October 2003 Archives
October 23, 2003
Pitch Session
Yesterday in my adaptation class, I pitched possibly the funniest concept I’ve ever come up with. The assignment was to find a magazine article and turn it into a story for a 30-minute film. I found an article that referred to some quotes Mark Twain gave in 1900, after returning from a speaking tour around the world. He said some disparaging things about the Jameson raid prisoners, whom he visited in Pretoria, South Africa. He said they shouldn’t be sitting around — they should be doing something constructive, like writing Don Quixote.
It was a typical “gosh, he’s a funny ol’ codger” remark from Twain, but I happened to read this article shortly after reading Tom Cruise is going to be starring in some revisionist World War II flick that basically asserts the U.S. single-handedly won the Battle of Britain. You know, the battle that was between the British and the Germans. The one that occurred more than a year before U.S. forces were technically involved in the war.
And this, after seeing the trailer for yet another Tom Cruise film, this one basically saying that it took an American to bring Japan from its outdated feudal system to the “modern” system.
We’ve gotta stop being so pro-America in this country. It’s all becoming disturbingly Orwellian.
With all of this roiling around in my rickety, underworked brain, I came up with and pitched the following idea for a revisionist action film starring Kevin Kline as 65-year-old Mark Twain:
Mark Twain shows up in Pretoria to lecture. While there, he visits the prisoners of the Jameson raid and gives them a brief, sarcastic “motivational speech” about how they should get off their lazy asses and do something with their time. They decide this is a good idea, so they get off their lazy asses — and escape from prison.
When Twain hears about it, he tracks them down to persuade them to turn themselves back in and return to prison. Then he sees what the problem is, all the hardships the South Africans face under British imperial rule, and he starts to empathize with Kruger, the leader, who wants to storm the capitol in Pretoria and start taking over provinces until the region is fully independent.
So moved by this newfound respect, Twain elects himself the leader of the siege, and together, they storm the capitol, get rid of the dastardly British, and cause South Africa to become the third independent African state (since the European partitioning in 1885, during which the already-established colonies of Liberia and Sierra Leone were and would remain independent).
If you know anything about African history, especially South African history, you will laugh and laugh and laugh. If you don’t, chances are you won’t find it nearly as funny.
Nobody in my class laughed. Including the professor.
Sigh.
So, I came up with a new concept. Not to be a shill or to bow down to peer pressure — I just desperately want this particular professor to like, or at least respect me. The new concept is similar, but instead of being a revisionist action satire, it’s more of a comedy prison-break.
See, Twain is under pressure to write another book, and his deadline is fast approaching. He’s taken a trip around the world to find inspiration, but so far, he’s blocked. He goes to the prison and makes fun of the raiders, and they take his mockery to heart — they start writing a novel. A really fucking good novel. Jealous, Twain hatches a scheme for the group to break out of prison and storm the capitol. He assumes they’ll forget about the book once they’re out of prison, and if they don’t forget it, they’ll surely die trying to take the capitol. There are all kinds of double-crosses and triple-crosses and it’s all sort of crazy and Chinatown-esque as far as pure “wtf?” moments are concerned — but in the end, Twain gets his book.
The reason why it’s better, I think, is because there’s a bit more to work with as far as motivating characters to move the plot instead of the other way around. But the first idea would be funnier as far as pure comic hijinks are concerned.
At any rate, the reason I’m explaining all this hilarity is because during my lunch break, instead of eating lunch (I wasn’t hungry), I decided I’d go and pitch this new concept to my professor. She’d be impressed, I thought, that I came up with such a different (and better) idea so quickly. But she wasn’t in — it was around 12:30, and her office hours were 1:30 to 3.
“Damn,” I thought and started doing what Lucy affectionately termed the “pissy shoulder walk” out of the screenwriting offices.
I walked down the hall when I heard somebody call my name. “Stan! Hold up a minute!” I didn’t need to turn around to know that voice: it was new girl, who I guess I’ll call Jennifer for hilarious personal reasons.
Wondering what she wanted, I walked back toward her. She had leapt from her classroom, yelled at me, and then sauntered back inside. I was confused, so I followed her into the classroom, which apparently was too busy to notice her jumping around and inviting friends in.
“Here,” she said, shoving a sheet of paper in my hands. On it was a poorly rendered, poorly Xeroxed flyer for a Halloween party.
“Um,” I said.
“You’re coming, right?” She looked so hopeful — what the hell was going on? The last time I was at a party at her house, I ended up making out with a tipsy girl and almost ruining my life (this was before we were seeing one another).
“Of course.” I smiled like an idiot.
“You have to come in costume, though,” she warned.
Come in costume? What the hell, dude?
“I’m not going to wear a costume,” I explained.
“Then you’ll be subject to a penalty costume.”
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “Fine.”
“Good.” She grinned. She is quite attractive when she’s not shouting at me. But suddenly, I was guessing this was some sort of elaborate and unnecessary practical joke.
“I’ll dress like a hobo,” I said. “I’m halfway there already.”
She laughed; women like self-deprecation, especially from me (they laugh because of the accuracy).
“I hope to see you there,” she said excitedly. I can read her like a book — this isn’t some practical joke. It’s a half-baked attempt at getting me back. Or possibly getting me to invest large sums of money (which I don’t have) into some sort of project she’s working on.
I muttered an acknowledgement that I’d go, although I’m not certain I will. I might invite the girl from my screenwriting class, just to make Jennifer jealous. The jealousy thing never really works as far as getting women back, but it’d be nice to watch her squirm.
I am evil, incidentally.
Posted by Stan on October 23, 2003 9:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | School Rants
Reason #4728 Why Microsoft Sucks Balls
The computer station at work is essentially good for browsing the Internet and nothing more, and even then, it’s sorta 50-50 on whether or not the website’s actually going to work. It’s an old Pentium-based (I’m guessing an original Pentium; my half-assed spec-hunt didn’t turn up any megahertz info or any indication it was a Pentium II, III, or IV) with 32MB of RAM, straining (not unlike a steam locomotive ascending an arduous hill) to run Windows 98SE.
I managed to single-handedly take down this machine today while trying to make it run better.
I should’ve just left it alone.
See, it was running like crap, and I figure it’s because it’s old and slow but still trying to run the latest version of Internet Explorer under an OS it can barely handle, but I thought, “Gosh, maybe it’d go faster if I disabled unnecessary bullshit, cleared out the old temp files, and got rid of the spyware.” I don’t work with the most computer literate people on the planet (as evidenced by the fact that, though I left a trail six miles wide, none of them actually found my blog — I’m thankful for that, though just in case, I’ve removed any potentially litigable remarks regarding the attractiveness of my boss and given her an actual fake name, “Jenna”), so I assumed the computer was loaded with spyware.
So, to rectify that problem, I downloaded Ad-Aware, a program I’ve used many times on my PC at home without incident. As it turns out, I was correct. There were 178 hunks o’ spyware littering the system. I had Ad-Aware remove them all, and it did. To be safe, I decided to reboot.
It went through the entire boot cycle, but when it came time to load “explorer.exe,” it gave me the following paraphrased message:
“The file ‘EXPLORER.EXE’ has been corrupted and cannot open.
“Please reinstall Windows.”
“Oh shit,” I remarked.
Believe it or not, below this message was an “OK” button (why?), so I clicked it, and it gave me another error that — froze the computer.
“All right,” I thought, “I can fix this. I’ll just reboot it and have it run ScanDisk. ScanDisk knows all, sees all, repairs all.”
So, I rebooted it, and ScanDisk ran for about 45 minutes before finally cleaning up all the HD problems. And then —
“The file ‘EXPLORER.EXE’ has been corrupted and cannot open.
“Please reinstall Windows.”
“Motherfucker,” I noted.
I decided to try restarting one more time before giving up and telling Jenna (my boss) about it. I did so, and ScanDisk ran for about 30 seconds before the system fully booted —
And gave me the same error.
I sauntered into Jenna’s office and explained, “My computer exploded.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“Well, it was giving me this funky error —”
“Yeah, it does that,” Jenna explained.
“— and so I restarted and now it won’t boot up,” I finished.
“Oh,” she said. “That’s all, folks!” She was genial, and she wasn’t blaming me. Whew!
Still, to be safe, I said, “I don’t have any idea what caused it,” and I’m pretty sure I looked and sounded extremely guilty.
She waved a hand, indicating that this problem would be solved via magical powers. “Don’t worry about it,” she reassured. “I’ll call a guy.”
“Okay,” I said, then added, “On a related note, is it okay if I bring in a laptop from now on to do my work?”
Posted by Stan on October 23, 2003 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
October 21, 2003
Limit: 3 Per Day
Some guy came in a little while ago. He tried to ignore me, but when he realized I was staring at him, he grinned sheepishly and rammed his hand into the wad of condoms in the “Limit: 3 per day” box. He said, “I just need to get me some, you know…” And then he giggled, though I’m not sure if it was because he realized the hilarity of his double entendre, or if it was because he had the emotional maturity of a seven-year-old.
Other than that, nothing interesting has happened.
Posted by Stan on October 21, 2003 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
October 20, 2003
Weird First Day
I started work at 11 this morning to find my boss, Jenna, missing in action. This would not have been a problem, except nobody knew who the hell I was.
I approached the desk and explained to the desk girl, Bianca, that I was working there and was supposed to start at 11.
“Um,” she replied.
Bianca whisked me off to the back of the supremely disorganized office and introduced me to Sally, who was in charge of something or another. Sally decided to take the opportunity to introduce me to everyone — aside from Bianca and Sally, there was Eric, a film student who seemed to enjoy facial piercings; Gregory, an enormous music student who enjoyed singing along to terrible, terrible rap songs; Shelli, who was the activities web designer; and she pointed at the doors to offices of two women I haven’t met yet. They weren’t in today.
As far as the actual responsibilities of my employ, Sally gave me few specific instructions. Mostly, she said, “If you have a book or something, just hang out. We don’t have anything for you to do.” I can’t possibly complain about that.
“Jenna will be in around one,” said Sally as she wandered back into her office.
I thought I had two options. I could either fuck around with Eric and Gregory, or I could sit and read. Eric and Gregory were busy with homework; they wouldn’t fuck around.
Oh, well. So, I sat and read for about an hour before Bianca called me back up to the front desk. She literally called the back of the office on the phone, even though it’s so small she could have raised her voice slightly and had the same effect. I went up there, and she decided to give me the basics. Essentially, when I’m working the front desk, I have three responsibilities:
- U-Pass distribution
- Condom distribution (seriously)
- reception
Anything more than that, and I have to send it to one of the higher ups. I enjoy having a job with very little responsibility.
After revealing the details of these important duties, Bianca sent me back to read for another hour or so, at which point Jenna showed up and we started payroll processing and worked out my schedule.
Jenna copied down my Social Security Number, and then stopped for a second and asked, “Where were you born?”
“Um,” I responded, “Arlington Heights.”
“Your Social Security Number is wrong, then,” she said. I’ve been writing down and/or looking at my Social Security Number for several years. I was pretty sure I had it memorized, and I said as much to Jenna.
“That’s weird,” she responded. “People born in Illinois are supposed to have a three at the beginning of their Social Security Number.”
I couldn’t express how little I cared about this, but I presented her with my card, she asked me if I’d had it replaced for any reason, etc., etc., SHUT UP.
She continued to fill out a little form and then asked me, seemingly at random, “Are you allergic to dogs?”
“Is that on the form?” I wondered silently. I said, “Yes, actually.”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Because some of us have dogs, and sometimes we have to bring them to the office. Very rarely.”
What the fiddly-fuck?
“Well, I am allergic,” I said, “but I like dogs as long as they’re not sniffing me or biting me.”
“Okay,” she said unenthusiastically.
Jenna sent me next door, to the financial aid office, to fill out the appropriate payroll and tax forms. While there, I ran into a girl from my fiction writing class. We exchanged “hellos,” and I stood there for an awkward moment, contemplating engaging her in conversation. I decided against it and went back to the activities office.
I read for another half hour or so before Jenna told me to go and sit with Bianca and watch her so I could get a feel for desk duty. I would be manning the front desk when Bianca got off at 1:30. It all seemed pretty straightforward, so when Bianca left, I sat behind the front desk and wielded the mighty and awesome power of somebody who has very little actual authority.
Mostly, I just sat and read. Jenna said she could hear everything from her office. She was there if I needed her, and as it turned out, the piss-poor training for this job meant I needed her a lot.
After about 15 minutes or so, I got my first customer, a girl demanding her U-Pass. I asked for her last name and looked through all the passes in the stack. None with her name. “When did you submit your form at Merchandise Mart?” I asked. This is the standard question if we don’t have a U-Pass.
“A week ago today,” she said.
“Okay, it takes seven to 10 business days to process,” I explained.
“They said five to seven.”
“They lied.”
“Oh. Well, that just sucks.”
“I agree, but there’s nothing I can do about it,” I said. “Sorry.”
She muttered something that probably wasn’t very nice and left.
After a safe period of time, Jenna came out and admonished me for agreeing with her. Technically, the policy of the office is to stand behind the CTA, no matter how shitty their service is. Instead of agreeing that taking seven to 10 business days sucks, even if I think it does, I should say something to the effect of, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Makes sense.
A little while later, I got my second U-Pass customer. She had a frightening assertive quality that I usually find attractive in women, but she was mostly annoying. I gave her the U-Pass, but she wouldn’t go away. She asked, “Could you tell me why nobody has responded to any of my calls?”
“Um,” I explained.
“Because I called, like, three times and left VoiceMails, and nobody ever returned my calls,” she continued.
“I have no idea,” I said sheepishly, but Jenna came to the rescue. She tossed it back about as hard and fast as Assertive Girl was dishing it out. I was impressed by the back-and-forth.
From what I gather, Assertive Girl just kept calling the wrong people and decided to blame the office as a whole for not being as accessible as she would have liked. No wonder I found her so annoying: she’s an idiot.
At 2:35 (yes, I was documenting things throughout the day, including the times at which certain events occurred), I started feeling extremely nauseous. I decided it was caused by either too much caffeine, or too little, but since I was jonesing for another cup of coffee, I decided to take my break.
I work in one of the buildings on Wabash Avenue, so I decided to trek up to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts where I don’t owe people money, the mysterious one at Adams and Wabash. I got my refill and headed back to the office. It was extremely warm out today (I heard it got up to 85), which meant one thing to me: scantily clad women. They’re even more scantily clad than usual after irregular bursts of cold. It’s fun.
As I walked back down Wabash, I started staring at the well-fed rear of a woman who was, from behind anyway, pretty attractive. She was wearing one of those spaghetti-strap tanktops, and she had a pile of auburn-esque hair weighing down her head. It looked extremely sexy, even though I realize as I am typing this masturbatory visual, I am the saddest human being alive.
She was about a quarter of a block ahead of me, so I decided it’d be a good idea to try to tail her for as long as I could. Hopefully I’d be able to catch up with her and, assuming my wit was at its usual razor-sharpness, I could impress her with my comic stylings on a street corner as we waited for the light to change.
I failed in this endeavor, and here’s why: when I finally did catch up to her, I realized why this arousing figure had been somewhat familiar to me. I’d been staring at it all summer. That’s right, I’d been eyeballing the ass of the new girl. Our last encounter didn’t go so well, so when I realized what I was up against, I decided not to back away like I usually do. I’d take this challenge full on.
This was a mistake on my part.
See, the funny thing about today was that, in addition to being very warm, it was also extremely windy. And when it gets windy in Chicago, shit starts to blow around. It’s not the cleanest city in the world. So, right after I said, “Hey,” to the new girl, and she looked at me in disgust but actually acknowledged my existence, I followed that up immediately with the following onomatopoetic word:
“Aaaaaaggggggghhh,” I said suavely as some large chunk of debris wedged itself into my eye socket. I decided to play it off as my left eye teared up and, I imagine, turned fairly red. I looked the new girl right in the eye and tried to elaborate: “Something…in my…eeeeeeeyeeee.”
I’m not sure why debris in my eye shorted out many of my more important motor functions, such as the ability to talk and walk and pretend to be cool, but it did, and instead of following the new girl and essentially begging her for another chance, the new girl started walking and I stood there like an idiot, continuing to make strange choking sounds.
How could eye crud make me choke? Ah, the mysteries of life…
Finally, I dug the debris out of my eye socket and tried to walk back to the office as quickly as possible. On the way, I saw The Mighty Rasta, from my Production II class, walking down the street in the opposite direction. I waved at him, and he totally blew me off, which pisses me off, but I really can’t stand him anyway. I was trying to be nice, though, and he blew me off. I tried to play the wave off as a minor stretch. I almost certainly failed.
I thought I saw The Ex standing among the crowd of people who constantly clog the outside of the building, but it’s possible that was my imagination. I think she was wearing a hat that I thought I lost, though. I was defeated, though; now was not the time to stroll up and demand my hat back. Imagine what would have happened if I had.
I announced my return to Jenna, who noticed that I was wearing a Foo Fighters t-shirt (prior to that, I’d been wearing a flannel — it was chilly this morning). She tried to engage me in a conversation about the merits of Nirvana over the Foo Fighters or vice-versa. I just said I like them both and left it at that. She said that when Nirvana was popular, she was not nearly angsty enough to like them, but now she is so she does.
I’m not sure how I feel about Jenna.
When I got back to the desk, I was greeted by a random guy who said the vending machine downstairs ate his dollar.
“So?” I asked. I am good at what I do.
Jenna leaped out into the main office and explained to him that we can’t help him, and Vending Machine Guy went away, dejected.
A little while later, I noticed the huge box filled with condoms hanging on the wall. I almost laughed out loud when I saw a sheet of paper taped to the box, on which was written “Limit: 3 per day.” Seriously, dude, if you need more than three condoms in a day, maybe you should think about paying for them yourself. Or maybe I’m just not hitting the night-spots like I used to.
What was even funnier was that, about half an hour later, a guy who ran one of the other offices came in looking for what they called “love the ones you’re with” bags, which prominently featured free condoms. I’m not sure what else was featured in the “love the ones you’re with” bags, but I found it extremely difficult to withhold my laughter.
Around 4:15, my moderate OCD decided to unleash itself on the sloppy desk. During the interview, Jenna had asked me if I liked working in a clean area. “Because we’re not clean,” she explained, “so if you like it clean, either don’t take the job or clean it yourself.” I decided I’d clean it myself.
This was easier said than done. Apparently, every single item on the desk is intricately connected with every other item, so if you even touch something, the entire balance of the desk is thrown off and things fall onto the floor or into my lap or in otherwise horrible places. This did not make me happy.
A few minutes before I got off, a woman, who was so ravishing that I was left literally — and pathetically — breathless for a few seconds, walked into the office and asked for what’s known as the “311 key.” Room 311 is a conference room next door, which is locked. We have the key, so when people need to use it, they have to come to us.
I stammered like an idiot as I grabbed the key from the desk. I handed it to her, and she smiled at me. I assume she thought I have some sort palsy. Maybe I do.
And that concluded my shift. The trip home was uneventful today. A lot of people seem to take Mondays off, so even in rush hour, there isn’t much traffic. I almost hit some guy trying to make a left into Adult World. I figure I owe it to my loyal fan to document this.
All in all, this job’s gonna work out. Lots of weird, bloggable shit happened today, and I’m sure it’ll be like this every day (and this was an incredibly slow day, according to the other workers), so yay for having something amusing to write about.
Mostly, I like the job because it requires very little actual effort, and it allows me to catch up with my reading, since I have literally nothing better to do.
In summary, hooray for employment.
Posted by Stan on October 20, 2003 9:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
Good Deed
I’d just finished breakfast and started reading when this guy who looked like a lankier version of Jeff Conaway, from the sitcom Taxi, approached me. “Hey, man,” he said in a far-out voice that indicated he was a real artiste, “you wanna help me out on this project for image design?”
“Um,” I responded.
“I have two pictures left on this roll, so all I need to do is just snap off two shots,” he said, “and then I’ll be done. You’ll really save my ass.”
“Sure,” I said. I had about an hour to kill before work started at 11.
“Okay,” Conaway said. “I’ll be back in five minutes. Sit tight, buddy.”
“Hrm,” I thought and continued reading until he returned with a guy named Tim who was in my public speaking class a few semesters ago. All I remembered about him was his confusingly high-pitched voice, his mutton-chop sideburns, and the fact that he was a “straight-edge” who lived in Schaumburg. He was the one who first introduced me to the term “hate-edge,” which I have mocked mercilessly ever since.
As per instructions from Conaway, we went to a little mini-park across the street and took the two shots. The whole thing took about a minute. Tim was wandering off to a class up the street, but I was headed back to the film building, as was Conaway. On the way, we discussed the difficulty of taking a 16-credit-hour course-load when you’re a perfectionist. We agreed that you can take 16 and do everything half-assed, or you can do 12 and get it right.
It made me feel better about not graduating until 2017.
After thanking me profusely, Conaway wandered away, and I went back to my reading. I felt good, having helped out one of my peers in a time of need. This would be a good thing, karmically. So I won’t feel too bad asking people for help in the future.
I also won’t feel bad about telling people who need help to fuck off.
Posted by Stan on October 20, 2003 7:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
October 17, 2003
Employment
Starting Monday, I have a job.
Hooray.
Posted by Stan on October 17, 2003 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
Friday Five (23)
This week’s questions suck balls.
Posted by Stan on October 17, 2003 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Friday Five/Albums of the Week
October 16, 2003
Bad Day
I hate Wednesdays.
It’s not because I have two classes in a row — one three hours, one four hours. Honestly, that’s not hard. I’ve been doing that for three years without breaking a sweat. It’s not even the two specific classes I am taking. It’s just the order in which I have to take them. If they were flip-flopped, I wouldn’t have any problems.
But that’s the problem. My first class is an adaptation course. It’s a lot of fun. We mostly spend our time doing research. Here’s a PRO-TIP that a lot of people don’t know: research is fun. It sounds arduous and painful, like disembowelment, but it’s fun. Writers like it. Most writers like it more than actually writing, which is why some of them spend decades researching and then forget to write an actual book to justify the research.
My second class is Fiction Writing II: electric boogaloo. It is unbelievably rotten and painful. I believe I may have blogged before on the subject of how much I hate fiction writing courses, so it’s surprising I’d be stupid enough to take another one. Unless you know me. Or, unless you read future entries in which I suddenly liked my fiction writing class.
The only thing that gets me through the class is the firm if misguided belief that eventually I’ll start warming up to this class, as well, and by mid-December I’ll stop dreading it.
I have realized, over time, why I despise the fiction department so much. It’s their stone-faced non-reaction to everything written by students. Writers are, by nature, competitive because, basically, writers aren’t good at anything else (and sometimes aren’t even good at writing). They’re also, by and large, a neurotic bunch. They’re paranoid and fear the idea that anybody is better at putting pen to paper than they are.
I pretend to be a writer; I have these exact same feelings, but during my time as a film student I’ve realized that encouragement is just as important — if not moreso — than vicious competition. Sure, the film department is competitive, but there’s also an elaborate support system that comes, mostly, from the fact that 85% of the students are their solely to make contacts they can later exploit. But after awhile, the blind support turns into genuine support, and the gentle praise turns into constructive criticism.
I’m not saying we film students are a bunch of dancing hippies mired in a festival of creativity and free love, but we aren’t as stoic. We don’t simply not react to others’ work. We encourage, even if we’re secretly seething and thinking, “Dammit, why couldn’t I think of an idea that good?”
This sort of exemplifies the details of my day and why it sucked so many balls the NBA will have to disband and get jobs at Burger King.
It all started with this lie. Well, it started as what I thought was truth last week and then snowballed out of control.
See, I have this crazy tendency to only remember about half of the assignments I have due, and I never bother to check the syllabus because I’m so stupidly confident in my knowledge of what needs to be turned in. So, last week, we were supposed to have found two newspaper articles — of which I found one, hurriedly before class started — and answer six questions (basic who why what where when how) to identify various ways the article could be adapted into a short film.
I didn’t really do that assignment at all, but I have a pretty smooth bullshit factory. Basically, I know how to pitch. I’ve mastered the art of sounding like I know what I’m saying when I don’t, of making really shitty ideas sound brilliant, all the while seeming humble. It’s really not a difficult concept, but maybe I was just toughened up by a year and a half on my high school’s speech team, most of which was spent hiding in bathroom stalls in foreign high schools, weeping gently.
So, I figured that to fulfill the “two stories” quota, I’d pull this story I remembered almost verbatim from the Darwin Awards directly out of my ass and pitch it. Then, I could find the article when I got home, answer the questions for that and the article I found in the Reader, and hand them to my professor the next morning with a lame excuse as to why I “forgot” to turn in the assignment the day before.
I had read this particular article years ago, and I had no idea why it stuck with me in such thorough detail, but it seemed like a blessing in disguise. Essentially, the story I pitched goes like this: a middle-aged woman in Louisiana is driving down a rural highway with her husband, who’s behind the wheel, when she sees Jesus on the side of the road. She freaks out, but the husband keeps on driving. Then, the woman sees people floating in the air. She starts screaming about the Rapture, wonders why she isn’t ascending to Heaven, decides it’s because she’s in the car, so she jumps out the window and, ahem, dies. It turns out, though, that a hippie van driver’s rear doors flew open and a bunch of sex dolls he had filled with helium flew into the air (now do you see why the story appealed to me?).
That was the barebones article, and I added to it a milieu of paranoia and blind religious fervor to establish a character that actually would do something that insane. Everybody in the class loved the idea, and they were laughing hysterically at the ridiculousness of the situation and my hilariously, off-the-cuff phrased pitch.
So, I went home that night and spent several hours trying to track down the article. It was difficult to find — the key words weren’t hitting anything on the Darwin Awards search, and the old newsletters I have in my inbox didn’t have the particular story. I started Googling, and eventually I found the story. On Snopes. Oh, shit, it was a hoax! But, hey, I got most of the pertinent details right.
I was frustrated that I’d fallen for a hoax, but in my defense, it was printed as if it was factual news back in 2001, when I originally read it and never followed up on it. It’s just one of those things that stuck with me, because it really is a funny idea. It would have been funnier, though, if it had actually been true.
At that point, I was really clueless as far as how to proceed. I sort of froze up and didn’t write the questions for that or the other article. I just sat around, trying to think of how to proceed. I didn’t want to come off as an idiot, because this particular professor is pretty influential in the screenwriting department. Getting into her good graces has been my top priority since school started, and I’ve been doing a respectable job so far.
Eventually, over the weekend, I decided on the obvious solution: answer the damn questions with the hoax article and the Reader article, but instead of writing the assigned treatment on the article I pitched, I’d just write a treatment on the other article and admit to my mistake and sloppy research. She’d have to respect that, right?
So, yesterday, I went into her office before class and lied to her — I said I’d had these articles sitting in my bag for a week but I didn’t know if she had collected them or not. And then I told her a distorted version of the truth: I had written a treatment, but when I tried to further my research, I discovered I’d been taken in by a hoax. She looked like she knew it already, and I felt like an even bigger idiot. And I felt like a jackass for lying. I should have just told her the exact truth. It would’ve been basically the same story, and it would have had the exact same consequences (a late assignment is a late assignment, no matter the excuse), except I wouldn’t feel guilty. I’d still feel like an idiot, though, for having forgotten the assignment and revealed my irresponsibility.
And that’s why I lied. Because you know what? There was a witness to the lie, an extremely pleasant guy who leads the large-group discussions in my script analysis class. He was in her office, talking to her, and after I explained my mistake, handed her my assignment, and pitched my other article, she said to me, “Stan, you know Jack, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking his hand while attempting to seem harried (I like to create the illusion I’m constantly busy in front of professors, so they cut me some slack when I fuck up), “you teach script analysis.”
“That’s right,” Jack said.
“Stan talked to me last week about our magazine idea,” she said. “He’s interested in an internship or a staff position, so we can’t let him get away.”
That’s right, I’ve been showing some initiative during my brief blogging hiatus. She’d mentioned an idea for a magazine designed for screenwriting students, filled with student work (short scripts, segments of long scripts, short stories and poetry from screenwriting students, editorials, etc.) that could be published and freely distributed around the school.
This is a pretty effective marketing tool. Journalism and fiction students have similar magazines (actually, the fiction department has an annual anthology book that costs an assload of money) to get their work out, and I thought it was a great idea to do the same thing with the screenwriting department, so I’ve been trying to get in on the ground floor. So far, it’s working.
But that just made me feel guiltier. They both got really excited about my volunteering while this magazine is still in the fetal stages, and here I was lying to her for no reason.
Later, during class, we did some research in the library and then re-joined as a large group to pitch our stuff. We were supposed to find two real-life people who led interesting lives. I found a random journal article about a freed slave who turned to a life of crime and then became a black radical in 19th-century England, but my real focus was my other concentration, the composer Robert Schumann.
See, I’ve been interested in Schumann’s story and have done random, minor research on him over the past couple of years. He’s such a strange, brilliant, and occasionally tragic figure, and there’s a particular time in his life that it would be great to write about, around the time he was 21 and first met his future wife Clara Wieck (and first started getting numbness in his fingers that marked the demise of his career as a pianist). The germ was planted in my head by a music professor I had during my brief stint as a music major.
So, I pitched the full idea after briefly refreshing myself with a couple of Schumann biographies in the library, and the professor absolutely adored the idea. She said, “It’s not a short film, but if I was in Hollywood and you pitched that idea, I’d throw millions at you to write it.”
Egad. More guilt. Because now, not only doe she know I’m a borderline insane go-getter, now she thinks I’m really smart and full of wonderful ideas, as well.
You know what I need to stop being? Irish-Catholic. See, I was raised in a secular household, but we still have the horrible sense of self-loathing and guilt that those crazy Catholics have. I wish I’d been raised by sociopaths.
But, see, this is why I don’t lie (much). For one, I’m not particular good at it, and for another, even with a tiny, harmless (to her) white lie, I’m racked with guilt, and I will be for the rest of my life.
At any rate, after class, I went to Dunkin’ Donuts and got a coffee refill (and some random, free donut-holes; apparently in donut-land, “Nothing else” means “Why don’t you give me some free donut-holes?” — not that I’m complaining) and then jaunted over to my fiction class. On the way, this guy was walking the second-cutest dog in the history of the universe, so I decided to hang out with him awhile and ask him random, possibly irritating questions while allowing the dog to chew on some coconut donut-holes. I hope she liked them better than I do.
Aaaaaaanyway, it was a session full of gloom and doom. Fiction Writing II concentrates on parodies, which I may have written about before, but it’s not like Weird Al parodies that are, you know, entertaining. It’s basically line-by-line copying of the structure and meat of a story, while grafting minor changes on top of it. I really, really hate doing that. It’s like a class in plagiarism. It’s the same reason I hated my creative writing class in high school. “Here, read this story; now, copy it.”
We’re in college. Hasn’t anybody developed a style yet? If they haven’t, what the hell have they been doing with themselves? They’re supposed to be fiction writers, for Christ’s sake! I have a style, and I’m a screenwriter. I chose the writing style that’s compared to a blueprint (not to architectural design; no, just the actual blueprint made when the design is complete). What the hell am I doing with a style when these people need to smoke pot, play games, and plagiarize in order to attain a sense of style?
I just don’t get it, but the entire class session frustrated me.
On the train ride home, I encountered the amazing, expanding fat man. Now, I’m not exactly petite, but there should be some kind of rule, like Southwest Airlines, where two fat guys can’t sit right next to each other on a train. Especially in seats parallel to the doors, where you’re basically wedged in between a plexiglass wall and another seat.
What I do to account for my somewhat tremendous girth is I huddle as much as I can. Did Jabba do the same thing? No. I swear to God, he let it all hang out, but then somehow he expanded, like yeast. I was somehow pressed against the wall, unable to breathe or read or do anything at all. At one point, I thought maybe I was the one who was expanding, and my brain almost exploded. But then Jabba suddenly hitched his breath, and he shrunk and suddenly there was a ton of room.
But, then, more expansion. Sigh.
Forty-five unbelievably irritating, foul-stench-filled minutes later, I got to deal with the fun of driving home in rush hour.
Here’s what I think is silly: calling something “rush hour” when everybody on the planet drives at five below the speed limit. And this isn’t a case of, “Well, there’s so much traffic, it’s hard to speed up.” I take a road that was particularly well-designed and only has minor congestion. It’s just idiots who can’t get up to 40 or 45, depending on the particular stretch of road.
What the fuck is going on? Why don’t these people want to get home as badly as I do? Why are they driving so lazily? What do they know that I don’t?
It was at that point that I began screaming loudly. For no reason, really. Just a random, “I’ve had it with the world” sort of primal scream. As I was uncontrollably screaming as I came flailing down Touhy, past Adult World, I thought to myself that I should feel better after this. I’d read at some time or another that primal screaming is a good thing for the body, mind, and soul. Just let it out, caveman-style, and all your troubles melt away. It’s like a full-body massage, except louder and with less chance of sexy shenanigans.
I didn’t feel better after my mouth decided to close and I stopped screaming. I actually felt worse, because now, not only did I have a bad day, not only did I realize that I’m steadily becoming more and more fed up with my life — now I was screaming uncontrollably at random times.
I decided it’s probably time to start seeing somebody about this.
Posted by Stan on October 16, 2003 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | School Rants
October 14, 2003
Back on the Dead Horse
I had one of the worst mornings in recent memory today. I woke up to pitch blackness. Sometimes this happens. My alarm clock is a piece of shit, and I’m too cheap to buy a new one. The consequence is that it will randomly go off in the middle of the night, even though it’s set for 7 a.m.
But this wasn’t one of those mornings. It actually was 7 a.m. — it was pitch black because enormous thunderheads had completely blotted out the sun.
Now, I like the rain. I really do. I like to stare at thunderstorms, I pray for tornadoes (because even though they almost never touch down anywhere near me, they really shake things up storm-wise), and I love the sound of the rain.
But this really threw me off, because my eyes hadn’t adjusted and I couldn’t see anything in the house. My parents decided not to leave any lights on for me before they left to work, so I stumbled around by feel, got myself some coffee, and promptly spilled it all over the couch.
This could have, and by all means should have, been a catastrophe, but we bought smart. My mom and I bitch incessantly about how uncomfortable this couch is (it was much better in the store, and we had already sent two back because they were uncomfortable), but it has this miracle stain-protecting fabric that causes any sort of pigmentation to just roll off of it. I don’t pretend to understand the science behind it; I was just happy that I didn’t have to expect a beheading when I got home.
So, I went to take a shower when I saw an enormous spider sauntering across the hall. Now, I’m (1) insane, (2) slightly obsessive-compulsive, and (3) deathly afraid of any creature that is 1/1000 of my size, so my immediate reaction was this: (1) shriek loudly, (2) nearly vomit, and (3) run back into my room, grab the pair of pants I wore yesterday, throw it over the spider, and dive onto it, hoping the enormity of me and would crush the nefarious arachnid.
I left the pants just laying there. I didn’t want to pick them up and discover that the spider had somehow gotten away. That would haunt me. No, seriously.
So, I got ready for the day and left at the normal time, stupidly not allowing an extra 15 minutes for what traffic reporters call a “rain delay” (ho ho!). Consequently, my 25-minute drive turned into a 45-minute drive, and my 40-minute train ride turned into a 60-minute train ride. As I’ve already mentioned, I get to class obsessively early, so I wasn’t late, but I was still going nuts about only being 15 minutes early as opposed to the normal 45.
Now, last week we were forced into groups to discuss the character bios we had to write (this is my screenwriting 2 class, incidentally). I got paired with a nice guy, who is also in my script analysis class, and a really attractive girl with low self-esteem. I sort of hit it off with the girl, and I was disappointed when she hadn’t shown up by the time class started.
She did show up about half an hour late and sat down next to me (good sign). She even said “hi,” despite the fact that another student was in front of the class pitching and she should have remained silent. I started to casually glance at her legs when I noticed her cell phone sitting on top of her open purse. It was on, which was odd because most people turn them off. She must have had it on “vibrate” or “silent,” that wily go-getter.
She got called up to pitch, and I really liked the script she came up with. Like I said, I read her character bio last week, and it was good, but she really had no idea what story she wanted to tell — she just wanted to create an interesting character and allow the story to be built around the character. Sigh. A woman after my own heart.
Then, I struck on inspiration. See, in most of the writing courses here, they have what’s called a “first reader,” which is pretty self-explanatory, but if you’re a total idiot: one student in class reads your work “first” and vice-versa. (The theory is that it’s important to get as many different perspectives as you can, but not every student has time to read 20 scripts in a week, so you only have a first reader, plus the professor.) So, say I told her I wanted to be her first reader because I really liked her script idea. And she agreed. And that gave me license to call her incessantly and essentially stalk her until the end of the semester.
It’s a winning plan, but there’s one caveat. While she pitched, I kept glancing at her phone for no other reason than being a snoop, and I noticed that she actually was receiving a call. A call from someone named Clint.
Shit! She had a boyfriend! Or possibly just a friend. But, no, she’s too attractive to be single. He must be the boyfriend. But, hey, that’s never exactly stopped me before, so all is not lost.
Then came another hurdle: During the break, I asked the professor, who hadn’t mentioned first readers since the first day of class, “Are you gonna assign us first readers?”
“No,” he said, “I decided to drop that from the course.”
“Fuck,” I thought.
So, my plans were dashed, although I concocted a plan in the same vein on the way home. I thought I could just call this girl and tell her I really like her script idea and that, even though we’re not really doing the first reader thing in class, I’d like to read it and give her feedback. And then I’d give her the option of reading mine and doing the same. Then, there’s the factor of me doing this because I want to, not just because I have to.
Plus, the professor’s kind of an ass, so if I, like I do in almost every other semester in at least one class, join with her (and others) in a personal vendetta to rid the universe of said professor, we’re fighting a common enemy. And she’d welcome my feedback because I’d seem that much smarter than the professor.
And, obviously, the rest would be history.
But, of course, this is all my fantasy happy play world of make-believe right here. In reality, it won’t work out nearly that well. In reality, she’ll have a boyfriend and be incensed by the mere suggestion that I read anything she writes, and she will sic her menacing, 6’ 4” hunk of muscle mass and bulk-up powder on my unsuspecting, doughy ass.
Actually, that sounds more like my fantasy unhappy world of paranoia.
So maybe it’s worth a shot. All she can do is say no. Well, saying no is the first of many horrible things she can do, but the possibility of being murdered in cold blood by such an attractive woman only strengthens my resolve.
Posted by Stan on October 14, 2003 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Fumbling Attempts at Relationships
October 13, 2003
Job Interview
I’ve been granted permission to be a federal work-study employee this year, which is nice because I have a tendency to spend money like normal people drink water, so it’d be good to have an income.
The day after I turned in my application, I got a call from a woman asking me if I wanted a job in the Student Activities department. Since I was too lazy to actually find something else, I figured I may as well go for it, so I set up an interview for this afternoon.
I showed up 10 minutes early to the interview, but that didn’t matter. The Boss showed up 40 minutes late, and one of the first questions she asked me was, “Are you punctual?” Ho-ho.
I didn’t take the time to explain to her that I’m at least slightly obsessive-compulsive, so I am required by mental law to be at least 45 minutes early* everywhere (it started with 10 minutes and has gradually worked its way up; by the time I’m 25, I’ll be six hours early to everything). I figured information like this would hurt my chances of gainful employment, and since I need to start a job this week in order to still be eligible, I thought it best to answer questions without adding any extraneous information. This is hard for me to do, with my natural tendency to ramble.
The interview lasted a grand total of five minutes. I’m glad I anticipated it being an hour when I planned it, because the total time spent was 45 minutes. Basically, it went like this:
The Boss: Sorry I was so late. I got caught somewhere.
Me: No biggie.
The Boss: So, what hours could you work?
Me: (rambling off my hours)
The Boss: (writing them down) Okay, here’s what the job is: you hand out U-passes to people who need them.
Me: And…?
The Boss: Occasionally, you’ll be running errands to the main building.
Me: That’s it?
The Boss: Oh, and sometimes we’ll have 15 people on at a time, but we only have two stations, so bring a book.
Me (thinking): Best. Job. Evar.
She said she was “about 75% sure” I had the job. She just has to check with her superior. She said she’d get back to me on Thursday. I hope I get this job, because seriously, I need money.
I am a sad, sad human being.
*You might be thinking, “But Stan, you said you were only 10 minutes early to the interview.” You, sir, are an idiot. The interview was at two o’clock; I was there at 9:30, but I did some work and finished around noon. I went to the office at noon and asked if I could interview early, and when they said I couldn’t because The Boss was out of the building, I sat downstairs reading for the next hour and fifty minutes before going back up.
Posted by Stan on October 13, 2003 6:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | “I’m a living joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
How to Piss Off Women and Apologize and Make Them Believe You’re Sorry When You Are, in Fact, Not Sorry at All
I had an interview today for a work-study job, so I went down a bit early and got ahead on some work. Around ten o’clock, Lucy called me up. I had set my cell phone to a different ringtone, so I didn’t know my phone was actually ringing until after it had gone to VoiceMail (damn you, violin sonata #2!). I called her back right away, excited as I was that she actually took time to call me (she usually calls me on the weekends, but I didn’t hear from her at all last weekend).
My excitement immediately turned to irritation when she brought her up her boyfriend, followed by dismay when she announced to me that she wouldn’t be coming home this weekend. I really wanted to see her. I had plans to surprise her with a movie that I thought she’d really like. She apologized about it, and then asked, “What was the movie you wanted to go to?”
“Bubba Ho-Tep,” I responded glumly.
“What is that?” she asked. Sigh.
“It’s about Elvis and this black guy who thinks he’s John F. Kennedy. They fight mummies,” I said, giving her the loosest plot summary I possibly could.
“Aww,” she said, sounding honestly disappointed, “that sounds like something I’d want to see.”
“I know.”
“Well,” she said, “if you want to come out here and visit me, I can figure out a good weekend for you to come.” By this, I assume she meant a weekend where she didn’t feel socially required to get completely hammered; she could just get slightly hammered while I furrowed my brow at her.
“But,” she added, “you have to be willing to come to the bars.”
“Gosh,” I said, the sarcasm in my voice approaching malice, “that sounds like fun.”
Silence on the other end. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that last.
“Stan,” she finally nagged, “there’s nothing else to do out here.”
“I know,” I said, “that’s why I don’t live there anymore.” Again with the saying things I shouldn’t be saying.
“Whatever,” she said. “If you don’t want to see me, fine.”
“I —” I defended myself.
“I’ll call you tonight,” she said tersely.
“But —” I continued.
“My break’s over, I gotta go.” Click.
Wow.
In recent weeks, it has been brought to my attention that I mostly sabotage my somewhat pitiful attempts at relationships by, for example, becoming really hostile, saying things I don’t mean, and then never, ever apologizing for the things I say and do while under the influence of my immense, soul-crushing ego and irritating superiority complex.
This realization has made me even guiltier than usual about everything I do in life, so I decided to make a change. From now on, there will be a kinder, gentler Stan. I need to tap into my sensitive, pony-tailed subconscious and pull out some lilac-covered bullshit in an attempt to be nicer when I say and do stupid things.
With that foremost in my mind, I called Lucy back about 30 minutes later. I was expecting her VoiceMail, since she was supposed to be at work. I could leave a brief, polite apology message and she could call me back and shower me with verbal kisses. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Instead, when I called her, she picked up. “What’s up, Stan?”
Well, she seemed less mad. That was a good sign. But it blew my whole polite, suave apology angle. I started stammering all over myself, but fortunately she didn’t really notice because she was talking instead of listening. Blah-blah she got off early blah-blah how awesome, et cetera.
“So, what’d you want?” she asked. Now, she seemed pissed again, like she couldn’t stand me calling back to further insult her lifestyle choices.
“I, um, I just wanted to apologize,” I said. She didn’t say anything, but I could somehow hear her perking up with astonishment. I’ve said lots of shitty things to Lucy, but I’ve never apologized for them. It’s the new me, bay-bee.
“See,” I continued, “I guess, you know, sometimes I can be a dick.”
“Yeah,” she agreed without even slight hesitation. Great for the self-esteem.
“But, I mean, I want to see you, so if you want to go hang out at the bars, I’ll go hang out with you,” I said. “I want to see you; it doesn’t really matter where.” This last was a big lie. It does matter where, and I really have no interest in going and hanging out at “the bars.” Lucy thinks this makes me a hypocrite, because I’ll hang out at dives for decades if they have decent live music or really awful poetry slams. Maybe it does make me a hypocrite, but I dunno. I don’t like drunks, even when there’s decent music to drown them out. But I’m willing to muddle through it, especially if I’m with sober friends. It’s a totally different environment than going to a place where everybody’s getting loaded and I have to tolerate their bullshit.
Aaaaaanyway, since I was compromising (and by “compromising” I mean “completely caving”), Lucy immediately reneged and said, “No, we don’t have to go to the bars. It’s just that, you know, everybody’s gonna know you’re there, and if I have somebody over but we just disappear for the whole weekend, they’re gonna think there’s something wrong with you.”
Notice how it’s not because she wants me to be social so she can introduce me to all her “sisters,” who I’m sure have heard so much about me (eyes rolling…), so I can finally truly understand the terrifying world of the Greek system, and so on and so forth. No, it’s just because they might think I have elephantiasis and porphyria and am not allowed to be outside. Lucy’s completely embarrassed of me, not that she shouldn’t be.
“Although there probably is something wrong with you,” she added pleasantly. What the fuck?
“Yeah, I know,” I agreed. Who am I to disagree (uh-oh, Eurhythmics in head… must… kill… self…)? “That’s fine. I’ll hang out with them, if you want me to. I mean, I just feel bad about it, is all. And I want to see you.”
“I know,” Lucy muttered and grudgingly admitted that she wanted to see me, too. “I’ll call you when I figure out what weekend would be good.”
“Fine,” I said, and we hung up amiably.
I’m not sure if the new me is working out all that well. If it’s gonna turn me into a liar and a phoney, maybe it’s not for me.
Or maybe I should just do what normal people do, and piss off all my friends, who know me and realize there is something deeply wrong with me and pity me enough to not completely disavow my existence, and just be a liar and a phoney with women who might have sex with me at some point.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Posted by Stan on October 13, 2003 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
October 11, 2003
Friday Five…on Saturday (2)
- Do you watch sports? If so, which ones?
Baseball and football, and none of that college shit — just MLB and NFL for me, thank you very much. - What/who are your favorite sports teams and/or favorite athletes?
CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBS. Also, the Bears.Personally, my favorite athlete is Kordell Stewart. His ability to throw a ball onto an enormous, empty patch of grass — or, even better, a patch of grass currently occupied by several members of the opposing team — has put him next to Cade McNown in the Bears quarterback club.
- Are there any sports you hate?
Tennis. I mean, seriously, what the fuck is going on? - Have you ever been to a sports event?
Uh…yeah. That’s kind of a shitty question. But, yeah, I’ve been to Cubs games, I’ve been to Bears games, I’ve been to Bulls games (back when they were good, even), I went to a Blackhawks game once even though I’m not a hockey fan, I went to a Wolves game once because I enjoy blood, and I went to a Sox game because I’m an idiot. - Do/did you play any sports (in school or other)? How long did you play?
Heh…not really. I played tee-ball when I was a little tyke, and then when I got older I played baseball…for about a month. Then I broke my arm, and since I hated playing sports (like watching, hate playing), I pretty much just quit and never looked back. And now I’m a fat tub of shit. How ironic. Or not.Actually, I did used to play basketball a lot in elementary school, during recess. I was never good, but I was always bigger (not fatter, yet) than the other guys, so my general strategy was to scream at people and shove them around so my team got the ball. I was basketball’s first defensive linebacker.
Posted by Stan on October 11, 2003 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Friday Five/Albums of the Week
October 9, 2003
Spillage
The thing you have to understand about me and this new girl I mentioned a little while ago is that we both have foul tempers. That’s why we get along so well. It’s also why we don’t get along well at all. We’re a strange pair, she and I, her and me. We’re also not a pair at all anymore.
See, that was sort of like Dickens, except I’m not paid by the word — I just ramble incoherently.
I originally wrote a long entry detailing our dramatic break-up, but since it got a little tedious and I really (deservedly) come off as the bad guy, I figured maybe it’d be best not to shatter my humble readers’ opinions of me and decided not to post it. So, here’s the short version: I turned down sex, or at least something nearer to sex than my usual thrice-daily masturbation routine, and said something bad about a poem, at which point we shouted at each other and then agreed it would be best if I left. I attempted to make amends, but to no avail. Officially, I imagine, we are over.
But that doesn’t stop me from making an idiot out of myself in front of her. No, nothing can prevent my god-given, constitutional right to do that!
See, this morning, as is part of my normal morning routine, I went down early, loaded up on coffee and donuts at Dunkin’ Donuts, and sat in the cafeteria of the film building, staring at the light pedestrian and vehicle traffic on 11th Street. Actually, I’m usually reading, but sometimes I get distracted by 11th Street. I find pedestrians interesting. I also find parallel parkers interesting, especially when they do it in a tow zone (“Gee, if I turn my emergency flashers on, they’ll think I had an emergency that lasted nine hours!”).
At one point, I saw this particular new girl walking down 11th. She, like most of the people walking down the street, looked in through the windows and got an eyeful of Stan. She furrowed her brow, possibly remembering my comment about her poem, and I imagine she planned to ignore me until I attempted to wave at her. I wasn’t going to do a goofy, bombastic wave — just a subtle hand-motion that would allow me to acknowledge her without coming on to strong via the power of meaningless greeting actions.
But, see, here’s something you may or may not know about me: I lack depth perception. My eyes, in the words of my highly competent ophthalmologist, “don’t work good,” and consequently I cannot perceive what the French often refer to as “the third dimension.” I see everything flat, like a movie screen. I bump into nearly everything: walls, doors, doorways, people, lightposts, muthafuckin’ frontas, and so on. In my fitful efforts to grasp objects without first looking directly at them, I often end up grabbing air.
So, it shouldn’t really be surprising to note that, when I raised my hand to make my subtle wave, I instead knocked my cup of coffee over and spilled it all over the table. I clumsily attempted to grab the cup (which only made it worse, as I just pushed it and caused it to roll off the table and onto the floor) while at the same time guarding my book and backpack from excess moisture while at the same time trying to look up at this girl and smile to indicate that, yeah, I’m a dumbass and gosh, it’s hilarious.
When I looked up at her, she had stopped and was staring at me like I was the most pathetic human being she had ever seen. It wasn’t the first time I’ve gotten that look, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
I tried, as I trundled my fat ass to the opposite side of the table to grab the coffee cup, to wave at her, even to motion her to come over and talk to me. Her look changed subtly into one of pure, unmitigated anger. I gathered she was declining my invitation. She sighed visibly — in fact, I could almost hear it through the glass — and continued walking.
I got about 450,000 napkins and wiped up the mess I made, all the while half-expecting (that’s the optimistic, or stupid, half of my brain) that she’d come around the corner and help me clean it up. But that didn’t happen, obviously.
So ends another of Stan’s pitiful attempts at relationships.
My mother, who objects to me talking to anyone of the opposite sex but is calmly resigned to the fact that I’m apparently sleeping with every woman I know*, so she sometimes, when she thinks it’s the right time, tells me that I should always learn something from a relationship.
Strangely, I learned two things, despite the brevity of the actual relationship:
- Never turn down sex when it is offered by a woman. It is a rare and glorious opportunity, especially if she’s sober at the time.
- Never insult the poetry of a woman, no matter how bad it is. This is especially true if you couldn’t do any better.
*Not true, but damn, I wish it were…
Posted by Stan on October 9, 2003 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Fumbling Attempts at Relationships
October 8, 2003
The Ex’s New Style
I passed The Ex on the street yesterday. She’s dyed her hair a bright red-pink sort of color. She looks like an idiot.
As I passed, I was going to point and laugh at her like the mature and responsible adult I am, but she averted her gaze like a woman on the streets of Riyadh, so I didn’t say anything at all.
I think she was trying to hide her face so I wouldn’t know it was her. But I did know it was her. Know why? Because I’m not completely retarded! (I am close, though.)
I think this hair-dyeing thing was a good idea. As a direct result of it, we have reached a new and critical phase in our relationship: the “completely ignoring one another” phase. This has to be easier than the “humiliate each other in public” phase.
I hope so, anyway.
Posted by Stan on October 8, 2003 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Fumbling Attempts at Relationships
October 6, 2003
That Lab Assistant
You’ll be happy to know that while most of my blog this summer was occupied by me writing about sexual fantasies with women who had no interest in me, I was still playing the field and actually attempting to find a disinterested woman who would be too lazy to fend off my advances. Which brings me to a tale I’ve never related: the story of the blonde chick in the lab.
This girl was cute and smart and completely not into me at all. Still, I wouldn’t let go. I told nearly everyone in class that I had the hots for her during my two-week effort to figure out what the hell her name was. As it turned out, nobody in my class had any idea what her name was, and they were all highly amused by my schoolboy crush on her.
Furthermore, I kept bumping into her outside the lab. I’d see her on the train, around the building, et cetera, and my natural inclination was to assume that this was some sort of serendipity. Therefore, if I pursued her, everything would work out and I’d live happily ever after.
In short, I’m a moron.
Still, I thought it’d at least be good to know her name. I mean, if I’m going to attempt to ask her out or something, it’d be kind of embarrassing if I got her number, called her, and then her roommate answers and I say, “Uh, can I speak to…um…you know, the blonde one?” Know what I mean?
So, since nobody in my class knew who she was, and none of the random people I knew in other classes knew her name, I had to craftily find out from the other lab assistants, when the blonde wasn’t working.
(At this point I should interject that the smartest thing to do would have been to simply ask the blonde herself what her name was. “Oh, I didn’t catch your name,” for example. But this was a weird scenario. This wasn’t my normal “Jesus I wanna fuck you” or “Wow I think I might be falling in love” deal — it was a sixth-grade, sweaty-palms, aw-shucks, beet-red-faced crush. I’d get very shy and wiggly for absolutely no reason whenever she was around, and I found my mouth cottoning up whenever I tried to say anything to her. In short, I did think of this, and I did want to try it — I just failed over and over.)
So, one afternoon when the blonde was not working, I attempted to do some reconnaissance at the lab counter. Two other assistants, a Big Guy and an Italian Dude, were working. Being that the lab was pretty much my exclusive hangout for most of the summer, I knew all the lab assistants and they knew me. It was very relaxed, and I felt safe approaching them with my question.
I said, “You know that blonde who works here in the morning?”
They both nodded.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
The Italian Dude had his back to me, but the Big Guy grinned at me. He said nothing, but his eyes said, “Wow, way to not be subtle.” I imagine the Italian Dude had a similar look.
It would take a lot of cleverness to get out of this jam. I continued talking. “Yeah, she said I had film back.”
Wow, that was stupid. Anybody could give me film back at any time — it didn’t need to be the blonde, and if the blonde herself had said I had film back, she would have given it to me right away. Both of the guys knew that, so they both looked at me like I was a jackass, which I am, and the Big Guy said, “You need to know her name to get your film back?”
“Uh…” I explained, realizing they were essentially mocking me. It was gentle ribbing, to be sure, but it was still somewhat humiliating.
“You know we can give it back to you, right?”
“Uhh…yeah, I knew that,” I said, playing it off. “Of course I knew that.”
The Italian Dude just started giggling and turned back around. I felt retarded.
So, a few days later, one of my friends from class (I referred to him as The Jock in my initial description of the class, so we’ll go with that) approached me and said, “Guess who likes you?”
As I mentioned, I’d already told everybody in the class about my crush in my efforts to find out her name. So, he was just kidding around. My response was a very effective, “Shut up.”
But then he responded, “No, seriously, I heard them talking about you.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I thought. “That can’t possibly be good.”
“She has a boyfriend, though,” The Jock continued.
“What? How do you know?”
“Because she said, ‘I have a boyfriend,’” The Jock replied.
“Oh.”
“But she still likes you,” The Jock said.
“Huh?” Obviously, I was genuinely surprised by this.
“She said you’re cute, and that she’d go out with you in a second if she wasn’t involved.”
“Really?”
“No.” The Jock was a bastard.
“Oh.” A beat. “What did she actually say?”
“She said you were funny,” The Jock said.
“That’s encouraging,” I said glumly.
“I guess,” The Jock said apathetically and moved on.
So, a little later on, I approached the blonde for one of the many reasons we generally have for bugging people in the lab. It was very awkward, and as she helped me, she said, “My name’s Julie, by the way.” She was about as subtle as I was.
“Oh, right,” I said. “I thought it was.” I had no idea.
“I heard you like me,” Julie said, like we were on the playground in fourth grade. She was mocking me.
“Well,” I said, “I think you’re cute. I don’t really know you well enough to ‘like’ you.”
“Were you gonna ask me out?” she asked.
“I was gonna,” I explained, “but I found out you have a boyfriend, or whatever. Oh well, no biggie.”
“Yeah,” Julie said noncommittally.
We shared a hideously awkward moment, and then I said, “So, uh, would you have gone out with me if I’d asked?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
AWKWARD.
That was about the end of that. After, Julie and I essentially resumed our student-lab assistant relationship and never spoke of my crush again. I always felt awkward around her, even though I think she got over it pretty quickly.
Posted by Stan on October 6, 2003 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Fumbling Attempts at Relationships
October 5, 2003
My First Time
My salivating fans know that I’m somewhat of a geek. They also know that I am a master of understatement. With that in mind, over the past several years, I’ve met a lot of people online. I’ve entrenched myself in a virtual world that is very separate from the real world (except for the infamous Jive connection), but at the same time is equally important.
There are some people I know online, people I’ve never met in real life, who I trust more than many of the people I know in real life. Maybe the distance thing is helpful — they aren’t a part of my “real” life, so I can be sure that if I tell them something in confidence, they won’t blab it to everybody. Mostly because there is no “everybody” to whom they can blab.
It’s all strange, though, because at the same time that this personal trust exists, I would desperately fear becoming “real” friends with them. I wouldn’t particularly want to meet them outside of the virtual world, not because I don’t like them, but because of a strange fear that it would ruin everything. Perhaps that’s more of my paranoia getting the better of me, but I just don’t feel comfortable meeting people I know online.
Unless they’re women.
And, see, that’s the trick. I am, by and large, desperate and lonely. When I encounter a woman on the Internet, one I don’t know in real life, I instantly create a fantasy image of who they are — obviously, they become my ideal woman, the one I’ve been waiting to meet and seduce all my life.
Which brings me to a few months ago, shortly before the summer break, when I actually met an online person in real life for the very first time (see, from the title, you probably thought it would be a different first time, huh?).
I’d been subscribed to a particular Internet forum devoted to creative expression. See, I pretend to be a writer, but instead of actually writing stuff, I mostly just troll web forums and newsgroups critiquing others’ work. And strangely, shortly after I subscribed to this forum, a thread popped up suggesting the idea of a creative writing club in the Chicago area.
It was suggested, as it happens, by a woman.
I immediately leaped on the bandwagon, indicating that this was a terrific idea. In fact, it was. Possible romantic liaisons aside, I have a hard time getting legitimate independent criticism of my work, mostly because I have no truly “independent” outlet. Everybody who reads my stuff are friends, and if not friends, well-wishers who are constantly encouraging. While I do want encouragement, I also want harsh, blunt criticism.
I used to have a girl who edited my work. We weren’t really friends — acquaintances, mainly, and she was good at what she did. She understood story structure, character, conflict, et cetera, and she was good for springboarding ideas and developing my various projects.
Then, some really weird shit happened (which is a whole other entry — remind me to write it), and now we don’t acknowledge one another’s existence. And, trust me, it’s better that way. But since then, I’ve never really had anybody who could read, understand, and criticize my work as thoroughly and as engagingly as she did.
Sigh.
So, I thought this would be good for my writing. And possibly good for me, because, OMG, hawt chix0r dead ahead!
We agreed to meet. We actually tried to get several people to join up, but it turned out we were the only two interested. We set a date, time, and place, and I printed out my best example of recent work prior to the meeting.
We met in the early evening, after I got out of class and she got off of work, at a little sandwich shop in the Loop. As a restaurant, the place sucked. Terrible food, terrible coffee. But, because of that, it was virtually empty most of the time. That’s why I suggested we meet there.
For some reason, the upper level (where the seating is) was extremely hot. Like, hot enough that I was sweating as soon as I got up there. This made things uncomfortable at first. Then, things got more uncomfortable: the only person there was a hefty blond girl chugging away at one of the shitty sandwiches.
Was this the girl? She was not the woman of my dreams. Not physically, anyway. I don’t want to sound like one of these asshole men who perpetuates the idea that every woman has to be a stick figure, except with a slight bulge at the waist and an excessive bulge in the general mammary area. Really, that’s not me. As someone who has been thoroughly unattractive for approximately 18 years (I was cute when I was a kid), I know the value of looking for the inner beauty of a person.
So, I didn’t dismiss her completely. Sure, she was Rush Limbaughian in girth, did not wearing particularly flattering clothes for her elephantine physique, and was not really pretty in the face — but maybe she had a personality and intellect that would make all that melt away.
“Are you Gen’ral Stan?” she enquired, just as I was beginning to hope/think that maybe this was the wrong person after all. Her voice was remiscent of fried eggs on a chalkboard.
“Uh, yeah,” I said softly. Possibly, I shouldn’t have said that.
“I’m Emily,” she said. I don’t really remember what her name is, but Emily strikes a chord with me, so let’s go with it.
“I’m Stan,” I said, sitting down across from her.
“Shall we get started?” Seriously, “shall.”
“Okay,” I said, already wanting to turn around and run away. Instead, I handed her my story, and she tossed hers at me.
I started reading silently, wanting to take in what I could on the surface. She immediately whipped out a blue pen and started scrawling all over mine. Hrm.
Her story was pretty painful. Not badly written, but the story — oh, the story! It was a point-of-view exercise on the story of Tristan and Isolde. For those who don’t know the story (or, like me, only know the Wagner opera that takes an assload of liberties), it’s all about a wacky love potion causing somebody to fall in love with the wrong person. So, he gets married but is in love with someone else. So, he goes off and screws around with her, and in the end everybody dies. That’s as brief as I can get.
At any rate, she took it from the point-of-view of Tristan’s wife. It was a somewhat amusing feminist take on the story, but it reeked of cheesiness. I, already knowing that this whole thing was a terrible mistake, decided it would be in my best interest to simply be complimentary, run away, and never come back. It would be pointless to waste my time debating the merits of the story when I didn’t actually care and would most likely never see her again.
But, then, she finished my piece, which was basically a character-sketch of Lucy. Not a very flattering one, but then again, Lucy will never read it. I thought that, while it wasn’t the greatest thing in the history of the universe, it was a pretty decent exercise in writing through a character.
“Your female character is weak,” she said flatly.
Huh. There are only two characters — the girl and then a random guy. The entire thing is from the girl’s point-of-view and, all things considered, I thought she was pretty well-developed, or, if nothing else, was a spot-on study of Lucy. Then again, I’m not a woman. Or, for that matter, a feminist. But it /was Lucy, and Lucy is a pretty strange and unique person. I couldn’t be accused of creating a weak character, because the only thing that’s fictional is the situation I put her in. She couldn’t accuse me of falling back on generalizations or stereotypes.
“I think you spend a lot of time falling back on generalizations and stereotypes,” she elaborated.
Oh.
“Well,” I tried to explain, but she stared at me with a frumpy sort of apathy that bugged me, “it’s a character-study that’s sort of based on a friend of mine.”
“Really?” she asked pointedly, as if, based on this piece, she couldn’t imagine me knowing any actual women on the planet. “How well do you know her?”
“I hate to use the term ‘best friend,’ but…” (Of course, at this point in time, Lucy and I weren’t really entirely on a speaking basis, but she didn’t need to know that. Plus, prior to our lapse in conversation, we were very close.)
Emily said, “Well, she’s just not a very strong character. I mean, she’s completely stereotypical, unless she’s supposed to have really low self-esteem or something…”
Which is funny, because that’s really the whole point of the piece. It’s all about a woman with extremely low self-esteem and the, shall we say, foolhearty things she does as a result. While it’s not explicitly stated because it’s from the point-of-view of the easily duped woman, one can infer that the male character in the story is dishonest and manipulative. He wants to get her into bed, and he knows exactly what to say to accomplish the task (SPOILER: It works).
(Funnily enough, I wrote a “sequel” to it, from the guy’s post-coital point-of-view. My fiction writing professor, for whom I wrote it, has been bugging me to get it to her for nearly a year now. I just ran into her last week, and the first words out of her mouth were, “Stan, I was looking forward to you dropping that story in my box months ago. I’m still waiting.” It’s good I remembered, because now I can print it out and get it to her.)
I thought very condescendingly to myself that I should discount Emily’s entire evaluation of the story because she didn’t “get” it. Usually, it’s very hard for people not to “get” the things I write. The only people who don’t understand them are people who have no sense of humor. Much like this blog, I write in a very frank and turgid style, light on symbol, heavy on scatalogical humor. It’s not hard to follow the story or understand the characters; the only thing somebody might not get are the jokes, but this particular piece was pretty light on humor.
I grimly assessed Emily, my independent critic: she was an idiot.
Still, I threw her a bone and tried to defend my work. “Well, I myself am not a woman, contrary to popular opinion. I can’t say I know exactly what’s going through a woman’s head at any given moment, or ever. But I know this girl pretty well, and I think if nothing else, I understand her.”
“It was a noble effort,” she said patronizingly. I wanted to punch her in the neck, but I have a strict policy of not punching specific body parts if I can’t distinguish them from other parts. “Your male character, on the other hand, was really well thought out.”
This surprised me even more than her saying my female character was stereotypical. The male character was completely undeveloped. He just sort of existed to drive along the barebones plot, so we could get to know more about the female character.
Maybe, I thought, she understood men about as well as I understood women. It was a personality stalemate.
“Well, I’ll definitely keep what you say in mind,” I said, glancing at my watch. We had agreed to meet, and had met, at 5:45. It was now…5:55. “But I have to run.”
“Already?” she asked.
“Uh…yeah,” I replied.
“Well, are we going to meet again?” Emily wondered.
Oh, Jesus. What the hell was I supposed to say to that? Of course we weren’t going to meet again, but I can’t just say that.
Or can I?
“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure if I —”
“How about in two weeks?”
“Yeah, okay.”
Two weeks would give me enough time to move to Peru and manufacture a new identity.
She wrote down the date and time in some sort of day planner, and I was about to leave when she asked, “Where’d you say you live again?”
“Uh…Oak Brook.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “I live in Antioch.”
Was she trying to start another conversation so I wouldn’t leave?
Instinctively, and rather stupidly, I said, “Antioch? Jesus, that’s a haul.”
“Tell me about it,” she said and forced out a laugh. “I’m actually from Iowa, but I moved here awhile ago.”
She had mental powers. She was playing me, just like the male character in my story, but my stupid conversational skills were jamming the “OH SHIT RUN” signal in my brain.
“Yeah? I went to school in Iowa for a little while.”
And, so, with that, we started an actual conversation. It turns out I wasn’t really giving her enough of a chance. So she didn’t like my writing — so what? As it turned out, after talking to her for awhile, I realized she had possibly the most cloying personality of any human being who ever existed in the universe.
Needless to say, after hearing a hell of a lot about her childhood and her current living situation, politely chuckling at her jokes (which weren’t funny), and also sharing my own brief reminiscences that matched her own, I decided that I must never see this woman again. Ever.
I found that another 20 minutes had gone by, so it was more than enough time — especially since we weren’t even discussing writing anymore — for me to gracefully run the fuck away.
“Okay, I really gotta go,” I said, grabbing my bag and heading for the stairs.
“All right, see you in two weeks,” she said.
I muttered something indistinguishable so I wouldn’t have to lie. An unnecessary gesture, since I had already lied and said I would go. But, come on, lying once is okay, but lying twice about the same thing is just mean.
After that, I just ran away. And I never saw Internet girl again, although I noticed she did post several more times in her thread about the creative writing club.
The gooey moral center of today’s entry is as follows: never, ever meet women you’ve met on the Internet. EVER.
Unless they’re hot.
Posted by Stan on October 5, 2003 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation
October 4, 2003
Ben Franklin
When I was in junior high, I hung out a lot with a guy named Art and two girls, Mandi (she spelled it with the “i” to be ironic, see) and Jenny. In a time of my life where nearly everything that happened confused me for one reason or another, it was nice to have people like them around. Thanks to the magic of marijuana and LSD, they were able to cut through the bullshit and really help me understand what was going on.
I have a lot of stories about Art, Mandi, and Jenny (and others), and many of them are much more sordid than the one I’m about to tell. But this story has been in my head for the past few days for some reason, so I figured since I’m not planning on blogging about anything that’s happened to me over the past few weeks, I may as well throw my loyal readers a bone and write about something that happened many years ago.
So, unofficially, Art and I were in a band. Not a good band, by any means. In fact, it wasn’t much of a band at all. We had four guitar players, a bass player who couldn’t actually play the bass (but owned one), a drummer who didn’t own a drum set (but could play), and no singer. Needless to say, we played a lot of speed-metal, and we didn’t play it well (or fast).
On one of the three occasions during which we actually rehearsed — the last one, if I remember accurately; sometime shortly thereafter, we disbanded and pursued solo careers — we decided to take a break mid-way through and go up to our little “downtown” area to fuck around. We did this often, and despite the fact that we rarely did anything interesting, it never got old.
Essentially, our downtown area stretched over two blocks (it has since expanded to two-and-a-half blocks): on one side was a delapidated shopping center, and one the other side was a bustling strip-mall. Fascinating local trivia: the dilapidated shopping center thrived when I was a kid, and the strip-mall across the street was a wheat field. Jewel, which is owned by mega-chain Albertsons (a chain that people outside of Chicago may have actually heard of), was the shoppinf center’s — my God, am I actually using this pun? — crown-jewel (zing!).
At some point, they bought half of the wheat field, developed it, built a new Jewel, but kept the lease on the abandoned property so they wouldn’t have any competition. Because the Jewel was now across the street, along with several other new stores, the original shopping center lost most of its business, and most places closed down. Since then, Jewel gave up its lease, the shopping center was leveled and rebuilt as a Dominick’s (Safeway to out-of-towners), and it’s actually a nice little strip-mall now.
When I was in junior high, the focal point of the delapidated shopping center was a Walgreens drug store. Nestled behind it was the abandoned Jewel, an abandoned alternate grocery store (Michaels Finer Foods, my sister reminds me), an abandoned video store, a cocktail lounge that may or may not have been abandoned at that point, an abandoned laundromat, a Goodyear, a Ben Franklin five-and-dime, a clothing store, and an Ace hardware store. There was also a dollar movie theatre (formerly a dollar porn theatre) and a Burger King, but I don’t think they technically counted as a part of the shopping center.
We used to go and fuck around at the Walgreens, the Ace, and the Ben Franklin. We live in the suburbs; there’s really not a whole lot to do. If we were feeling ambitious, we’d go shoplift from Jewel, or the 7-Eleven down the street, but mostly we targeted the delapidated shopping center because it was just more feeble.
We mostly bought candy and soda and shit; if funds were low, we’d shoplift (OMG!), but mostly we were honest. Sometimes, we’d pull pranks, like taking the magnetic stickers out of wallets and attaching them to customers’ coats so they’d set off the alarm. Imagine the fun!
We also used to have quite a time at the Ben Franklin, which was independently owned and one of the very few Ben Franklin stores around. It was owned by this terrifying, elderly Polish couple who happened to live down the street from Art. They also owned the clothing store next door, which was conjoined via an open doorway. On a few occasions we’d rip stuff off and make our escape through the clothing store, which never had any business (and usually didn’t have any clerks).
Mostly, though, we’d just go there and pretend to steal stuff, just to harass the Polish couple. The husband would follow us around, watching us like a hawk (and not just because we were teenagers — my parents used to complain about the same thing happening to them), so we’d pretend to steal stuff, and then they’d try to catch us at the front door as we left and demand that we empty our pockets. When they found our pockets empty, baffled, they’d let us go.
When you’re 13, this is a rockin’ good time. Looking back, it all seems extremely silly.
So, on this final rehearsal day, we went down to Ben Franklin to fuck around for awhile. This was one of the times we had actually decided it would be in our best interest to do some shoplifting. We didn’t see the Polish husband, and the wife was lazily leaning against the checkout counter. We figured it would be a great day to grab some random shit.
I don’t remember what all was grabbed, but in particular I snatched a few Lego sets I didn’t have (I obsessively collected Legos until I was about 15). When we were all ready, purloined goods shoved under our puffy winter coats, we made a mad dash for the conjoining doorway.
And then we got caught. The Polish man, sunken eyes attempting to bulge out at his, leathery face melting as he leered down at us, stood blocking the doorway, hands on his hips in a Superman pose.
“Yoo haff tehngs,” he said. The comical Polish accent was somehow no longer comical. In fact, we were all scared shitless.
Art, our fearless leader, attempted to explain. “Uh…” he said levelly, his quaking body betraying the steadiness of the nonsense syllable.
“Gheff dem beck pliss,” the Polish man said. I looked around to find another method of escape and found his wife down the kitchenware aisle, blocking our only other path.
“What?” Art said dumbly. This was the first time I questioned Art’s leadership ability. Normally, he was the big alpha-male, dictating nearly everything we said and did. I was proud to be his second-in-command/best friend, but at that point, things started to slip.
“Gheff dem beck pliss,” the Polish man repeated, and added, “err I kohl peliss.”
“Oh, shit,” one of our bandmates, Mark, muttered.
“Yoo dahm rett,” the Polish man agreed.
Mark cracked immediately, pulling several useless trinkets out from under his coat and handing them to the Polish man. Imitating what my bowels threatened to do, I simply sucked in my gut and allowed the Lego boxes to drop to the floor with a dull thud. Art and our other band members also returned their almost-stolen merchandise.
“Tehnks,” the Polish man said. “Yoo dent came behck.”
“No,” Art said, speaking for all of us. “No, we won’t.”
“Yoo meh go,” the Polish man said, pointing at the front door.
“Yeah,” Art said. “Let’s go, guys.”
Bummed, we walked down to Ace and took advantage of their free Dum-Dum sucker policy. With approximately 780 million Dum-Dums divided between us, we solemnly walked home, contemplating the gravity of the situation. Sure, they weren’t gonna call the police — or worse, our parents — but the idea that we were caught made us all uncomfortable and…guilty.
We didn’t shoplift because we needed things. We did it because we wanted things (and even then, not so much) and because it was fun. There was no guilt when it was fun. Who really cared, and who did it really hurt?
But getting caught…it put a damper on the whole thing, and I don’t really remember ever shoplifting after that point. I may have, but I honestly think that was the last time.
By the time we got back to Art’s house, we were reliving the entire story mockingly. Art did a pretty dead-on impression of the Polish man, and it made the guilt ebb away a bit when we put a comical spin on it. We all sort of acted out the scene as we walked down his street, and by the time we got back to his house, all six of us were giggling like women.
We sat around the kitchen, drinking sodas and telling the story to Art’s sister and her semi-live-in boyfriend. As Art, Mark, and Nick (our drummer who didn’t actually have a drum set) acted out all the parts, I stared dully out the window. Art’s dog, Brandy (actually, I think Brandy was the name of our fourth guitarist, Mike’s dog, but I can’t remember the name of Art’s dog), wandered around the backyard, randomly shitting.
“What’s wrong?” asked Steve, the bass player who couldn’t technically play.
“I think I have an idea,” I replied.
In fact, I did. Not an original idea, but a functional one nonetheless. When the story was done, we went back into the garage and I unveiled the plan.
We followed Brandy around for at least half an hour as it shit. Seriously, the goddamn thing was a machine. It was really disgusting.
We filled up about half of a brown lunch-bag, which was more than enough. Once that objective was completed, we waited until nightfall. To pass the time, we listened and attempted to recreate Metallica’s Master of Puppets album. We failed miserably.
When it got late enough, Art went down the street and confirmed that the Ben Franklin owners were, in fact, at home. Vengeance was at hand.
The six of us snuck stealthily down to their house, all but Art hiding behind bushes, trees, parked cars, garbage cans, etc. Art was the daring one. He tiptoed up the front walk, placed the bag on their welcome mat, pulled out his Zippo, and lit the bag. He then tapped the doorbell and ran his balls off until he was safely hidden behind an oak tree.
The Polish man yanked the door open, and for some reason I vividly remember the strange, creaky chunk it made when it open. That’s about the only detail that’s still sharp in my head. Weird.
The old man was wearing an old robe that looked like silk (but it was night and he was pretty much backlit by the light inside the house, so I may be wrong). He stared down at the flaming bag and, instinctively, he stomped down on it with one ancient slipper. With a sickening, wet “pleck” sound, the fire was out, and shit was all over his feet.
I stifled a giggle, but Mark wasn’t so lucky. He started laughing out loud, but was still obscured by the bushes. Heard but not seen.
The old man looked around for a second, saw nothing. He stared back down at his shit-covered slipper. He looked like the saddest human being who had ever lived, and suddenly I felt extremely awful about the whole thing. What the hell were we doing? I mean, Christ, we were trying to steal from this guy’s business, his livelihood, so we decide to take revenge in possibly the most juvenile way possible. Whose idea was this, anyway?
Oh wait.
Fortunately, the Polish man assuaged my guilt (for a little while, anyway) immediately thereafter. He raised his arms, stared up at the heavens, shook his fists, and screamed, “YOU ANIMALS!”
We all burst out laughing, and as if in mental sync, we all decided it would be an extremely good idea to run away at that point. So, we rushed back to the relative safety and comfort of Art’s garage and continued to laugh for at least half an hour.
Later that night, the guilt set in once again. I wasn’t the only one who felt it, I know, but I was the only one who said anything. I was told by Nick to “fuck them; they brought it on themselves,” despite the fact that they really didn’t. Later, the non-sociopaths in the group agreed that we were being retarded, we shouldn’t have done it, we shouldn’t have even been shoplifting, and after that we dropped it.
I like to think this experience was a turning point. At that time, I was headed on a somewhat rough path, but when I actually had a brush with doing something that was really pretty retarded, I labeled it as such (after the fact, of course, but that’s better than nothing) and really made a concerted, overall successful effort to not continue down that path.
Art and I sort of lost touch after freshman year of high school, and after the end of sophomore year I stopped seeing him around school entirely. I always assumed he went ahead with his plan (which at one point was our plan) and dropped out. In fact, I was right. I started running into him quite a bit between my senior year in high school and sophomore year in college — sure enough, he dropped out, got his GED, and got a job in some factory or something. He was still waiting for his big break to come, so he could be a heavy-metal star.
He’s basically Jack Black without the tongue-in-cheek irony.
Sometimes I wonder, had I felt no guilt — or even a tinge less guilt — after the experience with the Polish proprietors, if I’d be on the same path Art is on. If I’d still be a directionless burnout waiting around to be a star, instead of trying (and failing — but, hey, at least I’m trying!) to make it happen. I think I probably would be.
Not entirely interesting side-note: The reason I kept seeing Art so much from 2000-2002 was because he was in a band in our senior-year variety show, in which I was an actor, and because he started dating some 14-year-old girl when the rest of us went to college, so I kept seeing him at local functions for the next few years.
Posted by Stan on October 4, 2003 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em
October 3, 2003
Friday Five (22)
- What vehicle do you drive?
Chrysler Concorde. - How long have you had it?
A little more than three years. - What is the coolest feature on your vehicle?
It goes places (big step up from my last car). - What is the most annoying thing about your vehicle?
Constantly having to dump money into it (not just the occasional repair — I’m including oil changes and gasoline, as well). - If money were no object, what vehicle would you be driving right now?
I really, really, really, really hate driving, so I really don’t give a shit what I drive, as long as it’s functional (in the sense of getting from point A to point B without incident).
Posted by Stan on October 3, 2003 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Friday Five/Albums of the Week
October 31, 2003
Friday Five (24)
- What was your first Halloween costume?
I vaguely remember being dressed, against my will, as a clown when I was four years old. I hated the make-up. - What was your best costume and why?
Honestly, I have very vague memories of Halloween. I didn’t really care about costumes; I just liked candy. - Did you ever play a trick on someone who didn’t give you a treat?
Nah. We contemplated playing a trick on some guy who gave us notepads once, but we were lazy. - Do you have any Halloween traditions? (ie: Family pumpkin carving, special dinner before trick or treating, etc.)
No. - Share your favorite scary story…real or legend!
Oh, shut up.
Posted by Stan on October 31, 2003 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Friday Five/Albums of the Week
The First Stan-iversary (Laaaame) — Five Days Late
I’ve been having some problems this week, so I haven’t had a lot of time for blogging. In fact, I managed to miss the first anniversary of Stan Has Issues™. In celebration, I’ve decided to use my languishing LiveJournal account, which I’ve been using primarily to make pornographic comments in friends’ journals, to syndicate my blog.
I am doing poor-man’s syndication because, by God, I just don’t like the way the RSS stuff looks and I’m too lazy/stupid to do it well.
Posted by Stan on October 31, 2003 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
October 30, 2003
Eavesdropping
Since I really have very few interesting things to do at my current place of employment, I spend a lot of time listening to what others are saying. It’s not malicious (necessarily) or snoopy — it’s unavoidable, actually. This is why I’d never make or take a personal phone call in this office. Of course, that point is moot since we have the cell phone reception of a nuclear bomb shelter.
I overheard Jenna and Shelli talking at length about racial terms and stereotyping and how Jews are not a “race” but a “people” (I’d say “religion,” but what do I know?), etc. I guess Jenna is in some class about race and religion and its applications in journalism. There’s some guy in that class who gives everybody a hard time, which would be fine except he seems to be retarded.
Shit, by the time she was done talking about him, I wanted to kick his ass. Of course, I’ve been a little bit stressed lately, but that’s another story (which will never, ever be told anywhere near this blog; sorry, fan).
Somehow, the whole thing turned to the infamous and overused “c”* word. I didn’t really get that the discussion had anything to do with misogyny, but I suppose any talk that turns to slurs turns to that at some point. They exhausted their diatribe on the “n”* word. I guess, in addition to this guy’s not-very-subtle racism, he was also overheard saying something to the effect of, “Yeah, every time my girl gets out of line, I just call her a ‘c,’ and she shuts right up and leaves the room.”
Gosh, I wonder why.
At any rate, this was followed up by this guy’s friend, who said, “Yeah, dude. The power’s in the word. You can control them.” Now, bear in mind, this is coming second-hand from somebody who didn’t like these guys in the first place, but Jesus, no wonder most women (or possibly just the women I date) hate men so much.
Of course, this immediately reminded me of a recent comment I had to remove from this blog. It was made by my pal Adam**, and the comment likened my close friend Lucy to a “c.” Now, Adam’s a stand-up guy (not in the comedian sense), despite the fact that he is clearly throwing his life away (inside-joke zing!), and I understand he made the comment in jest and he thought it was harmless.
But he was wrong. Or, at least, I think so. But that’s the funny thing about words — everybody sees, hears, and interprets them differently. I have an actual, visceral reaction every time I hear the word “gestate.” Seriously. But normal peope (i.e., people who aren’t me) hear the word “gestate” and are fine.
Or are they?
Anyway, I didn’t mean this to turn into a political-correctness rant followed by a weird linguistics aside; it’s supposed to be about the weird, occasionally hilarious things I overheard today. So, moving on…
Around 3:30, I got a strange phone call. It was a recording, informing me that I needed to call a specific person at a specific phone number immediately for undisclosed reasons. I decided this call probably wasn’t for me, so I wrote down the phone number and handed it off to Jenna. Then, she made a phone call that made me respect her a lot.
(Note that I’ve filled in the blanks because, after this call, Jenna called the manager of the bill-collecting agency, and then she called no less than five people to discuss the conversation in an outraged tone.)
Jenna: Yes, somebody just called this number and asked us to call back. Who is this?
Collector: This is the Collector from the Nefarious Collection Agency. Is this Bianca?
Jenna: No, she’s not here. This is her supervisor, Jenna.
Collector: Really? Well, Bianca hasn