to see if I got it right. I spent the happiest summer of my life that year, and when I came back to Lincoln in August, college once again sparkled with promise and opportunity.

Over the summer, the idiots living in my fraternity house managed to lose our lease, but I found that I didn’t really care. I moved into the dorms and didn’t miss a beat. I strolled to and from classes with a smile on my face and a groove in my step. I genuinely enjoyed studying and learning the subject matter of my courses, which lead to good grades in my new general studies major. I quickly made friends in my dorm and in my classes. Any one of these things by itself was more than I had accomplished in the entire 2000-2001 academic year. Most of them were accomplished within a few weeks. I still partied and had plenty of recreation, but I found that these things were far more enjoyable when they felt deserved and when I was already happy with the way my life was going. I was giving everything I had, and I was getting a lot in return.

My optimism and dedication spawned success. My grade point average rose steeply. Soon, instead of a 1.2 sitting in the GPA column of my grade report, there was a 3.5. My achievements brought me happiness and optimism, which when paired with continuing dedication produced more success. I had an entirely new outlook on life. I was no longer the lazy, melodramatic high school kid who wasted an entire year getting drunk and playing Playstation. I was an actual college student who went to his classes and passed his tests. I earned my celebration, which made partying that much more enjoyable. I had a good attitude and a magnetic personality for the first time in my life. Suddenly college was that place full of great times and funny stories and I could enjoy partying and hanging out with my friends because I knew I deserved it.

College life can be great if you know how to make it happen. You will flourish if you promise yourself that you will put your best effort into everything you do, and not let failures or unexpected problems ruin your will to succeed. Work hard, and by doing that you give yourself good reason to play hard, and that playing is what makes college the Frisbee-tossin’ good time you read about in those pamphlets. It took me a year to learn that celebration without cause is not what college is all about. College is about doing what it takes to earn your happiness, and then celebrating that happiness. That’s the moral of my story. I wish you luck in writing yours.

The Night That Began The Worst 7 Months Of My Life

2005-05-16T19:15:00.000-07:00

Written in September of '03

“So I forget about her, and then when she comes back, I just pretend to have forgotten about her?”
“Right…only more likely the opposite.
“What?”
“Well at first you just pretend to forget about her, but eventually you really do forget.”
“And what if she comes back before I forget?”
“See, that’s the thing…somehow they know not to come back until you really forget.”
-Swingers

I know a lot of guys who would say that losing all the money in their wallet in one night is a traumatic event. On July 19, 2003, “all the money in my wallet” was ten dollars, and technically I hadn’t lost it. I’d gambled it away over the course of a poker night at my friend Devon’s house. I certainly wasn’t happy about the loss of my precious cash, but it was only a dollar more than an hour’s wage. I would have earned the money back by 1:00 the next afternoon. Besides, I love to play poker so it was more like paying $10 to be entertained. It was a loss from which I could easily recover. What I didn’t know was that when I arrived home, I would suffer a loss from which I still have not recovered.

Perhaps I should give you a little background on what my life was like up until that memorable poker night: I was in the midst of a mellow, yet enjoyable summer. I had just finished my junior year of college and gotten excellent grades. I made $9 an hour as a lifeguard and had 8 rescues, so I suppose on some level that made me a hero. It made me well-tanned and well-paid at the very least. I was having a great time partying with my friends and finally getting to spend lots of time with my girlfriend, Anna. Things with me and Anna were better than they’d ever been.
In the year and three months we’d been dating, we had always gotten along very well, but busy schedules and ever-changing locations kept us from seeing each other as much as we would have liked. During our first summer I made frequent trips from Omaha to Lincoln so that I could spend time with her. During the school year we were lucky to get five hours together in a week despite the fact that my dorm room was directly above hers. Finally, though, we had a summer where we were both in the same city and relatively unscheduled. I couldn’t have been happier. She meant the world to me, and I meant as much to her. The school year was done, Anna was there with me and I no longer had to answer to other girls when they so suggestively asked, “Where’s your girlfriend?” No matter what had gone wrong in my day, the moment I saw her face everything was better. My summer was going perfectly. I had good grades, a good job, the cool house where everybody wanted to party, a beautiful girlfriend who loved me…you name it. In my mind’s eye, I was the shit. Did you notice how that description is written in past-tense? Ah, what a difference a day makes…

I returned home from poker night in much better spirits than when I had left. A good drive and some loud music almost always do wonders for my mood. It was past 2:00 AM, so I figured I would just grab a glass of milk, check my e-mail and be off to bed. My figuring was all wrong. Steps one and two of the process went precisely as planned, but what waited for me in the e-mail was as unpredictable as it was surreal. I typed in my login name and password as I had done thousands of times before, and found that I had just one new message. Already I was getting excited.

Anna was in Turkey for an archaeological project. She had been gone nine days, which left 26 days until she came home…but who was counting? I had yet to hear from her, and I was becoming worried for her safety. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was becoming worried for the safety of our relationship. I hadn’t spent a moment away from my phone since she’d been gone, and I must have checked my e-mail a hundred times in that span of nine days. I had written her at least once every day, but up until that point there had been no reply.

My spirits skyrocketed when I saw that the lone message was from Anna. I hastily read through the contents of her message, thanking me for writing her while she was away, saying that she’d been having lots of fun and was very busy, it sounded like I was having fun back at home…then that while she had been there she had been doing a lot of thinking. My body became heavy in the chair, and somewhere in my head there was a switch as my thoughts and my emotions disconnected. This was not good. Everything within me braced for impact.

She had been doing lots of thinking, and she felt like she just needed to be single right now.

It wasn’t my fault, I had been great to her…

The words became a blur and now I felt adrenaline rushing into my bloodstream. I could have torn the house down with my bare hands if only I could have gotten out of that chair.

Did that really just happen? Did my girlfriend of fifteen months just dump me in an e-mail? Could this be the same girl who referred to me as "the love of my life"? I seemed to be standing beside myself, watching in horror the way people watch a train wreck at the moment they know it’s going to happen and there’s nothing that can stop it. The linchpin of my arrogance had just been pulled, and it was all about to come down.

That night it was all too strange to be real. I took the high road and wrote Anna back wishing her the best and asking that she call me so that I might gain some grasp on what had just happened and if I might ever have her back. That night I was cool and composed. I spent the late hours of the night driving around Omaha, smoking a cigar and believing that I was wise beyond my years. While I slept that night, my thoughts and emotions reconnected and my tower of ego came crashing to the ground. I woke up feeling more utterly broken than I ever have in my life. I spent the next day at work alone with my feet in the baby pool, crying like a lost child. In the month that followed, she never called.

I had never felt so rejected and unappreciated. Through fifteen months I had loved her with everything I had and I didn’t even have a phone call to show for it. The thing that made me furious, though, was that my identity had been swept out from under me in one little paragraph sent from thousands of miles away. I had based so much of my self-image and self-confidence on the fact that I was boyfriend to this incredible girl, that when that was taken from me I wasn’t sure who to be. I had never acknowledged the fact, but Anna had been the driving force in my life. Her belief in me had given me what I always lacked: True belief in myself.

She came into my world at a time when I had made numerous improvements to my lifestyle. I no longer got drunk four nights a week like I had when I was a freshman. I actually attended my classes and studied for my tests. I did my homework and switched to the major I had always wanted. Despite all these minor successes, my confidence in myself and enthusiasm for achievement was waning. At the time I started dating Anna in March of 2002, I was standing at the brink of slipping back into my bad habits. Spring break in South Padre had served more as a tool of exhaustion than refreshment, and I was getting sick of school. My drive had been slowly fading, and she was exactly the boost I needed. Once we were together, my desire to be impressive for her pushed me to excel. That added drive brought me added success, which put me into a cycle of achievement. The more I did, the more I was willing to take on. By mid-summer of 2003, I thought I could do anything. By the end of that same summer, I was so changed that I felt I could do nothing.

The change in me shocked my friends. As the oldest and arguably the wisest member of my social group, I had become a role model. My two roommates were more like little brothers than friends because they looked up to me for guidance and motivation. I had always been the level-headed one. I was always the one with the answers. I was the one who got everything right. Suddenly that all changed, and I was the one sitting at rock bottom and reaching out for help. I was the one spending his mornings in bed, sobbing uncontrollably and begging God for a second chance to be a good man to his beloved girl. I prayed over and over that I could just hold her in my arms again. When I looked at my eyes in the mirror, I could hardly recognize myself. That couldn’t be me; I didn’t do this. I didn’t lie helpless anywhere, I didn’t sob, and I certainly didn’t beg God for things.

With the help of my friends and especially my family, I slowly got back to normal. I was just starting to feel like my old self again when Anna made her triumphant return from Turkey and called me on my 21st birthday. It was hands down the worst phone conversation and worst birthday I have ever had. She was so excited to be home and tell somebody the stories of everything she’d seen and done that she couldn’t begin to fathom the anguish I’d been through. She claimed that she took her leave of me because of her belief that I didn’t support her future plans or her love of art. My protests that I loved her and wanted only the best for her did no good. She had made up her mind, and eventually I gave up on her and hung up the phone. I spent time with Anna on a few occasions in the week after that, but eventually the awkwardness that hung over everything we did was too much for me. I could tell that in her mind she was keeping me a safe distance outside of her world, and I couldn’t stand it. Adding insult to that injury, I came to learn that my suspicion that she took such hasty leave of me so that she could be free to have an exotic fling with another guy while in such an exotic locale had been dead on, right down to my theories on the prime suspect. For that I forgave her, because in truth, she was only returning the favor. For not giving either of us a second chance, I was not so quick to forgive. It tore me apart, but I called her one night and told her that I no longer wanted us to be part of each other’s lives. The hurt in her voice sticks with me to this day.

Since school started I have grown progressively more comfortable with the idea of being on my own, but I have to admit that the comfort comes and goes in cycles. Each time it comes back, though, it’s a little bit stronger. I can honestly say that I’ve gotten back to being my goofball self. I am having fun again, and each day it gets a little bit easier to hop out of bed and think that something great just might happen that day. I am learning to be proud and successful for my own sake, not just because I think I have to impress a girl. I As of right now, I would say I’m doing just fine, thank you very much.

Since I was doing just fine, wouldn’t you know it…I saw Anna while I was on my way to class last Wednesday. It had been roughly a month since I had seen her or talked to her. She smiled and looked thrilled to see me, but if my face matched the way I felt then I must have gawked at her as though she had three heads. I was so shocked to see her that it never occurred to me to stop and say something, but in the last moment before I passed her I could see that she was saddened by my reaction. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t thought about that moment almost constantly. Much though I spent months trying to convince myself otherwise, I still know that despite everything I love her deeply and would take her back if I had the chance…and as I put the finishing touches on this essay, my phone rings. I look at the clock and see that it is 2:25 AM. I can’t imagine who would be calling me so late or for what reason. I take the phone out of my pocket and stare in disbelief at the two words spelled out on its glowing green screen: “Anna Calling”

Actual Responses from Beav's PSYC 463 Exams, Exam 3

2005-05-15T15:53:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, I was in rare form on this one. It was getting late in the semester, and to be exact I believe it was the Thursday before "Dead Week". Those of you who attend UNL know that the aforementioned weeks is when there is at least one exam and/or project due for every class you have, and it's generally something you should have been gradually working on all semester but haven't been. This is the time of the semester when college kids stop sleeping and start going insane. I got hopped up on caffeine and went off to take my test. This is what followed:

Q: Describe how we use the information from two eyes to provide depth information. (You should include a description of the horopter and the importance of feature detectors).

Me:

Well, that multiple choice section went a lot better than I expected. If you'd like to know my state of mind right now, I think I drank too much Mountain Dew, and my brain right now is like an electrical circuit that is drawing too much wattage. It'll go for a while, but then I keep having to trudge down to the basement and reset the switch to get my attention back. Also, you can thank the papal declaration for me making it to class today. I was up until 5:30 and crashed without setting an alarm. The continuous ringing of church bells and the howling of neighborhood dogs that followed woke me up. Also, isn't the plural of "retina" "retinae" and not "retinas"? I don't mean to nitpick...but that struck me.

Here we come to a question where you've selected a concept that I don't really grasp. How you discover a concept like the horopter frankly is beyond me. I think the term sounds more like a derogatory term for loose women than a perceptual concept. I think I might adopt it. Next time some scandalous female tries to lure me away from my woman I'll scream, "Leave me be, you horopter! I'm a taken man!!!" Failing that, if I ever start a service that offers helicopter rides to prositutes, I'll call it 'horopter'. Where was I? Oh yeah, taking a test.

Soooooo the way that we use binocular cues to determine depth is by doing a lot things, really. Firstly, some prior knowledge of the size of the object helps a lot in the top-down processes. From there, we can use the visual angle to get an idea (albeit a subconscious one) of how far that thing is away from us. The visual angle and the amount of "space" taken up on the retina let us know about how big something is, and where it might be. Big angle, either big thing, close thing, or both. Small angle, small thing, far thing, or both. Along with that, we can use the retinal disparity of the two images from our two eyes to get an idea of the position of this thing. If the images fall at precisely corresponding points on our retinae (sorry, I'm a grammer nazi), then it is said to fall on the "horopter", which is an imaginary arc somewhere out in front of my face consisting of points that are all equidistant from my aforementioned face. Evidently from the way I worded that sentence, the horopter exists in front of my face and no one else's. If the two images fall on different points, then the degress of retinal disparity tells us where that thing is. We also can use accommodation and convergence, the oculomotor cues, to get a sense for how close something is. We call it kinesthesis. It's science.

Her: Lots of good here but a few missed details...I thought everyone would take the first option on this one. Hope the Mt. Dew buzz has worn off....or maybe you're on the next wave

Q: What is Corollary Discharge Theory designed to explain? Briefly describe the components of Corollary Discharge Theory (i.e., MS, CDS, IMS, comparator). Give at least two examples of how Corollary Discharge signals and/or Image Movement signals would work to provide information about the presence or absence of motion.

Me:
Corrollary Discharge Theory, which at first might sound like a life-threatening heart condition, is actually a model to explain the process by which we distinguish between motion created by things that are actually moving (real motion) and the perception of motion that might be created by moving our visual field across stationary objects (illusory motion).

Basically, when I move my eyeballs, the model states that because my visual input is changing, there is a signal sent to my brain that some motion is taking place and the things in my visual field are changing. Since I moved my eyeballs, there is also a signal sent to my brain that says essentially "Hey, I moved the eyeballs." In the event of eyeball movement, a copy of the motor impulse, or "corrollary" is sent out...or something to that effect. I'll be durned if I can accurately recall the exact model. The upshot of the whole thing is that when both the motion signal and the corrollary arrive at the brain at the same time, the brain says, "Nope, no real movement, that was just the eyeballs moving." When only the motion signal reaches the brain, then movement across the visual field is perceived...I think. What I took away from all that was "Two signals at the same time, no real movement. One signal, real movement."

Q: What is perceptual integration? What is perceptual dominance? Describe the relationship between equivalence, integration and dominance.

Me:
Side note: Both these proctor girls are pretty cute. I don't need these distractions. I hate this testing center and the ADD nightmare it creates for me. One of the proctors has a t-shirt that says "I Like Dirty Boys With No Money". If that's true, I bet she'd LOVE me. I'm broke.

Whooo, you picked a doozy here, didn't you? Oooooookay, perception integration. What you have when you have perceptual integration is the use of multiple senses combined in some proportion to create an overall perceptual experience. For example, when I walk into the kitchen of our house, I combine the visual input of its general filthy state, the smell of wet dog (even though we don't have a dog...ewwwwww), the temperature of the air, the sound of the creaking floorboards...and perhaps the taste of a glass of orange juice that I get from the fridge to form my experiece of our kitchen. Then I think "Wow, I should really clean. Nah, I'm always the one who cleans, and I'm moving out in May. Let it be Dave's problem." But I digress.

Perceptual dominence, then, is the tendency for one sense to play a greater role in a given perceptual experience than others. Usually it's vision, but not always. Let's say I'm eating a steak. While the appearance of the steak is important to me, as is the temperature and texture of it, the most important aspect is going to be my sense of smell. Why? Because as we know, you can't taste much without smell, and the taste of that steak is what I care the most about. This may not be universally true, but it is for me and my steak, you can count on that.

You have a real penchant for asking questions that could be multi-page essays, and "Describe the relationship between equivalence, integration and dominance." is no exception. I'll explain equivalence by giving the example of me going skiing. This is an activity that, at least in my opinion, requires me to balance two critical senses: Touch and Vision. I must be able to see where I'm going, and I also must have a good sense for being able to feel the terrain, the consistency of the snow, the slope of the mountain, etc. so that I can respond correctly and not fall. I will go ahead and say I could not ski without either of these senses and I think they're pretty equivalent in the overall perception of me skiing.

The relationship, I guess, is that in virtually any situation, integration and dominance are happening, and in many equivalence is also happening. It is the overall proportionality that creates the precise pereptual experience in the moment. They are crucial to the overall perceptual experience because in case you didn't know, it is not a passive fidelity system.

Her: yeah...I knew that...here's the deal....dominance occurs when there's a failure of integration...the info coming in from the two senses can't be combined to form a unitary representation, so one modality dominates the representation that is formed by the senses...usually vision

Q: What is figure-ground segregation and how does it relate to the perception of objects? Describe some of the characteristics distinguishing figure from ground. What do we know about when figure-ground segregation occurs in the perceptual process, and what does that suggest about the nature of perception?

Me:
Well well well, looks like I jumped the gun on the ol' "what does that suggest about the nature of perception?" question. I was afraid we weren't gonna see it.

Figure-ground segregation is the process by which we pick out objects (figures) in the environment and separate them from everything else (backGROUND). It relates to the perception of objects because if you have vision, you're pretty much always doing it. Perceiving something visual? Figure-groud segration. Go ahead, try to think of a good, practical, real-world scenario where you're not figure-ground segregating while looking at something...I dare you. If you can't, I get an A+ for the semester and don't have to do the final. Deal?

The figure generally tends to overlap the ground. Take for example catching a football. If I'm watching for the ball, then I segregate the ol' pigskin (figure) from the sky (ground) because I can clearly see that the ball is overlapping the sky behind it. I also perceive the edges separating ball from sky as belonging to the ball, and not to the sky. Often the figure will have characteristics that differ from the background, such as the example of a K-State fan at a Husker game. The purple stands out against the background of red.

I don't really know what you're hinting at with the "what do we know about when figure-ground segregation occurs in the perceptual process", but I'd just be willing to bet that it means that we use top-down processes and that it all means that peception is (gets out tape recorder, hits play) "AN ACTIVE, ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESS."

Her: I can't think of one, but your A+ depends on what you CAN do, not what I can't do....(but good try)...perceptual process--go back to the loop...does it always happen 'in order'?

Q: (Shows a big picture of some cars on a highway near some mountains)

(a) List and briefly describe the information provided by at least 5 pictorial cues available in the picture.

Me: Ugh. Ok, we've got overlap. I know that the car is in front of that pine tree because it overlaps the tree.

We've got...ehm...linear...I want to say convergence but I know that isn't right...because the lines of the road get closer together as the road gets farther away.

We've got relative size. The tree in the background must be farther away than the tree in the foreground because it seems smaller.

We've got some texture gradient. The shubs, etc. seem closer together as they get farther away.
We've got storms moving in over the pass. Expect delays. If you can, avoid travel through this area, as blizzard conditions are possible.

We'd have that phenomenon with the horizon...if I could figure out where the horizon is in this picture. My Art History Major ex-girlfriend would be disgusted with me right now. That's okay, she often was. I'm not bitter. Moving on....

Q:
b) List and briefly describe at least 3 depth cues that would be available to you if you were actually sitting in the moving car from which the photo was taken (as opposed to merely looking at the photo, as you just did).

Me: What? There's no file in my brain for this...

How about...motion parallax. The stuff near to me would appear to whoosh by in the opposite direction while the far-away stuff would seem to be slow and in the same direction. Because I'm familiar with that concept, I'd use it in a top-down manner to determine depth.

I'd have some convergence because not everything would be on a screen 2 feet in front of me.

I'd have some accommodation for the same reason.

I'd have some music playing, and I'd be singing, because that's what I do on road trips.

Her: a) thinking of atmospheric perspective & ht in the field of view b) NICE SAVE!

Q:
The following questions all relate to auditory localization:

(a) What is the cone of confusion, and which cue to auditory localization is it most closely related to? How can people overcome the cone of confusion?

Me: (This is my favorite of all the answers I gave all semester)

I don't know. I was gone that day and you didn't put that info into the powerpoints. It just says in red "Insert cone of confusion".

At this point, the cone of confusion is the metaphoric area in my brain where the understanding of this concept would go, but instead I don't know what it is.

Q:
(b) Considering both interaural time difference and interaural intensity difference, what combination(s) of frequency and location of sounds will be most difficult to localize?

Me:

Low frequencies that were off in the periphery I'd think. Really low frequencies from anywhere, but probably moreso in the periphery because while there is a difference in time, there won't be much in intensity. If it's right in front or behind, there won't be interaural time difference, you know it's right in front or behind. High soudns cast that intensity shadow because their frequency is so great...so they're easier to localize. That must be why whenever the thugs come a thuggin' down my street, I can hear the bass blasting out their Cadillac for a long time, but can't really tell where it comes from until they're pretty close. Darn thugs and their thuggin'.

Q:
(c) Again considering both time and intensity difference, what combination(s) of frequency and location of sounds will be easiest to localize?

Me: High pitches, straight on. Intensity shadow. I said most of this in the last question. That's probably why sonar uses a high pitches frequency, eh? Maybe that's also why a bat was attracted by the beeping of our basement smoke detector as it ran out of battery last year and got down there and became stuck on a glue trap and ultimately died and caused the basement to smell weird. Maybe not...

Her: c) so is it wet dog or dead bat...oh yeah the wet dog's in the kitchen. you've got the big pieces....cone of confusion is a cone-shaped area extending and expanding from the ear ....all sounds falling on the cone have equivalent interaural time difference; easiest to localize are NOT directly in front or behind because those are confusible and NOT on the cone of confusion...you've got all the frequency stuff right

Actual Responses from Beav's PSYC 463 Exams, Exam 2

2005-05-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in previous posts, my PSYC 463 professor was (and probably still is) really cool, and doesn't get mad when I completely fuck around on my exams.

Exam two saw me rather pressed for time and thus there is a shortage of funny responses, but I still got a couple out there.

Q: Compare and contrast the information that is available via audition, vision & touch. If you had to lose one of these three senses and could choose which to be without, which would you choose? Carefully explain your answer. (It may be useful to consider how you would ?replace? the information provided by that sense.)

Me: Okay, I run a definite risk of not sufficiently comparing and contrasting the information available via audition, vision and touch because that could (and does) take up a full book...but let's see what I've got.

Vision:
Simulus - Light waves & particles
Principal Organ(s) - Eyes
Receptors - Rods & Cones
Properties - Size, shape, brightness, color, texture, motion
Concept that most blows my mind - Opponent-process color vision

Audition:
Stimulus - Sound waves
Principal Organ(s) - EarsReceptors - Hair cells
Properties - Pitch, timbre, loudness, periodicity
Concept that most blows my mind - Missing fundamentals

Touch:
Stimulus - Pressure, temperature, chemical
Principal Organ(s) - SkinReceptors - Ehm...let's see here...ruffini cylenders, meisner corpussles, merkel discs, nociceptors...mechanoreceptors? Warm & cold fibers.
Properties - Pressure, temperature, stretching, motion, chemicals & extremes of the above (a.k.a. pain), texture
Concept that most blows my mind - Analgesia.

I really hope that'll do for now. I could spend all my time on just that part. I can easily tell you that I would choose to be without vision if I had to choose one of those 3 senses. No way would it be hearing because then my life would be devoid of music and I would quickly hate everything. I'd probably have a total psychotic break if I could never sing again. Also, being without a sense of touch would have to be about the most impossible thing ever to overcome. I have to imagine that it would be immensely difficult to be functional in a world devoid of touch stimulus. Plus which, touch is such a crucial and intimate element of human interaction that having it become a totally meaningless phenomenon would completely suck.

Doing without vision, while tricky at first, would be overcomable. I don't know if "overcomable" was a word before, but it is now. On the downside, I'd never see anything again, but on the plus side, I could still smell, hear, feel, and taste. Also, I'd never have to worry about how to decorate my home or whether or not my girlfriend was good looking, because what difference would it make?!? As if that's not enoguh, I could get a guide dog, which would be awesome, or possibly even a helper monkey, which would be even better. You think you're getting a monkey just because you're deaf? Sorry, I don't think so. They have sign language for that. You don't get a monkey if you can't feel anything either because you'd probly poke him in the eye really hard and not even mean to just because you have no concept of proprioception or kinesthetics. Then the PETA peple would get all pissed and probably throw paint and hemp all over your house or something. Nobody wants that.

Her: I'm glad you take the time to make my grading more interesting. You have really nice start on something you could use for the final here....on your comparisons & contrasts bulk up your consideration of cortical organization.

Q: For your next research project (you?re a dedicated perception researcher, after all!), you plan to study taste identification and discrimination. You intend to use stimuli which you will construct out of mixtures of ?basic? tastes. The stimuli will be liquids administered onto the tongue via an eyedropper. When you present your intentions to your supervisory committee, you get the following comments and questions. Respond to each (be sure to give reasons for your answers!).

(a) Your advisor throws you a softball first question, asking exactly which part(s) of the tongue you will choose to place the taste substances. Why does she raise this question, and what will be your response?

Me: Well I don't see what that has to do with softball, but okay. (Pause...groan...)

She raises this question because she thinks I'm an idiot. (She may be right.) My response is that I will place the substances on the tip of the tongue, and perhaps a little bit on the sides and back, but not in the middle. The tip and sides of the tongue are more sensitive to taste, while the middle of the tongue actually is not really sensitive at all. This is due to the lack of taste receptors there.

(b) The next committee member tells you that there is no basis for your research, as there are no agreed upon ?basic? tastes. How will you respond to this assertion?.

Me: I will stare at them as much as to say, "You bumbling ninnies, why do you question me?" After I've done that, I'll give a pained sigh and then tell thim that in fact there ARE agreed upon basic tastes. They are sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and sometimes umami (much like sometimes "y". it's the lonely outcast of the basic tastes.)

(c) The next clown (oops, I mean esteemed director of your future) tells you that this is a bad idea. ?You?re wasting your time unless you use real taste stimuli, like Twinkies, Oreos and Fudge Stripes. How will you respond to this ?helpful comment?? (Hint: What KINDS (there are more than one) of differences will there be in the information available from the stimuli you suggest and those your committee member proposes?)

Me: Well, I'll inform him/her that varying the conditions by depriving participants of smell or by altering the color of the liquid such that it does not correspond to the expected taste greatly affects the ability of people to identify tastes. If that isn't sufficient, I'll resort to hurling insults based on body weight.

(d) Your final tormentor (you?re beginning to think this committee is MUCH too large!) asks if you plan to allow participants to use their sense of smell during the taste task with the chemical stimuli. For the moment ignore the ethical implications of performing olfactory bulbectomies on forty or so 181 students. Based on the data discussed in class, what will be the relative taste performance levels with versus without smell?

Me: Crappy. You pretty much can't taste without smell. It's science.

Actual Responses from Beav's PSYC 463 Exams, Exam 1 Retake

2005-05-03T03:00:00.000-07:00

If you didn't catch the first in this series of posts, basically my PSYC 463 professor is really cool, and finds it entertaining when I joke around some while answering my test questions. She made the mistake of admitting that she thinks I'm funny, so that loosed a demon right there. The following are some actual responses from when I retook Exam 1.

Q: What is detection? Compare and contrast absolute threshold and difference threshold. Why are thresholds important?

Me: First I'd just like to say that those multiple choice questions were BRUTAL. Easily at least twice as hard as the original exam. You have an amazing ability to select the questions that I told myself, "She won't ask that on the exam."

Detection is basically the realization that a stimulus is present. In an unrelated story, a really attractive girl just sat down next to me. This could be a distraction, but I'll attempt to soldier on.
Absolute Threshold: The minimum amount of enery necessary for a subject to reliably detect the presence of a stimulus.
Difference Threshold: The smallest difference between two intensities of stimuli that can be reliably detected by a subject.

Thresholds are important because they tell us a great deal about the amounts of energy that are necessary for us to be able to perceive the world around us. The range of applications is so huge that I dare not get into it, lest I fail to do it justice and also run out of time. For me personally, thresholds make me aware that there is a whole gamut (bonus word points) of energy in the world, and I'm only aware of the middle-most percentage of said gamut, generally speaking. Threshholds are also important because without them, we'd have noplace to put our doormats and indicate in woven writing to visitors that they are "welcome" in our homes. (Minus 3 terrible joke points)

Her: Need some cheese with that whine? ;-) Remember thresholds help define "normal" and so help us understand perceptual defecits

Q: Define a neural circuit and briefly describe the two basic types. Compare rods vs. cones in terms of neural circuitry, and describe the resulting differences in perception. Briefly discuss whether the nature of human neural circuits argues for a passive fidelity or an active organizational perceptual system.

Me: (First part of response was not funny, just answering the question, I'll pick up where I start being a jackass) This is why when that hot girl sat down next to me and I got her image right on my fovea-o'-cones (scientific name), I could see her in sharp detail. Tall, blonde, thin, red shirt, jeans, etc. I would like to point out at this time that I am not creepy or a stalker, contrary to how it may sound from my example. When I got back to focusing on my exam, she was now in my visual periphery, so while I knew she was still there, more rods than cones were picking up her image, so I just kinda had a general idea that she was there and about how big she was and whether she was moving. (rest of answer is also not funny)

Her: Thanks for making me laugh out loud....you must type well or your exams would take forever, but they are amusing. AND you did a good job answering all parts of the question

Q: What is a feature detector? Describe the kinds of ?specialized? visual feature detectors that appear to exist in bees, frogs and primates. How important are specialized complex feature detectors for visual perception? Are these feature detectors inborn or created through experience (be careful and complete!)? Why might animals have these detectors for some kinds of objects/features, but not for others?

Me: (Most of response is technical and boring) Basically let's explain it this way: think of an animal with a decent visual system, then think of a thing in its environment that it would be really important for that animal to recognize. Got one? There's a feature detector for that. (Your example was a horse, and your environmental thing was hay. If I'm wrong about this...pretend like I wasn't. If I'm right, +10 psychic points.) I could go on like this, but I think you get the idea.

Tangent: The girl who just sat down now is wearing my favorite kind of perfume. How am I supposed to focus with that going on? Honestly...

These specified cells are very important to visual perception, because without them, how would we have an specific vision? The world would be a big, unintelligible blur. If I only had one kind of cortical cell for my vision, I'd run into stuff like the dickens. Okay...maybe that's not a great example, but I really wanted to say "like the dickens". Feature detectors allow us to (duh) detect the features of the world around us, and adjust accordingly.

Now why might animals have feature detectors for some objects but not others? Well, are you a creationist or a Darwinist? Being a Darwinist myself, I'll say that it's probably a combination of chance and adaptivity that was evolved over many many years. They probably had detectors for a ton of stuff once upon a time, but the animals with an abundance of the detectors without practical application probably were less successful in what Dr. Leger likes to call "the reproductive arena". The ones with lots of detectors that helped them survive (such as bees having detectors for flowers, me having detectors for Chipotle) were more successful reproductively, and gradually the species evolved to consist of individuals with abundant, adaptive feature detectors. I know that's oversimplifying it, but it would take many pages to properly explain it in an evolutionary context.
If you're a creationist, the answer is that God wanted it that way, and don't you question Him or you'll burn.

Her: --You invented the horse and hay thing.... --You have skirted around the plasticity issue...almost got there but no-o-o-t quite...remember we landed on the idea that there is certainly the PLASTICITY to develop feature detectors for environmental stimuli that are important --Assuming your Darwin poisition for the moment, would an individual start out with "tons" of feature detectors and have many wither and die? Or would individuals start out with the plasticity to develop feature detectors for those things that enhanced their survival....and so on as you described? (Although I'm still trying to figure out how a feature detector for Chipotle will enhance your reproductive success?????) --Do you really believe that creationism and Darwinism MUST be mutually exclusive? (and no I'm still not telling)....

Q: Briefly compare and contrast the trichromatic and opponent process theories of color perception. Are these theories specificity theories or across-fiber pattern (distributed coding) theories? Why? What was the result of the "clash" of these two opposing theories?

Me: Whoooooooo, briefly huh? I'll see what I can do.
My latest distraction: I'm hungry, and the proctors are eating Papa John's pizza in their little proctor office. Now that's just not cool.

(insert long, boring answer with no jokes)

The debate created a great sexual tension between the theories, but the tension was resolved two were mated after it was discovered that both were correct, and were simply occurring in different parts of the visual sytem.

Q: You're sitting in the basement intently reading a chapter in your perception text for the second time (is this a dream?), when you suddenly notice, out of the corner of your eye, that something is scampering across the floor. You immediately lift your nose out of your book, look around and discover what looks like a mouse about 10 feet away from you. You quietly move a little closer and determine that the mouse is actually your roommate's pet mouse Rover (so named for his propensity for roving aimlessly about).

27(d) Which layers of the LGN will receive information about the "scampering" motion? (Be complete and specific and explain your answer.)

Me: Oh ballacks. To be consistent with my earier answer and avoid cognitive dissonance, I'm going to say layers one and two because they detect motion, but I could be entirely incorrect. The word for those layers completely escapes me. I have a "pu..." in my mind, but all I can come up with are purposive, purfunctory and purgatory, none of which is correct.

Q: 28(a) What perceptual process begins immediately when the lights go out?

Me: Dark adaptation, as well as the audition of my swearing aloud.

28(b) With your reading light out, how long will it take before your ability to see the words in your book will be as good as it's going to get? Explain your answer.

Me: Well that depends...am I to assume that there is still some light available? If there is no light, then I can sit there until the cows come home, I'm not gonna see anything. If there is a little bit of light, then my ability to see the words in my book will be at its best after about 30 minutes, because this will be the time when I've become fully dark-adapted, and am relying mostly on my rods to take in as much light through their little convergent networks as they can. I'll notice a quick increase for 4-6 minutes while my cones adapt, but it won't be great, and after that they're maxed out. It's gonna be a good 30 before those rods are rockin'.

28(c) After about 10 minutes you notice a faint light coming through the crack in a closet door. (Don't ask me why you're still sitting here in the dark....the stories don't get that detailed!) FIRST, why didn't you notice the light before? SECOND, can you expect your perception of the intensity of the light to change over time? Carefully explain your answers.

Well, I didn't notice that light before because there was a bunch of light already in the room. That faint light was too dim to be detected amidst all the existing light. I can expect it to seem brighter (a.k.a. more intense) over time because my vision will adjust to the dark, and I will be better able to perceive the dim light.

More importantly, where did that mouse go? Now it's all dark and he could be anywhere. My roommate will be pissed if I step on his mouse.

Actual Responses From Beav's PSYC 463 Exams, Exam 1

2005-05-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

My PSYC 463 class has all computerized tests that the students take in the testing center at Burnett Hall. Ah, the magic of technology, right? WRONG! This is a room full of computers and people. It is hot, features the noise of scores of clicking keyboards, shuffling backpacks and opening and shutting doors, and has a constant traffic of people coming in and out, and proctors moving around to administer people's exams. In short, it is the opposite of the ideal place to take a test. The typing allows me plenty of time to write "creative" answers on my exams, though. Since my professor is really cool, she appreciates the humor and writes little comments back to me. She has on several occasions told me that she "loves" grading my exams, and saves them as a special break from grading the boring exams of my classmates. The following are actual questions, my actual responses, and my professor's actual reactions from some of my exams.

Q: Where are cortical cells for vision located, and where is the receptive field for these cortical cells? What is a feature detector? Describe the three types of cortical cells and the ways in which they act as visual feature detectors.
OR
What is the sensory code? Describe how each of the specificity coding theory and distributed coding (across-fiber pattern) theory propose that the sensory code works. Which theory is right? (Beware the too simple answer). How do these two theories address the mind-body problem? (Be sure to tell what the mind-body problem is).

Me: Before I begin this question, I would like to share with you that the click-click-clicking of scores of different keyboards in this hot room full of harsh flourescent light is pushing my "freak out" meter increasingly higher.

Ok, now that I've read the question, I have no idea what the answer is. I really was convinced for some reason that since the start date of the test had been pushed back, that the ending date had been pushed back as well, and I am what we call "unprepared" due to the exams being given in literally all of my other classes, as well as extensive rehearsals and performances for vocal groups, work, and a friend visiting from out of town. I was really counting on that extra day or two.

Q: What is detection? Compare and contrast absolute threshold and difference threshold. Why are thresholds important?

Me: Oh thank God, I know this one. I was about to have an aneurism. My space bar squeaks every time I press it. I would pay large sums for a good old pencil-and-paper test right now.
Detection is essentially the ability of an organism (let's use me as an example) to tell that a stimulus is "there". Since we're using examples, let's use my squeaky spacebar as an example of thresholds.

The fact that I am able to hear the squeak EVERY TIME I press space bar is because it produces a stimulus (in this case sound) sufficient for me to DETECT it. I really wish (and suspect that the people around me also wish) that it produced a sound below the absolute threshold of human audition so that we couldn't hear it. I don't think I technically defined absolute threshold in that rant...it's the least amount of a stimulus necessary for detection.

Perhaps it might be better even if the squeaking of my space bar were gradually decreased until I noticed the change--which would be an example of difference threshold, which is the amount of change in a stimulus necessary to realize that there has been a change. Yes, just keep on gradually descreasing the space bar squeak until I can notice the differences (method of adjustment) and then keep on decreasing until it's gone. Either that or throw the keyboard off Oldfather. I'd enjoy that.

Her: At least I'm entertained....hope you were able to laugh at your situation -- or at least that you can in hindsight...SO why are thresholds important?

Q: CHOOSE ONLY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING (be sure I can tell which):

Construct a description of the retina around the duplicity theory. (Be sure to start by briefly describing the duplicity theory).

What is a receptive field, and where are they located (specifically) for each modality? What is a center-surround receptive field and what are the two types? What is center-surround antagonism, and how might it affect the response of a neuron with a center-surround receptive field?

Me: Hey, congratulations, you selected more information I have yet to master. Also, am I supposed to CHOOSE ONLY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING between the first line and second paragraph, or do I select one and only one question? I'm going to assume the former and make an attempt at answering. Ready? Here I go.

A receptive field, as it pertains to vision (and in this question I assume we're discussing vision, but forgive me if I've made an 'ass' of 'u' and 'me') is the area of the eye and its structures that is *receptive* (hence the name) to stimulation. That having been said, I have no idea where they're located, or even what each modality is. How about the retina? The retina sounds like a great place for a receptive field, if only to me.

I have good news though, I do know what a center-surround receptive field is. It's pretty much what the name suggests...there is an area in the center of the field with a particular sensitivity, and a surrounding area with a different sensitivity. The two types are excitatory center with inhibitory surround, and inhibitory center with excitatory surround.

Center-surround antagonism, then, is also precisely what the name suggests. The if the center of the field is excitatory and the surround is inhibitory, then those are *antagonistic* properties, and it might affect the response of a neuron with a center-surround receptive field by making it quite picky about what types of stimuli make its little action potentials fire. I really wish I could draw a picture at this point.

Okay, let's say I have a cat with an electrode in its brain, and his little electrode is on a neuron with said center-surround field. If (between sneezes, because I'm allergic to cats) I show the cat a bar of light that lands in the excitatory center of his neuron and not on the inhibitory periphery, then his little neuron will just go nuts. If I put the bar of light outside the center and into the inhibitory surround, the firing rate will drop below baseline. If I put it somewhere between, you guessed it, the response will be somewhere between.

Unrelated request: Look at the picture of the cats with goggles on from those experiments on sensitive periods of vision development, and try not to laugh. I bet you can't do it, because a cat in goggles is funny looking.

Her: You have a fun sense of humor, Dan! Good job with the center surround stuff. Back to receptive fields...yes for vision it's on the retina. where for the other modalities (senses)?

Q: Describe the physical characteristics of light that are related to our perception of color. (be sure to consider both emitted & reflected light) Respond to the statement, "Each object has its own single wavelength."

Me: Ok, first I'm going to respond to the statement, "Each object has its own single wavelength." Ready?
NUH-UH! NO IT DOESN'T! DOES NOT DOES NOT DOES NOT TIMES INFINITY PLUS ONE!!!

Now, that having been done, I'm going to guess (because I've dealt with an educator or two in my day) that you want me to explain *why* that was my response before you'll give me any credit. Very well, then. Each object does not have its own wavelength, only the light has its own wavelength. An object is just an object, and it appears to be whatever color it appears to be not because it "is" that color, but because we *perceive* that color when we look at it. If a bird looks at the same object, it sees something different, especially if it's a hummingbird. Those little buggers have a crazy visual system. It is the light, not the object, that has the wavelength.

The physical characteristics of light that are related to our perecption of color as essentially wavelength, hue and saturation...but arguably wavelength is the only "physical" characteristic of the light. The lower wavelengths of light will be perceived as violet, then moving upward we see blues and greens, then yellows, oranges and reds at the high wavelenths. Saturation just refers to how much white light is or is not presenet as we perceive the color, and hue refers to...uh...how "true" the color is? I got nothin'...

Q: (Huge story problem. I won't paste it all here, because I know you don't care.)

A. Which event in Josie's experience corresponds the the perceptual phenomenon of detection?

Me: Vision? I'm not sure what you're asking me, but I think I'm supposed to say that she was relying on her vision to initally "detect" the things around her, namely a deer.

Q:
B. Which event in Josie's experience corresponds to the perceptual phenomenon of identification?

Me: The left side of this keyboard sticks, and it's making my left pinky feel really weird. Identification was when our pal Josie said to herself "that's a deer". Also later on when she realized "that is a statue" and "that is a crow" and "I am a moron". Okay, maybe that last part wasn't in there.

Q: E. Which receptors are responsible for Josie's perception of the movement off to the side of the road AND what kind of neural wiring connects those receptors to their ganglion cells?

Me: Yeah, couldn't tell ya. Did I mention I thought I had more time to study? One of the proctors is kinda cute, I can tell ya that.

Q: F. Which pathway from the striate cortex to the extrastriate cortex carried the information about the movement on the side of the road AND which cortical module(s) received this information?

Me: See answer e

Q:
You're at a party talking about the study of perception (this is going past dream into nightmare!) with a friend who is a biology major and insists that the most important way to understand human perception involves studying neural responses. He gives you some examples of response characteristics of primate neurons he's been studying and is wildly surprised at your ability to name the type of neurons he's studying and tell where they're located (make me proud now!).
(a)
What approach to the study of perception is your friend most strongly aligned with?

Me: How about I make you ashamed now? I can much more readily do that. My friend here is pretty deep into the biological/physiolgical approach.

(c)
The next neuron is one that responds best to a 90 degree "corner" of a particular size moving from left to right. What kind of cell is this, where is it located, and where is its receptive field?

Me: That's a....um...right angle cell located in the ehm....yeah ok, I give up.

(d)
Your friend is impressed so far, but he's pretty sure he's got you on this next one. This neuron is specialized to respond to faces. What kind of cell is this, where is it located (be specific), and where is its receptive field?

I can assure you my friend is NOT impressed, and I have already left to get another beer. I have only three words that could possibly help my point total for this question: Fusiform Face Area

(e)
Your brother's girlfriend, who is a postdoc in neurobiology at Cornell, where she is participating in a program designed to integrate the study of neurobiology with the study of behavior, has been eavesdropping on your conversation. She sidles up with a sly grin and asks, "So do you really believe that neural responses of non-human primates tell the whole story about human perception?" What other approach to understanding perception will she try to convince your friend to consider AND how would she suggest integrating this approach with your friend's approach?

I think the more important question is why did she just sidle up to me with a sly grin? She's supposed to be my brother's girlfriend...we're not in olden times here where if he dies she becomes my wife. Really, how does one sidle? If I were to say to you, "Dr. Turnage, show me a sidle." could you do it? I know I couldn't.
I don't remember what approach she's going to pitch to me, but I'll probably beg her to ask my perception professor to let me keep the retake score as my exam 1 score and take pity on me for being a stressed-out moron. If I weren't cracking jokes right now I'd probably be crying.

Her: Better laughing than crying....we'll talk after the retake

Beav Encounters A Cock-Roach

2005-03-17T23:04:00.000-08:00

I'll make short story...well...short I guess. My story begins at about 2:15 in the morning on some weeknight. I don't happen to recall when exactly it was. Now, I don't need to paint you a vivid picture of what I was doing at the time, but sufficed to say that I was at the computer, my pants were around my ankles and had been for around a half hour...and I was looking at "adult" themed websites. You do the math.

What's the point, you ask? Well, when all is said and done, I go to pull my pants up. Thank the sweet Lord that I look at my pants before pulling them up, becuse there in the crotch of my boxers, right about in the "taint" region, sits a huge fucking cockroach. Now, when you find a roach in your underwear, a number of things go through your mind. I'll try as best I can to tell you the questions and the order in which they ran through my mind:

1) What the fuck?!?!?
2) How long has that fucking thing been there? Was it camping out in my pants for hours and I didn't know?
3) Where did it come from?
4) What if I hadn't seen it?
5) Why, of all the places in this house, or the world for that matter, was it attracted to the crotch of my boxers? Is my taint a roach lure?
6) We've never had roaches before...does this mean we have roaches now?
7) How do I kill it without chasing it deeper into my pants?
8) What the FUCK?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Ultimately I stand, angry and dumbstruck, and stare at this cock-roach for a couple minutes, then very gingerly reach for a paper towel, and even more gingerly move in for the kill...I inch toward the roach so as not to raise its suspicions...

I strike.

I miss.

The cock-roach retreats into my pants.

Shit.

I decide that I have no choice but to remove my jeans and boxers and throw them into a scalding hot wash. The trick becomes to get the contents of my pockets out of my jeans and then remove my socks, pants and boxers without touching the roach or flushing it out.

I very careully accomplish this, get a clean pair of boxers from my drawer, shake them down and inspect them thoroughly to make sure they are chode-roach free, put them on and then go fill the washing machine with the hottest water our house has to offer. I take up my clothes and throw jeans, boxers, roach and all into the washer. I then quote the line from Major Payne, "If he's still in there, he ain't happy!" and then get the bug spray out and spray a defensive perimiter around my room. I decide that had I pulled up my pants without looking, the sensation of a roach crawling on my chode would officially have been the most violating feeling I had ever experienced. Worse yet, I would be unable to swat at it in that scenario, lest I damage my genitals, so I would have to find some other weird method of ridding my perenium of the roach. As it stands though, none of that happened and the most violating feeling I've ever experienced is still the first time I ever got open-hand cock-tapped when I was a sophomore in high school.

Postlogue: After removing my jeans from the wash and running them through the dryer at least twice, I found the roach's fragmented body partly in the jeans pocket, and partly in the lint trap. I feel I set an example for roaches everywhere: Stay away from my balls, or I'll kill you thorougly.

The Beav, A-Lamb and Atwood Have a Rap Battle, Take 1

2005-03-02T19:10:00.000-08:00

From time to time my friends Wood, A-Lamb and I like to have online "rap battles" where we essentially make up rhymes as though we were rapping. The upside is that nobody can tell how blatantly white we are online, and some of the stuff is hilarious. The key to finding it funny is 60% catching the references and 40% realizing that we're not serious at all. Here are some highlights:

DDBeavers: territory? bitch, please. I'll bring game so hot you'll get weak in the knees. you'll be sweatin' and droppin' like O-line for the Vikes, 'cause that's how Beav does when Beav steps to the mic

Atwood333: Mutha, you better step off your soapbox. Cause I'm at the podium, spittin' game that rocks. I'm like Richard Nixon, talkin' bout Watergate, But people know I'm the greatest, so this ain't no debate.

fudelco03: Well i got beav and wood with a dose of A' Lamb. When the mic is hot Who is the man. We all know the answer cause he's The cheese. Not saying Whos next in line may i help you please
(refers to the McDonald's employee in Illinois with the ultra high-pitched voice who had Beav, Wood and Maxey laughing until it hurt)

DDBeavers: Now look at young fun-size all up in our room, our sweetass cologne just acquired perfume, so can the female handle our rhymin' styles, or are inches to height like the rhymes is to miles?
(refers to our 5'0" friend Lindsay joining the chat room)

(A-Lamb's little sister joins in)
fudelco03: Well I'm THE little A-Lamb, yes I'm here to say: That I rap hardcore like every-day. Sure my rhymes aren't written out, and they aren't in ink, but it doesn't really matter, it's just what I think
fudelco03: Queen Latifah once said to me, that I don't need a man, just Unity. U-N-I-T-Y you see, it's what I want to happen with you and me. But now it's time for me to say goodbye, so I'll holla atcha later, Adam, get your D outta Ian's Eye.

Atwood333: Oh snap, it seems that that was the last straw. Lindsay left, while A-Lamb put up a guffaw. Now Little Lamb wants up in the mix? Pssh, she's got a grasp on rhyming, like the rabbit does Trix.

DDBeavers: why you got to get mad just 'cause my rhymes is tight? if it came down to need I could kick flows all night. don't think I can't spit verse just 'cause I'm wicked white, 'cause you all I know I gets hot like a halogen light

fudelco03: Ok beav i got your back. Your white as powder the albino mak. He aint got game but he sure tries. But when the women come your skin hurts their eyes

DDBeavers: Dog, why you playin? You got it all wrong. When the women come by I'm all up in their thong. Then when it's time I tear it up like a shark, and it don't matter 'bout my white skin in the dark.

Atwood333: My color ain't salmon, it's more like Maroon, uh. Only thing fishy bout me is when I'm smellin' that tuna. The ladies, I mean. Cause you know I got mack on. And I just felt up your mom, so that's another one I can tack on.

(referring to Lindsay losing her connection and constantly getting booted from the chat room)
DDBeavers: man, why can't she stay her short ass in the room? that girl is trippin' like she was on shrooms. she's got some issues like Sports Illustrated, and I done with this rhyme now. My skill's demonstrated.

fudelco03: Well dan i can see your skill. Except its liek a one legged man climbing up a hill. Its partially tight Like a potato sack race. Cause when the time comes i'll be bustin yo' face

Atwood333: Jeff's not getting the point, this here's a rap battle. You see, I'm spanking these guys, but I ain't got a paddle. It's my words that are lethal, just like that DJ's. So go back with your gay friends, the Khays and BJ's.
(refers to their friend Jeff who tried to join in, but was so horrible he wasn't worth paying attention to.
Khay: a flamboyantly gay guy they knew in high school.
BJ: a total douchebag our friend Ashley Warren once brought to a party of ours. He was a member of Pi Kappa Alpha, and nobody liked him. We suspected him of being a closet homosexual. He had the weakest handshake ever, gave us a fake name, and got into an argument in which he insisted that ALL Asians are short. Dave, Atwood and I were in the kitchen informing Ashley that her boy-toy was a tool, and she was trying to defend him when A-Lamb walked in and without being prompted said "Hey, I dunno about you guys, but I'm not feelin' this guy B.J.", causing all of the guys to laugh our asses off.)

DDBeavers: Well you flow kinda sexy like that girl Minnie Driver, but I flow on the spot like my name was McGuyver. Like the old champ Evander you know I'm the real deal, and I'm off in high gear while you're spinnin' your wheels

byte size 85: spinnin my wheels, pshh, i drive me a hummer/ when you hear me you know its a bummer cause i got more skills than an olympic athlete - should i rap or be runnin in a track meet?

Atwood333: I'm like George Foreman, all up in your grill. But there's no need to cry over the milk that you spill. My rhymes are Benedict Arnold, you think they're committing treason. So, fuck that milk, dawg. These lines are the reason.

DDBeavers: I know you ain't comin' here sayin' I'm gay. Man I'm not in the closet like that guy B.J. I'll shake hands so strong that I'm bending your ring, and I know 'bout tall Asians like the Rockets' Yao Ming

Atwood333: Like A-Lamb to BJ, dude I'm not feelin you. Cause you think you're better than me and you know that ain't true. I got trophies and plaques. Records platinum and gold. My rhymes stay fresh while yours are musty and old.

DDBeavers: Talkin' bout Benedict Arnold? That's back in the day, like pre-Run DMC and NWA, but go back to the bronze age, or whenever you choose, you'll be habilis to my erectus: You ain't got the tools.

Atwood333: Y'all should bow down to my lines as you see 'em. Shit, they're so precious, they should be in a museum. Next to Biggie and Tupac, I'll be hanging on the wall. While you put your weak-ass lines up in the bathroom stall

DDBeavers: When I bust out my verse man I know that you feel this, but when you speak crowds think "Wutchu talkin' 'bout Willis?" Your flow is just rattlin' like a card in your spokes while the ladies go nuts for my different strokes

Atwood333: Bustin' out the old sitcoms? Dude you know that ain't right. Next thing you know I'll be sayin' "DYNOMITE!" Different Strokes? With Janet Jackson and shit? Oh right, that's the lady with the Super Bowl tit.

fudelco03: Maybe it was a mistake asking this fool to come. He needs to go to pre-school and re-learn step one. The rapping game is complex a little to hard for you. Stop rappin right now wait take lindsay with you

Atwood333: Jeff, my man, there's a thing I got to know. How can it be a river when it's got no flow? But don't listen to Lamb, he's got no room to diss. He thinks he can spit, but it just comes out piss.

DDBeavers: I don't know who brought ya'll in, but you're not up to par. It's like we're in the restaurant and you're still in the car. So our food is comin' while we snack on hours'd'erves, but it's just you and Coppock who keep gettin' served

byte size 85: a-lamb i think you have some self-esteem issues. if it weren't for your outbursts here i'd be getting you some tissues

DDBeavers: what is all this now? just two rhymes per verse? that's cheap imitation like a fake Prada purse. If you can't take the heat then you best to quit bitchin, and make like a gay chef and come out the kitchen

Atwood333: Goddammit kids, you got me pissing my pants. I'm so full of laughter, I need to get up and dance. But wait, I'm white. That skill has escaped me. My moving's so painful, you'd think someone ass-raped me.

DDBeavers: Yo I may be snow-white but I know how to dance. Maybe that's why Pike B.J. wants into my pants. But Wood cannot shake it, I know this for fact. His dancin's like his sex, it's all just plain whack

fudelco03: Fuck that shit go back to first grade. Stop your poems you'll never get laid. See i called em that they aren't even raps. Call your grandma and play slap jack

Atwood333: A-Lamb's gonna quit, I think he must be defeated. My wit is so sharp, he must have got shredded-wheated. My stomach's growling. It's time for some dinner. So let's get this over with, and announce me the winner.
DDBeavers: You ain't won a thing, but I see A-Lamb is done. Your meter is broke and your rhymes slippin', son. Just realize your role and resign to the aces, and admit me and Wood put you all in your places.

fudelco03: atwood just stop theres no time on the clock. Just liek your shot it's gonna get blocked. Fuck Dan A-lamb is still here. Capable of rappin but not being a queer. You two go make love and call me later. I will be the one left sayin "Bis Spater"

Atwood333: It's your shit that's blocked. I'm waving fingers like Mutumbo's. So listen with them ears that look just like Dumbo's. You must get this straight, I am sicker than thou. And I keep blockin' them shots, just like my name's Yao.

DDBeavers: If we're bringing back Yao, then let's bring back OddJob, who reminds me of Wood, only not such a slob, just like he threw sharp hats now I'm throwing the verse, and he could take off heads, but I'll do you one worse 'cause I'll take off your pride and you're left all alone, and your friends are ashamed to have you in their phone, so you're sittin' bored like A-Lamb on a weekend, 'cause he's stranded in Wayne while I'm straight Lincoln-freakin'

Atwood333: Dude, you went to that level? you know that ain't right. Cause I got plenty of things that'll make up for height. My spit, my game, my bottle o' Hennessey. My friends and family, and oh yeah... my big ass D.

fudelco03: Ian your D is as big as my toe. When i step to the mic i bust my flow. Dan is mad cause his girls a hog. but he should really stop hittin it raw dog

DDBeavers: "My big ass D" must mean my first initial, cause when it comes to size, man I'll make it official. I bring it so deep she'll say "Careful big man" so I'll assume that your "D" was just shorthand for "Dan"

DDBeavers: Yeah man, you got a point about using a rubber, cause I hit girl after girl after girl then another, and when you push your luck man something's gonna give. I'd best wrap it up 'fore I catch me the hiv

Atwood333: Shit Dan, you must not be GWA. Cause what you thought I meant, sounds pretty much gay. I'm sorry if I made the atmosphere tensed. But Dan's wack flow has got me totally incensed.

DDBeavers: Man, I stay up too late just to whoop your punk ass, I gotta be up for a nine-thirty class. But it's gonna be cool, it won't cause me no strife, 'cause you can be half-asleep for Weight Training for Life

fudelco03: ok heres the deal 930 is weak 7 is better. i got to eat breakfast with a bed wetter. im about dead and i need to wake up. after a few more rhymes i'll just give up. hey dan come get this chick. SHes all about dissin a-lamb and his dick. Theres one thing that she dont know. Is that my reinforcements are coming good bye to you hoe

DDBeavers: A-Lamb, just give up now. You've been done for a fortnight. Your rhymes show complete lack of talent and foresight. I'm making you sleepy like Ted Debiase, and we're tired of watching you like your name was Dagrassi

Atwood333: What I suggest for your current debacle. Is that you aim for her eye and give her some spackle. Tricks don't need to be nasty, all up in your biz. So that's why I suggested the solution of jizz.

DDBeavers: Yeah, Wood has the skillz, what he lacks is the speed. When I'm cuttin' the rhymes all he can do is just bleed. He gets off some good ones, but his skills are still porous, and I bet he relies on a Roget's Thesaurus

Atwood333: Thesaurus? Bitch, please. I wrote that book. I think you need its services, so you best take a look. Antonyms, synonyms, it don't even matter. The rhymes that I spit just get phatter and phatter.

DDBeavers: Can't deny, that was tight, it may end up a draw, 'cause our skills are refined while them two are just raw. Me and Wood battlin' verbal just ends up stalemates, but for sure you two's cane and we're straight C & H

DDBeavers: I bring sugar to words 'cause my rhymes are all sweet. Anyone wants to test should just drop to my feet, 'cause that's where they all end when the rhymin' has stopped, 'cause I'm an active volcano; I cannot be topped

byte size 85: i'm sweet like sugar not tangy like a booger, lick me if you want a taste, or stay home and masturbate!!!!

DDBeavers: You can talk about sex, but it's clear you can't ryhme, but me and lovemaking is like years on good wine, the whole neighborhood's gonna be hearing you cryin', 'cause I just just keep on gettin better with time

Atwood333: So between me and Beav, when we reign, the shit pours. So you need an umbrella like the Morton Salt girl adorns. Speaking of wet, that's what I make the ladies do. Their panties getting so soaked, you'd swear they're see-through.

DDBeavers: and speaking of panties, they're stacked on my floor, 'cause when I hit it once they all come back for more, and when she gets strapped in and ready to ride, I do it up like spelunking and get deep down inside

Atwood333: When it comes to ladies, I've got quite a tally. So many nicks and notches, the shit'd fill up an alley. Whap that, tap that, mark it with an "I". Them ladies get branded when they give me a try.

DDBeavers: talkin' 'bout notches and serving the dick? Shit, mine gets more use than a Whacking Day stick. Yeah, best believe I just went to the Simpsons, 'cause no realm can hold the extent of my pimpin'

DDBeavers: and if it's like Whacking Day then put on Barry White, and watch me get down then back up through all hours of the night. When I'm all set again she'll say "It's good, but no more. You're just so much man, that shit's making me sore."

Atwood333: We keep setting the bar, higha and higha. I get more poon than my boy Jebidiah. Springfield, that is. The town that they're from. But like Barry White to the snakes, I make the ladies come.

DDBeavers: Well you can't help but see we both brought Barry White, 'cause our minds is alike and our rhymes is like, tight. With me and Da Wood ain't no duo can step, 'cause we got more dope rhymes than there's assholes at Prep

Beav, A-Lamb and Wood Have A Rap Battle, Take 2

2005-03-02T17:12:00.000-08:00

We shouldn't, but we did. Again.

DDBeavers: but I should warn you if you wanna step to my rhymes, I'll throw a beat and a right and crack your skull 2 times, so if you wanna kick it with the Beav, you'd best to bring your A-Game or just give up and leave

fudelco03: how ya livin beav?

DDBeavers: yo I'm livin' phat or sucka didn't you know? I make them fools look cornier than LFO, I'll drop a rhyme, take a breath, drop another and then, eat me a cadbury egg and do it over again

Atwood333: A-Game? Fool, just check the last name. Most folks see Atwood and then they get tame. But your brain's broke, dumb enough to step. Got so many rhymes, I'll rap till I get strep.

fudelco03: Oh man rusty i am i'm not flowin as fast as i can, trying to rap but my rhymes are broke, might just say screw it i've already choked

Atwood333: Shoot, man. I make this look easy. Just got done strokin that "Girl from TV" Flow so scary, I make the kids flock. Flappin' my wings, going "Bock bock bock"

DDBeavers: listen to this fool, soundin' like a chicken head, I assualt a rhyme so hard it's one more kick from dead. if you didn't know I got the A-1 rep, and I'll kill like penicilin that'll off your strep

Atwood333: A-1 rep? So you like steak sauce. Well, I ain't got beef so you must be at a loss. Make you my bitch, run you on some errands. Oh by the way, could you pick up some Lea and Perrins?

DDBeavers: I know you didn't send me for the worchestershire, I'm gonna run you over like I was monster truck tires. You'll get scorched so bad you'll be all covered in soot, while I just keep roarin' on just like my name was Bigfoot.

Atwood333: Monster trucks, huh? Well I'm the Gravedigger. Your fame stays small while mine gets bigger and bigger. My concert's soon. Invitation's sent. Screamin' "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" cause it's the main event.

DDBeavers: Well Sunday Sunday Sunday was the Lord's day of rest. You'd better follow his example; I'm in my Sunday best. I'll tell it like the preacher: your soul's in rap purgatory, you'd better get on your knees and start to worship my glory

fudelco03: dude, i might declare myself officially weak.............

DDBeavers: you ain't declarin shit, I'll do it for you son. Your rhymes was out of line before they'd even begun. If was you I'd stick to coinin' new slang and leave the real rappin to the Harper 8 gang

fudelco03: It's time to switch A-lambs ready. About to make my rebutles extra mc heavy. You guys are tight but here comes the End Make sure you realize your still my friends. Sorry to say your raps are lame go back to school or qit this game

Atwood333: Shit. son. Better quit your griping. Just go pick up a copy of "Mavis Beacon teaches Typing" Speaking of, I got something to teach too. So sit down, kid. Rap Class ain't through.

DDBeavers: Look at you, citing obscure computer games. They must remind you of your flow: it's been neutered and it's tame. You try to shift gears but your lexicon stalls, and you try to bust rhymes, but you got no rap balls

fudelco03: Holy shit i've met my match i got beav on one hand and wood in class. Back off before my flow starts to rise. A-lamb enters puttin tears in your eyes

DDBeavers: and if you're teaching "rap class" then I got ADD. your verse isn't tight enough to motivate me. You're doing all your best and you're just bustin your hiney, but I just sit here and think "Ooooooh shiney!"

Atwood333: I don't care about you and your psych's... now what was I saying? Oh! Wanna ride bikes? Anyways, you're the load-blowin' expert up in this place. Now go grab a towel and wipe off your face.
(refers to the joke:
How many kids with ADD does it take to change a lightbulb?
One to hold the ladder and...hey, wanna go ride bikes?!?)

DDBeavers: yeah the kids with ADD they say "let's go ride bikes" but if you're askin' me I say "let's go rock mics", as for nut bustin' I know a thing or two, and like she had flakes, I get her head & shoulders too

fudelco03: Wanna ride bikes...Bring a water bottle. cause i have just entered a state of full throttle. do me a favor and quit right now. before i destroy you through these raps somehow

fudelco03: Beav here you go settin the bar low. i dont even have to rap but i'll give it a go. Here come the ryhmes so grab your glasses. Put off on rappin before i slap them asses

DDBeavers: hey yo A-Lamb whutchu say about some lowass bar? your rymes are so far down they don't show on my rap-dar. I'll make em' bob their heads so hard that they all break their necks, while your words don't even count 'cause they're below the hard deck

Atwood333: Below the hard deck means disqualified. There's no getting Jester. Shouldn't even have tried. Your raps are useless. Don't know how to think. And just like Slider, *sniff sniff*, you stink

fudelco03: Ok shit time to make things clear. I havent rapped in over a year. But it still dont matter please bring your best. Cause after i'm through you'll be put to rest

DDBeavers: Hard deck my ass, we nailed that S.O.B. and you can't catch up because I'm going Mach-3. I spit a verse so hot you'll melt just like a candle, and you wanna eject but you can't reach the handle

Atwood333: What the hell?
Atwood333: I have a call from Manitoba...

DDBeavers: Man who the hell is calling you from up in Manitoba? I hear they got such fly bartenders I'd never be soba, but forget about Canadia, it's too cold for me. You'll never hear The Beav claiming Vancouver, BC

The Bathtub Dogs go to Lansing

2005-02-02T16:18:00.000-08:00

This past weekend, The Beav, along with The Bathtub Dogs (http://www.bathtubdogs.com/) journied to Lansing, Michigan to compete in the International Competition of Collegiate Acapella. Here are some of the highlights:

1/28 3:30 PM

We are supposed to be loaded up and leaving. We are actually on the way to pick up our student-director, Scott. He was supposed to pick up the vans at about 2:30, but instead I'm getting him from his house. Needless to say, we will not be leaving on time.

1/28 3:50 PM

I climb up into the dark grey van that will be my home for the next 12 hours or so. I quickly discover that my dad was right when he described driving a passenger van as being, "like driving a box of cheerios". This thing has a turning radius of about half a mile, goes 0-60 in probably 10 minutes or so, and in no way whatsoever can be described with words like "sporty", "sexy", "aerodynamic", "fuel-efficient", or any other word you would use to describe a desirable vehicle.

1/28 4:45 PM

We are at Greg's house in Omaha. We have come there to get a tape adapter so that we can play CDs, otherwise we'll probably lose our fucking minds. While we're there, we get some duct tape to cover up the sign on the back of the van that says "THIS VAN'S MAXIMUM SPEED IS 65MPH. IF SPEEDING, CALL 1-800..." When we finish, you can see that there is clearly a big orange sign on the back of our van that has now had the text obscured with duct tape. I hope that nobody called the University while I was doing 80 on the way up to Omaha. We hit the road again.

1/28 7:15 PM

We are in Des Moines, and I'm eating McDonald's for the first time since seeing Super Size Me. Up to this point I had been eating a very healthy diet and exercising regularly. Now I'm eating fried food with cheese on it, washing it down with a pop, and then getting in a van and sitting for hours. The guilt that is pulsing through me is exceeded only by the greasy deliciousness of my double quarter-pounder with cheese. From somewhere inside, I hear my arteries scream, "NOOOOOOO!!!!!! WE WERE DOING SO WELL!!!!!!" I tried to get the guys to eat someplace decent, but the overwhelming consensus was that they'd rather save three bucks per meal and eat utter shit all weekend. After we finish our meal, we take our duct tape to where the other van is parked and cover up its sign about speeding. After that we make a big duct tape penis on their back window.

1/28 9:30

We learn that the other van is somewhere around Iowa City, while we are nearly in Illinois. The other van had been right behind us, but Scott somehow confused our van with a Jeep Cherokee and followed them off the interstate and got lost. Did I mention he smokes weed and drinks too much? Let it be known: getting wasted can turn you into a moron.

1/29 3:00 AM

I'm still driving. I've been the only one driving the entire time. I'm losing my mind. We pass Climax, Michigan, and think it is the funniest thing ever, especially because it's only a few miles from the interchange to take I-69 North. We call the other van to tell them that they'll want to go with 69 after they reach Climax. We wish we had a camera. We also realize that Michigan is on Eastern time, so we've lost an hour. We are not pleased at this.

1/29 4:30 AM

I am driving aimlessly around Lansing. I know the exact address of our hotel, but cannot find it because Link declined to put the road atlas or map to our hotel into the van when he transferred the items out of my car. Among the other things he didn't move from the trunk to the van: two air mattresses. More on that later.

1/29 4:50 AM

We have found our Super 8 hotel, and I'm struggling to check in because I've just driven 12 hours, and the Indian guy behind the counter is mumbling through the glass separating the desk from the lobby. I slide him my credit card and get room keys, and this is all I care about.

When I get to my room, I discover that there are hairs on either side of my pillow. My mind is awash with images of the horrible things that may have happened on these sheets which seem not to have been washed. I am too tired to care. I go to sleep.

1/29 6:45 AM

The guys from the other van have arrived. We have 3 hotel rooms for 15 guys, so obviously some people are looking at sleeping on the floor. This wouldn't be a problem had Dave remembered the air matresses...but he didn't. Matt Engler is relegated to sleeping with Tim Pederson on an air matress designed to hold one person. I wish I could witness this spectacle, but it would require me to get up and walk to another room, so I don't. All 4 guys now in the room are so tired that literally anything is funny. We laugh hysterically for about a half hour about things that aren't comical, then finally crash at around 7:15 AM.

1/29 11:15 AM

I wake up to the sound of my phone vibrating against the desk, as does everyone else in the room. It vibrates twice, then stops. This could only be Ashley sending me a text message. I try to go back to sleep, but I don't quite pull it off because the message alert on Will's phone keeps fucking beeping, and he's also taking up more than half the bed. I am acutely aware of how much I prefer sharing a bed with Ashley to sharing a bed with Will, and I decide to check my text message. It's her complaining about how her roommates woke her up. Irony, anyone? I spend the next half hour or so angrily texting Ashley about how she woke me up...not because I'm especially mad, but because I like to give her shit.

1/29 12:10 PM

Scott comes into our room with two plastic cups. Each cup is filled about 1/3 of the way with an anonymous green liquid. Scott explains that since the hotel does not provide complimentary bottles of the little shampoos, he went and asked the Indian guys at the desk for some shampoo. They, evidently, took a big bottle of Pert Plus from behind the desk and poured some into plastic cups. This was to be our community shampoo. At this point I'm really glad I brought my own shampoo and my own towel. Half the group is waiting for the Indian guys to finish drying towels so that they can shower. I'm already clean.

1/29 1:00 PM

The Dogs will be performing in the standard dress shirt/tie and jeans ensemble tonight, so I go to the front desk to see about getting an iron so that I can remove the multitude of wrinkles from my dress shirt as well as the pleats that my dryer put into my jeans. Good news is that the Indian guys have an iron. The bad news, they tell me, is that there is no ironing board. One guy turns to the other and through his thick accent says "Yeah, we should really buy one of those." I try to avoid showing my disbelief at how crappy the hotel is and go back to my room to iron on the wooden desk. I'm sure that's not a fire hazard.

1/29 6:10 PM

We are in sound check for the competition, and it is becoming rapidly evident that the guy running the sound board doesn't know shit about sound board operating. We basically have to tell him exactly how we will be placing our microphones, and what level the mics should be. I sound check my solo, and tell him that I'll want my mic turned down "a lot" lower than it is for the show. More on that later.

1/29 7:30 PM

Half an hour until show time, and our dressing room smells horrible. At least half the group has crapped in the bathroom, which is really little more than a cement closet with a toilet in it. We're basically trying to stay awake considering the most sleep any of us got is around 4 hours. We're passing time by making fun of each other and throwing things at each other's genitals. Showtime cannot arrive soon enough...

1/29 8:40 PM

We're heading into the last song of our set, and it's going very well. The audience, while at first in disbelief, eventually accepted the fact that we did sing "I Wanna Sex You Up" by Color Me BADD for our second song, and even liked it. It's now time for my solo, and I can feel a wave of nervousness wash over me. My throat gets dry, my breathing gets shallow, and I get PISSED. I haven't been nervous to sing in years. What the fuck?!? The song starts off well enough, and I'm mellowing out, and then once I get to the verse, the sound guy turns my mic way up. SON OF A BITCH. Now I have to sing really quietly to keep from blowing out the audience and totally drowning out the group behind me. Not only that, but having to sing quietly is probably the hardest thing to do when you're already nervous and dried out. Long story short, I kinda choke and end up giving a really average performance. While not terrible, it might be the worst I've done the song, and that makes me cranky.

1/29 10:40 PM

We find out that we've gotten second place, which means we will advance to the Regional Semifinals in Madison, Wisconsin. I am no longer pissy about my solo now, because I realize that I could have knocked it out of the fucking park and we'd still have been second. The guys who get first were ridiculously awesome to watch, so we probably weren't even close to them in points. Jeff Orosco wins the award for best soloist, and we are pretty pleased for having come into Michigan and beaten all the Michigan groups. Only the University of Illinois group has topped us. We are pleased at our quasi-victory, and will now go get drunk.

1/29 11:00 PM

We are driving back to the hotel to change, and at the urging of somebody in the back of the van, I stop to ask a group of girls if they need a ride to the party. They surprisingly accept, and pile into the van. It quickly becomes evident that at least one of them has become a psycho Bathtub Dogs groupie since we performed. I learn that they're all freshman, most of them are stupid, and basically all of them really wanna do us. I haven't been able to figure out if they're cute yet, because they're wearing coats and I'm still driving the van. One of them tries to tell me that we're driving the wrong way to go to our hotel, but I elect not to listen to her. I am right to make this choice, because 15 minutes and a beer stop later, we're back at the Super 8, as is our other van. I hop out and yell, "I picked up beer and Freshmen! Just a quick change and we're ready to party!"

1/29 11:45 PM

We have arrived at the party, which is being held at some crappy house. The place is packed with people. We spend about the first 20 minutes pressed up against the wall in a narrow hallway that leads to the kitchen. Evidently nobody has managed to tap the keg yet, but I don’t care because I have my own beer. At this point I get a good look at the girls we picked up. None of them is hot. Not even a little bit. The best-looking one of them, “TheDecentOne” is maybe a 7 out of 10. One of them might be cute if she were in shape and didn’t have teeth pointing at every possible angle. Now that I get a good look around the party, I notice two things:

1) There are maybe 5 girls here.
2) They are all ugly.

1/30 12:05 PM

I am told to go up to the 3rd floor of the house, because evidently there are couches and a stripper pole up there. I am enticed not so much by the pole, but the couches. I go upstairs and sit on a couch, and continue drinking while I stare blankly at other people in the room and listen to the skipping CD playing on somebody’s crappy stereo. Some of the girls have followed us up there, and I am presently very worried that some of them might take their clothes off if they get drunk. Soon somebody comes up to tell us we can’t be up there, and I’m relieved.

1/30 12:40 AM

Somebody has spit out gum on a chair in a very dark room, and I’ve sat in it. I am now picking gum off my jeans and sending text messages to Ashley because that’s more fun than the party. TheDecentOne is flirting with me. I’d flirt back if she wasn’t a freshman and totally self-involved. She takes my phone away from me, but quickly gives it back after she sees that I'm going to get pissed rather than engage in further flirtation to get it back. I get the rest of the gum off my jeans and begin making fun of people who are “dancing” in the living room. I put dancing in quotations because they dance precisely like you’d expect drunken white kids from Michigan to dance.

1/30 1:00 AM

I’m in the kitchen, singing a song I don’t know with guys from at least 5 different acapella groups. Scott starts making fun of me from across the room because I had previously warned the rest of the guys in the group not to be “that guy” who does exactly what I’m presently doing. I’d care more, but I’m starting to get drunk, and anything is more fun than sitting in the other room watching people try to dance.

1/30 3:00 AM

We are leaving the party, and the girls we’ve met hug us all before we go. TheDecentOne hugs me just a little too long considering I’m somebody she just met and she hasn’t been drinking. On the way outside, I somehow get talked into carrying some random girl to her car, which is around the back of the house. That having been done, we all pile into the van and instruct Shoes (our designated driver) to take us to get food.

1/30 3:15 AM

I am drunk dialing people and telling them all about the acapella competition, as though they’ll understand or care. I call at least 8 people.

1/30 3:35 AM

We are at White Castle, and I’m talking to Ashley. I’m moderately drunk, and even still the smell of grease is powerful. We decide that 5 of us will split what the people of White Castle call a “crave case”. It contains 30 little cheeseburgers. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to get our food, but I don’t notice because I spend most of my time perched atop the trash bin, drunkenly narrating our activities to Ashley and quoting Anchorman. The Burger King employees across the room think we are hilarious, but we're not sure why.

1/30 3:50 AM

We are eating our “crave case”. I am drunk, and this shit still doesn’t taste good. The case consists of 30 “sliders”, which are basically half-sized cheeseburgers that are so greasy they come with holes in the bun. They also have onions on them. I eat my six and imagine the digestive horrors that will likely result from mixing this crap with beer. More on that later.

1/30 11:00 AM

Despite our plans to get up at 9:30, we’ve only just gotten up. We pack, pick up some doughnuts and hit the road. I drive until we get into eastern Iowa, and then move to stretch out in the back of the van at about 6:00 PM.

1/30 6:30 PM

The first of my White Castle/beer farts is released. The smell is much akin to rotting flesh stuffed with onions. Everyone in the van is instantly infuriated, and Greg attempts to stick his nose out the 2” gap created by opening the back window so that he can get fresh air. I’m so tired that everything is funny to me again. I'm laughing hysterically at the scene. I can feel a whole lot more gas on the way. This is going to be hilarious.

1/30 7:30 PM

Greg is ready to go on a killing spree. Over the last hour I’ve been upping the ante with my farts, having gone from just farting to farting and wafting it at Greg, to farting on Greg’s head, and ultimately to dropping my pants and farting on Greg’s head with my bare ass. He’s averaging about 0.78 seconds from the time I fart until the time the horrid stench assaults his nostrils and he lunges for the window to seek oxygen. Nobody in the van is pleased with the smell, but everyone else thinks Greg’s reactions are hilarious. This is even funnier than the time I subjected everyone on my plane home from D.C. to my Captain Morgan/Chipotle farts.

1/30 10:30 PM

We have arrived back in Lincoln, and are vacuuming out the van and removing the duct tape from the back. Several people comment on how we can vacuum up the chips and dirt from the floor, but the stench of my White Castle farts and everyone’s sweat will probably never come out. I drop everyone off, return the van and head back home. It wasn’t much of a road trip, but it had its amusing points.

The Streets of the City of Lincoln are Plowed by Dipshits

2005-01-05T14:39:00.000-08:00

Ah, the temperatures are down into the single digits, and the wind chill is into the negative double digits. It's a lovely time to be a Nebraskan, and by "lovely" I mean "Goddamn miserable". Here is what I did last night and why I hate being in this city in the winter:

8:30 PM - It is snowing, and all the meteorologists are predicting fucking doomsday. The radar shows a band of snow that starts in the southern part of Kansas and rolls to the northeast, right up over my fair city. The snow is predicted to last all night long and possibly the next day. One weatherman uses the word "thundersnow", which sends waves of sheer terror washing over me. I've seen thundersnow once, and I was pretty sure that the earth was going to fly out of orbit and explode shortly thereafter. I'm sorry, but it should not thunder and snow at the same time. It just shouldn't. Thunder is for summer, snow is for winter. No mixing.

Meanwhile, the geniuses who make municipal decisions for the City of Lincoln (the same morons who employed me in the summer months) have declared a "snow emergency", whatever the hell that means. If they're insinuating that I should stay inside, consider it done, because the wind chill is Goddamn -11 degress. It's not like I was gonna go for a jog in that shit. There is a huge list of school closings and event cancellations across the bottom of the screen as I watch USC decimate, rape and pillage Oklahoma just like the real Men of Troy used to do to...uh...Sparta or whoever. By the time they're done I think I can see the head of Jason White is on a pike at midfield to serve as a warning to all college football teams that challenging emperor Pete Carroll and his great general Norm Chow will not be tolerated.

8:45 PM - I look outside, and I can still see blades of grass peeking through the 2" of snow on the ground. I wonder when Lincoln turned into Nashville, because only Southerners could possibly consider this a "snow emergency". I believe you'd be slapped in Minneapolis for using the words "snow" and "emergency" in the same sentence until there's at least two feet on the ground. As I look out the door, it is snowing so lightly that I'd barely be excited if I were skiing the next day...but then I realize that for the dipshits of the Lincoln plow crews, this really is an emergency. Why are they dipshits? Well, firstly I suspect that they have maybe 2 plows, and secondly they don't know how to use the ones they have. More on that later.

9:15 PM - There is a knock at the door. Ben is already here, so I have no idea who else it could be. I open the door and see a girl of maybe 13 years old. She tells me that "we're shoveling walks in the neighborhood". She has just used the first person plural, and yet I see no one else. I let it go. At first I'm tempted to hire her for the job just to see how long it would take a girl her age to shovel our sidewalk (It takes me about 5-10 minutes because we have like 2 square feet of sidewalk), but I decide against it. I also decide against citing the multitude of reasons why I don't want her and her imaginary friend to shovel our walk, but I'll list them here for your amusement:

1) It's 9:15 and has only been snowing for about 2 hours. It's supposed to snow all night long and continue the next day. If I pay to have it shoveled now, sure my walk will be clear, but I'd better go and dance around on it or something because there could very well be another foot of snow on it by the time I come outside in the morning. I'll just have to do it again later and might as well have saved the money, which from the looks of this girl would have gone straight to Twinkies and/or PCP.

2) Our sidewalk is completely insignificant. It consists of maybe a 15 X 3 foot stretch leading up to the house and another 45 X 3 stretch across the front lawn. As I mentioned, it takes me about 5-10 minutes to clear it, so it's not like she'd be saving me much trouble.

3) I'm 22 years old. I'm in the physical prime of my existence. If ever there was a time in my life when I didn't need somebody to do physical labor for me, let alone a pre-pubescent girl, it's now. Add to that the fact that I have literally done nothing but play X-Men Legends with every free moment I've had since I bought the game around a week ago, and I really could use the exercise.

4) I bought a couple good shovels last winter after I got fed up with using the plastic, shitty, little Maxey-sized ones that Andrew bought, but then it didn't snow after that so I never got to use them. It's an obscure form of torture for a man to buy something from the hardware store and then not get to use it. Don't believe me? Go buy a power drill and try not to use it. I bet you drive a screw into something out of sheer curiosity.

5) There are two fucking inches of snow on the ground. Unless there's going to be a gnome parade down my sidewalk, it'll probably be passable for another few hours.

As it is, I tell her "no thanks" and go back to watching the game. I stop watching that at halftime and play some more X-Men while Ben surfs the ol' innerweb. Eventually Ashley gets off work, and we begin a text message negotiation about which of us is coming over to whose place. The negotiation finally ends at around 1:15 in the morning and after probably about an extra dollar or so in message fees on my phone bill. Why we can't just call each other I'm not sure...evidently we're still in that casual, "texting" phase of the relationship. Besides, why breeze by with the ease of speaking when you could painstakingly type sentences on a 9-button keypad? I hate our generation sometimes, I really do.

1:50 AM - I am driving to Ashley's place, and I have to stop while four people switch cars in the middle of the road in front of me. I have no idea why this happens or why it needed to happen in the middle of the street. The two from the rear car get in the front car, and then the two from the front go to the rear car. Then they drive away and turn off on separate streets. I try not to think about it, lest my brain explode, killing me instantly.

1:52 AM - I am driving down "O" Street, and doesn't look like it has been plowed, nor does 27th Street. Let me break that down for you. It's been about 5 hours since it started snowing, and there is no evidence that there has been even one plow down either of the two biggest streets in a city of 200,000+ people. WHAT THE FUCK?!? I get to 17th and Q and see that there has been some limited plowing of Q Street, but only the outside two lanes, as usual. For those of you not from Lincoln, let me explain. The streets downtown are one-way and usually 3 lanes wide. When the plows come through, they plow the outside two lanes, and don't touch the middle lane. This means that much of the snow from the other lanes gets piled into the middle, making it a virtual roadblock to most passenger vehicles. Again, WHAT THE FUCK?!? Now I'm no mayor, but I've always been from the school of thought that says that when you plow a street, you should make it easier to drive on, not harder. What if I turn right onto a street, and then need to turn left further down the street, and am not driving a Humvee? I just have to make 3 more right turns to get in direction I'm going? Plow the middle lane you dipshits!!!

Now let's talk about what they use to plow the streets. Lots of big plow/sand trucks like Omaha uses so they can get the whole job done well and all at once? Nope. Bulldozers. Fucking bulldozers. Firstly these things have a maximum speed of 25-30 miles per hour most of the time, so don't expect them to arrive wherever they're going anytime soon. Secondly they get shitty fuel economy, which means they have to return and refuel more often. Thirdly, they can't spread sand or salt, so you need a separate vehicle for that. Fourthly you need very specific training to drive a bulldozer, so good luck finding plenty of people to work on your plow crew. Fifthly, do you think you can plow side streets where there are parked cars with a bulldozer? No, no you can't, unless the residents are o.k. with having their cars bulldozed, which they generally are not. Basically what that means is that the side streets don't get plowed at all. In our case we're lucky, because some guy with a Wrangler and a plow blade clears our street. If a Wrangler doesn't sound like a good vehicle with which to plow snow, it's because it's not. Sometimes he gets enough weight on the front end to make the whole car tip forward on two wheels, which is funny to watch.

Of course by the time this all happens, I've already shoveled my car out, which means it gets plowed in again and I have to shovel it out. If you think Dave helps with this, think again. He has an SUV, so he doesn't give a fuck and just throws it in 4-wheel and packs down big ridges of snow so that they are unshovelable. He takes particular delight in informing me when I've been plowed in again so that I have to go shovel ice chunks for a half hour.

Basically the long and the short of it is that if you threw a plow blade on the Ram, I could probably do a better job of plowing all of downtown by myself than the morons who are currently paid to do it. For those of you who live in Omaha, give a shout-out to your snow crews, because those guys actually get shit taken care of. I never appreciated it until I came here, where the streets are plowed (or in many cases, not plowed) by dipshits.

Fuck Seasonal Affective Disorder

2004-11-29T16:15:00.002-08:00

Hey kids, it's that time again! That's right, it's the magical time of year when the days become short, the temperatures plummet, the leaves fall off the trees, and all of Lincoln looks like one flat, grey, dirty, God-forsaken expanse of shit. This is the time of year when Nebraska looks like what you would expect a state named "Cold, Bleak Wasteland" to look like. This is the time of yeah when one of my more charming little quirks springs to action. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: Seasonal Affective Disorder. This little gem, along with the cold, is why I HATE the winter.

"But Beav," you ask, "what's Seasonal Affective Disorder?" Well, I'll tell you. Seasonal Affective Disorder is essentially a mood disorder in which certain people (namely me) tend to suffer symptoms of mild-to-severe depression during the winter months due to the lack of light. I'm lucky in that either my symptoms are mild enough or I'm vigilant enough about my mood that I don't get officially depressed. What, you ask, does a lack of light have to do with a higher instance of depressive symptoms? Well, as with most psychological phenomena, they're not exactly sure, but there are a few prevalent theories.

There has been decent evidence to suggest that serotonin "dysregulation" occurs in people with SAD. Let me translate that for you: "Something weird happens with their serotonin levels, but we're not always sure what or why." Serotonin is a major culprit in depressive disorders, which is why many anti-depressants are SSRIs, or Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. Basically not having enough serotonin bums you out. Serotonin is largely produced during sleep, which is why exhausted people are no fucking fun, and may also be why people with SAD want to sleep so much more during the winter.

Another theory proposes that the brain produces excess melatonin because of the excess of dark conditions. Melatonin excess is thought to be linked to depression.

SAD has been around for a long, long time. It was first documented as a phenomenon sometime before 1845, but wasn't officially named and recognized until the 1980s. It is now classified in the DSM-IV and most estimates say that around 10% of the general population suffers a noticeable shift in affect during the winter.

People who get to party with SAD every winter enjoy such symptoms as these:

1) Regularly occurring symptoms of depression (excessive eating and sleeping, weight gain) during the fall or winter months. (Yep, that's me. Just ask Dave how fucking much I've slept lately. It's a lot. Also, don't ask me how I gained 5 pounds all of a sudden when I can't gain weight any other time even if I try.)
2) Full remission from depression occurs in the spring and summer months. (Yep. Ever hang out with me in the spring and summer? I'm like a giddy 5-year old half the time.)
3) Symptoms have occurred in the past two years, with no nonseasonal depression episodes. (Yep, unless you count getting dumped in harsh fashion and having to recover from that as a depression episode...which I guess you can if you want, but at least I had a reason.)
4) Seasonal episodes substantially outnumber nonseasonal depression episodes. (Yep. Ask Barker or Rachael what a little bitch I suddenly become and how much more moral support I require once daylight savings time switches back.)
5) A craving for sugary and/or starchy foods. (Not sure I can count this one, as I crave these foods all year, and also Thanksgiving was only last week. There was pretty much nothing but turkey, sugar and starch on that table.)

6) Feeling of fatigue and inability to carry out normal routine (lllllllllike a MOTHERFUCKER)

7) Feelings of misery, guilt and loss of self-esteem, sometimes hopelessness and despair, sometimes apathy and loss of feelings (I dunno about misery...and really my ego could use the downsize...but I'm gonna say no on hopelessness or despair)

8) Tension and inability to tolerate stress (Yeah basically. I'm usually not one to avoid conflict, but I have been lately)

9) Decreased interest in sex and physical contact (hahahahahaha, no. I think nothing short of castration could do that to me.)

10) Irritability and desire to avoid social contact (oooh, let's roll with this one for a minute)

Now I don't want to make it sound worse than it is. I'm certainly not sitting here tying a noose just because it gets dark at 5:00 PM. Basically the worst it gets for me is that I'm much easier to piss off from about December to March. I was getting real pissed off about the dishes just now, and I also got pretty cranky with Barker earlier today for having multiple screen names on AIM. I mean honestly, what the fuck? Other highlights of my week include going off on Rachael for hanging out with her boyfriend instead of devoting a full night to drinking with me and Barker. She still hasn't spoken to me since that one, despite me getting into a much more jovial mood once drunk and leaving her (in my opinion) some pretty hilarious voicemails. I also threatened physical violence on several members of The Bathtub Dogs (http://www.bathtubdogs.com/) last night if they didn't stop singing "skeet skeet skeet" during the break of one of our songs...but I think I was justified on that one.

So what's a boy to do? Well, I'm not sure exactly. I'm not about to go on fucking Zoloft for 3 months every year, so basically I guess I just suck it up and exercise more to get that sweet, sweet endorphin rush. Oh, and I go tanning too. It's not so much because I want to look tan, because I really don't mind being pale. Tanning is a practice for which I am often verbally accosted, but here are the 4 reasons I go tanning:

1) I literally get a weird rash on my legs if I don't get enough UV exposure
2) My face and chest don't break out (I know, my chest. That's gross.) when I tan regularly
3) It's warm, unlike the entire rest of this goddamn state
4) It's a nice place for a 10-15 minute power nap
4.25) Hot girls work at the tanning place, but they're really obviously fake-baked, which is why this is only one fourth of a reason. Plus they know my last name, which all but ruins my chance for a decent first impression. Take a survey of girls who want their married name to be Beavers, and I bet you get damn near 0%.

Not long ago there was an article in the USA Today about how one particular study found that exposure to UV light via tanning beds was correlated with improved mood. They had people basically go tanning, and then had a control group who thought they were tanning, but didn't get UV light. The people getting the UV had better mood afterward, so I now have a 5th reason to go: maybe I won't be such a little bitch. I'll be orange, but cheerful! Okay, I won't be orange; I don't go that much...but every little bit of added happiness helps.

The worst it really gets is being tired more often and a bit more touchy, so as burdens go, it's a pretty light one to bear. Still, though, fuck you Seasonal Affective Disorder. What kind of bastard stepchild to hibernation are you anyway?