Caustically Optimistic

Hulu

I told Deanna that I’d write a funny story for her, but I cannot seem to do this on demand.  Funny has to happen on it’s own good time but awkward happens daily, like the sun rising and setting.

I recently discovered Hulu, and am catching up on Arrested Development.  I have a huge crush on Portia de Rossi, despite the fact that she is a vegan, and would watch anything she acted in.  I realize that Hulu isn’t something new or something that I am breaking to anyone but I don’t watch TV so I wouldn’t have had a need for this site. 

It is a huge discovery for me: it is the Tut’s Tomb of Popular Culture.  Thankfully, it has limited commercial interruption.  This will allow me to catch up with what my peers are talking about at work and social gatherings in a matter of years when before I would have had to hope to catch things in free moments on cable.  Now I can do this from work or home and know what’s going on in time to be forty.  This in addition to Dale helping me with what he calls my, “Tupac Merit Badge,” will mean that in time I will be significantly less socially inept.   I will know what you’re talking about!

Of course the greater danger exists that this will turn out as well as my adolescent literature project where I read everything Madeline L’Engle had written while on a trip to San Diego.  I know nothing about San Diego now and all her work is blended into one long story involving time travel and orphans in New England building a boat in the desert. 

For now I am glad that growing up I did not do it as George Michael did – with a video camera catching my worst moments.  Growing up was hard enough, I’m glad it didn’t include digital cameras, videos in telephones, and social networking on the Internet.  The academic in me that hasn’t completely died yet is interested in knowing how kids today do things differently now that they are under the constant threat of electronic surveillance by their peers and their shenanigans could be broadcast over the series of tubes before they get home to log on and see what someone else did.  As a teacher I loved it because the kids were too involved in what they were doing to realize that we could see everything they were doing as well, it was a great tool.  I never engaged in surveillance but it is a tremendous opportunity for disciplinarians with nothing better to do.  

I am not a little disappointed that I do not have a stair car/truck to drive around, George Michael Bluth has everything.  

there is no end

I’ve lost my moleskin that Enzo gave me, which means that I am relying on random scraps of paper and napkins to write down my ideas and this isn’t an ideal situation.  This means that I have a bunch of half-baked ideas that haven’t been through the very cursory filter I put them through. 

 Three shorter stories: one melancholy, one random, and one inappropriate. 

Doing Time

 Most of you don’t know this, but I did time at Leavenworth.  I did each year of high school in a new school and I completed my junior year there.  This was a great opportunity in many ways but most of all; the best way to get rid of a bad reputation is to move.  It’s a really cool thing to drop into any conversation that you’ve done time at Leavenworth and while it isn’t the best thing I took from the experience I get a great deal of mileage out of it.  No one asks questions and no one will fool around with you after learning you’ve done time in the LV. 

I’ve kept up with two people from that experience pretty well, Nedenia and Candace – but I knew Candace better at University than during High School, despite being in Youth Group and school together.  I didn’t have many friends that year because on top of my social anxiety disorder I was a one-year student that move through that school while their fathers or mothers filter through Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and wasn’t going to exert the incredible effort it would take me to find a connection with the other humans.  I did, however, make friends accidentally with a few people but because the internets were around there to link us through a series of tubes I lost contact with everyone when the next school year became busy.

While wondering what happened to this or that person who had been, “a friend in my head,” as Wendy Williams would say it, a friend offered the idea of updating my Facebook schools to include where I had gone so I could find them.  I can count on my hand all the times I left the house without being ‘on official business.’  It was a hard year, new school, new town, new country and new everything.  The closest I came to friendship was teammates, people who picked me for a partner in gym, and being in your group for projects in class.  I wonder sometimes if those people knew exactly how nice they were being when they were just trying to fill out their squad or finish a project well.  It’s funny that these people, who constantly included me at school probably were picking the other slow, fat kid in gym or the other smart kid in class, didn’t realize the depth of their compassion.  Sometimes I feel like I really did do time in Leavenworth and I remember that there were people who were a cool breeze in Hell and endeavor to be that person for someone else. 

The best and the brightest of these encounters was the time I had a group project for American History class that I had to work on after school at the public library.  This was a harrowing experience for me because I had to exchange contact information with my peers, accept an offer of transportation from them to the public library, and then find my way home afterwards.  One of my neighbors brought me home from the library and that wasn’t so bad because I wasn’t expected to socially interact with an adult, except this adult was only three of four years older than I was and married to someone my father’s age.  The hard part was riding in a peer’s car to the library when – in all my social anxiety I would have been happier in the trunk.  Towards the end of the project, when I had solved the riddle we were working on the peer that drove me to the library said, in his glee that we were close to final success, “If I were gay, I’d kiss you.”  The neighbor who was driving me home had heard this and on the way home coached me to pretend to be gay and date this young man, “just don’t put out,” so that I could, “meet some people my own age and make friends.”  Even at sixteen, I knew this would be an inappropriate method to integrate myself into society.  I would have loved to be that person’s friend but I didn’t have the skill set and I would have had the niggling fear that people thought I was pretending to be his friend so he’d molest me in the public library.  To this day, if they remember that they probably think that my weirdness toward them was in reaction to their statement and not, in fact, to my neighbor unconsciously twisting my brain around.  Until I moved that same neighbor would ask if I were dating that guy yet and if were even ‘just friends.’  I think she thought I was being facetious when I’d say, “I have no friends.” 

 The next Monday in class this same person announced that he had gotten new shoes and threw his feet into the air so everyone could see; they were very nice shoes.  The teacher responded that he didn’t need to make the same demonstration when he got new underwear, I think it was the first time I spoke in class without being called on – it was an open question in one class if I was autistic, in another if I could speak English at all - and I announced that I had gotten new underwear that weekend. 

I think not having friends was only partially due to my social anxiety.  

However, this guy prepared me for senior year where it became difficult to shut me up.  He may or may not have quoted in class, "be yourself, everyone else is taken," but his example reminded me to come back out of my shell and terrorize everyone with every random thought in my head, and my new shoes - which were never as nice as his.  

Forward, All Through the Night 

Another thing I don’t advertise is that I am a huge fan of Cyndi Lauper; she is like a prototype for the Chaos Bean.  Pop stars today rely on their looks and ability to be someone’s private dancer, a dancer for money – than to have talent and something to say.  A great deal is debated about what makes someone an artist and in my opinion an artist is someone with talent and something to say.  The person who paints the pretty cottages can paint a pretty cottage but I wouldn’t call him an artist because he isn’t saying anything, there isn’t a message conveyed.  They don’t make them like Tina Turner anymore, and we certainly don’t have any Cyndi Lauper replicas running around.  When I heard five of her songs on the radio in twenty minutes I feared that she had died as well. 

Bring Home the Bacon

 One of my favorite, essential things to do is to name your baby for you.  I find it awkward to refer the fetus you’re germinating in neutral terms.  Anna introduced me to her baby by referring to distended womb as, “Ali,” and this started my habit of naming your baby for you. 

During the Revolution I was interned to Mademoiselle who is now great with child and worked closely with Kristi who recently bore her child into the world.  Mademoiselle is a vegetarian, and I’ve mentioned her habit of eating leaves off tries like a Giraffe but I haven’t mentioned is that she is a huge fan of Absolutely Fabulous and I’ve named her baby Serge Monsoon Turtle after Edina Monsoon’s beloved son; Kristi’s baby is Saffron.  

Her husband, also an herbivore and a partisan in the Revolution, misses bacon.  My traditional and condescending baby gift is a piggy bank and I’ve gone the step further from naming their child for them to naming their child’s piggy bank.  I promised Mademoiselle’s husband during the Revolution that after the Revolution I would do my best to find bacon for herbivores.  While I was toting Serge’s bank around Target looking for something else I realized that I had found the only bacon that Mademoiselle would find acceptable and thus fulfilling my promise.

Poor Mademoiselle, all through the Revolution she had to endure my shenanigans and tomfoolery and spent the better part of her past week wondering what I was fervently text-messaging her about when I babbled about the vegetarian bacon and how I needed to hide it in her garden.  Moreover, in some cultures it’s considered rude to put money in the pig (stuff the bacon) and in other cultures it is considered rude to leave the pig with an empty belly.  In a quandary because Mademoiselle and her consort come from different cultures I left a bag full of pennies to add to the pig if it were appropriate.  The copper in pennies comes from Arizona - John McCain’s adopted home state.  I wanted that to be Mr. McCain’s sole contribution to the little dauphin’s life.  Honestly, won’t someone check HIS birth certificate?  The non-Christian who was born beyond our borders isn’t the candidate who won, silly gooses. 

I hate to ruin the surprise, Kristi but I have to find you the appropriate piglet as well for Saffron. 

And this, dear reader, is what happens when I miss-place my moleskin.  

 

 

 

 

 

upsold

I like to tell stories.  I really like to tell lies.  I like to tell incredible whoppers and see if you’ll buy what I am selling.  It is the one thing I really, really like about my current job.  I get to talk to people and see if they’ll buy into me, my product, and how much money I can make off them.  Concurrently, the most important qualities for me in a friend is for you to be loyal and either interesting or intelligent.  I can’t stand people who are indiscrete or boring; I can overlook just about any fault if you have those two attributes. 

 I love telling lies so much that when I was little my father gave me a Pinocchio doll before a deployment.  For years I would blame everything on this doll or claim it told me to do the naughty things I had done.  I am unsure of how this doll met his demise but I am pretty sure that a three-year-old Chaos Bean led an angry mob of toddlers and they burned it at the stake. 

 I also like when I am buying something for the salesperson to sell me something.  Yeah, I usually do some cursory research before I get to the store and generally know what I want but as a salesman I enjoy being sold to.  I can usually repel the advances of the other salespeople; today was not one of those days. 

 I didn’t need a new phone, but I could get a deal on one and had the money for it.  I annoyed my friend Darren at the Apple store with a million questions about the phones and which one was best for me when I had done something that probably voided the warranty on the iPhone I had.  Darren is also a hero of the Revolution and because of this I trust him implicitly – as I trust all the other partisans from that long ago.  I cannot believe he fleeced me the way he did, I am very proud of him. 

 He used a very classic move that isn’t as easy as it sounds.  He talked the product down and pointed out how I didn’t need it.  This worked because Chaos Bean was there to point out that, oh no – I really did.  You see, size matters.  I could have lived – and maybe even been content – with eight gigs but I would be happier with sixteen.  My Internet will be faster measured in metrics that are beyond my comprehension and I will be able to hold twice as much video that I am not even sure that I will take.  It is going to be amazing. 

I deserved this; just the day before I took people off a perfectly good Jetta Wolfsburg and into a Passat Komfort.  They spent ten thousand more than they intended to and I didn’t make a dime more than I would have if I had sold them the smaller car.  I sold these people the Passat to do it. 

I used to do this to my students when I taught when they asked questions about nonessential information like, “How exactly was the Continental Congress called?”  I have never known the answer to that question because when someone asked that question in a history class where I was a student the response, from a peer, was that Benjamin Franklin stuck his head out of a window and shouted, “Continental Congress.”  That is far more interesting than however it actually happened.  I had a student, God bless him, who’d ask where the different punctuation marks came from and I attributed every last one of them to Horatio Ashby – father of English Grammar.  If you don’t know the answer or the answer is boring there is absolutely nothing wrong with making the answer interesting. 

So, Karma came on Sunday, and it came full circle.  I not only bought a new phone – something I had been able but too stingy to do for a while – but I bought the enhanced phone because I fell for the “you don’t really need this,” mind trick and found myself saying, “go big or go home.”  There is always a bigger fish, there is always a better salesman, and even if you are a master of the Jedi mind trick if you let your guard down it can happen to you. 

As Chaos Bean was using the navigation features on the new iPhone to make sure we were headed at the right bearing on a road we’ve traveled a thousand times I realized what had happened to me, that I deserved it, and that I didn’t care.  I still haven’t called anyone on the phone yet or received a phone call but rest assured I am very pleased with this purchase.   

too legit to quit

I like going to my friend’s house in Indiana: they’re fun to be around, their kids and pets aren’t obnoxious and there is usually some sort of debauchery (drinking, gambling, Amanda).  They’re not math teachers, but they’ll do. 

 Jason and Erin live in the wilderness of Indiana far from where the Golden Arches shine or an iPhone will work properly.  Chaos Bean won’t admit it but I know that she thinks they’ve descended into Hell.  There are several ways to get to their house and I always take the longest route because it is the simplest and the least treacherous.  Jason always gives me different routes I could take here or there, but I stick with what I know.  On Saturday night, I decided to try the alternate route. 

 The decision I made was on the spur of the moment so I didn’t double-check my route with Jason before leaving.  This was a special kind of stupid.  I took a road that winds up a hill on what I like to call a series of z turns along the side.  It wasn’t too intimidating, I drive a Volkswagen and what can’t it handle?  I should remember that, while my car is awesome, other people’s cars and trucks are not.  The Ford truck in front of me disintegrated on a road where I didn’t have a lot room to avoid the less glamorous parts of the exhaust and emissions system.  I knew my car could slalom but I didn’t know I could slalom.  Sometimes, I even impress myself.  Not only did I slalom but I didn't soil myself. 

 Once I got to the top of the hill the road stopped and I had to turn – but I didn’t remember if I was supposed to turn right or left.  I turned left because I felt I should turn right and I am always wrong on the first guess insofar as a sense of direction.  The record will note that I should have turned right but my politics and faith turn me left, and toward Jesus all the time so I took that to geography as well.  I drove through the woods and then some cornfields and a trailer park before hitting another wooded area, all while making haphazard turns on roads I’d never seen before.  It was in the second wooded area that the beginnings of concern took root in my mind and MC Hammer came onto my iPod; realizing that I too was too legit to quit and pressed on.  Luckily, their house was around the next bend. 

 I was never lost, though.  I always knew that I was still in Indiana where I intended to be all along. 

 The night’s activities included poker (something I know nothing about) and Wii Sports Resort: which I had brought with me.  Chaos Bean and I had been training on the games so Erin’s eight-year-old wouldn’t school us on the games.  If I had any pride I would have been ashamed but shame isn’t something I feel or recognize; I am terrible at both activities but, again, I was too legit to quit.  After Erin and I were both out of the poker game we revisited the Wii Sports Resort where she schooled everyone, in every game.  I am too legit to quit but not so legit that I can’t be repeatedly beaten, I’m just glad it wasn’t the eight-year-old because at this point I’d probably have had my ear bitten off (for good measure).  Through all of this Asian Reporter Jason had confiscated my phone and took pictures of just about everything, and I believe the best picture of me ever taken was captured on Saturday night. 

 I need to teach these people some religion, infuse some decency.  Indeed: if this were a group of math teachers (as I prefer) there would have been a good game of Left-Right-Center for the centerpiece gambling with real money.  When I host the barbeque I will pay for it with their money through the generosity of Left-Right-Center.  I know that not everyone can be a math teacher but I rejoice in the fact that poker wasn’t played with money but rather with chips.  

When in Rome

Valerie is back to work and that means that I am back to distracting her.  This may seem political at first, but rest assured, politics is way too boring. 

There is a lot of serious debate about what it means to be an American, and what you should do to be an American if you weren’t born here or if your ancestors didn’t walk here from Korea via the Bering Strait.  Much of this focuses on if people should learn to speak English – a fun debate to watch as the people who insist upon others learning the language butcher it.  I don’t want people to learn English for me because I will never talk to them anyway.  In fact, I prefer that they not learn English because then the barrier to being antisocial is theirs and not mine. 

What I would like people to change is the way they smell.  Of all the things people can do to make themselves more acceptable, in my opinion, is to wear deodorant.  I realize that in other countries this isn’t the norm and other cultures don’t put the emphasis on smelling pretty that Americans do.  However, we are not in those countries or living in those cultures – at least my nose isn’t living there.

When I lived outside of the United States I will own up to the fact that I continued to make sure I smelled clean before leaving the house but otherwise did my best to blend in with the local population or appear Canadian as much as possible.  I’m not ashamed of being an American but people have axes to grind with Americans but not Canadians.  No one has a problem with Canada, although they should. 

You’re supposed to do things to show respect to local sensibilities when you visit faraway places.  It annoys my nose that – while people expect this of Americans – they don’t do this in America.  There are so many things that can be done to bring people closer together but that will never happen when you smell like you haven’t bathed in months and used paprika to cover it up.  Besides, it won’t matter how well you speak English if I can’t get close enough to you to communicate with you without gagging. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  When in America, do as the Americans do.  Daily, and with products for under the arms.