Because my brain operates in a general state of chaos most of the time, my To Do Lists serve as a thin-but-critical lifeline of sanity.  The Lists keep me from straying off into the wilderness, where I would inevitably become lost and live in the trees and have to eat beetles.  I am fairly worthless in a grocery store without The List -- Instead I'll skip up and down the aisles, excited about some new chicken marinade recipe I just thought of, only to come home to be greeted by a hungry dog.  Then I have to go back out to get his dog food.  And he sits there and judges me.

When I don't get around to doing something, it gets repeated at the top of the next day's list.  That's the little penalty -- I have to rewrite the undone thing on the next list.  It's not quite the same level of self-flagellation like the creepy albino guy from the Da Vinci code, whacking his back with some sort of torture device at the end of a rope.  But it's still a penalty to pay.

Recently, I found myself doing the list-rewriting thing with my haircut.   For weeks.   I simply could not make it to the place.  At first it was general sense of procrastination, but then I ran into an odd series of obstacles that wouldn't let me get my haircut.

Eventually, my hairdo started doing some weird stuff.  If it was music, this would have been free-form jazz.  Lots of noise, no melody.  For some reason, my hair doesn't all grow at the same length.  I grow hair seven times as fast at the temples, which can get out of control pretty quick.

One Saturday morning, I rushed over to the haircut place right when they opened, hoping to be the first one in line so I could make it to some birthday event on time afterwards with kiddo.  No luck -- the manager was late to open the place, everybody was standing around out front.  And I couldn't talk the haircutters into giving me a trim right there on the sidewalk, and they were a little standoffish when I offered to pick the lock to the store's front door.

Another day, I ventured out to the haircut place by my work but they were "out of stylists."  But they said I could come back at 3pm and they "might" be staffed then.  How does a place run out of stylists?  In some crazy scheme to turn a profit, you'd think they'd keep the place staffed with scissors and people who know how to use them during the day.

So I tried to leave work early one day, and right as my car hit the on-ramp to the highway, I got called to do a U-turn back into work for an emergency.   At this point I started looking around to see if I was on Candid Camera or something.

This went on literally for weeks.  Everytime I'd try to go get the haircut, something crazy would pop up.  Like I'd get held up by a stopped train when I had a short window of time to get the haircut.  Or I'd finally make it there during daylight hours, but oops, forgot my wallet.  Fate obviously did not want me to have shorter hair.

Finally, the planets aligned in my favor and I was able to make it to the place by my house.  And not only were they open, and I had my wallet, and I had time to get the haircut without being somewhere else in a hurry... my favorite haircutter Betty was also available.  Score.

I peeked outside to see if the place was about to get robbed, or perhaps a pack of wolves would figure out how to open the door and try to come interrupt us. No, this haircut was definitely going to happen.

But as I waited for Betty, there was a weird vibe in the air.  The stylists were awestruck as the guy right before me gave Betty a $100 tip.  Holy crap -- that's like a 700% tip.  I was sure she'd suddenly decide to be done for the day and I'd fall back into Haircut Purgatory.  It was the biggest tip she'd ever received, by double, and she was glowing with the feeling of appreciation for her special craft.

Despite being wildly distracted, chatting to the other girls about the big tip, Betty went ahead and gave me a terrific haircut as always.  In fact, she was in a zone today -- it made my top 5 best haircuts ever.

It was such a relief to have this thing done -- not just because my hair continued to grow longer each day, but because of all the obstacles.  Through a combination of the sheer happiness of getting my haircut finally accomplished, and the funds I accumulated while missing whole haircut intervals, and a general sense of competitiveness... I knew what I had to do.  I threw down a tip that beat his by one dollar and strutted out of there like a boss.

Get a haircut

I took Diva Girlfriend to a small town last weekend for a bed-and-breakfast thing.  It was mostly great -- I'd recommend the historic and beautiful place where we stayed, if not for the creepy innkeeper who lurches over you like one of the hillbillies from Deliverance, and the enormous box-top TVs that dangle precariously over each of the bathtubs and beds.

We explored the small town in search of a good dinner, and a wishy-washy Yelp crowd led us to a small hibachi place in a strip mall across from a SuperTarget.  But we're open-minded, so we gave it a shot.  ("Hey, this looks like the least worst place within 45 miles!")

Our hibachi griller wasn't exactly spectacular, in the sense that he seemed nervous and completely boned all of our orders.  But you had to appreciate that this was some pretty fine dining for a small town.  The table next to us was full of ranchers' sons and daughters out on their prom dinner dates.  They looked like they were well-fueled with teenage hormones and rot-gut whiskey.  But in a good way.

And I thought the griller guy was trying really hard, which was worth more than anything.  When I see a guy trying his best and struggling, I can't help but to pull for them.  I suddenly become their own personal plant in the audience, laughing at their terrible hibachi-themed humor (Ha! You spun the egg!  An "egg roll"!  I get it!), trying to get the rest of the crowd to rally in their behalf.  I root for the underdog, even when he's making bad food for me.

So while our less-than-spectacular griller made unrepeatably awful jokes, and I laughed out loud, and Diva Girlfriend wondered if I had a head injury, the rest of the small town hibachi crowd did their normal thing... until suddenly...

Whoosh!  The sudden flame of the grill as the next griller set his little round of oil on fire.  This was followed immediately by the loudest, girliest shriek my ears have ever heard.

It was a boy at the next table.  Probably 10 years old, definitely impressed by the hibachi experience, scared out of his wits.  He was caught completely unaware that his griller was about to set his hibachi on fire.

Somehow that single banshee-like exclamation made the whole experience worth it.  I didn't get the food I ordered, my Asian griller was actually kinda Mexican, and the local prom yokels outnumbered us 4 to 1.  But that one little shriek reminded me that at some point, we all had our first hibachi experience.  Good for you, Scared Shrieking Dude.

Some of you have experienced the flavor (or witnessed the general insanity surrounding the production) of my new 'Diablo Sauce'.  For any of you who are interested in making your own special concoctions, here are some helpful tips to help get you started.

Advice 1:  Go buy a badass blender.  You need one with at least 3 billion watts and several rows of blades and teeth .. it should be so strong that it makes the lights in the house dim when you turn it on.  Mine actually has a picture of a ninja on the side.

Advice 2:  You gotta get your mind right.  You can't just jump right into full-blown kitchen-scale hot sauce manufacturing with a trial-and-error approach.  You can't simply dip your toe into the pool of insanity and expect great-tasting hot sauce.  To make it really good, you need to make over 200 bottles.  It has to consume you.  You must be up late at night, firing up variations on new batches with the intensity of a bearded weirdo in a cabin churning out pages of his manifesto.

Advice 3: Pretend to value the input of others.  You do need a test audience, so skip around town and pass those bottles out like a spicy version of the Easter Bunny.  But don't be surprised when the feedback is all over the map.  Some want more spice, some want it milder, some say it's too sweet, some want more sweetness.  You can't make everybody happy.  So in the end, just stick to the input from a foodie-connoisseur or two who you feel well-calibrated with.  For everybody else, just nod your head and pretend like you're listening.  Whoever is reading this, yours is the actual feedback that I'm using to shape future batches.  Wink.

Advice 4:  Save the byproducts.  In my recipe, I end up with an enormous amount of the pureed pulp from the blender that doesn't get strained out into bottles.  At first I was throwing this away, but I realized later that some people love this stuff.  My buddies around here all put it on pizza, and my Austin buds seemed to unanimously prefer it over the original sauce.  I dried some out into a spice rub and my girlfriend's mom put it in brownies.  I was just reading about how rum -- the world's first globally traded commodity -- was manufactured from the byproduct of the sugar refining process.  So hang onto ye scraps, ye salty sea dogs.

Advice 5:  Go easy on the thickener.  Whatever you use to give your sauce some stickiness/ emulsion / shine, approach that right amount slowly.  In my first shot at it, I ended up with a batch that stuck in their bottles like Jello.  A hot sauce- flavored Jello might be considered fancy and nouveau at some point in the future, but for now I just want something that I can stick on pizza.

Advice 6:  Don't touch your eyes or bits.  Remember at all times that these peppers are chemically similar to the ones that are used to make weapons to repel angry humans.  I can attest from personal experience, and having done both within the span of seven minutes, that if you rub your eyes and/or aim your man-parts after handing peppers, there is a burning surprise that awaits you.

Visit the new Diablo Sauce website here:  http://diablo-sauce.com/

I have a friend who smacks when he eats.  It's a nasty habit -- and not just because that wet smacking sound makes me want to poke four little fork holes in his forehead - it's because you can see the food become chewed up and squishy in his mouth hole.  I had dinner with his family one time, and I was disturbed to discover that his whole family smacks.  They're one of those families that doesn't talk at dinner until everybody is done eating.  So all I heard for 20 minutes was the symphony of grown adults smacking and eating with their mouths open like the Cookie Monster.  The nom nom nom family.

My stepmom used to take forever to eat.  (She doesn't smack -- she's super polite.)  Long after we finished eating and were lounging around sprawled out in the living room (watching The Little Mermaid or The Land Before Time for the fourth time of the day, the cost of being a big brother), she'd still be sitting the dining room by herself, nursing the same little sandwich.  I used to tease that she needed to hurry up and finish that meal because it was almost time for the next one.  I studied her eating mechanics and tried to figure out why she was so inefficient at getting food into her belly.  She seemed to be busy the whole time, and it's not like she was taking little baby bird bites.  I concluded that she just chews her food more times per bite or something.  Women seem strange to me.

I am a really fast eater.  I can usually finish any meal in less than six minutes when I eat by myself.  I chew my food just barely enough to swallow it down, and then I already have the next bite already in hand.  I remember my Dad making me eat in front of a mirror.   But the failure there was that I enjoyed looking at myself.  I am one handsome devil. 

One time my brother and I went to Pancho's with my mom, and we both finished our first plates before she got to the table.  She loves telling that story.  In our defense, she was being super pokey -- we had plenty of time to wolf down 4 cheese enchiladas and 2 tacos while she piddled around at the salsa bar. 

I guess whatever sort of negative reinforcement tactics eventually worked --  now I consciously alter my habits in the company of others.  I intentionally take my time, pacing out the meal to coincide with that of whomever is eating nearby.  I pretend that I'm a normal person instead of the ravenous ogre that I truly am.   Rather than trying to finish my meal before everybody has their napkins unfolded into their laps, I'll kill time by storytelling, or I imagine poking fork holes into the foreheads of anybody who is smacking within earshot, or I challenge the waiters to wrestle. 

 Waiters probably wear shirts.  This was as close as I could find on Google.

I used to visit a Catholic church with my buddy Wes when I was growing up.  I have fond memories of the place, but they mostly involved me trying really really hard not to laugh at inappropriate times.  (Why is the humor center of our strange little brains wired to think it's the absolute funniest thing to get uncontrollable giggles in inappropriate settings?)  Wes would get this little smirk, say “Hey man, watch this,” and then do something epic.  One time he hooked an arm around the wrist of the wine-goblet-holder-person so he could chug the whole thing before they pulled it away.  In the scuffle, he got the Blood of Christ all over both of them.  Wes was something of a legend in our middle school circles.  To this day, if Wes says "Hey man, watch this," go ahead and get out the camera app on your phone.

I happened to move back to that same neighborhood, and my backyard fence is shared with that church, which is now a huge Catholic mega-church and school.  So now I’m surrounded by tons of Catholic neighbors.  They all go to the church next door, and they have little gates in their backyards so they can walk out the back door and straight across the field to the services.  In reality, however, they mostly pile into minivans and drive around the block.  I'm sure my neighbor Andy will love me busting him on this -- but in his defense, he does have 17 kids.  After a certain point, the parents have to drop man-to-man coverage and go zone defense.

Being in a high-catholic-density area means two things:

1)      My daughter has a million little friends to play with because they don’t practice birth control and their families are enormous and

2)      It takes me approximately 3 ½ hours to get home on Wednesday nights because every Catholic in the area swarms my little part of the city.

I'd like to think that I have a pretty good standing with the Catholics.  I’ve been a best man in two Catholic weddings – for Wes and Dre – and I’m an honorary Catholic godfather to a perfect kid named Brianna who is much cooler than I was at 10 years old.

In Wes's wedding, I was surprised to find out that as the best man, I had to kneel at the front altar with the groom the whole time.  (They call their services a "mass" to give you a sense of how epic-long these things are.)  When we were standing next to each other, I could kinda slouch next to Wes and not look like such an ogre (I'm 6'2" and I weighed 320 back then).  But kneeling next to him at the front of the church in a tux, there was no avoiding it.  In the middle of the service, I earned extra awkward points for getting leg cramps and publicly stretching so I looked like a fat penguin doing yoga.  Not a pretty sight.

For the Methodists, our Lent offering is optional, but I've always done it.  Every year, my Mema gives up chocolate for Lent.  My brother gave up smoking one time, just to show everybody he didn't need cigarettes, but then went right back to smoking on Easter.

I usually give up red meats, but this year I gave up drinking.  I considered giving up speeding in my car, but I realized that would be entirely impractical.  My car wants to go fast.

Here is the rule of Lent Fate -- whatever you give up, you will be handed many times.  If you give up drinking, you'll find yourself as the only sober person at bachelor parties, college buddy reunions, and all kinds of drinkypoo events.  If you give up chocolate, you will somehow win the Golden Ticket and end up at Willy Wonka's factory.

One of the universal themes in parenting is that you’ll receive an endless stream of unsolicited advice.  For many people, who haven’t accomplished much in the whole world except churning out some loinproduct, this is their one chance to feel like an expert about something.  Anything.  They’ll assault your ears with all kinds of nonsense and wives' tales about how to get your kids to stop using their pacifier, or how to trick the little weasels into eating servings of vegetables, or how to get them to stop removing neighbors' license plates.     

I felt that being the oldest of five kids gave me a nice head start into fatherhood.  I was better prepared because I was raised around lots of small humans.  I watched the trials and tribulations of my (very young) parents, helped out where I could, and I remember their struggles.  I remember having to take a break from my marathon girlfriend telephone conversation -- “Sorry sweetie, my brother is about to poop” -- and then join my family in the bathroom.  All seven of us would huddle in there -- we were required to clap and cheer for my brother Jerry while he dropped a tiny deuce into the plastic kiddy potty.  Then he received a small matchbox car for his efforts.  

I never received anything. 

What eventually spawned out of trying to get all these little hoodlums to stop crapping their pants on the couch was an idea of such sheer genius, that it eventually went into widespread usage for successful potty training.  You may have heard about it elsewhere, but this all started in my backyard.  I give my stepmom Frances the credit for The Method.

Step one:  You let your kids run around the backyard with no pants on.  There are no other steps -- that’s the whole plan.  I didn’t say it was an elaborate system, but it works for every kid.  After they drop a couple biscuits in the yard, they begin to realize that it is so much nicer than hauling dirty logs around.  Eventually they’re wearing real underwear for the first time, and voila, they’re on their way to wiping their own little butts.  Hallelujah. 

One of the drawbacks to The Method is that it's not very sophisticated.  There is a theorectial possibility that your two-year-old angel hikes up her little easter outfit and starts pooping in your grass while you're talking to your neighbor Andy in the front yard.  But just think of it as a small price to pay to have them stop using diapers.  As time passes, nobody will ever remember that event and embarrass them later.  Unless your dad happens to write a column about it, of course.  Sorry, kid.

Wow, five years old.  In some ways, Jules hasn’t changed at all – she is still impossibly adorable, she still doesn’t like to cuddle unless she’s sick, and she's much more clever than her Dad.

“Hey Jules, did you know that we can see planets in the sky tonight?”

“No Daddy, that’s the moon.”

“Of course -- the big one is the moon.  I’m talking about that glowing dot right over here.  That’s the planet Venus.”

“That’s a star, Daddy.”

“That one looks like a star, but that one’s a planet, Jules.”

“Okay, all the dots are planets.  I’m going to count all the planets… 1… 2… 3... 4..”

“No Jules, you’re right, most of them are stars.  Just that one right there is a planet.”

(She looks up, kinda makes skeptical-face, one eyebrow up.)

“Okay, Jules, let me show you Google Sky Maps.  This app shows us which ones are planets and which ones are stars.”

“Neat!  Can I play the Princess Game on your phone?”

“Yes, but let me show you the sky map first.”  (I pull it up, I show Venus, but she's now fixated on the phone.)  “See Jules, there’s Venus.  Just under the moon.”

“Can I play the Princess Game now?”

In social circles, her role is best described as a Vice President of Operations.  She seems to relish in the planning of events and will direct other little kids in which games to play.  She's not quite the Queen Bee -- but stays friends with whoever it is -- and it saves her general bullying and scheming.   I'm not going to claim that I understand the innerworkings of groups of little chicks... but then again, I don't understand females who are my age, either.

Maybe I'll ask Jules to explain it all to me one day.

Each night, we have a standing ritual -- it goes bathtime, storytime, prayers ("Give us this day, our stale-y bread"), we talk about our day, and then she introduces random conversations to stall going to bed.

During this time, these conversations cover all kinds of topics -- where does God sleep, why do little bugs always seem to follow her around, why does our dog Ralphie always try to sleep in her bed and then push her off, and why is poop brown instead the color of the stuff that we eat.

I'm the one on the left.

I went to the doctor with a cold, which basically means that I paid a $50 co-pay to have a professional male nurse look at me and go "Yep, you're sick.  Good luck with that."

In the doctor-detective shows, the patients usually have some cool disease that can be cured with some kind of miracle /experimental treatment.  They'll struggle with the diagnostics, and then figure out the cure during some climactic or inspirational moment during the show.

"Hey man, you wanna pass me the salt?"

"The salt!  That's it!  You figured out how to beat lupus!  It was the salt all along!""

And the patients are usually super hot.

In my real life, which is not nearly as interesting as any doctor-detective show, I show up at my physician's office looking like Death, slinging snot everywhere, hacking up small bits of leathery lung boogers.  I get the standard fare about drinking lots of fluids, they check me for strep or rabies or whatever, and they send me back out into the world to go suffer a slow death.

It's just a virus.  It'll run its course.

I'd be more inclined to believe them if they weren't so insistent that I always pay my co-pay right then, instead of billing me.  "Whoa there, buddy -- let's make sure you pay before you go, just in case you die at home.  We didn't give you any kind of real treatment here today, so God knows what's gonna happen later."

Instead, I wish that we paid for all healthcare afterwards, based on how well it worked.  Waiters and bartenders are paid for each performance, so why not doctors?  Here's how the plan works:  If you die, you don't pay anything.  If you do live, but it was a wrong diagnosis and you spent 3 months chasing the wrong cure, you give them a bad tip, just some marginal amount.  Hey Doc, better luck next time.  You'll afford that second Lexus when you start brushing up on recent medical advances.

But when they nail the diagnosis the first time, and your doctor called and checked on you at home, and he or she went out of his or her way to pretend like you were more than just a 7-minute segment on their Thursday calendar, you pay them handsomely.

"Mister Young, you have six months to live."

"Oh yeah?  make it eight and I'll double the pay."

In this corner… weighing over 200 pounds, in his hometown of Keller, Texas, we have Jeff “Surprised to suddenly be participating in this fight” Young!  

In this corner… we have some random drunk guy that Ogre James brought over to play cards, who has suddenly revealed some impulse control and boundary issues! 

Are you ready to Rummmmmmmble? 

No, I was not ready to rumble.  I was ready to sit on a couch and exchange witty banter and vulgar stories and drink whiskey with my friends.  Instead, I found myself with a big idiot jumping on my lap, trying to pin my arms down.

I don’t have a temper.  I can usually defuse fights with wordplay.  “Psst.  Hey man, between you and me, you look like you need a hug.  No no no, not from me – watch this.  OKAY LADIES, free drinks for whoever hugs this big ugly dude over here.  Now don't hold him too long, he looks like he might have ticks.”

Whenever you see the macho escalation of two guys posturing and yelling “You want some of this?!?” and “You want to say that to my face?!?” and “Do you want to take that outside?!?”, I can't help but to grin.  It reminds me of the kinds of primal behavior that you see on National Geographic -- the silliest and worst of our human instincts.  I call it the Gorilla Standoff.  The male gorilla beats his chest, bristles out his spine fur, runs off the other gorilla, grabs a flower, sticks in up his butt, then eats it.

Our version of conflict resolution is almost as elegant.

I’ve learned from my friend Jack Reacher that all plans go out the window just as soon as you get punched in the mouth.  No matter how fast your brain goes in that fight-or-flight moment, the slippery crunch of a fist hitting your teeth and lips is enough to make you forget your next move.

Here’s how it played out...

Big Random Idiot jumps on me while I’m lounging on my couch.  Out of nowhere.

What is this guy doing? Okay he’s holding my arms down – Is he kidding?  I don’t think he’s kidding.  If I can just…. No… he’s pretty strong.  Yep I’m pinned.   Okay, defuse this before it gets out of hand.

“Okay you big dummy, you win, whatever, ha ha, look how strong you are.  Now get off me before I sic Ralphie on you.”  (Ralphie is my 16-pound, timid little terrier).

Big Random Idiot responds by punching me in the face, and re-pins my arms back down.  Our faces are 8 inches away, and now he look possessed.  He reeks of pink lemonade vodka and I can tell he's not a big fan of flossing.

Whoa whoa wait, am I in a fight?  I haven’t been in a fight in years.  We didn’t do the Gorilla Standoff yet.  Okay this is happening, I gotta get this guy off me.  Damn that hurt.  I forgot all my sweet hypothetical fight moves. 

He hops into a full straddle, facing me.  I’m totally pinned, adrenaline is up, and I’m losing energy fast.  My shoes are trying to grab traction with the floor for leverage, but I’m basically trapped like a turtle on my back, with the weight of both of us pushing me down into the couch.

Okay let's keep cool here.  If I can just get my arms free, then I can …  I wonder what my dental co-pay is.  I think it’s 20% plus the deductible?

I pull an arm lose and we scuffle in a flurry of hands, trying to contain each other’s fists.  I take a hard elbow to the chin and feel and hear my jaw pop.

Everybody in the house is now standing, watching in shock, paralyzed by surprise.  Ralphie – who I’ve learned is worthless in an emergency – is barking maniacally, and we’re kicking furniture everywhere.

Okay brain, let’s do something here!  Protect protect protect!  No wait, hurt him hurt him hurt him!  No wait, protect protect protect.  What would Chuck Norris do?

Just as he grabs both wrists to pin them again, I hook my right elbow up and draw it across my body and crack him in the side of the head with it.  Having stunned him for a second, I‘m momentarily able to twist my hips slightly, just enough to get my right foot on the ground.  Then I push hard and pivot, and I’m on top of him instead.

Ha ha! Now the glove is on the other foot.  Whoa, we got some wild knees here.  Protect the Boys.

Although he’s taller, I’ve got the weight advantage, and I press my body against him to wear him out.  The strategy is also heavily influenced by my complete exhaustion.  I realize I've been holding my breath for a whole minute, and I stop and remember to breathe.  We do the grabbing-for-wrists thing again, but this time when I grab his wrist, I pin his arm under my knee, giving me a free arm.

Yay, this is finally starting to go my way … Whoa, note to self, that plant really needs watering.

I use my free forearm to jam in Big Random Idiot's neck, choking the bejeezus out of him for about 20 seconds, then give him a chance to submit.  Finally he taps my arm, indicating surrender.  I climb off and tell him he’s lucky I don’t kick a new hole in his face.  He gets up and then proceeds to barf all over my guest bathroom for the next hour.  I limp away, completely out of energy, shaking as the adrenaline works its way out of my bloodstream.

I would find out later that he had earlier drank 15 shots of (my) pink lemonade vodka and would not remember the incident.

In retrospect, one of the funniest moments from the scuffle – as brief as it was – was that I had invited a new couple over to join our card game for the first time.  They happened to walk in during the middle of it, and asked "Are we at the right place?".

(I’ve never been accused of making a good first impression.)

In the aftermath of the fight, I ended up with a bruised chin, a body full of bruises, and I learned that my dog - while awesome at snuggling - is not quick to action when I'm fighting to the death.

While waving my hand frantically in front of the automatic towel dispenser, I start to wonder which is drying my hands more – the paper towels, or all the hand-waving and time spent waiting for more towels to dispense.  I give it 50-50.  Before I leave the restroom. I take one last look in the mirror to make sure my hair isn’t standing up all crazy and that I look generally presentable – Hello there, handsome – and… uh oh, there it is.  My zipper is down again.  My barn door is open.  XYZ, examine your zipper.  Your cows are getting out.

How did I make it this far in life doing something so well, only to suddenly start leaving my zipper down all the time?

The same sudden decline of other abilities is emerging in other areas of my life, too.  I used to be a pretty decent bowler, but now I’m happy just to clear triple digits.  I used to have a sweet spin move, where the ball would Tokyo-drift back to the center and obliterate all the pins and I would do white-guy fist-pumping dance moves.  Now when I fire that sucker off, it makes a beeline for the gutter and threatens to hop out into the next lane.

I understand that in time, I may not be able to run as fast or take a punch the same due to old age and the slow decline of my body – I’m cool with that.   But I’m still in the first half of my 30’s – I’m supposed to be at my peak!  Why have I suddenly started losing my few awesome abilities, like my 30+ year streak of always remembering to zip up my pants after shaking hands with the man?

As another example, I’ve been driving legally now for more than half my life, but I just now started to forget to close the little gas cap door after I fuel up.  I’m the dummy who has to get out of the car at the red light and run back to close it.  Luckily for me, nobody notices because they’re all playing with Facebook on their phones.

Perhaps my glory days are behind me.  I know I’m a bit young to start talking about a mid-life crisis, but I feel one coming on.  Is there a place you go to sign up for that?  How does that work?

My one consoling fact is that my closest friends are all getting older, too.  Mike the Greek’s mantastic-sexy facial scruff is starting to show a few silvers.  Fox and others are starting to show some midsection.   Dre is having his first mini-Dre, Crazy Mike has a real girlfriend, and Clinticus even got married.

If you’re feeling the hands of time too, just be sure to stop and check your fly in the mirror on the way out.

There comes a point in the mad scramble before work, when you’ve already looked in all the normal locations for your keys – twice – and you find yourself revisiting all those same spots in a loop.  When you’ve looked at where they should be for the third time, hoping that they magically reappeared,  it can truly make you insane.  In that fifth trip around the house, you’re ready to just call into work crazy and watch The Price is Right dressed in clown makeup while they fit your for a straightjacket.

Just in case this happens to you, I’ve given you a quick-reference here for more places to look.  Here are:

More Places You Might Find Your Keys

Still in the lock, hanging outside your front door

In the fridge, top shelf

In the pants you wore yesterday

In the garbage

In the dryer

Buried in the backyard next to Fluffy

Gripped in your ex-girlfriend’s hand while she watches you with binoculars from across the street

In that package that you sent to your eBay customer yesterday

In a pile of other shiny things where those damn raccoons hang out under your house

In the drawer where you keep your unmentionables

At the bottom of the front pocket of your invisibility cloak

In your big Bucket ‘O Keys

In your pocket, but in a different dimension

Transformed into a tiny robot that steals one sock at a time

What are “keys”?  We’ve always used combination locks on cars – you’ve been imagining this “key” thing this whole time

The last place you look

Just kidding, of course.  I have all kinds of flaws.  Here are:

 10 things I am not good at

1)  I am not a good dancer.  If you look into my eyes and whisper Hey, you’re actually a pretty good slow-dancer, then that is a good sign that you are currently really drunk or have experienced a recent head injury.

2)  I’ve never been hunting.   I am not opposed to the idea of hunting at all, and I even took a bow hunting class in college.  If I were hungry enough, I could knock a koala bear out of a tree with a hammer.  But so far, I’ve never killed any animal larger than a squirrel.  And he had it coming.

3)  I never learned to whistle.  I know how to play several instruments, but my mouth just isn’t made for whistlin’ purposes.  People always say “Oh really?  Look it’s easy, you just roll your lips like this,” and shriek one out.  Then I ask them if they can still do that if I were to knock out all their teeth.

4)  I have never been skiing.  Neither water nor snow.  I am more of a sledder.  My special sledding techniques rely heavily on my ability to lay down and allow gravity to drag my ass down a hill.  One time I stripped down to my undies when it was 12 degrees out and sledded down an icy hill.  I didn’t realize I was dragging my feet behind me on the ice because they were too numb to feel it, and afterwards they were so chewed up, they looked like a polar bear had been gnawing on them.

5)  I am not a very kind driver.  I am a good driver from the angle that I’m really good at avoiding obstacles and other vehicles.  My car is an extension of my own body (unlike some drivers I know, who barely have command of their vehicle between applications of makeup and playing with Facebook on her phone).  But from the perspective that I'm zipping around out in public and not being a friendly representative of our community, I am the cartoon equivalent of the Tasmanian Devil when I’m behind the wheel.  I’m really impatient, I’m quick to use the horn, and I fly past people like they’re standing still (whenever kiddo is not in the car with me, of course).

6)  I’m bad about going to the doctor for regular checkups.  My medical history is strikingly boring – no stitches, no broken bones, never been admitted, or anesthetized, or had anything removed besides wisdom teeth.  If my past performance of not dying so far is any indication of how the future will go, I am apparently invincible.  (If I die in some cool way, be sure to re-read this at my funeral for irony purposes.)

7)  Whenever I meet another Jeff, I can't remember his name later.  I see his face, recognize him, and then draw a complete blank.  Geez what is this guy's name?  It can't be Jeff, because I'm Jeff.  This is probably rooted in some version of egocentrism, where in my self-absorbed brain, I am the only possible Jeff.

8 )  I am not as strong as I used to be.  When I weighed 320 lbs, I could lift a small car off the ground like a chunky white Hulk.  I guess my muscles were stronger then from hoofing all that fat around.  After losing all that weight, I'm noticeably more puny.  But I can still hold Diva Girlfriend up over my head in the kitchen, against her will.  At least I still have that.

9)  I have to turn down the radio to find street signs.  Everybody thinks they're good multi-taskers, but apparently my brain cannot handle both audio and visual stimuli at the same time.  On a similar note, if you ever start into a super boring story and my eyes are pointing towards my Skyrim character on the TV, please be advised that I might be only devoting 03.7% of my attention span to your super boring story.

11)  I never learned to count.

I enjoyed all the merriment on my first cruise ship – all the eating, the lounging around in the sun, the singing, the drinking, the two or three naps a day, and all the eating.  In fact, the ship experience was so much fun, I would have even had a great time on one of the 'cruises to nowhere,' where the boat basically does donuts in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico while everybody inside slowly becomes one of the big fat hover-couch-people from Wall-E.

The cruise director James woke us up constantly.  Diva Girlfriend and I would be happily napping in a burrito-induced food-coma, hear that cheerful little bell, and before he could say anything we’d both grumble “Hi James.”  Then his chipper British voice would come over the loudspeakers, “Hello passengers!  This is James your cruise director!  Come stop by our booth and see all the exciting ship excursions!  Go zip-lining through the trees!  Or surf in the nude on top of a dolphin!  Or go parasailing in Jamaica and take pictures of all the sad little homemade shacks from above!”

After hearing a few dozen of the overhead advertisements from the eternally perky little director, we were set on not going on any of the damned excursions.  No amount of reminders could make us go.    Maybe we could drown out the announcements with some TV… nope, the ship’s TV channel is showing advertisements for the same thing.

At one point, they were showing all the underwater adventures that you could see from their submarine, which looked like an underwater bus packed with other cruisegoers.  I had already been packed into elevators and hot tubs with my fellow cruisers, had my fill there, and I wanted no part in sharing an underwater mobile cage with 3 dozen more of them for a whole hour.  On the commercial, we were watching the footage of turtles, manta  rays, various fish, etc, and Diva Girlfriend suddenly blurted out  “Ha!  That’s a ridgeback Galapagos turtle!  Those aren’t indigenous anywhere above the 39^th parallel!  See the purple ridges on his lateral crest?  Who do they think we are, a bunch of dummies?  Just wait until I tell my ichthyology forum friends about this.”

Whoa.  My girlfriend is a huge fish nerd.

So we invented a few shore excursions of our own.  Here are our homemade shore excursions, if you’d like to do one of these instead on your next cruise.

Hide and Seek - Jamaica

This adventure is a simple 5-step process.

1)       Go to any beautiful beach in Jamaica.

2)      Get hammered on the local rum.

3)      Store all your cruise ship “Drink n’ Sink” cards and credit cards in a loose pocket.

4)      Swim out to a floating trampoline and jump into the ocean.

5)      Swim around all afternoon and try to locate all your cards on the ocean floor.

It took me a couple hours to find the last of our cards, but with the clarity of the water and the courage from the rum, I found them all.  Diva Girlfriend called me a hero, but I’m also the one who lost them, so it kinda evens out.  If you save somebody from a burning building, you’re the hero *unless* you’re the same dummy who forgot to turn off the stove.

The Price is Right – Grand Caymans

This adventure depends on your bartering skills and knowledge of precious stones.  Your challenge is to go into any Cayman Islands jeweler and try not to overpay for any kind of trinket or precious stone.

Somehow, even among thousands of other cruisers, I must look even more like a clueless American than the others.  The vendors (all from India, by the way, which I didn’t mind of course, but seemed halfway-around-the-world out of place there) treated me like I had never stepped into a jewelry store before.  The guy would talk really slowly, nod yes while he explained things to me, and used a lot of one-syllable words for my dumb little brain.  The vendor explained that the bigger stones cost more because they’re more rare.  What?  Really?  All this time...

Maybe I should re-think how I’m dressing or something.  Because they all approached me like I was the kid who licked the windows on the short bus.

Eventually I just started playing the part, and threw on the big fake Texas accent. “Hoo boy, look at all these shiny little rocks. Hey there little fella, how ‘bout you trade me some of this beef jerky for one of ‘dem big shiny stones over there?  Yee haw.”

The Amazing Race (back to the boat) – Cozumel

By the third shore day, you’ve successfully survived a couple foreign excursions, and now your confidence is up.  People hit the pier in Cozumel, split up, and zip out to all ends of the island for whatever versions of organized merriment that the perky director James talked them into doing.

But here’s the thing.  Cozumel seems like it’s a part of Mexico – but it’s actually a big floating college party barge.  They hand you tequila shots just for looking in their stores.  After browsing about 5 shops, you’re ready to take off your clothes and go streaking through the quad.

We learned (not the hard way, thank God) that the ship will leave without you.  But I could see how it would be really easy to lose track of time on a beach, and get lost staring into the waves with a margarita in hand, and notice your cruise ship slowly coasting across the ocean without you in it.

Our new cruise-friends, who I explained before were all way better at this than us, have a tradition of camping out on the high decks and watching people try to scramble back to shore on time.  After a fiesta day in Cozumel, you could very well end up limping back down the pier, dragging your cruise companion, or trying to swim your drunk ass back to the boat.

Have you ever heard advice that was so good that you couldn’t ignore it, even though you didn’t want to hear it?  I was talking about exercise with my boss’s wife, who is one of those naturally-gifted mega-athletes that does marathons just to stretch her legs a little before her real workouts.  Talking about cycling, she said “You only have to ride one mile at a time.”  Well, hell, that certainly makes it sound much more do-able.  I was seriously enjoying my couch time before, satisfied with how reasonable it sounds to fear a whole bunch of running.  Little chunks of running aren’t so scary, so I’m out of excuses.   I run a few houses – then a few more – and so on – and the next thing you know, I’m Forrest Gumping it all the way down the street.

So now I find myself hitting the pavement three or four times a week, propelling my large body at great speeds through our neighborhood.  I kinda run like Batman, with too much arm movement, like I’m punching a guy with each step.  KER-POW!  Between that, and the momentum that is created by any large body moving at a fast rate, and my general lack of attention because of low oxygen to the brain while running, you definitely don’t want me to run into you.  I’m trusting you to notice me and move out of the way before I plow into you like a big retarded grizzly bear.

People talk about a “runner’s high,” but I haven’t experienced anything like that yet in my first few weeks as a new jogger.  Usually at the end of a run, everything hurts and I’m so grouchy that I could kick a baby otter right in the face.  And it’s usually something different every time.  Just my right knee will hurt.  Or just my left foot arch.  Or my moobs will hurt from bouncing around.  (That’s “man-boobs,” for anyone out there who is new to the term).  It’s like playing Bingo, figuring out what’s going to scream in pain by the time I get back home.

My friend JPC goes to a Running Class (I call them the “run-tards,” which I understand is a terrible term and apologize profusely to any of my readers who run, or are retarded, or both).  I thought this class was the silliest thing in the world until I started jogging too.  I figured there was just one lesson where the teacher said “Okay, here’s our only lesson.  Use your legs to run that way,” and then took everyone’s cash.   But there is more to it.

I’ve been figuring out all the jogger mistakes by trial and error.  For example, you definitely want to pee right before you go.  Otherwise you’re three miles away from your house, trying to find a place to go, a car shows up out of nowhere with its lights on and startles you and then you run home covered with three pints of your own urine and it’s 35 degrees outside.

I also learned that wearing the right gear is important.  I thought my old tennis shoes were okay to wear, the same ones that I wear when I mow the yard or swim in a creek.  But JPC gave me a sizeable gift card to a real running store where they sell real running shoes, and a tiny old dude with creepy little marathon-runner’s-bird-legs showed me the right kind to wear.

You put these things on, and it’s like they’re making sweet, sweet love to your feet.  Not only are they the most expensive pair of footwear I’ve ever owned, now when I put on any other shoes, it feels like I’m clamping on rusty bear traps.

I ran my first 5K this weekend, the Hot Chocolate Race in Dallas.  The temperature at start time was 27 degrees, but I still managed to sweat profusely during the run.  The scarf that I thought was a good idea to wear ended up strangling me during the race.  When I took breaks from fighting with the scarf to focus on the running, I was flying through the race, passing folks left and right.  I zipped past all kinds of kids, old folks, people doodling around with strollers, playing with their Facebook on mobile phones, chicks chit-chatting about Grey’s Anatomy… you name it.

I’d like to think that none of these “casual” 5K-ers beat me because I ran the whole time, but you never know.  I’m probably still slow enough that somebody could beat me while they’re tagging themselves in their friends’ Facebook pictures during the race.  Hi Facebook friends, I'm almost at mile marker three, and I almost got run over by what looked like a retarded grizzly bear struggling with his scarf. 

In the end, I hit all my goals:  1.  I didn’t die.  2.  I beat Diva Girlfriend.  3.  I finished in under 30 minutes.  4.  And I didn’t die.  Good race all around, plus there was tons of chocolate at the end.  I briefly considered how ironic it was to put all those lost calories right back into my system, but I was grouchy from everything hurting.  Plus, my soul needed the chocolate.

KER-POW.

I recently went on my first cruise.  I came back in one piece, a bit more tan, and noticeably chubbier.  But more importantly, I became wiser in the ways of the high-seas vacation experience.  Here is some advice for any of you who are considering going.

Get to know your cabin stewards

They start off the cruise with mandatory meetings at the "muster stations," where they explain that if the ship is sinking, you should casually grab your lifejacket out of your cabin closet (if you're not somewhere else on the ship, floating in a hot tub, hammered out of your mind when the ship rams an iceberg or Italian coastline) and gather at your safety locations.  Our safety-experts, who looked an awful lot like our hot dinner hostesses, all looked like Russian porn stars (don't ask me how I know).

If you go right, tiny ninjas will attack your family from all directions

Our cabin steward was very friendly guy with a 27-syllable name that we couldn't remember.  He never stopped smiling.  Ever.  This was my best guess on why he was missing a couple of prominent teeth.  You gotta occasionally not-smile to protect those things.

One night, Diva Girlfriend wanted a grilled cheese at 3 am, so I called it in and fell back asleep.   When they knocked on our cabin, I groggily stumbled to the door to open it.  Only then did I realize that one part of me thought it was morning already in a really obvious way.  I'd like to think that maybe the cabin steward didn't notice, but my error was gloriously noticeable, and I noticed that Smiley didn't make eye contact with me for the rest of the trip.

Use the buddy system

Whoever you bring on your cruise, you want to stick together.  The ship is a 14-stories-tall playground, and you can get lost with that much merriment at hand.  The one time I left my cruise companion unattended for an hour, I found her on all fours in our cabin, naked, very out-of-sorts, and sporting a new black eye.  As a side note, the cocktails in Mexico are super strong.

Pack your booze

The ship doesn't let you bring your own adult beverages because they want those drinkin’ dollars.  Following the advice of friends, we emptied out the contents of a case of plastic water bottles, filled them with premium liquor instead, and jammed them back into the case.  We packed enough clothes to live on the boat indefinitely, so we didn’t have any room left to put the "water" in a suitcase, and we ended up having to let the cruise security team inspect it along with our other carry-ons.  I would refer to these folks as ship "Security," but they also looked an awful lot like the guys we saw making pizza at the all-night pizza buffet later.

I'm terrible at being sneaky because I blush like I've been attacked with pink paintballs in the face.  The inspector guy saw our case of "water," rolled his eyes, and sang, musically, “What do we have in here?  I wonder if it’s water or something else?” and he ripped open the case.  After shaking each bottle, he was able to determine that they didn’t contain water.  He comically opened one up, sang a little song about vodka, and tossed each one in the trash.  In the commotion, Diva Girlfriend adjusted her shoulder straps and her tubetop fell down, popping out a boob.

The combination of watching my premium combustible beverages go into the trash and the sudden public appearance of a nipple broke my brain, and I could only stutter out a rambling apology to the guy.  “I, uh, don’t know how that got into my milk bott… I mean my water bottles... I mean, those aren't mine...”

Make some friends

Our first couple of breakfasts were spent listening to stories about grandkids from 37th-time cruisers.  Everybody goes around the table, inevitably asks all the same questions, and then we go about eating our eggs benedict and making smalltalk.

We eventually just started skipping all the back and forth, and introduced ourselves with all the pertinent information.  "Hi, we're from North Texas, this is our first cruise, we're having a great time, and we're a dating couple, living in sin."

After listening to unsolicited cruise advice from the Golden Girls, we were thrilled to find out that they assigned us to our dinner table with similar folks.  Everybody at our table was roughly our age, all couples, all from Texas.  And all of them were way better at this cruise thing than us.  A couple of them were selected to be headline performers at the last theater show because they were badass singers.  A couple others were newlyweds, winning big at the casino.  Another couple swam with dolphins, took scenic beach photos, and saved 27 kids from a burning orphanage at one of our stops.  We were the couple who lost all our credit cards in the ocean while swimming in Jamaica after too much rum.  In comparison to our new friends, we were like a couple hobos who snuck onto the ship.

Bring your fat pants

Holy crap, I gained a pound a day.  It’s not that we necessarily ate enormous meals at each sitting – we just tended to eat 6 or 7 times a day.  I’d be walking by holding a chimichanga roll, suddenly notice a Mongolian wok bar that I hadn’t seen before, and then make excuses to come back there after whatever shop we were visiting next.   Then on the way, I’d grab a couple sushi bites and an ice cream.  Almost all of the food around the ship is included, there’s a ton of variety, and room service runs all night (also free).  When you add that to vacation-mode lack of diet willpower, plus tons of free time, you can expect to look and feel like you’re about to give birth to walrus twins.

It might just be a coincidence, but towards the end of the trip, I noticed more passengers triggering the heavy-weight siren on the elevators.  After each chubby would-be final passenger embarrassingly stepped back off to wait for the next elevator, all the other people would make comical faces at each other.  Then I'd whisper, "Psst, we're the fat ones."

Actual picture of me, day one

Actual picture of me, day seven

]]> http://buffman.net/blog/?feed=rss2&p=410 0 http://buffman.net/blog/?p=402 http://buffman.net/blog/?p=402#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:03:41 +0000 Buffman http://buffman.net/blog/?p=402  

As we prepared to go on our first cruise, the process of getting ready highlighted some of the differences between men and women.  Here’s how it played out.

One month until the trip

Diva Girlfriend already has all our trip information printed out, we’re registered online, she has maps of where our cabin is, she’s researched everything about the ship, and she’s asked her doctor to prescribe her the little patches that go behind your ears so that she won’t barf when the boat wiggles.  At this point, I am vaguely aware that there is some kind of trip coming up.

Two weeks until the trip

Diva Girlfriend is already starting to feel the stress.  She has compiled detailed lists of what to bring, she wants to spend every dinner talking about which bags will be used for carry-ons, and she starts dedicating multiple nights to pack in the weeks ahead.  I am still mostly oblivious about the trip.

One week to go

Now Diva Girlfriend is asking me every day if I’ve packed yet.  She has all her luggage out, and she’s trying to whittle down which seven pairs of flip-flops she will need to sit on a boat.   I watch the news about the cruise ship that hit the coast of Italy, and picture swimming down the hallway out of my cabin room, in slow-mo, dramatic movie fashion, to escape the ship before it topples over.   I consider watching Titanic again.

Three days to go

Diva Girlfriend is in full panic mode.   She starts chanting we’ll never be ready in time, there’s no way we’re going on this trip.  I finally agree to write down a packing list so she’ll settle down.  “Phone charger, clothes, deodorant, lube.”  She didn't seem impressed, so I fixed the handle on her luggage that I broke at Disney.

Two days to go

Diva Girlfriend has our luggage tags printed out and is running around the house panicking like the place is on fire.  She uses our living room and bedroom to stage large piles of stuff to bring, and other piles of stuff to maybe-bring.  I pour four liters of liquor in water bottles and cram them back into the case so they look like water.  Then I start realizing that I’m going to be out of the house and away from technology for 9 days, so I start playing video games around the clock.

The day before we leave

Literally 70% of everything that Diva Girlfriend owns in the whole world is sitting out in piles around the house.  She has rows of shoes, three-foot tall piles of reading materials, and several different kinds of cameras.  She even brings plastic cups for us to drink from.  It looks like she's moving out -- I have moved into new homes before with less stuff.

She makes the very bold claim that when she usually goes on vacation, that she packs super light, like one bag.  I look at the enormous piles of clothes, along with every kind of medicine and first aid we own, three different kinds of sunscreen, and the seven open luggage containers, and I silently scoff at her light-packing stories.  Then I invite buddies over to play video games and drink whiskey.  The cats notice that we’re about to leave and all start acting insane.

Thirty minutes before we hop in the car

While Diva Girlfriend dresses and second-guesses and triple-checks which shirt she wants to wear to ride across Texas in the car, I calmly walk around the house and pack in ten minutes flat.  Two piles of clothes, a dressy coat, some toiletries, cell phone charger, a guitar, and a book.  Easy.  I end up spending more time hauling all her enormous luggage out to the car, and trying to do a big Tetris puzzle to cram it all in there.

The final result of our packing:

- My total time spent packing:  10 minutes.  I ran out of t-shirts shirts and underwear, and forgot my sunglasses, all of which were replaced for a total of $40.  Side note:  Wearing underwear in the ocean doesn't get them as clean as you might think.

- Diva Girlfriend’s total time spent packing:  73 hours.  She remembered everything and had clothes to spare, but we had to pay porters to lug all the extra crap around, plus whatever costs we spent on extra fuel to lug all of it back and forth across Texas.

In retrospect, my packing method was very much like firing a shotgun.  It wasn't very accurate, but it got the job done quickly.  Next time I'll remember to bring more underwear.

Did you know that some cities are expanding their commercial offerings and providing personalized car photography services?  Here’s how it works – They take a picture of your car (with zoomed-in views!) and send you a picture in the mail. Then you send them a check for $75.  If you don’t pay, they’ll even send reminders.  It can be any time of day – even if it’s at night, they have little automatic lights that come on to get a good shot of your car.  Neat! 

Actually, it’s not neat.  I can’t imagine a lazier version of law enforcement.  

I recently started to contest one of these traffic camera tickets.  After receiving my ticket, I went to the online website (from the shenanigans-out-of-state-third-party company who operates it) and logged in to see more information.  Not only did they have a picture of the event, but full video as well.  The video showed me taking a right turn on red at about 45 mph, didn’t even slow down.  I might have been eating lunch and texting somebody at the same time, or maybe working on my cross-stitching.  Who knows.  But I rocketed around that corner like a cartoon character. 

The bad news is that it cost me $75, but the good news is that my car looked pretty awesome.  I considered going back there and trying to get up to a higher speed around that corner, just for the cool video, but $75 is a bit too steep.  

It is a good thing that I’m not independently wealthy.  If not for the $75 price tag, I’d go around that corner backwards, or with a foot out the window, or maybe I could run the light and get out to do some kind of chicken dance on camera. 

The same day I sent in my check for the ticket, I was heading home from the store and trying to get off the phone with my mom.  This is my end of every conversation: “Okay Mom.  Yes.  Yes you told me that.  Yes you already told me that too.  I would get that looked at by a doctor.  Okay, I gotta get going here.  Okay.  Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.  Yes.  Yes, you told me that, too.  Okay, hanging up now…”  (and repeat all that for 17 minutes). 

I was on my residential street, almost home, when suddenly I saw the rotating blue-and-red lights.  At this point my brain did what it always does.  I map out the surrounding areas in my head, start thinking of the best routes to outrun this guy before radios and helicopters catch up, and then I talk myself out of it.   I am not a criminal, so he was probably just stopping me to tell me how cool my car is. 

This was a weird stop, though.  I always drive super slow on my street, actually under the speed limit, because all my neighbors mingle and wander in the street like it’s an extension of their living room.  You couldn’t go the speed limit if you tried, or else you’d hit a bunch of rednecks, kids on bikes, and a couple of hot moms.  So why did he stop me? 

The officer ran up to me, out of breath, and he was super pissy.  Apparently I had led him on a brief chase.  While I was listening to my mother’s repetitive stories, this officer lost me in cross traffic when I cut through my gym parking lot from the main road.  He had to speed off the other way, stop traffic, and gun it across my neighborhood to find me.  

Sometimes I’ll try to talk my way out of a ticket, but I knew from subtle context clues (the way he ran towards my car while unbuckling his gun holster and how he could only speak in shouting volume) that I wasn’t going to get off with a warning.  For future reference, if this happens to you, don't tell him "Wow, man, you are really out of breath."

So I signed for my tickets – for driving 62 in a 45 and for cutting through a commercial lot.  As he walked away, he wanted to leave me a little jab.  “Hey man, next time I have to chase you, it’s not gonna be pretty.”  So I replied “I’m happy to get a 62 in a 45.  You would have caught me doing 90 if you had seen me earlier.” 

You find a laptop on a park bench.  You're a kind person, so you decide to open it up and figure out whose it is so you may return it to them.  You don't see any obvious contact info, so let's look for context clues to figure out who owns this thing.  

Uh oh, looking like they use Internet Explorer.  Gross.  Let's up it up and see wh... oh my God, the whole top half of the screen is covered with random toolbars.  How can she even see the screen?  (Notice here that I've already assigned gender.)

I look at the homepage, and sure enough, it's AOL.  I haven't seen anyone use AOL as their primary email since 1998.  The bookmarks are recipes and sentimental blogs.   The programs in the Start menu are the ones that came with the computer and the wallpaper is one of the stock choices from the original Windows install.  All antivirus programs are expired and their icons are blinking for updates.

Obvious conclusion:  The owner of this computer is a grandmother, possibly 70 years old, and uses this thing to share recipes, print church newsletters, and read websites about knitting.  (No offense, Mema.)  I think I have this thing figured out.

Nope, way off.  The owner of this computer is the gorgeous, hip, young brunette that I'm dating.  Somehow, in this crazy mixed up world, this same woman who has a closet full of sexy corsets and leave-on heels happens to have elderly computer habits. 

The dichotomy is staggering.  This otherwise-fashionably-hip gal uses a computer like an old lady.  Diva Girlfriend's virus protection expired years ago and her external backup drive has been sitting in its original packaging for over a year.  She is scared of storing any backup picture or music files on the laptop because using 5% of her available memory space "might mess it all up." 

Luckily for the sake of her computer, she ended up dating me, and I am probably the biggest geek she knows.  Here is how to make the world right without getting anybody upset.

1)  Install Google Chrome or other better browser. 

2)  On her desktop, go into Google Chrome's properties and change the name of its shortcut to Internet Explorer.  Then change its icon to the blue "E" that she's used to seeing.

3)  Now you have Google Chrome installed, disguised as Internet Explorer. 

If she's the type who needs this to happen, then she'll probably assume that a system update or something "got rid of all my toolbars."  Just play along. 

Now you may enjoy safer surfing and reduce your future tech requests.  I don't know how to get a girl to switch over from an AOL email address to any other domain that people are using this decade.  If anybody out there has women all figured out, please send me some kind of troubleshooting guide.   I only understand these crazy computin' machines, and even then, just barely. 

Here are sounds that start with "S" that I don't like:

• The SQUISH when you're walking barefoot in the yard and find something that was recently deposited there by one of the pets.  When it happens, you're almost afraid to look down and see the dookie landmine squeezed between your toes like some kind of demented Play-doh Fun Factory.
• The SKREEE that my car's brakes make due to the accumulation of brake dust.  The fix is to get the car going quickly and do a fast stop to clear the rotors, but I always seem to be in traffic, or have my kid in the car, or have lots of loose objects that can bounce around in the vehicle.  When I do finally get the opportunity, sometimes I'll do the fast stop at a red light and freak out whoever is waiting for the light there in front of me.
• The SIGH of any pissy woman.  Even if she fires it off in another room, it makes it way across the house and hits you in the face like a heat-seeking missile of negativity.
• The SKTKTKT sound that one of those hologram plastic cups makes when you scrape a fingernail across it.  Just thinking about that sound makes my skin crawl.  Everybody has different sounds that make them insane, but this sound is worse than nails on a chalkboard or any other audible irritant to me.
• The SHRILLY VIBRATO style that is sung by some elderly choir women.  You can usually tell which choirs have try-outs or who lets everybody in who wants to sing, because the latter will inevitably have one or two of these.  When they sing, it sounds either like somebody is shaking them violently, or they're being electrocuted.
• The SLURP that Ralphie makes next to me on the couch when he's cleaning his puppy parts.  I understand that he doesn't understand human manners, so I try to ignore these kinds of activities for the most part.  But when I'm trying to sit on the couch and eat a burrito, I don't want to hear the sloppy wet cleaning of his brown eye while he leans against me.  Go do that in the yard or something.

My four-year-old daughter Jules posed for pictures and thanked Santa for her new box of checkers.  She politely gave the impression that she believed Landon was the real deal.  Then she leaned in to whisper to me, “Daddy, is the real Santa going to bring all the stuff I asked for before?”

When you’re a kid, Christmas is your biggest payday of the year.  In your little Kool-aid pumping heart, you’ve been led to believe that there is an old benevolent man with God-like powers, an army of elf labor, and he wants to bring you stuff that you demanded after you saw them during prominently-placed commercials.  He has supernatural powers to know if you’ve been naughty or nice, but still needs a letter to tell him what you want him to bring.  After all the excitement, you finally close your eyes on Christmas Eve night, badda bing, some intruder has entered your house to do a reverse robbery.

Clairebear, my almost-two-year-old niece, a very bright and serious young child, was getting ready for Christmas Eve night and put out cookies with my sister Jenn, who is currently so pregnant that it hurts to look at her (it’s like there’s a tall baby standing up in there sideways and doing dance moves.)  Clairebear made sure the cookies were placed where Santa could see, then told the cookies “Okay.  Bike.”  Having presented her Christmas Currency, and specifying her wishes again, she was content to go to bed.  Just in case, she had given the cookies a “Claire”-ification.  Ha!

Pardon me, dear readers.  I throw puns in here sometimes just because they make my sister insane.  Maybe it’ll send her into labor.

When I was younger, I played along to keep getting the gifts, of course.  In time I became the oldest of five siblings, and we all played along well into adulthood to continue getting that sweet, sweet Christmas loot.   But as a young kid, I considered the Santa evidence kinda soft.  Okay, I see here where somebody took a bite out of the cookies I left.  Physical proof, but?….  I didn’t go so far as to compare dental patterns with my parents, but I did leave the door open that they were the ones biting my cookies.  I was also curious why all the adults acted uncomfortable when I asked how the Santa thing works out with the Jesus thing.  I asked if Santa could use his powers of space and time to bring back dead relatives, and why he didn't use his flying powers to help stop wars and help injured people out of burning high-rise buildings , and if he was cryogenically frozen all year to give him longer life.  I was the kid who asked the creepy questions. 

10)  I resolve that when my internet goes down, and I call my internet service provider, and they stick me on hold for 30 minutes, that they stop playing messages referring me to go to their website for assistance.  Hey dummy, I can’t go to your website because your internet service is down.  This is the help line for internet service disruption.  Each time their message goes through the loop, inviting me over and over to “simply go online for assistance”, I want to punch somebody in the throat.

9)  I resolve that Diva Girlfriend will stop telling our mutual coworkers about what kinds of websites I visit when I’m home alone.  I would think that her, of all people, would be more discrete with sharing what kinds of content I have saved on my home computer.    wink wink, nudge nudge

8)  I resolve that my cat will stop waking me up at 4:30 in the morning, yowling loudly for wet food.  My new policy of giving him an impromptu bath in the sink seems to be working, but we still seem to do these early morning grooming sessions more often than I'd like.  He is a big orange jerk.

7)  I resolve that everybody stops talking about the world ending in 2012 because of the Mayan calendar.  The faulty calendar of an ancient civilization shouldn't get nearly as much press as it has.  Watch for the distancing and backpedaling by the same people responsible for all the countdown hype and news coverage of Armageddon Day.

6)  I resolve that the Disney organization will stop whoring out my personal information.  I had an amazing time in Orlando this year.  But every day since then,  I have received telemarketing calls and junk mail for various vacation-related offerings, timeshares, cruises... you name it.  If you ever go there, I recommend giving them fake personal information.  Instead, Mickey Mouse will know you as Scooter McFargus, from Salt Lake City.

5)  I resolve that nobody else dies this year.  I've lost five close friends and family in the last two and a half years, including a brother and my dad.  If you're reading this, try really hard not to die in 2012.

4)  I resolve that everybody quits smoking.  You spend a ton of money on cigarettes and your breath smells like an ashtray.  You know the only thing worse than having to smell the smoky fart that you leave lingering in my breathing space?  Listening to a grown adult boohoo about how hard it is to stop their own bad habit.

3)  I resolve that when I ask for help finding something at Target, that they don't wander up and down aisles, hoping to notice it.  Hey Einstein, that's what I just now did before I reached out to you for help.  I don't want to watch you spend another 10 minutes wandering around doing the same thing.  Use your radio to ask someone who is smarter than you if you don't know where it is.

2)  I resolve that this year's presidential race gives us many comical moments.  The embarrassing moments, muddy smear campaigns, catchphrases, and misspoken facts expose our presidential process for what it truly is -- a contest of charisma.  the winner is whoever can give the most general, middle-of-the-road, non-committal answers to appeal to the masses.  I hope this year's proceedings deliver us the high level of comedy "irri-tainment" that we've come to expect.

1)  I resolve that my Mom will learn how to exit a building faster.  I love it when she comes over.  But you can ignore her the first time she says she's heading home because she is going to say goodbye to each person three times, piddle around in her purse, linger by the door, and will not be ready to leave for 47 minutes.  She does the same thing when it's time to exit a vehicle.  When she puts the vehicle in park, she's not even close to ready to get out.  She piddles on her phone, takes time to gather things, stops and forgets what she's doing, and then gets out 15 minutes later.  When we arrive somewhere together, I just go inside without her.

Diva Girlfriend is super resourceful.  If you need to locate something at a local store, or to find best rates on a flight, or find a recipe for Polynesian wombat stew, she can find it in 37 seconds.  Her little fingers blaze on the keyboard, she makes a list, badda-bing –  she locates most information in what usually would require me three to four lunar cycles.

In the manic scramble to prepare for Dad’s memorial service last week, we scanned pictures to show in a repeating slideshow up on the projection screen.  Some people put these things together in a way that makes your deceased loved one appear to be majestic in every pose.  But for my dad, I wanted to capture his zany character, so I put in pictures of him making a face while tasting escargot for the first time, and a picture of him bringing me home from the hospital in a yellow laundry basket.

After years of doling out free tech support to family, to family members’ neighbors, to family members’ neighbors’ plumbers, to some guy who heard of somebody that knew a guy who looks like me, I realized that once you help somebody out with their computer, they assign you to be its custodian for the next 12 years.

“That damned Jeff.  He filled up my computer with too many files.  Now all my internets go to this peckerhead singing a song about how he’s never gonna give me up, never gonna let me down.”

Back to the slideshow.  My sister Jenn came over and we were knee-deep in scanning pictures of Dad sporting a hippie haircut in his high school senior pictures when suddenly, a brand new antivirus program appeared.  Wait, I don’t remember this program here before.   It offered to scan the drives and provided a way to fix the 47 viruses it “found,” but only if we registered and sent money to their company.  Uh oh, looking like a virus.  Let me just do… a few more clicks…. yep, everything is locked up.  Anything I clicked on, only this dumb “Vista Antivirus 2012” program would load.

3.       I tried a long list of things to do it the hard way… fighting with the task manager, futile attempts to uninstall, deleting files, trying and failing to start in safe mode, system restore wouldn’t load, stood on one foot while I waved around magic beans, etc.

Shortly after eating, still milling about at the dinner table, Jules randomly said “We’re all kids here.”

Diva Girlfriend smiled and said “Not quite, Jules, your Daddy and I are adults.”

Jules replied “Nuh uh… we’re all kids because we still have our mommies and daddies.”  Then she paused, looked at me and said “Oh.  Except you.  Your daddy’s in heaven.”

Ouch.

Jules and her Papi were the very best of friends.  He’d come over and the two of them would make an enormous mess while making gingerbread houses, painting on canvases (and each others’ faces), making bowls on a pottery wheel... you name it.  A mere mention of his name, and her little eyes would light up.  She knew that he’d always show up with an armful of presents or crafts, and would give her his undivided attention.  From there it was a contest who would be the loudest (and trash the house more) as they boisterously played – the 4-year-old or the 53-year-old.

He happily let her boss him around ... One night a couple weeks ago, she convinced him to sit in her closet and read her bedtime story to him, jammed in next to the toybox.  I told her that wasn't nice to do to Papi, and I got the impression she was just seeing how much she could get away with.

So I expected that Jules would take the news harder when I told her about his death last week.  Instead, here’s how it went down.

I delivered my pre-rehearsed explanation about life and death and heaven and how she won’t see Papi again in this world.  Jules smiled and replied, “Okay.”

Whew.  That was easy.

She thought about it for a bit, then asked me, “If you and Mommy die, do I get a new Mommy and Daddy?”  Trying to spin this away from some kind of response that would make me start crying like a lunatic, I told her that we were going to drive her crazy well into her old years.  She was satisfied with that response.

Later, she offered confusing questions to her Nana and Diva Girlfriend – maybe Papi would meet us at the church?  Or Papi was in the hospital?  At the hospital with Jesus?

When I was a kid, I wouldn’t have handled it nearly as well.  I’d blow a gasket if I lost a GI Joe guy.  I still remember my uncle pretending to throw Dusty out the window, got a good laugh when we all freaked out, and then laughed again later when he revealed to us that he really HAD thrown the guy out the window.  Then he peed in my windowsill in the middle of the night, hosing down each of my stuffed animals in their little faces.  I didn’t handle loss very well as a kid, I guess.

The moral of the story is that we’re all kids, until we aren’t.

As I hold him in the sink and turn on the water, he tries to wriggle out of my hands and turns his face up to yowl at me.  His screech turns into a gargle as he catches a mouthful of the faucet water.  Suddenly , I hear an angelic voice over my shoulder – it’s my four-year-old daughter on the stairs.  

“Daddy, why are you rinsing the cat?”

Wait, the story starts earlier than that.  Let’s reboot.

As I drive home with my new tiny orange furball, he curls up on my lap, tucks his head under my arm, and purrs while he paws at my armpit.  He wasn’t named Diablo yet (which means “devil”) – I had just bought him 5 minutes ago and his personality had yet to emerge.   For now he is a rescue case, he’s deathly ill, and I just picked him over his furry white sister at the grungy apartment because he looked like the better chance of survival.  My $20 purchase turns into $850 in vet bills the first week.  But of course, you can’t put a price on who would eventually become my best furry friend and longest roommate.  

Oops, I went back too far.  I’ll skip ahead.

I’m standing in my yard at 4:19 am in my underwear, and I’m out of breath.  I’ve been chasing the little jerk for 17 frantic minutes.  He knows that if he stays in the yard and doesn’t get cornered, he can avoid me catching him.  We’ve done this every night now for three straight nights – or I should say early mornings.  He thinks it is hilarious to yowl at the top of his lungs to wake up the whole house in the middle of the night.  “YOWWWWWWWUUUUULLLLLLLLLLL!”  He makes it out the cat door before I even open my bedroom door, and then I’m in hot pursuit.   At that moment, huffing and puffing in the yard, arms scratched up from trying to reach at him hiding in my bushes,  I make a new house policy – if Diablo wakes me up, he gets a bath.  If I have to wake up two hours early for unscheduled cardio, then he gets to spend the morning getting his wet fur back in order.  

Fast forward two hours.

Diablo struts into the bathroom where I’m getting ready for work.  He’s playing it cool, but his ears are both pointed towards me like little orange satellites… he is feeling me out on whether or not his statute of limitations has passed.  Or maybe Kitty Daddy forgot all about the incident in the yard?   Nope.  I look at him, we have a locked-eyes moment, I grin, he goes wide-eyed, and he makes a break for the living room.  Before he makes it to the cat door, I stun him with a couch pillow and leap over the couch to grab him.  As I head for the sink, he bellows a woeful yowl and tries to claw me with his rear claws.  He knows what’s coming.   

Fast forward to that evening.

We’re doing some make-up petting on the couch, and Diablo smells great.  He must have needed the bath.  I scratch his head and ears in all the perfect places, the culmination of almost 15 years of trial and error together.  He purrs like a lawnmower, tucks his head down, and nuzzles it into my armpit.  Good times. 

Top 10 Christmas Pet Peeves

10.  Santa haters

For you cutting-edge parents out there who tell your kids about Santa while they’re still toddlers – I see your point.  It’s weird to start off kids in this realm of magic, mystery, and the unexplainable business model of the North Pole, only to turn around later and shrug it off later as organized lying for the purposes of good holiday cheer.  But keep in mind that the rest of us do this tradition with our kids because we enjoy it.  When your little enlightened blabbermouths spread that word like a virus, you might as well have snuck into a hundred kids’ rooms and punched them in their little faces.

9.  Overrating old Christmas movies

When you were a kid, the claymation Rudolph may have been the most amazing thing you’d ever seen on TV so far, and might have triggered some special form of holiday glee in your little eggnog-pumping heart.  Christmas movies have gotten better, but your nostalgia may have kept you from updating your goofy brain with better taste.  Don’t believe me?  Watch it again and tell me you don’t roll your eyes the first time you hear the blasting shrill sound everytime his nose lights up.

8. People who put their lights up too early

I have neighbors across the street who do Halloween lights, and another set down the street launch their full glowing Christmas regalia the next day, long before Thanksgiving.  If you count up all that time, plus the rednecks down the street who leave theirs up until February (and turn them on every night), my neighborhood has some kind of lights up a third of the year.

7.  People who shop too early

Yes, yes, you already told me at Thanksgiving.  You got your Christmas shopping done in July.  I’m tired of hearing about it.  I hope everybody’s tastes have changed, and nobody likes the things that have been collecting dust in your closet for 6 months.

6.  Christmas songs that make you cry

I love me some Christmas songs.  I will sing and dance to “Run Run Rudolph” at the top of my lungs in the car, and then hum that awesomeness all day afterwards.   But lately they play songs that make you cry, like the kid who needs to buy his mom some shoes because she’s on her deathbed, but he came ill-prepared to the checkout stand because he’s too poor to buy them.  I do an emotional 180 when this comes on – three minutes ago I was happily air-guitaring to Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and now I’m fighting off tears for Christmas Shoes.

5.  Christmas songs twisted into advertising

I understand that especially now, companies need to whore out their crap to the masses.  But when you set the song to one of my favorite Christmas songs, I find myself singing your dumb version instead.  Jiggle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle all the way.... Oh what fun it is to ride… in a brand new Honda Accord…

4.  Gifting anything related to Christmas

Whoa …. a Santa Claus mug?  And a porcelain nativity scene?  And an ornament with my name on it?  Neat, I’ll pack all this stuff in a box right now to go sit in my attic for eleven months.

3.  Mass mailings

I love the holiday cards that include a hand-written update on how the family is doing along with an updated picture slipped into the envelope.  Those get a front-and-center spot where I display Christmas cards.  The ones that serve as the floorboards of that display are the ones that are mass-processed.  Glossy, impersonal greetings with a computer-generated envelope, made from some picture you uploaded to a website on a break one night while you were playing FarmVille.  It’s all the automation of junk mail, but with no coupons.

2.  Mistletoe belt

Mistletoe is a sweet concept – a romantic moment, you grab a girl around the waist, uh no, look up here, it’s traditional, let's get our smooch on.  The mistletoe belt is the tacky joke-gag add-on.  I am sure that this was invented the same year they started the original tradition, probably by the perverted uncle of whoever started it.  Please tell me that in all recorded history, that this has never successfully resulted in an extreme act of appreciation.

1.  Ruining Rudolph

When you sing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, sometimes kids will shout out the little add-ons.  LIKE MONOPOLY!  LIKE PINOCCHIO!  LIKE COLUMBUS!  But hey, they’re kids… you just roll your eyes and wish those little boogers would be attacked by hungry wolves.   There is also an occasional adult who won’t sing any other part of the song, but will yell out the nonsense.  LIKE A LIGHTBULB! The next grown-up who does this in my car might end up in a wood-chipper.  LIKE FARGO!

There comes a time where all visually-impaired people finally admit that they need corrective lenses.  I would call it a “moment of clarity,” but it’s probably anything but.  It is usually a new tree-shaped dent in your car, or a missed street sign that gets you lost deep inside Oklahoma,  or a misfired “Hey check out that girl’s butt,” who ends up being the elderly grocery cart wrangler at Walmart.

I've always been the guy who smugly exclaimed that I have perfect vision.  When I was younger, I could read newspaper print from across a table.  Now I have to slow my car down to approximately 2 miles per hour to read street signs.  I find that it also helps if I turn down the radio -- I guess my ears are linked to my eyes somehow, or maybe my brain can only power one set of organs at a time.

I still have not bowed down to stick my head into the jaws of inevitability.  Instead, I’m in that middle ground called Corrective Lens Denial.  I probably need glasses, or contact lenses, or whatever surgery where they zap your eyeball with a light saber.  But I haven’t committed to that first eye exam.

I recently  passed the eye exams for a new driver’s license and a physical, but both were narrow-passing marks, heavily reliant on hints from the test givers.

We had a Benefits Meeting this week at work, and I found myself squinting at the slide to read it.  Hmm, looking fuzzy here, turn on super-squinty powers... Oops, this is the slide for vision benefits.  Okay, I'll pay attention for a moment.  They started talking about co-pays, eye exams, we'll fund frames up to a certain amount -- and the combination of tired-head and my Corrective Lens Denial took over and I blew it off until next year.

"See" you later, Four Eyes.

“Daddy, when we go to Dis-ah-ney, on the airplane, who’s gonna sit next to me?”

“I am, Sweetie. “

“Oh.  Okay.”

Few seconds goes by…

“If I wasn’t sitting next to you, where did you think I’d be?”

“You always drive.”

Our trip was right before they stopped requiring kids under 12 years old to remove their shoes again, so we sent her battery-powered-motion-activated-pink-blinking-princess shoes through the X Ray conveyor.  I’m surprised that those didn’t set off some kind of alarm.  Those things are wired like little explosives.

She didn’t mind the security check, waiting in line, removing shoes, etc.  To a four-year-old, everything was accepted as the normal course of business.  If there was a clown juggling three Chihuahuas and a mariachi band singing Journey cover songs, Jules would have seen that and thought Okay, they do juggling and singing here, I guess that’s normal.

Around the terminal, she had a captive audience while other passengers waited for their planes.  She explained to each person about how she was going to Dis-ah-ney, and this was going to be her first airplane ride, and Daddy was not going to be flying the plane today.

I showed her the little trains of carts that bring our luggage up the airplane, and we watched the guys load the conveyor to send our suitcases up into the belly of the plane.  She said, “Oh.  That’s nice of them.”

Jules was fairly well-prepared for the rest of her first airplane trip except that she was surprised that airplanes had wheels.  When we were taxiing around DFW Airport, she thought we were just flying really low.  She needed some convincing that there were wheels under the plane that retracted once we got in the air.  She still might not believe me.

Jules was moderately impressed with watching the Earth become small beneath us for the first time in her life, seeing houses turn into tiny specs, climbing up through the clouds.  But she was super-impressed with the tray table that she could put up and down.   I’d point out how we were flying higher than birds could even fly, miles up in the air, and then she’d show me how neat it was that the tray table included a little round cutout area for her drink to sit.  I’m considering installing one of those in my car for her to use.

When we landed, I explained that the airplane was going to take us to the terminal, and then we’d rent a car to go from there to Disney.  She asked why the airplane didn’t just fly straight to Disney and drop us off there, and I didn’t know what to say.  That’s actually a pretty good idea.

Hello readers. I have three revelations for you.

#1: Since the last post, I’ve been in a fight with a grown man, I took kiddo to Disney for the first time, I was in my new car while a friend wrecked it, I attempted to drown my 15-year-old cat, my childhood best friend moved in, and for some reason, I have stopped remembering to zip up my pants after bathroom activities approximately 93% of the time. We have much to catch up on.

#2: You have been amazing readers, even during my hiatus. Hundreds of you have been checking in on the site, posting links to my pages to other places out there, sending supportive emails, and I’ve gotten three offers for ads. This blog marks my 146th entry on this site. That seems like a lot of content, but I’m honestly astonished that you’ve continued to visit while I’ve been away. You have been surprisingly great consumers of my goofy brand of insane ramblings.

#3: I’ve decided to make a real commitment to this blog. I’m not going to come right out and say that watching Julie and Julia set this in motion, or even admit to watching that movie and tearfully cheering for her to beat her culinary goal. But I think it is a great idea to impose a deadline for productivity.

So here it is – I am giving you 100 humor blogs in the next 365 days. I want to be the very first blog that you pull up on your smartphone when your bottom touches the potty seat.  This counts as the first one, and by next December 2, we’ll have that blog count up by 100. Here is how my new self-imposed challenge goes:

• Each entry has to be over 300 words to count as a blog. Quotes, links, funny pictures, etc. don’t count against the total.
• If you have a blog and link to me, I’ll link back to your sites too (Just send me an email to request it --- buffmancomic@gmail.com )
• At the end of the year, I’ll be using your feedback and votes to determine the best entries, and will submit a book for publication that contains what you consider to be the best columns.

Go ahead and bookmark this site, or add me to your RSS feed if you haven’t already – I promise fun reading in the months ahead. Welcome to the ride, please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. I hope you enjoy it.

"You no have money. No donut."
"I do have money. Can you run it again?"
"The machine. The machine say you no have money."
"Well I'm sure I have money in my account. Please try it again?"

beep boop beep…. (sour face, one eyebrow up)

"Still say no money. No donut."

Despite her payment policy, she took one look at my adorable 4-year-old daughter and allowed us to leave there with her pink donut and Sunny Delight. But only after I first signed a piece of paper that said I'd come back and pay her. I wrote "123-4567" for my phone number and she didn't notice.

"Hello, this is Bank of America representative Ruben, what can I do for you today?
"Hey, what's up with my check card? Why is it declining?"
"I see here that we sent you a new one and shut this one off."
"Oh that letter that arrived yesterday? I haven't even opened it."
"Yes. You should be using that new card. The old one is closed now."
"Yeah, I noticed. Well, Ruben, how about letting me know so I don't look like a jackass in the donut store? That lady acted like I was trying to rob the place. What if I were stranded somewhere without gas? Or out of town?"
"We did notify you. It's explained in the letter that came with the card."

So I moseyed back to Donut Land with my new card, and tried to pay.

"Hi there, I was here earlier, I need to pay for a pink donut and a Sunny Delight."
(She tries to hand me a pink donut.)
"Don't you remember me? I've already got the donut. It turns out that the card was closed because this other, new card was sent to me. I'm here to repay."
She gives me a puzzled look and says "The Sunny Delight is in the case. You go get it, right there."
"No, I already have a Sunny Delight. I just want to give you money."

It was like I was sticking the place up, but in reverse.

"You no want pink donut? You want other donut. Here. You take chocolate."
"No, just ring me up for five bucks. I want to repay you from earlier."

The only way I could make it happen was to go grab a Sunny Delight out of the case, get her to put a pink donut in a bag, and then pay. Afterwards, it was very confusing to her when I left those things on the counter and walked out of the building, but now the world feels pretty right.

I guess I’m not as compassionate.  I’d understand her becoming a vegetarian if she had to – like if meat was giving her incurable itchy butt worms or something, but the compassion-based approach, I have trouble relating.  It’s like she announced that after a period of time off, that she wants to be a Buddhist.

Much like other temporary Buddhists, her whole family gets dragged into the ordeal.  My brother-in-law deserves a medal for being the best husband ever.  If I had a wife and she wanted to talk me into eating bean dip at every meal, I’m not sure I would be as understanding.  If I were him, I’d be at home right now trying to find a good place to hide baby back rib bones.

Hmm…. On the other hand, maybe he’s doing that right now too.  (Ha!  Sorry Craig if I just busted you.  I'm the worst.)

It’s funny how we project ourselves into everybody else’s situations.  Hearing about somebody finding Vegetarian Religion, it just makes me crave some kind of juicy red meat.  Why is that?  Perhaps the brief consideration of ‘Could I do that too?’ triggers my inner glutamine response, and my brain starts cheering for the careful marination and grilling of said meats.  I've eaten pounds of red meat since my sister's hippie revelation.

Dammit, now I want to eat a koala bear.

With ranch.

It’s hard to imagine a life without meat.  Sure, you could get your protein from other sources, like beans.  But you don’t want to hang around me after some epic bean consumption.  Especially if we’re in a car or something.

How about we just don’t eat the cute ones?  I could see not eating deer on account of their majestic appearance and cute fluffy white tails and memories of Bambi.  That makes sense.  And even pigs are pretty sweet once you get to know them.  They’re smarter and sweeter than dogs, despite their deliciousness.

Longhorns are awesome with the big pointy defensive head-swords, but your basic cow is pretty dumb.  I’m talking about your traditional farm cow, who just stands around burping back up chunks from one stomach to another, chewing on it again, wandering around, and leaving huge poops.  A cow is nature’s walking billboard that says “Hi I’m fat and slow, I dispense milk and taste terrific.”  You release a cow into the African Sahara, she’s gonna get ripped apart in like two seconds.  Hell, a zebra could probably even beat up a cow.  I don't know if it's ever happened in the wild, but I would bet on the zebra.  They're quite wiley.

I try to remind my sister, and other humans, that we are animals, too.  Our species didn’t get this far by eating hummus and vitamin supplements.  We fashioned crude weapons just so that we could whack the heads off all God’s little creatures.  Later, we invented cow-sized guillotines and bolt-guns to save ourselves the trouble.  I’m sure that we’ll still be eating meat in 100 years, even when we’re slicing the cows up with badass laser weapons.

Centuries from now, I picture a peaceful utopian society, with Buddhists chasing around koala bears with lasers.  Now that is the future I want to live in.

I’ve gotten her convinced that the truck windows are voice-activated.  She’ll decide that she doesn’t want the last inch of her cheesestick, yell “Windows Down!” and I quickly and discreetly fumble for the automatic window-down button on my side while she explains that she’s not a litterbug because the birds can eat cheese. 

For the record, we don’t do this with any sort of paper or plastic garbage.  (Don’t Mess with Texas, yeehaw.)   I’m not sure if birds will actually eat cheese, but to be honest, the cheesesticks don’t even make it out the window.  She’s sitting literally an inch from a 18 inch x 24 inch open window, and somehow misses EVERY TIME, resulting in an inch-long hunk of cheese bouncing around randomly in my truck to find later. 

Lately we’ve been playing a version of “I Spy,” a riddle game where one of us gives three clues to get the other person to guess what we’re thinking.  She’s still working on her clue-giving process.

“Hey Daddy I have three clues for you.  First of all, it’s a number.  And it’s…”

“Is it three?”

“What?!  How do you know?!”

“Your hand is holding up three fingers.”

“Whoops, ok.  Let’s do a new one…  I got it.  The first clue is it’s black.”

“Is it the radio?”

“Daddy!  What?!  How do you know all my clues?”

“Well you’re staring down the radio without blinking, like a laser.”

“You are so crazy!  I’m gonna punch you right in the nose.”

“Jules, this time don’t pick something inside the truck.  Pick something else and give me clues.”

“Alright I’m ready.  It’s purple on top…. and has feet all over it, like 28 feet … and the sides have some kind of little brown things, like different sizes, and some are spiral twist things… and it lights up… and it lives in the ocean... ” (and voice trails off)  “What is it?”

“Well, I have no idea.  You got me.”

“I don’t know either!”  (and laughs maniacally)

"I'm sorry, sweetie.  Friday is Donut Day, remember?  Today is Wednesday, and I already made you toast."

"But the other day it wasn't Friday? And we ate donuts then?  Then why not today?"

"That was a special occasion, Jules.  We were running late that day."

"Well maybe today can be special, too."

"I'm sorry, today is just a regular Wednesday.  And you already have toast."

"Daddy, I have an idea."

"Yes?"

"How about I decide which days are special instead of you, okay?  Then we'll eat donuts whenever I feel like it."

What an exciting start to the story, with a little sneak preview into how it ends!  I hope it starts back at the beginning, to see how they got to this wacky little predicament with the mouse. 

There is something funny about Texas – it’s built on a weather swivel, of sorts.  We’ll bake in the sun at over 100 degrees for months and months, then get one or two days of real Autumn weather, then bam, freezing temperatures.  No in-between.  Well this crazy temperature-shift sends our large Texas-sized rear ends indoors, along with any critters that we don’t successfully manage to keep out.   

There is a field behind my backyard – with no houses for a hundred yards – which is awesome for hot tub skinny-dipping, but also provides a little in-town wilderness area for field mice to thrive.  About once a year, right when it starts getting cold, one of the brash young field mice will ignore the horror stories from his elders and try to venture into the Young household.  He doesn’t know that I already have all the irreplaceable Christmas mementos secured in plastic totes, that all my perishable goods are kept locked away in sealed containers, and that I don’t leave food out … except the pet food bowls.  Cue The Torturer.

Who is this “Torturer”?  He sounds so ominous!  I must continue reading.  I was already hooked when he mentioned the skinny-dipping.  I hope that comes up again.

The Torturer’s real name is Diablo (Spanish for “Devil”, which I’m sure is how he is described by any Spanish-speaking field mice in the vicinity).  His nickname is “Itty Bitty”, but as I’ve explained in previous columns, he is neither itty nor bitty.  He is a huge, strong, loud orange tabby with an affinity for biting people’s faces and torturing smaller animals.  If he were a human, he’d already be doing life behind bars or been sentenced to Death Row, depending on which state he lives in.

I think he lives in Texas.  I remember that from earlier in the story.  They execute lots of people. 

Instead, Diablo lives in the luxury of suburban cat life.  He lounges around all day, acting like a jerk, strutting like he owns the place.  He won’t move out of the way when I’m  trying to walk up the stairs, he gets excited at midnight and knocks all the change off my bookshelf for no reason, and loudly yowls at 3am to wake me up. 

But this one time a year, he earns his keep.  Diablo has an important job to do.

I bet it has something to do with the mice.

His super sensitive cat-senses, speed, and agility are no match for a misguided field mouse that tries to scurry in through the cat door.  It’s like watching an Olympian sprinter close the distance on a four-year-old.  He snatches the adorable critter up in a second, usually by the scruff of the neck.  He wounds him in the process, but he's careful not to kill him.  If I don’t intervene, he’ll keep little Fieval alive for several gruesome hours before dismantling him into little gift-sized parts on my pillow.

Oh I remember Fieval Mousekewitz from the American Tail cartoon, about the little Russian mouse who wears a hat and sings.  He and his sister would look at the moon and sing songs at the same time.

So here is the sad-but-necessary intervention process:  I stun Diablo with the cardboard box to get him to drop the mouse, and before he can pounce back on him, I scoop up Fieval in the box.  At this point, he’s irreparably injured, and certainly in no shape to escape The Torturer a second time if I let him go anywhere near the house.  Instead, I put him out of his misery with a few unceremonious shakes in the box and an toss back over into the field. 

Maybe the gesture sends a message to the rest of them: Beware the Torturer... and The Guy With The Box.  Hopefully they’re not coordinated enough to all attack me at once while I’m skinny-dipping in the hot tub.

Yay!  A throw-back to the skinny dipping.  I was hoping he’d go there. 

1. Place an order on Amazon.com.
2. Forget all about the order.
3. See the bill and freak out bigtime.
4. Call and cancel your card. They’ll send you a new one.
5. Ta-dah! New card. Your number is safe.

• Loudly announce whenever you need to go potty, and then while you’re in there, yell out a narrative of the details of the experience to anyone within earshot.
• Slam all doors.
• Wrap scotch tape around two fingers until they start to turn blue. Cry for someone to cut the tape off. Repeat.
• Dip everything you eat in ketchup.
• Whenever you talk on the phone, randomly yell “Byeee!” and hand the phone to someone else.
• When you eat animal crackers, eat the head first. Then legs, then body. You can optionally soak the cracker ahead of time in a cup of sweet tea.
• Sing random songs, incorporating song lines you know with whatever you can see right now. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star… old lady, stop sign, brown dog with three legs…”
• Put up a good fight to avoid bathtime. Then when it’s time to get out, put up another fight to stay in the bath.
• Keep everybody guessing what you’re really like. For example, on Halloween, run into random people’s houses when they open the door, then introduce yourself and tell them that they’re gross if they like pickles. Then, when you’re at a birthday party a week later, clam up and pretend to be shy and not talk to anyone at all.
• Dig random holes and fill them with water. Repeat.
• Tell everyone’s news to anyone who will listen. “My Aunt Mereny is gonna have a baby. It’s in her belly. We’re gonna have to bust that baby outta there.”
• Attempt to hug all dogs, even if they look mean.
• Anything that can possibly fit up your nose deserves a chance.  Crayons, toothbrush, baby carrots, anything.  Hold it there for a moment, show somebody and say "Look at me!", and then go back to using it for its original purpose, as if it hadn't just now been inside your nostril. 

“Daddy, I think it’s going to rain.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the clouds are dark.  They have water in them.” 

“No, they just look dark because you’re wearing sunglasses, sweetie.”

“Oh.”

(She takes them off.  A minute goes by while she looks out the window.)

“Daddy?  Jesus is everywhere.  He put the water in the clouds.”

“Yep.”

“And Jesus is in my heart.”

“That is so cute that it hurts, Jules.”

“Daddy?  Where is my heart?” 

(I point at it.)

“No silly.  That is my shirt.”

“No I mean here, inside your body.”

“Eww!  There’s poop in there!  And blood!”

“Well, your body has lots of stuff in it.  Remember your x-rays when you broke your leg?  Those were pictures of your bones.  You have bones and all kinds of stuff in there.”

“Oh yeah.  Jesus is in my bones.  Except the one that broke.”

Randomly, she takes out her gum, hands it to me and says, “Hey, hold this for a minute, Punchy.“

"Yep."

"But my birthday isn't today."

"You're right.  It's next week."

"That's later than tomorrow, right?"

"Exactly."

(a minute of hard-thinking goes by...)

"Hey Daddy, I thought of something.  There were days before yesterday, right?"

"Yes.  Alot of them."

"How many days were before yesterday?"

"Time goes back indefinitely, kiddo.  Too many days to count."

"Yeah, there were alot of days before yesterday.  Hmmm... probably more than 3."

“Okay there’s this nun who gets on all the other nuns’ nerves because she runs around like a loon in the mountains, and she’s a hot redhead.  So they get together and conspire about how to get her outta there.  They hook her up as the babysitter for this rich widower with a million kids.  He acts like a turd at first, but then comes around and they fall in love.”

“That sounds kinda racy.  Are nuns supposed to be shacking up with rich employers?”

“Oh that’s just a minor detail –  nobody will notice.  Trust me, this thing will be a hit.”

“Hmmm... that sounds good, but we were really wanting to do a movie about Nazis this year.  Or a musical.”

“I tell you what – Let’s add both of those to it.  The hot nun and the rich kids will sing and dance, and later the whole family will run from the Nazis.”

“You got yourself a movie, mister.  We’ll call it the “The Sound of Musical Nazis,” or something close to that.

Depending on what time you drive through my neighborhood, there’s a good chance that you’ll hear my teenage neighbor banging on his drums in his garage.  He hits them randomly like he’s just now sitting down at a drum-set for the first time, bangs around really fast for four seconds, taps a few times, and then rests.  Then it starts all over.  The funny part isn’t that he’s an awful drummer – instead, I’m amazed that he’s been drumming out there for years like this and hasn’t gotten any better.  He might even somehow be getting worse.  I fear a head injury has taken place over there.

My other neighbors across the street go all-out to decorate their house for Halloween, with orange lights, tombstones, and the like. Those decorations make it out about October 1^st and then they’re more extravagant than any other neighbors’ Christmas decorations in December. The parents, kids, and pets end up dressing together as a group theme. The funny part is, when you ask either the husband or the wife about all the excitement about this particular holiday, they each say it’s the other one who is dialing Halloween up to an 11, and they each roll their eyes and act as though they’re not the interested party.

Exploring my neighborhood, there’s also a good chance that at least once a month, you’ll catch a grown man hurrying trash cans out to the curb in his underwear late at night.  I cannot confirm nor deny if that person is me.

Another unforgettable neighborhood character who you might see trolling up and down my street is Franks, the gentleman who picks up scrap metal to turn them in at a recycling facility.  The unforgettable part isn’t his old beaten truck or his Depression-era hardship stories – he does a crazy thing with his tongue where it flicks around like a snake, whether not he’s talking.

Franks will occasionally stop you on the street and ask about your excess metal situation while he mesmerizes you with the amazing flicking tongue.  It seems to operate completely independently from the rest of him, dancing around in a half-open mouth.  Even if you don’t have any scrap metal, like an unwanted BBQ grill or rusty lawn chairs to send with him, you’re hypnotized by the tongue and you find yourself starting to consider letting him recycle your whole pickup truck.

It’s probably rude, yet impossible not to stare right at the tongue.  You quickly accept that there is a different life form that is merely visiting Franks’ mouth, and you wonder about its intentions and language capabilities.

One bummer about his scrap metal haul-off service is that Franks doesn’t mention until you’ve lugged all your large metallic junk to the curb that he also needs you to put it inside his truck for him.  Oh – and by the way, his truck is always full, so you might have to do some removal and sorting of your other neighbors’ items to cram your stuff in there.  What seemed like a 2-minute exercise is now a 20-minute ordeal, with you climbing around in the bed of Franks’ truck while he stands there and licks the air at you.

On a rare evening that I remembered to get the trash out to the curb before I stripped down to my underpants, I ran into a group of competitor scrap-metal guys, trolling up and down the street for unwanted junk to recycle.  But these folks provided a full-fledged service, offering to do all the heavy lifting and disassembly.  With impressive flair, a whole family piled out of the truck, disassembled and carried out all my unwanted scrap in record time with a smile, and left me with a handshake and a “Gracias!”  I was half-tempted to talk them into taking the drum-set from the goofy teenage musician.

I initially felt good about offering my recycling to the super-efficient family, but later on I felt like I had let Franks down.  The way my mind takes things too far, I imagined that the lack of earnings from my recycled junk would be the last straw that sent Franks into absolute poverty, ultimately leaving him laying cold and lifeless in a ditch somewhere.

... with his tongue still dancing around, of course.

"Okay, here we go ... oops, we're all out.  See this box?  It's empty."

"Let's go get some more at the store, Daddy."

"Do you have any money to buy those fruit snacks?"

"Yep, I have some in my pocket."

"Oh really?  Let me see."

(She peeks in here pocket, looks around a bit....)

"There's something wrong with my pocket.  All the money falled out."

"Oh well, we don't have to go to the store now."

"But you have money, Daddy.  Let's use your money for fruit snacks."

"Do I have money, Jules?  Where do I get it?"

"At the store?"

"No, they take money at the store.  They don't give it to us."

"Did you find money on the ground?"

"Nope, not on the ground.  They give me money at work."

"Oh really?  That's nice of them."

"Really?  What did he say?"

"He said he wants to bring me presents."

"Cool!  What did you ask him to bring you?"

"Toys!"

"Toys?  What kind of toys?"

"I don't know.  I just like toys."

"Me too.  How did you get to be such an easy-going kid?"

"Because yeah."

We’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time together over the past few months, but I think my days as a virtual farmer are coming to a close. I am breaking up with you.

I still remember how we met through a friend. Over the course of about a week, I was fascinated to watch my buddy James transform from “Farmville is so lame, I can’t believe people play this thing,” to “Hey I checked out Farmville and it’s pretty cool,” to “I haven’t eaten or slept in two days and I made a second Facebook persona just to play this thing more!”

The early days off our fling were a magical time, harvesting electronic crops, plowing imaginary land, and then planting new make-believe seeds. In the beginning, the leveling was captivating – I’d anxiously await the next new sets of available seeds and decorations, double-fist-pumping in the air when I’d hit a new level. I figured out the trick of trapping my little farmer in hay bales so that I wouldn’t have to wait for him to walk around to each square. Life was good… or at least, this awkward “second life” was good (in the strange world where seasonal patterns and watering weren’t necessary to make crops grow).

But then I got hooked on you. I started setting alarm clocks to remind me to harvest blueberries. I befriended dozens of Facebook friends just to get more gifts. I fell asleep at my computer. I talked real people into playing. I pleaded with Farmville friends to send me more orange fences. I ordered novelty business cards that said “Badass” for my title, just to score a few FarmVille bucks to buy Sweet Haiti seeds.

I started to question where our relationship was heading after I bought that stupid million-coin villa, seemingly the highest achievement I could find to try to justify all the ludicrous wasted hours. Oh, I had so many questions… Why were pesky raccoons perpetually ransacking my cousin’s garden every time I visited? And why do I get 86 coins for brushing my cat? And why is my horse bigger than my tractor? And if I’m reminded every 42 seconds to fertilize other people’s crops, why couldn’t I fertilize my own damn crops?

We were caught in an endless cycle of planting and harvesting again and again to get more abilities to plant more and harvest more, a dangling carrot to keep me clicking and clicking. Sometimes, when I’d be 93 clicks into a crop cycle, you’d lock down because you’d been “enhanced.” And then I’d go back and re-click all those little squares. You were a cruel mistress, FarmVille.

Finally, I got to level 36 and realized that I didn’t care if I could plant asparagus at level 37. Like the creepy kid said in the Matrix, “there is no spoon,” I realized that there is no asparagus! It’s a video game about farming! We might as well be watching electronic paint dry! The amount of time that 70,476,996 people are cumulatively spending playing this game right now, addicted to continuous synthetic achievements instead of making the world better, makes my brain hurt.

So goodbye, my old friend. I am leaving you for a real woman. I’ll always remember the soybeans we grew together.

- Jeff Young, former FarmVille addict

“I don’t see it.”

“Oh. It’s on the other leg. Here it is.”

(A week later…)

“Daddy, see my boo-boo? It’s on my leg.”

“I don’t see it, Jules. It must have healed.”

“Yeah…. It fell off my leg. My boo-boo is gone now.  It died.”

As I looked around at the new signs in each state, I was stunned at the sheer volume of signage. So then when I got back to Texas, I had a fresh perspective on the amazing multitude of things we’re expected to read while driving. It is freaky how many there are. If you were to actually look at each sign, there wouldn’t be any time left to make sure your car is still facing the right direction with no children or adorable animals in front of it.

I realized that if the landscape is littered with signs every 10 feet, they lose their effectiveness and we just don’t notice them anymore -- the same way you don’t feel a shirt after you’ve worn it for a few minutes. The signs are just part of the scenery now, so I really only notice them when I whack one with my head while bicycling or when an officer points out some silly rule that I missed, like no driving 70 mph in a school zone.

I’ll concede that some signs are necessary, like street names to find directions. Or signs that show very specific information. A stop sign is a good example – it has a simple message: Hey you -- this is the specific spot where you are supposed to stop your vehicle, or at least slow down to a crawl and look for cops before continuing.

Another good sign with information we need to know would be “The goats on this cliffside are kinda clumsy and tend to leave a huge dent. Try to swerve around them if you see one plummeting.” I might put up one of those just to see drivers looking up.

Another observation from my roadtrip was that the signs take all kinds of crazy grammar license. The sign that said “No Driving On Shoulder” in Mississippi had plenty of room to say “No Driving On The Shoulder.” But instead, they chopped up the command, using a sentence structure we don’t regularly use.

“No Driving On Shoulder. Me Tarzan, You Jane. Ooga Booga..”

Of course I understand the need to keep the signs short, or they’d be gigantic. The “Fines Double When Workers Present” sign doesn’t sound very good when spoken aloud. (Try to slip that one in casual conversation today.) But it would go too far to say “Hello there, Mister or Missus Driver. I hope you remember to obey traffic laws today, because if there are any workers out here, the police officer hiding behind this sign will give you a ticket with super nasty little fine. You sexy thing.” That sign would be 17 feet wide.

I saw a sign in Florida that said “Obey Posted Traffic Speeds.” C’mon, Florida. Was that worth posting? If somebody is going to speed, that little reminder isn’t going to change their mind. But this got me thinking about general-purpose signs… we could replace all these silly signs every 10 feet with one all-encompassing sign, something that reminds us every once in a while to remember the traffic rules and try to avoid killing each other. I considered “Try Not To Drive Like Your Grandmother” or “Don’t Hit Anybody With Your Vehicle Today” or “Feel Free To Honk At Any Drivers You See Not Doing What You Want Them To,” but those were all too long.

But then I found it, the perfect sign. We should take down all the unimportant signs and replace them with this one simple, encouraging message.

“Be Good.”

(Kudos to Mike Harnisch for the great supporting art. Fans, stay tuned for more of Mike's artistic stylings.)

New Urbanism

Whenever I'm at a social function and somebody throws out a term like "new urbanism," there's a pretty decent chance that I don't know what it is, unless it somehow showed up on MythBusters or SportsCenter . But unlike most people, who might use this opportunity to nod and be generally agreeable, I choose to feign an opposing viewpoint just to stir things up.

"So, Jeff, what do you think of all the new urbanism projects popping up in Dallas?"

"I'm against it. It's going to kill us all."

"What? Why? Don't you think it's a great way to reduce our dependence on automobiles?"

"Yes, but – you won't believe this – I think somebody brought queso. You guys keep talking about the evils of new burbanism. ... I'll get a read on the queso situation." And then I'll run home and search dallasnews.com and Wikipedia to find out what the heck everybody is talking about.

It turns out that new urbanism is an inspired concept of community structure, where you combine mixed-use development with pedestrian-friendly walkways to condense sprawling suburbs into little microcosm neighborhoods. You mix in some trees, hide all the cars and, ta-da, you have a little Truman Show-type world where people can eat, sleep, work, play and go on dates, all within 17 feet of one another. You get extra points if you live on top of a bakery, next door to a dental office and across the walkway from a yoga studio. (Pssst ... good luck finding a dollar store.)

The idea is that you no longer hop in your car and drive 20 minutes to Target, then drive another 20 minutes to the oil change place, then sit through seven red lights to reach the video rental place, then go back for that one thing you forgot at Target, zig-zagging across town like you hate gasoline and want to personally deplete every last drop.

The new urbanism movement has been a little slow to take hold in North Texas because, well, to be honest, we sure do love our motor vehicles. The quaint little communities like Addison Circle or Mockingbird Station are modern marvels, but if you look closely, they're surrounded by parking garages. The same folks who want to meander the scenic walkways and enjoy all of life's offerings in one tidy spot also want to get the heck out of there and drive to Ikea in Frisco on Saturday.

I imagine that if you really followed the whole concept, you'd ditch your car, embrace light rail or use a bicycle or scooter to go anywhere else. But then after a while, you'd realize that you've had every item, on every menu, at every restaurant within walking distance, and you might one day run out of there screaming.

I think I'd get tired of the same scenery and interacting with the same people every day. And I can assure you that they'd get tired of me pretty quick, too. I think long before my corner bakery's special cinnamon scones lose their zest, the people who work there would be plenty tired of hearing the only four jokes I know (none of which are appropriate to be published in a major newspaper).

Here's where I'm really going to drop a culture bomb on you – imagine no more garage sales. Eep! Where would you host your garage sale when you no longer own a car – or a garage, for that matter – and your front yard becomes a manicured walkway with a pizzeria? Without garage sales, where would you go to buy the stuff that you're going to get rid of in your own future garage sales? That is a life that is not worth living.

So all in all, I call new urbanism an interesting and groundbreaking concept. But I maintain my original position – it will kill us all.

I couldn’t speak.  Did he say awesome or awful?  My obsessive-compulsive brain, which might be even more obsessivey-compulsivey than most folks, was sounding off alarms in my head in a deafening roar.  I muttered something that sounded like a high-pitched “Whadjuh? Howdjoo?” while staring at the closed drawer. 

Ben gave me a knowing glance and opened the drawer back up, revealing the array of scattered chrome, just as I had feared.  “Find me a fork, brother,” he said. 

I found a fork.  Then another.  Then another.  I found all the forks, stacking them in a neat little interlocking stack in my hand as I went, intending to help my brother sort this back out.  But it shocked me how fast it went.  When you’re looking for a specific shape in a little two-by-two foot area, it’s not hard to find.  He explained, “I know this sounds crazy, but you won’t believe how much time it saves.”  It was then that I realized how much of my life I’d wasted needlessly sorting forks, knives, and spoons into neat little stacks. 

So I became a believer.  I went home, took the tray out of my silverware drawer, and then flipped it upside-down with great satisfaction.  Then I slammed the drawer shut and did the double fist pump in the air. 

Let’s do some math.  The two minutes it takes to distribute from the dishwasher tray into the appropriate little slots is time that adds up.  Two minutes a day, 14 minutes a week, 730 minutes a year.  That's a total of 12.16 hours -- MORE THAN HALF A DAY STOLEN AWAY FROM YOUR LIFE EACH YEAR.  That is the face of insanity.  Not my face.   

At first, I kept my new silverware religion a secret.  When people came over, I usually got forks out for everybody, so nobody ever needed to know about my little Drawer of Chaos.  But over time, I grew prouder of my incredible amazing efficiency.  I showed my inner circle, who each responded with great distress, as I had similarly done in my younger, unenlightened ways.  Now this is the very first thing you see on the tour of my house.  I drag people into the kitchen, whip open the drawer, and yell “Check this s*** out!” 

Maybe my alternative silverware lifestyle isn’t for everybody.  Maybe some people need the comfort of knowing that each of their forks is all facing the same way.  I won’t judge.  But the next time you’re sorting your utensils into neat little stacks, maybe you’ll imagine yourself flipping the tray upside down, slamming that drawer shut, and then fist-pump in the air.   

Hell yeah.

I’m here to help you gain a more fantastic grasp, a fantasticker grasp, of the English language. If you just follow these principles, you will be on your way to composing amazing, successful, orgasmic grammar.

Whoever vs. whomever

This seems like a tricky subject but it is actually quite simple. You say “whoever” in reference to a person who is the nonspecific subject of your sentence, as in “Whoever ate my last cookie deserves to get incurable itchy butthole worms.”

There is never a correct time to use “whomever.” It is a made-up word, and if you speak it aloud you look like a real turd.

Letter Writing

In the address of your letter, the phrase “To whom it may concern” is much too formal and anonymous. Your reader will digest this line as “I am not smart enough to know who I’m writing to, so I want you, Mr. or Mrs. Stranger, to make the effort and drop this off with the right person.” It is actually less offensive to start your letter with “Hey you with the fat face.”

A more effective approach is, if you can’t find the person’s name, to use that person’s title. For example, you can begin a letter with “To the district director of research for hamster mating rituals” or “To the cute girl on the bus who guffaws like an old man when you sneeze.”

A good way to end a letter is “Sincerely,” but “Get ‘er Done” and “True Dat” carry more impact. It is usually inappropriate to color in all the loops in each lower case “e” or to draw cool spiderweb designs in the margins on your letter prior to sending. This is only considered acceptable behavior if you are stuck in a meeting or on the phone.

Semicolons

Semi means “half”, and colon means “ass.” Just start a new sentence.

Acronyms

Everybody stop it with all the acronyms. You might think it saves time, but your reader or listener still has to stop and figure out what the heck you’re talking about. It took me half a CSI episode (also an acronym) to figure out what “G.S.W.” meant, and then I was irritated to realize that “gun shot wound” requires two less syllables to say than its abbreviation.

I sent an email to a coworker, and she replied “LOL”, but she sits 10 feet away and I didn’t hear her laugh. Either she is a quiet laugher or she misrepresented her response for my benefit. I think “LOL” has been so overused that it now actually means “that thing you said mildly amused me” or “I barely cracked a grin.” Now we have much more exciting acronyms to represent actual laughter. For example, “ROFL” means “rolling on the floor laughing” and “ILSHIPAL” means “I laughed so hard I peed a little.”

Ben reminded me that 55 gallons of water weighs well over 400 lbs, and it’s a delicate balance between dropping the water level to reduce weight and keeping enough water in there to save his prized fish. Plus, it’s a huge glass box, so it naturally wants to shatter into seven million pieces.

The move had been perfect so far. I’m used to showing up to help people move where I’m the only helper and the person has nothing packed. Usually I’m the one developing hernias dragging somebody’s junk out to my truck while the owner scrambles to throw stuff in boxes, or just now remembers they need to get the key for the new place, or chooses that moment to struggle to get his or her life in order. But not Ben – he and his fiancée were the perfect movers, with everything packed and ready to go. All we had left was this bigass aquarium.

The official recommended method to moving a aquarium is to leave the water a little bit dirty for the weeks leading up to the move. This preserves the natural bacteria in the water and helps reduce shock later when you refill the tank at the new place. But it also means that this gigantic and delicate glass box smells exactly like the dumpster at a seafood restaurant.

I gave all kinds of false reassurances -- which I’m prone to do -- and convinced Ben that we could do this, even though I internally gave it a pretty high chance of exploding somehow. He siphoned the first half off the top of the tank into buckets while I ferried them out to be dumped on the grass – that way the whole neighborhood could enjoy the smell. While we lowered the tank level, the fish swam around and looked confused.

“Something seems weird in here. Is our ceiling dropping?”

“You’re such a conspiracy nut, Larry. I don’t believe anything you say.”

“I’m serious – look how small our room looks.”

“Larry, I want a divorce.”

Our test lift was an embarrassing attempt – the aquarium still weighed a ton. We realized that we were going to have to drop the level to right about the height of the fish and hope they didn’t flip out (literally). As Ben went to siphon again, I stood there leaning on the tube like a big dummy, accidentally pinching it off. So when he inhaled to draw the air through the tube a second time, he didn’t realize there was still a large amount of water in there… and he inhaled a mouthful of that nasty, nasty liquid.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in this aquarium move beforehand, but I did not picture my brother puking and retching in his kitchen sink while I laughed maniacally.

“See what you did, Larry? Look how upset Ben is.”

We eventually moved the fish over to the new place in an ice chest, with a hasty transfer of fish on the shoulder of the road. I tried to balance driving quickly to limit their transport time, while also maneuvering the crazy drivers in Austin, and inching delicately over bumps to avoid cracking the big fragile aquarium. But when we took our first turn, the nasty fish water splashed out of the ice chest and drenched Ben’s shirt.

As of the time of this report, all the fish made it. And Ben brushed his teeth.

But apparently I did a decent job one time painting kids’ faces for an after-church social event, because now I’m the designated painter of all tiny chubby faces when the occasion requires it. It’s not as lucrative a task as the hunky guy who greets people at the front door, but I can work up to that in time if I continue to grow hunkier somehow.

Prior to my first foray into drawing on kids’ faces, long before I became a seasoned professional, I was worried that I’d need to learn how to draw 1,000 different objects. But on the first day, I realized that whatever icon or symbol the first kid gets, everybody wants. One time it was all scorpions and hearts, the next time it was lightning bolts and kitty cats, and another time it was skulls and lily flowers (Any combination of those, by the way, makes a cool band name.)

The skulls got me in trouble. For one kid, before I could even finish asking him what he wanted, he shouted “I want a skull! Yay!” and threw a fist in the air. I was like, heck yeah, this kid’s getting a cool skull with that kind of energy. He was excited about it too, and grinned like a little maniac while I painted a green skull with crisscrossing bones behind it. The next three kids in line happened to be boys, so they all wanted skulls too (of course) and I gave them all different colors. But then the first kid’s mom exploded onto the face painting scene, barking at her kid, “I told you not to get a skull, and then you did it anyway!” (and then to me: ) “Why are you drawing skulls on kids’ faces?!” She reacted as if I had drawn a curse word on the kid’s face or something. Flustered, I pointed at my forehead and answered, “Um, because we all have a skull?” I would have said something cleverer, but I had a line of kids gawking at me getting in trouble.

After that, even the girls wanted skulls. “I’m sorry kiddo, no more skulls today.”

I also learned that no two kids have the same wigglyness, texture, or face density. You might get a calm kid with a dry bony cheek (perfect for painting) or you might get a chubby cheek on a oily-faced kid with the attention span of a cat at a laser light show. You try not to over-handle the kids’ faces while you’re painting, to keep your professional distance – the parents would probably freak out if they look over and you’ve got their kid in a headlock so you can paint a decent Tyrannosaurus Rex on his cheek. Instead, you just chase their little hyper faces around with your paintbrush and hope for the best. I could never be a tattoo artist – “Oops, sorry there pal, your little twitch made this eagle look like Oscar the Grouch.”

I’d like to think I’m pretty talented at this one thing in life, but sometimes the face paintings don’t work out as intended. Sometimes a dog ends up looking like a floppy-eared rabbit, and you have to add in scary teeth so that the boy doesn’t get beaten up in the bounce-house later for having a cute bunny on his face.

The good news is that every kid likes their painting, or at least plays it up for the crowd as the new best face painting ever designed. They all look in the mirror afterwards and say “Ooh, neat – everybody, look how great my face is! This is awesome!” and then smudge it a little with a finger.

Seeing as how all kids are undaunted by an occasional mistake, I started seeing how far I could push that. One time I accidentally drew a yellow lily flower that looked more like a corn-on-the-cob, and the girl went on to exclaim that it was the best flower ever painted by human hands on this planet. The next girl in line requested a yellow lily too (of course), so I painted one that looked even more like a corn-on-the-cob. She also faked a grin in the mirror and feigned excitement over her yellow lily. Over the next few kids, I slowly perfected my corn-on-the-cob, and started adding the little square of butter and corncob holders on the ends. Eventually we had a whole church full of kids with perfect cornstalks and buttered corncobs on their cheeks.

I think some of the other parents started catching on, but they didn’t dare say anything. That’s how you become the new Facepainter for Life.

I recently found myself at work without my mobile phone – and the world shouldn’t be like this – but I experienced a fleeting moment of utter shock and panic. I grieved its temporary loss as though I had left my artificial heart at home, and then I internally deemed that day to be the worst day ever.

It was through this experience that I learned two critical things about myself. One is that I have a terrible short term memory. I’d reach into my pocket to check my messages, and oh yeah, I left that thing at home. Then literally three seconds later, I’d reach into the same pocket to find my phone again, this time to peek at what time it is. Oh yeah, it is still at home. Step 1: Throw head back. Step 2: Slap forehead with hand.

I did this about 37 times through the rest of the day for various reasons. I’d be telling a story about my amazing 2-year-old daughter Jules, and would say “Hold on, I’ll be a good Daddy here and show you a picture of her. Oops again, no phone today. Dangit.” Or I’d go to send a message to Current Wife to remind her that we need dog food. Or I’d check the time… again. Nope, it didn’t magically fly here and then sneak back into my pocket. I considered rushing home at lunch to repeat my commute twice and get the darn thing.

The second thing I learned is that I don’t know anybody’s phone numbers. I went to call my cousin/babysitter, but oops, no phone. I started a mental tally (in which I always say the numbers dramatically in my head like the Count from Sesame Street: One! Twooo! Threeee! Ah, ah ah ah…) and it only totaled five numbers memorized.

Fiiiiive! Ah, ah ah ah …

In summary, without my phone I’m pretty much worthless, I can’t call anybody, and then I’m reminded all day how terrible my memory is.

I see approaching the same problem with car navigation systems. I know people who will punch in the address out of habit, even for a routine trip to a place they already know, like a grocery store that is four blocks away. Maybe they just like the comforting voice and feedback of the electronic navigator. “You have reached your destination, you big sexy devil you.” My friend has a nav system that, when you switch it to Spanish, she has a sexy flair to her voice.

Over time, we will continue to become so dependent on the navigation systems that we can’t even find our own way back home. It reminds me of my friend Crazy Mike during college, who was terrible at directions. He only knew how to find his way home from the tower (yes, that tower) at the University of Texas. So as long as he could still see the tower, he could make it home – he’d drive towards it and then go home. But the problem with this was, his system fell apart if he couldn’t see the tower.

What happens when the navigation system breaks, or just gets ornery one day? “Calculating your destina… oh screw it. Hey man, I’m taking the day off. Find your own way to Home Depot.” If you’ve relied on that thing for every trip for the last year, now you’ll have to explore the world like people did in the ancient 1990s. Technology is making us dumber than ever!

Extrapolate this to future advances in technology and you can see where this is headed. One day a famous rapper or charismatic actor will start wearing a nametag that automatically plays your theme song as you approach new people, and then introduces you.

Most people will probably have a little song intro, like the first few licks of a rock song that they play when a batter steps up to the plate in baseball. But I’m going to pick out a theme song that is two or three minutes long, so when I walk up to somebody, we’ll stand there and have a nice long awkward pause and smile at each other until the nametag finally makes the introduction.

But here’s the problem with the nametag introductions – just like phone numbers, you forget the details over time. Eventually we’ll forget our own names.

“Hi, my name is … hold on a minute. Oh crud, I left my nametag thingy at home. I think it’s Joe, or Jeb, or something? I should have written this down somewhere. Let me call home and see if they know my name.”

“Oh wait, I left my phone at home too.”

Published on Monday, 4/6/09 in the Star Telegram

The bunny with the gimpy leg works his way through the meadow, struggling along to get back to his den in his old and familiar lop-sided hop.  A quick flash of a shadow alerts his flight instinct – he knows he's been spotted by the hawk.  With wide eyes and terrified leaps, he races to find shelter under the closest thorny shrub.  But thanks to the gimpy leg, his strides are ill-timed and don't offer him the lightning speed of his other bunny brethren. 

The bunny doesn't see the hawk closing in on him, but he sees the shadow becoming larger, diving rapidly towards Earth.  Suddenly, the hawk shrieks, and the bunny is paralyzed with fear – he won't reach cover in time.  As the hawk opens his talons for the kill grab ...

Obama's gigantic spending package jumps in and saves the day.  The bunny lives long enough to mate, and eventually the meadow is littered with bunnies that also hop sideways.  Hooray for progress!  Oh wait, you didn't want a meadow full of gimpy bunnies? 

You're allowed to feel bad for the bunny who doesn't make it.  After the hawk gets his talons around him, it's a terrible sight for everybody (except the hawk) to see a meadow covered with whiskers and bits of rabbit fur.  But over time, the hawk is doing the bunny community a favor by fine-tuning their lineage so that only the most successful live on. 

If we violate the rules of the natural order of success and demise, we reward the ignorance that got those companies where they are in the first place.  Here you go, you big dummy -- congratulations for not being ready for the inevitabilities of business hardships in the global market:  Here is a fat wad of money that we took away from taxpayers who earned it. 

It's a sad tale, but the gimpy bunny is supposed to die.  The company who leans on tradition, who lives with fat operating costs and a stubborn corporate vision, who can't reform when the world changes and won't look ahead, is supposed to go away.  Even if you save the gimpy bunny from the hawk this time, what about next time, and the time after that?  Not only will our children have to pay the bill for all these business rescue plans, we'll have to explain to them why their meadow is full of gimpy bunnies and tragic bits of rabbit fur all the time. 

A few days later, the hawk is hungry again.  She circles the sky, ready for another chewy bunny morsel.  She spots another bunny in the meadow and turns around for the kill dive.  Silly rabbits.

Unfortunately for the hawk, this bunny isn't like his gimpy brother.  He's lean, his legs are lightning fast, and he remembers his poor brother's demise.  In fact, this time, he's ready for the hawk.  He was watching the skies and saw the hawk long before she saw him. 

As the hawk tucks her wings in for the dive, the lean brother takes two hops and ducks into a new burrow that he dug last week, one of many that he dug across the meadow.  This bunny decided that he isn't going to vanish, to leave an idiot-shaped hole in the world economy and become a lesson to others.  He is proactive, he's lightning-fast, he adapts, and so he will live on to litter his meadow with lean, smart little bunnies. 

The bailout plan may save a few companies this year, but it's a very temporary solution because it doesn't fix the problem.  We need smarter bunnies.

I'm interested in hearing what you think of the new look!

jeffyoungtheauthor@gmail.com

http://www.star-telegram.com/242/story/1122741.html

How to Haggle:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/opinion/stories/DN-west_young_0330edi.ART.West.Edition1.470add7.html

Drivers Wanted:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-west_young_12edi.ART.West.Edition1.4b2e489.html

Hamburger Helper:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-west_young_04edi.State.Edition1.3e6b7a.html

My first published non-humor article, about the passing of my dog Emily:

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/opinion/stories/DN-west_young_08edi.ART.West.Edition1.4b019a4.html

When you show up at the big castle-shaped building, you pay a very decent-sized chunk of money to people wearing corsets and typing on computers, and then you're cattle-corralled into a big waiting area. One of the first things I noticed was that there are two bars in the waiting area, only 30 yards apart. Gathered all around the bars were people slamming drinkypoos. I wondered at first if the kinds of people who came to Medieval Times just coincidentally happened to be the types to chug large amounts of dragon-named drinks out of little plastic knight helmets. Only later would I realize why some people would choose to include just a wee bit of inebriation with their Medieval Times experience. I'd realize later that these people were the veterans -- they were getting prepared for all the silliness on the other side of those doors.

A guy showed up with a long trumpet thing, held it to his mouth while speakers blared out recorded music from several trumpets, and a guy ushered us into our appropriate sections. My group happened to be seated the Green Knight section, which meant that for the duration of the evening, we were supposed to support the Green Knight unconditionally, even if he fell off his horse or turned out to be the bad guy in the plot or if he was caught hosting dogfights.

With the other people seated in the Green Knight area, we shouted our heads off to support him, along with derogatory shouts against the other knights. "The Green Knight rules! The Yellow Knight drives slowly in the fast lane! The Black and White Knight doesn't fold his laundry until several days after it comes out of the dryer!"

I'm not afraid to admit here that I'm apprehensive around horses. It is not because of their huge size or because they can kick your head right off, but rather because they're so smart. My previous run-ins with horses have been some negative experiences. They can tell I'm a bit shy, so they follow me around and mess with me, biting at my neck and trying to steal my wallet. I tried to explain to this one horse that I'm supposed to be the more-intelligent species, and he bit off a little bushel of weeds from next to my truck and plopped them down on top of my head, just to be a jerk.

About half of the Medieval Times entertainment was watching horses do tricks. Horses would come out, strafe sideways, walk in crisscross patterns, dance in little circles, and do jumping kicks. The crowd loved it, but not me. While they politely clapped, I sat in my chair in the fetal position and covered my eyes.

Then the falcon guy came out. Unlike the horsemen and other assorted cast, the falconer guy seemed disturbingly genuine, like this was his whole life. You could picture this guy sitting in a chicken coop after the show and feeding birds out of his bellybutton.

There are two kinds of plot actors in the Medieval Times cast -- the Ponytail Guys and everybody else. Apparently, to be one of the knights, you have to have a certain "look" : skinny arms and legs, sporting a ponytail, able to ride a horse, and walk with a certain heroic swagger. The other guys with shorter hair, or chubby, or who run like my wife with her arms out front, like she's about to slide into second base -- they're the flag carriers and other miscellaneous cast.

The Ponytail Guys came out swinging. I wondered if it would be like old-school WWF wrestling, where the manager pulls them aside at the last minute and says "Okay, listen up guys. Red Knight wins today. Make it convincing." But instead, it was more like the newer WWE wrestling, with very intricate plots. Luckily for the crowd, the plot was centered around constant violence -- it was a friendly arena event, which thanks to the "bad guy" being the organizer, turned into a non-friendly battle. Each colored-knight had some kind of victory throughout the day. They kept the excitement pretty balanced between the colored groups so that one wouldn't get heckled in the parking lot on the way out. "Hey Blue Knight, way to go on dying in the first round there. Next time we'll make sure not to sit in your section. You ought to hit the medieval gym sometime."

For the next two hours, the Ponytail Guys swung swords and axes in dramatic paths that would connect with shields and other weapons from other Ponytail Guys, making loud clanging noises. At times, the choreography seemed pretty convincing, but as the skirmishes rotated around to side-views, you could see that they never swung the swords in a path that would hit the opponent. There were some moments that it was very clear they weren't even really trying to kill each other. Whenever there was a fight centered around a major plot element, the other fights would dissipate. You'd see the good guys and bad guys, who were previously supposed to be fighting to the death, lean on their swords and talk about something they saw on YouTube. Or a guy would drop his sword with his opponent closing in on him... and instead of killing him, the attacker would back off, making dramatic poses until the first guy could pick up his weapon to go back to clanging.

I secretly found myself rooting not for the Green Knight, but instead for an accidental stabbing.

Overall, it was a fun experience, and the food was surprisingly tasty. But after a couple hours of these shenanigans, we found ourselves peeking at our watches, wondering when what medieval-time this thing was going to end. At this one table near us, however, in the opposing Red-and-Yellow Knight section, the group kept up their intensity throughout the night. Everytime something would happen, they'd be on their feet, roaring with applause, occasionally doing fist pumps, and high-fiving each other quite impressively. It was then that I realized that these were the earlier folks from the bar. They had gotten sufficiently liquored up to the point that they didn't notice or care that some parts were silly and unrealistic. I envied their drunkenness and promised to do the same if I ever returned. That should be their slogan: "Medieval Times -- Better If You're Loaded."

We completed our awkward essential human experience and drove home from the big castle-shaped building. Like the majority of the other patrons did, I'm positive, my friends went home afterwards, drank too much wine, and duked it out in the backyard with rakes and shovels.

1) Location, location, location

The setting has to be just right. You can't just go crawl in your bed in the afternoon and call that a nap. For one thing, you're snoozing in the same place you just woke up a few hours ago, which isn't special at all. And perhaps more importantly, this has some potentially negative side effects. You're likely to break off into Nap Outerworld Territory, where you wake up disoriented and sweaty at 4 a.m., wondering what day of the week it is.

2) Ambiance

The nap has to take place in a cool, dark location. If you try to crush a few z's in a hammock on a hot day or curled up next to a sunny window, you might wake up with an ear full of sweat. The last thing you need is to have your skin sweating and sticking to yourself at unfortunate places on your body. For some reason, if I try to nap in a hot room, I'll end up with my arm stuck to my face, my pants turned around half-sideways, and pooled sweat on my neck. I wake up looking and feeling like I got urinated on in an alley.

A heavy fan in the room or a football game on TV are the ideal ambiance. Your wife in labor, yelling about needing a ride or something, is not good ambiance.

3) Accessories

Two couch pillows are ideal, one to lay your head on and another to squeeze an arm around. If you're the type of guy who puts a third pillow between your legs, I'm not going to criticize. If I happen to be that kind of guy, I'm not admitting it here.

Another critical feature of the perfect nap, if you have them, are two snugglin' pups. One pup is like an awkward wiggly extra pillow who might walk around and step on your face, but if you have two pups, their snuggles will take your nap experience to a new level. One curls up behind your feet and the second one curls up behind your knees, essentially locking your legs into an immovable, snuggly state. Then, if you happen to look down their direction, one of them is likely to poke a groggy head up, look at you with one sleepy open eye, and then put her head back down. That alone is enough to send you into deep hypnosis.

You can push the limits of nap nirvana by pursuing the Snugglin' Trifecta, in which you include a third pup, but I've never successfully accomplished this. The closest I've ever gotten was two snugglin' pups and a cat. He didn't add to the nap experience at all -- instead, I woke up to him repeatedly bonking my forehead with his paw while he licked his rear aggressively.

Taking turns, each of our pets leaned their furry heads way into the car seat to get a good look at the tiny new family addition. Emily (our mentally challenged, diabetic, elderly chihuahua mix) turned her head sideways in confusion. Shelby (our long-haired, skittish hummingbird of a Chihuahua) jerked her head back when Jules moved. Diablo (our mountain-lion-sized, crabby orange tabby) rubbed the bottom of his chin along the handle of the carseat, which was his way of saying "I hereby claim this bald dog in the name of me."

In the months that followed, Jules and the pets grew to learn much about each other. Now Diablo knows to stay 3 feet away from Jules at all times or he might he lose two tiny handfuls of belly fur. Shelby knows that if she paces underneath the high chair, Jules will sometimes say "Uh oh!" and then "accidentally" drop a snack or two from above. Emily endures being propped up like a little couch to be sat upon. She really just likes being noticed by anybody at this point -- as Jules climbs on her, Emily will give the biggest, goofiest open-mouth doggie smile you've ever seen.

Even before Jules started walking, each of the pets treated Jules with an understood level of caution -- She is the one thing in the house that they seem to respect as special property. This even includes Diablo, who has enough attacks on his record that, if officially reported, he would have been banned from living within city limits. Somehow, without having it explained, each of the pets oddly behaves like little guardians for her. The same dog Shelby, who I still can't get to stop yelping like a car alarm for five minutes every time I walk in the door, used to stand on top of the couch like a quiet sentry for hours while Jules slept in her baby hammock.

Now Jules is a loud toddlin' kid. She occasionally points a tiny finger at Shelby, shouts "Dog!" , and then hands over the contents of whatever foodstuffs she is currently gripping. Then she comes back to the table with a wide-eyed, concerned expression, jibbering to say This dog is clearly starving and I'm the one who is going to feed her! If you hand her a nibble of tortilla or biscuit, she'll race back across the room frantically and stuff it in Shelby's face like it's the antidote. Then Jules puts her tiny hands on her hips and nods her head in satisfaction while she watches Shelby scarf it down.

We'll do this repeatedly until we decide the cuteness of the moment no longer outweighs our previous policy of not giving table food to the pets, and we say "Sorry, Jules, no more." Then all the pets simultaneously look at me, with their variety of furry faces all saying the same thing: We had a good thing going here, ya big jerk.

We're not sure what the future holds for Jules and the pets. I'm hoping that Diablo keeps up his policy of self-restraint -- he has endured 10 times more pain and indignation from Jules than he's ever allowed another person to commit without injuring them. And poor aging Emily ... I'm hoping Jules isn't the one who finds her on the couch one morning, paws in the air, on her way to Doggie Heaven. Our luck has it that Shelby, the wiry basketcase dog we've been "temporarily keeping until we can find a home" for 3 years now, will be the one who grows old with Jules.

Afterwards, we'll be sure to remind her of the furry posse who ran with her during her younger, balder years.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/opinion/stories/DN-west_young_13edi.ART.West.Edition1.4710eb0.html

]]> http://buffman.net/blog/?feed=rss2&p=128 0 http://buffman.net/blog/?p=127 http://buffman.net/blog/?p=127#comments Sun, 15 Jun 2008 03:49:04 +0000 Buffman http://buffman.net/blog/?p=127 Stanley Cup season is upon us! For the real hockey fans out there, you already know what that means. To anybody else out there who understands hockey about as much as you understand the mechanics of how a flux capacitor works, that means that right now they're having their 6-month-long playoff series. Stanley was the first hockey player. He designed the game using sticks and a frozen burrito on a frozen pond in his backyard.

I'll state up front that I don't claim to understand as much hockey as some of the genuine fans out there. My hockey experience is limited to attending my first Stars game last year, playing Blades of Steel on Nintendo, and watching the Mighty Ducks movie, and one of the sequels. But I'm eager to share with you...

Everything I Know About Hockey

Fighting: Hockey has a weird take on player interaction. In basketball, you'll get fouled or ejected out of a game for even nudging your opponent. Because of this, the players are ready at all times to throw themselves on the court and slide backwards 17 feet with their feet in the air if somebody runs into them to "draw a foul" . Hockey is the polar opposite -- they encourage fighting. You can hold a guy's shirt with one hand, punch him in the face 20 or 30 times with your free hand, and then skate along as if it didn't happen. The refs will even stand there and watch, and then hand you back your stick afterwards. "Here you go, big fella. Way to hang in there."

Icing: This is a complicated penalty that nobody seems to fully understand. My best interpretation so far is that if you ask too many people in the crowd to explain it, they may try to lift you over the glass and toss you out onto the ice... hence the term.

Goalie: The goalie gets to wear a different color mask than the other team. He also has huge square-shaped pads, which is terrific from the point of view of keeping the puck out of the net, but terrible from the point of view that you can watch an hour straight with no pucks going in. If a goalie's team is losing at the end of the game, sometimes he'll get bored and wander away from guarding his net and try to score on the other side.

NHL: The NHL stands for National Hockey League, but some of the teams are not based in this nation. Rather, they are from Canada, which you might be surprised to hear is not part of this country. NHL teams are comprised heavily of Canadians, Swedes, Russians, and interestingly enough, Puerto Ricans.

Face shields: The puck goes crazy fast. Professional hockey guys can crack that sucker down the ice at the speed of sound -- so by the time you hear it, it's already knocked 13 teeth out of your head. I'm glad to see that some hockey players have started wearing face shields to ricochet that puck away when it hits them in the mug. But the only troubling thing is, the glass at the hockey stadium doesn't go up very far. Occasionally, it will bounce down the plexiglass (tak-tak-tak-tak-tak-tak!) just inches below the top of the glass, and the people in the crowd don't seem to mind. Maybe their reflexes are sharper than mine, or muuuuch slower.

Power play: I'm not really sure what this means, but it sounds awesome! Every sport needs a POWER PLAY. "Okay guys, I know we're down 3 points, but I just had a crazy idea: Let's do the power play." From my limited experience, I can only assume it's when you skate all your guys down the ice together in a Flying V Shape and win the game with a dramatic slow motion shot while Emilio Estevez cheers you on.

Love and Logic

I used to know a tiny sweet pink person who would snuggle up on my chest in a little ball and coo while she played with my ear. As I was reminiscing about this yesterday, I was suddenly interrupted when she roared around the corner, chasing the dog with our remote control in one hand and a squished banana in the other. Our dog made a wrong turn in her panicked state and got cornered at a dead end near the front door, allowing my daughter time to catch up. After Jules cracked the dog on the head with the remote, she yelled "dog!" , cocked her head back and laughed like a crazyperson, and then ran over to me to hand me the remote and offer a tonguey kiss.

I've only been a Dad for a year now, but somehow I have a hard time remembering what my life was like before her arrival. I vaguely remember all the "things I'm gonna do one day when I'm a Dad," but that list seems to change with time. In my plans, I worked off the assumption that kids started off with no real persona, like a pizza with no toppings, and then we'd add toppings through time and experience. I was very wrong. My tiny sweet bald person quickly became a loud, funny, independent bald person. Her pizza started off more interesting than mine.

Jules loves music. Long before she could talk, and even before she could really hold her head up, she'd rock her head to the music. Now when she hears music, she's likely to swing her shoulders back and forth and headbang to the song. She looks at you expectantly, waiting for you to headbang with her, then she'll resume her dancing. Music is in her soul. She already understands how to play the drums, she dances and toots on her flute recorder in interesting little rhythms, and understands how my guitar works. She wants to pluck each string, and while I play, her eyes dart back and forth to my strumming hand and the fretboard hand. If you look closely, you can see her tiny fingers occasionally twitch as she watches, like she's memorizing chords.

My daughter has always been interested in how things and people work. As an infant, she was so fixated on our ceiling fan that we named it "Samuel," and we referred to Samuel in casual conversation. "Hey Jules -- time for bed. Say goodnight to Samuel." Over time, her attention was increasingly focused on the pets, our keys and mobile phones, the remote control... anything interactive. She'll thoughtfully look at the remote control, push different buttons, and then look up to see if the TV has changed. Or sometimes she'll position the dog ... reposition, reposition, ah yes, just right... and then lean back and stretch her arms out on her like she's a furry couch.

Whereas other kids might be briefly interested in something shiny, only to quickly abandon it for something else, Jules has an incredibly focused memory. At a Christmas party we attended, Jules was only 9 months old, so she still needed a held hand to walk around (if only barely -- she started walking solo a short time later). She was interested in a specific red Christmas ornament and wanted to grab it, but it was fragile and made of glass so I dragged her away in hopes of distracting her by mingling with other guests and kids. Jules complied, but twenty minutes later, as soon as Jules got the opportunity to hold somebody else's hand, she led my wife's friend back to the tree in the other room to grab that same ornament. It was an amazing combination of her memory of the layout of the house to get back to the tree, the position on the tree where to find it, the time and distractions that had occurred since, and her sheer willpower. I think if we went back to that house today, she'd point to where the tree once stood and give us a questioning look.

People who talk out loud end up exposing a bit of themselves. In Jules' version of this, she reveals a great depth of memory and character. You can show her something she's not supposed to touch, like the stove, and the next day she'll casually sing "no no" to herself as passes by it.

In Jules' mind, she is in a movie where she is the star and we are all bit players. She seems to have endless independence -- while other kids at birthday parties break down in tears when their moms turn their backs, Jules will instead walk around a new house without fear, explore every hallway, try to open doors that she's never seen, and yell at strangers. Then she'll pass through the living room and briefly acknowledge us, but she plays it cool so that nobody knows we're her folks.

There is no greater joy in my life than hearing her say "Da-da" . She said it first, she says it often, she shouts it when she sees me, and sometimes she even sings it while she bobs her head. I have had many achievements in my life, but Da-da is the greatest title that I've ever held.

How to be a Terrible Mover

1. Don't have anything packed ahead of time

When your movers show up early on moving day, they've already given up time on their precious free day off... so why not take the whole day? The best way to do this is to appear surprised and frantic as they ring on your doorbell. If you plan it just right, you might not have to take a single thing out of the building.

While they're developing hernias dragging your junk across your front yard, you should casually sit on the carpet behind your desk and roll up computer cables.

2. The less the merrier

Although it would be faster and easier on everybody if you also commissioned your able-bodied significant other, large hunky brothers, or well-meaning neighbors, inviting them won't give your one mover friend the attention they deserve. Instead, let your mover show up alone and then move your whole house by themselves.

Or even better, while they drag your crap out to the truck, you should hang out on the phone with other people who aren't there. This will tell your mover that, Hey, my friendship options are wide open, but I want to spend this special day with you and only you.

3. Plan everything at the last minute

People love spontaneity. If you already had the key to the new place in your pocket, that would send a bad message to your mover friend -- that you are a boring, responsible person. Instead, after a day of packing and heavy lifting, casually mention to them on the way over that you're not really sure if there is going to be an open door to be able to unload this stuff.  You can either leave the key to the new place at the old place or leave some loose details open (like signing the lease -- oopsie). They will respect your impulsiveness and you can have a nice laugh together.

To add a little spice to the day, let them hold your angry dog on the way over to the new place.

As I approached the beach, my mind raced with questions. What is the proper etiquette for taking off one's clothes? Is it going to ruin somebody's lunch if I start stripping down in their view of the ocean while they have sandwich in hand? Or what if I'm the only one there and I accidentally strip down at the wrong beach? What if my clothes blow away and I have to drive home nude?

Immediately upon entering, all preconceptions were tossed out the window. Imagine the people you see at the mall near your house... very old people, rolls of fat, moles, stretch marks, hairy rears, scars that tell painful stories -- now transport all these imperfect people from the mall to a beach in some kind of Terminator-type travel system that makes you show up naked upon arrival. Those are the people at the nude beach... casually walking around, chatting, merrily toasting their bits in the sun.

It was much like walking into a lamp store. Holy crap, look at all these lamps in one place. There's another lamp. And another. Okay, this lamp store is boring the bejeepers out of me -- where's my sunscreen?

It was during this initial walkaround through the beach that I experienced one of the most ironic moments of my life. I saw one very lovely-constructed female who had tan lines where she had obviously spent time at one of the regular beaches. As I noticed her tan lines traveling around her skin in the shape of what had previously been a tiny bikini, I thought I bet she looks pretty great in that outfit.

I found the spot on the beach that was the farthest possible place from any other beachgoers, casually and quickly pulled off my clothes, then stacked them into a neat pile under my shoes. Every 3.4 seconds, I checked to make sure they were still there -- and in between those moments, I worried about them blowing away. For the first hour, I cleverly hid my manbits by laying on my stomach.

After realizing that I was just as imperfect as all the other folks walking around, I finally felt brave enough to walk around and explore the world of nude community interaction. A pair of cute girls my age approached me and one asked "Is this your first time at one of these places?"

Panicked, I did a quick mental skim -- I've been making eye contact, right? What have I done to show I'm new at this?! Are all my seat backs and tray tables still in the reclined position?

"Yes. How'd you know?" I casually asked.

She pointed behind me. "Your rear end has obviously never seen sunlight. You should really put on some sunscreen."

Later, I thought back to that woo hoo moment as I lay on the ground in my brother's duplex, writhing in pain from my first injuwii.

For those of you who have been living in a cave (implying that caves probably don't have the Nintendo Wii, but you never know), the system's remote can sense acceleration in several directions. This means you can wave the wireless controller around in the real world and the game will interact similarly. To the player, it represents an all-new way to interact with the virtual world. To any cats who are watching you, you are simply dancing around in your living room like an idiot, waving around a plastic stick that doesn't seem edible to them.

Unfortunately, however, the real world has stuff in the way. Your little onscreen tennis guy has plenty of room for a good backswing, but oops, there goes the Christmas tree. Your special blend of bowling may require a good windup, but yikes, sorry dude about your lamp. About 30 minutes after I got the Wii out of the box, I found out exactly how hard my brother can swing a tiny plastic bat. The answer was: Not quite enough force to break my arm, but plenty enough to drop me to the ground.

To boot up one of the Wii Sports games, you are bombarded with little pictures and screens begging you not to hurt yourself. In simple pictorial language, the diagrams all have the same general theme: PLEASE STOP HURTING YOURSELVES AND BREAKING CRAP IN YOUR HOUSE AND THEN SUING US! HELP US HELP YOU!

I initially scoffed at the wrist strap (because as a basic principle, I'm against safety and I'm known to scoff at things), but I later started asking people to wear theirs after my friend launched one of the Wiimotes high in the air during bowling. As peeved as I was to see her hit my ceiling fan with my precious new toy, I was more irritated that her wacky bowling style always outscores mine. One of my brothers consistently accidentally whacks his own leg while bowling, and his score is even better.

At first I considered the likelihood that Nintendo may have to face litigation for people who will hurt themselves, others, property, family pets, or tiny infants during game play. But then I thought How is this any different than real sports equipment? You don't sue the manufacturer when you accidentally smash your future sister-in-law in the neck with a tennis racquet. Instead, you blame the genius who was wildly swiping it around the room. I hope the inevitable first personal injuwii lawsuits against Nintendo get laughed out of court.

On the same note, this might be a controversial stance on the topic, but I think the mark of a good toy is if it is somewhat dangerous. If there isn't some level of danger, those toys are going to collect dust while people seek more intriguing ways to interact with the world. Trust me, when I was a kid, you'd much rather have sent me loose to terrorize the world with a little virtual plastic controller instead of matches and fireworks, or a bicycle and an aluminum bat, or a bag of rocksalt and a fertilizer spreader. I'd share more details, but I'm not sure what the statutes of limitation are on my childhood hooligan shenanigans. If you have nice yard art or manicured landscaping, you might make an investment in buying all the neighborhood teenagers a Wii so they can break stuff in their living room instead of your yard.

So as we pass that annual moment when we all start writing the wrong year on our checks, here are my:

2008 New Year's Resolutions, But Not for Me

• I resolve that nobody gets to join my gym in January. I hate showing up on January 2^nd to find the place packed shoulder to shoulder with well-intentioned-but-ultimately-doomed-to-quit newcomers. I love to see all the people stop sitting around watching the Biggest Loser (ironically, while sitting on couches, consuming millions of calories and watching the show) and getting their padded rears to the gym. But come on, people -- if you're going to join and quit, let's not all do it at once. Get your big butts in there at some other arbitrary time.

• I resolve that nobody is allowed to go under the speed limit in the fast lane. If we're on Loop 820 and I realize that you're the bottleneck because you're texting your best friend about a sale at Kohl's, I'm going to motion at your car and mouth "There is something wrong with your car! One of your wheels fell off!" . Then, when you pull over to inspect, all the other motorists will happily resume our preferred driving speeds, and you can text your friend all about it.

• I resolve that all the people who try to quit smoking will stop telling about their achievements. You don't get credit for a habit you shouldn't have started in the first place.

"It's been a whole month since I had a cigarette!"

"Whoopty doo. It's been two years since I poked myself in the eye with a fishing rod."

• I resolve that restaurants will stop requiring their waiters to do stuff that nobody wants them to do anyway. I don't want to hear a 10 minute filibuster describing the special of the day. I like that they take the time to use phrases like "succulent crabmeat" and "hint of a spicy glaze" and "nobody sneezed on it," but we all know you're describing the most expensive item on the menu. Along the same topic, nobody wants to hear a group of strangers sing badly to their company's rhyming birthday song. I also resolve that people I know will quit randomly initiating these impromptu choirs throughout the year for me when it's not my birthday. It was funny the first time.

• And finally, I resolve that the network programmers set limits on the number of times a commercial may air during a program. If I see that Dr Pepper commercial where the guy pulls a DP from his sock and does a front flip bellyflop off the field goal one more time during a football game, I'm going to write a strongly worded letter to the networks. Then, on the way to pick up a stamp, I might accidentally purchase a Dr Pepper.

We were very excited about being invited by one of my wife's friends to a fancy wedding with a reception at the Marquis downtown. Because it was Amy's friend, I left her in charge of our schedule and navigational responsibilities. She didn't give enough time to get across town, so by the time we got to the mansion where the wedding was held, everybody was already seated, with the bride about to enter the front door. The proper decorum is probably to not enter late, but instead Amy darted for the front door, saying "Let's run in past the bridesmaids, I see people do this all the time." Yeah, but that all the time is at weddings where the food is served potluck and the wedding party leaves in a pickup truck decorated with condoms and trailing beer cans behind it. We were kindly diverted away from our attempt to interrupt the wedding party entrance, and instead we found a side door. This allowed us to stumble loudly to our seats in front of the remainder of the crowd that we didn't draw attention to before.

During the wedding, my wife spent the time waving at people and loudly asking "What did he say?" I was able to stop her from opening a noisy tissue wrapper during the prayer, but I couldn't stop her from motioning to the people outside the window near where we sat. She was waving them in, showing them open seats near us, trying to get them to be the new Last People to Show Up instead of us. The outsiders kept their distance outside of the building and seemed to be scared of us.

The wedding was beautiful and classy, and our unfashionably late entrance was soon forgotten. We made our way over to the Marquis on a secret-coded invitation paper. The directions were printed in gold on dark brown paper, making them nearly illegible at night. This may have been designed to deter any riffraff from showing up, but somehow I made it through the barrier.

The reception was brilliantly decorated and catered, and it had a fun casino-theme with an open bar. Throughout the night, as my designated driver/ wife looked on with alarm, I managed to outdo her previous embarrassing indiscretions. At one point, the wife's brother sang a sentimental song from a musical, and everybody clapped politely and got back to the festivities. Later, I said "You know what would crank this wedding up a notch? Another song from Fiddler on the Roof -- Where's that guy from earlier?" not realizing that he was seated right behind us.

I tipped the casino employees with funny money, flirted shamelessly with my wife's girlfriends, and while the best man was up there, I said "Wow, this is the longest toast ever" and got an elbow in the ribs from Amy. I didn't compute that only specific portions of the plate she handed me were for me, and after enduring a long lecture about how she doesn't like strawberries, I responded sassy with "You know what? You should throw a big fit about it right here in front of everybody." By the end of the night, I had enough glasses of wine that when the DJ stood on the stage to give announcements, I went up there and stood next to him. As I smiled at the crowd, I thought, wow, this is a classy wedding. Except that I'm here.

When I get up to 2am yelps from the nursery, I get one of three kinds of receptions from her:

The sweetie: She grabs both my ears and plants a huge slobbery gummy kiss on the mouth, then wants to be cuddled and given a bottle.

The party animal: She headbangs her little bald head and laughs, bouncing around, indicating that she's in no mood to sleep. We'll have a 30-minute impromptu playtime, then she'll suddenly fall over asleep on the carpet like a tranquilized bear.

The Stinky One: She points at her diaper and gives me the Something is amiss face, indicating that something is indeed amiss under the Huggies. We're lucky if the Huggies are the only place we find it.

I'll back up and explain that Mommy, or as she is called these days, "Nuh-nuh," is the usual latenight caretaker. I have awoken many a bright and sunny morning to her explaining how Jules got up every 17 minutes all night, managed to sneak out of her crib and catch the house on fire, and somehow crapped a whole elephant. I always feel a mixed sense of Yikes, good thing she was here - I would have slept right through all that and Thank God I slept right through all that.

But occasionally, I'll either wake up on my own or the wife will plop down next to me, face grimacing, and say "Go... get the girl... up all night.... She's dead to me now."

Then "Dah-dah" springs into action. Last night, as I watched Jules yank the bottle out of my hand and feed herself (I didn't have the angle right -- when I went to try to hold the bottle again, she swatted at my hand with hers), I reflected on my own development from tiny bald person to large person with hair.

I look forward to the years ahead with Jules, and I wonder if my childhood will be anything like that of my parents. You see, I didn't have any late-night spells of climbing into bed with Mom and Dad. This was because I wasn't nearly scared of the boogeyman as I was of Mom. She used to take separate cars when we went places, just so when we got back, she could drive ahead and then leap out of the bushes and scare the bejeezus out of us.

The word on the playground was that some kids saw a monster under their bed. They seemed very serious about this, and I gave the kids some credibility because they had much cooler shoes. I contemplated it for the remainder of recess, thought about it through the rest of the schoolday, then through dinner and bathtime. By the time that bedtime rolled around, I had worked my 6-year-old brain into an absolute tizzy about the possibility of there being some sort of monstrous creature under my bed. After the lights went out, I called out to the folks, who poked their heads back in reluctantly while buttoning shirts and pants back up, interrupted from late night shenanigans.

"What?"

"There's a monster under my bed. I think."

My parents shared a knowing glance. Then my Dad crawled down to his hands and knees to inspect under the bed. "Let's see if there are any.... Holy crap!" He yelled, "There IS a monster under here! Run for it!" He scrambled past my mom and they both raced down the hall and slammed the door to their room. After I sat on the bed in a paralyzing moment of fear, they came back, crying from laughing so hard. "That was fun, Jeff -- Let's do that every night."

And I never bugged them again.

We eventually ran out of the mango, so we considered our other options. The beets looked gross (really-  who eats beets?) The carrots are probably good, but had a weird ooky color. The green beans looked like pureed barf. So I decided to give the butternut squash a shot. The little baby food label showed wholesome-looking squashes and an ecstatic baby.  I half-considered the possibility that this kid on the label wasn't laughing like a little gummy hyena after having eaten this exact flavor -- they probably use the same picture for all their flavors, even the tragic beets. But being an optimist, I moved forward with the notion that his smile was an endorsement for this particular flavor.

Jules wasn't as ecstatic as the baby on the label. As I loaded her first spoonful into her mouth, her eyes bugged wide open and she gave me a deeply concerned look to tell me Daddy, there is something seriously wrong with my mango. She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue to show me the grossness that was still sitting there. I tried to make light of the situation, saying "It's different, Jules -- but look, it's still good!" taking large mock bites of it and feigning interest. I'm a terrible actor, and she didn't buy it.  She scooped the first spoonful off her tongue with her tiny hand and then shook it wildly, flinging squash bits all over both of us.

As a footnote, I also made a mistake regarding diet sodas. I thought it would be adorable one time to let her have a little sip, and now we have to hide our diet cokes or she crawls over us to lunge at them like a little crackhead. From her point of view, the metallic cans are way more interesting than her boring plastic bottles or mommy's dispensing units. I'm not sure what kinds of toxic evils reside in diet cokes -- perhaps some kind of villainous medical condition that we'll all find out about in 30 years -- and she'll have started earlier than anybody.  If Jules turns out to be as strange as Daddy, I'm blaming it on the diet cokes.

The open side of the cubicle doesn't face anybody, but it does face the little hallway where the water cooler resides. This gives me privacy for tunnel-vision productivity immersion at my desk, except of course whenever my coworkers stop by to refill their water containers.

I have found over time that people act pretty strangely when they think nobody's looking. It has become a fascinating daily study of human behavior. In the average 9.2 seconds it takes to fill up their containers, every person has some kind of water-filling ritual. The R&D director fills his bottle for a while, stops and spaces out while he looks around the office, then fills up the rest. The V.P. of Operations fills up the bottle with one hand while she strikes a runway pose and taps an impatient foot. Our regulatory associate crouches and watches the water-to-bottle dispensing process very closely, from like 4 inches away. A guy from the lab bends sharply at the waist to fill his thermos, pointing his rear directly at me. Our company lawyer looks back over his shoulder while he's filling his bottle to see what I'm up to. He named me "Twinkletoes" because I ran like a girl one time during an office putting match, so I throw out random new nicknames for him during his 9.2 seconds at the cooler. I'm leaning towards "Z- Licious," since his name is Zach, or "Mayor of Nosey-town" because he wishes he was omnipotent.

My boss fills up his big thermos cup while he's directly facing the cooler, puts his other hand on his hip, and relaxes his head back. From my angle, it looks and sounds like he's peeing.

The V.P. of Scientific Affairs caught on that I was taking notes on everybody's dispensing rituals and he started changing his routine. One day he put a foot up on a nearby shelf. The next day, he did a hilarious between-the-legs maneuver. I'm waiting on him to one day pull the 5 gallon jug off the top of the cooler and start drinking right out of it.

In addition to my other work duties, my station near the water makes me the waterboy. I'm happy to do it, except people gawk at the operation with much more fascination than it deserves. All I'm doing is taking off the old water jug and tilting the new jug back on top, but people stare at the process like I'm giving birth to a giraffe.

I've noticed that people get incredibly thirsty in the last 30 minutes of the regular workday. People crowd the water cooler, draining about half the big Ozarka jug before they head out for the day. Maybe some of my coworkers don't drink anything all day, and only realize at the end of the day that they've become dehydrated. Or maybe my coworkers don't have water at home. I can picture them bringing home a thermos of water to their families. "Look, kids, I brought home water! Whose turn is it for a shower today?"

At least once a week, somebody will notice the red knob on the cooler for the first time and give it a little burst to see what it does. Every time, they strike a surprised expression, turn to me, and say "Ow, I burned myself! That water is hot!" Since my nearby location implies that I'm the expert on all water dispensing operations, I usually try to offer some kind of explanation. They look at me expectantly while they wave their hand in pain, and I say "I think only the first little bit is super hot. Try it again."

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/opinion/stories/DN-west_young_0702edi.ART.West.Edition1.42fe547.html

Just as Tony the Tiger and Scarlett Johansson were about to show me how to make a crème brûlée in my Mema's kitchen, a shrieking alarm punched me in the face. When I came to, an irritating pitch was sounding off downstairs, filling the whole house with EENK-EENK-EENK-EENK! Before jumping out of bed, I did the traditional suddenly-awoken-and-confused conversation with myself.

We're in danger!
No, we're not. Go back to sleep.
Yes we are! That's a fire alarm or something. We should freak out.
Settle down, buddy -- that's not the sound the fire alarms make.
I think you're right. Hey, let's eat a frozen burrito for breakfast today.
You always have the best ideas, Me.

I turned to look at the alarm clock next to the bed: 5:15 am. Crap, just long enough before my wakeup time that it wasn't worth it to try to go back to sleep. Or was it? I remember my man Tony showing me something, and it had to do with Mema's kitchen... what was it? I could probably sneak back into Dreamworld if I could just hurry back out of this one.

I turned over and shook the wife -- "Hey, get up, I think the house is on fire. Go check it out." She pulled the covers up and said through muffled fabric "That's your cell phone, you go get it." I shook her again, but this time she just growled, and then the dog lying at our feet growled at me too. Dreamworld would have to go on without me.

I went downstairs, squinting my eyes as I sought out the EENK-EENK-EENK-EENK noise. I'm not sure why I instinctively squint my eyes with loud noises -- I also turn down the car radio when I'm looking for a street address. Apparently the visual and auditory portions of my brain do not work simultaneously.

When I found the source, imagine how peeved I was -- It was the wife's cell phone alarm! I pushed random buttons until it stopped, stormed back up the stairs, called her a "big dummy" , bounced her phone off her rear, and went back to sleep. The dog growled at me again.

For the next 30 minutes, I slept restlessly, dreaming about alarm clocks, until my wife shook me awake. What now?!? I still had 30 minutes of sweet, sweet sleep until I had to get up. She was holding our baby and nudging me. She said "I've been trying to wake her up to play with you but she's really crashed out." I barked at her "Of course she is! Even at three months old, she realizes it's dark outside! Begone, woman!" As I drifted off into angry slumber, the dog jumped off the bed to finish her Doggie Dreamworld elsewhere in the house.

I blinked my eyes and it was 7:15, the time I normally leave for work. After cursing alarm clocks all morning, I found I suddenly missed mine when it didn't go off! This meant that for me to get to work by 8 am, I'd have to skip breakfast and start off today with questionable hygiene habits. I compromised and did the 4-minute shower version, just the pits and bits.

After some driving behavior that I wouldn't be proud to repeat here, I barely made it to work on time. Walking into the building, a forgotten voice reminded me where my morning went all wrong:

Hey! Where's my damn burrito?

If there was ever a need for an icebreaker, I think it's when you're asked to sprawl out on a mat in a crowded room of strangers and give your spouse a neck and back massage in front of everybody. It might have been a little less uncomfortable if we weren't packed into the room with everybody's elbows and knees touching. At various points in the class there wasn't any instruction going on, just the sounds of the shuffling of hands on clothes, which was kinda creepy in the large setting. Crawling around on the floor giving our spouses massages is what got most of us there in the first place.

At the first class, we didn't bring our Focal Point, the designated object (a baby sock, sonogram picture, etc) that the mom in labor is supposed to focus on instead of her convulsing uterus. So we improvised with an Ozarka bottle. During our first simulated contraction, we stared and focused hard at the Ozarka bottle, doing heavy timed breathing in the crowded, quiet room with 20 other couples. Not one to allow an awkward moment to go unannounced, I whispered loudly into my wife's ear during the next long breath. "Ohhhhhh zahrrrrrr kahhh." It got the desired effect of making her laugh and elbow me, but I didn't expect to completely derail the class. In my haste to be silly, I forgot that we were jammed in next to 20 other couples who heard me too, and I also forgot how pregnant women will spontaneously tinkle while laughing. As the class went nuts with chuckling and women running for the bathroom, the instructor glared at me again. She told the class (and I quote) "See, class, Jeff and Amy are what we call a disruption. You will face many disruptions like them during your real labor. With good focus, you can ignore them."

One night, our instructor Miss Glarey von Glarenstein was out of town and we had a substitute instructor, a different nurse from the Women's Center. I'm not sure if she did this normally in her own classes, or if it was just because we weren't her students, but the substitute teacher went out of her way to tell us every labor horror story she's ever experienced. Every mild question was met with some frightening story of a baby that almost didn't make it for some reason, followed by audible gasps around the room.

"Yes, I was wondering... what percentage of women need episiotomies?"

"I'll tell you one thing, you don't want to just let yourself tear down there. Don't try to be a hero -- I've seen some ugly blowouts you can't imagine."

(More audible gasps around the room)

After hearing about the baby who was born with three legs while part of the hospital was on fire, we were happy to see a different, third instructor the following evening at our Breastfeeding class. I understand that breastfeeding is optional, so I wondered how intense this nurse was about making this choice. The nurse/ instructor opened up the class with "I'm glad to see you all here learning about Breastfeeding. You are the ones who love your babies. The only ones."

The instructor went on to explain all the great benefits of breastfeeding, talking about what great bonding it is for the mother and child, how the milk is always clean and the right temperature, and so on. Then she told us about studies that showed how breastfed babies have higher IQs and less eating disorders later in life. Then she made wild claims about how every U.S. president was breastfed until eight years old, how breastmilk is the antidote for every poisonous snake on the planet, and how babies who don't breastfeed have a 87% chance of growing up to become the teenagers who wear black makeup and noserings and hang out at mall food courts.

We were reminded no less than 23 times that there is a Breastfeeding Center next door to the Women's Center, and we were encouraged to stop by for regular visits to make sure she's doing it right. I can't imagine what they do there that would require a whole building. I imagine a group of nurses crowded around the baby, chanting Chug! Chug! Chug! like a kegstand at a frat party.

I giggled during the powerpoint presentation of differences in breast shapes, which drew another elbow from my wife and instigated additional giggling around the room. At the end of the class, during the Q+A portion, my wife saw the smirk on my face as I raised my hand, and she managed to successfully stop me from asking the instructor why men have nipples.

The High Five originated in the 1920's with its subdued predecessor, the Low Five, in swing and jazz venues. Then, while watching baseball one evening in November of 1955, brothers Tim and Tom Thompson, simultaneously decided to smack each other on the forehead as was the family custom while drinking heavily. However, on this fateful night, they accidentally clapped hands in the air. And the High Five was born.

The new celebratory gesture took many years to gain momentum, as the High Five requires mutual participation between the two participants. During the early awkward years, many individuals were "left hanging" , standing with a lingering, unclapped hand in the air while the other party flinched, thinking he was about to be struck in the forehead.

However, over time, the popularity of the High Five gathered momentum, reaching its pinnacle of coolness with the release of the blockbuster hit Top Gun. All over the country, if they weren't busy rushing out to join the Navy or Air Force, teenagers were practicing complicated High Five maneuvers. Up high, followed with the no-look clap on the downside. No longer considered a threatening gesture, a hand coming thrust towards one's face was now universally met with a return clap. The sole exception to this was that highly-intelligent males, having exhausted their brain capacities for more-nerdy endeavors, would often miss their High Five to the great bemusement of normal folks everywhere.

The High Five worked its way into nursery rhymes with the popular childhood interaction: High Five / Now down low / Put it in the hole / Oops you're too slow, or the alternative ending: You just put your finger in my toilet bowl.

It is still debated in international symposiums on the subject, but the decline of the High Five may have begun with the introduction of its many derivatives and competing gestures. The handshake, for instance, remained the timeless staple for greetings in the corporate environment. In the hip-hop community, the High Five couldn't compete with the highly complicated and choreographed hand-contact gestures that could carry on for upwards of seven minutes. The Wink and a Point has become a staple gesture by smarmy men everywhere, replacing the Mock Punch to the Abdomen that held a small amount of popularity in the late 1980s.

The Jumping Double- High Five with Belly Bump Maneuver, thought to become the heir and revitalizing successor to High Five fame, was unexpectedly replaced with the more simple Jumping Belly Bump. In more recent years, the High Five has been replaced in the NFL with the Leaping Interlocking Elbows Maneuver. Newly published studies from world-renowned behavioral sociologists that indicate the High Five could be phased out entirely by the year 2021. In its place, popular culture may soon witness the rise of other new gestures, such as the One Handed Shark Fin Wave and the Double Middle Fingers in the Ears Maneuver.

Not everybody, however, is content to sit back and watch the steady demise of the High Five. The sixth annual High Five Day will be held this year on April 19^th, on the customary third Thursday of April. The festivities will take place in open areas with good lighting to ensure good midair hand connections. Judges will be on hand to judge clapping decibels and judge the High Five Speed Round competitions. A compilation of some of the greatest movie and sports moments featuring High Fives will be shared, along with a keynote address by Borat. As is the customary practice, at the conclusion of the ceremonies, with puffy and sore palms, each participant will make a solemn promise to carry on the rich and distinguished practice of the High Five, then High Five each other in the parking on the way out.

I found a bump on one of my boys.

I quickly checked the other one. Maybe this was a previously unexplored feature of my anatomy. How could I have missed it all this time? Unfortunately, Mister Left didn't have a matching bump. I was doomed. By my best estimation, the bump was about the size of a BB, but in my mind it was a seven pound watermelon that was going to destroy me, and also take the lives of whoever happened to be standing nearby when it exploded. My life was over.

In a panic, I called my doctor's office, which uses a strange and frustrating system for logging in appointments. There is a triage of sorts, whereby if your symptoms are interesting and compelling, you have to repeatedly explain the gruesome details on the phone to several different people. By the fourth person, I was pleading "Just let me see my doctor! I have ball cancer!"

My doctor must have missed that medical school class where they show how to feign coolheadedness when examining a bodily anomaly. Instead, he gave a surprised expression with an audible gasp, very similar to the one I had on the couch just the day before. His mouth said "Let's send you to an imaging center to get this looked at" but his eyes said "Oh my God! You are going to die right now!"

A few nervous and anxiety-ridden days later, I went to the medical center's sonogram center to get an ultrasound on my man-bits. I sat in the waiting room with five women, all pregnant, all giving me the same What's this guy doing here? look. As my name was called, I patted my belly and said to them "I'm hoping for a boy."

The imaging technician was very professional. She instructed me to lie on my back and arrange towels around so that only my Easter eggs were showing, like an optical illusion. Then she covered the whole region with about a gallon of that purple sonogram goo and started probing me with the electric wand thingy. To add to the awkwardness in the room, two more random women in scrubs joined her and whispered while they pointed out things on the monitor. For like thirty minutes. I tried to break the awkward silence, "So, we doing lunch after this or what?" Looking at the monitor, without skipping a beat, the lead technician said "Awww... he has your eyes."

After several more nervous and anxiety-ridden days, a random doctor called and said it was some kind of non-cancerous cyst, nothing to be worried about, but I should continue getting checked every couple years. I said "Are you sure?" to which he responded with a thick accent "In Russia, the horse rides you." Not very comforting, getting the weird analogy I don't understand from some guy I never met.

But here I am -- still alive, still paranoid about it, still keeping a close eye on things, and still watching cartoons on the couch.

2. One who pursues stealthfully or observes (a person) persistently, especially out of obsession or derangement.

I was kinda disappointed to find out that my stalker was an overweight,
older bald guy. I'm not sure what I expected, but in retrospect, I guess
there aren't many gorgeous twenty-something, bikini-clad redheads out there
following guys like me around. I guess stalkers are kinda like family --
you just kinda get stuck with one.

During college, I was working up to 40 hours a week as a waiter and I was on
the newspaper staff, on the archery team, and in the band for the basketball
team at the University of Texas. Between all the running around, and
general delirium from chronic lack of sleep, I guess I just didn't notice
him. I was chewing through another busy semester, completely unaware that a
grown man knew my whereabouts at all times. It was shocking at first, of
course. By the time I started receiving the "admiration letters," as he
called them, he already had my whole schedule down. He left notes for me in
my gym locker, at my apartment, at the school newspaper offices, and in one
of my classes. It was a sobering thought that this guy was better organized
at finding where I was going than I was.

It's amazing how much a stalker can find out about you through digging
through your garbage. For example, my stalker probably saw wrappers from
Jack in the Box tacos on one weekend, followed by guilt-inspired containers
of Slim Fast the following week. I'm sure it seemed odd to find receipts
for Legos from Toys R' Us and a Grad school-level Genetics textbook on the
same day. If he really admired me, he would have popped out of the shadows
at the grocery store to point out that I was buying cereal but was currently
low on milk, and saved me another trip.

My stalker never made any threatening gestures, like leaving death threats
or slashing the tires on my car. Instead, he was your gentle, respectful
stalker-type. His letters started "Dear Jeffery (How he knew the correct
spelling of my name is beyond me -- my stepmom even spelled it wrong on my
Social Security card), I hope you don't mind that I am writing you. I just
wanted to tell you how great I think you are." As much of a clear violation
this was, and how eerie it was to have to look over your shoulder all the
time, I was lucky that he never became dangerous. That might be the
definition of the blind optimist: you find a creepy guy going through your
gym locker and leaving letters for you, but you stop to reflect on how
flattering it is.

I found myself referring to my stalker with distinction, like I was talking
about a butler. "My stalker left me a note today in my Botany book. What
did yours leave you? Oh yeah, I forgot, you don't have one."

One day I was walking to class and I had that being-followed feeling. I
stopped around a corner, and in the reflection of windows on the building
across the street I saw this guy break out of a walking stride to run to
catch up. I caught him at the corner and he jumped back, surprised. He was
red-faced and out of breath from his short sprint. He started to run but I
grabbed his shirt and pulled him back and said "Hey buddy, let's have a
little chat."

He started to explain that he's been going through some personal stuff and
didn't mean me any harm. I cut him off, reached in my bag and pulled out
one of his "admiration letters," and showed it to him.

"Do you see right here where you misspelled 'Forlorn'? Why on Earth would
that be spelled like the number four? Also, you've got its and it's
confused all through this whole darn thing. And it isn't even consistent.
Look, you have it both ways. I know you're dying to stick that apostrophe
in there when you're talking about the possessive, but those are the rules,
man. I see you've taken all the time to handwrite it on this flowery paper,
but I'd really rather that you use spellcheck. Do you have a pen? Here,
I'll give you my email address."

"Oh. I, uh. I have it already."

"Of course you do. I appreciate all this attention, but you're going to
have to bring your grammar and spelling up a notch. Otherwise, I'm halfway
through this thing, and no offense to you, but I'm like 'Geez man, is my
stalker in high school or something?' After I get hung up on a couple
misspellings, I'm all turned off and I've lost interest. Here, I made some
edits on the other letters."

"No thanks, I.. I gotta go."

And I never saw him again.

- 

- 

- 

Suddenly my perfect evening was interrupted by the screeching of several birds "SQUAWK! Reeeeerrrr! YAR YAR! AIEEEEEEE!" It startled me so unexpectedly that I dropped my fork. I couldn't see the death duel that was taking place over my head, but my shoulders instinctively bunched up as I peered into the dark trees to find these winged predators. Again, the sounds shattered the silence "SCREEEEEEEEEE! Squawk-Squawk-Squawk! AIEEEEEEEE!" I clutched my fork and knife upside-down in my fists, ready to stab at any would-be attacks from above. The birds were silent again.

As I crouched in my chair, straining my ears to find the source of the scuffle in the trees, a waiter casually passed by and threw a laughing half-grin my way, complete with a condescending "You silly rabbit" kind of chuckle. Who was this man to be so callous as to my reaction while these winged beasts were waging war just a few feet over my head?!? He noted my apprehension and said "Hey you - don't freak out. It's a recording. It keeps the birds away."

Oh.

I felt like the biggest dummy in the world for a brief moment, only to be repeated when I flinched and dropped my fork again at the next set of screeches from the hidden speakers. For the rest of the evening, at sporadic intervals, the speakers would fire up a death scream from various winged predators, then leave the arboretum in blissful silence for a few minutes. I don't see any alternative to keeping birds out of the trees, but it might be better to let a few birds poop on heads than to scare poop right out of the restaurant patrons.

My first girlfriend was in 9th grade, a girl named Vanessa. On our first date, we had our parents drop us off at the mall to see the movie "My Girl." At the end of the movie, the kid Thomas J. gets killed by bees, which sounds hilarious, but I never got to see the end of the movie. Why didn't you see the end of the movie? you might be asking yourself. I try not to ask myself too many questions, because the next thing you know you're arguing with your elbow in the cereal aisle of the grocery store. "I'm telling you, we didn't like Frankenberries last time!"

From the very thumbsy-hand-holding in which we were engaged, I knew that our first kiss was imminent. I was so nervous that I couldn't concentrate on the movie. I kept sneaking peeks at Vanessa, wondering when I should go in for the smooch. In an effort not to faint, I took the deepest breaths I could manage, which I realized later was the exact wrong thing to do. She turned to kiss me, my lips met hers, and then I promptly passed out -- I didn't rouse back into consciousness until the movie was over. Vanessa thought it was weird that I took a nap during the movie, but over the next few months she let me kiss her many more times and we became quite great at it. After we broke up, I went on to date a small assortment of other girls and she systematically dated every friend of mine, and then every guy who lived in Haltom City, and then much of the north Texas population.

At age 16, I had built up a little more confidence about my kissing abilities, so I wasn't as nervous. I asked a pretty redhead named Amy to go out on a date, and we enjoyed a great night out together. It was a beautiful night, the night was lit up with stars, and I was full of adrenaline from driving around wildly in my Dad's sports car, scaring Amy enough that she gripped her door handle with both hands. At the end of the date, as I walked her to her house, I thought Should I go in for a kiss here? and then You only live once, man - Go for it! and then Hey, I better stop asking myself questions before I go crazy. We stopped at her gate, I told her she was pretty, and we closed our eyes and went in for the kiss.

That was the moment that I realized that somebody's gotta keep their eyes open. Or on the first kiss, at least keep them open long enough to see that your shuttle docks are going to engage. Otherwise, that first connection can go terribly wrong. Either Amy went in too high or I went in too low, and she ended up with a mouthful of my nose -- and might have licked my eye. Paralyzed by the weirdness that had just transpired, we drew back and stared at each other for a horrified moment. Then I ran to my car and drove away so fast, it left behind a cartoon cloud in the shape of my car.

Amy hates it when I tell that story at Christmas with our families.

"Um, Mom.... isn't the State Fair in October? This is April."
"Oh, I meant to say the North Texas State Fair."
"Ah." I smelled shenanigans.

I eventually got her to admit that this was actually just a carnival in Denton that they called a State Fair, but I agreed to go nonetheless. I was excited about the prospects of testing my Manly Feats of Strength with the oversized hammer thingy, eating gigantic nachos, and then regretting the nachos on the Tilt-a-Whirl.

The day of the State Fair/ carnival rolled around, and just before I left work, my mom called again. By the way, I'm not sure how the rest of the Moms of the world operate, but no matter how clear I am on instructions on what time I'm expected to arrive, she'll call me repeatedly on the way there wondering why I'm not there yet. Call #1 is "Just making sure you're still coming!" but Call #4 is awkward: "Hi, I.... well I was just bored. Can you drive faster?" This particular time, she called five times, the last of which occurred while I was pulling up into her driveway. "Mom, please quit calling me. I'm pulling up into your place right now. See me waving?"

My wife and I hopped into my stepdad Jim's huge pickup truck and we were on our way. It wouldn't have been so scary riding with him if we rode in the front seat, but from the back seats, which face each other, we got to watch cars approach from behind us going 35 mph faster than Jim and then each jerk the wheel to miss us at the last second. It was some kind of crazy reverse wind tunnel. As we pulled into the muddy fairgrounds, my Mom's eyes lit up as she asked "Who's ready for the RODEO?!" I rubbed my eyes with frustration, trying to push them up into my brain. Not only was I tricked into coming to this rodeo, all the fair carnival rides were closed for the main event. No nachos, no Manly Feats of Strength, no Tilt a Whirl. Just watching people and animals run around a muddy arena for the next three hours.

I was born and raised in Texas, but until this point I still had never been to a full-blown, big-scale rodeo. It started off with impressive feats of balance, such as horse surfing while holding a gigantic American flag. Then they settled in to the key purpose of the rodeo, which is apparently to hurt animals for amusement. For example, they released a young cow out of a pen on one side of the arena, and his little legs ran for the other side like his life depended on it. As the wide-eyed little cow raced across the muddy arena, the horse rider closed in on him from behind. The rider released his lasso, caught the little cow around the neck, and then reared the horse back to yank the rope tight. The horse weighed much more than the little cow, so when the rope popped tight on his neck, he did a backwards flip in the air before landing on his head. Then he lay there, stunned, while the cowboy quickly tied his legs together. As the cowboy raised his hands to the cheering crowd, the horse dragged the baby cow through the mud while he bleated for his cow mommy. Then his cow momma called back to him in their cow language: "Hey! I found a boot spur!"

.

If you've got a new product and slogan you're trying to promote then you should look into purchasing some promotional products. There are many different promotional items you can put your logo on such as coffee cups, shirts and stress relievers. You'll then be able to give your promotional products to potential clients or customers to help spread your name.

Sometimes we get so swept up in the details that we miss the real deal. We become bogged down with To Do lists, only rarely pausing to savor time with friends and family. Instead of enjoying the opportunity to buy gifts for our loved ones, most people I know speak of Christmas shopping with the exact same lack of zeal as getting their driver's licenses renewed. "Man, the lines are gonna suck at the mall tomorrow. (Sigh) I guess I'll try to get there early. I should have done this a month ago."

For kids, the looming Christmas Day fills their every thought. You know you're getting old when you find yourself more excited about Christmas being a day off work and getting a good nap in than the presents you're getting that day. This is because as you get older, the amount of gift loot you take home decreases dramatically. When you're five years old, for instance, they have to build another wing onto your house to have a place to stick all the presents. At my age, I'll probably get a fifth crockpot and a pack of socks that don't match any others that I have. When you're 60, you get a mug from the Dollar Store with a picture of Santa Claus on it.

By the way, on that subject, I'm against giving anything specifically related to Christmas as a Christmas gift. "Oh thanks, a lovely ornament... Too bad this is going in a box tomorrow for eleven months. Here, I bought you a 2008 calendar, I hope you enjoy it next year."

So get out there, live it up, and enjoy the heck out of this holiday season. And bring extra pants if you come over to my house.

10) Bits of string
9) Tickle-me-where-you're-not-supposed-to-Elmo
8 ) The cousin of the Spork: The Spoon!
7) Suzie Pukes-a-lot
6) Halfa Hoop
5) Custody battle subpoena
4) Hungry Hungry Hobo
3) Bratz Drunken Bachelorette Party Limo
2) Lego "˜Rebuilding Baghdad' Set
1) Rabies

Instead of resorting to one of these gifts, why don't you just buy a great holiday gift basket for that hard to buy for person? Gift baskets can come in many themes such as Christmas gift baskets, wine gift baskets and corporate gift baskets for your workplace.

Quick, get Charm up here to work this guy.

It's too late -- he wasn't ready yet and got soured by this ticket-taker's smugness. There's no time to prepare.

Do we have Bully on standby?

Yes, always -- Quick, send him in.

"Wanna bet? Go get your manager."

Okay, that bought us some time. How we gonna work this?

It depends, do we have a visual on the mark yet?

I'm scanning our memory banks. No, we didn't see anybody in a suit on the way in. I want a contingency plan set up to make a hasty run for the theater with this coffee.

Wait, this is him -- Let's size him up. Oh no, he's a foot shorter than us. Persuasion sent an emergency message, he wants us to slouch our posture a little, let's make the manager here feel more comfortable.

Okay, done. Charm, you ready now? Let's open with the two handed handshake -- Increase the grip on the lower hand by 18% to feign sincerity.

"Is there a problem here?"

Yeah, your Designated Boogerpicker here is making a power play on my coffee and I'm about to ask for my damn money back.

Impulse, no! What are you thinking? Did that get out in the open? Oh thank God, we had our Sensibilities Filter on. Impulse, you go sit down somewhere.

Charm, you're up to bat.

"Yes sir. I stopped to get this coffee on the way here at 7-11. I love having coffee when I see a late show... you know, a little caffeine to keep me up. I didn't mean to be any trouble."

Is he buying it?

The Observation Analysts are saying 47% success rate here, not looking good. Let's hint about taking our business elsewhere. But keep it subtle.

"You see, I usually go to Tinseltown in Grapevine, and they have this nice little coffee shop in their lobby. You guys don't sell coffee, so I brought one with me because I like this theater better."

Oh nice, a theater compliment. Nice audible at the line of scrimmage, Charm.

Let's bring this thing home. Up the volume by 12%, just enough to include the other nearby moviegoers.

"I'm sure you'd rather me come here with 7-11 coffee than go to Tinseltown, right?"

Persuasion sent another message, he wants us to glance over at the people in line.

Did the manager follow our glance? Sweet, that worked out nicely. Now he knows he has an audience.

Okay, big smiles, big smiles everybody. We have a decision coming up here. Wait for it....

"I guess that would be alright."

Woo hoo! Congratulations everybody. The Ego sends word that he is pleased.

Bully wants to say one more thing to the first ticket-taker guy when the manager walks away.

Okay, I guess he earned it. Go ahead, Bully.

"Hey look, I'm still bringing my coffee in. You know what's even funnier? I don't wear a bowtie to my job."

Many years ago I was a salesman, a good one, and after a while I realized that my bosses were stealing from me. They were secretly siphoning my most active accounts into their personal 'house accounts' to reap the bonuses from my checks. I confronted my weasel boss and gave him the "Knock knock. Who's there? Not me anymore" line and hit the road. As dramatic and satisfying as that was, I soon found myself in need of a paycheck, so I became a Temp.

My Temp job was dreadfully simple, but fearing unemployment, I embraced it with enthusiasm and worked hard to please my new bosses. My job was to file the various short term disability claim files for thousands of people and to quickly gopher the files back to their originators when needed. Wearing the requisite long-sleeve shirt and slacks, running around all day made me a sweaty boy. This satisfied one of my bosses, who told me "If I don't see you sweating, you're not working hard enough." But unfortunately, I had a conflicting directive from my other boss, who said "Try not to be so sweaty."

Since moving onto permanent employment, I've always had a sentimental side for Temps, careful to not misjudge or under-estimate these unstable office characters. Yesterday I witnessed a Temp imploding. Five minutes into her first day on the job, she got on the phone and started fighting with her ex-boyfriend. Redheads and crazies are usually my cup of tea, but this was over the top. As the tide of the conversation climaxed, you could hear the sounds of typing and office chatter fade to silence to listen to the escalating dispute. We were treated to such memorable phrases as You get out of there right now or I will call the cops and This is why I broke up with you, because you're a psychopath and If you take a single thing out of my house I will shoot you... with bullets.

The first time she got off the phone after arriving was two hours later, when her Temp agency manager showed up and escorted her out of the building.