Question of the Day, 11:

TRUE OR FALSE: If you make a bag of microwave popcorn, and then sprinkle Lucky Charms over the top of the bowl and mix it all up, the resulting combination (which I call "Lucky Corn") is delicious?

Answer: True.

Try it yourself and see.

You got yourself into debt, but they can help you get out.

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They Are Made of Marshmallows, Dad: 68 down, 9,157 to go.

I finally was able to put up Giant Rudolph, The Drunken Reindeer, and Pete the Patriotic (And Now Christmas-Y) Parrot up last night, joined this year by the newest addition to our yard decorations, the Snowman.

The Snowman was a gift to Sweetie from my dad, who followed the rules of giving that my family always follows: Learn one fact about a person, then apply that fact to all gifts. That is, once you know one thing about someone, make sure every gift you give that person relates in some way, no matter how tangential, to that fact. That rule is why my family decided that I liked monkeys: I had a "Curious George" T-shirt that I'd bought because when I was a kid I had liked "Curious George" and had a stuffed "Curious George." Because my family saw me wearing that shirt -- exactly one time-- they decided I liked monkeys, and so I was given, over the years, a stuffed monkey, and a monkey lamp, and three ceramic monkeys that had goofy faces.

Sweetie collects "S'mores," those little statues/Christmas ornaments that are like snowmen made out of marshmallows. Because my dad saw that we had a rack of those little ornaments, he decided Sweetie likes snowmen, and so for her birthday she got an outdoor snowman decoration, plus a package of hot chocolates with mugs shaped like snowmen.

I made a deal with her, because I love yard decorations. I swapped her the Snowman in exchange for a birthday-present-to-be-named later, so now she gets her choice of my birthday presents when they come in.

I hope she likes monkeys.

Song 68: Angels We Have Heard On High, by The Brian Setzer Orchestra.



Down... to go: All the songs on my iPod, used to counterpoint all the things that I think. Song 67 here.


Read the first installment of Ninety-Four: my recounting of the year that made me what I am today, by clicking here.

I know I'd like it.

Suppose that you owed $30,000 or more on your credit cards. Would you want to pay that $30,000 back, or would you rather pay, say, $5,024 -- and have your credit card company agree that you didn't owe them any more money after that?

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Ninety-Four: Part one-- Saying Goodbye To Machiavelli The Hamster.

Everyone has one year in their life that has a greater impact on them than any other year. Mine was 1994. Once a week, I'll recap that year, beginning today.

In January, 1994, I packed up everything I owned and went off from Milwaukee to Washington D.C.

I don't think anyone had believed that I was actually going to Washington D.C. until I went. Going to Washington, D.C. -- going anywhere -- was not something that was done in our family and circle of friends.

Sure, my cousin Joey had gone off to school in Arizona, or Washington state, or somewhere. And, yes, a few friends had gone to school out of state, too. But in our family, the accepted practice was to talk about the things we were going to do, and then not do them. So my announcing that I was going to go to Washington D.C. for a few months, and then to Morocco for a few months after that, was in keeping with our family's longstanding tradition of saying things like that. It's a tradition that continues to this day in some portions of the family, such as when Oldest constantly announces that she is, in fact, going to nursing school, and then does not actually go, or Dad constantly threatening to move to Arkansas where the property taxes are lower and it's not so cold.

And my brother Bill has made a virtual career out of virtual jobs he was virtually going to have. In between the few jobs that he has had, Bill has often and loudly announced that he was going to start a company, or had started a company, or was actually right at that very moment engaging in business without us even knowing it. These business ventures sometimes produced tangible results, like the mountain of cheesecakes that Bill's first wife had to bake when Bill discovered that she baked excellent cheesecakes, and then decided that he would go into business selling the excellent cheesecakes she baked, which required that she bake a massive amount of cheesecakes. I don't know what happened to them, but Bill is not today the Cheesecake King of Milwaukee, or even anywhere in the Cheesecake Royalty Line of Succession, so there had to have been some flaw in the business plan. My guess is that the "flaw" was that people are reluctant to buy cheesecakes, even excellent cheesecakes, if those cheesecakes are being sold out of the back of a car from which Tom Cochrane's "Life is a Highway" is blasting, and that was Bill's marketing plan.

Bill's businesses also resulted, among the outcomes I am aware of, in a closetful of unground coffeebeans (for mail order coffee) and a few lawsuits. I don't believe he's started any businesses in a while, but everytime I hear about someone selling something weird on eBay, I hold my breath.

Bill did at least try to do some of the things he said he was going to, which was more than could generally be said for our family. Very few people in my family managed to break away from the tradition of saying we were going to do something and then not doing it. I was always a little different, and I like to think I was a groundbreaker as one of the first people in my immediate family to have that follow-through, to say that I was going to do something and then actually do it, the kind of groundbreaker who could set the stage, eventually, for my sister to up and move to California on the spur of the moment to become a teacher.

I am, by the way, very impressed by that move, but it's a move that my Mom will never forgive. My sister is still living in California, years later, but Mom has never given up on her dream of forcing my sister to move home. She is constantly hatching plans to get my sister to move back home, and interpreting the news in ways that will support her schemes. When I mentioned to her that Sweetie's dad, who is a teacher in California, said that it's very difficult to get a job as a teacher there, Mom replied "Maybe Katie will have to move back home and work as a teacher here." I am, I like to think, a little responsible for Katie having the gumption to pack her things in a U-Haul and drive that U-Haul through the Rocky Mountains, and that inspiration all began when I decided to go to Washington, D.C.

I decided to go to D.C. and then to Morocco the way I make most of my major decisions: On the spur of the moment, and because I was lost. I was lost, and about to make those decisions, in the fall of 1993, when I was walking through the building in which I believed my advisor's office was located at my college. It was not located in the building that I was in, but I hadn't realized that right away and I wandered through the hallways looking for her office so that she could do the three things that she did for me throughout my undergraduate years. Those three things were (1) help me choose my classes, (2) tell me to take Astronomy 101 as my science credit, and (3) discourage me about my future goals.

She was very good at part 1, tried hard at number 3, and was not so good at task number 2. From the first time I met with her until the last semester, when I finally gave in, we'd meet each semester for her to help me pick my classes and for her to tell me that I wouldn't achieve my goals, and she always suggested that I take Astronomy as my science credit that semester. Each time she suggested it, I rejected it. I don't even know why; it just didn't sound that good to me, and it did sound hard. So instead, I took things like "Environmental Dynamics," and "Anthropology 101" and some sort of geography class that I only vaguely recall, all classes which fulfilled my science credits while not actually teaching me science at all.

The single thing I remember from all the science classes that I took as an undergraduate, the sole fact that I can recall, is this: My anthropology professor insisted on saying "Neander-Tall," instead of pronouncing it "Neander-Thall."

I don't even care if she was correct. She probably was. But it annoyed me each and every time she said it because I assumed that she did it to sound pretentious. Who ever heard of a silent "h?" So to this day, I remember only that she pronounced it that way. I don't know the correct way to pronounce the word, I don't know anything else about Neanderthals, I just know that's how she pronounced it and because of that, I make a point of saying "Neanderthal" with a "th" sound. Out of spite. Or class envy. Or boredom. I don't even know why I do it anymore, and it's not like I get that many chances to pronounce the word, anyway. But if given a chance, I will say Neanderthal. Try me.

I did, my senior year, after 1994, cave in and take astronomy, and it turned out that I loved it, loved it so much that I briefly considered switching majors from "political" science to "actual science" and becoming an astronomer. I didn't, though, because doing that would have extended my college career even longer, and I'd already been going a long time, and also because I didn't want to give my advisor the satisfaction. We had a love-hate relationship that was best exemplified by this exchange, when I told her I was applying to law school:

Her: What law school do you want to go to?

Me: The University of Wisconsin.

Her: You won't get in. Don't even try.

When I asked her for advice on how I could get in, she advised me to apply to other schools, instead, and suggested one down south that I'm pretty sure wasn't even accredited.

But in the fall of 1993 our relationship had not yet devolved to that level and I was looking for her office. I could not remember which building it was in from the last time I'd seen her nearly eight months before. I wandered around the hall of the building I wrongly believed her office to be in, passing a bulletin board crowded with posters and fliers and photocopies, the kind of billboard that ordinarily I would not even try to read because it was so full of papers that my eyes would just kind of glance off of it, unable to get a foothold on anything on the bulletin board and so I'd ignore it and move on, but there was a larger poster in the corner that said something about foreign study programs which managed to catch my eye. I stopped and read it, in part to kill time because I wasn't all that excited about going to see my advisor, anyway. The poster had a listing of various foreign study programs and what they cost and how long they lasted. As I read it, I suddenly and out of the blue developed a desire, a longing, to go to a foreign country.

At that point in my life, my travels had been limited to a few vacations with my family: Tennessee, Maine, Florida, Virginia, and South Dakota. While those vacations had left me with a breadth of experience in American culture-- culture ranging from "knowing what Wall Drug is" to "knowing the correct way to pronounce Mackinac Island*", I was lacking in experience with foreign countries, and suddenly my life in my tiny L-shaped efficiency apartment with my jobs at the movie theater and sub shop seemed boring and commonplace.

The poster had exotic cities and countries listed: London, Paris, I think Moscow, maybe Tokyo, each of which sounded exciting and promising. And each had prices listed after them, and each of those prices was high.

But down at the bottom of the list was "Rabat, Morocco," with a note that the program was only two months, and a price of only $2,000. So I took the application and sat down and filled it out because I suddenly wanted to go to a foreign country and Rabat, Morocco, was the only foreign country I could afford to go to.

I wasn't exactly sure, then, where Morocco even was, despite being in my second year as a college student majoring in political science, a field of study which, while I wasn't entirely sure what it was about -- whenever people asked me what "political science" was I would shrug and say "it's about politics" -- I was pretty sure that a "political science" major meant I should know where the countries of the world were. But maybe not. Maybe that's for cartographers to know. I'm still not, to be honest, entirely sure what it is that political science majors are supposed to know. But I knew then, as I read that poster, that I wanted to go to a foreign country, and I knew I could afford to go only to Morocco.

So Morocco is was. I was confident that once I got into the program, I'd learn where the country was. I took the application out of the little box there, filled it out, and went to the office down the hall where I was supposed to hand it in. While waiting to do that, I noticed that there was also a program to spend a semester in Washington, D.C., attending classes and working for some government office or other group in our nation's capital. So I took an application for that and filled it out, too, and handed them both in.

Then I wandered back outside and eventually found my advisor's actual office and forgot, more or less, about both of the applications, until I got letters telling me that I'd been approved or selected or whatever the process was, for both, which is when I began telling my family "I'm going to Washington, D.C. And Morocco."

To which they would inevitably reply: "Great." Or "Nice." Or "That's good."

At Thanksgiving, I told my relatives "I'm going to D.C. next semester, and then Morocco."

"How nice for you," they would say, and go back to talking about whatever it was they talked about.

At Christmas, my brothers were trying to make plans for January. "I won't be here," I told them. "I'm going to Washington, D.C. And then Morocco."

"Okay," they'd say.

Shortly after Christmas, I asked Matt if I could store a few things at his house beginning in January. "Why?" he asked.

"Because I'm going to D.C., and then Morocco," I said.

He okayed it, but I know he didn't believe me, because when the day came for him to go drop me off at the train station in Milwaukee, he met me outside my apartment. As we loaded a couple of things into his car -- my suitcases and a large cardboard box that would be shipped to Washington, D.C., and also the hamster cage that had my hamster, "Machiavelli," in it for him to take back home with him ("Machiavelli the Hamster" would not keep his name long; he would be renamed "Hammy The Hamster" by my nephew Nick)-- Matt said to me, amidst the loading, "I can't believe you're actually going."

But I was, and I did. He drove me to the train station, where I picked up my suitcase, waved goodbye to him and to Machiavelli, and got onto the train that would take me to Washington D.C.

Oh, and: *It's pronounced "Mack-In-Naw."




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Question of the Day, 10:

If one person can't sleep in the middle of the night and the other person IS asleep in the room, who should get to decide if the television is on and who should get to decide which channel to watch?

Because giving that power to the wrong person means that one person ends up lying awake in bed listening to his spiky-pink-fish clock click away, and wondering whether that episode of '3rd Rock From The Sun' was as funny as it looked in the first minute or so.

Also, underneath the dress shirt, I have on my "Nacho Libre" t-shirt.

I was getting ready to go to the office the other day, and I stopped to review my outfit. Nice shoes, nice pants, nice sportcoat, dignified dress shirt and tie... and my NFL leather briefcase and orange puffy winter coat. Lookin' good, I told myself. Lookin' good.

Also, lookin' a little ... underdignified. That's what I've decided. I mean, I'm nearing forty and I'm a lawyer, and while I listen to The White Stripes and can still rock out with the best of them, at least until 9 p.m. when I watch the early news because I like to go to bed by ten, I also have an image to project. People come to me with their problems, and pay me money to make their problems go away, and I don't think they want to see me coming in to try their case with my NFL briefcase and my puffy orange coat.

That's why I've decided to get a good men's cashmere coat. Specifically, that's why I've decided to get this:


That's a cashmere overcoat, the "Brisbane," from Sanyo. I think it looks both dignified and kind of cool; it's not the kind of overcoat that my dad or (God forbid) my grandpa would wear. It's the kind of overcoat that says "You can trust me. I'm a grown-up. And, yes, that's the White Stripes playing in the background in my office."

It's not just the looks that sold me, either. These coats from Sanyo have something called "Breath Thermo technology." I'm no clothing engineer, but they promise to keep me warm in the winter, which is an absolute necessity when living in Winterland... I mean "Wisconsin." If I'm going to replace the orange puffy coat, it has to be with something warm, and the Brisbane is promised to be warm.

So when you see me striding confidently to court next time, I'll be doing so in my nice shoes, my nice pants, my nice sportcoat, my dignified dress shirt and tie... and my new cashmere Brisbane overcoat from Sanyo.

And, also, my NFL leather briefcase. I'm not giving up everything.

Santa & The Aliens: 67 down, 9,158 to go.

Song 67 manages to combine everything that I spend most of my time thinking about this time of year, those things being Christmas, and cool music, and also spaceships and aliens. Song 67 is Carol of The Bells by Mannheim Steamroller, and it has the distinction of being the only Christmas carol which I can say is both beautiful and the song the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind would have played over its loudspeakers if that movie were a Christmas special.

And shouldn't there have been a Close Encounters of the Third Kind Christmas movie, in which the aliens learned from Richard Dreyfuss about the legend of Santa Claus, and then learned that Santa doesn't exist, so they come back to Earth and use their technology to actually bring a gift to every man, woman and child on Earth, in order to promote peace and brotherhood? It could have Richard Dreyfuss in a Santa outfit standing on that white deck/walkway and waving. It could be called Close Encounters of a Christmas Kind.



Down... to go: It's a countdown of all the songs on my iPod. Be grateful; I could have simply listed breakfast cereals I like. Song 66 here.

I never had moon boots, by the way.

When I was a kid, the only choices of boots that we had were either Moon Boots, or those clunky black fireman's boots with the metal buckles that always bent and then the boots were kind of useless. Those were our options.

What I didn't know was that the world of boots included boots that could do more than simply slip off your foot while you walked to school. I know that know, because I've been browsing around over at CopShoes. CopShoes has more boots than I could ever imagine had been created.

Now, these aren't your typical boots for typical people who have to go out and shovel their driveway and don't want wet feet. Sure, you guys (and I) could wear them for that, but these are boots that are meant for real men with real man jobs. These are SWAT tactical boots, and boots with names like "Blackhawk Mens Warrior Coyote Tan Desert Ops Assault Boots."

My boots don't have names like that. My boots don't have a name at ALL, let alone the "Warrior Assault Boot."

CopShoes especially has great Wellco Boots, boots that are made for use in high-pressure, tactical situations: Navy Flight Deck boots, temperate weather tactical boots, jungle boots with rubber souls, and even lightweight tactical boots. Whatever situation a man (or woman) might find himself (or herself) in, CopShoes has a boot for it-- and a good Wellco boot, at that.

CopShoes will even help pick out the right boot, and answer any questions, so if you're thinking "I'd like to give that boot as a gift, but I'm not sure it's right for this person," CopShoes has excellent customer service on call to answer your questions from 8:30 to 5 (CST) Mondays through Fridays.

Protect the feet of the people who are protecting you -- get them some great Wellco boots at Copshoes.

Question of the Day: 9

How many half-used bottled of "Thousand Island Salad Dressing" is too many to have in a refrigerator?

Because to make room in the 'fridge, I threw out last night four half-used bottles of "Thousand Island," which left two still sitting in the refrigerator. And, I believe, one unopened bottle of "Thousand Island" in the cupboard.

Bonus Fact: The "special sauce" on a Big Mac is just Thousand Island dressing.

Have you read "Rebellious Youth Without Girlfriends?"


Make out:

The Make Out Shirt
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brianefp

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Apparently, the bar for Christmas miracles has been set a lot lower in my house.

One of the things I like best about shopping for Christmas is getting "stocking stuffers," those little, inexpensive presents that can be wrapped separately as a fun little thing, or actually put into a stocking for someone on Christmas morning.

Like this year, I'm getting Middle and Sweetie and Oldest some nail polish as an extra little gift -- and, guys, listen up: You don't have to venture into that frightening make-up zone in the department stores to buy nail polish, because you can get it online through "Hello Gorgeous!"

"Hello Gorgeous!" is this site I found that sells things like OPI nail polish and nail accessories, like balms and nail files and... whatever it is that needs to be done to nails besides cut them occasionally, I guess. I don't know, because I'm a guy and all I do to my nails is cut them too short and chew on them.

But Sweetie and Middle and Oldest like doing their nails, and I like getting them presents, so it's nice to be able to go online and just order them things like this:
Neat picture, right? That is "Creative Nails" nail polish, which comes in "bold colors," and can even come in glitter and things like that (Middle, being 17, will probably appreciate that.) All the "Creative Nails" are discounted from $7 to much less, so I can order them and save money on them, too, and get some brightly-colored little things to add in as presents.

The girls get bold-colored nails, I get credit for being thoughtful, and nobody has to walk past those perfume spritzers to get what they want. Plus, I can then give the girls the website address where I got these things, and they can start buying off of there, too -- so in the future, I won't need to go with them to the mall and spend a whole day bumming around while they shop. It's like a Christmas Miracle.

Enemies List: 2

My Enemies List:

1. People who honk their horn.
2. Pepperoni Pizza.

The Boy claims he likes pepperoni pizza. He does not. I know this for a fact (and I've proven it.) But he persists in claiming he likes it. So then, a week or two ago, we got take-out pizza. Or, as the British apparently say, "takeaway" pizza. I like it better that way. So we got takeaway pizza, some sausage, one pepperoni. The next day, the leftover pizza available for breakfast was only pepperoni, because The Boy ate only sausage pizza for dinner leaving me to very grudgingly have pepperoni pizza for my Pocket Breakfast.

I can't put The Boy on my enemies list -- not officially, anyway -- so pepperoni pizza gets the number 2 slot.



Rachel's not sure where she came from or what she's supposed to do, unless she really is trying to take over the world with a little help from her Octopus, a Valkyrie, and her lover Brigitte. Read Lesbian Zombies Are Taking Over The World!

Rebellious Youth Without Girlfriends.

I wish I was more of a fun kind of guy, the kind of guy who could and would do things that are "fun" without at the same time doing things that are "guaranteed to result in a sprained ankle."

We all know those "fun" guys. They're around when we're growing up, and they have names which can be shortened into fun names, like the "fun" guys did when I was young, like "Rupe," which was short for "Rupenthal." "Rupe" when I was younger was part of my brother Matt's group of friends, a group that I joined sort of by default and sort of by virtue of the fact that I was living back at home at 19 and most of my friends had gone on to do other things: Bob and Fred had gone into the army. Eric had gone off to college, and, we heard/probably made up later, freaked out on acid and wandered off somewhere to join a cult, and Pat was also living at home but was going to school.

Eric was the smartest of our group in high school. Eric was smarter than me, which my parents didn't and don't like to hear, but it's true. Both Eric and I were naturally smart, the kind of naturally smart guys who can naturally get an A on their paper on the play MacBeth without ever actually reading the play, something that I thought would never, ever, come back to haunt me -- how can not reading MacBeth ever become a liability?-- but then it did come back to haunt me, because Sweetie was reading a headline the other day about Governor Blagojevich's troubles, and it referred to Mrs. Blagojevich as "Lady MacBeth."

"What did Lady MacBeth do?" asked Sweetie, who seems not to have taken a British Literature course that she then had to fake her way through because British Lit is really boring and hard to read. Sweetie knew that I had taken British Lit because I fall back on it all the time in my effort to continue to give the kids mixed messages: I alternate between telling them that they need to study hard and get good grades and that the studying hard is what leads, directly, to good grades, and then I tell them, later, about the time I got a 108 -- out of 100, earning 8 extra credit points -- on a paper about The Canterbury Tales, and I hadn't even read The Canterbury Tales.

My exact answer to Sweetie's question was this: "She helped MacBeth do something. I think there were witches involved. Or maybe she did something to MacBeth."

Sweetie's exact answer was "Oh." She sounded a little letdown, so I added, to bolster my claims:

"I'm pretty sure there were witches."

Eric would have known whether there were witches, and what Lady MacBeth did to later be compared to a 21st-century political wife. Eric was the kind of teenager who was more prone to spending his weekends home reading and doing homework and doing whatever else it was he did, while Bob and Pat and Fred and I drove around in Bob's old white Impala, trying to get people to buy us beer and hoping that we could find girls who would not mind that we were the kind of dorks who acted cool but who also made up, during study hall, a claim that we were part of a revolutionary organization named "Rebellious Youth Without Phones," an organization devoted to proving that Ulysses S. Grant was the best president ever, and to also having Riboflavin declared the national food additive.

We fostered those goals by once telling the Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher that we thought Ulysses S. Grant was the best president ever, which made him actually sputter, and by writing "R.Y.W.P." on blackboards in empty classrooms.

Seriously.

It's amazing to me that I was not voted the prom king.

Eric did not take part in that kind of tomfoolery; Eric was only nominally part of our group and did not hang out much with us on the weekends, because he was busy having a future which would not be dominated, as some of ours are, by blogging when he should be paying attention during a seminar. Eric was the least-fun, and accordingly most successful, of our group. However, Eric paid a terrible price for missing out on what we thought of as "fun" during high school, because when he went to college, possibly at Michigan State, Eric snapped from the pressure of being so smart and studious and good all the time, and he did acid and he wandered away from campus and nobody heard from him again.

Or at least that's what the story was. That story made the rounds between graduation and the 10-year reunion, people who knew Eric telling others how Eric had lost it, telling the story as proof that, yeah, we'd spent a lot of time at the teen bar ("Jellybeans") and even more time sitting in my basement drinking beer we got my older brother to buy and talking about what we'd be doing if we were at the teen bar... but at least we had gotten our wild oats out and had not gone off the deep end. Our parents may have frowned in dismay when we told them that we were not going back to the UW after winter break and may have frowned even harder in dismay when we got a job working on an assembly line that spring, but did they want to be Eric's parents, wondering where their formerly-brilliant, now drug-addled psychotic kid was?

I actually think that rather than wandering the Earth in a deranged stupor, Eric ended up being a veterinarian at Ohio State University. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

It was because I made those choices: don't read MacBeth, do hang out in a 1968 Impala, don't go back to school, do work a drill press next to Carlos, a guy who would regularly get stoned before work, so stoned that he once drilled his hand and didn't notice-- because I made those choices I got adopted into Matt's group of friends as the people I would hang out with for the next few years, until I finally got back to school because assembly lines and gas stations aren't all that fun to work at for a few months, let alone for an entire lifetime.

And it was when I joined Matt's group of friends that I got to hang around my first "fun" guy, the kind of guy I imagine Chris Farley was -- crazy and funny and able to do anything. Matt's group had one of those ("Rupe", as I said) and had it's own Eric, called "Andy" in Matt's group. Andy was everything that Eric was to our group, smart and funny and hard-workiing, but Andy had two other things going for him: he was also athletic, and he looked like he should be on the cover of a teen magazine. Andy actually stayed with our family for a while when his own family had troubles, and my sister Katie used to go look at him with her friends. "Come on," she'd tell her friends, "Let's go look at Andy." And they would, a bunch of 11 year old girls standing in the doorway watching Andy drink gallons of orange juice right from the jug while watching TV with his shirt off.

With all that going for him, you just knew Andy was going to end up worse than Eric, and he did: So far as legend has it, Andy too wandered away from college in a drug-induced state, and I think he also killed a guy. (Our group was not very creative with the horrible endings that befell those who seemed destined for success. We might have, in fact, been better if we'd read MacBeth. Then, along with drugs and wandering, witches could have been involved.)

I'd always thought of myself as a fun guy -- as the fun guy of our group, in fact. But as part of Matt's group, I learned what a real fun guy is, or was, at the time. Real fun guys can do anything they want. Real fun guys can be at a pool party, and can be standing on the deck of the pool, and can come up behind two hot girls in bikinis, and can grab both of them and go "Let's go, ladies," and pick them up and jump into the pool carrying them, at the end of which, the girls will bob to the surface, wet and giggling and laughing and splashing, and will say things like "Oh, Rupe!" and he will laugh his hearty, real-fun-guy laugh, and splash back, and later on he'll totally make out with one of them.

Guys like me cannot do that. A guy like me who tried something like that would slip before grabbing the girl and twist his ankle. Or he would grab the girl and twist her ankle. Or her top would come off and he'd get charged with sexual assault. Or she would fall into the water, hit her head, inhale water, have to be revived, and it would all end up with the ambulance taking her away and the rest of the people at the party looking at me and saying "What were you thinking?" And there would totally be no making out.

So for the couple of years that I hung out with Matt's group in between college and more college, I watched the fun guys, like Rupe, do the fun things, and I always thought to myself, I wonder how you get to be the fun guy? What is it that separates the Rupes from me, that allows them to chase a girl through the house and tickle her and not have her step on a beer bottle and break it and slice through their foot, so that what was supposed to be fun ends up as stitches? How is it that some people can leap up and crash down on the volleyball net, bringing it to the ground and the game to a halt, and yet everyone laughs and thinks it's funny, whereas if I tried that, I'd get "What were you thinking?"

I know what it is that separates me from the Andys and Erics, after all: they did their homework. They did not, when told to read Slaughterhouse-Five, skip reading that so they could instead read the Crisis on Infinite Earths comic series, the result of which is that they would guess wrong on the quiz on Monday and end up having to read even more when they got home that night. Andys and Erics always knew what happened to Billy Pilgrim in the cave and never got themselves into trouble by forging notes to get themselves out of physics class, as I did, but it wasn't really my fault.

I had to forge notes to get out of physics class because I didn't like going to physics class. It was first hour in my senior year, and it was boring. Physics itself isn't boring; physics itself is exciting. Physics class, in my high school, was boring, though. It was taught by Mrs. Kaiser, and Mrs. Kaiser did not have an exciting cell in her body. Physics helps explain why curveballs curve, why black holes are black, why those spaceships in Independence Day would have torn the Earth apart before they even got close to Washington D.C.

But physics in Mrs. Kaiser's classroom was this: Hold a ruler up, then drop it and see how fast you can catch it. That was an actual experiment we did. I remember it to this day. I don't know what it was supposed to teach, but whatever it was supposed to teach, it didn't work, unless what it was supposed to teach was how to hate physics, in which case it worked brilliantly. So I skipped out of physics every so often, something I could do because Mom at the time was working third shift, so she didn't get home until 8:30 a.m., and Dad left at 6 a.m. I even had a brilliant ploy: I faked up a note that excused me from class because I had to go pick up my Mom from her job as a third-shift nurse, and signed it with a reasonable facsimile of my mom's name.

How that genius scheme fell apart occurred thusly: Mom, one day, actually did need to be picked up from work, and I did have to miss physics, and she did write me a note, which I stupidly turned in to the office as my excuse. A few hours later, I had to go talk to the Principal about that, and he showed me the notes I had written, and the note my mom had written, and said to me that he wanted me to admit that I had faked the note my mom had written. As evidence, he used the other five notes or so that I'd written and signed, and showed me how the signatures on those notes all matched, while the signature on the note from that day was clearly different.

He seemed proud of himself, so I didn't make things worse by correcting him. I falsely confessed to forging the note that day and got a day's detention. That was actually kind of a cool thing, in my book. I only got detention two, maybe three times in my whole high school career, and detention was something that was cool to get, as we'd all learned from The Breakfast Club.

The other time I got detention was when Fred and Bob and I decided one day to just up and leave and go driving around in Bob's Impala. We decided to walk out the main entrance to the high school, a decision that seems dumb until you consider this: We didn't see any teachers watching the doors. So we walked out, and Mr. Brill, who was the track coach and who taught a class on the History of the United States in the 1960s, and who taught, so far as I knew, nothing else, and whose class focused primarily on (a) giving the dirtball kids who smoked and worked on cars a History credit and (b) playing The Who's "Baba O'Riley", Mr. Brill stopped us and asked if we had a pass, at which point we did a version of Who's On First ...

Me: [to Fred] I thought you had the pass.

Fred: [to Bob] I thought you had the pass.

Bob: [to me] I thought you...

... until Mr. Brill stopped us and gave us detention. And made us go back in.

That, and the riboflavin thing, constituted the "fun," "wacky" part of my high school career, forming the basis for my personality now, today, as a guy who's not one of those "fun" guys.

"Fun" guys don't stop being fun guys just because they get out of high school, after all. They're still "fun" even when they're thirty or forty or fifty. They can exist in law school, where they can give long hugs to my girlfriend (Sweetie, before we married) and pick her up off the ground when they do so, and do that without their own girlfriends getting jealous and without throwing out Sweetie's back the way I inevitably would if I tried to do that -- not that I would try to give a long hug to someone else. But if I tried to give Sweetie a long, lifting-up hug, it would have to be followed up with a long, helping-out trip to the chiropractor because I'd crack her vertebrae.

I know I would, because even little fun things that I try to do go awry. Like the other day, when I got home from work and wanted to surprise Mr F at the door. Each day, when I get home, Mr F and Mr Bunches hear the big garage door opening, and they get excited. Then, when I get out of the car, I start calling "Hello," and calling out their names, and they come rushing to the door, where they wait until I turn the handle and then they open it.

So the other day, I got out of the car, and I said "Hello!" and got to the door more quickly as I called their names. I was going to open it a little, and then when I saw them, throw it open more quickly and surprise them. That was my plan, and you'll note that it included checking before I threw the door open, because I didn't want to hit them with the door.

So I got up to the door, and I opened it a crack, and I peered in and didn't see them standing there, so I yelled "Hello!" and threw the door open, but it didn't throw and it didn't open. Instead, it went two inches, made a big thunk! and stopped dead.

So I did what anyone would do in that situation: I pushed it harder and got another thunk!, at which point I peered in and saw Sweetie standing there, doubled over, holding her head.

"What are you doing?" I asked. I don't pick up on things all that quickly.

"You hit me in the head," she said.

I eventually sorted out that she'd gone to open the door for me, because Mr F and Mr Bunches were busy in the playroom knocking over the slide. Just before I'd thrown the door open, she'd bent down to move the blanket that was blocking the drafts from under the door, at which point I had thrown open the door, hitting her in the head. Twice.

She didn't blame me-- for long-- and she's okay. But things could have been so different, if I was a "fun" guy. If I was a "fun" guy, I'd have yelled "Hello!" and the door would have swung open and Sweetie would have maybe tripped and fallen onto the couch, gently, while giggling, and I'd have come in, and she'd have laughed, and I'd have laughed, and maybe shotgunned a beer.

And then we'd have totally made out.

Also, an Ebel Chronograph is more fun to unwrap than a "power of attorney" form is.

I was going to get my Dad, for Christmas, the wonderful gift of "estate planning," hiring a lawyer to do his will and things like that. I even asked him if he'd like that, and he didn't say no, so that was the plan. Then I talked to the lawyer I was going to hire, and he pointed out that my Dad didn't need an estate plan, that a few simple forms would take care of everything, leaving me with a dilemma:

Do I get those forms and give them to Dad and claim that was my present, and end up getting some kind of horrible karma? Or do I give my Dad something else?

I've hit on something else. I'm not messing up Christmas or my karma. The something else I've hit on is an ebel chronograph from The Watchery.

The Watchery is the best place to get a watch, and I can say that with confidence because it's the only place I know that not only sells great watches like the Ebel Beluga , but it also sells those watches, and other luxury watches, at up to 75% off.

This is the watch I've picked out for Dad:


The Ebel 1911 Men's Chronograph watch, which is marked down 75% right now, saving me nearly $4,000 on that watch -- it's less expensive than hiring a lawyer, but he doesn't have to know that.

I picked that one because it's the kind of thing Dad would like: Solid, not flashy, traditional, and very well-made. But they've got all kinds of great men's and women's watches by Ebel there on the site, watches made by a company that's been making watches since 1911 and knows, after all this time (get it? It's a pun!) how to make a great watch.

And, I can order it now and they'll guarantee it gets here by Christmas Eve -- just in time. (Can't resist it.)

Maybe you've got the same dilemma: Maybe you planned to get someone a great gift like "hiring them a lawyer," but it fell through. Or maybe you're a last minute shopper. Or maybe you just want to get a gift that the person will use every day. Regardless of which category you fall into, isn't it TIME to check out The Watchery?

Sorry. I like puns.

An infinite amount of luck: 66 down, 9,159 to go.

This morning, I got into my car and started it up and turned on the radio and heard, just beginning, song 66, which is The Underdog, by Spoon. Since I love this song (it's on my rarely-used "Upbeat" playlist of songs that always make me feel happy), I thought to myself what luck! How awesome is that, to get in and hear a song you love just beginning on the radio?

But then I worried that I may only get a certain amount of luck in my lifetime, and that I'd just used up some of that luck on this, getting a song to play just as I get into the car, and what if the amount of luck I get in a lifetime was just barely enough to win the lottery and move to Hawaii, and now I was just under the threshold of that amount of luck?

And then I further used up some luck by winning tickets to The Nutcracker on the way to work. And also in not crashing as I called the radio station to win those tickets.

So I may not be going to Hawaii, but I am going to see The Nutcracker. And I got to listen to The Underdog. Which I have on my iPod anyway.

I hope I'm wrong about the luck. I hope that there's an infinite amount of luck available.



Down... to go: I may have an infinite amount of luck, but I have 9,225 songs on my iPod and together we'll get through them all. Song 65 here.

They don't even sting like you'd think. And they feel velvety.

When we first decided,last year, to take the kids to Florida, we let them choose which of the theme parks we would go to, and to be honest, I was surprised that they picked Sea World. With all the other theme parks that in Orlando, I wondered why they'd take what appeared to be the one that least appealed to them.

I was wrong. Sea World totally appealed to them. There were excellent rides, rollercoasters and water rides that they loved. There were, too, more things to do than in many theme parks. Sea World had their shark tank aquarium, where you can walk through a tunnel while around you and above you swim what seem like hundreds of sharks. They had the Sting Ray bay, where I got to feel a real sting ray and see more of them swimming around than ever. There were manatees and dolphins and shows and of course killer whales doing tricks.

There was even stuff for the little kids to do -- a playland with all kinds of contraptions to climb on and slide around.

In the end, I liked Sea World even more than the kids did, and they liked it a lot. If I had any regrets at all, it's that I bought the tickets at the door, which meant I spent a ton of money and paid full price like a sucker. Had I known then that I could get discount sea world tickets through Orlando Fun Tickets, the day would have been perfect, because we would have spent our time at an awesome theme park with one-of-a-kind attractions, and we would have done so for a lot less than full price.

In fact, Orlando Fun Tickets would have saved us enough for me to buy even more souvenirs than I did -- plus, they've got a special limited time offer right now giving a FREE second day if you buy your tickets, so we could have paid less than we did and gone twice as much as we did.

Twice as much sting ray petting and souvenirs and roller-coaster riding, for way less money... and I could have seen those sharks again, too.

Question of the Day: 9.

When someone asks you what one food you would pick if you could only eat one food for the rest of your life, would it be cheating to say "Ramen Noodles" if in your head you are secretly planning to take ALL of the varieties of Ramen noodles, so that technically it's one food but many flavors, and, if you can do that and it's not cheating, then why would you say "Ramen Noodles" instead of "Pizza," because if it's the category of food, not the flavor of food, then "Pizza" would be a better choice, wouldn't it?

It's not HOW you meet, it's WHO.

I don't see what people have against using the Internet to meet people. Is it really so much worse than the alternatives? Picture sitting around with your family and someone says "So how did you two meet?" Based on how most people meet, you'd have to say "Well, a bar." Or "a party." Or "We were set up by someone who knew we were both single?"

What makes any of those ways better than the Internet? You use the Internet to find all kinds of things, so why not a friend or soulmate?

One reason not to in the past was that, let's face it, the Internet is a virtual den of iniquity. Even the most innocent searches turn up more smut and porn than you'd imagine, and dating sites are filled with the kind of people you wouldn't want to meet anywhere.

But the Christian Chat Rooms at Christian Chat City aren't like that. With your free membership, you can start meeting and chatting with Christians today -- with your webcam, even. Using Christian Chat City, you'll be able to meet people who share your values and goals and morals. So someone asking how you met won't matter so much -- because they'll be too impressed with WHO you met.

Question of the Day: 8.

Is melon more manly than peach?

Sweetie picked up lip balm yesterday, some kind of multipack that she then distributed among the family. She gave me "melon," and when I asked why, she said "I gave you the most masculine one." So I asked which one The Boy got, and she said "Peach."

I used it today, and my coffee tastes melon-y.

Not in the holiday spirit yet? Read "Merry Guckmas" and you will be!

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W

Welcome a new reader!

I'm trying to be more conscientious about recognizing the people who read my things. I write because I love to write, and without people reading and liking what I write, I'd have nothing else to do but spend time with my family. And they don't want that, so by reading my stuff, you help them, too. If you read anything I write and want some recognition (or links, or write-ups, or just to be said hello to), let me know.

Today, I'm recognizing Lavern Gueco, who is a fan of mine on Digg -- helping let others know about what I'm writing. Lavern lives in the Phillipines and judging by the articles he's dugg, has excellent taste. I'm gratified that he likes some of my stuff, too.

Check out Lavern's Digg profile here, and say hi to him!

That last part seems a bit of a non sequitur.

It turns out that cable news shows can lead to helpful information -- provided that you listen to the Cable News Show and then go to the Internet to get the actual information you need.

This morning, the news woke me with the warning that Microsoft Internet Explorer is vulnerable to yet another hack -- probably a hack that was created by Apple to divert attention from their own recent news that, yeah, Mac users, you have viruses too, but that's beside the point.

What is NOT beside the point is this: You probably have a bunch of junk in your registry and need to clean up your registry.

Which is gonna be tough, given that you don't know what a registry is or how to clean it, right? Luckily for you, you are reading this post, so you can find information on what a registry is, as well as what might be the best registry cleaners out there.

RegistryCleanersInfo.com gives you both of those critical pieces of information, explaining what a registry is (you need to know that) and then rating and reviewing the best registry cleaners so that you can avoid the slowing, malicious effects of bad software and speed up your computer, while avoiding hacks and phishes and identity theft.

So, in summary: Cable news is okay, this blog is very good, and RegistryCleanersInfo.com should be on your bookmarks. Also, egg nog is tasty.

65 down, 9,160 to go.

There are really only two things that can be said about song 65:

(1) It has an Eleven Spot at about 4:20.
(2) It is very difficult to sing this song when you have a mouthful of Cherry Pop Tart.



Down... to go: Giving you tips on singing with your mouth full since 1832. Song 64 here.
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Question of the Day: 7.

If you ask someone about a hypothetical present that you might get them for Christmas, and they say they would like that present, are you then obligated to get that present for that person?

I was talking to Mom last night, and asked her about a biography of Jane Austen that I saw, and asked specifically whether Mom would like that as a gift for Christmas. I explained that I knew she liked Jane Austen's books, but was unsure whether she would also like a book about Jane Austen. Mom said that she would, in fact, like a biography of Jane Austen, if I were inclined to get her that for Christmas.

So now, do I have to buy that for her? Or am I free to get some other present?

Spoiler Alert! There's a Wondeful Splash: 64 down, 9,287 to go.

I don't know why, but this song makes me happy. Not just happy like, you know, "smiling," but happy like "everything's pretty much okay in the world so let's get a smile on that face, bucko."

Which is weird, because first, I don't usually call myself bucko and, second, it's a song that is about a woman who is on a plane that starts going down in a horrible plane wreck, and then the guy next to her who hasn't even been talking to her, consoles her as the plane goes down by telling her they're going to a birthday party, and then the plane crashes into the ocean and sinks to the bottom.

You know, so not, superficially at least, the happiest song. But listen to it and see if at the end you don't feel like things are pretty much okay in the world, too...



...Down... To Go: Stick with it long enough, and you'll know everything about me and everything about all the songs on my iPod. Song 63 here, Bucko.

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Get it? Ahead of the "curveS"? It's a pun.

Here's one way to avoid overindulging as the holidays really get going: help yourself skip that extra glass of egg nog, or avoid the third trip to the cookie tray, or pass over that fourth slice of pecan pie...

... and, yeah, sometimes I have four, but they're SMALL slices, okay...

by avoiding the cravings in the first place. You can do that with the diet pills from Lab88. Lab88 sells the diet plans, exercise videos, detoxifier regimens, and even sleep aids that are used by people around the world -- including celebrities -- to lose weight, keep weight off, and stay healthy. If you click through that link, you'll be taken to a website with real stories from real people, people who lost as much as 65 pounds and kept the weight off.

These pills aren't the dangerous diet pills you've read about; there's no "Ephedra" or banned substances among them. They're supplements like Hoodia, which is believed to work by convincing your brain that you're already full -- so you take it, and then go to the holiday party and when that silver tray lined with frosted sugar cookies and sprinkles (man, I love those sprinkles) comes by, you won't even reach for them because you'll think you're full.

The best way to cut down on overeating is not to want to eat in the first place, and the Lab88 products can help you the way they've helped all the people who have posted their success stories on that site. Get ahead of the curves this year with Lab88.

Question Of The Day: 6.

The question of the day was going to be Have you ever had a really really bad itch on your foot but you were too lazy to take off your shoe and scratch it so you sort of mashed your heel into the toe to try to resolve the problem?

But then I decided on this more philosophical question:

If I am the only one in the office on Sunday morning, is it okay if I use the ladies' restroom, which is on the the same floor as my office, rather than going all the way downstairs to the men's room on the first floor?

It's not like I use it during the week, you know.

Question of the Day 5, here.

You need debt consolidation now, before it gets worse.

Before those Christmas bills hit, before your year-end bonus goes to pay late fees and mounting interest charges, before the happiest time of the year is ruined by debt collectors and overdue notices, you need to consider taking out a Personal Loan so that you can get ahead of your credit cards, rather than behind them.

We all have lots of credit cards. Lots of credit cards equals lots of payments and lots of interest and lots of chances for a payment to be missed, a limit to be exceeded, or other fees and charges imposed. Those all mean that you're paying more than ever on balances that are higher than ever, and getting further behind -- or risking falling behind.

But with a debt consolidation you can pay off all those cards, leaving you with one easy payment per month, getting rid of late fees and overlimit charges, and many times lowering your interest rate. You pay less and get more out of it, and the hassle and trouble are over.

If you over $10,000 on your credit cards, you can apply online right now to get a debt consolidation loan that will help you get ahead of the debt -- with no home ownership required, and bad credit is okay; there's no credit checks!

Just click on through those links and start ending your debt right now, before it's too late, and you'll be able to enjoy the holidays without worrying about your credit cards.

Where would they be hauling the oats to? 63 down, 9,288 to go.

Music ends up on my iPod because of other people, too.

Who knew that Sweetie buys music? I didn't think she even liked music. But then, yesterday, while I was cleaning up after dinner, Sweetie took time out from replaying "Dear Sister" several times to play today's song. This is the conversation that we had when she started this song:

Me: Your music is terrible.

Sweetie: That's a nice thing to say. You're not nice.

Me: Do you like any of my music?

Sweetie: No.

Me: Why?

Sweetie: Because your music is for old people.

At which point, she put on what is now Song 63, She's Gone, by Hall & Oates.




Hall & Oates. Hall & Oates. This is the music Sweetie considers cool. All I have to say about that is this: "Hall & Oates" was beloved by old people in the 80s, which means all the middle-aged people who loved them then are now senior citizens. Take that, Sweetie!

Also: When I was younger, I thought the name of this group wasn't "Hall & Oates,", but "Haulin' Oats."

Down... to Go: All the songs on my iPod. But not in order. That'd be crazy. Song 62 here.

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