The Continuing Adventures of Oatmeal Girl

I woke up the other day and found my house infested with young people. I wasn’t especially thrilled about this development, as I dislike youth on principle, what with their vitality and hope for the future and all. But I assumed they belonged to my roommate somehow and thought nothing of it. After a quick shower, I wandered into the kitchen to get some water and found myself confronted with a young girl, maybe 16 or 17, who as best as I could tell was wearing nothing more than a blanket. I think she was my roommate’s sister, who I’d only met once in passing when it was very dark out, but I didn’t have time to confirm this suspicion. As I entered the room, she held out a bowl and asked, “Is…is this what you use to make oatmeal?” Extrapolating from the packets of oatmeal on the counter and the almost boiling pot of water, I read the intent of this question as “is this what I should eat oatmeal out of?” Horrified by the prospect that I was in the same room as a half naked and potentially underage girl who hadn’t mastered such complex concepts as how a bowl works, I said “it could be,” and left.

That was my first encounter with Oatmeal Girl. The next day, I was getting out of the shower when I heard the bathroom door creak open slightly. Again, I thought nothing of it, as the door hasn’t closed enough to latch since I moved in, so I figured a draft must have nudged it a bit. But when it creaked further still, I decided to have a peek outside to make sure nothing was out there preparing to murder me or sell me encyclopedias or anything. Peering around the edge of the door, I found myself face to face with Oatmeal Girl, who appeared to have been spying on me as I was toweling off. She apologized and asked for a bar of soap, which I awkwardly handed her while hiding my shame behind the door.

When you realize that the only person to have seen you naked in the last few years is quite possibly the dumbest, unskilled, underage voyeur alive, it’s difficult to argue that life is going according to plan.

-TC

Hockey

Last night I joined some friends in watching the Olympic gold medal hockey match between The United States and Canada, and I must say I found myself astounded. Just when I thought sports couldn’t get any more boring, I was amazed at how incredibly little I could manage to care on the highest of international stages. It took many years of hard work and dedication, but I think I have finally reached the apex of human achievement in putting on such an unparalleled display of herculean disinterest. If only there was a medal for that.

-TC

Snow Storm

I lived in Phoenix for about eight months, and it was probably the most consistently awful eight months of my life. I had no friends. The ceiling in my cockroach infested apartment leaked rusty algae from time to time. My job involved destroying people’s lives by looking at pictures of backed up toilets and decapitated horses all day long. I went on a single blind date with a woman who turned out to only have a single leg. In short, I came away with absolutely nothing positive to say about the American Southwest.

And yet somehow on days like this when I never see the sun, can’t control the heat in my apartment, and am plagued by an ever increasing number of wet socks, I can’t help asking myself, why did I leave the desert again?

-TC

Valentine's Day 3: Day Harder

When I was a boy, Valentine’s Day was a day for friendship as much as for love. We’d tape brown paper bags to our desks, and walk around giving Ninja Turtle themed cards to anyone we could stand. I’d always open the package of cards, pick out the second best card for my best friend, keep the best one for myself, and divvy up the rest amongst my classmates, less as an exercise in appreciation for the people I gave them to than an exercise in spite for the people who weren’t even worthy of false sentiment.

But oh, how times have changed. As adults, Valentine’s Day is exclusively for the purpose of showering appreciation on people who have low enough standards to take their clothes off for us in hopes that they will continue to do so. If you’re in a relationship, it’s a day of love, sex, and rapidly depleting cash reserves. For me, it’s usually a day of twiddling my thumbs while I have no one to talk to because no one else in the world seems to be single. But this year, I don’t want to be left out of the festivities, so I’ve been trying to come up with a series of activities for one that will be both productive and romantic so that I may make the best use of my alone time without feeling like I’m the only person in the world who isn’t in love.

Thankfully, another flash of inspiration struck when I woke up this morning. I live in New York City, where the opportunities for romantic activities are endless. But one of the time honored traditions for young couples in this city is the good old fashioned horse drawn carriage ride through Central Park. So, as a token of appreciation for myself, I’m going to get gussied up, head on over to Central Park, rent all the horse drawn carriages in the city, and pay them to run over anyone they see holding hands.

And then, if I’m in an especially jaunty mood, I might steal their chocolates.

-TC

Valentine's Day 2: Electric Boogaloo

Since I am lucky enough to be single this Valentine’s Day, I’ve been planning for how I will spend my day. Pretty much no one I know is single, so I won’t have to worry about regular social obligations. And as I am blissfully unattached, I won’t have to worry about some chocolate and rose crazed harlot trying to have her lustful way with me again and again all night long until the sheer repetition of it causes me to pine for the fresh originality of the tenth season of M*A*S*H. Instead, I’m trying to come up with romantic yet productive activities for one to keep me busy while the rest of the world is engrossed in gazing lovingly into each others eyes. Thankfully, another flash of inspiration struck today. While all my friends and neighbors are out enjoying fancy dinners, carriage rides, or whatever it is that people in love are supposed to do to avoid conversation, I’ll put on my fanciest suit, light a few candles, then break into their homes and steal their stereos. The proceeds should be more than enough to buy a Valentine’s Day hooker.

What can I say? I’m a hopeless romantic.

-TC

Valentine's Day

Valentine’s Day is this weekend, and like most single people, I’m trying to come up with plans for how to make the most productive use of my time while everyone else is stuck sitting through tediously romantic dinners, exhausting romantic walks, and unnecessarily passionate love making. As I’m not unfortunate enough to have my life fettered with such humdrum obligations, I’m going to have the quintessential single man’s Valentine’s Day. I’ll be going out in search of the most romantic restaurant filled with the most happy young couples, and I will be setting it on fire. It’s a sparse itinerary, but I think it will be a rewarding one all the same.

-TC

Maple Candy

My first job out of college was in a maple candy factory, perhaps the most successful application of a liberal arts degree to date. Now, as a good Vermonter, I am a huge proponent of all things maple. Maple syrup, maple candy, gay marriage licenses notarized with a maple stamp, you name it. I lived and died by the code of maple. That is, until I got the factory job and ate maple candy non-stop for the better part of a year. My shameless gluttony coupled with coming home every day in maple soaked pants (not to mention working with a drug dealer who regularly threatened to stab me) was enough to make the very thought of maple candy absolutely revolting to me.

When I went home for Christmas, I bought a maple leaf from my old factor as a little present for someone, but it never got delivered. So I’ve been looking at this maple leaf on my dresser for a few weeks and wondering, is four years enough time that I can finally put the past behind me and stomach the idea of maple candy again? Well, today my sweet tooth got the better of me and I decided to give it a shot. The verdict? The sickening sweetness of the candy was only offset by the bitter memory of folding thousands of these boxes as I opened it.

Maybe in another four years…

-TC

State of the Union

I was a bit disappointed with yesterday’s State of the Union Address. I mean, really, it’s just a giant iPod touch. What were you thinking, Obama?

-TC

Avatar

I finally broke down and saw Avatar last night. I’ll only say two things about this movie. First…unobtainium? Really? This must have been a total Poochie moment in the writers room, if ever I saw one.

Second, at exactly what point in the course of human evolution do we start feeling the need to equip our giant, walking battle robots with hunting knives? “Sure they have machine guns and missiles, but you gotta give ‘em a blade, ‘casue you never know when they’ll find themselves in the midst of a robot whittling contest.”
-TC

An Important Lesson

My dad’s toilet hasn’t worked properly for a couple years now. He has neither the money nor the skill to have it fixed, so he’s just sort of let it be, filling up the tank by hand with jugs of water whenever he needs to use it. So I decided that as part of his Christmas present this year, I would buy whatever parts need to be replaced and fix it for him. I like to think I learned a valuable life lesson from this experience. If someone says “I’d like you to fix my toilet, please,” you say no. And if they say, “I’d really just as soon you didn’t fix my toilet,” you don’t insist.

On the upside, after a good seven hours of effort, it does in fact work.

-TC

Awkward

My roommate had a birthday party last night, and invited me to come along. While I quite like my roommate, I tend to be a bit introverted, so we don’t hang out or bond too terribly much. As such, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to go out, meet some new people, and spend some quality time with the person I spend so much time silently cohabiting with. Unfortunately, the party was going to be held in a strip club, which, as a general rule, is exactly the sort of place tend to avoid. But luckily the stripping party was going out for food and drinks beforehand, so I decided to at least go along and show support by playing my part in ensuring that the birthday girl found herself more or less completely trashed by the end of the evening.

However, after some delightful conversations with new people, not to mention more than a few drinks, the possibility of going to a strip club didn’t seem like anywhere near as bad an idea as usual. My spirit of adventurousness quickly took over, and upon my roommate producing passes for free entry, it was quickly joined by my spirit of cheapness. As a general life policy, I like to think that I’ll try almost anything once. If you get me drunk first and tell me it’s free, the “almost” tends to become roughly as flexible as my good judgment. And so it was that I found myself venturing out to a strip club last night.

The experience was very similar to the one I expected, save the fact that I thought the dancers would be a bit more energetic and the chairs would be a bit more comfortable. As for the dancers, I was surprised how “stripping” seemed less an act of burlesque and more one of awkwardly swaying at a high school dance. At one point, one of my new friends of the evening turned to me and asked, “So, what do you think she’s going for with that dance?” I paused thoughtfully for a second and replied, “I think she’s going for ‘I’m stoned and I’m looking for my car keys.’” And as for the furnishings, all I can say is that I would have imagined a place that is based solely on making people feel like they’re important could have made at least some effort to make them feel comfortable at the same time. After all, what self respecting guy with wads of cash and an abundance of sexual magnetism would blow his money on awkwardly shaped velvet chairs with stains and no lumbar support?

Now, when I walk into a room where there aren’t any ladies taking their clothes off for money, typically there will be more than enough awkward to go around. So you can just imagine what walking into a room and finding a naked woman perched precariously on a pair of oversized high heels that she clearly borrowed from an Amazon at the last second did for the situation. At first it was actually a bit of a relief. After all, it’s been so long since I’ve seen a naked woman that it was nice to know that all the important bits are more or less where I remembered them to be. And really, being surrounded by scantily clad strangers, while not an experience I’m anxious to repeat, was not as uncomfortable an experience as I might have thought.

The real awkward came when I, as the guy in the group sitting closest to the nearest walkway, kept getting offered lap dances every few minutes. In and of itself, this wasn’t especially objectionable, as you can pretty much apply the basic rules of telling a waitress that you don’t want a refill on your Pepsi to informing a woman in a corset that you’d rather she didn’t waggle her bottom at you. But what I hadn’t accounted for was how physical strippers are in their flirtatious advances. After we’d been sitting for maybe twenty minutes, I was in mid conversation with the man next to me when all of a sudden a strange hand started running up my inner thigh. I abruptly whipped my head around to give her my best deer in the headlights look (which, with eyes like mine, is pretty good), and she offered me a dance. Now, as this was the most physical contact I’ve had with a woman in about two years, I found myself a bit flustered and surprisingly unable to verbally articulate complex thoughts like “No, thank you,” so I had to make due with hand gestures that I felt conveyed my sentiments. Unfortunately, it would seem that in Russian these gestures translate as “Please stare at me blankly as you continue to stroke my inner thigh.” No wonder the Soviet Union collapsed.

As I said, I’ll try almost anything once. But as is often the case, going to a strip club is an experience where once is enough.

-TC

Laughter

This year has been a tough one for everyone, and so it’s no surprise that this Christmas will have to be a lean one. That’s why I’ve decided to give all my friends and family the most precious gift of all: the gift of a child’s laughter. Unfortunately, when I run up to a child in the streets and shake my fists wildly while screaming “laugh,” I seem to get more crying than anything else. But I’m not giving up hope. Because at the end of the day, the people I care about are worth it.

-TC

Cab Driver

It’s rare that I find myself in a cab, but this weekend I accompanied some friends from Manhattan to Brooklyn in one of the city’s many fine taxis. While we were dodging traffic at what might have seemed like excessive speed in less sophisticated parts of the world, one of said friends decided to strike up a conversation with the driver, and it wasn’t long before he opened right up and started chatting away like there was no tomorrow. As soon as I mentioned that I was from Vermont, he started to describe in unexpectedly graphic detail how he used to have sex with this girl in Bennington, which segued nicely into a thorough account of every woman he had ever slept with and, occasionally, married. In the course of his life story, it dawned on me that my cab driver has impregnated more women than I have seen naked. I can’t begin to count the number of levels on which I was unhappy about this.

-TC

Spam

It would seem that today, someone pretending to be me accessed my e-mail account and sent out this mass message to everyone I’ve ever contacted inviting them to buy digital cameras from some website. My friends knew it wasn’t me, though. This isn’t due to the fact that I was inexplicably selling things or had the grammar of a bad Chinese robot, but because I suspiciously mentioned that I was experiencing “happiness.” My friends know me so well.

-TC

Hair Metal

I see people performing for money in the subway all the time. But today I saw my first one man hair metal band. And he totally rocked my world. Not enough that I gave him money, of course, just enough that I decidedly avoiding giving him any overtly dirty looks as I passed by. I’m too kind, I know.

-TC

Writing

I’ve been writing a lot lately. As is always the case when I’ve been productive for a while, I felt like doing some mindless busy work to make it feel like I was accomplishing something while actually doing little more than killing time between now and the grave. In that spirit, I decided to print out the latest copies of all the scripts I’ve started in the last few years and organize them together in a binder.

Once I had done so, the first thing I realized was that this binder is now heavy enough that I could easily beat someone to death with it. The second thing I realized was that doing so would probably be the most productive thing that is likely to happen with this material.
-TC

Transformers

Alright, I’ll admit that there’s a ten year old boy inside me, and no matter how much I may fight it, I still have an overwhelming impulse to see movies based on things from my childhood, like super hero films and the like. But at least I’ve reached the point where I can usually wait until they’ve come out on DVD so I can experience my shame in private. And I knew when I rented Transformers 2 from Netflix that I was making a terrible life choice, but I had no idea just how bad an idea this was. All I can say is that I’m less than 15 minutes in and there has already been a flatulent robot.

Michael Bay, if you’re reading, I’m embarrassed for both of us.

-TC

Highs and Lows

I came home to New England for the weekend, and I thought I would give a quick rundown on the highs and lows of my day here in small town USA. On the high side, within hours of waking up this morning I had a stranger tell me I was handsome, then had an attractive young woman give me a free cookie in exchange for flashing my winning smile. (I’d like to gloat about how dreamy this sort of thing might suggest me to be, but sadly I don’t think that the title of Most Attractive Man in Walpole, New Hampshire is as difficult to attain as one might imagine.)

And on the low side, I went into an empty house and saw my first free-standing urinal in a residential home. Not, I should point out, in a bathroom. Just sitting there off the kitchen. Western Civilization at it’s finest.
-TC

Master Race

Today I saw a man walking down the street with a cat sitting on his head, and a very nice homeless looked at me and shouted, “You ain’t no master race, bitch.” Or, as we say in New York, it’s Monday.
-TC

Yelps

Today I was reading The New York Times, and there was a story about a supreme court case where a man is accused of distributing images of animal cruelty for including scenes of a dogfight in a documentary. As part of his defense, his lawyers counted “at most, 25 seconds containing yelps.” Some go to law school for the money, others to fight for social justice. I wonder if these people went in hoping they’d get the chance to sit with a stopwatch so they could stand before the supreme court seriously arguing over exactly how many dog yelps constitute animal cruelty from a legal standpoint. Still, better than being the bankruptcy attorney advertising on the subway.
-TC