Ten Thousand Hours

Today some girl at work who is now dead to me shouted at me, as I was walking away from her desk, “What sport do the Cincinnati Bengals play?”

Now there is nothing worse than someone asking you a question so moronic as all her colleagues stare at you for the answer. Is this some sort of a joke? Am I a laughingstock right now? Her colleagues assured me that there was no trick question. I didn’t answer because I am not some trained monkey and I will not be the butt of some big prank.

Turns out she didn’t know. Everyone gave her a hard time about not knowing who the Cincinnati Bengals are and that they play in the NFL and so she tried to find the person least likely of all to know such required man-card information: me.

What, a guy can’t letter in drama in high school and still know the names of all the teams in the nfl? Really? Of all the people who she could have seen to ask, *I* was the person most likely to share her ignorance of all things masculine? I like to tell myself that she only asked me because I stood out in my lilac Façonnable shirt, which people maddeningly refer to as lavender (and even sometimes as-gasp-purple!!) and that it had nothing to do with my lack of manliness.

I am plenty manly, even if-nay, *especially* if viewership of the nfl is the key metric. I was a fan of the Denver Broncos when they were getting trounced in Super Bowl after Super Bowl, a pattern of performance that no doubt was because of those dastardly orange uniforms. (Did anyone really NOT notice that they started *winning* Super Bowls once they got rid of those atrocities?!)

Just because I have renounced all American sports in favor of a true sport, English football, the sport of the Queen herself, doesn’t mean I have left my man card at the table. No sir. Nice try, coworker whose name I now forget, nice try. Next time you want to find the leftmost point on the manliness continuum, you might want to pass right over the guy who can blow the doors off of any karaoke bar with any (any!) of George Michael’s considerable song list (that includes Wham! of *course*). Because this guy is as manly as it gets.

So if you want money from me

Tell me you just got out of jail for killing your daughter’s rapist

And I will give you money and hope I’m a sucker

Because I’d rather be a mark than have that story be true

My wife and I had this exceptionally brilliant idea last week, now that we own a Vitamix.  We thought that we should definitely have a weekend where all we do is drink juices we make from vegetables and maybe some fruits just tossed in our blender.  So this was the weekend.

We wanted to do a three day journey of clean living, and the debate was between starting Friday or ending on Monday.  I chose ending on Monday because Mondays typically signify unrelenting hell for five days anyway and Fridays usually mean I go out to lunch at some extravagant place because I’ve braved five days of unrelenting hell.  Here’s what the website (based off of Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead—a documentary you can at least find on Netflix) said:

The cleaner your diet is going into the Reboot, the faster you will get to the feel-great phase! 

My pregame meal consisted of three Moscow Mules, something that I can’t remember, and two loooooong pours of Scotch.  Which, if you had asked me on Friday night, represents the cleanest eating of all.

Then there was Saturday.  I woke up early because, despite my pounding head, I had told my wife that I would wake up with the children so that she could sleep in.  I made breakfast for my son and starved.  In fact, I starved for the whole day.  I’m starving now just remembering yesterday morning.  First juice was at around 7:30am and it was spinach, apples, carrots, celery, and cucumber.  Tasted fine but I was looking for some real food.

@spirit_fingers: First day of my three day juice fast! I just woke up and I want to quit already. #3dayjuicefast

Which is true.  I wanted to die and then quit my juice fast.

@spirit_fingers: So it turns out that all of our recreational activities revolve around food. #3dayjuicefast

Also true.  And pitiful.  We were so bored by not eating.  Our kids wake up at 630 (give or take) and go to sleep around 830 (give or take) and apparently 10 of those 14 hours are filled with either planning or eating food.  It’s humiliating but effective.

@spirit_fingers: Two hours into the #3dayjuicefast.  We have no energy so we are slouched on the couch and the kids are tearing the house apart.

True.  I think the kids were about to make the sofa into firewood but I was feeling so depleted morally and emotionally, not to mention the fact that I was too weak to lift a hand.

@spirit_fingers: So far all I’ve gotten from the #3dayjuicefast is the knowledge that I’m weak in spirit.

It’s unfortunate that “weak in spirit” only carries so much weight.  Because I am the weakEST in spirit.  I am essentially spirit-less.  All I wanted to do is curl up in the fetal position and die.  My wife gamely prepared food and activities for our kid and I wished for a meteorite.

@spirit_fingers: Wife: this is a dumb idea. #3dayjuicefast (three hours in)

And it was!  As usual, she was right.

@spirit_fingers: Disoriented.  My mouth won’t stay closed.  #3dayjuicefast (three hours in)

You might not know this, but in times of severe energy deprivation, the body is forced to prioritize.  Apparently the muscle that keeps your jaw from slacking is extremely low priority, as far as the body is concerned.

@spirit_fingers: At the farmers market.  Filled with depression.  Otherwise starving.  #3dayjuicefast

Your soul also must prioritize the things it wants to concern itself with in times of extreme duress, and all my soul could think of was how sad it was.  But also, a distant second, was the gnawing pangs of hunger, exacerbated by the bounty on display at the Irvine farmers market.

@spirit_fingers: Made it to 11:09 [note: 11:09 *am*]! This has been an unqualified success.  Even if I were to quit now. #3dayjuicefast

Thank god for honesty.  The writing was well and truly on the wall.  I am, frankly, aghast that it took me four hours to contemplate the beautiful visage of surrender.

@spirit_fingers: At this exact moment, I’m not that hungry. #3dayjuicefast #win

I had a juice at the farmers market made of beets, oranges, carrots, celery, something else, and a few other things, none of which had any real substance to them.  For about ninety seconds, I was not starving.

@spirit_fingers: Okay I’m starving.  I wish I were swimming in an ocean of nacho cheese. #3dayjuicefast

I thought about this and it’s patently absurd that I would be swimming in an ocean of nacho cheese without some sort of a conveyance, such as a tortilla chip canoe.  With ample extra material—you’re seeing where I’m going here—so that I could break some off and dip it into the nacho cheese ocean and then eat the tortilla chip with nacho cheese.  A couple of important notes: first, the cheese should be the iridescent, almost radioactive kind that comes in gallon cans and is served at movie theaters, and second, that I should have a cooler full of jalapeños and ice cold water.  And maybe Coke.  I used to prefer the smaller, crushed ice, but now I would need to have the larger ice so that it sufficiently cools the Coke but doesn’t water it down at all.

@spirit_fingers: Wife: why do you look so angry? Me: I *am* so angry. #3dayjuicefast

Stupid question.

All I could dream about, for some reason, was the hummus we had in our refrigerator.  When I opened the fridge, I saw some leftover tabbouleh and mixed it with the hummus in a blind frenzy.  Of course I added sriracha.  And I ate it with a bell pepper.  That may sound to you like the most spartan of meals but to me it felt like my life was one gigantic nerve ending, stimulated raw and firing to exhaustion with every subsequent bite.

Fortunately, my wife and I are a perfect match and she gave in pretty much immediately after.  Because I don’t know if I could have sat idly by and watched her suffer through the rest of the weekend.  It just is too much deprivation to ask of one person.

The post-mortem of the 3 Day Juice Fast:

Days Committed To: 3

Starting Weight (lbs): 208.4

Hours Before Failure: 4

Number of Tweets Complaining About Task: Between 9-11, depending on what you consider to be complaining

Ending Weight: 210.6

Important facts confirmed about self: 1

And that is how you spell success.

My therapist shows dogs.  Kerry Blue terriers.  His dog is amazing.  Very docile when he needs to be and gorgeous and of course, since the dog is a good judge of character, he likes me.

But the dog is also very flatulent.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you this: I get farted on most sessions, and more than once when the dog is in the mood.  Naturally, the first few times that smell washed over me, I couldn’t be sure of what it was.  Except that I was completely sure—i just guess I didn’t want to believe that I was going to have to spend valuable therapy time pouring out my soul and getting bathed in this dog’s stink.  My therapist acted indignant and told me that that couldn’t possibly be the case, but the dog and I knew the truth.

Trouble is brewing.

I’m pretty sure all of us can relate to how humiliating it is to be forced to sit in someone else’s stink, but it also turns out that it is a little therapeutic.  It opens my pores and my heart at the same time.  Now if I get stuck in a drafty elevator, I feel the need to share my emotions with anyone who can spare me some unconditional positive regard.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: how can a paragon of balanced thinking and emotional stability possibly need therapy?  But most of the time, it isn’t *real* therapy—it’s more like me sitting around asking him about the ins and outs of showing dogs.  Something I learned: these dogs have a naming protocol in which the kennel’s name is first, as in Sierra’s Perfect Ten (where Sierra is the kennel and Perfect Ten is the name of the dog).  Interesting, right?  Something else I learned: much to my chagrin, when dogs are being shown, the handler will have to set their back legs in position by hoisting them up by the balls and setting them down.  I have no idea if that’s true, or if at the time my therapist was just messing with me, but it traumatized me and I couldn’t wait for the dog to fart on me again so I could tell him all about it.

My therapist, to his credit, dropped the ruse about whether or not the dog was cropdusting me months ago.  It’s better that he did, because trust is a cornerstone of any therapeutic relationship.  And if I can’t trust him, who else will listen to me when the dog breaks wind?

i just noticed that (unwittingly) my last two posts were about my dad.  My bad!  here are some posts that you should find more entertaining (but if not, please don’t tell me because I will be sad):

1) On big noises coming from small places.

2) On how bathrooms should be.

3) On how I hate to be compared to anyone.

4) On near death by raccoons.

5) On partial anesthesia.

6) On Words with Friends.

7) On organization.

8) On how my singing evokes great passion.

9) On my Olympian fitness.

10) And On my lack of manliness.

Bonus: Things I learned when i attempted to be a counselor.

You want another bonus? On yoga.

On car washes and stupidity?

On my birthday!!

And if you want to know how lovable my son is, this.

There is no rhyme and there definitely is no reason.

My dad was the jury foreman in the Jodi Arias murder trial.

I am betting that a good portion of you don’t know or care but there is sure a sizable piece of America and beyond that knows now who my dad is—which is to say they know his name and they know he had a chance to help execute a criminal. And they know that on his watch, that criminal was not sentenced to die.

That’s where it ends, of course. The knowledge of my dad. That’s all that all but a statistically negligible percentage of the universe knows about my dad. They don’t know that my dad loved his kids or loved baseball or loves cars or loves golf or loves his grandkids or any of a million things. They don’t know that above all his weaknesses, my dad is an honorable man.

And that’s okay. No one needs to know my dad. I think before this all happened, my dad would have liked to be famous. I’m not speaking for him but I’m pretty sure that’s not the case anymore.

Today I read hate mail my dad had gotten. Some person had sent him a threatening message complete with his email address, full name, and phone number (which at the very least means that this guy should retake Hate Mail 101). I also read some comments on an article online about my dad. Surreal. They say my dad was fooled by the defendant, that he was taken with her, that he hated the prosecutor. But what was most interesting to me is how many people say my dad is a media whore.

Let me explain to you how the media works. I am a media whore. I want nothing more than an open mic, a bully pulpit, a captive audience. But no one cares what I have to say, and therefore the media doesn’t care.

But the world (maybe even you, if you are honest) wants to hear about Jodi Arias. Everything, every lurid detail about her. So when my dad showed up at his own home after the mistrial was declared, the major media were there waiting for him. They spent the night in his home. He chose to speak, but if you all didn’t care, no one would have even had a clue who my dad is. It’s poor form to consume media and at the same time complain about its availability.

One last thing, and then I’ll be done, because thinking about how my dad is suffering makes my heart hurt. A jury gets impaneled once or twice in a generation to oversee a trial like this. That means there are one or maybe two people per generation that know what my dad has just gone through. I would love to hear what their thoughts are. I’m sure my dad would like to decompress with them over cocktails. What that group alone would know, though, is that when you are a juror, you are bound by law to be impartial. What you see and what you are *mandated* to consider and not consider is different from what Nancy Grace’s viewership gets to see. They are allowed to foam at the mouth for five months with bloodlust, knowing from day one that the defendant is guilty as sin. But a juror is told to leave emotion and sensationalism at the door so that the defendant can have a fair trial.

You might say, “But Jodi Arias is a psychopath. She doesn’t deserve anything but the hot end of a gun.” You’re allowed to think that. But I hope for your sake that if you’re ever put on trial for something, you have jurors like my dad to hear you out.

I looked at my four year old son today as he was about to fall asleep. He gave me a dreamy, half conscious smile. Genuine, because four year olds always are. I told him I loved him. He said back to me, “I love you, dad.”

At that moment I realized that if I make it to the end of my life and my son can be proud of me, then I will die happy to my very bones.

So here’s my open letter to my dad:

Dad: I love you. And I am proud today, and I am proudest today, that you are my dad.

My dad used to drone on and on about how a family had to have a leader.  At the time, there was a lot of talk about how a man needed to be a pillar of the family and even though everything was 50/50, someone had to be on the hook for the final decision, blah blah blah.  That always stuck in my craw, mainly because I looked at it as a religious anachronism and bordering on (if not completely) misogynistic.  (Aside: A family does need leadership (obv) but from both parents (obv) and my dad was a great leader for our family, for all intents and purposes.  This is not a critique on him at all.)  As I became a husband, I learned how laughable the thought of a man actually forcing any kind of decision on his wife was.  (Just kidding, angel pie.)  Except seriously.  And when I became a father, I learned how utterly preposterous the notion of leading children to anything is.

I say this because I am the father of a three and a half year old son and a nine month old daughter, and if you think that there’s any way on earth that I can tell either of them what to do, you have no bleeding clue what you’re talking about.  I tell Samir to stop doing (…) and it doesn’t even matter what noun comes after “doing” because he is ignoring me completely if he’s still even within earshot.  It’s maddening.  Correction: it WAS maddening until we got the Elf on the Shelf.

If I have the timeline right, the elf on the shelf is not something that anyone my age without kids will remember.  When I was little, it was enough to just tell your kids to mellow out or you’d whip them with a belt.  Now, since we can’t beat our children, we have to resort to cunning and subterfuge to lead them away from temptation.  The Elf on the Shelf was created by some brilliant woman who created not only the perfect prop to manipulate kids at Christmastime, but also a way to monetize that so that she can retire on a sandy beach with mai tais and hire three nannies to take all the sting out of parenting.

There’s a big book that tells the story of a magical elf (doll included, pick its sex) who comes to spy on children in plain view and take notes on the goings on in their world.  At night, by way of “magic”, the elf returns to Santa to debrief him on all the debits and credits in each child’s moral ledger.  Then the elf returns every morning IN A NEW SPOT to monitor what they do for the next day.  You cannot touch the elf or else her magic will disappear (natch).  I have no idea why the elf can’t just use Magic to beam itself from the north pole back into its same spot but I guess that’s the shaft you get when you rely on Magic for transportation.

The deal with the elf on the shelf is that your child is required to name it.  This sucks when you have a three year old whose capacity for creativity with names is simultaneously microscopic and unbound by societal norms.  When we told Samir to name the elf, he said, “Let’s name it A-M-I-L.”  My wife looked crestfallen that he chose such a nonsensical name and made him choose again.  The book suggests such nonsense as Sparkle and Floggin or some stupidity, and of course Samir picked Sparkle because that makes total sense, an elf named Sparkle.

And the kicker of all of this is that while i could literally threaten to box my child and ship him to siberia and it would have no discernible effect on his behavior, at the *slightest* mention of Sparkle’s name, tears start welling up and Samir immediately falls in line.  I would like to tell you that it’s a positive thing that we now have some meaningful tool that we can now use to convince our child to behave, at least sporadically, but in reality it is a little distressing that the scion of moral authority in our home is a pretend elf who was probably made by some machine in a far away country and can’t even teleport to the same spot every night.

There is nothing honorable about yelling at the top of your lungs that “Sparkle is watching what you’re doing!” or “I am going to tell Sparkle about all of this!” but the truth is that when you have a three year old, you take what you can get, and if that means that you have to forfeit your fatherly mandate to a toy and a lie, then so be it.  At least something is getting through.

My son is tough as nails.

Today, my wife told me a story about how Samir fell on the sidewalk in front of the other kids.  And I know the look he gives—his eyes well a bit but he holds it together and gets up and hurries off as if nothing ever happened.  Well I have fallen before on the sidewalk and it hurts like a son of a bitch.  In fact, I don’t even think I learned how to ride a bike until I was like 18 because when I was learning and my dad let go of the bike to let me balance on my own, I crashed to the pavement and got up and just walked back to the house without even looking back.  So I am a pansy.  Which means he doesn’t get his toughness from me.

My wife, on the other hand, has birthed two humans.  The more recent time, she got into a wreck, totalled the car, gave birth by c-section the same day, and was up and walking around within a week and never once used narcotic pain medication after leaving the hospital.  In fact, she didn’t even use any painkillers but once or twice.  So I think we’ve solved the mystery of where the family toughness comes from.

He got a large dose of stubbornness, too, and I think it comes from the same source.  We were at the park with him and some friends the other day and he grabbed one of our picnic forks and started trying to break it.  Have you ever tried to break a piece of plasticware?  Some are very flexible and will almost bend in half before breaking, if they even snap at all.  But this fork was the more brittle variety, and if you’ve ever tried to break one you will know that they don’t snap in half ever.  They break in a minimum of three pieces—one for each hand and then a shard breaks from the middle, they’re that brittle.  And when Samir started trying to break it, I sensed danger (because, to reiterate, I’m a pansy BUT I’m okay with that because it is the sort of evolutionary trait that has ensured that my genetic code has lasted for millennia) and told him to be careful and just hand us the fork.  But he is a stubborn mule, even for a three year old, and so he hurried up and strained harder to quickly break the fork before my buddy could get it from him.  And so naturally the fork broke into three pieces and I know that when these things break into shards in your hands, it hurts like hell.  But Samir just dropped the fork after it was broken and kind of looked at me vacantly, like he does when he’s mastering his emotions.  And he just rubbed his hands on his jeans, as if to dry them off, and then walked away.

I told our friends that I was ninety-nine percent sure that he just hurt himself and they didn’t believe me, because to anyone who doesn’t live with the kid, it would have seemed like nothing happened.  But we looked at his hand and it was totally bleeding!  And he didn’t even cry or complain once.

The truth of the matter is that—of course—that makes me proud in a “my three year old son is already more of a man than I am” sort of way, but it is really infuriating too.  Because it’s okay for him to act like he’s hurt if he is actually, legitimately hurt, but I know that the only reason he didn’t even so much as say ouch is because he didn’t want to admit I was right.

And that, he gets from his mom.

I know my limitations.  It’s easy to remember them because they all relate to grace and coordination—and since I have neither, I’m well aware of what I can’t do.  And as such, I’ve never had any illusion that I can dance.  

But there’s this chunky korean dude who looks like he should not be able to dance and yet he has made this song that everyone is listening to (including my three year old son) and the video has been watched over half a billion times on youtube, and basically if he can dance, why can’t I?

My brother can dance, and I share parents with him, so it’s only logical that if he can dance like Psy does in Gangnam Style, I should be able to as well.  This only makes sense.

But it isn’t true, and I knew it even before I spent the evening tonight trying to disprove it. There are a handful of completely useless videos on youtube that purport to teach one how to dance the gangnam style dance.  It seems easy enough, but I was dancing around in my living room like the dude from riverdance and coming nowhere close to what the korean guy did on the computer.  One of the videos was done by this english lady and she referred to one move as the “bum-shift” and then pronounced “lasso” as “lah-SOO” which is probably the only thing that is more laughable than me dancing.

I thought it would be fun to do this as a family thing, you know, we would all gather around and learn how to dance like crazy koreans making fun of americans, but it wasn’t that fun because i don’t see how my kids will ever look at me the same way again.

Well, Samir will look at me the same, because—as things go with three year olds—he wasn’t paying any attention to me at all—he was galloping around the living room in a big circle, oblivious to the fact that he was the first person on the planet to dance gangnam style worse than me.  But my daughter is a different story.  I was holding Amelie (seven months old) while doing this dance and she just had her arms held straight out from her sides as if she was trying to balance for me.  She had this look on her face of curious detachment and made no attempt to hide her judgment and consternation.  I’ve seen this look on my wife’s face many times, and it’s the measure of the depths at which she has seen me that she didn’t even laugh at me tonight.  Or maybe it’s a measure of just how bad I am at dancing.

I’ve dissected this, and the main problem is one of balance.  (And grace.  And coordination.  But if I have to pick one, it’s balance.)  The dance actually requires that you shift balance from one leg to the other in a less than regular pattern.  This can’t be fair at all.  I am kinda worried that my daughter is going to have a slightly compressed spine after being held while I was hopping around.  I don’t think her little frame was meant to undergo such forces of physics.

The one thing that I have down in this dance, though, is the facial expression.  Psy himself says that if you want to dance the dance, you need to have a very serious look on your face to contrast with the silliness of what your body is doing, and I hit that objective perfectly.  In fact, my face had to have borne a look of complete frustration while I flailed around apoplectically.

So another night, another confirmation of what I’m not good at.  Maybe one day some dude will go viral by shooting a video of himself making witty quips and esoteric shakespeare references.  And I will be ready.

The other day I was on some phone demonstration for work where I was learning how to do some thing that is completely unrelated to any job function I have and which does not affect me in any way.  Since I was on the invite, though, I figured I would show up and listen in.  But the crappy thing with this particular conference call is there were only a few of us on the call and it was one of those setups where every time someone dials in or out, you hear a ding.

I hate that godforsaken ding.  I am not the person who wants to be hurting presenters’ feelings and throwing them off by making the phone system ding halfway through their presentation.  I hate that.  Technology allows us to do many things but what it no longer allows us to do is surreptitiously (or passive-aggressively) (or both) leave a conference call unnoticed.  And why?  Is this information beneficial to anyone at all?  No.  In fact, one of the reasons why I (used to) like conference calls more than live meetings is because I can drop off the call a few minutes in if it’s dull and irrelevant enough and no one is the wiser.  But the stupid ding ruins all that.  Next technological advance will mean that the host/presenter gets pinged every time I think about donuts during the call.  Deafening.

These technologies are not welcome.  One time, on twitter, I decided that I had had my fill of someone’s drivel and just stopped following that person.  I looked at how many followers they had, and it was plenty, so I figured that even if they did count their followers, the task of figuring out *who* they lost would be prohibitively onerous.  So I wake up the next morning and there was some bot (some automated twitter account) which sent a message to the other person to TELL HIM I HAD STOPPED FOLLOWING HIM!!  Do you know how awkward that virtual space between us was from that moment on?  About as awkward as possible when you consider that he and I have never met in person, and presumably will never meet in person.  But still.

And the overkill in terms of notifications is really evident when you are using the iMessage texting functionality on your iPhone.  (If you don’t have an iPhone, it’s okay, because the same thing happens on Facebook.  And if you don’t have either, then I’m not sure which newspaper you found this blog in.)  I send you a text.  Maybe: “hey how are things?”  And then I see on my screen a little voice cloud with three dots in it which means that you are writing to me.  And I sit there, waiting, on the edge of my seat, riveted at what might come next.  And usually I get rewarded by whatever you send back.  ”Nothing.”  Okay, so now I send you back a text.  ”Any plans tonight?” And then I see the three dots.  So I KNOW you have seen the text, because you were typing something.  But then, nothing.

And I wait.

And then the dots come back!  And I think that you must have just cleared your schedule because I am asking you what your plans are, and I get ready to read what you are typing, which must be lengthy because these dots have been on the screen for like five minutes.  And then they disappear.

And I wait.

Usually they disappear right before the text is sent, but in this case I haven’t seen a text.  And now I don’t even see the comforting dots.  Is this by design?  Did you deliberately stop texting?  Is there some emergency?

Still waiting.

I run down the possibilities of what could have happened and statistically speaking it seems overwhelmingly probable, albeit unthinkable, that you are still alive and in good health but have just stopped texting me of your own volition.  But you were writing for so long!  So NOW I have to wonder what it was that you were planning on telling me that you could not ultimately bring yourself to send me.  And you are probably sitting there worried that you are going to crush my feelings but I assure you I will be just fine.  In fact, you will notice that I didn’t even ask you to do anything at all, but you were probably assuming that I was soooo desperate that I would ask you to do something—well I am not, I don’t even want to hang out with you and I am sorry I ever texted in the first place.

And then I get the message: “Nothing planned.  Want to do something?”

And now I have been through such a whirlwind of emotions that I can barely stomach the thought of even leaving the home tonight, much less hanging out with you, you who had a paragraph devoted to how you didn’t want to hang out and then chickened out and didn’t have the GUTS to send it to me.  So no, I don’t want to do anything tonight and no, I don’t think the world is better when every single whim or flight of fancy of mine (or yours, for that matter) is broadcast to everyone else who is participating in our little ecosystem.  Too much information, and by a long shot.

I know you all can instantly think of a million things that I am exceptional at, and I encourage you to think about those things at length and share your thoughts with others ad infinitum.  But, while this might come as a shock, there is an even longer list of things that I am completely terrible at.

As an almost iron-clad rule, everything on the bad list revolves around agility, lightning fast reflexes and decision making, peripheral vision, and depth perception.  I have none of any of these things, and so I am terrible at pretty much every sport there is.  Unless you count test taking as a sport.

I am typically much better at things which require little to no physical skill, particularly when they require some sort of knowledge.  Although it’s much better for me if I already *have* the knowledge and not so good if it requires much research.  Which is really the only acceptable reason that I am such a terrible gardener.  I bought this gardening set FOR CHILDREN at Lowe’s because I thought it might bolster my relationship with my son.  (Spoiler alert: my relationship with my son has little to nothing to do with the activities we engage in, so that was pretty much a waste.)  This gardening set has a website with a bunch of vegetable characters who tell you 80-90% of the information you need to grow the little seeds in the box all the way into plants.  (On the list of things they don’t tell you is if there’s a difference between fertilizer and plant food.)

My wife is a straight up plant murderer, so it took some doing to shepherd those plants carefully from seedlings to sprouting tomato and basil plants (the oregano never made it out of the ground and the bell pepper died when it was an inch and a half tall).  I would be at work and start feeling pangs of terror thinking that my plants needed to be watered.  I would text my wife and she would berate me for relying on her to water plants.  I would hurry home from work to lovingly water the plants and coax them out of their shells.  That was the scope of my love for these stupid plants.

Then, when they got to a certain height, I had to plant them in the soil, which was really dirt, and add fertilizer.  My wife insisted there was a difference between plant food and fertilizer, and that made me certain that there was no difference at all.  I added plant food and the tomato plant grew tall enough to need a stake—a big victory in my book even though the stupid thing still shows no signs of flowering.  But the basil—well there were leaves all over that plant just dying to be eaten.  And they got eaten—two or three leaves got eaten by humans but every other one was devoured right to its fibrous little stem by some sort of vermin which apparently is undetectable by the human eye and lives on my son’s balcony.  It didn’t take me many days to come to grips with the fact that I am a shitty gardener and I would never eat any of that basil and that I would never get a chance to eat the tomatoes.  I think it was yesterday that I decided for good that I will just let my wife “take over” the gardening duties and effectively put those plants out of their misery. 

So rest in peace, little plants.  You made a brave go of it but at this point it seems like darwinism has claimed yet another prize.  And rest in peace, Gardener Richard.  The idea of you was intriguing but ephemeral.

Last week I had a six day business trip to Nashville.  Which is apparently referred to as NashVegas.  After pulverizing my sensibilities (and my liver) into submission for nearly a week (oh yeah, and I worked some too) (more than some, really, because by the end of it all, the partying *was* work) I returned home over the weekend.

A few months back, in a moment of pure folly, I signed up for the Nashville 5k Fun Run, a work sponsored event that took place on Wednesday morning at 630.  In the weeks prior, I started training for said Fun Run by purchasing $110 bright orange shoes and a little Nike+ apparatus ($29) that goes into the shoes to tell me how far I’m running and how fast and all that.  I bought insoles ($20) that I used for half a run and an armband to carry my iPhone ($25).  I of course needed to buy new headphones and naturally could only buy the ironman brand ($29) because every other brand is for pussies and also because they guarantee that they will never fall out of your ears.

And with all that training, I got up to the level of being able to run five kilometers.  And I took an extra large suitcase to Nashville to house all my extra large shoes, including my bright orange Nikes.  By Tuesday night, at the beginning of the third night of ridiculous debauchery, a colleague of mine said to me, “You aren’t running that race tomorrow.”  And I told her: “Yes I am!  Why are you trying to challenge me!?” And it turned out that she wasn’t challenging me at all—she was just stating the blatantly obvious.  So by 230 Wednesday morning I asked myself just who exactly I was trying to kid—and my bright orange Nikes were the shoes that never saw the light of the Tennessee sky.  Don’t act surprised.

Fortunately, all that money I spent is not in vain because I am pretending to train for a half marathon with two of my closest friends (who are much more likely to actually complete the half marathon).  Well tonight was the night that I opted to get back on the horse (sadly a metaphorical horse and not a real horse to carry me to the end of my destination) and run again.

As you may know, a 5k is 3.11 or so miles and that is the most that I have done anytime in the last five years, so tonight I thought it would be wise to detox my system of all the vodka and fried pickles and run a personal best of 3.5 miles.  Now you might look at me and think that my real obstacle when I’m running is gravity, but in fact it is boredom.  So tonight I ran a different route—up the gigantic main road we live on.  It was dark along the road and I was running into headlights.

There aren’t many things that annoy me about *the* OC but the spiders are one of them.  There are spider webs everywhere, and I always find myself walking through them.  It kind of unnerves me.  For the obvious reason that there is web all over me, but also because I always feel a jolt of panic that there is a spider on me somewhere and an ancillary jolt because I realize that someone might be watching me freak the hell out.  (You might remember this.)  So I’m running my run and right as a car comes around the bend so that the headlights are pointed squarely at me, I run through a web.  Because I am who I am, instead of playing it cool and just wiping the web off of me, I kind of jump and spaz out and my arms kind of kick and flail for an instant—an instant only, but a long enough instant surely to end any misconceptions in one driver’s mind that I am anything at all resembling a man.

Which is cool.  Because it wasn’t nearly as bad as one time a few years ago when I still lived in Arizona.  For whatever stupid reason back then, which was probably as stupid a reason as my stupid reason now, I was running on a semi-regular basis.  We lived in a neighborhood that had a big grassy area and a lot of sidewalks, and as I ran my loop I would run near a lot of trees and right along a row of houses which, conveniently, had view fencing along the walkway instead of block fences.  In case you don’t know, view fencing is the sort of thing you want to have when you like to kick your feet up and look out your backyard at whatever is going on in the real world.

So I was making my loop and had been running enough to have a layer of sweat, and then I ran through some sprinklers and came around the corner to the sidewalk with all the houses along it.  I don’t know if it was because the water from the sprinklers mixed with the sweat on my shiny head, but for some reason a bunch of bees decided that I was some sort of attacker to their interests.  (If you know me, you know that I don’t attack anything.)  I didn’t know this because I was running, innocently, ignorant of my impending fate.  Suddenly I felt a stab of pain right in my head, and then another, and this was right when fight or flight kicked in and I realized I was being attacked!  So of course I fled.  And as I was being stung by a million bees of course I was flailing my arms and legs like in cartoons, you know, and all I could do was imagine the swarm of bees forming a giant arrow and chasing me.  So I ran.  As fast as I could, with my arms and legs akimbo, a fat, bald guy flailing and running so forcefully (but so slowly) that I think what had to have happened is that the bees just thought that there was no way that I could be attacking them, such was the pathetic nature of my attacking abilities, and finally realized that it wasn’t worth ending their own noble lives to sting me.

And that’s why I don’t ever run.

Can anyone name a more disgusting cubbyhole than the airline lavatory? There are a couple things that really irritate me about flying.
The first, of course, is this woman sitting to my left. I think of the line between seats as a tiny-yet absolutely critical-line of demarcation that is intended to separate the persons of passengers sitting next to one another. Now before you call me a hypocrite, let me call myself one first. My personal width is not, shall we say, exactly what airline seats had in mind when they chose their vocation. But despite my portly comportment, I do my best to be as small as possible on flights. Especially when I am stuck in the middle seat, as I am today. On my right is a colleague from work who has proven to be a good conversation and wise counsel as well. But on my left is a marginally larger than ideal passenger whose thigh is pressed disconcertingly up to mine, and has been for the entire flight.
Now I don’t blame this person, but that doesn’t preclude me from surreptitiously writing about her at the very same time as the invisible border of our respective personal spaces gets trampled upon. I hate it, and most because I am not sure if it is her leg or mine that is crossing over the border of the two seats. I’m sitting here suffering from unwanted contact but suffering even more from the fact that I don’t know who is to blame. *She* is probably sitting there thinking that it is my transgression and not hers, and that just pisses me off. I want to look and see who is the culprit but it’s one of those uncomfortable situations that I don’t want to bring attention to. Instead, we both just suffer and shift from time to time, trying to solve the problem by ignoring it.
My only reprieve has been a trip to the bathroom, and that is no reprieve at all. Everything in an airplane bathroom is designed to be touched, and that is just abhorrent. You can’t really reach up and flush the toilet with your foot, because the button isn’t shaped well enough. (also I’m wearing sandals.) You can’t just tap it and be done, either. You have to really hold it down and then when it flushes, a blast of air floods into the bathroom from somewhere and I hate that too because it just means that all the germs sitting on all the surfaces are now being roused into action and blown all over me. The sink is big enough-maybe-to nest a hummingbird. Trying to wash my hands in it is a farce. The button is designed to turn off unless you are holding it, which lends itself well to those who only wash one hand at a time. I personally wash both hands because washing only one hand after going to such a haven of filth is second on the list of vomit inducing acts only to jumping into a vat of Ebola.
Then, once you’re done washing your hands, you have to push the sink open so that the water drains out. And if you want to dry your hands you have to jam your hand into a crevice small enough for a rock climber to try and pull out a towel. And no such experience would be complete without a trash can that you have to push with all your might just to open. It is revolting.
One day, when I’m absurdly wealthy, I will only fly first class where I’m sure every latrine is well sized and has all the necessary amenities. Until then, I will continue to suffer with the serfs.

Sometimes karma takes its sweet time.

We had a big bash at work today, and one of the events featured employees doing a race on kids’ bikes (basically the smallest size bike there is) complete with training wheels. It ended up being a pretty fun looking event, particularly when one dude lost the seat on his bike.

Each team was supposed to have sponsors and all of the proceeds would go toward some random charity. One of the girls on the teams is sooooo cute, probably one of the nicest girls ever and definitely a favorite colleague. She totally sent us a five paragraph essay about how much of an honor it was to get to work for the benefit of kids. The end of her email was about how she hopes everybody appreciates today just a little bit more. How could I resist that?

So I went over to her desk to find out how much anyone else donated and presumably donate more, just because that’s how big my heart is and how much I cared about whichever charity it was. Ten dollars was all it took to buy some sanctimony. Then, today, another colleague (much less cute) ambushed me under the pretense of business and made another pitch for the charity about kids in need or plasma shortages or the dwindling rain forests or whatever so I was trapped into donating five *more* dollars to the cause. Sunk cost: $15.

To be honest, because I am so kind, I hadn’t really planned on using these tickets. But today, while I was suffering through vegan week at In-N-Out day (where our company pays for free cheeseburgers for the entire staff), I learned that one of the items up for raffle was a Keurig coffee maker—the very same coffee maker that my wife has been crowing about for years and years. For some reason I convinced her two years ago *not* to get that and I think that it was the worst thing I’ve ever done because my wife is a genuinely low maintenance girl and yet she has made it clear to me that the only real thing she wants in this universe is a Keurig coffee maker.

There were other things to bid on but I thought this would be the day that I would make my wife’s dreams come true, and so I put all of my raffle tickets into the pot for the coffee maker and then promptly forgot about the drawing.

I had a meeting later and when I returned to my desk, I saw in my email inbox that the winners had been drawn. And a wave of heady satisfaction washed over me as I read the numbers that matched my ticket—at long last! So many donations to myriad charities and finally something to show for it! And I could give my wife something nice, too. Because she deserves it.

I let out a yell of celebration, and immediately a group of coworkers started circling my desk like a bunch of buzzards with their big buzzard wings flapping and with their buzzardy paws out asking if they could have the coffee maker and how the coffee maker would make them so happy and how if it were them, they’d leave the coffee maker at work so everyone could enjoy it and do I really need a coffee maker since I always go to starbucks, every single day, day in, day out, even when I’m not getting coffee? And I felt threatened and worried that I should protect myself on my way to the car—mainly because half a dozen people told me that I should watch my back for the rest of the day. It was terrifying.

I made it to my car with my coffee maker in tact. I am convinced that the warm glow of my philanthropy protected me from all the looters intent on stealing my well-earned prize. And I’m happy to say that my wife was thrilled when she learned how much I cared about her! Everyone wins. Especially the wild three toed sloth, or whoever the charity was supposed to benefit.

Stupid vegan week.

At the beginning of this week, I decided (for some reasons best left unspoken) that I needed to be a little healthier.  A couple years ago, I started trying to be a vegan and I attribute that folly to the confluence of many terrible events (I started at a really humiliatingly bad job and… that’s it, I guess) and the relentless arguments of my one vegan friend.  (I know what you’re thinking, and I wouldn’t have been friends with him either if he had been vegan to start with.  He *became* a vegan during our friendship.  Loophole.)  He had me read The China Study (or, more accurately, had my wife read it) and I started to fall victim to the notion that everything that is wrong with the world stems directly from animal protein.

Back then, for the two or three months that I ate no meat or dairy or eggs, I started to feel wonderful (in many ways, including some that are best left unspoken), but the brute force of my love for everything that stems from animal protein won the day and I stopped the madness.

So, two and a half years later, I came to the conclusion that I needed a Vegan Week to see if I could reclaim the lost physiological glory that came from my last foray into the world of dietary extremism.  And now I’m on day three.  Day three’s temptations: oatmeal raisin cookies, ice cream, and a slab of cheesecake.  Day two’s temptations: Mexican food from a shockingly great restaurant.  Day four’s temptations are, at a minimum, going to include free In-N-Out burgers at work.

And instead of all of this gluttony, tonight I got to eat sautéed spinach with a pile of black beans and toast with almond butter.  (It was pretty good.)  We went to get ice cream and I was stuck with their one dairy free option of pink lemonade sorbet or dessert at the vegan place.  At the behest of my wife, I tried dessert at the vegan place.

Me: My wife says I should try the peanut butter parfait, but how does it compare with the brownie?

Employee: I LOVE the peanut butter parfait.  I eat it all the time.  It’s way better than the brownie.

M: Does it have any soy products in it?

E (Concerned): Yes, it does.  It has a (no idea what she called it, something like Toe-Feety cream cheese product) in it.  That’s what makes it so creamy.

M: Sounds horrifying.

E: It’s so good!

She seemed convinced that it was delicious, and my wife was convinced too.

M: Well.  My wife tells me this is amazing.  Let me ask you this: are you a a vegan?

E: Yes.

M: Were you ever *not* a vegan?

E: Yes.

M: Okay, so I’m trying to find out if a normal person would like this.  If you weren’t a vegan, would you still like this thing?

An important question.  You wouldn’t ask a gay dude if he thought your new girlfriend was hot, would you?  Based on my extensive experience with vegans (sample set of one, unless you count Alicia Silverstone), they like some funky shit and they are deluded enough to think it is normal.  But a lifelong vegan wouldn’t know what normal *is*.  So I had to ask.

E: I think it would be really good.

So I went for it.  Now a while back, I worked at a coffee shop, and the skim milk just made me want to puke with its unnatural hue and its watery thinness.  And soy, rice,  and almond milk were even more offensive to me.  I detest fake milk.  But I am all for personal growth, and so I figured that this was as good a time as any to see what the world of totally contrived fake foods had to offer.

Can we even trust the chocolate chips anymore?

And it was pretty good, I’m not going to lie.  The fo-teety or tofurky or fo-tooty or whatever it was was repugnant to me, just like I thought it would be.  It didn’t taste repugnant, mind you.  It just *felt* repugnant, objectionable on a moral level, right to the core.  Overall, the dessert was a little too sweet for my liking, but it was okay, and I think I might have liked it if I could somehow forget that it’s an unnatural substance that is designed to trick people into thinking they’re eating dairy.  Fortunately, come Saturday, I won’t have to worry about any more of this culinary chicanery and I can eat some of the good stuff, like movie theater cheese and twinkies.

(I googled it.  It’s Tofutti.)

There have been some odd goings on in the work bathroom lately.  I know that you probably think this is TMI, and it most certainly is.  But by reading on from here, you accept responsibility for whatever it is you learn about… well, about anything.

So even those of you who don’t often visit the men’s bathroom are surely familiar with the setup of such a place.  There are typically both urinals and stalls in a public men’s bathroom, and the one at work is no different.  

Well today, as I was going to the bathroom, a colleague came in to take a leak and was texting with his left hand for the entire time.  Not inconspicuously.  I finished before him and walked over to wash my hands and saw him wash his hand at about the same time.  Hand.  Singular.  He didn’t stop texting long enough to even pocket his phone and wash both hands.  No, he turned on the faucet, rinsed his hand, soaped as much as one can presumably soap with only one hand, and then rinsed and left.

Does that seem normal?  Do you ever wonder if there are little particles in the air in bathrooms?  This is why I wash both hands, even if I didn’t “use” either of them.  Because a bathroom is a filthy thing, and before you leave you should wash your hands. Both of them.

If at this point you’re judging me, I want to remind you that I warned you above that this was a post about bathrooms and you are the one who decided to read on.  You’re the one with the perverted curiosity and I hope you aren’t sitting there casting aspersions on me just because I am an innocent purveyor of the facts.

Anyway, women always think they know more than men about urinal decorum, and this is a lot like saying your brother knows a lot about menstruation.  Okay, maybe, but not enough to reasonably opine about its nuances.  I tell you this because women always think it’s so disgusting to chat it up at the urinals.

Well I, for one, don’t like to talk at the urinals.  But not surprisingly, some others do, and if you think conversation is uncomfortable while you’re facing a wall and peeing, you should see just how awkward awkward silences can get in those circumstances.  (I am steadfastly and unequivocally against inter-stall conversation, however.)  Consequently, if someone talks to me, I will answer.  Well the other day, I was going to the bathroom and a buddy at work walked into  the can and stood at the urinal next to me.  He asked me what I typically prefer to be called, and I told him, and then he finished and walked around the corner to wash his hands.  At this time, another guy we work with walked into a stall to pee.

Well my buddy, now out of view of the business end of the bathroom, asked me a question—I forget what it was, so let’s just say it was: “So how are you liking things over in your department?” And right as I was about to answer, I heard this ungodly noise rise up from the deepest recesses of the dude in the stall next to me.  If I can put it into relief for you, it sounded like a tuba that has been run over by a dump truck.  Or maybe it sounded like someone sounding a conch shell.  That’s a thing, right?  Someone standing on a cliff and blowing into a conch shell?  Or it sounded a lot like those dudes in the Alps on the Ricola commercial. Maybe a mix of the two more dissonant of the Ricola horns.  Anyway, I defy you to find someone who wouldn’t have laughed at that sound, that unholy sound, that unnatural and yet so, so natural sound.  I am not that person.  I was laughing so hard, and so silently, that I was suffocating for air.  I was crying my eyes out and suffocating with laughter, and that sentence contains no hyperbole.  I was dying.

My buddy who had asked me the question, though, was forced to wait for an answer (well, an answer in the Queen’s English, anyway) while I just gasped for air, and after about fifteen seconds of silence, he was like, “Welp, I’m gonna get back to work.”  Which of course made me laugh and cry even harder.  Because I’m a juvenile, yes.  But mainly because farts are completely hilarious, and if you’re judging me right now then I have no answer to you.

I regained my composure, washed (both of) my hands, and went to my buddy’s desk and it turns out that he thought that I was the culprit!! Of all things, like I would do that in the middle of my conversation!  Not this guy.  Not on this day.  And this was one time where I still had to fight to hold myself together and everyone who walked by was totally thinking I was a complete loon for laughing to the point of tears.  And how do you explain *that* humor?  You don’t.  You don’t explain that humor.

So since I’m a real child, I was telling other (female) colleagues about this experience, and I was a little bashful about it because who wants to talk about farts with women?  But when I got to the part in the story about how my buddy thought it was me, one of the girls looks at me and says, “You look like a farter.”  A farter!  I look like a farter?!  What does a farter look like?  Do I also look like the sort of guy who would wash only one hand?  I have worked with guys who fart all day long at work, in front of women, no less.  I have worked with men whose farts can peel the paint off the walls, and I have almost fought with such men because of the putrefaction that came from their intestines during work hours.  No, I am no farter.  In fact, I live in a world of self-imposed intestinal lockdown just for the benefit of my colleagues and the rest of those around me.  So judge not, lest ye be judged.

And that goes for those of you who ignored my warning and read through this entire post.  You’re gross, and you have only yourself to blame.

I’ve been learning lot more about Asian food since I’ve moved out here to *the* OC.  I tried pho, for one thing.  Another thing I’ve had recently is shabu shabu, which shows you how creative Japanese people can be because they have figured out a way to make me to want to pay $12 for a lunch that consists of a boiling pot of water and a plate of vegetables that I have to cook myself.

Part of the reason for this is that I have never seen such a variety of Asian culinary offerings, since Phoenix is pretty stale when it comes to such things.  But the other reason is that I have a Japanese coworker and a Korean coworker and so now I have people who can guide me through the pitfalls and adventures that come from eating crazy shit that makes no sense at all.

So the other day we’re all at lunch at a Korean place.  I have been to this place three or four times and on this day, I wanted to order something different from my usual hot stone rice dish.  So I looked for something healthyish and there was a cabbage soup that sounded appealing.  When we’re there, my Korean colleague orders for the rest of us (or now, looking back, I think she just orders for me), presumably because she’s worried we’re going to screw things up.  So when I had decided to have this cabbage soup, right as I was going to spread my wings and order on my own, she quietly tells me to say some ridiculous word to the server.  I get all nervous and can’t hear what she said and whenever I try to learn a new Korean word it takes me fifty tries to even get my pronunciation into the eastern hemisphere, so I just said I wanted number 48 or whatever it was.  The server looked nonplussed and started chattering away to my coworker in Korean.  I just looked guilty and worried about what I must have done wrong and then I found out that she totally was prohibiting me from getting the cabbage soup!

Instead, the server thought I needed something more befitting my American palate, so I got a soup that was blood red in color and lined with kimchi and shreds of meat and glass noodles.  Which is about as American as Mt. Fuji.  She basically forced my colleague to get what I wanted originally so that I could try it too, though, and as it turns out I loved it!  Of course, I liked the red thing more but still.  I probably would have really liked the red thing but my mouth was filled with the putrid bile of discrimination.

Another little adventure I’ve had at lunch is dim sum.  I have now been twice to dim sum and I have to say that it’s completely hilarious.  They come around with little carts and you order whichever thing you see that you like, which is cool, except that everything looks pretty much identical.  Oh, except for the chicken feet that you can order.  No other food looks like chicken feet.

This time when I went to dim sum, I went with four other Koreans instead of just one, and the one who was responsible for the ordering kept asking for them to swap out one of the dishes they put out on the table for a marginally different one.  I kept eating what I thought looked like something new and each different little dumpling had all the ostensible variation of swapping out a Times New Roman ‘A’ for a Palatino Roman one.  I’m sure there was some sort of nuance there, but I couldn’t really tell you what it was.

I think my most favorite thing about dim sum is that they put what you order down on a little bingo card with a stamp, which is both riveting and completely unintelligible.  Kind of like fried chicken feet.

Sometimes you are just dying for the adorable to happen. Happen! Happen, adorable!