the condom of truth.

This morning I returned to my room to get my phone before going into the bathroom. Was I expecting a call? Of couse not. I am not popular, no one ever calls me. And if for some reason I did get a call there is nothing that couldn’t have waited until my business in there had come to conclusion. Yet I still felt it necessary to maintain my electronic connection to the outside world.

I find it deeply disturbing to answer the telephone while taking a shit. Once I was told that being able to go the bathroom in front of someone is the highest form of intimacy, but the idea of forcing the unwitting individual on the other end of the line to be a part of that intimacy violates my Sagittarian sense of justice. I try to operate on the principle of full disclosure, a fact that I believe is doing considerable damage to my love life. Conceptually speaking, people always insist they prize honesty but in practice it terrifies them. People seem to be more comfortable with the idea of a STD than honesty. A transmittable disease can be wrapped in plastic, but there is no condom of truth.

Having done my duty in the bathroom I return to my room and check my email. No messages their either. (and no, mom, I don’t have any transmittable diseases.)

Jerky and the civilized world.

As I clamp down and tear my fist away from clenched teeth my friend looks at me with disgust. His judgment is quick and brutal. He sees the pile of beef jerky lying loosely in a plastic bin in 7-Eleven, with only a flimsy sneeze guard protecting it from the world. There are tongs to retrieve them, but let’s be honest here; It’s three in the morning. No one uses the tongs.

“That’s disgusting. You know you are eating a meat stick that has just been sitting out, only edible because of the chemical processing.”

I shrug it off. My friend’s judgment comes only from his own ignorance. The ability to cure meat was a revolutionary development in the history of mankind. So shove it.

Occam’s toothbrush.

My roommate left town for the weekend. Coincidently my toothbrush has gone missing.
A tooth brush is not something you misplace. You use it in one specific location then put it back. It is not like the remote control that can be lost to god knows where until one day you stumble across it on a book shelf or in the refrigerator. Ok, I only found it in the fridge once and I only had to look for a few minutes. But a tooth brush going missing seems odd to me. It wasnt in the trash. Seemed a reasonable place. Careless roommates may have knocked it onto the floor and not wanting me to use it again threw it away. I would have just put it back, but they might have been more thoughtful.

Roommate leaves town and my toothbrush goes missing. There are moments when we all would rather the simplest solution not be the case. hmmmmm.....

When my father and I shared a bathroom he would often steal my toothbrush claiming it to be his. It became such a problem that I finally took a bottle of my mother’s nail polish and painted the end of a fresh toothbrush. About a week later I went to brush my teeth only to find my brush was already wet with use that day. When confronted about the situation, my father exclaimed that it wasn’t my toothbrush but his. He knew because his was the one with nail polish on the end so he wouldn’t mix them up. In all fairness the man is colorblind so these things happen. Whenever retaliation was needed it was just as easy to go into his sock drawer and mismatch his black and brown socks. Something his secretary learned to watch out for.

I texted my roommate to see if she had actually taken my toothbrush. She had, and promised to bring it back with her. I told her not to worry, as I would need to get a new one anyway. Though I do wonder, how long had she been using it?

a matter of context.

So Patryk and i are at a Häagen-Dazs restaurant. and yes a do mean restaurant. Patryk was feeling dehydrated and wanted a smoothie. And according to the chivalrous boyfriend handbook, when your baby wants a smoothie: buy your baby a smoothie. (sidenote: nobody puts baby in a corner.)

It was strangely difficult to find a smoothie establishment, and the pressure was on. I was in a foreign city, didnt know my way around, and had a parched Polish queer on my hands. The only place we could find was the aforementioned Häagen-Dazs restaurant. We walked in and looked around. The place looked like it was straight out of the IKEA Nightclub catalogue. It was more of a posh-trendy lounge than a place where one would buy frozen milk in a cone. We are not seated on one of the low rider couches on the main floor, instead a table in the corner. (sidenote: posh ice cream joint put Adam's baby in the corner.)

Our menus are brought to us, and I order a lemon sorbet smoothie and Patryk orders a strawberry/banana smoothie. Patryk is then informed that it is a strawberry/banana/raspberry smoothie.

Patryk: "ok, i will have the banana/raspberry smoothie then."
Hot waiter: "no, no. It is a strawberry/banana/raspberry smoothie."
Patryk: "yes, the strawberry/raspberry smoothie."
Hot waiter: "no, no. it is a mix. strawberry/banana/raspberry."
Patryk: "THAT IS FINE, I JUST WANT A SMOOTHIE."

Patryk is overwhelmed by the interaction and becomes terrified that Hot Waiter is going to spit in his strawberry/banana/raspberry smoothie.

Adam: "So what if he spits in your smoothie."
Patryk: "you joke! it is spit! that is disgusting!"
Adam: "Patryk if you has the opportunity, would you make out with that waiter?"
Patryk: "oh yes, he is very hot waiter."
Adam: "then why do you care if he spits in your drink? obviously you dont mind the idea of his saliva."
Patryk: "it is a matter of context."

chemical fires and Canadian Pete.

When the internet was new to the general public, my father bought a computer for the family. He did it in the hopes that it would improve our education. At that time, there was a sort of reverence towards anything that was posted on the internet. It was a vast, bottomless encyclopedia that didn't give paper cuts, or take precious shelf space away from the movie collection on the book case. The day he connected it marked that last day our edition of the World Book was ever opened again. Since then the 29 or so books have sat collecting dust on the bottom shelf. We don't really pay much attention to them anymore; a couch is in front of that part of the book case. The space is no longer coveted for videos. We now regard bulky videos with disdain, calling them VHS, and carelessly throw them to the side in favor of a system that takes up less space, and includes hours of useless commentary over the directors cut of Joey Tribiani in "lost in space." Forgive me if I do not know his real name.

I didn't take too much interest in the internet. I was not a driven student and I didn't see the value in learning to type, so I left my sister Allie to explore the world wide web of endless communication. I had tried it once, just to see what it was like, but exploring involved needing a specific answer to a question, which I didn't have. Instead, I spent my computer time playing Load Runner. In this game, a small blocky figure ran slowly through a blue and black world, climbing up and down ladders, picking up gold before the red monsters ate you and stole your money. At the time the shadow of a capitalist undercurrent escaped me. I didn't pay much attention to the internet until Allie came across what she called, a "chat room". For some reason, she had stumbled onto a rollerblading website that was devoted to hardcore teenage rollerblades.

Over the next several months, Allie developed a sort of internet relationship with a young blader named Tristan, from Olympia Washington. With permission from our mother, Allie dropped her alias, Strawberry, and gave him her real name and address. The two of them began sending each other photos in the mail. His were of rollerblading, and his rollerblading buddies, and hers were pictures I took of her in the backyard by the giant trampoline we had; before it burned down one fourth of July when a stray spark hit it, turning our beloved toy into a ten foot ring of fire and molten rubber. Allie and Tristan kept in contact for the better part of a year, until chat rooms became such common place that their relationship faded into cyberspace. The box half full of the hard copies of her hundreds of emails printed from her romance across state lines now serves as a bed for the cat, who sometimes hides in the now abandoned room. I had never really put much thought into Allie's little affair. It was odd to see her so excited for a email from a skater in Washington when she wouldn't give the skaters in her own Leslie Middle School the time of day. But besides that it didn't affect me. I never really understood her connection to a complete stranger. The images I draw from meeting people online are those of older men looking for underage girls. You know, those guys on 20/20 who show up at the house of Kelly the sixteen year old cheerleader they just met on singles.com, only to be confronted by a camera crew asking them when they first realized they were a pedophile. It always made me nervous to think how frivolously we gave out our home address to a random stranger that met Strawberry on rollerblade.com. Although my mother dutifully reminds me that she personally inspected every piece of correspondence, though I question whether it was for safety rather than gossip.

I think of Allie’s internet friend now, because I have had my first internet friend. His name is Pete and he is from Canada. For a while I talked to him frequently, until it came to an abrupt end. I made a sarcastic comment that was not taken well. Sarcasm never goes as well in writing as it does in speech, and for a while I was very stressed that I had offended my friend. That is until I realized that he is a complete stranger to me, and I had more important things to worry about than what some random person thinks of me. I can just as easily waste my time with something else. The new version of Load Runner has teleport pads in addition to ladders, and a bucket of sticky slop you can drop on the ground to catch those dirty man-eating reds.