Judge Mental

I've been accused of being judegemental before and for good reason. Sometimes I am judgemental. I know it and I accept it becuase I think everyone is guilty of this from time to time.
Case in point: This morning, I opened up MSN and found a link to a story that caught my eye. At first, I had decided to ignore it. I almost felt my hand pushing the mouse toward the icon and conciously made the decision not to go all the way.
I read a couple of news itmes and checked my e-mail. Then, as I signed off e-mail, I got that golldang icon again....the one with Brittney Spears' sister's image staring at me with the caption, "Whatsername may be pregnant". Okay, it said her name but I forgot what it is and I don't want to look it up and lose my train of thought.
I guiltily clicked on the story and read about three sentences. It was enough. Brittney Spears' sixteen-year-old sister is knocked up by some dude she met in church.
The nasty thought that immediately sprang to my mind (as I'm sure it did to that of so many) was that if anyone had been unsure of the level of white-trash that was embodied in the Spears gene pool, little sis just confirmed that it was pretty dang high.

Now, as sad as it is that this young girl is knocked up, I think that it's kind of sad that I am judging her: for thinking her a slut, a whore, a teenage jezebel, for thinking of her mother as a bad parent, a dirty piece of redneck waste, for thinking of her skank sister as a bad role model.
Who am I, after all? I'm not even rich or famous. I could be considered white trash by some people. In fact, the other day I heard a patron at the bar I work at refer to me as white trash behind my back - when he thought I wasn't listening.
Of course I think he's wrong. If I were really white trash, I would have blown some mucous into his scotch. To be honest, the thought never even crossed my mind. I was too busy pretending not to be offended and telling myself that I misunderstood what I thought I'd heard.
Does that make me not white trash? Maybe not. Maybe I am. Maybe we all are - except black and chinese and indian people. They are black, indian or asian trash.
Wait....maybe I am white trash! I just referred to asians as Chinese! Worse yet, I wrote 'chinese' with a small c! I am a terrible, horrible person.

POINT: Judging is mental. Lets shoot the judges. (But please don't kill them because that's violent and violence is bad. Ugh. Here I am now, judging people who are violent. Or am I?

facetiae

Facetiae, is a word that you will probably never use, though it describes something you might want to describe.
I'm not going to tell you what it means.
Perhaps you know already because you 'speak' Latin or because you're a pseudo intellectual.
Maybe it was a Word of the Day and you - for whatever reason - recall its meaning.
In any case, it's a fairly useless word. Not because it lacks meaning but because it's just not recognized - and I doubt it ever will be - by the masses. It sounds way too much like something brown and sticky - a wet turd. There's a word that people don't use every day but still recognize. Turd. Has a nice ring to it.
As a child I referred to all my teachers and other enemies as "turds" or "stupid turds" or "fat turds" or "lousy turds". I was obsessed with turds.
What does that say about me? I'm afraid to ponder the subject any further.
That's all for now.

Emptyheadedness

Have you ever had the sense that your mind was completely empty? That you had lost any and everything you'd had in there? Just for a moment? A second, maybe?
Well, I have. It's scary.
Without our memories, without thoughts, without the ability to make a command: existence seems pointless.
I don't like being pointless. If I wanted to lead a life of pointlessness (emptyheadedness) I'd have to become a politician. That would be terrible. I'd rather be a prisoner - an innocent prisoner, though.

Useless Advice

I have always been more of an advice giver than an advice taker.

It's interesting that I rarely take advice from anyone. I always feel that what people tell me is either good information or bad. I decide almost immediately what I am going to do with that information; I'll either file it away in the mental drawer labeled, "Good Advice that I should take even if I already think I know it" or the other one (the big one) labeled, "Crap".

I am sure that I give out lots of Crap to many people who talk to me. I am not a good example to follow. I am completely and utterly financially unsuccessful. I have very few close friends. I have rarely participated in the most basic events of human life which tend to shape the average person's decision making processes. I have almost always rejected the obvious in favor of the absurd. I'm totally self-absorbed - just look at my use of the word "I" in this blog.

YET, I know that it is a very basic tenet of my personage, the EJ inside me all the time, that one should always consider every detail of their actions and how those actions will affect others.
I am not sure how these two facets of my personality coexist in any kind of harmony. Maybe they don't and that's why I so often find myself feeling low.

This belief that your actions, my actions - that they are directly linked to everyone else through even the slightest gesture - is something that seems so basic to me. Of course someone will know or be affected when I do something that is dishonest or cruel or wonderful and fantastic. I often feel I do things that are a total waste of time to the casual observer but to me these seemingly useless actions somehow make the world safer. Or not. Maybe they just make me feel better. My feeling better can affect how I treat others and then I pass on that positive sense to my neighbors. That's good, isn't it?

Unfortunately, I often feel badly, even if I've done something nice or harmless because I think I could have spent my time more 'wisely' - whatever that means.

I do and say a lot of awful things as well and I'm always sure that those words and deeds trickle through the air and make someone miserable somewhere - even if it's not my intended victim.

At moments when I, myself, feel sad, lonely, miserable, vulnerable, wronged by life - I want to take back all of the bad things I've ever said about anyone and undo all of the evil I've done, no matter how tiny and forgettable it might seem. Life is too short to be painful, even if the pain does make it more memorable.

I don't know. Maybe pain, misery, suffering - maybe these are necessary evils; kind of like Hilary Clinton and George Bush or Osama bin Laden and Kim Jung Il. They seem so inessential but the world would be really different without them and not necessarily better.

Wait - I'm being political! That's not really me.
At least I'm offending both major political parties on equal levels.

I often wish I were a different person: someone who is cool, financially secure, worldly, sophisticated, has smartitude, likes chickens...but then I realize that to have all those things I would have to be mostly clueless about the rest of the world - the world outside my immediate experience.

If I Ruled The World - OR - When I'm Dictator of The World, I'll...

Nostradamus' ghost seems hell bent on ruining the future. His predictions are so full of death and destruction that it just makes me wonder why anyone would want to read his cryptic "prophecies", much less make them into TV specials for the History Channel. Truth be told, I wanted to watch the latest "Lost Book of Nostradamus" but I've been so overly occupied that I didn't get a chance to see it on The History Channel. Now that I've analyzed the situation, I believe the right course of action is for me never to watch the show. For one thing, I saw that movie documentary that the dude from Citizen Kane and those Paul Masson commercials made before his heart exploded from fatness. I saw it when I was just a child and it basically stayed with me for my entire life. I grew up SURE that New York (my home town) was going to be blown to smithereens by turban-wearing terrorists. When I got off the subway at 9:AM on Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, late for work, seeing all the nacos on the street running at that ungodly hour and looking south on Canal, toward the hole in the first hit tower, and then seeing the second plane hit the other tower, my mind went immediately to that old documentary Orson Welles did. I remembered seeing cartoons of zombie-like people in the streets of what was called "new city". I remembered those re-enactments showing an Arab man ordering rockets to be shot toward New York. None of these thoughts were pleasant at all. They just fed a paranoia that had been deeply embedded in my brain - has been, actually. The point is, I have come to believe - or hope, that since Nostradamus, or Nos, as I like to call him, was just another quack who somehow got worldwide attention and created a series of self-fulfilling prophecies. As such, these SFPs can become SUPs or Self-Unfulfilled Prophecies. One of the ways I would like help facilitate this SFP to SUP process is to declare myself a prophet, gain worldwide acceptance and then, turn things around on old Nos and prophesy that Superman will fight the terrorists, wipe out the virus and zap the meteor out of the sky, saving the Earth for at least the next million years. I think I have quack potential. Don't you? The best part about all this is that people would love me and I'd then, hopefully, get to rule the world. Then I could really start making changes. The first thing I'd do is make public transportation free. Nobody should have to pay for the crap we get - at least in New York City. I'm soooooo sick of the subway. It's easily the most miserable part of my day, standing on the trains amidst the masses of funkmeisters carrying luggage! What the H E double hockey sticks is up with these people carrying their damn wheeled luggage on the rush-hour trains? Have we really gotten so lazy that we can't pick up and carry our briefcases? What amount of crap do people need to carry around? Those people really squeeze my bojangles. The next thing I'd like to do is create a worldwide currency to facilitate travel. Of course this would wipe out several businesses but I would be a world leader unsympathetic to the money mongers of the Earth and I wouldn't listen to their cries. Next I would put a hold on all the wars until each warring tribe/nation/ethnic group writes me up a 10,000 word essay on why they need to win their respective wars. The winning essay would get a year's-supply of fruit and meat. The next thing I would do would be to remove all gym equipment from prisons around the world. Why are we letting these people get stronger? Isn't that dangerous? I'd also like to remove all metal/plastic and glass from the prisons...except for the bars, of course. For my final decree, before retiring to my secret Empirical Palace in Mauritius, I would create a flat tax of 10% worldwide and set a salary cap on all world employees of 200,000 World Dollars...which would be something like a Euros, only less snotty.

Why I Love Public Transportation

I haven't blogged for a while and have been hatin' on my daily trips to work, so I'm going to take a moment to digitally ponder my life as a commuter.

My mother is a life-long New Yorker. That means she can't drive. Given that situation, I have been forced onto subways and buses since I was old enough to walk.

Mom didn't stroller me into subways and buses because that involved carrying stuff and slowed her down - and Mom liked to move fast. She used to be one of those race-walkers - only she used high-heels instead of sneakers.

Ma didn't want to waste time by trying to stuff my stroller into a bus or train. That's probably why I walked when I was just 7 months old - she wanted to make sure I was ready for the commute and wouldn't slow her down.

Anyway, I traveled on the number 12 bus and the number 6 train from as far back as I can remember, with my mother. I recall being like four and my mother running and making me follow her through the sliding doors that link the subway cars so that we could get to the middle car where the conductor was. That was the 70s and a woman with a small kid was ripe for being mugged in New York and she felt comforted by Jerome and his lethal flashlight. The fact that I was terrified of falling between cars didn't seem to faze my mother who sometimes was three or four steps ahead of me. I usually closed my eyes when I stepped from one car to the other, holding my breath and letting out a sigh of relief each time I made it across the mysterious abyss that peaked through the gap between the subway cars.

I remember how the lights used to go on and off all the time on the subways (which were covered in graffiti) - whenever the subway came to a stop. Sometimes we'd be stuck in a dark tunnel for ten minutes with nothing but B.O. to give me a sense that anyone else was around. Had the train needed to be evacuated, I'd have to follow the stink of other commuters to find my way out. I've never had good night vision. Good nightmares, but not good night vision.

As I grew older, the AIDS epidemic began to take its toll on the heroin-shooting homeless of New York and they became more aggressive about panhandling on the subways. From the time I was in high school until the first year of the Giuliani administration, I swear I never got on a subway without at least one would-be homeless person coming into the car to announce that he or she had had AIDS yet they were not drug addicts nor were they alcoholics and that they were trying very hard to get back into life via some form of treatment. Sometimes they'd add that they had six or seven children at home to feed. It's interesting to think that they were shooting heroine with six or seven kids at home who needed things like food and diapers.

I don't mean to sound unsympathetic to AIDS victims. I mean to sound unsympathetic to annoying people who smell bad. I am totally unsympathetic to people who choose their own cards and then expect others to pay up when they're dealt the losing hand. Furthermore, to be frank, these beggars were very annoying. They were even more annoying than the mental case riders without AIDS - who had all their limbs and none of their marbles. At least I could laugh at them without feeling guilty.

Over time the little sympathy I have for beggars on the subway has diminished to virtually no sympathy at all. Recently, as the Giuliani effect has weakened, the beggars have started to return to the subway. A month or so ago a man came into my subway car, reporting to those that weren't wearing iPods, that he had been looking for a job for over 6 months to support his family. He finally found one, but, unfortunately, he needed to make an initial investment of 325 dollars to get started in this new "job".
I think one guy gave him a dollar just because it was a fairly novel approach to begging on the subway.
As ridiculous as it sounded, I felt in the back of my mind that maybe he really did need the money to buy a suit or something and that maybe he wasn't a crack head.
About two-weeks later I was riding the same subway at more-or-less the same time and the same dude comes into the car and gives the same lame sob story, except this time the initial investment is $285 dollars.
Either he just makes up these figures or he was making very slow progress.
Either way, I still didn't give him any money.

Boiled French Fries

My father, as I've mentioned before, is from a weird little country called Estonia. Sometimes kids whose ethnic backgrounds are different are a little ashamed or embarrassed to talk about it. I grew up in a neighborhood of New York City that was/is 80% Italian and everyone there was extremely proud of their heritage. They proudly went about their days wearing T-shirts with the Italian flag on them, driving cars with the red devil horn/chili pepper hanging from the rear-view, speaking that strangely American working-class Italian-English dialect whenever they ordered lunch meat. I was actually traumatized as a small child by the guys who worked in the deli across the street. My parents and/or grandmother used to send me there on a daily basis to buy things like American Cheese, salami, ham and bologna - those things were fine to order; but there were days when the menu of the house called for exotic things like "mozzarella" and "capacolla". If I pronounced the former the American way, as "MOTTS-A-RELLA" they guys in the deli would point at my five-year-old face and laugh at me.
"Ha! What do you want, kid? MOTTS-A-RELLA? Is that some kind of apple sauce?"
I would stand there humiliated while the other patrons looked at my little blond head and laughed in unison with the guys behind the deli counter.
I knew full well that I could go in there and say I wanted the cheese the way they wanted me to say it, which was/is - MUTS-A-DELL. If I had the personality I have now, then, I would have asked them, "what's that? A broken computer?" Of course, Dell didn't exist at that time, but it's just a supposition. I probably wouldn't even do it now anyway.
I always returned from the deli defeated. It got to a point where I could only order mozerella by brand name and the brand that I was able to pronounce tasted like window caulking - or what I would imagine caulk to taste like.
Capacolla was another issue. Thankfully, this was a rare order in my house but it was virtually impossible to pronounce the way they wanted me to in the deli. I think those goombas used to call it "Gabba-Gool" and I just refused to order this after a few humiliations in the deli. Much later in life, after I had been to Italy a couple of times, I realized how stupid all of these people were and got over my past traumas. These things take time sometimes. I no longer feel intimidated for the gumbas, just sorry. The cool thing is that they don't care. That's the good thing about goombas.

So, back to my weird Estonian heritage. I can't say that there's anything that's so different about my father's ways. I can only say that everything is almost completely different. He does everything his own way. There have been virtually no developments in his repetoir since he crossed the Atlantic through a hurricane in 1948.

As a child, I remember him laughig riotously at every joke he told - none of which made the least bit of sense when he translated them from standard English to his own version of English. He'd listen to jokes in the bar he hung out in after work and come back and tell my mother the thing - usually something highly inappropriate for family listening. The thing was it didn't matter because the joke was so mangled that it was no longer really dirty. We could tell that it was supposed to be a dirty joke but that my father had misunderstood it so completely that he lost the filth somewhere in there yet it still seemed to him to be a riot. My mother usually stopped listening after the part where "a naked woman walks up to a priest" and started planning her next pair of shoes in her head. "Oh, that was a good one, Elm", she'd say.

Well, that's dad. He was always surprising us with something.
Since mom hated to cook, he often gave it a whirl but it was almost always a waste of food. My brothers and sisters were older so they could just flat-out refuse to eat but I, as a small child, had to eat or at least pretend to eat whatever he put out on the table. I dreaded the days when he was in the mood to cook. I remember the fried steak that was cooked for about forty-five seconds, the canned string-beans that were cooked for forty-five minutes to the point of tastelessness, or the boiled french fries.
I remember the first time I saw the french fries sitting in a pool of tepid water.
"What's this?", I asked?
"French fries."
"What happened to them?"
"Just eat them. They're good."
"They look sick. Why are they in water?"
"I boiled them."
"Why?"
"We had no oil. Just sit and eat."
I passed on the fries.

Being a non-Italian was hard. Being half Estonian was harder at times. Life is not always so easy but really, why should your ethnic background be such a pain the the ass? At least growing up relieves some of the ass pain.

Diet 7-Up and the Cure for Borderline Diabetes

I was perched up on the Formica counter chatting with my brother Aldo and his eventual wife, Drucilla about Patrick Ewing's chances of being named rookie of the year when the smoke started turning the corner from the hallway to the kitchen.
We didn't give it much thought since we knew Gerty'd been boiling herself in the bath for the last three hours and this was the usual fallout from the pressure-cooked dousings she subjected herself to every evening after work.
She used to get the steam from the hot baths lodged so deeply into her pours that she'd sweat for about two hours after. She had to keep this giant turban-towel around her three-feet of hair to keep it appropriately moist for the next day so it would seem like she washed it in the morning rather than the day before. I'm sure between the wet mop of hair and the steam-filled pours of her body she weighed at least an extra 10 pounds when she finally slo-mo geysered out of the bathing chamber.
So, Aldo, Drucy and I were sitting around yaking it up when Gerty entered the kitchen for a her nightly water-guzzling ritual whereby she stood in front of the open fridge, removed a large soda-bottle filled with cold water and proceeded to suck down the contents until the bottle flattened into a great collapsed origami lung. Once the water was sufficiently expunged, she started searching through the refrigerator. For what? More water? That wasn't enough?
Aldo and I had kind of seen this routine before but Drucilla was new to this scene and kind of grossed out by the sight of my pruned-out bathrobe-wearing sweat-ball turbaned sister inhaling a half-gallon of water in six point five seconds, all the while not even acknowledging our existence though we were three feet in front of her.
Well, she hadn't acknowledged our existence until she realized that what she was looking for in the fridge was in fact, not there.
"What happened to my Diet 7-Up?", Gerty interrogated.
Aldo and I were kind of wrapped up in our conversation and Drucy was just sort of quietly observing the scene as if it she were not really in the room. Since we weren't all that interested in where her Diet 7-Up had gone, we didn't answer.
"Hello? Are you deaf? Where is my Diet 7-Up?"
"Ma must have drunk it", Aldo answered back.
"Well, I need it quickly or I might go into a diabetic coma."

Now, Aldo and I were not so cruel as to allow Gerty to go into a diabetic coma by simply denying her request. We denied her request because we didn't believe that she was going to go into a coma, nor did we accept that she was a borderline diabetic.
You might wonder how we could be so callous...Cruel even. But don't wonder. Just accept that Gerty was and is simply a bit of a sometimes-lovable and sometimes infuriating nutcase.

So, Aldo and I didn't respond at all.

"EJ, I need you to go and get me some Diet 7-Up right now."
"Gerty. It's almost 9. The deli is closing and I am in the middle of a conversation. So, I'm sorry but, no. You'll have to get dressed and go yourself."
"Do you understand that I'm a borderline diabetic and I could go into a hyperosmolar coma? I'm dehydrated and I need to balance out all the sugar I've been eating all day."
"And Diet 7-Up will somehow save you from going into a diabetic coma? Come on, Gerty. Do we look stupid to you?"
"Don't argue with me. I was a Phys-Ed major and I know a quite a few things about the human body, okay. Now, I need Diet 7-Up and I need it now so just go to the store and get it for me and stop being a jerk about it."
"No", was all I replied. Aldo started mocking her, "diet 7-up - like that's friggin insulin or something. Are you retarded?"
Drucilla was still silent, looking very uncomfortable.
Then we started chatting again, trying to ignore Gerty who by this time was on all-fours on the kitchen floor.
Drucy looked a little worried - like maybe it was time for her to go home - when Gerty held her head and let out this annoying moan that I suppose was intended to convince us that she was actually melting into a hyper-super-awesome-molar coma (or whatever it was called) and then she screatched out some words that were at-first hard to identify but which sounded something like, "ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" which loosely translated to 'if I don't get Diet 7-Up now I'm going to die!' and with that, I jumped off the counter and hiked the two blocks to Roma's deli to get her stupid Diet 7-Up-icilin.
I think when I got back, Drucilla was gone. I was sure she would never be back, but then Aldo must have convinced her that whatever Gerty had wasn't contagious, or maybe that Diet 7-Up really was a cure for dehydrated diabetics.

JUG

When I was in High School or, as I used to call it then, "prison", I was a fairly good kid. I mostly kept to myself, I mostly obeyed the rules and I usually displayed outward respect for my teachers and the school staff despite feeling that they were all a bunch of nacos.

Despite my calm and quiet, respectful demeanor, I was somehow thought to be a particularly dangerous problem for the Dean of Disciplin, Mr. Queery.
Queery was not so much a man as a robot.
Even his voice radiated the sickly mental dust from the reruns of Lost In Space on an old black and white rabbit-eared TV set. Since Queery was evil, he was more like a combination of the robot and Doctor Smith. He used to call to me with his robotic arm, gesturing for me to come to look at the clipboard in his hand so he could write my name on it.
"Mr. Sepp", he'd say as he looked at the clipboard. "You have JUG. Report to room 145 at 2:35."
"Why? What did I do?!"
"You're slacks are not proper dress slack material."
"These? These are so dress pants. I wear them all the time"
"Well, the you've been getting away with murder, Mr. Sepp. They are not regulation fabric."
"Yes. These pants are dress pants. You cannot tell me that they are not dress pants!"
"They are not dress pants, Mr. Sepp. If you keep arguing with me you will have two days of JUG".

I guess I deserved this JUG punishment. After all I was killing small African children by wearing non-standard-fabric Bill Blass dress pants to school.

JUG was rumored to stand for JUSTICE UNDER GOD and it was just a CARDINAL SPELLMAN word for 'detention'. It was a waste of an hour after school but at least I did some homework when I was there when they decided to let us do it. Sometimes doing anything was forbidden and we had to just sit at our desks with our hands folded neatly. JUG was, after all, a punishment for doing awful things like wearing bad fabric or not having our ties so tight that we couldn't breathe or letting our hair grow one milimeter below our shirt collars.
It's no wonder I was ADD when I literally spent every other day of my first year of High School in JUG doing nothing but staring at Sister Angelica's beard and wondering why she didn't get a Gillette Contour Plus razor and shave those suckers right off there. Maybe it was too embarassing to go to Duane Reade and ask for a man's razor when you were a nun. She could have dressed like a man or even taken off the habit and pretended to be a normal woman shopping for her husband. Of course the cashier would have noticed the beard and realized that this woman was actually buying the razor for herself.

Maybe she could have asked one of the other nuns to wax it for her in the convent loo. Then again, where would these convent nuns get the wax? Maybe they could make it. After all, don't nuns spend a lot of time in nature and have easy access to the common wax plant? Then again, these were city nuns - Bronx nuns. They probably don't know anything about making wax. So, I suppose she could send one of the non-bearded nuns to a beauty supply shop and have her buy a tub of wax with which to tear off her muttonchops. But then maybe it was too embarrassing for her to confide in any of the other nuns enough to send them on such a mission. Yet aren't all nuns supposed to be on a mission? Perhaps other kinds of missions.

You see where all this is going, don't you?

Exactly.

Mr. Queery will have a lot to answer for in the next life.

Why I Think it's Disturbing When People Accidentally Sit on Things that Get Lodged in their Ass

Okay, so I'm straying from my usual personal history today to get something off my chest.

A recent conversation I had with a radiologist has had the rusty wheels in my head doing quite a bit of spinning lately.

He told me about something that I had heard before but it was second-hand information so I took it less seriously. Now I feel I must speak out.

What really bothers me is that we live in a society where people regularly go to emergency rooms at various hospitals around the world complaining of stomach pain. Once they are x-rayed it is discovered that a large object such as a flashlight, a reading lamp, a cell phone or (most commonly) a vibrator has been lodged in the intenstine, most likely through the anus.

When asked how this object got into their intestines, most patients seem to answer that "they accidentally sat on it".

How, is the question that immediatly comes to the mind of the Radiologist, but is seldom asked. You see, we live in a society where people are okay with randomly sticking large electrical devices through the sphincter and subsequently losing them, but those same people will be offended if you ask them why they did that. So, they lie. They say they sat on them.

Now, even if I'm completely naked and reading a really engrossing novel or watching game seven of the NBA finals and it's in overtime, I don't think I'm going to accidentally sit on my umbrella (which is so oddly placed on my sofa as to be ready to penetrate my clenched sphincter) so hard that it will go up my ass and I'll lose it there. It just can't happen.

Of course, I might get e-mails from random readers who will insist that yes, indeed it is possible to sit on your cell phone and have it travel through your intestines. But I don't buy it. End of story. Even if you're "used to" having things shoved up your ass, a big Hello Kitty vibrator won't just slip in without you putting in a little effort.

Now as to why it bothers me so.

The fact is, there are a lot of problems going on in the world. People are dying in wars and famine. Cancer, AIDS, bird flu - countless diseases take lives every day. But there are people who have so little in their lives that they are sitting around their houses and apartments in big cities like New York - probably making more in a year than I will ever make in my lifetime - searching their dwellings for the biggest knickknack that can possibly fit through the anal orifice in the hope that it will give them some kind of pleasure.

I say these people need to be hurded like bored cattle and sent to Lebenon to stand at the frontlines and protect the innocent - take a grenade or two for some child who has nothing.
It would save insurance companies some money on patients who don't deserve coverage.

That brings to mind a good question: is that covered?

Sick All the Time

I'm sick today and I haven't entered anything for a while. I've been busy getting engaged and all that jazz. Anyway, I'm sick and have been reflecting on the fact that I have a crappy immune system and as it's my style to find ways to blame other people for any and all of my problems, I have decided it's my mother's fault that I am sick.

Why? How? Those are fair questions and I have the answers.

First off, my mother didn't breast feed me.

Need I say more?

My body lacks the antibodies to fight diseases! All because my mother was too shy to breastfeed! Oh, that upsets me.

I investigated by using the modern day bible, AKA, "the net" and found this:
"Human milk is baby's first immunization. It provides antibodies which protect baby from many common respiratory and intestinal diseases, and also contains living immune cells. First milk, colostrum, is packed with components which increase immunity and protect the newborn's intestines. Artificially fed babies have higher rates of middle ear infections, pneumonia, and cases of gastroenteritis (stomach flu). Breastfeeding as an infant also provides protection from developing immune system cancers such as lymphoma, bowel diseases such as Crohn's disease and celiac sprue, and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, all of which are related to immune system function. And breastfed babies generally mount a more effective response to childhood immunizations. In all these cases, benefits begin immediately, and increase with increasing duration of breastfeeding."

I am not sure what is more disturbing - the information that my mother has left me with a sub-par immune system of the part where it says "Breastfeeding as an infant also provides protection from developing immune system cancers..." which suggests that some might breasfeed as non-infants.

So there really is not "second off" as I don't think there is any more evidence that I need to present.

That being said, I don't really blame my mother for not breast feeding me. If I were a woman I would not want some baby sucking my tit either. It's just gross. If I can get it in a can, why the hell not get it in a can. Isn't that called progress?

So, now I think I might want to blame the scientific community for not better replicating breastmilk. Hell, with all the money being poured into research for every kind of crap you can think of, why can't they develop formulae that exceed the health benefits of natural breastmilk?

I blame society, the scientific community, the government, my teachers, the national parks department, and any organization that has ever received public funds.

Stupiditude

I believe I've mentioned before that I often thought of myself as a really intelligent retarded person. This was particularly true when I was in school. I often found myself unable to understand anything that was going on in my classes. Of course, now I realize it was simply because I wasn't paying attention to what the instructor was saying and when I read the books I usually was thinking about where I'd go if I had enough money to travel around the world.

My travel interest inspired me to think about how great it would be if I could become a photo journalist for National Geographic. I have never really read National Geographic, but I've often looked at the pictures. I like pictures. Especially the pretty ones. Pretty pictures make me happy.

I have no idea why, with this kind of mind that sometimes seems so limited, I have always had an attitude when it comes to my perceptions of other peoples' intelligence. I am immediatly annoyed by those I perceive to be below my intellectual level. Yet deep inside I know that my intellectual level is not so high. I constantly meet people who are probably smarter than me but I seem unable to believe it because often very smart people are not very polished in physical presentation, nor in verbiage. Though I have to point out here that I tend to think of "smart" people as those who are skilled in math and the sciences as I have no idea what the hell those people are talking about most of the time and so they seem like they have brains that work better than mine. At the same time I find them to be socially inept and look down on them anyway.

Then there's also this testing problem I seem to have developed around eleventh grade - you know - when standardized tests actually seem to matter. I had always done pretty well on them and then boom - I was statistically retarded. Was I simply psyching myself out? Did I have a brain aneurysm in my sleep which killed a bunch of my smart cells? Am I an idiot for thinking that an aneurysm could have done that? Do I want to do the research involved to find out? Is my increasing laziness a symptom of my decreasing perspicacity? Am I being pretentious when I use words like 'perspicacity'? Does that word even exist? Do you think I'm even interested in finding out? Maybe. I like words. I'm not always sure how to use them but I like to try.

I've always liked words and sentences and how things sound and look. I assume that there is some kind of nearly useless intelligence there but sadly we live in a world that values test scores and statistics. I find that to be very annoying and it forces me to concluded that we live in a world run by idiots - even if they are good at math and scored 1300 or more on their SATs.
What really pisses me off is that those bastards are getting all the high-paying jobs.

Live Slow, Die Old

I think this is a much better way to live. So far that's the way things are going for me and I'm pretty happy with it.
I hope to be about 99 before I die. I like the number 99.

That chick on Get Smart was pretty hot.

Skinny but hot.

Yeah. I'll take my time dying. Chillin'. Livin'. Tuning in to what it be. Hopefully.

A Boy Without a Name

For the first 95% of my life on this earth, I was officially nameless. I have always had a last name though. Let's say it's STANK.

Why, you ask?

Because my parents, yet again, were trying to prove they were crazy.

Even from birth, I was being given the signals.

So, the story goes like this. My mother doesn't like my father's name. Let's call him, Excretious. And, Excretious didn't realize that Excretious was a horrible name in this country. He therefore insisted that his last born son (they knew I'd be the last born as six was more than enough) be named with his beautiful name.

To add strength to my fathers argument was the fact that my sister Jaqui was named after my mother. So this was not only about sharing a super-fantastic name like Excretious with my father but also balancing out the family with a mother-daughter/father-son same-name situation.

Of course after months of arguing about naming me before I was even born, my mother decided to do what women do best and manipulate things by giving in until the real time came. She told my dad, "Okay. Excretious is a terrible name but I will punish my unborn child for the duration of his life by naming him after you because it will make you happy."
"Thank you.", my dad said in reply.

So mom proceeded to pray nightly, daily and afternoonly for a girl. "He can't expect me to name a girl, Excretious."

Maybe Excretiella?

Then that fateful day in February came, after she'd endured the fall on the ice in the blizzard as well as some balloon-hat ridicule (which I will get into another time if I feel like it) she was rushed to the hostpital to deliver a bouncing ten-pound baby boy who was doomed to be called Excretious.

Now most people don't get to hear much about how their mother reacted when they were born. You generally assume you were met with tears of joy - at least by your mother - when you were first introduced to the world. I, however, have always known that I was met with an "oh shit, it's a boy!" followed by genuine tears of deep depression.

The nurse came to my mothers room with the birth-certificate forms and my mother filled out everything except the name. She told the nurse she needed more time to discuss it with her husband who was having a mid-life crisis and was unable to make clear decisions easily.

She went home and talked it over with my older siblings who proved to be on my mother's side. They all then conspired to call me EJ. The story would go like this: I was Excretious Jackson and my father was Excretious too, so why not make it easier on everyone and call me EJ for short to avoid any misunderstandings that might happen. You know, when my father calls my mother from work to say he's going to be late because he's having drinks at a titty bar with some of his construction buddies. It might be confusing if the messenger said, "Excretious will be late for dinner because he's at a titty bar getting drunk with his friends." This way, she and all my siblings would know that it was my father and not I that was engaged in this activity. Likewise, when someone said, "Excretious just puked all over my back" there might be some confusion lest we differentiate Excretious Sr. from EJ.

My father reluctantly agreed. He never argued about the fact that my sister Jaqui and my mother seemed to exist quite comfortably carrying exactly the same first, middle and last names and that the children never referred to either of my parents by first names so confusion never really came about.

More than thirty years later, I still had no name on that damn birth certificate. I liked it that way. I felt like Sting...only I was Stank.

Career Choices & The Joys of Mental Illness

So, I've been officially diagnosed with ADHD. The psychologist says it's more A than H but "mixed". That's fine and dandy. I was expecting it. But I was also diagnosed (accidentally) with a fairly high level of anxiety disorder as well. The worst part is I don't think of myself as anxious, but apparently the experts agree that I am and I have no say in it.

Not only that, but, as I could have guessed, I might also have a form of narcolepsy. Now I can tell my father and make him feel guilty for torturing me when I couldn't get up all those mornings years ago. He probably won't feel guilty though. That's one of the benefits of being Estonian.

At least now I know what has been wrong with me my whole life. I know some will brush this off as an excuse for my lack of progress, but at least now I have some idea about why I've been such a freak all my life.

Most kids, by the time they're six years old, have an idea that they want to be firemen, baseball players, coat-checkers - whatever. I, however, wasn't sure about what I wanted to do with my life until I was nearly ten. I know, that's a dangerously long time to go without starting on a career path, but I have always been slow. I've mentioned this several times. I hope I don't have to say it again.

The idea of being a vet came to me while on one of those drives to Westchester with my sisters or my father - I don't remember who it was because I was too busy looking out of the window. I was, as usual, scanning the sides of the highway for dead animals.
I used to tell myself, "Don't look out of the windows. You'll just see another dead dog or deer or turkey and feel sad for the rest of the day!", but I always looked anyway.

On nearly every ride north, there were at least three dead animals on the way to wherever we were going. Usually it started with a dead dog. Sometimes there might have been a few dead cats and squirrels but I had never liked them and so I didn't notice. The dead dogs, however, were another matter entirely. I was immediately stricken with thoughts of the dead dog's family and questions about his life with them.
Did they have a son in the family who loved that dog as much as I had loved my dogs? Did the dog go for a walk and never come back? Is the hopeless family going through pain, waiting for Fido to come home? Does Fido have a soul? Is he just a lump of dead meat or will he go to doggy heaven? If I go to heaven and my dog goes to doggy heaven, can he come and live with me or can I just visit him from time to time? Are there limits to how many times I can visit? What if there's a doggy hell? Can I visit him there? What if I'm in hell and he's in heaven? Can I see him? Can he come to me? Do they deliver in heaven? I guess hell would only deliver Dominoes and I could see myself getting really sick of that.
(Well, you see how the unselfish thoughts of concern for the dog's family quickly came back to me.)

On one of these trips, I decided I would help and save these poor dead animals. I'd become a veterinarian and bring them back to life! I'd be like Franken-Vet and bring happiness to all those in the world who'd lost their loved-pets! What a samaritan.

I was pretty sure of my calling for several years. Then my dog, Cheeks, got constipated. We took her to the vet and as usual, I liked to sit in on the examination process to see how the doctor did his thing. So, we told Dr. Scheiz that Cheeks hadn't had a bowel movement in over a week and that she seemed pretty upset about it. He immediatly put her up on his exam table and put on a rubber glove. I was young, but I had a pretty good idea that the rubber glove thing was not usual. However, I was not at all prepared for what would come next.
I remember Cheeks' face as the doctor lifted her tail. She was facing me and looking really pissed. Her nose started to flair and she stiffened up as the doctor stuck his right index finger right between Cheeks' cheeks and WHAM! POP! The crap just shot out of her little dog ass in all directions, onto the calm but disgusted face of Dr. Scheiz and the horrified face of his assistant. Up until that point, she had been all smiles but the assistant looked pretty grossed out now that her face was covered in doggy diarrhea. "There we go!", said the doctor. "She should be all better". It was kind of like there was giant bubble in there keeping her from passing the feces", he told us.

"Eww" - is all I could think. I was just imagining this huge chocolate-colored bubble of shit inside my little dog's ass and then the doctor's finger puncturing it and creating this giant explosion of hershey-squirt that nearly hit the ceiling and all four walls in his office.

I had to search for a new career. There was no way I was going to stick my finger in any dog's ass. Not even my dog's.

Slow Learner

My first trip to Europe happened when I was just a wee lad. I went to Sweden to visit my father's relatives and to witness the great spectacle that was Esto 80. I had been to Esto 76 but was too young to remember anything except that it was kind of boring. This Esto 80 thing was going to be a little different. This time I was going to Stockholm, Sweden instead of Baltimore, Maryland.

The travel bug had bitten me ever since our family took a trip to exotic Disney World when I was four years old. Those flying Dumbo elephants helped me to realize that the world was full of unexpected pleasures waiting to be discovered. I couldn't wait to get on a real plane and not just a flying elephant that went in circles.

So, I got on Northwest Orient flight somethingorother on a sunny Saturday morning in July of 1980 and was as excited as a tourist in Times Square. Here we were - me, my parents and my sister, Minerva - off to exotic Sweden! (I am not sure if I have used "Minerva" as my youngest sister's alias before, but anyway, it's the youngest one - still much older than me.) I had met several of my Swedish-Estonian relatives a couple of years before when they came to New York to discover my family. They were all a little nutty, so we all got along very excellently. I remember my cousin Lailai had a penny rocket shot up her dress on the fourth of July and she just seemed to enjoy the heck out of that. That was cool.

So, I was very excited about this trip, yada yada yada. I get on the plane and find that the seats are broken into groups of two or three. Two on the left, three in the middle and two on the right. So, naturally this was going to cause me some amount of stress because my mother would probably have to sit next to my father and I would be stuck with Minerva.
There was some discussion about me sitting with my father but I would hear none of it because my father was a chronic nose wiper/picker and I just couldn't sit through 8 hours of that. This was my first intercontinental flight for Christmas sake! It had to be at least somewhat pleasant! So, I sat next to Minerva who was expectedly quiet. Minerva had lived in France the year before. She was an exchange student and to me seemed very worldy so I spent most of the first two hours of the flight asking her questions about airplanes: the food, the takeoff, how such a heavy thing got off the ground, etc. She didn't know the answers, but that was fine. I just liked hearing myself ask the questions. The answers were (and usually still are) secondary.

So, the flight is going fine except for the excruciating pain I feel in my ears. I thought my head was going to explode for the first twenty minutes of the flight. Then that kind of went away and I yaked at Minerva for however long until dinner was served.

During our gourmet in-flight meal of crap-covered feaux chicken with grease-engorged rice substitute and "caviar", Minerva got some of the "caviar" stuff on her hands and had to use up the toilet-tissue style napkin to wipe it off. Then she had no napkin and she looked at me and asked, "E, do you have an extra napkin?".

I knew I didn't have one. But for some reason, I started feeling the sides of my legs and digging into the crevices of the seat to find one. I looked under the food tray, between the plastic dishes dividing the "caviar" and the chicken stuff from the chocolate-mangoesqu cake-like thing and still I found no "extra" napkin.

I felt awful. Minerva was very sweet and deserved an extra napkin but I couldn't provide it.

"No. I don't have one", I finally answered.

Poor Minerva looked so disappointed. I started to realize then that when she said "Do you have an extra" she really meant, "give me yours because you're a little boy and you don't really care if you have a napkin or not". I guess Minerva didn't understand exactly who I was and that this was my first real airplane ride and that that napkin was MY FIRST AIRPLANE NAPKIN and I had every intention of using it to wipe the grease from MY CHICKEN STUFF off my mouth.

I did feel for her though. I thought I might go to the loo and bring back Minerva some toilet paper. I didn't have to go, but it would be an adventure, I thought. I'd like to see how the bathroom works in a plane and see if the pee and poop really fly out of a trap door when you flush. (That's how I'd imagined it worked anyway.)

So, off I went to the bathroom. I didn't have to wait on line as it was still dinner time and most people were still eating. I entered the tiny restroom, closed the accordian door and studied the handle. The light was not on and I was apparently doing something wrong. After a few seconds, I had it figured out, the lights came on, I turned around, did my business and turned to the sink to wash my hands. My hands were wet and I needed a towel to dry them. Guess what? They had a whole paper towel dispenser right there in the loo! I was impressed. But I said to myself, "this paper towel is kind of dry and hard. It's not good for Minerva. She needs to wipe her mouth and this will be too rough." Just was I was thinking that my right eye caught sight of the most amazing thing I had ever seen. It was like God Himself had been listening to my thoughts and was answering my prayers tenfold!

"EJ. I knoweth that it is thy intention to bring forth to thine sister - fruit of thine mother's womb, flesh of your flesh - a napkin so that she may wipe the muck from her brow and feel the glory of a clean face!"

Yes, God, I thought. That's exactly what I want to do.

There in front of me, just above eye level, was a great dispenser with an embossed label which read, "SANITARY NAPKINS".

"Wow", I thought, "these aren't just regular napkins, they're extra clean! Minerva will love these!"

So, I yanked on the plastic covered napkins sticking out of the bottom of the dispenser and took a long, hard look at it.

"That's amazing! It's a whole package of napkins! Minerva can wipe her face till the cows come home!"

So, I took the napkins in hand and left the restroom. I was so proud of my discovery and so sure that Minerva was going to be completely exstatic when she saw this that I held the napkin package up high while walking down the aisle through the plane back to my seat.

I got back in my seat and looked over at Minerva who was still eating and seemed really out of sorts due to her lack of a napkin. I looked at her with a great expression of self-satisfaction and handed her the package and said, "I got you some napkins from the bathroom. They had whole packages in there!"

Minerva then turned a bright red, clenched her lips together and snatched the package of napkins out of my hand, opened her purse and stuffed them inside.
She then started stuffing her food into her mouth, emptied all the little plastic dividers and didn't speak to me for the rest of the ride.

I knew I had done something wrong. But I didn't know what it was until maybe eight years later when I was in Australia for another Esto festival and Minerva corrected my mistake when I asked the server in a Melbourne Pizza Hut for a "napkin" and she gave me the dirtiest look.

"Oh! I get it now."

Drunk and Debauched

Most of my bloggings are written while drunk - not necessarily me, but the readers.
No, really, I am actually a little drunk when I write these things. I find that a little buzz frees me from the constraints of propriety - not that I usually feel too constrained to begin with. Today, however, I am sober as a Muslim during Ramadan.

As a kid I was so incredibly repressed when it came to saying what I wanted to say. I was always dying to blurt out something really really inappropriate and on the few occasions when I did that, my mother was ready to swat me like a fly. If you've kept up with these blogs, you know some examples of my fitful malefactions (the underwear "gift", the Lacoste giveaway) which caused my mother so much grief.

Despite the all-encompassing nature of my mothers efforts to repress me, I have never, in my adult life, found it all that hard to avoid a full-on rebellion against her way of thinking. Instead, I have maintainted a mildly rebellious nature throughout most of my life, doing little things to annoy her conservative sensibilities.

I never became a drug addict or worse - goth, although I came close a few times. I have never solicited prostitutes or become an abusive alcoholic. I have never killed anyone, nor have I killed their pets. These are all things that would probably bother my mother a lot.

I know she really hates when people curse. My brother Aldo, who is an abusive alcoholic drug addict and I think he probably has killed some pets, can do all sorts of really bad things for which he should be (and has been) arrested, but my mother seems to get most upset when he uses dirty words.

"It's the drink that makes him talk like that!"

"Ma, he killed the neighbor's cat with a shovel!"

"I know! It's awful. But, you know, I think I heard him say 'F' when he was doing it! Why does he have to use that filthy language? I mean, does it make him feel better when he is killing the cat? Why is that necessary?"

I, myself, have never used the type of language Aldo uses in front of my mother. However, as I get older I have gradually come to the point where I will say the words: ''bitch'', ''bastard'' and ''hell'' in front of my mother. Every time I use them she makes a face.

The odd thing is that she has always just gotten the biggest thrill of her day when using almost any phrase with the word "ass" in it: STUPID ASS, DUMB ASS, PAIN IN THE ASS, ASS ACHE, KISS MY ASS, YOU'RE AN ASS. I think she tells herself it's OK because she's using the word "ass" as "donkey" which is the same thing. But we all know she's not thinking "donkey" when she says it.
To her credit, I suppose, she never uses the terms: ASSHOLE, ASSWIPE or FATASS.
I use those terms frequently. I like the way they sound.

My mother did actually use the word "Asshole" once - to my knowledge.

I was 13 and attending the 7th grade at St. Benedict's Academy and one day, during a family party, my mother repeated a joke she'd heard at work (where the other women used to "talk about diddle doos and use all kinds of filthy words") in which the word "asshole" was the punchline.
I was upstairs listening to the joke and thought it was a good one and wanted to tell my best friend, Denny. Denny had always thought I was a freak because I didn't curse, so now that I'd heard my mother curse, and since it was told in such an innocent and funny way, I figured God might not kill me for saying, asshole.
So, the next day after school, (I couldn't actually tell the joke IN school because one of the nuns might hear it and expel me) on the way to the Video Hut to play Donkey Kong with Denny, I told him I had heard a really funny joke and I started to tell him.
I still remember the way I felt when I told the joke. I had almost put myself out of my body in case God struck me dead and my soul would be able to escape my body and take over someone elses in an instant. Denny didn't flinch when I told the joke. I had been thinking, he's gonna notice that I am saying a dirty word and he's never heard me say one before. But the dirty word came at the end and, while I nearly had an aneurysm at the exact moment the word, "asshole" came out of my mouth, Denny barely seemed to notice! What's worse, his reaction to the joke was kind of tepid. He laughed but it wasn't so big. I was expecting roars. I mean, it was almost like giving up my virginity - saying this word! Up until then I had had a perfect record! My fan was nearly rusted solid from not turning for thirteen years! Now I had moved it. It turned once and was well on it's way to becoming an air conditioner for the angels.

Well, that was the beginning of my demise. Since then, things have just gone to hell and I no longer have a chance at not decomposing when I die.

So sad.

Narcolepsy

Okay, so I have never been diagnosed with narcolepsy but it IS one of the many many diseases that I wish I had so that I can divert the blame for my laziness away from my self and toward a tragic birth defect.
But then again, who knows. I, like most people, LOVE to sleep. Maybe the fact that I love to sleep is what keeps me from hearing alarms, explosions, earthquakes, etc. - while sleeping. OR, maybe I suffer from some form of narcolepsy that puts me into a deep, hypnotic sleep and which makes it nearly impossible for me to wake up in the morning.
As an adult, I have managed this problem by simply having a radio go off at 6, a CD-clock go off at 6:30, a traditional beep alarm go off at 7 and a wake-up call at 7:15 to help me get going. That still doesn't work, but sometimes.

Now that I'm analyzing myself here, I do think it's possible that one of the reasons I have trouble waking up is that I associate waking up with trauma. My body and mind know that waking up is a horrific experience and so, they choose to shut down. But more on that later.

I hope I never go into a coma. I'd be totally healthy and not want to wake up out of a combination of fear and laziness.

Almost as soon as I started to HAVE to get up for school, I had trouble doing it. My mother had always encouraged me to stay up as long as I wanted. She liked to force-feed me ice pops and keep me next to her while she watched horror movies. We had to keep the sound down to an almost inaudible murmur so that "daddy won't wake up". Of course "daddy" did wake up every hour or so to go pee and complain in a much more audible tone while heading for the loo.
"Gosh damn TV going all night. No wonder nobody wakes up in this house."
He'd say that same thing every night that Mom was home.
(Some days she worked through the night and I would have to lay in bed alone, trying not to imagine that demons were in the attic above my bed trying to dig through the ceiling so they could eat me alive.)
So, when the horror films from "Chiller Theater" were over, I would finally go to bed. On Sunday nights, when Mom was always home, I would usually go to bed well past midnight and have to wake up at 6:30 to get ready for school and be there by 7:30.
I pretty much never woke up before 7 though.

Most Monday mornings were the same in my early school years. Aldo's alarm would begin to ring at 6:30. He didn't have to be up until 7 but since he had pretty much the same problems I had with sleep, he didn't hear it either.
I vaguely recall hearing my father washing his face in the morning. It was always a rather noisy affair - much louder than the alarms - even my Raggedy Ann N' Andy Alarm, which was hands-down the most annoying alarm ever. I had a girl cousin who loved Raggedy Ann and so, naturally, she and her mother thought it would be appropriate to buy an alarm clock for me featuring Raggedy Ann and her equally unattractive and retarded brother, Andy. (Andy was basically Raggedy Ann's producers trying to open the boy market for their extremely-annoying-doll business.) So, my cousin bought me this clock, which I think was actually supposed to be annoying because by the time I was 4 years old, it was pretty clear that I liked sleep a little too much and my extended family had heard about this - including my cousin. The clock used the voices of two really annoying kids to SHOUT every morning, something like this: "Andy Andy, Please get up. You must be on your way! So, brush your teeth and comb your hair and start your happy day!" Then it would repeat until you started your happy friggin' day. I guess that alarm actually didn't last so long. I think about one month after I got it, I found it in my backyard smashed to bits. I heard Aldo later brag to his friends that he'd, "helped Raggedy Ann and her stupid brother die". I guess it was kind of harsh, but I apparently didn't hear the damn thing anyway so it was no loss to me at all.

So, back to my father and his morning routine.

For some reason, even though I had this love for sleep, my father NEEDED to come into my room before the alarm clock rang and say, "KIDS! UP! SCHOOL!" and then go to the bathroom to do whatever he did in there. I am still not sure what it was, but it apparently involved a lot of water because the bathroom was always very wet when I had to use it, and it smelled like Aquavelva had been splashed into every corner of the room.

Needless to say, I never got up when my father preceeded the alarms. All those pre-show warnings just put a deeper, sleep-inducing fear into me so that by the time I felt my father's rough hand yanking my ankle I only had about a milisecond to drop my hands to the floor to avoid getting a cuncussion. I remember feeling the seams in the hardwood floor scratching against the skin of my back as my pajamas rode up during the dragging process. But this wasn't the worst part. I was always basically still partially asleep when the dragging happened. It wasn't until we got to the bathroom across the hall that things got really scary.

Lying on the carpeted hallway floor, I was fairly comfortable and could just start to feel the sleep seeping back into my body when Dad would lift me up by the pajama collar, or the seat of my pants (which always gave me an annoying wedgie), pull me into the bathroom, turn on the cold water in the sink full-blast and dip my head over the vanity. He didn't really put my head all the way into the sink. It was too awkward as the sink wasn't that big and even as a child I had a huge head. Anyway, his method was more jarring than mere water-pressure-to-the-face stuff. He took his sand-paper-feeling hands full of freezing cold water and smooshed them into my face so hard, over and over and over until I begged him to stop.
"Okay, okay, Dad!" I'm up, I swear! Stop it. I'll be ready in five minutes." I would always say that and it was never true. The fact is, I would always go back to bed and lie down, thinking to myself that I just needed to rest for ten seconds to recover from the recent trauma and get up and put my uniform on and go to school.
The reality was that I almost always fell asleep for about ten to thirty minutes when my mother would come in the room whispering something about how my father was going to kill me or leave without driving me to school or something. The leaving without driving me was what usually got me going. I didn't want to have to take the bus. I mean, I could sleep on the bus, but I usually overslept on the bus and missed my stop, so it was generally a bad option.
So, I usually opted for suiting up, going outside to my father's truck, in which an enraged Dad had been sitting - engine idling for half-an-hour. I guiltily crawled into the passenger seat, often next to some Irish carpetbagger-construction laborer who smelled like beer farts and said, "quick dad, I'm late!"
"Late because you can't get out of the bed", he'd reply. "In Estonia, we woke up at five o'clock in the morning! We fed the chickens and miked the cows; had breakfast, run around playing with the pigs - like that!"
I just stayed silent as he repeated the same things over again about how in Estonia kids were not so lazy like these Americans here, as if I were some "American" he didn't know and as if I had a house full of farm animals to care for. It was sooooo anoying, but the guilt I felt about being lazy coupled with my tender age, kept me quiet through all those rides to school until I was old enough to drive my self.

When you do things for yourself, you have no one to blame but yourself. It's better that way - at least it is for me.

A Boy in a Bubble

About a year ago, I met this manic-looking reject-woman through a friend. She was one of those people that you just look at and immediatly hate. She wasn't attractive in any way, though not homely. She dressed exceptionally poorly though it wasn't like she looked homeless. She also had a way about her that made me want to punch her in the face. And I rarely ever puch strange women in the face.
Anyway, I recall having the misfortune to be invited to lunch with this particularly strange woman. She basically dominated the entire lunch conversation, boring us with the story of her life in what she constantly referred to as "a bubble".

I live in a slightly iffy part of town which hugs East Harlem and so, this woman, who appeared to be about thirty, was apparently just in her early twenties and "scared" to go out at night because Latin men find her "irresistible" and "cat call" her constantly. She was worried that one of these sweaty, hot-blooded "mens" would one day grab her by the neck and force her to do the merengue. I was slightly unsympathetic to this woman, not just because I wanted her to die as soon as possible, but also because she seemed geniunely uncomfortable living in my hood. She lived around the corner and was basically telling me I lived in a shithole neighborhood which didn't sit well with me. I mean, I pay good money to live here and I like it. So, innocently, I asked her why she was so unprepared for life in the big city among various people of color.

Here started the "bubble" references.
"I'm unprepared to live like this because I grew up in a bubble, okay! I had a maid, okay. I had nothing but rich Jewish white people around me all the time. I had friends who played tennis and went to parties at the yacht club on the weekends, okay? I was in this...this...this BUBBLE! Okay!"

So the feeling of common hatred that I felt the second my eyes had met hers was growing into a black rancor that I could amost feel oozing out of my skin. I literally wanted her to have an accident right there in the restaurant. But I remained calm and the venom in my veins slowly cooled to a soft pity. I sensed that she invisioned her life in a bubble as something to be proud of, despite her pretense of shame at living a life of privilege - a life which I still suspect she may or may not have lived. Though the black sheet she was wearing might have come from a very nice store on 34th Street, I didn't notice anyting about her that said, "I'm refined and well-educated. I am too genteel to live in el barrio con los nacos." So, I took her paranoia to be the result of some kind of pseudo-sophisticated delusion.

I know, this is supposed to be all about me and my life, starting from zygotedom, but I have a point.

Her bubble talk made me realize that we are all raised in bubbles of some kind. Even if some of those bubbles are a little cracked and broken, they are still bubbles. No matter how diverse we may think our environment is, our home is always our biggest influence. In most cases, our home revolves around our parents and no matter how different their individual cultures or even races might be, they were attracted to each other and in some way think alike. They have some things in common that are sure to influence their children, ie - us.

There are bubbles everywhere. A house is a bubble, a block is a bubble, a street, a neighborhood, a school, a city, a country, a continent. We all develop instincts, prejudices, fears - based on the environments in the various bubbles we grew up in.

My parents, for example, were by no means snobs. Nor were they rich or even slightly fancy people - but my father grew up on a farm in Estonia and my mother grew up in a notoriously picky Irish family. As a result of this, there were no Chef-Boy-R-Dee cans in my home growing up. I used to look at my classmates lunches and talk to them about what they ate for dinner and I'd hear things like "rice and beans" and "Spaghetti-O's" and make the gross-face and ask innocent questions like, "where's the meat?". I was labeled a snob by many of my classmates. Don't you see how unfair that was? It's the damn bubbles fault.

In my adult life, I have found myself held back in so many ways. I spent many of my formative years cooped up in my room watching TV or playing video games. Now I find in my adult life that I really enjoy sitting in my apartment typing on my computer, sending e-mails.
The bubbles again!

Next time you find fault with yourself or another person, just think about this bubble idea and instead of stressing yourself out and/or getting angry or depressed, just shout out, "I hate you fargin bubbles! Bubbles suck! Break! Break, you damn bubbles!"

OK, maybe that's too long, but you can figure out how you want to say it. It doesn't matter as long as you just blame the bubbles.

Critical of the Masses

I remember being a small child and listening to my sisters and Aldo (my oder brother was nicer and didn't do this) constantly criticize people - even themselves. I assume that this behavior, which might have been normal for teenagers and those in their early twenties like my siblings were, was what led to to a life of cynicism.
I was in Sweden with my parents when I was about ten and I remember my mother being ebarassed by me cutting up virtually every famous American brought up by my relatives there. I couldn't understand why my relatives seemed to think that every famous person was either beautiful or handsome. To me, almost everyone was ugly and stupid. I was critical of every aspect of faces, bodies, cothes, hair, personality, acting ability, athletic skill, intelligence, morality, personality disorders - you name it. And who was I to criticize? I still don't know.
My cousin was a fan of Marylou Retton who had just gotten 10's at the Olympics. I recall saying she was ugly and a little fat. My mother nudged me in the side. One of my cousins complimented her on her incredible athletic ability. I suggested the judging was fixed. My mother nudged me harder. My cousin reminded us how proud we must be as Americans, to have this great athletic hero and I responded with a "not really" and a "who cares about stupid girl's gymastics". My mother wanted to pound me into the floor at that point.

I also had a big mouth and annoyed her in other ways on that trip.
My sister Jaqui, who had always kept company with the fancier set, had gone to a fundraising sale at a public school in Bronxville. (Bronxville is one of the richest towns in America, for those not in the know.) At this particular sale, there were unused-used children's clothes being sold and Jaqui picked up about five Lacoste aligator golf shirts in various colors for her favorite little brother. (That'd be me.)
Guess what they cost?
One freekin' dollar! Amazing. OK, this was more than 20 years ago, but it was still amazing.
Anyway, I had no idea what these things cost in retail, but I knew that Jaqui had picked them up for a buck a piece because she quickly got reimbursed by my mother - Jaqui was no fool when it came to money.

So, in Sweden, my cousins commented on my "rich" wardrobe as Lacoste must have been hot there at the time. I remember my mother's face as I said this. She looked so irritated - like she wanted to kill me. I asked with surprise, "This thing? You know what this cost? A dollar. It's no big whoop."

My mother almost knocked me off the table when she pinched my leg under the table.
My cousins, noting her embarrassment lauhed it off. "You're so funny. The United States is not that cheap!"

When I was just five, I remember having a birthday party with my relatives in New York and my mother's sister, Pasquelina, gave me a bag of colored briefs. I remember opening it and not even waiting a second before I said, "Underwear? This is not a birthday present."
My mother turned the color of my crimson Crayola. Secretly, I felt her pain, but I didn't care too much. I genuinely couldn't fathom, in my five-year-old brain, why aunt Pasqui would give me underwear for a huge event like my fifth birthday. I started forming ideas in my head about how she must have thought my parent's weren't doing well and that they couldn't afford to buy me underwear, which I would get on any old day without having to reach some milestone, lose a tooth or achieve some level of pre-school success. (Imagine if the tooth fairy left you briefs instead of money!)
What was wrong with Aunt Pasquelina? Why would she think that was appropriate? OK, I embarrassed my mom by negating the value of Pasqui's gift, but Pasquelina embarrassed me in front of my friends and family by giving me, not only intimate apparrel, but COLORED BRIEFS, for God's sake! I mean, what did I look like? A friggin' Turkish sailor? Julio Iglesias? A forty-year-old guy who hangs out it single's bars and brings whores back to his disco-balled bedroom to make whoopie on his vibrating heart-shaped bed?
No, I was not the type to wear such things, even at five.
I remember Underoos were a fashion trend and I wanted nothing to do with. Wearing spider-man shooting his web over my wee wee wasn't for me. What kind of message does that imply? Think about it, America!
To add insult to injury, my mother forced me to use the colored undies and I recall getting a humiliating infection in my pee-hole from the yellow ones.
(Secretly - and ironically, I liked the convenience of those yellow ones as they didn't show the pee stains at all.)
You see, my rudeness and prejudice is often just God looking out for me. He knew those underwear were bad news and he sent me that message when I opened them up.
That's why, I have decided, it's OK to be critical sometimes.