Friendship Essay

In elementary school, every student had to write a persuasive five paragraph essay about why their best friend was literally the "best" friend. One of my friends, we'll call him Ronald, wrote his essay about me.

I wouldn't have known I was the subject of his essay except that Ronald's mother mailed my family a copy. She thought it would be nice for my parents to see all the nice things Ronald had to say about me. While I found it flattering, it also put me in an awkward position because I couldn't exactly return the favor seeing as I hadn't written my essay about him.

I hadn't written my essay about anyone in particular, actually. I made up a phony friend for the purpose of the essay. I had friends, I just didn't think of any of them were going to seem awesome enough on paper to earn a good score on the essay. It was much easier to persuade the graders that my friend was the "best" when I could make up any attributes I wanted. I fully acknowledge that this says a lot of sad things about me, but I maintain that I wasn't entirely awful… and I have Ronald's essay to prove it! 

Nevertheless, I've always felt a little guilty about that situation. That guilt is only compounded by the fact that last I knew, Ronald was in a halfway house.

Obnoxious

While attending a wedding, I decided to be polite and reintroduce myself to an older woman I've only met once or twice and haven't seen in about 20 years.

"Hello, I'm Kev…"
She cut in immediately. "I remember you, you were such an obnoxious kid."

I froze in panic and checked her face to see if there was a hint of humor in this accusation, but it was genuine contempt. "Uh," I stammered. She either didn't pick up on my discomfort or didn't care.

"You were the most obnoxious kid. I was just thinking about you the other day and how obnoxious you were."

I didn't even know how to respond to this woman. Did she want me to apologize for some unspecified "obnoxious" thing I did in my early childhood? Her adult children seemed mortified but didn't come to my defense, so I just stared back at the woman, my mouth slightly agape, long enough for her to add one more, "Just so obnoxious!" I couldn't decide whether I was more disgusted with the words she was saying, or the fact that she spit when she spoke.

At this point, the woman had called me obnoxious four times in just fifteen seconds. As tempted as I was to call her out, I wasn't about to get in a fight at my friend's wedding.

Instead, I simply said, "I have to go" and walked away. Granted, it was pretty dumb because I obviously had nowhere else in particular to go at a wedding reception that had only just begun, but how much longer did I have to put up with a woman who was insulting my youthful former self? And "obnoxious" four times? Bitch, get a thesaurus.

Whatever, her unpleasantness spared me the trouble of having to make pleasantries with her. I may have been obnoxious as a kid, but at least I'm not an obnoxious adult.

The Fire Drill

When I was a young kid, our town had a “Fire Safety Week”, so my mom thought it would be a good idea to run a fire drill in our own home to learn an escape plan in case of an emergency.

From my bedroom, my best route outside was down the staircase and out the front door. At our house, though, the front door was mainly ornamental. We always entered and exited through one of the side doors, so the front door actually stayed double latched.

For the drill, my parents sounded a fake alarm. I ran down the stairs to the door. Seconds were of the essence in this hypothetical scenario, but I struggled with the locks and couldn’t get the door open. When I didn’t arrive at the the designated meeting area out front, my parents came to look for me as I still tried to get the door open.

My mom showed me how to open the door, but when she put it to me to replicate what she had done, I still couldn’t figure out how to unlock it on my own. After a couple more of my failed attempts, she said, “I’m sure in a real emergency you’d figure out how to open it.”

Yeah, good drill. HOW AM I EVEN STILL ALIVE?

Paul Walker Died, So I'm Telling

I'm 2 Slow, 2 Stoic to have seen any notable Paul Walker films, but that hasn't stopped me from getting caught up in news of his death, namely because of my ongoing obsession with people who died doing what they loved. In Paul's case: speeding in cars.

I tried to figure out if I've ever seen a Paul Walker movie and it turns out I have: Pleasantville, which he was good in; She's All That, which I don't remember him in; and The Skulls, which I'm almost too embarrassed to admit that I've seen.

More importantly, while looking at Paul's IMDB page, I came upon the most important factoid of all: he was a child contestant on I'm Telling!, a sort of Newlywed Game for siblings. My sister and I would watch it often as kids and dreamed of going on it, mainly for the toy spree at the end. We were [are] also really good at fighting with each other in front of other people, which is half the show.

"Don't let me down, YouTube!" I said aloud as I searched to see whether Paul's episode was there, and thankfully, it didn't disappoint. Nor did the episode. If you're feeling sentimental about Paul, or just nostalgic for 80s TV, you'll enjoy the uploaded episode (which includes bonus 80 kids commercials.) 

Part 2 of I'm Telling episode
Part 3 of I'm Telling episode

See Paul:

• bicker with his sister
• make a "funny" face
• discuss his drinking problem... (the drink being milk)
• not-so-modestly declare himself better looking than his sister
• when pressed to describe what animal his sister eats like, daftly say a "human being"

At this point, Paul had a long way to go as an actor, though, because he was clearly being upstaged by the third set of siblings. Their blend of social awkwardness, twitching, and over-explaining their answers made them the obvious stars.

I'm Telling! will have to suffice as my memorial for Paul. Surely it's no worse than Alyssa Milano's tweet, which the CNN obituary saw fit to quote in full:

Huh? You. #beauty #love #RIP

Quail-Man

I dressed as Quail-Man for Halloween. I chose Doug Funnie's alter-ego because the actual costume IS a crappy costume and therefore isn't hard to put together. But it was still a hit! I mean, most people seemed to have no idea who this dude was running around with a belt on his head and underwear* as outerwear, but the minority of people who did recognize me were super into the nostalgia and I wound up posing for a couple dozen photos with strangers. I just wish Quail-Man had some kind of catchphrase, because each time people shouted at me, I had nothing to respond but, "Heyyyyy." (What does the Quail say?)

I thought Quail-Man would be an original costume - I've never seen anyone dressed as him before - but wouldn't you know it, I ran into two other Quail-Men in my trek around Hollywood last night. We should probably start an Awesome People/Awesome Ideas club.

* I purchased the tighty whities from Goodwill for 50 cents. Yeah, that's gross, but I washed them twice and they went over my pants so I think it's okay. I hope it's okay, anyway.

Halloween Suicide

In 7th grade, my friend hung himself a couple of days before Halloween. I learned about it from a couple of crying girls the following morning outside of the junior high. At that age, half of everything you hear about someone else is mere gossip, so I kept watching the school buses, expecting to see him get off one and confirm that it was all a horrible rumor. With each bus that emptied without him, his death felt more real.

Halloween is an especially inopportune for a peer to take his life. Everywhere we looked, the morbid decorations were no longer playful, but yet another reminder of death.

I found it inopportune for another reason, too. We still went out trick-or-treating that year despite the somber mood. At some point in the trek between houses, someone referenced the topic we were all trying to avoid. I chimed in, "I don't get why he didn't at least wait until after trick-or-treating."

I cringe when I think back to that comment. I honestly wasn't trying to trivialize the matter, that was legitimately how I felt. If you're going to kill yourself, fine, but take advantage of the free candy first!

Really, though, the quip speaks to just how young we were. My number one concern then was maximizing the number of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups in my pillowcase… there's no way a 12-year-old was capable of making such a final decision about his own mortality.

Blow It Out Your Porthole

Despite some initial success (meaningless ribbons and certificates) in my earliest years, I believe I officially gave up as a visual artist in 8th grade.

On the one hand, maybe I just couldn't handle not receiving constant praise on my presumably unimpressive artwork from my art teacher for the first time. On the other hand, I think he was a dick who stifled my expression.

I was excited about our landscape assignment because it was the first time I ever painted on an honest-to-gosh canvas. Something about painting on a canvas makes the process seem so much more official than doing it on paper.

While my peers took a traditional approach to the assignment, I chose to paint an island seen through a cruise ship porthole. More than half of the canvas was devoted to the interior of the cruise ship and the landscape aspect of it was kind of incidental in the background.

I thought it was a modern approach to landscapes and showed how removed we are from nature. Most people really do only experience a sight like that through glass on a boat, and I wanted to acknowledge that fact in my painting. Whether I was able to articulate that idea better or worse in 8th grade, I don't remember.

My teacher graded it poorly and called it a cop out. Okay, maybe part of the reason was because it was easier than painting an actual landscape. But all that other stuff I just said? That was a part too - a bigger part. This teacher had one idea of what a landscape could be and stomped on my creativity.

He also didn't like my mixed media collage that incorporate the lyrics to The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony". (Looking back, maybe I was anti-capitalist before I even knew what that meant.) What a fucking buzz kill. Then again, I suppose the true mark of a great artist is not being appreciated in your own time.

I'm not sure where the porthole painting is anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it somehow made its way to an art museum because that shit is genius.

The Most Amazing Tan I've Ever Seen

On the first day of school my sophomore year, my Spanish teacher asked one of my peers whether he had spent much time at the beach during the summer.

"Yeah, I surfed most days," the student said.
"I knew it! I could tell!" the Spanish teacher celebrated. "You have the most amazing tan I've ever seen."

While his skin was remarkably tan, there was one problem… dark brown was his natural skin color. Year-round, even. An awkward silence fell over the room because most of us students knew that she got lucky with her beach guess and the tan was not temporary, but correcting her might make the kid feel even more uncomfortable.

When you're in a school district that's 95% white, mistakes like this do happen. I remember in elementary school, I had friends that were very plainly not Caucasian, but it never occurred to me that some of them were anything but white. With only a juvenile understanding of race, I figured people who acted like me and that I liked must be "white." Sure, they had really dark skin, but deep down, they must actually be white. In a way, I thought I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, which is all sorts of horrible, but the kind of notions a kid has to navigate through in a world of white privilege surrounded by limited diversity.

Occasionally, I think back to the incident and wonder at what point she realized his "tan" wasn't going away. Did it take a week, two weeks, maybe a month for humiliation to set in? Did it surprise her to discover that the kid who acted just like the others in an otherwise all-white class wasn't white after all?

If it makes anyone feel better, the Spanish teacher was diagnosed with cancer a few months later. But she was also a nice woman, so don't revel in it! Subconsciously whitewashing the people around her makes her ignorant, but taking pleasure in her getting cancer makes you an asshole… and that's probably worse.

Who Wants to Know?

When I karaoke (which is rare these days), I usually only choose songs I'm familiar with and know I won't embarrass myself on. But tonight, I saw RAY, JIMMY - ARE YOU JIMMY RAY? in the book and I got super excited and chose it on an impulse.

I pride myself on my 90s nostalgia, but "Are You Jimmy Ray?" is definitely one I've forgotten over the years. I don't know how I let it happen because it is so perfectly campy. Granted, I had trouble singing the song because I didn't remember the cadence other than the chorus, but it was worth it to have it reintroduced to my life.

My favorite lyric is "I've gotta let it out, something in my genes [pun alert!], ya come and take a walk with me if you're feeling dane-ja-rus", but obviously the backup vocalists trying to guess his name over and over is the bread and butter… surely, it's hard to miss the irony that people can't remember the name of this would-be one-hit-wonder.

Who wants to know, indeed! Well, actually, I want to know, as I'm kind of newly obsessed. Who IS Jimmy Ray, this gangly man with an oversized belt buckle I see in the video? According to Wikipedia, "The video juxtaposed Ray's rockabilly image with a trailer park setting as stereotypical "rap video" women in sports jerseys and football shorts danced provocatively behind him." That might be poorer writing than the song itself!

At 3am, I thought it would be a good idea to find Jimmy Ray on Twitter because he seems like someone who would be neglected enough to respond back to some cheeky comment I make, but alas, I could not find him. Rest assured, however, that I will be asking all strangers I encounter whether or not they are Jimmy Ray until I finally locate the man.

Archimedes

For over twenty years, I've sang the name "Arrrrrrrr-chimedes" to myself without really remembering why. I knew I must have picked it up somewhere, so I finally did some internet searching and rediscovered this gem.

Man, I forgot I even used to watch Square One. I'm tempted to say that I used to love "educational" tv, but that's not really accurate. I used to love tv period, and with only 4 or 5 channels to choose from in my formative years, PBS had to be your jam if you didn't want to have to… go play outside. ::shudders::

Though the chorus is catchy, I don't know about the quality of the song. They try to cram in so many facts about the mathematician without even staying on the beat. Honestly, I find it hard to follow as an adult, so I don't know what educational facts I took from it as kid, but I can be pretty confident that that mask used to scare me… mainly because that mask still scares me.

Other people commenting on this video say they've been humming the song for decades and are finally seeing it again for the first time. For once, I actually feel a kinship with YouTube commenters. Usually I'm not racist enough to hang, but these are just fellow former nerdy kids without cable who planned their play schedule around Mathnet.

Say Cheese

My sister posted this photo on Facebook and then texted me angrily a few hours later when I hadn't "liked" it. Will blogging it suffice, Alison?

Math Problems

To this day, I still feel guilty about some drama I caused in the 3rd grade.

3rd grade was the first year we switched teachers for math. Even at 8 or 9, you have a sense of which kids are "smarter" than the others, and it was hard to ignore the fact that I was in a class with most of them. Then when I realized we learning times tables well before any of the other classes, I thought, hmmm, this surely isn't as "random" as they want us to believe.

I figured if there was a high math class, then surely there was a low math class as well. I estimated the intelligence of the kids in the other three classes and ranked them accordingly. I was pretty sure my homeroom teacher had the dumb math class, not only since there were a couple obvious idiots in attendance, but because she would have me grade her students' math homework when I finished other assignments early.

Formulating these opinions about how less intelligent other people were made me a conceited shit, for sure. What made me a real troublemaking shit, however, was not keeping these thoughts to myself. I wanted to share our brilliance with the other people in our class, so I told them that we were in the smart math group. Then, to make some other people feel better, I matter-of-factly pointed out that they were in the 2nd highest math group. Still other kids got hurt by that, and I'd say "At least you're not in the low math group!" My class rankings became common gossip and soon everyone knew where they "stood." As you can imagine, the kids in the lowest class were teased a lot and I'm sure they lost confidence in their subtraction skills.

It got so bad that the teachers had to sit us down to talk about math class rankings. As they explained, the classes were all equal to each other and there was no low class. Apparently, those rankings that I concocted based on stereotyping weren't accurate after all. I was mortified that I was wrong and made people feel dumb (which I probably should have seen coming since I literally labeled them dumb) and didn't think it could get any worse…

Except that it did get worse when the teachers acknowledged that though there was no dumb class, there was a higher math class… and it was my class. As boastful as I was about it a week prior, let me assure you, my guilty conscience could not handle getting to be one of the "smart" ones after stirring up all this shit. I didn't feel like I deserved it.

I never got in trouble for this since the rumor was never traced back to me, but I can assure you that the math deities did get their revenge on me by high school when I couldn't figure out Calculus for the life of me and had to handwrite a plea on my final to "Please give me a C- or I won't be able to go to college." That was definitely a really proud moment for this self-proclaimed math wiz.

Cherry Popped

1998: Hear "Zoot Suit Riot" and convince myself I'm "really into" swing music despite only knowing this song and "Jump Jive an' Wail."

2013: Only just now realize the vulgar implications of the band name Cherry Poppin' Daddies and physically shudder from repulsion.

 How did that slip by me for 15 years? I knew what it meant to pop a cherry, but I guess I never gave a second thought to a swing band being so crass.

Hoodwinked

In elementary school, I thought I had an amazing rapport with one of my best friend's mom, mainly because she winked at me all the time. Pretty much anytime we exchanged words she'd give me a wink. It made me feel special because not only did she really seem to like me, but it was like we shared some kind of secret. Occasionally, I would wink back, but mostly I just smiled at her since it seemed a little excessive to wink after each sentence, even though I appreciated her commitment to the gesture.

By the time I reached junior high, I was a little wiser and more critical. I started picking up on the fact that she was not just winking at me, but everyone. It made me a little jealous that I might not be her favorite son's friend after all. I also found myself questioning the timing of the winking. Was me telling her what I was learning in English class really wink-worthy?

Then, while she sat at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, I spied on her from the next room. She was just sitting there winking at nothing. It was then - and sadly only then - that it finally dawned on me that she wasn't winking… she was twitching. And while it's not to say that she's not friendly, it was humbling to realize that I had invented a special bond between the two of us based on a chronic facial tic.

It may be for the best since since our bond was never meant to last. This same mom got herself into soap opera-like drama a few years later. That's not a story I'm willing to blog about publicly, but that doesn't mean you couldn't ask me for that gossip in person. WINK! ; )

I Had a Fake Pen Pal in High School

It sounds more pathetic than it is… at least I hope that's the case. In my Spanish class, we had to strike up a correspondence with someone living in a Spanish-speaking country. It was a long-term assignment, and I was so disgruntled with my tragic pen pal experience from elementary school that I didn't want to do it. That, or more realistically I just procrastinated intensely and found myself days short of a deadline without a pen pal, so I just decided to make one up.

Her name was Ana and she was from Madrid. I chose both of those proper nouns because they were the first ones I thought of that didn't have accents in them. Why annoy myself having to find the accent marks on the keyboard to type something like "María" when I didn't have to? I went about setting up a fake email account for Ana when I discovered a flaw in my plan. How, with just a few years of shaky Spanish, was I going to write an email that seemed plausibly written by a native speaker?

I approached my profesora after class. Since she wanted us to include all of our emails in our packet, I thought I'd take a moral stance, asking, "What if they're kind of personal?" This excited her. "Personal? Vicente [my "Spanish" name], do you have a new girlfriend? Are you flirting with your pen pal?" "I dunno…" I stammered, really thrown by her leap. But it worked! My profesora said, as nosy as she was, that it wasn't her business to read my private emails and that I could just summarize the relevant content in my own Spanish words instead.

Even if it wasn't my aim, I should have known that just alluding to a love connection would be enough to win my profesora over. She taught us a lot of relationship vocabulary words, had us write love letters in Spanish, and even had us to a video project where we filmed ourselves describing our traits and desires in a "dating profile." When she found out we had both a competitive hockey player and figure skater (one of whom went on to play in the minor leagues and the other went on to appear as Pocahontas in Disney on Ice) in our class, she had us watch The Cutting Edge in an attempt to make romance blossom. And she shared embarrassing stories (though she didn't seem to see it that way) about how she would secretly watch her crush by climbing his neighbor's tree.

The Ana rouse wasn't an easy one. I had to invent all sorts of her interests and personality traits to write about, too. Fortunately, her hobbies were things like futbol and fotografia and other vocabulary words that were in our text book. I'm sure it would have been less work if I had just found a real Spanish speaker to correspond with. But then again, nobody said that maintaining a fake Canadian Spanish girlfriend would be easy.

Genius vs. Monsters

You know how a lot of kids had to sleep with the closet doors shut to stop monsters from attacking in the night? I used to keep my closet doors open so I could verify that there were no monsters in there. 

What's remarkable about this is not the idea, but the self-esteem it built. I legitimately used to think this made me really smart. Like, I told my gifted teacher about it even, and didn't get why she wasn't nearly as impressed as I was with myself.

I also used to take a long, running leap onto my bed so that the monsters under my bed couldn't grab my ankles when I got close. How I was never diagnosed as some sort of child prodigy, I'll never understand.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

It's funny how my childhood affinity for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has blinded me from ever thinking critically about the cartoon. As much as I want to respect it as an art, it is nothing if not a blatant commercial attempt to appeal to as many kids as possible:

Teenage - old enough to be looked up to, but not old enough to be uncool adults
Mutant - supernatural in a slightly creepy but inoffensive way
Ninja - kids love karate and fighting
Turtles - reptiles are kind of the best at that age, and turtles are probably the least "disgusting" reptile around

Oh and if the turtles title characteristics weren't enough, they also exclusively eat pizza and lived in a sewer. What kids don't love pizza and bathroom humor? They just piled on as many things as they could think of that would pander to children.

I don't care if I was just five, I'm kind of belatedly ashamed that I fell victim to such an intense marketing campaign. I bought tickets to the movies, the action figures, and even the breakfast cereal. Shame on them for playing into my youthful lack of media savvy.

It no only makes me angry, it makes me want to make my own cartoon. Preteen Radioactive Astronaut Cheetahs. Sure, it's a muddied concept that lacks integrity, but I'd make millions.

I guess I've been right all along: the Ninja Turtles are super gay.

AIDS Quilt

As a kid, I thought that AIDS quilts worked in the same way as smallpox blankets. In other words, your risk of getting the disease wasn't about who you slept with - but WHAT you slept with.

Yeah, that is some ridiculous misinformation, but with this AIDS coloring book as my guide, what more do you expect?

Forbidden Love

Forbidden Love

I stare at her longingly

Desiring to possess her

Yet I'm always told

Don't bother

The agony of seeing her

And being unable to hold her

My hatred towards society

And their silly viewpoints

I should be able to have her

We connect in so many ways

Who feels so elevated

That they dictate conditions

Of true love?

I happen to believe

That blood relation

Makes our spiritual bond

Even closer

Susan unearthed this poem I wrote as a teenager. For a while, writing inappropriate poetry was a pastime of mine (making me an inappropoet?) and I especially got a kick out of "Forbidden Love"'s last stanza incest reveal. I submitted it to my high school literary magazine where it was initially rejected. So then I intentionally became friends with the editors, and without me having to ask, they reconsidered and ran it anyway.

I did have some reservations about publishing the poem because, in a world where people take things at face value, particularly when it was presented alongside other angsty and unironic teenage poems, I wasn't sure that my peers would get that it was a joke. But then I figured, heck, I graduate in three weeks. The real fun would be knowing that if a scandal were to arise, my sister still had two years of high school to go.

Love you, Alison!

No really… LOVE YOU!

Look Out, Heaven

Look at this shitty thing my mom received for Christmas from one of her friends.

This is what happens when she regularly gets together with her friends to drink wine and make crafts. I mean, I know it's a good time for her, but someone must have drank and crafted too much if they thought that this was a reasonable present.*

Firstly, what does that text even mean? Are there people who get really sad when snow melts and need to be comforted? Like, "There, there, that snowman you built is with God now. He's a snow  angel." I'm also not sure how to go forward. Should I be making more snowmen so that there will be more snow angels? Or should we stop making snowmen altogether so that there's room enough for the rest of us in heaven? I don't want to get to St. Peter and have him say, "Sorry, there's no room at the inn, we've had an influx of snow angels."

Secondly - and I know I started over-thinking this, but the blame for that rests on that ridiculous poem - I have to nitpick about how the design of this thing spits in the face of physics. I don't know if you've ever built a snowman before, but a snowman doesn't melt bottom to top. The head is actually the first thing to melt: It's the smallest ball and the one that the sun has the most contact with. So, like, as cute as this craft is supposed to be, I suspect foul play was involved. For the head to be so intact, someone must have come and attacked its torso with hairdryers or something.

It all reminds me of a question (inspired by the Simpsons maybe?) I asked my Sunday school teacher as a kid: "If you're decapitated on earth, do you get your head back in heaven?" Given what remains, is this new snow angel going to have a head? Because if heaven is full of headless snow angels, that sounds terrifying and I don't want to go. I might start murdering snowmen just to avoid that.

* All of this criticism is moot if this was a regift. Because I would pawn that crap off on someone else pretty quickly, too.