Things I Love

I always write "Things I Hate," so here's a list of "Things I Love:"

-Making perfect contact with a baseball with a wood bat.

-The feeling of blood rushing into your muscles right after completing a really difficult last rep. Especially good for dumbbell bench and skullcrushers.

-The face all dogs make when they take a dump - sheepishly glancing around, mouth pulled tight into a frowny clown face. Combines well with the posture every human assumes when he realizes the dog he's walking is about to drop a deuce: standing still and looking around helplessly, dangling the leash while maintaining a safe distance from the biohazard being deposited.

-Puppy breath.

-When an athlete goes into the "violent elation" pose after a hard-fought victory - fists clenched by the waist, head back, eyes wide, screaming "AAAAHHHH!!!" in one short burst. Kevin Garnett is a master of this.

-Taking a really long, satisfying piss and getting that shiver that runs up your spine.

-Putting your freshly shaved head under the showerhead for the first time.

-When someone you don't know quotes a really obscure movie line that you love, like Chong Li admitting defeat by saying "Mah... te" from the end of Bloodsport.

-Peeing outside under the stars.

-Being anyplace where you can turn 360 degrees without seeing any manmade structures.

-When you've been in the ocean all day and you lie in bed at night, and you can still feel the phantom current pulling at your legs.

-The back part of a girl's neck that you can only see when she has her hair up in a ponytail.

-Going for a run to "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails.

-The way the drive-thru person at In-N-Out gets my order right every time, even when it's complicated, and reads it back to me in coherent, audible English. It practically brings a tear to my eye, if only because it's so refreshing compared to other fast-food places. I understand that the Taco Bell guy can't speak English, but he could at least turn the speaker volume up past "Ghost With Emphysema" so I can GUESS what he's saying.

-Starting your car just in time to hear the beginning of an awesome song.

-Trying to pinpoint where you remember a TV character from for 10 minutes and then successfully remembering. (Recently made obsolete by the iPhone.)

-The feeling of anticipation you get when you make a throw to the plate from the outfield and you know the guy is out while the ball is still in flight.

-The barely-painful tingling sensation you get in the middle of your back from a light sunburn after you spent all day outside.

-Conversely, looking outside and realizing the sun's going down and you're still wearing a bathrobe.

-When someone's behind you in line at the supermarket and the items he's purchasing speak such volumes about his life that you feel like you know him intimately. This is gratifying regardless of the statement the person's groceries make; either you mentally congratulate the person on his excellent taste (Cookie Crisp, Blue Moon beer, beef jerky, and Bagel Bites) or you get to feel like you're better than him (hummus, TV dinners, and low-fat yogurt).

BLLLAAAAAAGGGGHHHH!!!

Puking is unique. It's one of the handful of human experiences that are truly universal. It's also rare that you can be at your physical rock bottom and still have other people laughing at you - for example, if you're wearing a Tinkerbell costume and throwing up still-undigested black beans onto your own front porch during a Halloween party. Aside from that fun experience, some lessons I've gathered from a lifetime spent discussing philosophy with the porcelain pillow:

Don't ever rent an apartment with a gross bathroom if you can possibly afford it. Apartments are retreats, and as a human being, I can guarantee that some of your darkest hours will take place on or near a toilet. It’s important to have a faithful, clean friend in that time of need. There's nothing worse than desperately clinging to the rim of an unfamiliar toilet, guts convulsing furiously, and having to wonder how much butt gravy has been splattered over the space your chin occupies. It's definitely possible someone like Chris Farley or John Goodman or someone who really liked Indian food owned the place before you, and that is not a thought you want to conjure up during the "nightmare" portion of your puking vision quest.

In other words, when you’re looking at a new place, inspect that shit close. Look behind the septic tank. Know in advance how much Comet it's going to take to rectify the situation. Bring a blacklight if you have to. Think about it this way: your face will probably only touch two surfaces in all the time you live there - your pillow and your toilet. You can always buy new pillowcases, but you don't get to bring your own toilet. Eventually, you and that toilet will come to share an intimate bond. If you think about it carefully, you can probably describe every toilet you've puked into with the same level of detail as many of your relationships. Some toilets are stable and forgiving and can always be counted on. Others are just fuzzy memories that you only met because of tequila and poor decisions.

The first time I puked from drinking was actually in college. I don't know how I managed to hold it off until then, considering everything I drank in high school was some horrible combination of things like powdered Gatorade and Goldschlager. It was less than a month into my sophomore year, and I had friends visiting me from out of town. My roommate had taken the opportunity to make floats with ice cream, root beer, vanilla vodka, and Bacardi 151. I know because the last thing I remember was asking him about the recipe.

I don't remember anything that happened between the time we started drinking and midnight, when I decided it would be a good idea to go to bed. Because our room was tiny, I had lofted my bed and put my desk under it to conserve space. This required that I climb up to the bed using the desk as a foothold, which is more difficult than it sounds when you're incredibly drunk. After a heroic struggle, I managed to summit the bed and passed out.

Thirty minutes later I woke up with my mouth watering. To the experienced puker, this is a dead giveaway that the stomach has given the "Lube up the pipes - it's coming back up!" order. I knew I had about thirty seconds to get to the bathroom down the hall. Logically, I figured that the best way to do this would be to just jump out of bed. My body, however, was still hammered and translated this into falling six feet directly onto a metal dumbbell that had been lying on the floor. For a quarter of a second, the thought that I might have just cracked my rib overwhelmed the need to barf, and I groaned enough for my friend - who was sleeping on the futon - to wake up and laugh at me.

I got up, drunk-jogged down the hall in my basketball shorts, and hustled into the bathroom. Thankfully, it was empty. At this point the "24"-style clock in my digestive tract was at about 0:03, so I got into the first available stall and cut loose.

"BLLLLAAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!"

After about five minutes of puking up everything I'd eaten since lunch, I was confident that I had everything under control and decided it was time to go back to bed. My brain chose not to remember leaving the stall... which is probably why my (very conservative Mormon) friend walked into the bathroom to pee at 4 AM and found me with my cheek comfortably resting at the base of one of the urinals. Thoughtfully, I had cleaned up the leftover barf I'd deposited there and was employing the unused paper towels involved in that effort as a pillow. He started laughing immediately. I opened one eye and saw where I was.

"Whah... wha?"

He kept laughing.

"Wha... awww! Awww!" I realized how I'd spent the night. I also later found out that several other guys from my house had come into the bathroom, peed in the urinal adjacent to mine, and decided not to wake me up. I must have looked peaceful. Needless to say, that urinal and I are now forever connected, whether I want us to be or not. I'm surprised there isn't a plaque above it with my name on it.

There were others, too. I shared a precious moment with the toilet on the second floor of the house I lived in junior year. That session was made even more special by the fact that my girlfriend thought I was dying because it looked like I was puking up blood. In reality, I had come home drunk and wandered into the kitchen, where I had come across an entire bowl of fresh strawberries. I ate all of them, and they all came back up about twenty minutes later in various states of digestion. In case any Hollywood special effects designers are reading this: this is an excellent way to make other people think you are either dying or possessed by some kind of demon. I actually had a brief "Holy shit, THE DEVIL IS COMING OUT OF ME!" moment when the first salvo of chunky, bright-red puke rocketed out of my mouth and into the toilet, but this was quickly replaced with "Haha - AWESOME! [BLLLAAAAGGGHHH!!!!]"

That toilet and I grew to have a loving relationship over the next year. There would be others; I grew close to my toilets in Massachusetts too. I threw up in my apartment in Cambridge the night I moved in, after a game of Beirut with my new roommates. That bathroom was the site of multiple lessons for me, the most important of which was that when it comes to drinking, West Coast colleges don't really compare to the Northeast and South. Two of my roommates had played hockey at the University of Vermont. If you know anything about hockey players or Vermont, you know that that combination is a recipe for disaster on the order of Andre the Giant attending school at a brewery. There was a full-size Rubbermaid trash can in our kitchen just for empty MGD cans, and they filled it to the top every week. After six months of living with them, I don't think I can be an organ donor anymore.

I'm pretty comfortable with my toilet now. She's cool, and we talk every now and again, but recently we've been in a dry spell, and I'm not sure I'm giving her the attention she deserves. I'm not sure it's time for a change just yet, but it might be time to spice things up. Maybe add some strawberries or something.

ED: Yes, I'm sorry it's taken so long to put stuff up here. One of the key steps to becoming a writer is actually, you know, writing, which is something I should do more of. In the words of great butt pirate/writer Oscar Wilde, "If you want to build houses, build a house."

Last Rites

I was sitting in the passenger seat of Krystal's 1989 Mercedes as we drove through Irvine, surfing my hand up and down through the air currents outside the window. It was a Sunday night and we were driving around for no reason other than that it was nice to be sixteen and traveling in a car without someone's mom in it. We were in the middle of an awkward conversation about our potential future children, which we'd had six or seven times before.

"If we had kids, what do you think they'd look like?" she said.

"I don't know - ugly, for sure. They'd probably get my nose and your hair."

"Plus I'm sure your mom would love it if I got pregnant."

"Yeah, yours too; your dad would have me killed before you had a chance to give the kid a name."

"Yeah, and my---AAAHH!"

I followed her gaze over my shoulder. We were in the middle of a left turn, and a Chevy Silverado was barrelling into the intersection, its grill racing toward my window at face height. The glare from the headlights poured into my window, blinding. I didn't even have time to flinch toward the driver's side in shock. I just stared, dumbly, at the 4400-pound truck that was about to rearrange my internal organs. I could see the guy driving, tensed, fighting the truck's fishtail action as it skidded toward us. In that instant, I had one thought:

"God, please don't let me die without having sex."

Krystal had run a red left-turn light, which must have surprised the poor guy driving the Silverado. He finally came to a complete stop about eight inches from the passenger side of the car - timed nicely, since Krystal had also hit the brakes once she'd realized her mistake, aligning the car so that if the Silverado had failed to stop it would have hit the Mercedes squarely in its center of gravity. Collisions from the "Die Hard" movies weren't as perfect as that one would have been.

We sat there in silence for a second before she continued on through the intersection to the public park where we were going. I shifted around in my seat until she spoke again.

"God, I'm so sick of Jenny. I'm seriously thinking about not hanging out with her anymore."

"Oh yeah, why's that?"

"She was at BJ's in Huntington the other night and ended up fucking the WAITER on the beach outside the restaurant. Can you believe that?"

I could. Jenny was about 5'5" and had an early start on the sort of body girls get after freshman year of college - soft and perfect, after the high school stick-skinniness and before the beer gut really settles in. "Jesus," I said.

"I know," she said. "She's such a slut."

There is no easier insult for one girl to drop on another one than "slut." It's an argument-ender in the grand tradition of "I know you are, but what am I?" It's applicable anywhere, it can't be disproven, and nobody ever stops to say "Wait... what's wrong with that?"

I thought of Jenny that entire night. When you're given a mental picture of an attractive girl having sex, it's hard to separate that from her identity. Every time you see her after that, you'll be thinking of her on her back, sand in her hair, with the lights on Coast Highway just far away enough to avoid a public indecency charge. After I heard that story, I'd actually listen to all of Krystal's stupid stories about Jenny, pretending to sympathize while actually conjuring up that mental image.

When you grow up in church, sex takes on a weird stigma. Let's start from the premise that it's impossible to get a sixteen-year-old boy not to think about sex. It's just his nature. It's not even comparable to trying to teach a dog not to hump the furniture - it's like trying to teach him to juggle torches. Thus, talking to high school kids about sexual purity probably has an effect opposite from the one intended. Every interaction with every girl suddenly has malicious undertones, so that every parents-out-of-town house party and every dark golf course is an opportunity to stamp your ticket to Hell.

Teenage boys are ALWAYS thinking about sex, and nothing will make you think about it more than not having it.

Krystal and I danced along that line for the entire duration of our relationship - we'd end up alone in someone's car fifteen minutes before one of us had to be home, or her parents would call demanding that she come home right as we walked into someone's empty house. Furthermore, her older sister got pregnant at 18, so Krystal was convinced that she'd get knocked up the first time she had sex, no matter what precautions were taken.

It was a great match - her irrational fear of a small child growing inside her mixed with my dogged belief that I'd be letting down my future wife by sleeping with her. Of course, this made perfect sense to me at the time - I mean, why would you want to have sex with more than one person?

Another free lesson for girls who aspire to control a dude completely: send mixed messages. Specifically, insert a couple of insane, emotional demands into a long string of otherwise normal behavior. Nothing is more frustrating than this.*

I was particularly vulnerable to this growing up. My dad loves my mom so much that he'll do anything for her. My mom knows this and never abuses it, so it took me a little while to realize that if I made myself available to solve problems, some girls would come up with an endless string of them. I think the specific instance that made me realize this was when I was seventeen; Krystal called me at 2 AM on a Wednesday morning and asked me to come over because she'd had a bad dream about her mom dying. I had actually walked out to the garage before I realized what I was doing. Of course, that was the beginning of the end, when I finally realized that there were, in fact, other vaginas in the sea.

Needless to say, it never happened between me and Krystal. Had I been turned into hamburger by that truck, I'm sure I would have rocketed up to the pearly gates, where St. Peter would congratulate me on my restraint. "And remember that time Kelly Silva offered you head in front of your house in 8th grade, and you said no because you thought she was dirty and regretted it for two years? Well, it's a good thing you did, my son. Welcome to Heaven." And I would wonder if it was worth it.

*Especially when you have huge tits.

High School Reunion

Last Friday I had an evening flight out of San Jose. I had just settled into my seat on the plane when a chunky girl in her late twenties sat down next to me. Her dress was made of some kind of reflective gold material that looked really uncomfortable even for an hourlong flight, and she had on the sort of makeup you don't usually see outside Cirque de Soleil. She looked like a hurriedly wrapped Christmas present.

She was obviously dressed to go out, and given the timing of the flight I figured she was meeting a guy.

"Going home?" I said.

"No, just visiting people. I'm actually from around here. You?"

"Nah, I'm from Orange County. Just going home for the weekend."

"What for?"

"I figured I'd visit my parents; they still like seeing me every once in a while. And I have this 5-year high school reunion thing."

"Oh yeah?" she said, smiling broadly. "You looking forward to it?"

"Not really; I sort of got talked into it. I don't really have a reason to go, you know?"

"Yeah, I feel ya. I actually met my boyfriend at my 10-year - I'm going down there to see him tonight."

"Oh. Did you guys go to high school together?"

"No, he was actually there with someone else. Funny story." At this point she launched into a long story about her cousins and Fresno State football that lasted until we were over San Luis Obispo. The whole time, I was thinking that she had probably looked much better at 18. With some fat girls, you can tell they've always been fat - they don't care as much, and they're used to wearing clothes that don't make it obvious. Others, like Gold Dress, had clearly been the hot girl at some point, back before they started spilling out the arm holes of their overmatched cocktail dresses. I wondered if her boyfriend had been around through the transformation. When you see someone every day, it's easy to lose sight of radical changes in their appearance, but when you take a five-year break and suddenly see them again, it's obvious - you can tell who put back forty beers a week in college, who grew out of her goth phase, who lived down the hall from the university fitness center. I smiled. Yeah, I was looking forward to the reunion.

For all the growing up that everyone supposedly does between 18 and 23, the vast majority of people still carry around more or less the same identity that they had in high school. As much as we'd like to believe that college makes us radically different and that we "find ourselves" when we can get away from our hometowns, really, it's usually the other way around - we carry the people we were in high school with us to college. Because of this, when you go home for a reunion, you don't just get to see old friends again, you get to jump back to whoever you were when you were 17. I enjoyed high school, and like most people who weren't miserable as teenagers, I had cleaned up the memories a little - forgotten about the early-morning lifts and runs with the baseball team and the four hours of homework a night, and replaced those images with football games and underage drinking on the golf course.

The other great thing about reunions is that you can socialize well with very little thought. Since you'll be repeating the same story about how you're doing 50 times, it's really easy to zone out and pick up on other things that you wouldn't notice if you were actually focusing on the conversation. This means you notice not just that someone's not really interested in talking to you, but also that they're checking out the ass of one of the girls you had English class with in 10th grade. It also makes it way easier to function while hellaciously drunk. Plus, you already have a template to shove people's life experiences into - the stoner, the girl who got hot, the incredibly successful nerd. Everyone seems to conform to the stereotypes. They almost have to, by definition; it's just a question of degree. Obviously you can qualify to be the faded loser by getting arrested for exposing yourself at Coachella, but you could also just do something as minor as dropping out of college - as long as nobody's done anything worse.

So when I showed up, I at least had a framework to work in, but I still didn't really know what to expect. The reunion itself was at Dave & Buster's in Irvine Spectrum. A couple of friends were having a hotel party beforehand, and within fifteen minutes of showing up I was starting to get a good buzz. Right before we left, there was a knock at the door and some guy whose name I'd forgotten came in. He was wearing a t-shirt that was covered in refried beans. Suddenly I didn't feel so bad that I'd worn basketball shorts to a semi-formal event. "Jesus man, you alright?" someone asked.

"Nah, I'm fine; this is only my second beer," he said, holding up the burrito.

Things went downhill from there. We all piled into a shuttle to the other side of the Spectrum (why is there a shuttle going from the Doubletree to D&B's on a Saturday at 7 PM?), and I got my nametag and walked straight to the bar. Within twenty seconds a girl from my junior year physics class came up to me. She had been one of the cheerleaders in high school, and she was still gorgeous. "Hey, I heard you were working on a book!"

One of my favorite parts about coming back home is hearing rumors about myself. For some reason I think adults - and particularly my parents' friends and friends' parents - are even worse than kids about spreading unconfirmed facts, so every time I come back down south I get to hear something new. To date, I've heard that I was getting married (to two different girls), that I was going to Harvard Law, that I was a vocal atheist, and that I'd already written a novel (like I have that kind of commitment). I actually remember being introduced somewhere once as "the kid who got 100% on the Santa Margarita entrance exam" when I was like 21, which is not only untrue, but is also a good competitor for "Least Impressive Introductory Fact Ever." I think I would be more proud if people introduced me as "Hey, this is Dan - one time when he was twelve he kicked a shoe all the way from the base of his driveway into the shoe closet AND IT LANDED RIGHT SIDE UP NEXT TO THE MATCHING SHOE."

I laughed. "No; I wish. How are you doing?"

"Great, great!"

"Are you still living around here, or somewhere else? Weren't you up in LA?"

"Well, I just finished up with school, but I'm looking at jobs in New York now - I really think I want to move out there."

"Oh yeah? What do you want to do?"

"You know, marketing, design, whatever I can get - I know some people out there, so I'm hoping I can find something pretty soon. Where are you?"

"Actually, I live up in the Bay Area now."

"Oh, nice!" She smiled, for real. Even in high school she had mastered the art of The Look - responding to something a guy says and meeting his gaze in that perfect, innocent way that says 'I honestly care about what you're saying and I swear I have no idea that you're imagining dotting my eyes* right now.' Girls, if you learn how to do this in bars, you will never have to buy a drink again. "How do you like it?"

"Eh, it's okay - definitely different from here, that's for sure."

"Different how?" I didn't have an answer prepared.

"I dunno, it's just... less hot girls, a lot of dudes. Work." I couldn't think of anything. Shit. I sounded dumb.

"Yeah, I understand. Well, it can be tough."

"Yeah, it sucks. Don't ever get a real job, seriously," I said, deadpan. She laughed.

Whenever you talk to old friends there's some threshold that they hover around where you have to decide how much to tell them about what's really going on with your life. The base level is typical: where you work, how you like your job ("it's cool"), how you like the city you're living in. Then there's the second level, where you reveal that your work is repetitive and boring, just like everyone else's, and that you still aren't really sure what you want to do with your life. The third level is finally approaching honesty: you can let them know that you're happy to see a couple of people, but mostly to evaluate how the rest are doing with their lives. (Hopefully, worse than you.) The fourth level, rarely achieved while sober, involves telling the other person that you'd rather drive home to jerk off in the shower than spend another thirty seconds talking to them.

Really, you're just looking for the mask to drop. You want that first glimpse of honesty from them as badly as they want it from you. It's not really the fear that your accomplishments pale next to anyone else's - it's that you have a nagging feeling that everyone's story is the same, and you just want someone else to confirm it. On the outside it looks like the typical vodka-fueled pissing contest that you'd see at any party, but really it's the opposite. You're just hoping that the other person is as miserable and directionless as you.

When I gave a speech at my high school graduation (OK, stop laughing) the first thing I said was something like "Congratulations on graduating. Welcome to the top 95% of the American population." The speech was mostly about how easy it is to get complacent, especially for rich kids from a private Catholic high school who had always had everything given to them. Twenty-three is a weird year for most of those kids, because they're starting to see the peak of the roller coaster. There's no longer an attractive, constantly available pool of the opposite sex around (see: Loyola Marymount and Santa Clara) and the parental teat is finally starting to run dry.

Most people I talked to before going home said having a five-year reunion was weird, but really it was perfectly timed - it's the absolute pinnacle for most kids from Orange County. We've just finished up with college and gotten jobs that are still interesting just because they're jobs. The drudgery of work is still outweighed by the cool new stuff you can buy to furnish your apartment - which is WAY nicer than the one you had in school! For most of us, our lives have been so ludicrously plush that only a spectacular failure or success will do them justice. Nothing else merits a good story. And for those of us who are merely comfortable, it's not going to be enough. If you grew up in a five-bedroom mansion in Coto de Caza, even a nice apartment and a 60K job right out of college is going to feel like dogshit, and the inevitable "...is this it?" moment is that much worse.

Part of me is a little glad I'm probably going to be out of a job in a couple of months. If anything, it'll force me back to that place where I was exactly five years ago - 18 and waiting to start the next big step, and just young and stupid enough to think that it'd all work out without me really making an effort to direct things myself. That's why I hate the expression "enjoy the journey." It implies that you can get something out of treating your life the same way you'd treat a four-hour road trip.

After many very similar conversations and an ill-advised 4 AM trip to Del Taco, I got home around 5. This didn't help the fact that I had to be up at 9 for church with my parents. Probably for that reason, when I finally got back to my apartment in Sunnyvale that night, I was exhausted. I collapsed into bed immediately, and when I woke up, still wearing the same shirt I'd had on all day Sunday, for a brief second I forgot I wasn't at home anymore. "Sweet," I thought. "I'll get a bowl of cereal and then take the dog for a walk, and the- FUCK!"

Then I went to work. Don't ever get a real job. Seriously.

*For those of you who don't know, dotting a girl's eyes=blowing one on her face. As in, "Every girl has had her eyes dotted at least once by age 25." Which is also true.

Man Jose

Just one quick thing today: I just saw this map, which pretty much confirmed my suspicions:

Distribution of Single Men and Women in the United States

Before even looking at the map I knew the Bay Area was going to be an enormous cockfest. The supposition that San Francisco is all guys is true, but it's even worse on the Peninsula and in the Valley. It's not even about the gay dudes, either - it's the tech industry. Here's why:
1) Vijay gets EE degree from Technological University of Hyderabad.
2) Vijay secures scholarship to San Jose State to get his master's degree.
3) Vijay gets a job with a big tech company.
4) Vijay sees the appeal of non-arranged American vagina.
5) Vijay buys a shiny shirt.
6) Vijay stands next to the door at Molly Magee's with 3 male friends, making awkward attempts to pick up on every chubby white girl who enters the bar.

The sad part is that the foreign dudes are probably more smooth than the white engineers. Hindi isn't high on the list of accents that make girls hot, but it's better than showing up to a bar wearing a T-shirt that reads "/usr/bin/drinking?"

Also, the implication this map appears to be making is that I have to go to Sacramento to find single women. If that's the case, I may as well beer-bong a gallon of insecticide, because I no longer have a reason to live.

A Brief Example of Why I Don't Want Children

When I was 12, my friend and I used to jump off his patio roof into their pool all the time. The roof was maybe 9 feet off the ground, and its edge was maybe 5 feet from the edge of the pool.

This was pretty easy for us to clear, so naturally we felt the need to make the jump more difficult. We started out jumping over floating objects placed at the edge of the pool - inner tubes, boogie boards, etc. Then we decided to try jumping ONTO the boogie boards. From the patio roof.

If you've ever jumped onto a boogie board that's placed in the center of a pool and tried to "surf" on it, you know that usually one of three things happens:
1) You land gracefully in the center of the board, maintain your balance, and the board sinks beneath you. Everyone watching will clap and cheer, and Stephanie, the hot 8th grader who lives in the house next door, will come over and offer you a handjob.
2) You jump too far and land on the front of the board. The board rockets backward and you faceplant into the water. Everyone laughs.
3) You don't jump far enough, and you land on the back of the board. The board shoots out from under you and you fly backward and upward, not unlike a cartoon character slipping on a banana peel. The back of your head cracks into the edge of the pool. You break your neck and become quadriplegic. The rest of your teenage years are spent desperately trying to convince your helper monkey to jerk you off.

My friend went first. He landed on a combination of #2 and #3 and slipped off to the side of the board. His head must have come within 3 inches of hitting the edge of the pool, and he hit the board with such force that it shot out of the pool entirely. Of course, as soon as he surfaced, the first words out of his mouth were "That was awesome!"

Somewhere within my 12-year-old brain this situation gave me pause. I waffled for about 20 seconds and finally climbed up to the patio roof. Luckily, this 20 seconds was just enough time for my friend's dad to see us from inside the sliding glass door.

I can only imagine how stressful it must be to be a parent, because every once in a while every kid does something so inexplicably dumb that it must take every ounce of restraint in your body not to choke your son out like Macho Man Randy Savage. The look on my friend's dad's face when he saw me on his patio roof, about to jump onto the boogie board, was that look of confusion and anger. He ran outside and screamed, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"

"Uh... not jumping into the pool?"

"You're damn right you're not. Get off there."

In all honesty, it did look really awesome though.

More Things I Hate

"Every time I feel bad about not updating my site, I look at yours." - Noah
Sorry this has taken so long - I really need to spend more time writing. And doing pretty much anything besides working and sleeping.

-At the gym, when someone stands next to the machine you're using and just glares at you until you ask them if they want to work in. You don't need an invitation. Just ask.

-When people send you a link to something that was new over a year ago. This just happened to me with that video of the ridiculous Christmas lights display set to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. It's in a BEER COMMERCIAL now. You have no excuse.

-Women who read Us Weekly in the airport. Seriously, you can complain about celebrities whoring themselves around and acting like idiots all you want, but the fact remains that there's a market for it. Every time you pick up that magazine you're giving some paparazzo a reason to sit outside a coffee shop at 5 in the morning.

-People who buy diamonds. De Beers runs the diamond market with a tighter fist than most drug cartels, and the "A Diamond Is Forever" campaign is one of the most successful slogans in advertising history. It was designed to prevent the existence of a secondary market for diamonds by convincing women not to resell their rings. Seriously, it's not a symbol of your everlasting love that you HAVE TO HAVE TO GET MARRIED. It's a fucking rock. Spend the money on a house, or better yet, send it to the kids in Sierra Leone.

-People who complain about the diamond industry. It's a market based on the exploitation of stupid people and the diamond producers do this extremely well. I have nothing against De Beers - they did a brilliant job of architecting one of the world's greatest marketing campaigns. You can't blame someone for selling shit people don't need as long as they'll buy it.

-Restaurants with small water glasses. I drink a lot of water, and I hate eating without drinking. If you're going to have glasses the size of Dixie cups, you better have a waiter hovering next to the table with a fresh pitcher. Better yet, just leave the pitcher on the table. Better yet, just let me drink out of a huge Mason jar full of whatever liquid I desire.

-During an NFL game, when fans boo after the result of a replay challenge goes against the home team. If you're drunk and 200 yards from the play and you saw it once in real time, who do you think is right, you or the professionally-trained official who saw about 15 different replays in slow motion?

-People who get indignant after a really good "That's what she said!" joke. That's what she said will never, ever not be funny.

-People who order really complicated drinks at the bar when they KNOW other people are waiting.

-Video games whose difficulty dramatically and arbitrarily increases for no reason (I'm looking at you, Madden).

-Milk that goes bad before the expiration date. Nothing will ruin your Sunday morning faster than taking that first delicious bite of Cocoa Puffs and then realizing that a dairy farm burned down inside your mouth.

-Polite laughter. 95% of things that people say that are intended to be funny are not, so let's not encourage them.

-People who send obscure questions to the e-mail list of the entire department AND THEN NOTIFY THE LIST THAT THE QUESTION HAS BEEN ANSWERED.

-People who can't do anything fun without drinking. I am a borderline alcoholic and I STILL don't need to drink to have fun at, say, an amusement park. Also, people who HAVE to be the drunkest person at the party.