the ocean

Fright Fest

When I was a kid, Halloween meant dressing up as Pac Man or E.T. (hey, it was the '80s) and eating tiny, stale Three Musketeers bars for the better part of a month. Sure, we had to take our candy to the emergency room to get it x-rayed (hey, it was the '80s) and wear bright orange sashes so our parents could feel somewhat less like we were going to end up under the rear wheel of a Malibu, but we largely got the run of the neighborhood, to the point that some years I actually hauled home multiple bags of sugary goodness, in addition to the occasional hopeful apple. One year we even trick or treated at the mall. Spencer's gave out some awesome Mr. Goodbars.

But now that I'm older, Halloween is mainly a matter of sitting in my living room with all the lights off since I forgot to stop by the Jewel for a bag of Hershey's miniatures. Oh, and hoping not to get egged. For the first time this year I am utterly without a costume, since I lacked the time to properly execute my Jeffrey from Project Runway idea, and in fact am still at work right now. I could try to sell my current look as some sort of minimalist getup, but "Irritated Man in Green Sweater" is hardly going to hit the plastic smock racks at Meijer any time soon.

Oh, and the jack-o-lanterns are totally rotted. Already. I'm beginning to worry they'll give me pulmonary spores, although I'm also half convinced that's something I just made up.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

As promised, here are the photos from our annual Pumpkin Carvstravaganza. As it turns out, Roommate Liz and I have a very limited understanding of what is sometimes referred to as "sexual intercourse," but we made do with what we had. For the children, you know?

Here are our dominant and submissive jack-o-lanterns. It turns out hats are very difficult to make out of construction paper. That's a whip coming out of the dominant pumpkin's stem. Where else do you think she'd hold it?

This poor little gourd didn't really make it into our display, but I find it hilarious nonetheless. This is what I imagine Charlie Sheen's penis looks like by now.

Yes, this pumpkin is committing an act of fellatio. As Roommate Liz said when I wondered aloud how we could complete this project, "I think we're going to need some gourds."

Crackerjack Dialogue

I overheard the following conversation, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, on my way home on the train tonight:

MAN: I bought some socks today.
WOMAN: Uh huh.
MAN: I always have a hard time finding socks that fit right.
WOMAN: Uh huh.
MAN: I hate it when they don't stay up on your legs right.
WOMAN: Yeah.
MAN: I'm talking about athletics socks here, not dress socks.
WOMAN: Uh huh.
MAN: You know, the white ones.
WOMAN: Right.
MAN: So what did you do?
WOMAN: Oh, you know, work.
MAN: Right. So did you call Inez and tell her not to come on Tuesday?
WOMAN: Yeah.
MAN: Because, I mean, I don't want her coming on Tuesday if the painters are coming on Wednesday. It'd just be a waste.
WOMAN: Right.
MAN: They always make a mess.
WOMAN: I guess they do.
MAN: I mean, not that I blame them.
WOMAN: No.
MAN: So I kind of feel like Thai food.

I would have overheard more, but I was too focused on resisting the urge to throw myself off the train.

Girlfight

Sunday night my friend took me to the rollerderby. I wasn't really sure what to expect, since my exposure to the sport was really limited to a vague recollection of having seen clips of people in lime green short shorts tearing at each other's feathered hair while going around in circles, but I couldn't really think of any better way to spend The Lord's Day, so I decided to give it a go. As it turns out, the rollerderby is totally awesome and you should definitely go right away, although chances are there isn't one going on on a Tuesday night at 8 PM.

First of all, the girls all make up awesome nicknames for themselves, like "Beth Amphetamine" (being me, I immediately thought of Beth from the Real World Road Rules Challenges) and "Celia Coffin." I tried to think of what my nickname would be if I were in the rollerderby, but I just kept coming up with things like "Mr. Mild Annoyance" and "Please Don't Hurt Me," so perhaps I'm not butch enough.

Second, there's an element of costumery involved. Lots of the girls were wearing amusingly severe makeup (think Katherine Harris on skates) and, since it was a regional battle, our team had outfits with the stars and waves from the Chicago flag on them, which teaches children about history as well as gratuitous nudity.

But the main attraction has to be the violence! The whole point of the sport is to try to keep people from skating past you, and there's all kinds of falling, skidding, and even punching involved. There had to have been at least six injuries while I was there. They have a paramedic on their staff! That's what we need at my office.

So yeah. The rollerderby is fun, in case you haven't gathered.

Celebration

My neighbors appear to be setting off fireworks right now. Either that, or the North Korean nuclear program is a little lower tech than we had imagined. I'm not sure exactly what the occasion would be -- though my google search reveals that it is Jonathan Lipnicki's birthday.

For my part, I have largely spent the day watching television. I watched the marathon, largely for the fun irony of viewing rigorous physical activity in the least physically rigorous manner possible. Then there was an MTV's MADE on that I've already seen about seven time -- the one where the "bookworm" wants to be a "beauty queen" -- so I had to settle in for that. And I've just wrapped up the only episode of Parental Control I've ever seen where the dater ditches his incumbent. She screamed obscenities and pushed them into a pool, all of which was definitely, definitely not staged.

Never fear, however, Roommate Liz and I did engage in our annual tradition of carving grossly inappropriate jack-o-lanterns last night. Because we felt we had exhausted just about every ignorant racial stereotype ever, we turned instead to over-the-top sexual explicitness. Largely this proved that Liz and I know shockingly little about sex. Pictures, of course, will follow later this week.

Right now, though, I've got to pre-clean the condo in preparation for the cleaning lady to come tomorrow. Because somehow I don't think pumpkin guts in the dishwasher was exactly what she signed on for.

I Am Nothing If Not A Student of International Culture

This past weekend we went to the Brauhaus for Oktoberfest, and the proceedings were not only enjoyable but highly photogenic.

They let you drink beer from an enormous glass boot that you pass around the table. You try not to think about the backwash. Also, Germans have really amazing-looking hats, as Katie amply demonstrates.

Roommate Liz demonstrates the proper technique for draining a beer boot. Yes, that's my hand in the corner of this picture. I actually thought I was going to be in the picture, so I was going for a pensive expression. I was not picking my teeth, thank you very much.

Jill and Friend Amy are flagtastic with this checkered number that I later decided to stick down the back of my pants and take as a souvenir. It doesn't look quite the same any more.

Cab Drivers Again

Tonight I was terrorized for fifteen minutes by a cabdriver who swore at me about the Bears game for my entire trip home.

"Addison and Wilton," I told him.

"The Bears aren't gonna win this fucking game, I tell you that," he responded.

Given that my awareness of football is such that I had forgotten there even was a game, I wasn't sure how to respond. I settled for a vaguely affirmative grunt.

"This fucking happens every time they start talking fucking shit. They talk shit, and then they start fucking losing. They need to start focusing on playing the fucking game."

"Yeah," I ventured, "they sure ought to focus."

"All this week, talking about their fucking defense and the goddamned Super Bowl. Shut the fuck up and play the goddamned game."

At this point he was so visibly angry that I feared he might actually strike me should I show less than one hundred percent support for his theory.

"No, you're right; you're definitely right," I solemnly intoned.

"I mean, if you're good enough to fucking back it up then you can go ahead and talk shit. But they're not good enough, see?"

"Yup, you're right about that. Man."

This part I delivered in my deepest, most football-loving voice. And yet the onslaught continued.

"They're not going to win this fucking game, I tell you that."

At this point I simply pretended to place a phone call. Turns out I really can carry on a fake conversation for five minutes.

Mapquest Lies

So I had to go to Indianapolis for work the past few days. This got off to kind of a rocky start when, arriving there on Thursday night, I became completely and utterly lost in their genuinely not-so-ginormous downtown. The problem was that Mapquest wholly fabricated one of the streets on which I was supposed to turn, leading me to peer hopefully at street signs for about twelve miles before finally realizing that arriving at Shantytown, USA, probably meant I had gone too far. So I called my friend for the old fashioned kind of directions, the kind that involve a lot of "oh wait, you should have turned back there" and "okay, now I have no idea where you are." An hour and a half later, I had finally arrived.

Also notable on this trip? I had to sit and eat all alone in a sit-down restaurant. Okay, so it was Rock Bottom, but I still kind of felt like everyone was staring at me and wondering why I don't have any friends. I wanted to shout "I am very popular in Chicago," but I managed to restrain myself. Mainly I just played with my Treo and pretended that people were emailing me many very important things.

I Loved the '80s

When my sister and I were little, my parents for some reason decided that we were going to spend our summers traveling around the country in a camper. I like to think that this was part of some kind of national craze or something, but the truth of it may well be that living in an aluminum box in fields littered with white trash outside the nation's various second tier cities just seemed preferable to spending another three months in Quincy. But whatever the impetus, we spent a great portion of the '80s pulling a living room across the great plains behind our Escort.

The camper itself was one of those Transformer-style jobbies where the couch and kitchen table somehow folded out into beds. There was also a bunk that could be unlatched from the ceiling. My sister and I used to argue over who got to sleep in the bunk; it never occurred to us that this also involved the privilege of falling out of the bunk and getting a concussion. When everything was folded out, pretty much every square inch of the room was covered in bedding. From the master bed your head was mere inches from both the refrigerator and the john.

I don't remember too much about the trips themselves, other than being stung by a whole swarm of bees in Nebraska and having to wear plastic bags for shoes because my feet were so swollen. Oh, and visiting lots of relatives, which was essentially the same feeling.

My point in all of this, I guess, is just that I've always been this completely classy.

News & Commentary

Today on the elliptical at the gym, I was reading The Red Eye, Chicago's home for the hardest hitting journalism this side of the Grover Cleveland Middle School Gazette. As usual, I started from the back, so as not to miss any clever Nicole-Richie-related quips or amusingly indignant restaurant reviews. I had solved the sub-TV-Guide-difficultly-level sudoku in my head and rounded into the home stretch of some still-timely Cubs and Sox snarking when I made a shocking discovery. Yes, folks, some actual news had made it into The Red Eye.

Apparently, the prospect of a scary Asian man with a Billy Bob Thornton hairline and Dixie Carter glasses getting nuclear weapons is upsetting enough to reach even the people who bring you the Wearwolves and Bag Boy. It got like half a page. And they didn't even try to review the outfits Kim Jong Il was wearing (although I'll say it -- get out of those drab jumpsuits and into some fun pastels, Mr. Il!).

They also had a piece on the Foley scandal, but that's got sex in it, so it's kind of to be expected.

Oh, and there were like twelve murders in the city yesterday, but that's more of a sidebar type item. Something to squeeze in alongside a piece on America's Coolest Movie Murders, perhaps.

Inspiration

Almost five years ago, when Roommate Liz and I were still living down in the land of experimental corn and pirate-themed Italian restaurants, she gave me an amazing gift. Trashed and no doubt belligerent in a bar one night, she tore down the following poster from the wall of the ladies' restroom and dumped it in my lap:

In case you can't tell, it is a poster for Tina Yother's band, Jaded. And at the time, it seemed like an odd choice for eighties-sitcom-themed paraphernalia. Why not a copy of Delta Burke's gospel album or a vial of Rhea Perlman's vanity fragrance? But now that Our Tina has prevailed in Celebrity Fit Club Four, taking home what I believe is pretty much the same car I own, it seems more like a wonderful twist of fate. Because who else can inspire us so? Certainly not Nelson Mandela or Mother Teresa.

So every morning before I leave for work I take a moment to stop and reflect on the Power of Tina. I'm not sure I can get back to my Family Ties weight, since I think I was like ten at the time, but I may well just learn a little something about myself on the way.

Math Class is Tough

Every day when I go to my gym they ask me what number locker I'd prefer. I really don't much care, to be honest, but they always seem very hurt if you say it doesn't matter, locker choice apparently being an incredibly vital health club moral issue. Because one side of the locker room has slightly fewer skanky showers, though an equal proportion of elderly nude reclining men, I always say that anything above 250 is fine.

And somehow I invariably end up with 249.

It's not that this actually matters. Pretty much any locker is equally likely to contain used q-tips (this actually happened) or discarded underwear packaging (ditto, and it was for the really cheesy kind that has tiger stripes and doesn't exactly provide full coverage, and it fell out into the middle of the room and embarrassed the hell out of me), so again, I don't really care. But seriously, how is it so difficult to understand that 249 is not above 250?

I blame cable television.

Stability Personified

I'm going through kind of a weird era in my life, and by "weird era" I mean that I was actually on the verge of tears the other day because my dentist had to cancel my cleaning at the last minute and couldn't get me in again until November. Recently I find myself becoming sad at the drop of the hat, at least if it's a really nice hat and it gets damaged in the fall. Though I've never been the type to cry at Kleenex commercials or become moved by the exploits of television characters, I am shocked to find myself genuinely worrying about whether Flavor Flav is choosing the woman who really is right for him or whether the nice lady in the meadow with all the flowers will be able to rid herself of that not so fresh feeling. I'd blame hormones, but I am twenty-eight years old. It seems like puberty should have ended a while ago.

Or maybe it's just a lifelong process. Looking at the older people I know, I don't necessarily see the "stability" or "maturity" my eighth grade health teacher promised me would occur. I see people who cheat on their husbands with barbacks or pay more attention to their fantasy football leagues than their children. I see people who drink until they puke Jager all over the bathroom attendant at Hi-Tops. I see people who don't realize that MTV stopped being for them about fifteen years ago.

Actually, come to think of it, I really like those people.

In Which I Continue to Spread Cultural Understanding

Today is Yom Kippur. While I'm not totally sure what that means, I know that all of my Jewish friends get to take the day off today but that they have to act really sad all day long. Apparently, they need a whole day to atone for their sins, unlike in the Catholic model where we spend fifteen minutes telling a dirty old man about them and then say some Hail Marys. But regardless, I wish to atone for the following things:

-- Wearing tight rolled jeans.
-- Thinking Wings was funny.
-- Secretly replacing your regular coffee with Folger's Crystals.
-- Throwing up on Jill McAndrews' Mothers' Day Card in second grade.
-- Throwing up on Jill McAndrews my second year of law school.
-- Blogging about reality television with an alarming frequency.
-- Briefly liking Liv Tyler.
-- Shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die.
-- Staying out all night before the LSATs.
-- Eating at Long John Silvers.

There's plenty more, but I try to keep this place PG-13. So many kids look up to me.