The Waterpik was an attempt to harness my love of gadgets to trick myself into practicing proper hygiene. It didn’t last long. Hard water did it in. I figured if calcium was building up on the device itself, how could it help my teeth?
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The consultant here is being portrayed by Tim Rickard, the creator of the very funny comic strip Brewster Rockit: Space Guy. We met up while he was on vacation with his family at Walt Disney World, which explains the fanny pack.
People who would never even consider a fanny pack in their everyday life will happily wear one while visiting a Disney theme park. I guess people figure they’ll be screaming on rollercoasters and taking pictures with a giant mouse, so maintaining their dignity is already off the table.
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Prometheus.
It’s weird how that movie was so anticipated, such a big deal when it came out, a huge topic of debate for weeks after, such a source of disappointment for some very vocal critics, and now it’s just something playing on basic cable on Saturday afternoons about once every two months, along with Ocean’s 11 and Iron Man.
That sounds dismissive, but you know, if I’m flipping through the channels on a Saturday and I come across any of those three movies, there’s a good chance I’ll finish it.
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Shortly after Missy and I started living together, I attempted to make her a nice dinner. I decided I would try to make quiche, as it is a dish that sounds fancy, but also seems easy to make. I found a recipe, but it called for individual ramekins, which we didn’t have and really couldn’t afford to buy for one meal. I was determined to do this thing right, though, so I popped out to the store, bought the ramekins, and got back into it, following the instructions to the letter.
I guess our oven ran cool, because while they looked cooked at first, they were essentially a warm egg soup. I could tell that Missy was trying to be kind, but I told her it was fine to not even attempt to eat it. I apologized for screwing up dinner. I’ll never forget what she said.
“It’s all right. I hate eggs anyway.”
I had wasted money and time failing to make something she wouldn’t have wanted to eat even if I’d executed it perfectly.
It was a bad night, but I’ve never regretted it, because I made an attempt. Also, she has never, in all our years of marriage, asked me to make dinner.
Oh, for the record, we still have the ramekins. They’re good for eating small snacks out of.
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Back when I was a comedian, another comedian told me his theory of how to make it in show business.
Let me clarify.
Back when I was a comedian, almost every night, at least one comedian—and often a member of the audience or two—would tell me their theory about how to make it in show business. My favorite was a guy barely old enough to drink who told me that the key to success as a comedian was for me to rent videos of all the best comedians I could, pick out the best joke in each of their videos, then make up my act with those jokes.
But I digress. This one specific time, a comedian I respected shared a theory with me, that the amount of success you’ll have in show business is directly proportional to how willing you are to be totally ripped off. His theory was that you let your unscrupulous manager exploit you when you’re young, then you shed them like a booster rocket and use your fame as the foundation of a later career in which you take care of yourself.
It’s an interesting theory, but at the time I was just struck that I was listening to a middle-aged man who was bitter that nobody had exploited him.
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Deliberately leaving people problems from beyond the grave is an interesting idea. People have been doing it by accident since wills were invented. Anytime someone dies without having their house professionally cleaned, they’re leaving some sort of mess behind.
If you leave your belongings to someone you like, and they have to clean everything, you’ll seem like a kind person who lived like a pig. If you give your dirtiest belongings to someone you didn’t care for the filth will seem deliberate, and you’ll just come off as spiteful. You can decide for yourself which you’d prefer.
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January 15 was the 30th anniversary of Flood, by They Might Be Giants.
I’d love to say that my first exposure to the album was listening to it in its entirety, but that’s not the case. My first exposure was when a good friend who had heard the album before me was absentmindedly singing “Particle Man” to himself, and I thought he’d lost his mind.
Because time is a flat circle, I recently caught myself singing the chorus to this They Might Be Giants song while I was shopping. I’m pretty sure anyone who overheard me had questions about my mental state as well.
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In a former job, I had a coworker who liked and respected me much more than I liked and respected him. But I was pleasant and professional to him, so he didn’t realize the disparity in our attitudes. We had various managers who we reported to on different days. He had a specific problem with one of the managers, an African American woman I respected and liked. I defended her to my coworker more than once, but he was oblivious. Literally oblivious, like he couldn’t even hear my defense of her.
One day he asked me to read a letter he was sending to someone three rungs up the ladder from us, two up from the manager in question, explaining exactly why he didn’t think she should be employed by our company anymore. He asked me to read it and tell him what I thought.
It was hand-written, in very large letters, and spoke specifically about how she dressed, what parts of her body her clothing accentuated, and what kind of impression her appearance gave, in his opinion. “Whore” was one of the nicer words involved.
He signed his name to this letter, by the way.
Strangely, I found myself torn. I didn’t want someone saying these things about the manager, but I knew that sending the letter would do tremendous damage to the career of the guy who sent it and, if anything, demonstrate to the higher-ups exactly what she had to put up with.
In the end I did what I thought was the decent thing and told him that he shouldn’t send the letter, because I didn’t agree with anything in it and that I thought it would reflect badly on him. To show you how oblivious he was, he came in the next day with a smug look on his face and told me he sent it.
I never saw any sign that the note caused any damage to the manager’s career, and while the letter writer wasn’t fired, he certainly never got promoted past the position he was in.
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I’ve driven across the entire country twice. Whenever someone tells me they’re thinking of doing the cross-country road-trip, I ask the same question. “Do you really need to?”
It’s a great question, because they can deduce what my final answer will be without them having to answer my question themselves.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a beautiful, fascinating country. But man, there’s a lot of it. Like, a surprising amount. Especially Texas. We went a little crazy on the Texas, and that’s coming from someone who has driven all over Montana.
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