Morphin' Time

I have had a lot of nightmares recently about losing teeth. I've been on an oral hygiene kick recently, and I'm not sure if the nightmares are causing this or if my attention to clean teeth are resulting in a fear of losing them all. I am reminded of the horrible fact that at one point in my life, tiny bone fragments from my tiny skull fell out of my mouth and I got paid for it. I remember how awesome it felt to have a tooth in my mouth that flapped with every breath I took. 

And then I remember how terrifying it was when I had to come to grips with it being pulled from my body. It was an exhausting ride. I remember having to psych myself up to actually get to a point where I was emotionally ready to pull a tooth out of my face. It was basically just like 127 Hours.  But there was a time when I didn't know those horrors. Back when I had all my baby teeth. 

One day at my Nana and Papa's house in Skokie my brother, dad and I were playing a rousing game of Power Rangers. I took a leap off of the sofa just as my dad pretended to punch me in the face. I landed swiftly into his fist and out popped my first tooth. 

Not knowing the side effects of losing a tooth, I was paralyzed in horror when I saw the amount of blood coming from my mouth. I thought that my Dad was trying to kill me. And then I wondered why the Power Rangers never bled. 

As for the rest of my baby teeth, I just remember a thinly veiled annoyance from my mother over my severe fear of a new bloodpit in my mouth. Kudos, Mom... I really can't imagine talking or helping a kid through losing a tooth. At all. I guess that having a tooth punched out during a game of Power Rangers is a pretty sweet alternative to a wet, bloody kleenex being shoved in your mouth. 

Talkin' about my View

Let me just say- comparing the premise of The View and The Talk is a nearly impossible task. The View features a panel of five female outspoken quasi-celebrities who spend every episode of their show speaking non-stop on any topic. The Talk features a panel of five female oustpoke.. Oh. I guess they're exactly the same premise. Never mind.

I guess the main difference is that I don't have to take an Advil in order to sit through an episode of The Talk.

It also seems the women of The View hate everything. Including each other.

Congratulations to the women of the entertainment world for creating talk shows in the form of boybands. Apparently, the formula works. Now if only the Spice Girls would start a discussion panel show, I'd have a new favorite series.

Sorry, I'm not sorry.

I realized that I have an awful habit of over-apologizing. Any time I feel like it would be appropriate for someone else to apoligize, I cover it for them. I don't think this is an altogether uncommon thing, but it happens all the time. 


I apologized to the fat woman who gave me an accidental lap dance by bumping into me with her front-butt at the movie theatre.

And I said "I'm sorry" to the elderly woman
with"Jewish Red" hair at the Jewel
when she rammed her shopping cart into my shin.










And I even apoligized to the rack of clothing I bumped into

at the thrift store. Twice. 





























So I'm going to attempt and stop saying "I'm sorry". Not in general... I mean, when I don't mean to. Sorry.

I've also been on a huge genealogy kick recently, and after signing up for a well known ancestry search site I encountered a woman with who I share a great-great grandfather with. Her name is Ruth- she is 72 and she lives in the backwoods of Texas. We have been emailing pictures and stories about our common elders for the past week, and I am thrilled to haves such an unexpected link to the past!

Along with spending time researching my family history, I have also been spending time with family members that are actually still alive. My Fourth of July was nice, and was held at my house. Relatives came over to visit and Eric grilled up a classic American feast. I was reminded, yet again, of my severe love for food. The highlight of the day would have to be when I got my Nana to try on an old high school flag costume. The red, white and blue short-skirted dress was one of a few things I had salvaged from the High School costume purge. She ended up in the front yard in the sequined dress waving an American flag and singing "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." The whole thing was very Grey Gardens. Talk about a firework show!
We have fun family get-togethers.

Summer is NO BUMMER!

So tonight I am reinstating my sought after literature with a short blog to let all of my readers know that I am alive and well. Sorry I haven't written in so long... Sorry I'm not sorry.

I can offer some advice tonight, which I am sure many of you will find 5 years too late. If you are going to eat Burger King's tacos, please under no circumstances consume more than two of them. I know that Taco Bell has a reputation for leaving the bowels burned asunder, but I have never had a bad taco experience until tonight. Long story short, my mind was hungry, my body was not. I ordered 4 Burger King tacos and ate them all. Then 10 hours later...

As Adele would say... "There's a fire..."
I am going to attempt to write about something other than pooping in this blog- because I know that while my family members all enjoys discussing our... Alright. New subject.

I have been spending this summer relaxing at home, working at the funeral home and spending some quality time with my family. My brother, Eric (for those who have forgotten) is spending the summer living in his apartment at school. He's employed as a manager of a group of house painters, because apparently you can get promoted to a manager in three weeks time in that sort of industry. No offense, Eric. I'm proud of you, buddy. Maybe you can finally paint the front door with all your experience. It's covered in scuff marks from all the times I kick the door open to get in the house as quickly as possible to avoid being mauled by June-bugs.

I also had the privlege of going on a vacation early in the summer with my friend Danny and his mom. Spending a week at Fort Meyers beach was a true vacation, mainly because of the beaches and the alcohol. It was a more accurate definition of a vacation than past trips I've been on. One of many highlights was watching overweight, elderly women picking up sea shells on the beach at sunset with their gopher-grabbers.

After the romp in Florida, I had the chance to visit my old High School and help clean out the costume closet in order to make room for some renovations in the building. The costume closet consisted of nearly 5 decades of old rotting clothing with a few gems mixed in. After working for over 24 hours that weekend, we accomplished the cleaning goal with mild organization, a dumpster filled with useless costumes, and diseases that don't have names yet. It was wonderful.

So here's to you, Summer 2011. I've got a lot of stories that need some Microsoft Paint images to solidify their memory in my mind... so you, my dear reader, are in luck.

 

Oh, Deer Forest.

When I was a young tot, my family took a yearly vacation to South Haven, Michigan. While there was little to do there besides visit the beach, fortunately a shady little amusement park lay close by in Coloma, Michigan. It was called Deer Forest.

The trick with kids is to learn that their perception of tackiness and displeasure is usually based entirely off of your reaction. My parents were exceptionally good at faking enthusiasm, and so my brother and I were often excited about the most mundane things. Deer Park is a prime example. So was going to the Dentist.

The park opened in 1949 and hadn’t undergone much change since. It featured a petting zoo, and I’m sure some of the animals from the original opening were still there. The grounds smelled like an unkempt farm from the 50s. Their slogan was  “More fun than a zoo”- a brilliant lie. The only way that Deer Park was more fun than a zoo was that it featured a few treacherous rides. These scrapped carnival rejects included an unstable Ferris wheel and a dragon themed roller coaster. The coaster, a rickety, 20 foot circular disaster, was closed for safety reasons not long after we stopped visiting the park.

  Whiplash is a privilege

On one occasion my younger brother and I took a ride on the Ferris wheel, unaccompanied. The Ferris wheel ride began slowly, but began to gradually accelerate until we were rotating around the structure at break-neck speeds. The ride was terrifying at first, but after a while Eric and I were loving the sensations of hurdling aimlessly through the air.

It wasn't until we had been spinning for about seven minutes until we felt that something was amiss. We noticed Mom flailing at the bottom of the wheel and assumed that she was enthusiastically waving at her big boys taking their first solo ride. We waved back with equal vigor. After we finally got off we learned that the Ferris wheel had broken and was spinning at top speed. Workmen were using blowtorches and as sparks flew from the underbelly of the Ferris wheel's base my mother had a little bit of a breakdown.

Another classic staple of Deer Forest was the Storybook Lane. This featured fenced in scenes depicting beloved childhood classics including Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Little Pigs and The Ugly Duckling. Sickly animals were placed appropriately- live pigs for the three little pigs, ducks for the ugly ducking, etc. The sets were poorly constructed and probably was the result of a parent labor union and a lot of paper mache. The paint chipped off of the cheap structures and animals strolled in and out of the scenery as part of the story- and also pooped everywhere. In front of each gated storybook pen there was a voice box that narrated a brief synopsis of the story. It was never easy to hear the narration over the howling and screaming animals and children, which filled the park as an appropriate soundtrack.

The park also featured a fighting cage for children and animals falsely labeled as a petting zoo. I vividly remember being chased by angry goats and deer while trying to hold onto my tiny fistfuls of old corn. There were no rules in this arena. Being butted, tripped and chased by hungry and neglected farm animals was a childhood entertainment dream to my parents, who patently videotaped and took pictures. While I fell into buckets of old food and poop, it occurred to me that this was supposed to be fun, and so I made the most of it. As is life.

Call of the Wild

Before I started my (first) Senior year of college I bought myself a phone. I haven’t been swayed by the whole mac craze yet, although I acknowledge its only a matter of time. Because of my lack of familiarity with apple products I opted out of buying an iphone and instead purchased a virgin mobile touch screen monstrosity that has caused me an incredible amount of stress.





A phone should, naturally, be able to make phone calls to other cell phones. But in addition to the occasional dropped call, my phone has this special feature that allows it to answer and hang up simultaneously.
Usually this situation is only an mild annoyance, but often I am unable to call the person back because they are still waiting for me to answer the phone or in the middle of leaving me a message. So I’ve learned to wait about 30 seconds before calling back. It's an art, really.


The thing is, when I call these people back I hardly ever get an answer. I know you’re there- you just called me. “Phone tag” is too jolly of a name for a socially distressing dance. The only clear explanation that allows me to understand how someone who had just called me and is now missing my calls seconds later is this:

They were so upset that I missed their first call that they threw their phone into the sidewalk. Then they ran away, crying.





Apart from being unable to make actual calls, my phone also has its own time schedule of delivering messages. I have received voice mails without missing a call and I receive texts up to three days after they were sent. Sorry your Grandpa died three days ago… I would have cared and texted back if I had known.

My phone has taught me many things, the most important thing is the art of being patient with technology and with the people who use it. I know that when I’m having a conversation there is only so many times I can ask “what?” before just giving up and pretending I got it. I don’t know the exact number yet, but I do know that it is less than five.

Missing a sentence of someones conversation usually works in storytelling. I can catch fragments of your 18 minute tale about how your dog killed your turtle and put the story together myself, but missing a sentence doesn’t work in small talk.

It’s not that I even have relevant conversations to make up for the insuffering inability to hear.


Mom: Hi
Me: hey
Mom: It’s Elmo’s birthday!
Me: What?
Mom: It’s El-mo’s birthday
Me: What??
Mom: ELMO- It’s his birthday!
Me: Wha- oh… okay.
Mom: Yeah
Me: …
Mom: …

Me: Who’s elbow?
Mom: ELMO!!!
Me: OHhhhh. Elmo.
Mom: Yeesh. Yeah, he was born in 1972.
Me: What? Oh.
Mom: Yeah, he’s 14.
Me: Uh…
Mom: What?
Mom: Wait… that’s not right…
Me: Not even close.
Mom: Don’t put this in your blog.
*end call*

Pet Names

Pet Names

My experience with my first pet came about when my parents decided to introduce me to the subject of responsibility. After asking incessantly for a dog, my parents offered me their next best offer- which was to have some fish.  We went to a supermarket pet section and I picked out two beautiful pets. They were small and transparent fish with neon stripes running down their spines- one pink, one green. 





I named them Timothy and Alex and they lasted for about a week before an accidental overfeeding led to their passing. I think I also convinced myself that they needed to live in salt water to survive… so me adding some table salt may have not helped the situation.

“LIVE!”

I was devastated, and knew that the only way to overcome my sorrow was to fill the emotional void with more fish. The next pair of pets were larger goldfish. I chose a generic gold goldfish, and another creamy white and orange one.





I named them Timothy and Alex. Again. Reoccuring names were something that my brother and I both had problems with. His first fish was a black monstrosity with huge eyes named Herman. After Herman died, there came Herman II, Herman Strikes Back, and finally Herman III. They were all identical.





After a while, my new goldfish were bored and lonely so I got some kind of crustacean crab-like creature that was supposed to help in keeping the tank clean. I figured that adding a new aquatic friend would be the solution for a happy community.  After a week or so I was introduced the horrors of the animal kingdom. As the fish would swim close to the bottom, the crab would reach out a claw and grab the tail of the fish. The fish would then panic and drag the crab around like an amusement park ride until ultimately the crab would just rip out a chunk of tail for dinner.





The fish were damaged both on the surface on a very deep emotional level.





All three of them died of what was assumed was an abundance of stress not too long afterward.
After Eric and I had seen the lifespan of one too many fish, we asked our parents to stop the emotional pain of aquatic slaughter and for an upgrade to rodents. After seeing how well we handled fish, I can see now where their apprehension may have come from.


So when we asked “CAN WE GET GERBILS??”
They said:





But Eric and I heard:





Never say “maybe” to a kid. All they’ll hear is “I swear on everything, including my love for you, that this will definitely happen. I promise.”


And so after we had convinced our parents that we would die of heartbreak if we didn’t get gerbils, our wishes came true. We were elated, we knew having a gerbil was as close as we were ever going to get to having a dog. We chose our pets carefully and brought them home in cardboard  boxes. Eric and I named the gerbils Timothy and Resseafurd. I think you can guess who named who.




And so began years of friendship with our rodent friends. We would make obstacle courses, mazes, and costumes. We developed identities for the gerbils over time. Timothy was given the perceived personality of a neurotic, effeminate librarian while Reeseafurd was a tactless, obese American aristocrat, very much like William Taft.


Eric had a favorite game in which he would take a large down pillow and punch a crater into the center of it. He would then put Reeseafurd into the crater and hit the sides of the pillow as to make a catapult that would send the poor guy flying vertically into the air and then straight back down onto the pillow. Eric was convinced that his gerbil loved this game.






Near the end of their lives they began to show signs of serious rodent senility. Timothy began to eat Reeseafurd alive starting with the ears. We weren’t sure how long they were going to go without killing each other, however Reeseafurd won out in the end outliving Timothy nearly a year.  


If there is a moral to any of this, it would be that giving your child a pet usually means that you are going to have to take care of that pet for them in order to maintain their emotional stability.

The Itchiest VD

Unlike everyone else who claims to hate Valentine’s day because it’s a corporate holiday based in card and candy sales, I just find it unpleasant it because I’m single. I am not ashamed to say that I will most likely spend this Valentine’s planning out where to shop for clearance chocolate and will inevitably end up watching The Notebook on my computer. Okay, I’m a little ashamed. But as ashamed as I may be, I have plenty of Netflix movies in my queue to lighten the emotional burden. No worries. 


 

   “Do you think our love is strong enough to take us away together?”

I’m getting to an age where holidays are exciting again. This is bad news. Now I know that I have officially left behind the days of my life where I had enough general fun that I didn’t need a specified day to tell me that life was exciting.


The harsh nature of Valentine’s Day is not new to me. We all felt the sting of childhood when we would hand out our small pop culture infused valentines cards in elementary school. It was proof of the hierarchy we were all too familiar with. We tried to impress our friends and the popular kids with the best of the valentines cards while shunning those we hated with the worst. It was the difference between getting a valentines day wish from the Red Power Ranger and getting one from the Putties. You knew where you stood with someone based on the Valentine they gave you. It was an unspoken and a universal rule, and it was FUN. 

I was never this popular. But hey, it’s my blog.

There was also that bittersweet resentment for the people who had candy attached to their Valentines. This was no Halloween. It was candy based on love, not merit. They really knew how to break kids down at Oak Knoll.


On an unrelated note, I have striven not to forget the true heart of this blessed holiday. Take a moment and think of Anna Howard Shaw and her contributions to this country.





What a woman. Well I’m a bust man, so I’ve got to get back to reading all of your facebook statuses so I can revel in your proclamations of happy relationships!

Fun Times in Skokie

As a kid we would often go to visit my Mom’s parents in Skokie. It was about an hour drive and my brother and I would entertain ourselves in the backseat. In these days before televisions were in cars, we spent most of the ride hitting each other, singing, reading and sleeping- usually all within the hour.

My Mom’s parents (Nana and Papa) lived in a small ranch house that wasn’t exactly equipped to entertain the average kid. Among many of our favorite games to play at Nana and Papa’s house was to crawl through a giant, jersey knit tube of fabric and play “caterpillar”.





Another classic game was to take the baby powder near the pool table in the basement and squeeze the bottle so that the “genie” would come out. One particular day we got carried away with the genie game and ended up covering the entire basement in baby powder.





Another game was to take out a folding play-pen and sit in it while we watched TV. My brother and I justified this as playing RugRats.





Playing in Nana and Papa’s house was at times a dangerous game. Whenever we would enter the front room (Pronounced frunchroom) we had to be especially careful of the Lladros- an invaluable collection of ceramic statuettes waiting to be broken.

Other than that, the house was always a warm and pleasant environment.
On summer days we would go to the tiny backyard and fill up an industrial giant brown garbage can with water to create a makeshift pool.





We did this for a few years until someone finally invested in a kiddie pool. That was a real treat.
In the colder months we spent much of our time at Nana and Papa’s in the basement. Near the pool table there was a support beam that Eric and I would grab onto and spin around until the point of exhaustion. There is a memorable Christmas video where we had taped cotton balls to our faces as makeshift Santa Claus beards and spent a good four minutes spinning around the pole in our Santa costumes. In reality it was probably longer, but there are about four minutes at least on film.






There are no Christmas trees in Skokie, so we spent that Christmas decorating one of those fake, plastic birch trees in the front room.


There was a bar in the basement as well, and we would play “Drunk” which usually ended up with us spinning ourselves around the support beam. A shopping cart was used to catch laundry out of the chute, and when we weren’t spinning around a pole I was busy pushing Eric at lightening speed in the cart around the basement.


In the basement there was also fun to be had playing in the “Cedar Closet”. One holiday my brother, cousin Ryan and I dressed up in Nana’s finest minks and heels, then paraded them in front of the family. Needless to say, an old house with no toys is an ideal place to fuel the imagination. We had fun.

Grow Up

When I was in Kindergarten our teacher had the class fill out a worksheet in which we were to draw and title our future careers. I misunderstood that I was supposed to choose a career, and instead focused my thoughts not on work, but on “What I Wanted to be when I Grew Up”, which was more or less the title of the assignment. So as the other kids around me were busy scribbling out pictures of firemen, nurses, policemen, doctors, teachers and veterinarians I was busy illustrating what I wanted to be when I grew up…more than anything.

Wheel of Misfortune

I love wheel of fortune. When I was a toddler I was obsessed with the show. I used to run up to the TV and stand wavering in front of the screen in order to fill my peripheral vision with spinning color. I imagine it’s similar to a meth trip.


.


When the wheel would come up and fill the screen I would place my hands on the glass and “spin the wheel” along with the contestants. I knew my letters somewhat, and hearing middle aged women scream their letter requests and then watch it magically appear on the board was like a second episode of Sesame Street that day.

One fateful day, as my parents were watching me watch wheel of fortune, an accident occurred. As I reached up for my turn to grab the wheel I somehow pulled the TV onto my face.





I laid there for a while, in shock. Presumably horrified, my parents pulled me out from under the TV and once they had established I had not died they put the TV back up on the stand. As soon as the commercial break was over, I continued to watch the Wheel of Fortune as if nothing had happened.





I betcha the media would be elated if all television viewers were as dedicated to viewing programs as I was. Having a television fall on my face as a child is one of many life excuses I use to justify the way I am.