RevSpork

Sexy Reverend

As everyone is painfully aware, I'm a pretty sexy guy nowadays.  We ugly nerd ducklings tend to blossom into full sexiness when approaching middle age, and I'm no exception.  Hundreds of busty young women actually buy Facebook ad space to inquire as to my whereabouts.  My wife has resorted to keeping dirty coffee cups in every room to throw at any busty young woman bold enough to attempt to break in through the windows of our third-floor apartment.  I greatly appreciate this, of course: I may be a sexy reverend, but I'm only human, and I can't hold off the feminine throngs like I used to.

Of course, my studliness quotient was an entirely different number 20 years ago.  I was hopeless as a teenager; I could creep out a girl merely by bumping into her in a crowded hallway.  If this occurred, the afflicted young lady would immediately run to the girls' bathroom, where she would hang the freak-tainted clothing on a hook, take out a 50-pound can of hair spray and a hot pink cigarette lighter from her purse, and incinerate the garment with an Aquanet flamethrower while muttering a prayer to Saint Cyndi, the patron saint of electric blue eye shadow.

The irony of all this was that the girls didn't have anything to worry about.  Before I went to college, I was something of an antisocial freak-nerd hybrid, but when it came to the fair sex, I was hopelessly shy.  I couldn't ask a girl out to save my life.  (In fact, the only time I did ask a girl out was for senior prom, which I had no desire to attend.  The only reason I bothered to ask the lucky 12 girls out was to convince my schoolmates I was at least interested in girls.  I didn't expect an affirmative answer, and those expectations were thankfully rewarded.) 

And actual sex?  With, you know, genitals and stuff?  That was merely legend, an activity so far from possibility that I never considered it, outside of teenage erotic fantasies with hot '80s chicks like Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles and the porn my cousin hid under his mattress.  The problem was, I was under considerable peer pressure to score with an actual girl, those "peers" being my parents.  My mom and dad, sexually active during most of their own adolescences, scratched their heads at my seeming lack of interest in bouncing the ol' boxspring.  My mother would begin many a phone call (I lived with my father at the time) with "Gotten laid yet?" while my father would only half-jokingly suggest that a hooker would make a perfect birthday present for his son.  Being Italian didn't help matters; we young Italian guys are taught from an early age to be mega-virile, banging at anything that moved.  I'm surprised my dad didn't point to a random young lady at our local A&P and yell, "You're going to fuck her and you're going to fuck her RIGHT NOW, young man!" 

I would occasionally tutor students at home in my attic bedroom, and if that student happened to be female, my father would light up with hope.  He would be shattered, however, that my virginity was still stuck to me while the girl improved her math grade.  I would occasionally attempt to go through the motions: I'd have the young lass on my bed with me, and I'd edge closer to her, only to explain the cosine.  My poor dad: he had this Italian boy who didn't care about cars, the New York Islanders, or - seemingly - girls. 

I was interested in girls, but only the concept of girls.  Real girls - girls at school who lived nearby and were therefore technically attainable - I believed were so out of my league that my teenage lust switch simply shut off the moment I walked through the school doors.  I had my share of crushes, mind you, but they were puppy-dog, gee-I'd-sure-like-to-kiss-you crushes.  My first genuinely sexual crush on an actual girl - in one of my classes - didn't occur until my final year in high school.  (Note to my fellow high school classmates who might read this blog entry: no, it's not you.  As far as I know, she doesn't have a Facebook account.)  I wanted to lust for them, really I did, but my brain was too rational for its own good: if I didn't have a chance of screwing them, why lust for them?  Susanna Hoffs was just as attainable as they were, and she always smiled at me.  As it turned out, I didn't have my first sexual experience until my first month in college, and the big V didn't fall until late my sophomore year.  (Also as it turned out, both moments were the product of unbelievably bad judgment on my part.  And how seldom is that?) 

Now, of course, I've got this sex thing licked.  I've attained the apex of True Studliness, and I can get laid anytime I want with the lady I love.  We only need to find some time between our work schedules, pop some Advil for my back, kick the cats out of the bedroom, take my blood pressure medication, kick the cats out of the bedroom AGAIN...

The weekend of my cold

It was only a week ago when I first felt a little soreness in my throat.  By Thursday, the sore throat had become a full-blown cold.  Unlike the cold from six months ago, which mutated into a nasty case of bronchitis, this particular cold virus has largely come and gone.  The weekend was ruined, and I had to cancel both my volunteer work and a weekend project this week, but the weekend weather sucked anyway, so at least everyone else in Chicago was miserable. 

Tori was home, but she was unfortunately preoccupied with a Christmas card project, so Mimi took over the job of nursing me back to health.  Although her chicken-noodle soup preparation skills need improvement, she stayed in bed with me all day Saturday, being careful not to hog the comforter as she normally does.  Tori did back her up on occasion, buying me orange juice and Nyquil.  By Sunday evening I was well enough to make pancakes for dinner. 

I'm now sufficiently recovered to go to work this week.  If I had sick time at either of my jobs, I'd be a little bummed about this, but since I don't, hooray for a full paycheck! 

Philosophical musings with 7th graders

Philosophical musings have usually been most effective either in an actual philosophy class, or lying on the carpet of a friend's off-campus apartment, off-kilter on some medicinal substance at 3am on a Saturday morning.  A few weeks ago, however, I had the opportunity to discuss whether clouds rain down on people because they wish to, or because they are slaves to scientific laws. 

Conversations like this are what tends to pop up when I volunteer as a creative writing coach at Open Books, a literacy non-profit where I've volunteered for over a year now.  Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, a class from local schools arrive at the Open Books loft, where a bunch of volunteers attempt to convince 4th-8th graders that writing their stories makes a darned good field trip.  And for someone who typically avoids kids, I get a lot from them, including sentient cloud debates that quite frankly blow my mind.

Quick overview on my North Carolina trip

This is what I did on my fall "vacation" last week, in case you were nosy:

• Imagine a cool, sunny October afternoon in the Carolinas.  Imagine soaking in a hot tub in a backyard, watching leaves fall and dragonflies zip past you.  Imagine doing this for a half-hour, then laying down in a hammock for another half-hour.  While I occupied this little time-space of heaven, I could think of only one thing: Sex?  Sex is for the young.  Let the little whippersnappers fumble with condoms and diaphragms, clumsily doing the nasty while thoughts of unintended pregnancy, STDs, and what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here lurk about in their brains. This hour on Saturday afternoon, my friends, was pure pleasure.  
• My wife, in-laws, and I spent Friday in Asheville, a little gem of a city in western North Carolina.  If Charlotte doesn't strike you as a genuine Southern city, Asheville is even less of one.  It's as if aliens pulled a town in northern California out by the roots and transported it 2000 miles to a little nook among the Smoky Mountains.  Hippies and buskers abound everywhere (the town hosts a huge drum circle every Friday), the tiny shops are fantastic, and the entire downtown is practically an giant Art Deco museum.  If God told me to move to the South, I'd move here.  
• I spent more time during this trip in South Carolina than during previous in-law trips.  Tori, my father-in-law, and his wife spent a little time at a Confederate monument in Rock Hill.  These monuments are light-years away from the Civil War monuments and gravesites up north.  Northerners know about the Civil War, but we're pretty laid-back about it.  South Carolina, on the other hand, seems to define itself by the Civil War, and to them, war event that occurred nearly 150 years might as well had ended last month.  Monuments were erected to the "cause of Southern freedom," slaves are depicted as loving, loyal defenders of the Confederacy, and the sites themselves are meticulously maintained by local historical societies.  It's a world entirely alien to a first-time tourist who has never lived south of Kansas City.  
• No matter what my wife says, I didn't pet my sister-in-law's dogs one bit.  I kicked them all around the house when they approached, and not once did I scritch around their ears and rub their bellies.  Any statements to the contrary are pure libel, and will be answered by lawsuits ASAP.

Finally, I can't end this little blog entry without thanking my wife's family, who have adopted me as their own over the last few years.  And to my sis- and bro-in-law, don't be surprised if you go into the backyard one night and find your hot tub missing.

Nothin' nothin' nothin' to do

I'm at work right now, and as usual I have little to nothing to do.  I will probably leave early due to lack of students.  It's still the dead season; although a new crop of students have arrived, I don't get my claws into them for about another month.  In other words, another day packed with oodles of ennui.

I remember a time, not so long ago, when I went to work and actually worked.  I miss that.  I believe that constant activity at work leads to a more active home life, and I believe that because the negative is certainly true.  I find that the less I do at work, the less I do at home.  That doesn't make sense to me at first: I thought we all carried a finite amount of energy, which we expend either at work or at home. 

On a typical Monday, for example, we put in eight or more hours at work at the office, factory, retail store, etc, then we get home, where we have just enough leftover energy to make dinner, watch some TV, and hit the hay.  But that's just not so.  Since my hours were cut, I've found that idleness at work leads to idleness at home; my daily energy shrank.  It would seem to explain why I've been less active looking for work than I was in February, when looking for work was my job.  I can't figure it all out any other way; the less I have to do at work, the less I want to do at home, which leads to not just idleness at work, but the desire to remain idle.  Excess idleness feeds upon itself until you find yourself doing nothing more than the basic human activities for survival.  

This is dangerous.  I need to get off my butt.  Hopefully I'll regain some of my old energy when I get back from North Carolina next week.  One can hope, but hoping isn't much of an activity.

Downer mode

I've been on the low end of an emotional cycle for the last two weeks, and it's been tough to shake.  Then again, should I try to shake it?

We can't be content all the time.  Eventually something out there will take careful aim at our perky mood and shoot it down, be it family, CNN, or your favorite candidate on Top Chef getting shown the door.  It's a part of life; certainly it's a part of civilized life.  For each piece of new technology placed in our hands, it will give you at least one reason to lose your good humor.  Your cell phone will give you bad news, as will your TV, radio, the internet, traffic lights - everything.  And if somehow you were lucky enough to live in a technology-free society in New Guinea somewhere, I'll bet someone out there lost their mother to kuru, or the chief fell off a cliff.  Eventually we're all miserable.  And this is a good thing.  (Not losing your mother to kuru: that would suck.)  

I can't imagine being happy all the time.  I'm grouchy by nature; why on earth should I prefer to go against my nature just so I can be permanently happy?  I'd be miserable to be happy all the time.  I've had Christian friends tell me about heaven, how I can have everything I want, and I'd be in an eternal state of bliss.  I don't know about you, but that sounds like the opposite of heaven to me.  I never want to have anything I want; what's the point of life (or the afterlife, for that matter), if I have no challenges, no desires, no possibility of defeat?  Eternal bliss doesn't sound much better: what's the point of happiness if I can attain it merely by existing?  It's like a self-esteem camps where everyone wins a trophy.  Heaven, as described to me, strikes me as an eternal self-esteem camp.  If that doesn't sound like a recipe for insanity, I don't know what is.  

I like being grumpy sometimes.  It makes me feel alive.  But it does get emotionally exhausting after a while.  Personally, I think two weeks is too long for melancholy.  If this bout of misery lasts any longer, I'm going to need a perky break.  Now, I had a couple of happy breaks last week (my volunteering, my trip to an apple orchard), but I could use a couple more.  If any of you out there could provide for me the following, it would definitely perk me up:

• a full-time job
• a Borders gift card
• a hug from my mom
• an opportunity to punch Glenn Beck in the mouth
• Vienna Fingers

Please do not send chain letters.  Chain letters make me sad, as well as violent.  And who wants to see a violent grouch?

Twenty years ago today

As I type this blog entry, I'm wiping the sweat off my forehead.  It's a typical Midwestern August, warm and humid.  I don't have air conditioning in the office; the apartment's layout makes keeping the entire apartment cool close to impossible.  The a/c we do have is a room unit, cooling off the bedroom so that my wife and I can sleep without drowning in a pool of sweat.  So I sit in the office, sweating and typing, taking in as much coolish air from the tiny fan in here as possible.  It's not too bad; in fact, it's almost homey.

I wished I had the little fan when I first walked into my dorm room twenty years ago today.  I remember the heat even then; the dorm building itself was very warm except in the stairwell.  When I first received my dorm room assignment, I hadn't given much thought to cooling the room.  I had lived in my grandparents' uncooled attic for the previous six years; anything was an improvement. The dorm itself, a 50's-style minimalist concrete bunker, held in heat like a kiln, and my bunk bed happened to be about a foot below an plaster-covered (and probably asbestos) pipe that added to the warmth.  To say it was as hot as hell in that dorm room is an insult to hell.  And that's where I started on the road to adulthood.

Given, it was my start on the road to adulthood.  No student is a grownup in college, no matter how restrained or mature they appear to be.  I certainly wasn't, and I showed it early on.  Within three weeks, my roommate, a nice guy from a small town in rural Illinois, ran away, begging the resident hall director to reassign him to the non-psycho section of the floor.  He was apparently genuine in his pleas: the resident hall did not replace him, so I had my dorm room all to myself for the remainder of my freshman year.  Had I the social skills and good looks to attract the ladies, this would have been heaven on earth, but since I was an out of it dweeb, I spent most nights doodling on the computer in my underwear.

(Oh yes, there was a computer in my dorm room, that lovely year of 1989.  Provided by the university, it boasted a monochrome monitor, a floppy drive, and enough memory to download entire kilobytes of whatever you wanted.  It wasn't my first time on a computer (that would have been a TRS-80 back in '79; can you imagine home computers and disco existing at the same time?  Wowzers.), but it was my first brush with the Internet.  I fell madly in love.)

I can say, without hint of exaggeration, without that computer in my dorm room, I would have had far fewer friends in college (and adulthood) than I ended up with.  Within that little box were nerds, freaks, geeks, outsiders, techies, Trekkies, and other social reprobates of all shapes and sizes, all connecting with each other in the form of ASCII characters on the green screen.  It was an amazing little world that was opened up to me, this local network of people just as weird (but not quite) as me.  It took folks some time to get used to the likes of me, but many did. 

It blows my mind today that the server I logged on to could only handle 36 students at a time.  We had internet access, but indirectly through another, larger university.  (Posters to usenet groups had addresses that looked like this:  bradley!bucc2!***@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu)  The World Wide Web didn't exist; it could take hours to download one badly-altered nude photo of Madonna; the majority of students didn't have an e-mail address; many students at my school still typed their assignments with... typewriters.  By the time I graduated five years later, none of that was true. Think about that.  Do you think technology evolved that fast for the typical college student between, say, 1925 and 1930?  Or 1971 and 1976?  It was as if we had climbed into a slow-moving car that suddenly sped up to a hundred miles per hour.  And it's only accelerated since.  When I look at my computer, my cell phone, my iPod, 1989 seems much further back than it really is.  And it really isn't that different: for example, as I finish this blog entry, I'm  sweating in my underwear in front of my computer.  Some things never change.

Random musings - a most common blog title

I'm glad "Random musings" faded as a blog name fad.  It sounds like something from a college litmag.  If someone attempted to regale me with their "random musings," I'd be prone to punching them in the mouth.  And on that note, some Random Musings:

- TypePad has a new look, which means it will take me about six months before I can figure out how to post again.  Here's hoping people will actually see this.

- I replaced our broken shredder a few weeks back, and I've tossed out six bags of shredded old bills, junk mail, and everything else I could find in the office that neither I nor Tori could justify keeping.  This included Tori's bank statements from 1997, a relic I assured her she really didn't need anymore.  Now I'm digging through stuff we had collected around the time of our wedding; among other artifacts was an edition of The Onion published the week of our wedding.  Talk about a tough call.

- I aggravated my digestive system yesterday.  Since my bout with pancreatitis, I was told to lay off the high-fat foods and other junk.  So what was my diet yesterday?  A cheeseburger, an all-dressed Polish, a vodka collins, a large Italian ice, and French toast.  A true international feast, don't you think?  Which is why today I've eaten a handful of cherries, almonds, and banana creme-flavored Ensure, which is probably manufactured in a plastics plant in China.  Oh, and tofu.  Yum-fucking-my.

So there are my random musings.  Aren't you delighted?  You'd better be, or I'll muse yer ass off.

On being evicted from my hospital bed

The last test I endured at the hospital on Friday was a CAT scan.  Overall, it wasn't a bad experience: it took less time than the sonogram, where I spent what seemed like six weeks having my gut kneaded while being told to hold my breath.  Nor did I nearly pass out, as was the case during my X-rays.  A smiley face informed me to hold my breath for six seconds, I listened to the machine whirr, then I was told to breathe again.  All in all, it was a friendly little stop on the ER tour. 

When I was wheeled back to ER, I found my wife, who had spent the last eight hours watching over me in my ER room, in the hallway near the front desk.  We had been evicted from our comparatively homier digs in favor of a more recent tenant, and there were no other rooms available.  I asked her about the new patient.  Heroin and Oxycontin, was the reply. 

A little over an hour later, when I had been discharged and we were walking to Walgreens to pick up my new meds, we discussed the patient.  Although I had not seen him, Tori had: she described him as a white guy, no older than his mid-twenties, casually but not sloppily dressed, unconscious, with an oxygen mask over his face.  He could have been one of those college kids who drank too much at a fraternity party on a Friday night, but that would have not explained the steady march of doctors, nurses, and orderlies - the latter pushing over a half -dozen machines - into a space not much larger than my college dorm room.  It was a hospital version of the old clowns in the tiny car trick, but lacked the humor.  The same nurses whom I cracked jokes with a few hours earlier walked in and out of the ER room with grim looks on their faces.  Doctors and nurses discussed the patient within earshot of Tori and me: his friends had found him unconscious; he was suffering from pneumonia and septic shock.  It was quite possible the patient would not survive the night. 

While at Walgreens, Tori and I discussed our own drug histories.  Tori's, of course, was nonexistent; mine wasn't much more impressive, outside of making the acquaintance of alcohol and maybe a couple dozen marijuana cigarettes in my college years.  More importantly, neither of us succumbed to the "temptation" of hard drugs, simply because it wasn't a temptation.  As turbulent as my younger years were, it never occurred to me to numb the pain in that manner.  We were part of the "just say no" generation, I suppose, but I wasn't necessarily anti-drugs: I simply didn't regard it as an option for myself.  Had someone in high school offered me heroin or cocaine, I would have turned it down without a second thought.  Was that because of the propaganda, or was it because I saw family members struggle with drug addiction?  Maybe a little of both.  At any rate, neither Tori nor I could imagine ourselves in that young man's bed, a dozen doctors, nurses, orderlies, and machines all working to save his life.

I'm a little spooked

Here's my present state: I'm okay...sorta.  It hurts when I yawn.  Or burp.  Or inhale deeply.  The only solid food I've eaten since Thursday has been two Reisen chews and a dozen or so saltines. 

On Friday morning, I walked into my doctor's office complaining of upper abdominal discomfort.  About twelve hours later, I exited the emergency room with pancreatitis.  During that half a day I experienced many personal firsts: my first doctor's recommendation that I go directly to the ER; my first injections of morphine; my first CAT scan; and of course, the first time a pretty blonde medical student with a Southern accent violated my personal space in a BIG way.  All in all, it's been a very unpleasant few days.

Pancreatitis is, for the most part, not that big of a deal nowadays.  It's an inflation of the lining of the pancreas, causing serious discomfort and pain in the upper abdominal region.  If untreated, however, it could unleash a whole lotta harm, including death.  So it's good it was caught early on.  However, it's a serious enough condition that I was almost kept in the hospital overnight and possibly longer. 

The flaw with the diagnosis are the list of causes: alcoholism, abdominal trauma, and gallstones, none of which I suffer from.  More tests were done, however, and I hopefully will have more information when I return to my doctor's office Monday morning.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, I've been on an almost entirely liquid diet.  I bought gallons of Ensure and Slimfast for breakfast and lunch, and meat broths for dinner.  As a treat, I have popcicles in the freezer.  I need to drink oodles of water as well, most of which I drink straight but sometimes (like now) I mix with a little Tazo iced tea for flavor.  If my tests go well Monday, I may graduate to solid but soft foods like mashed potatoes and applesauce...for upwards of a month.  No alcohol.  No high-fat foods.  No fun whatsoever. 

I've suffered from maladies before.  Bronchitis, flu, pneumonia.  But this pancreatitis really spooks me.  It was so unexpected, so totally from left field.  When I come down with a cold, I know it could trigger bronchitis, or the flu, or even pneumonia.  And those are pretty dangerous too.  But I've always had problems with my lungs; I can see one of those babies coming from a mile off.  My most recent malady, however, is a painful reminder that my other body parts are not immune to acute problems, and just because they worked perfectly fine for close to four decades doesn't mean they'll keep it up for another four. 

I'm headed for bed now.  I'll probably listen to some NPR podcasts and pass out in the middle of some Ira Glass monologue.  In the meantime, I hope my pancreas responds well to prayer.