The best kind of anger, I have always believed, is the kind of anger you can direct at someone - particularly when you can do it in letter form. Angry letters are an art unto themselves. My college roommate and I devoted an unhealthy portion of our otherwise squeaky clean youths channeling rage and frustration into just the right combination of adjectives and sentence construction to deliver that verbal slap in the face that people and institutions sometimes need. Especially in America. Especially nowadays. Any country that thinks six editions of CSI and fourteen Law and Order franchises are necessary is more than a few quarters short of a dollar.
Frankly, I have strong suspicions that our sad devotion to angry letter-writing might have a little something to do with why neither my roommate nor I graduated on time from Rutgers on time. But that's another story. A much longer, much more boring story, with not nearly enough sex involved.
And it has nothing to do with the point of this post, which is this: what do you do when you're pissed off, but there's nobody to write a letter to?
With apologies for the dangling participle, the question relates to a series of train rides I recently took into New York City via the vaunted rail service of New Jersey Transit. I'm a big fan of New Jersey Transit. The fact that their trains are often filled with degenerate lowlifes and self-absorbed, narcissistic, Blackberry-enslaved commuters is hardly their fault. Nor are they responsible for the piles of drunk human wreckage draped across the benches like yesterday's clothes on the 1:41 AM Northeast Corridor trains on Friday and Saturday nights - the last ride home for the Bridge-And-Tunnel crowd. I know this.
For let's say 15 years now, I've been at least a somewhat regular rider of the rails, with a streak of amazingly good luck where my co-passengers were concerned. Once on a night in July, a very attractive Asian woman in a black-and-white checkered dress offered me what amounted to six months of guilt-free sex. "I'm in town on a development project till the end of January," she said, "why don't you give me a call some time?" And I, being the genius that I am and always have been, threw away her fucking number instead of framing it.
More recently, I struck up a conversation with a trio of gregarious lesbians on their way from Metropark to a Melissa Ferrick concert. That was 40 minutes of my life well spent, right up until the point I found out they were lesbians. Still, at least it was entertaining.
Sure, there were the odd spots of trouble, like the time in October 1998 when, on my way to a Nashville Predators-New York Rangers hockey game, I was forced to sit next to a gentleman who smelled overwhelmingly of coriander and smoked halibut. In a restaurant setting, maybe I would have found such scents delightful and promising. In the close confines of a cushionless two-person vinyl seat, however, I found my companion's odors suffocating and, as it turned out, portentous of other awful things. (Nashville lost the game 5-1, and then first-string goalie Mike Dunham was taken out early in the 2nd period with a strained groin. Also, I paid $60 to a scalper who had bought the ticket from my eventual neighbors for $10. And someone threw a beer at me for wearing a Predators jersey. Or possibly it was that jilted Asian girl exacting some small measure of revenge.)
On the whole, I led what I would consider a charmed existence on the train.
Then I started commuting.
Even the commute started off inauspiciously enough. My first day, with New Jersey in a state of emergency, enough people stayed away that I managed to procure a seat alone on an express train, which is the commuting equivalent of digging in your flower bed and finding a cache of rubies, or so I'm led to believe. Toward the end of my first week, I ran into a girl who used to work for me as a host when I managed a restaurant in New Brunswick. We strolled up 7th Avenue and gossiped like teenagers. I barely noticed how gray it was outside.
A week into my commuting career, I was having a blast. Then came the fateful weekend when I bit the bullet and bought my first weekly pass, having exhausted all the one-off tickets I had in my wallet.
It was a freelance project meeting on a Saturday that compelled me to go to New York for the sixth straight day. I never did that before. And I won't lie, I was feeling confident. Maybe it was hubris even, and the gods of train riding had had enough of my amiable smiles and relentless unobtrusiveness toward the other passengers. I'm not sure.
All I know is that I had never been stuck in a two-person seat next to a crying baby before, and I'm still not entirely convinced I deserved it.
But I am entirely certain that I didn't deserve to have the mother jiggle the seat with her legs and ass in a vain attempt to calm her screaming brat. Clearly, children have no business on trains, especially when those trains are packed with Mets fans and politely inconspicuous gentlemen who just want to be left alone to listen to their iPods without feeling like they just stuck quarters in a motel room bed.
But I wasn't truly angry. I made a token display of my outrage with a series of sideways glances and scowls at the baby's parents. I never looked at the baby itself, not even out of the corner of my eye. I stopped well short of dealing with this in a remotely courageous or head-on manner. I wussed out.
Two days later it was back to the grind, and my Monday morning trip into New York furnished me with a companion who was actually skinnier than I am. I thought it was a stroke of good luck - plenty of room for both of us to knock into each other sideways like melting ice cubes in a glass every time the train lurched. Then my string bean companion fell asleep, and my immediate seating area was beset by an odor that had me checking my armpits for stray tendrils of B.O. Turns out it was the guy's breath.
The train ran significantly late that day, all thanks to a breakdown in the tunnel under the Hudson River which we had to use to get to Penn Station. So I had to contend with the fire-breathing dragon and his stank-ass pie hole for an additional 40 minutes. But here's where it gets weird : I turned this into a mental exercise. I can't control this man's breath, I thought, and I can't control the speed of the train. But I could control the itch on the back of my neck that had started when we left Newark Penn Station. So to test myself, I decided not to let myself scratch until we reached New York
My reasoning was that until I could accept the things I couldn't control and stop letting them stress me out, I didn't deserve to take care of the thing I could control. Add this to the list of reasons Matt Hooban belongs in an institution.
The ride from Newark to New York took 52 excruciating minutes. Ordinarily, it takes 14. I stepped out onto the platform under Penn Station and scratched like I had fleas.
I actually thought the self-immolation would have been enough to appease whatever karmic force I had run afoul of. I was wrong. On my way home that day, I got crammed against the wall by a generously proportioned gentleman who helped himself to the other half of my seat with the gusto that fat men usually reserve for barbecue ribs or birthday cake. I would have expected him to attack a ham sandwich just the same way.
What I didn't expect was for him to look at me, leaning precariously off the edge of the bench, and tell me with a straight face, "you could move over."
I looked him dead in his piggy eyes and said, "what, into the wall? I'm already leaking off the bench."
But even though my outrage had finally hit a boiling point, I still stopped short of making it personal. I felt like saying, "yeah, I could move over, or maybe you could skip a meal from time to time. You don't see me asking your fat ass to go on a diet so I can be more comfortable do you, John Candy?" or "oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were supposed to be sitting in first class on this flight, asshole. That's actually three cars up, just past the conductors booth. Tell you what, why don't you wait out on the platform and I'll have one of the valets come pick you and your luggage up - and don't worry if you see the train start moving without you. We wouldn't leave a valued customer behind."
Seriously, who did this jerk think he was?
But more importantly, who was I supposed to write so I could complain? It hardly falls within the vast purview of New Jersey Transit's authority to discriminate against ticketed passengers. But I got the raw end of the deal three straight rides. Isn't there some sort of grievance hotline for that? Dear Abby?
The story at least has a happy epilogue. My new corporate home inadvertently put me back in touch with an old acquaintance of mine - a girl I had known since my days in middle school and high school without ever sharing as much as a two-sentence conversation. Not only did we both land at the same company, but we also live in adjacent towns in central New Jersey. And unbeknownst to me, she was on the very same train as the fire-breather, and possibly also on the same train as the Louie Anderson look-alike.
Christine - that's her name - has been a delightful train buddy so far. We ride in at the ungodly hour of 7:19 in the morning and walk from Penn Station to our building, and it's a stroll through storytime the entire way. But if you see her, don't mention that. She's a senior copy editor with a 16th-floor office overlooking Park Avenue. The last thing this chick needs is a bigger ego. Instead, focus on the fact that she's short and bad at crossword puzzles.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Back To Work
There's a new post over at YATOPNRTB's sister site, Now Is The Time For All Good Antelopes To Come To The Aid Of Their Banana. Check it out.
Meanwhile, I have gone back to work.
Gone are the days of sleeping till 3 in the afternoon, intermittent showering, and endless time to correspond with the far-flung Matt Hoobans of the world. Man, do I miss those days. It's been one week, and I think I'm ready for retirement already.
My new job is with a great big French company that makes books. (I've removed the name in the interest of my own safety. Thanks for the tip.)
Bookmaking (not making book) is right up my alley, although I was surprised to discover that my alley is located on 50th Street in New York City, and I live in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And despite the fact that the company is populated by hordes of fascinating people with a keen interest in what they're doing (most of whom are female too, which doesn't hurt a bit), they still adopt the relatively conventional stance that it's easier to do business from 9 to 5 than overnight. So instead of going to sleep at sunrise, I'm getting up then. There are now trains involved in my day.
On the bright side, it does mark the first time since I started writing my book that I'll have access to health benefits. (My mom is already sleeping easier.) Be warned, computer keyboards of the world: I'm done taking it easy on you now! Remember those years when you basked under the lightest, most delicate pressure from my fingers, when you luxuriated to be little more than caressed or brushed? Say goodbye. It's eighteen pounds of pressure per keystroke from now on, bitches!
I'm sincerely hoping this job turns out to be amusing too, unlike my last job which was in food service. Working in a restaurant seemed like a great place for comedy - not to mention temper tantrums, broken dishes, and creamy garlic dressing poured down customers' blouses every now and again. But there was always so much pressure there. Servers would end up in tears after customers yelled at them for not getting a salad order right. (Seriously though, how hard is it to get a salad order right?)
I've never known another industry that turned so many good people to smoking, alcohol abuse, and hardcore drugs - not counting American higher education in the last 30 or 40 years, that is. Maybe restaurants should stop hiring college students, or waiters and waitresses should quit going to college. It's kind of a chicken-egg thing. (Speaking of which, I once heard a customer tell a server, "uh, I'm pretty sure I ordered chicken salad and this is egg salad." The server's response: "you want some advice? Give it a little while and see if the egg salad hatches into chicken salad." I had to fire that server on the spot. But I was proud of him.)
Anyway, so far, my new company isn't that funny, but it's only been a week. Give it time.
In the meantime, it's now close to 9:15 PM, which means I need to start packing it in for the night. My god, what have I become? It's like I'm a totally different person. Maybe I'll go break my leg, just to try out my new benefit package. That'll show 'em.
Meanwhile, I have gone back to work.
Gone are the days of sleeping till 3 in the afternoon, intermittent showering, and endless time to correspond with the far-flung Matt Hoobans of the world. Man, do I miss those days. It's been one week, and I think I'm ready for retirement already.
My new job is with a great big French company that makes books. (I've removed the name in the interest of my own safety. Thanks for the tip.)
Bookmaking (not making book) is right up my alley, although I was surprised to discover that my alley is located on 50th Street in New York City, and I live in New Brunswick, New Jersey. And despite the fact that the company is populated by hordes of fascinating people with a keen interest in what they're doing (most of whom are female too, which doesn't hurt a bit), they still adopt the relatively conventional stance that it's easier to do business from 9 to 5 than overnight. So instead of going to sleep at sunrise, I'm getting up then. There are now trains involved in my day.
On the bright side, it does mark the first time since I started writing my book that I'll have access to health benefits. (My mom is already sleeping easier.) Be warned, computer keyboards of the world: I'm done taking it easy on you now! Remember those years when you basked under the lightest, most delicate pressure from my fingers, when you luxuriated to be little more than caressed or brushed? Say goodbye. It's eighteen pounds of pressure per keystroke from now on, bitches!
I'm sincerely hoping this job turns out to be amusing too, unlike my last job which was in food service. Working in a restaurant seemed like a great place for comedy - not to mention temper tantrums, broken dishes, and creamy garlic dressing poured down customers' blouses every now and again. But there was always so much pressure there. Servers would end up in tears after customers yelled at them for not getting a salad order right. (Seriously though, how hard is it to get a salad order right?)
I've never known another industry that turned so many good people to smoking, alcohol abuse, and hardcore drugs - not counting American higher education in the last 30 or 40 years, that is. Maybe restaurants should stop hiring college students, or waiters and waitresses should quit going to college. It's kind of a chicken-egg thing. (Speaking of which, I once heard a customer tell a server, "uh, I'm pretty sure I ordered chicken salad and this is egg salad." The server's response: "you want some advice? Give it a little while and see if the egg salad hatches into chicken salad." I had to fire that server on the spot. But I was proud of him.)
Anyway, so far, my new company isn't that funny, but it's only been a week. Give it time.
In the meantime, it's now close to 9:15 PM, which means I need to start packing it in for the night. My god, what have I become? It's like I'm a totally different person. Maybe I'll go break my leg, just to try out my new benefit package. That'll show 'em.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
The Other White Matt
I have known of the existence of another Matt Hooban for some time now.
It's a strange sensation, going through the day-to-day business of your life with the knowledge that somewhere else in the world, someone else is going through the day-to-day business of his life being called the same name as you. Just the fact of Matt Hooban's existence used to sit there in my brain like a splinter. "What am I up to today?" I used to wonder, and "could the other Matt Hooban be having more fun being me than I'm having?"
But it wasn't until my obsessive need to take control of my identity hit a fever pitch after my 31st birthday that I decided to track him down and find out.
Now, when I say "take control of my identity," I'm talking about being the first Matt Hooban that comes up when you search for "Matt Hooban" on Google. For years, the other Matt Hooban had that honor, thanks to a stage production called "Soiled" for which he apparently designed all the way back in '03, when I was busy writing online tours of the flora in my backyard.
But it's not exactly like I've been slouching here. My highly acclaimed website, Now Is The Time For All Good Antelopes To Come To The Aid Of Their Banana has been up, running, and updated on a completely irregular basis for four years now. So why was the imposter Matt Hooban still beating me in the Google listings?
Part of the problem was the name of my website itself. Notice that it makes no mention of "Matt Hooban" anywhere in there. As it turns out, this was a critical mistake. Live and learn, I guess.
Anyway, Matt and I jockeyed for years as the top Matt Hooban in the Google results, and my frustration continued to grow. Who was this masked Matt? Why had he made no attempt to contact me when I had clearly gone out of my way to make myself both popular and accessible? Was he really so secure or just not vain enough to even bother Google'ing himself? "What," I asked myself, "is going on in America?"
But Matt Hooban - and by Matt Hooban, I mean the other Matt Hooban - doesn't live in America. He lives in Leeds. I'm pretty sure that's in England, but I only have an American public school education, so it could be anywhere. And I know he lives there because he told me.
See, Matt made a fatal error in judgment, and decided to post some Hooban-related information on a genealogy website, where he left his e-mail address as well. The genealogy site appeared on page 2 of the Matt Hooban Google results listing - territory into which I had previously been shy about venturing. But turning 31 will do some weird things to your brain. It'll make you go insane. Just to relieve the pain.
So I e-mailed him.
And as it turns out, he seems like a nice guy. Doesn't that just figure, though? Before I met Matt Hooban, I can safely say that all the Matt Hoobans I knew were right on the top of my list of the nicest guys in the whole wide world. So far, I think we're 2-for-2.
Matt's response e-mail to me was also laden with this very interesting fact: bananas, according to Matt Hooban, can walk up to six feet every year. It may sound hard to believe, but I have no problem assuming that Matt Hooban is a credible source. Frankly, I believe just about anything Matt Hooban tells me.
It's a strange sensation, going through the day-to-day business of your life with the knowledge that somewhere else in the world, someone else is going through the day-to-day business of his life being called the same name as you. Just the fact of Matt Hooban's existence used to sit there in my brain like a splinter. "What am I up to today?" I used to wonder, and "could the other Matt Hooban be having more fun being me than I'm having?"
But it wasn't until my obsessive need to take control of my identity hit a fever pitch after my 31st birthday that I decided to track him down and find out.
Now, when I say "take control of my identity," I'm talking about being the first Matt Hooban that comes up when you search for "Matt Hooban" on Google. For years, the other Matt Hooban had that honor, thanks to a stage production called "Soiled" for which he apparently designed all the way back in '03, when I was busy writing online tours of the flora in my backyard.
But it's not exactly like I've been slouching here. My highly acclaimed website, Now Is The Time For All Good Antelopes To Come To The Aid Of Their Banana has been up, running, and updated on a completely irregular basis for four years now. So why was the imposter Matt Hooban still beating me in the Google listings?
Part of the problem was the name of my website itself. Notice that it makes no mention of "Matt Hooban" anywhere in there. As it turns out, this was a critical mistake. Live and learn, I guess.
Anyway, Matt and I jockeyed for years as the top Matt Hooban in the Google results, and my frustration continued to grow. Who was this masked Matt? Why had he made no attempt to contact me when I had clearly gone out of my way to make myself both popular and accessible? Was he really so secure or just not vain enough to even bother Google'ing himself? "What," I asked myself, "is going on in America?"
But Matt Hooban - and by Matt Hooban, I mean the other Matt Hooban - doesn't live in America. He lives in Leeds. I'm pretty sure that's in England, but I only have an American public school education, so it could be anywhere. And I know he lives there because he told me.
See, Matt made a fatal error in judgment, and decided to post some Hooban-related information on a genealogy website, where he left his e-mail address as well. The genealogy site appeared on page 2 of the Matt Hooban Google results listing - territory into which I had previously been shy about venturing. But turning 31 will do some weird things to your brain. It'll make you go insane. Just to relieve the pain.
So I e-mailed him.
And as it turns out, he seems like a nice guy. Doesn't that just figure, though? Before I met Matt Hooban, I can safely say that all the Matt Hoobans I knew were right on the top of my list of the nicest guys in the whole wide world. So far, I think we're 2-for-2.
Matt's response e-mail to me was also laden with this very interesting fact: bananas, according to Matt Hooban, can walk up to six feet every year. It may sound hard to believe, but I have no problem assuming that Matt Hooban is a credible source. Frankly, I believe just about anything Matt Hooban tells me.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
This Is Not An April Fool's Day Joke
This is an actual video on YouTube. I'm not kidding.
So basically, this particular creationist is making a case that evolution is false because spontaneous life doesn't ever erupt in a jar of peanut butter. Apparently, the lesson here is that primordial earth was made of peanut butter. Yup. Makes perfect sense.
What makes even more sense is that a magical man in the sky snapped his fingers and made a great big world for us to play on, then got mad at us for violating his rules (which he must surely have anticipated, since it was all part of his plan after all), and gave us the rest of the universe basically as a nighttime light show.
And then a few thousand years later, our mysterious creator blessed us with factories that mass produce lifeless plastic jars of peanut butter, just to prove he was behind everything in the first place. How did I not see the logic before?
I'm pretty sure the peanut butter isn't the only thing around here that's made from nuts. God, do I wish this was a joke.
So basically, this particular creationist is making a case that evolution is false because spontaneous life doesn't ever erupt in a jar of peanut butter. Apparently, the lesson here is that primordial earth was made of peanut butter. Yup. Makes perfect sense.
What makes even more sense is that a magical man in the sky snapped his fingers and made a great big world for us to play on, then got mad at us for violating his rules (which he must surely have anticipated, since it was all part of his plan after all), and gave us the rest of the universe basically as a nighttime light show.
And then a few thousand years later, our mysterious creator blessed us with factories that mass produce lifeless plastic jars of peanut butter, just to prove he was behind everything in the first place. How did I not see the logic before?
I'm pretty sure the peanut butter isn't the only thing around here that's made from nuts. God, do I wish this was a joke.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Hayley Morgenstern's Cat
So about me...
I'm a writer. And that's really what this is all about, is all this writing I keep compulsively doing. It's such a pesky habit. I keep meaning to find a way to get paid for it. But in the meantime, I've whiled away the majority of the Bush presidency working on my first novel.
Now, a lot can happen to a project after you've been at it for as long as I have. For instance, you might completely change your mind about setting part 1 in 1992 and move it to 1993 instead, causing massive tidal shifts in the plot and all the action. You might decide that one of the main characters has a steady boyfriend that you completely forgot to mention. You might have a notebook computer (or two, or three even) crash on you, causing you hair-pulling agony, along with the loss of a few months' work each time.
You could lose heart along the way. You could regain heart along the way. You could lose heart again, regain it again, spend three years working in a restaurant in central New Jersey, lose heart, quit that job, regain heart, lose heart once more, go broke, and finally force yourself to regain heart with a frantic proclamation that you'll finish the book before you turn 31, which you won't quite manage to do. (But at least you won't lose heart again.)
I'm speaking purely hypothetically, of course.
Anyway, one of the sad byproducts of so much work is that sometimes, a really great story snippet ends up being tossed into a file folder somewhere on your computer because there just isn't room for it within the framework of the story. That's what this post is about.
What you're about to read is a background piece I wrote about one of the characters in the book - a curly-haired girl from Connecticut named Hayley Morgenstern. Hayley grew up with three older brothers that took no end of delight in making Hayley's childhood as miserable as possible. Eventually, like all little sisters, Hayley learned how to turn the tables on them. But not yet.
This story takes place the day that a young Hayley, all of eight years old, got a cat.
Incidentally, you may notice that my avatar has a picture of me with a cat. Rest assured, the cat in the picture in no way inspired the character of Glen The Cat. When I wrote about Glen The Cat, I was in the midst of cultivating a deep and lifelong disdain for all things feline, which I have since gotten over. Whether felines get over their deep disdain for me, however, is another matter entirely.
I'm a writer. And that's really what this is all about, is all this writing I keep compulsively doing. It's such a pesky habit. I keep meaning to find a way to get paid for it. But in the meantime, I've whiled away the majority of the Bush presidency working on my first novel.
Now, a lot can happen to a project after you've been at it for as long as I have. For instance, you might completely change your mind about setting part 1 in 1992 and move it to 1993 instead, causing massive tidal shifts in the plot and all the action. You might decide that one of the main characters has a steady boyfriend that you completely forgot to mention. You might have a notebook computer (or two, or three even) crash on you, causing you hair-pulling agony, along with the loss of a few months' work each time.
You could lose heart along the way. You could regain heart along the way. You could lose heart again, regain it again, spend three years working in a restaurant in central New Jersey, lose heart, quit that job, regain heart, lose heart once more, go broke, and finally force yourself to regain heart with a frantic proclamation that you'll finish the book before you turn 31, which you won't quite manage to do. (But at least you won't lose heart again.)
I'm speaking purely hypothetically, of course.
Anyway, one of the sad byproducts of so much work is that sometimes, a really great story snippet ends up being tossed into a file folder somewhere on your computer because there just isn't room for it within the framework of the story. That's what this post is about.
What you're about to read is a background piece I wrote about one of the characters in the book - a curly-haired girl from Connecticut named Hayley Morgenstern. Hayley grew up with three older brothers that took no end of delight in making Hayley's childhood as miserable as possible. Eventually, like all little sisters, Hayley learned how to turn the tables on them. But not yet.
This story takes place the day that a young Hayley, all of eight years old, got a cat.
When Hayley Morgenstern was eight-and-a-half years old, she felt she had accumulated enough wisdom and experience to manage the responsibility of a pet. So with all the earnestness that an eight-and-a-half-year-old can muster, she set about brokering a deal with her parents to allow her to get a cat. The terms of the deal were that if they let her get a cat, she would feed it, take care of it, and clean its litter, and it would never be a bother to them in any way. About the only concession she asked for was naming rights to the cat. She had tentatively settled on two: Phoebe, if the cat was a girl, and if it was a boy, Glen.
Parents are notoriously susceptible to the charms of their children in moments of greatest cuteness, a fact of which the young Hayley was well aware. She made sure to make her eyes as big as possible, to pull in the corners of her mouth so she looked serious (but in an adorable way), and to keep her hands folded neatly and sincerely on the kitchen table in front of her. She even had the good sense to brush her outrageously curly hair and to wear her most decent pair of corduroy overalls, all in the interest of putting her best foot forward.
It worked like a charm.
Sadly, however, the naming of the cat did not go quite as smoothly for young Hayley. The cat turned out to be a boy, but because Hayley had three older brothers (and more to the point, because her brothers were jerks), the cat's full name ended up being Glen The Cat.
It was a Tuesday in the early summer, just after the end of Hayley's tenure in the second grade when the Morgensterns brought Glen The Cat home from the Ledyard Animal Shelter. Hayley's mother was quick to remind her daughter of the terms of their agreement, and Hayley was equally quick to remind her mother about the naming clause in her contract. The naming of Glen was a rare moment of glory for her. It lasted almost a full five minutes before her brothers changed, or rather, extended the cat's name to its present state.
"What's his name?" said Randy. Randy was the oldest, but only the second biggest jerk among the Morgenstern boys.
"Glen," Hayley said. "I got to name him."
"You named him Glen The Cat?" asked Howie, who held the distinction of being the biggest among the jerks. Howie was the second oldest.
"No, just Glen," Hayley insisted.
"Aw, Glen The Cat is kinda cute," Randy said.
"Yeah," said Hayley, "he's really cute." He was too. He was a pretty black and brown cat with white paws and big, green, luminous eyes.
"No," said Randy, "I meant the name 'Glen The Cat' is kinda cute. Glen The Cat is ugly. Look at his paws. They don't match the rest of him."
Last among the jerks was Ricky, the youngest of the three brothers. Ricky's role in this kind of hijinks was usually restricted to background laughter, but it was still enough to qualify him for jerk status. Ricky was cracking up on the living room floor behind them.
"He is not ugly, Randy, you’re ugly!"
"Not as ugly as Glen The Cat," said Howie.
“Leave the cat alone!” Hayley yelled.
"You mean leave Glen The Cat alone," said Randy.
Ricky kept on cracking up on the living room floor. It was vintage Ricky. He cracked up so often he ended up with asthma. That was why Howie and Randy loved having Ricky as an audience. Hayley thought he deserved it.
"Mom!" Hayley yelled. "Howie and Randy keep calling the cat 'Glen The Cat'."
Hayley's mom's voice cut into the argument all the way from the kitchen. "Howie and Randy, stop bothering your sister," said Hayley's mom. Already, this pet thing was turning into a bad bargain for her. It was evident in her tone.
"We’re not bothering her, Mom," Howie yelled, "we’re just trying to figure out why she named Glen The Cat 'Glen The Cat.' I mean, it's obvious he's a cat. It's not like anyone's calling him 'Glen The Dog'."
Ricky's wheezing laughter in the background wasn’t doing a whole lot to buy Howie any parental sympathy.
"Yeah," said Randy, "but what if we got a dog, and I wanted to name him Glen?"
"No!" Hayley yelled. "You can’t do that, Randy! I already named the cat Glen!"
"...The Cat," added Randy, that jerk.
"Actually, 'Glen The Dog' is a much better name," said Howie. "Maybe we should call Glen The Cat 'Glen The Dog' instead."
Hayley's eyes started to well up at the same moment her mom emerged into the living room from the kitchen, peeling rubber gloves off of her hands. There must have been a causal relationship between the daughter's agony and the mother's arrival (and possibly, although doubtfully, the glove peeling too), but it was entirely unclear in what direction that causality went.
"Howie, Randy, please, for Pete's sake," said Hayley's mom.
"No, come on, Mom, this isn’t fair," said Howie, who loved to overplay his hand. "I didn’t even want a cat. I wanted a dog, and I was gonna name him Glen."
"You were not!" Hayley said. Her quivering lower lip joined her watering eyes in the early stages of what could only turn into crying. Parents are also susceptible to their children crying, especially when their children are as adorable as Hayley was.
"This sucks, Mom," said Randy. "Me and Howie were gonna get a dog and name it Glen and now Hayley's trying to steal the name."
Howie sighed in mock disappointment. "I guess we could name the dog 'Glen The Cat' just so we can tell him apart from Glen The Dog here.”
"He's Glen The Cat!" bellowed Hayley. Ricky practically choked in the background.
"See, there you go," said Howie.
"I hate you!" Hayley shouted.
Ricky's laughter was turning into an asthma attack. At the same time, Hayley's quivering lower lip and watering eyes were giving way to full-fledged, four-alarm crying. Glen The Cat, for his part, seemed nonplussed by all of it. He sniffed at the living room furniture, his tail low.
"That's it!" yelled Hayley's mom. "All three of you go to your rooms right now before I wash your mouths out with soap!" (She was never terribly creative with punishment. "And I don’t want to hear another word about Glen The Dog or Glen The Cat or whatever his name is!"
Hayley's brothers laughed all the way up the stairs and into their rooms. Ricky had to race to the inhaler on his dresser so he could breathe again. And despite Hayley's tearful protests, and despite the contract she had so carefully and diligently negotiated, Glen The Cat's name stuck.
Incidentally, you may notice that my avatar has a picture of me with a cat. Rest assured, the cat in the picture in no way inspired the character of Glen The Cat. When I wrote about Glen The Cat, I was in the midst of cultivating a deep and lifelong disdain for all things feline, which I have since gotten over. Whether felines get over their deep disdain for me, however, is another matter entirely.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Dillehay'd
This is not a post about me. This is a post about a word that doesn't exist, but should.
Anyone who lives in or near a big city, or who has spent time in or near a big city might be familiar with the odd phenomenon of running into someone unexpected and familiar literally in the midst of thousands of strangers. Obviously, it doesn't only happen in big cities, it just tends to happen more there. I once ran into an old friend of my father's - a man from Wisconsin named Steve Tomassi - in the lobby of the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was spending my summer undergoing a rigorous deconstruction of all the good parts of my self-image. They call the job "bellhopping," but don't be fooled.
But this isn't a post about my checkered employment history either, or about old friends of my father's from Wisconsin. I'm just very bad at staying on topic.
Getting back to the premise of running into someone familiar in an unfamiliar location: it's jarring enough when it happens in a place like New York, where there are always millions of people and you should really sort of half-expect it. Lots of folks visit New York at one time or another. It's not such a big stretch to imagine two of them (or more) might know each other.
Now imagine that happening on the internet. Not in the traditional way where you go looking for someone and find them (stalker!), but in the random way where you're browsing semi-pornographic sites and you happen to run across the face of a girl you knew pretty well in college, and you had no idea this was how she was paying the bills now. Last you heard, she was a teacher in southern California. Now she's masturbating on camera. And you, pervert that you are, found out completely by accident.
Not that that's ever happened to me, of course. All I did (yes, let's finally get to the story) was stumble onto a YouTube video featuring a guy I acted with in high school.
His name is Sam Dillehay, and I don't know a whole lot else about him. I met him doing a summer production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in 1992, and I remember he smoked Marlboro Reds at the tender age of 18. I also remember a comment that he made to me when I asked him why he smoked Reds: "I like the pleasant tugging in my chest," he said. Sick bastard.
I never really gave Sam a second thought after that summer. We shared none of the same friends, we didn't exchange e-mail addresses or phone numbers, and both of us were straight so there was no prospect of any funny business. It's just that I have a pretty decent recollection when it comes to names, faces, dates, and numbers. So when I saw this video, I was mildly stunned to see that it contained someone I knew in it.
Okay, maybe mildly stunned is an understatement. Maybe "totally fucking floored," would more accurately capture the mood. I just don't like to swear is all. It's ungentlemanly.
The point is that there isn't a word for when something like that happens. "Coincidence" isn't big enough. Even "big coincidence" only sort of hints at what's really going on. It seems bigger than a big coincidence, like "wow, that is a really truly amazing coincidence." But I just think that given the versatility of English and the long hours already spent creating words, there ought to be a more punchy way to get that across. Let's say something with a four-syllable limit. That's what I'm talking about.
If that word exists, though, I don't know it.
Incidentally, this story is true. If you don't believe me, here's Sam's video. Sam is the guy in the video.
Anyone who lives in or near a big city, or who has spent time in or near a big city might be familiar with the odd phenomenon of running into someone unexpected and familiar literally in the midst of thousands of strangers. Obviously, it doesn't only happen in big cities, it just tends to happen more there. I once ran into an old friend of my father's - a man from Wisconsin named Steve Tomassi - in the lobby of the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey, where I was spending my summer undergoing a rigorous deconstruction of all the good parts of my self-image. They call the job "bellhopping," but don't be fooled.
But this isn't a post about my checkered employment history either, or about old friends of my father's from Wisconsin. I'm just very bad at staying on topic.
Getting back to the premise of running into someone familiar in an unfamiliar location: it's jarring enough when it happens in a place like New York, where there are always millions of people and you should really sort of half-expect it. Lots of folks visit New York at one time or another. It's not such a big stretch to imagine two of them (or more) might know each other.
Now imagine that happening on the internet. Not in the traditional way where you go looking for someone and find them (stalker!), but in the random way where you're browsing semi-pornographic sites and you happen to run across the face of a girl you knew pretty well in college, and you had no idea this was how she was paying the bills now. Last you heard, she was a teacher in southern California. Now she's masturbating on camera. And you, pervert that you are, found out completely by accident.
Not that that's ever happened to me, of course. All I did (yes, let's finally get to the story) was stumble onto a YouTube video featuring a guy I acted with in high school.
His name is Sam Dillehay, and I don't know a whole lot else about him. I met him doing a summer production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in 1992, and I remember he smoked Marlboro Reds at the tender age of 18. I also remember a comment that he made to me when I asked him why he smoked Reds: "I like the pleasant tugging in my chest," he said. Sick bastard.
I never really gave Sam a second thought after that summer. We shared none of the same friends, we didn't exchange e-mail addresses or phone numbers, and both of us were straight so there was no prospect of any funny business. It's just that I have a pretty decent recollection when it comes to names, faces, dates, and numbers. So when I saw this video, I was mildly stunned to see that it contained someone I knew in it.
Okay, maybe mildly stunned is an understatement. Maybe "totally fucking floored," would more accurately capture the mood. I just don't like to swear is all. It's ungentlemanly.
The point is that there isn't a word for when something like that happens. "Coincidence" isn't big enough. Even "big coincidence" only sort of hints at what's really going on. It seems bigger than a big coincidence, like "wow, that is a really truly amazing coincidence." But I just think that given the versatility of English and the long hours already spent creating words, there ought to be a more punchy way to get that across. Let's say something with a four-syllable limit. That's what I'm talking about.
If that word exists, though, I don't know it.
Incidentally, this story is true. If you don't believe me, here's Sam's video. Sam is the guy in the video.
Monday, March 26, 2007
hello? is there anybody out there?
personally, i would stop reading this right now. any blog that begins by titling its inaugural post after pink floyd lyrics from 1977 is either pretentious, seriously flawed, or both.
seriously, that song is 30 years old. what does it say that i couldn't come up with something fresher? it says everything.
and yet you still came this far.
this will be my attempt at putting a somewhat serious side of me on the internet somewhere, for the zero members of my reading public to pay attention to. in the coming days, weeks, months, and yes, years, i intend to give anyone who gives a crap a little something to read about yours truly.
for now, all i'll tell you is that my name is matt.
that is all.
now you have to stop reading because there's nothing else to read. i win.
seriously, that song is 30 years old. what does it say that i couldn't come up with something fresher? it says everything.
and yet you still came this far.
this will be my attempt at putting a somewhat serious side of me on the internet somewhere, for the zero members of my reading public to pay attention to. in the coming days, weeks, months, and yes, years, i intend to give anyone who gives a crap a little something to read about yours truly.
for now, all i'll tell you is that my name is matt.
that is all.
now you have to stop reading because there's nothing else to read. i win.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Reunions Unlimited
(reprinted from NITTFAGATCTTAOTB)
A strange thing happened to me the week of my 10th High School reunion. It was so strange, I couldn't immediately come up with a word for it. I still couldn't come up with a word for it after 20 minutes of staring at myself in the mirror. Eventually, just as I was crossing the room in front of my computer today with a cup of coffee in my hand, I managed to hit upon the word "strange."
Genius, I know. 28 years old, and I am genius personified.
But the thing that happened in front of my bathroom mirror on Tuesday morning was so unexpected that I actually caught myself thinking in Latin. Not Pig Latin, either and not Latin dancing or Latin America. This was the real, hardcore stuff - Ovid and Julius Caesar and college mottoes - that kind of Latin. And I never took Latin, not even ten years ago in high school. I was way too cool for that Latin crap. I took Spanish for seven years instead. So why the hell wasn't I thinking in Spanish?
Not that either language was doing a whole lot to pad my extensive vocabulary. "Strange," I came up with. The blandest possible adjective in... the world maybe? Strange.
Strange.
The reunion was on a Friday night. Tuesday morning I woke up and took a shower. And for the first time in the ten years since I left the tall brick walls of Ridgewood high school behind me, I started wondering what girls were going to think of me this weekend - especially with that little surge of acne on my face.
What?
Acne? You can't be serious. At 28 years old? Who gets acne at 28 years old. Aside from baseball players or guys in the gym on steroids - two groups of people with whom I was in no danger of being confused. I wiped the mirror, but there it was still - small red spots here and there, little telltale patches like steam before a geyser. The tectonic forces of... what, adolescence?... were pushing little pink little volcanoes through the surface of my 28-year-old skin.
Apparently, the road to my high school reunion was going to take a little detour through puberty. Again. Dammit. As if the first time wasn't enjoyable enough.
Dammit, I thought. That sucks. I think about girls in high school and I get acne. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
That was when my thinking lapsed inexplicably into Latin. Strange.
But I don't know Latin very well, so post hoc ergo propter hoc was the limit of relevant things I could come up with. After that it was Julius Caesar. Ovid. Sol iustitiae, et occidentem illustra. That was my college motto. It means "the sun of righteousness, shine upon the west also." Seven years there, and I'm not sure, but that might be all I remember from college.
I could not recall the names of the teenage girls who drove me to wishing my face was clear in high school, the era before the sun of righteousness burned all my pimples away. And believe me, it took me a long time, lot of self-reflexive therapy, and a great deal of alcohol to forget those names. From the second I set foot on a college campus as a student, I was dedicated to re-creating myself so I would never again be the same person I was in high school.
I was going to improve. I was going to become a great and impressive specimen of humankind. I had it all mapped out.
All right, minus some of the finer points of achieving greatness and impressiveness. But I had time on my side. Like the Rolling Stones song, which I learned about from my college roommate. See the growth?
Nevertheless, I knew that from freshman year onward, my primary motivation had to come from somewhere slightly deeper than worrying about falling over and spraining my ankle in front of a cute, popular girl in a Lexus. That single thought was what powered most of my unfortunate time at Ridgewood High school, although the Lexus could really have been any means of conveyance. Falling over a girl on a bicycle, or on rollerskates, or in a pair of shoes, would have been just as rough.
The whole mentality had to go. My whole modus operandi (more Latin!) of harboring secret crushes and writing poetry about my clandestine heartbreak needed some serious revamping. Crushes themselves had to become something more meaningful, more adult, more than the fuel for my suburban teenage neurosis. I didn't even feel any particular warmth for the term "crushes" anymore. I had to go a step beyond the crush, while still keeping carefully on this side of stalking - another something I learned in college.
The bottom line is that a face without acne was something I needed to be able to take for granted.
I get told all the time that I look very young. My dad was like that too. He could still pass for 17 well into his 30s, which was not nearly as useful as, say, a magic sack of money would have been. Or telekinesis. Anyway, I'm not sure if dear old dad lost track of his portrait in the attic or whatever, but somewhere in the mid- or late 1990s, he finally started to age. He still does pretty great, though; even on the far side of 50, he can still pass for 40. Okay, 45.
Don't worry - this print is too small for him to read.
The Tuesday morning before my reunion was one of those times when my congenital youthful countenance was working against me, like five guys on the crew team suddenly pulling their oars in the opposite direction. (Something else I picked up in college, not that I ever rowed myself.)
Looking young is great. Having the skincare problems of the young is something else entirely.
When I graduated high school, I had four goals for the next ten years of my life. In no particular order, they were to become a) funny, b) charming, c) irresistible to women, and d) a great stage and screen actor.
When I saw the amount of dedication it took to become a great stage and screen actor, I cut it down to three goals.
When I saw the amount of dedication it took to become irresistible to women, I cut it down to two. Sorry, ladies. Being funny and charming is going to have to be enough.
"Alumnus, alumni," I said out loud to my reflection in the mirror, exhausting the rest of my Latin vocabulary. "Uranium. Plutonium. One-point-twenty-one gigiwatts. " Wasn't I being a little bith shallow about this acne thing? A little vain even? "Crater-facium. Acne scarium."
By then, I was making things up.
I certainly wouldn't suspect that anyone else coming to the ten-year reunion of the Ridgewood High School class of 1994 was facing similar issues in their bathroom mirrors on Tuesday morning - not that I had any way of knowning. I have basically kept in touch with three people from RHS, and one of those people was my twin sister. Biology (which I knew about before college) is involved in the transaction.
As for evolution, my high school classmates have had every excuse to do it however they saw fit to do it. Apparently, that evolution was destined to take place without me around. So I still wasn't sure why I was supposed to get excited about spending a lot of money to be in an enclosed space with people whose post-adolescence wasn't compelling enough to keep me in the audience in the first place.
More specifically, I started wondering if any of my secret crushes would mention my splotchy forehead to their friends, or laugh about my hideously pockmarked face. Or worse, what if they only remembered my acne, and not the funny and charming parts of me that I had worked so long to develop?
This is what comes of not being irresistible to women. This is my lack of dedication at work again.
I don't blame the people I went to high school with for losing track of me. I don't blame them for anything at all. We were thrown together by virtue of geography, socioeconomics, and bad timing. I can't begin to start talking about the degree of coincidence that was responsible for putting us all in the same place at the same time. We had it all at RHS - the druggies, the drunks, the burnouts, the serious art students who all wore memorably quirky outfits, the calculus students who all wore glasses, the cool rich kids who drove their parents' Mercedes to school right past the losers with a two-mile walk. We had parties every weekend, we had fights after football games, we had school plays, proms, the mandatory embarrassment of high school health classes, and the constant crush of growing up with no Cold War, when our parents could really pay attention to us, especially those of us with twins.
Fast forward to Friday night - November 2004. The dot-com wave has come crashing onto the beach of Financial Reality along with so many of the dreams of people our age making it big. The Cold War has been replaced by color-coded terror alerts and fear of brown men. Kurt Cobain is dead. Jerry Garcia is dead. Phish broke up. George W. Bush got re-elected. The Red Sox won the World Series.
And set amid this ridiculous backdrop was the unholy mixture of the Ridgewood High School class of 1994 - the 'Ten Years Later' edition. Research scientists would rub elbows with news reporters. Bartenders and web designers would buy each other drinks and reminisce about the hot World History teacher they had in 9th grade. The walls would be lined with teachers and investment bankers and teachers and police officers and hedge fund managers and more teachers, all waiting to drink from the same punch bowl.
Republicans would be digging chicken marsala out of silver chafing dishes alongside those of us with brains in our heads.
But ten years ago, for no reason more noble than having been born in the same year, we were all baptized into the voting-eligible public right around the same time. Especially those of us with twins.
What was Latin for chicken marsala? Better yet, what was Latin for pepperoni pizza, which was what my face was rapidly turning into. I had serious doubts that this mess could be cleaned up in three days, which made it awfully hard to get excited about going.
Why was I supposed to be excited about the reunion anyway? What was going to happen once we stuck a bunch of people in a room whose only familiarity derived from having been stuck in rooms together a long time ago? Granted, the decorations would be a lot nicer this time around. But that wouldn't change the fact that most of us chose to leave, to depart the friendly confines of our childhoods and seek out our fortunes in The Real World.
(I don't mean the TV show. I mean the sad, ubiquitous truths our parents never told us about, like car insurance and corporate layoffs and alimony. No one from RHS '94 made a The Real World cast. Although there was a guy from our class on the first season of Survivor who naturally didn't show up.)
It's been ten years since I saw any of these people, and most of my former classmates have taken the intervening decade to remove me from their little black books, if not entirely erase me from their recollections. I don't think I've made the cell phone directories of more than five Ridgewood High School alumni. I have made other choices, other amazing and disappointing choices. I have paid for car insurance. I have been laid off by a corporation. I have studiously avoided alimony. I have bought any number of cell phones myself, but I never went hunting for their numbers either.
In the journey through my own personal wilderness, I thought, I never bothered scattering bread crumbs behind me.
Then came the strange part.
All these seismic things kept going through my brain (not to mention my face), and suddenly the reunion started to seem like a pretty interesting notion. Why not go, if for no other reason than it seemed like a good opportunity to spend a night out with three hundred almost total strangers (give or take the ones who were too cool for school... reunions)?
I had no idea who these people were!
Well, not entirely, though. Certainly there would be countless opportunities for corny jokes like "how long has it been?" which you can really only ask a person you've actualy met before.
But still, there was a distinct possibility was that the number of cell phones containing my number would at least double. I have no idea when or why that became a yardstick for anything, but there it was. I would have my cell phone too, and I could reasonably see myself filling up a few more empty spots in the directory.
Maybe all my charm and humor would finally pay off a little, just for a change of pace.
Sure, there were still blemishes on my skin, marking me every bit as much on Tuesday as the dog-eared pages in the story of my life since 1994. But why worry about it now? I didn't get where I am today worrying about my skin, I can tell you that much. Just please don't ask me where I am today is all.
I don't miss high school or anyone I went there with, not anymore. But how great will it be to see those people again? Even without a single screen credit to boast, even without being voted onto People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful list (yet), even without having finished my first novel (yet either). Maybe I don't have half a dozen diplomas, or a multi-million dollar contract, or a house, or a wife, or a kid, or even a full-time job to show for the past ten years, but I have no expectations, either. I come free of the burden of judgment.
Maybe those girls who made me worry about my skin ten years ago and whether or not I was going to fall over would have grown more gorgeous over time. Maybe they'd look terrible. It had already stopped mattering long, long ago.
It stopped mattering again in front of the mirror in my bathroom on Tuesday. I picked up my toothbrush, spread paste across the bristles, and started imagining Friday night, entirely comfortable with the ten-years later version of myself who would be attending.
Still, it would have been nice to be a movie star. Or irresistible to women. Or an Olympic gymnast, which was a goal I came up with after I graduated high school. This reunion was a second chance to make a first impression. A medal around my neck would be so cool.
I turned off the light above the mirror and wandered back to the bedroom, totally at ease with whatever condition my skin was in. It would clear up eventually, anyway. My hair, well, that was another issue. I picked up my cell phone, paged through the directory, and called my hairdresser to make an appointment.
A strange thing happened to me the week of my 10th High School reunion. It was so strange, I couldn't immediately come up with a word for it. I still couldn't come up with a word for it after 20 minutes of staring at myself in the mirror. Eventually, just as I was crossing the room in front of my computer today with a cup of coffee in my hand, I managed to hit upon the word "strange."
Genius, I know. 28 years old, and I am genius personified.
But the thing that happened in front of my bathroom mirror on Tuesday morning was so unexpected that I actually caught myself thinking in Latin. Not Pig Latin, either and not Latin dancing or Latin America. This was the real, hardcore stuff - Ovid and Julius Caesar and college mottoes - that kind of Latin. And I never took Latin, not even ten years ago in high school. I was way too cool for that Latin crap. I took Spanish for seven years instead. So why the hell wasn't I thinking in Spanish?
Not that either language was doing a whole lot to pad my extensive vocabulary. "Strange," I came up with. The blandest possible adjective in... the world maybe? Strange.
Strange.
The reunion was on a Friday night. Tuesday morning I woke up and took a shower. And for the first time in the ten years since I left the tall brick walls of Ridgewood high school behind me, I started wondering what girls were going to think of me this weekend - especially with that little surge of acne on my face.
What?
Acne? You can't be serious. At 28 years old? Who gets acne at 28 years old. Aside from baseball players or guys in the gym on steroids - two groups of people with whom I was in no danger of being confused. I wiped the mirror, but there it was still - small red spots here and there, little telltale patches like steam before a geyser. The tectonic forces of... what, adolescence?... were pushing little pink little volcanoes through the surface of my 28-year-old skin.
Apparently, the road to my high school reunion was going to take a little detour through puberty. Again. Dammit. As if the first time wasn't enjoyable enough.
Dammit, I thought. That sucks. I think about girls in high school and I get acne. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
That was when my thinking lapsed inexplicably into Latin. Strange.
But I don't know Latin very well, so post hoc ergo propter hoc was the limit of relevant things I could come up with. After that it was Julius Caesar. Ovid. Sol iustitiae, et occidentem illustra. That was my college motto. It means "the sun of righteousness, shine upon the west also." Seven years there, and I'm not sure, but that might be all I remember from college.
I could not recall the names of the teenage girls who drove me to wishing my face was clear in high school, the era before the sun of righteousness burned all my pimples away. And believe me, it took me a long time, lot of self-reflexive therapy, and a great deal of alcohol to forget those names. From the second I set foot on a college campus as a student, I was dedicated to re-creating myself so I would never again be the same person I was in high school.
I was going to improve. I was going to become a great and impressive specimen of humankind. I had it all mapped out.
All right, minus some of the finer points of achieving greatness and impressiveness. But I had time on my side. Like the Rolling Stones song, which I learned about from my college roommate. See the growth?
Nevertheless, I knew that from freshman year onward, my primary motivation had to come from somewhere slightly deeper than worrying about falling over and spraining my ankle in front of a cute, popular girl in a Lexus. That single thought was what powered most of my unfortunate time at Ridgewood High school, although the Lexus could really have been any means of conveyance. Falling over a girl on a bicycle, or on rollerskates, or in a pair of shoes, would have been just as rough.
The whole mentality had to go. My whole modus operandi (more Latin!) of harboring secret crushes and writing poetry about my clandestine heartbreak needed some serious revamping. Crushes themselves had to become something more meaningful, more adult, more than the fuel for my suburban teenage neurosis. I didn't even feel any particular warmth for the term "crushes" anymore. I had to go a step beyond the crush, while still keeping carefully on this side of stalking - another something I learned in college.
The bottom line is that a face without acne was something I needed to be able to take for granted.
I get told all the time that I look very young. My dad was like that too. He could still pass for 17 well into his 30s, which was not nearly as useful as, say, a magic sack of money would have been. Or telekinesis. Anyway, I'm not sure if dear old dad lost track of his portrait in the attic or whatever, but somewhere in the mid- or late 1990s, he finally started to age. He still does pretty great, though; even on the far side of 50, he can still pass for 40. Okay, 45.
Don't worry - this print is too small for him to read.
The Tuesday morning before my reunion was one of those times when my congenital youthful countenance was working against me, like five guys on the crew team suddenly pulling their oars in the opposite direction. (Something else I picked up in college, not that I ever rowed myself.)
Looking young is great. Having the skincare problems of the young is something else entirely.
When I graduated high school, I had four goals for the next ten years of my life. In no particular order, they were to become a) funny, b) charming, c) irresistible to women, and d) a great stage and screen actor.
When I saw the amount of dedication it took to become a great stage and screen actor, I cut it down to three goals.
When I saw the amount of dedication it took to become irresistible to women, I cut it down to two. Sorry, ladies. Being funny and charming is going to have to be enough.
"Alumnus, alumni," I said out loud to my reflection in the mirror, exhausting the rest of my Latin vocabulary. "Uranium. Plutonium. One-point-twenty-one gigiwatts. " Wasn't I being a little bith shallow about this acne thing? A little vain even? "Crater-facium. Acne scarium."
By then, I was making things up.
I certainly wouldn't suspect that anyone else coming to the ten-year reunion of the Ridgewood High School class of 1994 was facing similar issues in their bathroom mirrors on Tuesday morning - not that I had any way of knowning. I have basically kept in touch with three people from RHS, and one of those people was my twin sister. Biology (which I knew about before college) is involved in the transaction.
As for evolution, my high school classmates have had every excuse to do it however they saw fit to do it. Apparently, that evolution was destined to take place without me around. So I still wasn't sure why I was supposed to get excited about spending a lot of money to be in an enclosed space with people whose post-adolescence wasn't compelling enough to keep me in the audience in the first place.
More specifically, I started wondering if any of my secret crushes would mention my splotchy forehead to their friends, or laugh about my hideously pockmarked face. Or worse, what if they only remembered my acne, and not the funny and charming parts of me that I had worked so long to develop?
This is what comes of not being irresistible to women. This is my lack of dedication at work again.
I don't blame the people I went to high school with for losing track of me. I don't blame them for anything at all. We were thrown together by virtue of geography, socioeconomics, and bad timing. I can't begin to start talking about the degree of coincidence that was responsible for putting us all in the same place at the same time. We had it all at RHS - the druggies, the drunks, the burnouts, the serious art students who all wore memorably quirky outfits, the calculus students who all wore glasses, the cool rich kids who drove their parents' Mercedes to school right past the losers with a two-mile walk. We had parties every weekend, we had fights after football games, we had school plays, proms, the mandatory embarrassment of high school health classes, and the constant crush of growing up with no Cold War, when our parents could really pay attention to us, especially those of us with twins.
Fast forward to Friday night - November 2004. The dot-com wave has come crashing onto the beach of Financial Reality along with so many of the dreams of people our age making it big. The Cold War has been replaced by color-coded terror alerts and fear of brown men. Kurt Cobain is dead. Jerry Garcia is dead. Phish broke up. George W. Bush got re-elected. The Red Sox won the World Series.
And set amid this ridiculous backdrop was the unholy mixture of the Ridgewood High School class of 1994 - the 'Ten Years Later' edition. Research scientists would rub elbows with news reporters. Bartenders and web designers would buy each other drinks and reminisce about the hot World History teacher they had in 9th grade. The walls would be lined with teachers and investment bankers and teachers and police officers and hedge fund managers and more teachers, all waiting to drink from the same punch bowl.
Republicans would be digging chicken marsala out of silver chafing dishes alongside those of us with brains in our heads.
But ten years ago, for no reason more noble than having been born in the same year, we were all baptized into the voting-eligible public right around the same time. Especially those of us with twins.
What was Latin for chicken marsala? Better yet, what was Latin for pepperoni pizza, which was what my face was rapidly turning into. I had serious doubts that this mess could be cleaned up in three days, which made it awfully hard to get excited about going.
Why was I supposed to be excited about the reunion anyway? What was going to happen once we stuck a bunch of people in a room whose only familiarity derived from having been stuck in rooms together a long time ago? Granted, the decorations would be a lot nicer this time around. But that wouldn't change the fact that most of us chose to leave, to depart the friendly confines of our childhoods and seek out our fortunes in The Real World.
(I don't mean the TV show. I mean the sad, ubiquitous truths our parents never told us about, like car insurance and corporate layoffs and alimony. No one from RHS '94 made a The Real World cast. Although there was a guy from our class on the first season of Survivor who naturally didn't show up.)
It's been ten years since I saw any of these people, and most of my former classmates have taken the intervening decade to remove me from their little black books, if not entirely erase me from their recollections. I don't think I've made the cell phone directories of more than five Ridgewood High School alumni. I have made other choices, other amazing and disappointing choices. I have paid for car insurance. I have been laid off by a corporation. I have studiously avoided alimony. I have bought any number of cell phones myself, but I never went hunting for their numbers either.
In the journey through my own personal wilderness, I thought, I never bothered scattering bread crumbs behind me.
Then came the strange part.
All these seismic things kept going through my brain (not to mention my face), and suddenly the reunion started to seem like a pretty interesting notion. Why not go, if for no other reason than it seemed like a good opportunity to spend a night out with three hundred almost total strangers (give or take the ones who were too cool for school... reunions)?
I had no idea who these people were!
Well, not entirely, though. Certainly there would be countless opportunities for corny jokes like "how long has it been?" which you can really only ask a person you've actualy met before.
But still, there was a distinct possibility was that the number of cell phones containing my number would at least double. I have no idea when or why that became a yardstick for anything, but there it was. I would have my cell phone too, and I could reasonably see myself filling up a few more empty spots in the directory.
Maybe all my charm and humor would finally pay off a little, just for a change of pace.
Sure, there were still blemishes on my skin, marking me every bit as much on Tuesday as the dog-eared pages in the story of my life since 1994. But why worry about it now? I didn't get where I am today worrying about my skin, I can tell you that much. Just please don't ask me where I am today is all.
I don't miss high school or anyone I went there with, not anymore. But how great will it be to see those people again? Even without a single screen credit to boast, even without being voted onto People Magazine's 50 Most Beautiful list (yet), even without having finished my first novel (yet either). Maybe I don't have half a dozen diplomas, or a multi-million dollar contract, or a house, or a wife, or a kid, or even a full-time job to show for the past ten years, but I have no expectations, either. I come free of the burden of judgment.
Maybe those girls who made me worry about my skin ten years ago and whether or not I was going to fall over would have grown more gorgeous over time. Maybe they'd look terrible. It had already stopped mattering long, long ago.
It stopped mattering again in front of the mirror in my bathroom on Tuesday. I picked up my toothbrush, spread paste across the bristles, and started imagining Friday night, entirely comfortable with the ten-years later version of myself who would be attending.
Still, it would have been nice to be a movie star. Or irresistible to women. Or an Olympic gymnast, which was a goal I came up with after I graduated high school. This reunion was a second chance to make a first impression. A medal around my neck would be so cool.
I turned off the light above the mirror and wandered back to the bedroom, totally at ease with whatever condition my skin was in. It would clear up eventually, anyway. My hair, well, that was another issue. I picked up my cell phone, paged through the directory, and called my hairdresser to make an appointment.
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