You Fucking Freak: A Memoir

Before we get to what I'm sure is a hilarious Tulane Chris post, I have a few administrative matters to discuss:

1.) I just got back from Andrew of the Great Juno Debate's ironic Apex College Night Birthday Outing (no pun intended) and I learned something very important about myself tonight: I can not dance to house/techno music. But like, at all. It's like I can't mathematically figure out how my body should move to that beat. Every now and then they'd play a hip-hop song at a normal pace and I'd be like, "Ooo. Yep. I can handle this." But then it would start to speed up and be like thump, thump, thump THUMPTHUMPTHUMP—ASYMMETRICAL HAIRCUTS! SCREAMING! LASERS! CARTILAGE PIERCINGS! GAHHHHHHH!!!1 and I'd lose it. I think I did the robot a few times. Not trying to be funny, mind you, but because it honestly just felt like the right thing to do.

2.) At one point I looked down at the floor, saw something, and thought to myself, "Huh, I guess someone stepped on a french fry." In retrospect, it's highly possible, if not probable, that that was semen.

3.) Thanks to your votes, we won WTOP's Best Local Blog! Hollerrrrr! To show our appreciation, we're doing a giveaway today with our good friends at Jägershop.com! If you'd like to win a brand-new, badass Jäger Tap Machine, just leave a comment in today's post by midnight and I'll think of some highly scientific way to pick a winner and announce it tomorrow morning. Again, the cut-off time is midnight, so kindly do not enter past that time. (Yes Kevin Yang, that means you.) Good luck!

4.) BONUS ROUND! We actually owe you guys another giveaway because we ended up winning Washingtonian magazine's Best Blog in their 2010 Best Of issue as well! We didn't announce it or do a giveaway up until now because they never actually notified us that we won, didn't invite us to their party and spelled my name wrong in the magazine. It was like the "You look like you've lost weight" of wins. That being said, we're obviously still completely honored and to show our gratitude, we're also giving away a 2birds1blog logo tee to another lucky reader from today's comments section. So, again, leave a comment with your name for a chance to win some sweet free shit from Jägershop.com and the all-new 2birds1blog merch store. Thanks guys! We love you.

5.) How dare I almost forget—it's T.G.I. Hagman!

As of July 23, 2010 at 2:25am, Larry Hagman is...alive! And totally excited to read Chris' post, I'm sure. Enjoy and thank you so much again for all of your love and support.

- Meg

So, I’m sitting here in my underpants, drinking Carlo Rossi chianti out of a chipped mug and watching a made for TV movie starring Tori Spelling. It sounds like the countdown to a bathtub suicide, but for some of us, it spells contentment. Then Meg calls.

“So, no pressure, but we won the WTOP contest. So, no pressure but we’ll get a lot of publicity tomorrow so… I guess what I’m saying is no pressure but could you please try not to… I don’t know how to say this but SUCK? Could you not? Suck? No pressure. I mean I think you’re wonderful but some of the readers are tired of…rambling, obscenity-laced discussions of things some people might technically find incredibly boring.”

“Is it the rambling, the obscenity, or the boring?”

“The boring. Rambling obscenity is your medium. Work with it. Work in it. Be it. Just try not to advocate genocide this time. I’m still getting emails.”

“I… I’ll try.”

So NOT boring and NOT genocide. Tall order, but we grow the most when we’re challenged. So, I scrapped the post I’d been working on about Princess Diana, which was shaping up nicely but was hardly WTOP material, and went back to the one wellspring that has always served me well: my wacky upbringing. (A P.S. to my six faithful readers: Remember the dwarves amok at Long John Silver’s? Mom brought them up on her own accord tonight on the phone, very casually, “Oh do you remember the So-and-Sos?” Who will ever forget?)

All my life, with varying degrees of politeness, people have been telling me I’m weird. The educational system uses codewords like “gifted” and “creative,” but it’s the same thing. To be fair, I was weird. I was a moderately odd child, and it’s only gotten worse. I’m told that as a pre-kindergartener, I used to go tell the principal that aliens came down in little ships and spoke to me. (To be fair, neither my parents nor the principal could prove they didn’t.) In some areas of the country, this would have led to a therapist demanding to be shown, on the doll, where the aliens spoke to me, but in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and Don’t Make a Fuss Because the Neighbors Will See” Belt, I was thankfully left alone.

I stayed weird through middle school. In sixth grade I spoke in an English accent because I thought it made me seem cool, one of the most monumental errors of judgement ever seen outside a government office. In seventh grade I became, through no direct fault of my own, “the kid whose parents have a cage full of turtles in the front yard,” and my only clear memory of eighth grade is saying, “Oh, don’t kill yourself, you should at least lose your virginity first.” (It won’t get me hired on any hotlines, but it worked.)

High school was a brief golden age for me. By a bizarre fluke, our school was terrible in sports and academics but had a crackerjack theatre department, so the theatre kids got the screwing-around privileges usually reserved for jocks. Weird was cool, oddly enough, but even in this climate I managed to shine. I was neither especially talented nor particularly attractive, so I played the usual third-string dads, teachers, and fatherly teachers, except for two parts: Scrooge; and Renfield, Dracula’s insect-eating mind-slave. Imagine that teenager. “Well, what can Chris do? Be an old man a hundred years ago, or a homicidally insane old man a hundred years ago?” Keywords: Victorian England; cannibalism. I was also apparently the only person who didn’t realize I was gay:

“I’m going to college to explore myself.”

“You’ve spent the last six years exploring yourself. I bet you spend college exploring other dudes.”

Well, yes, but in my defense I also experimented with drugs. As my nom de guerre Tulane Chris indicates, I went to college in New Orleans, as did the weird kid from every other high school in the country. Open-till-dawn bars, voodoo, and the phrase “oh, it’s just an alligator, leave it alone and it’ll leave you alone” don’t inspire a lust for conformity. Add the cachet that comes from “well I don’t know about you but I was an internally displaced person and the UN actually counted me as such in its yearly statistics and you should have seen Mid-City before the hurricane but the Marigny was lucky because…” and you get a square peg indeed. I had one really illuminating conversation about eccentricity in college. A friend said, “It’s always so awkward when you have to out yourself as weird.” This friend would later gain fame as “the girl who, not content with extant plagues, made up diseases and told us she had them,” but she made a good point. Even if you try to conceal it around new people, you’ll slip, and everyone will know. One passing reference to the year when you were twenty and had an irrational fear of nuclear weapons so strong that whenever a plane flew low overhead while you were asleep you hid in the bathroom because you thought the bathroom was relatively protected despite the fact that the Cold War had been over for fifteen years, and suddenly you’re “weird.”

So now, as a so-called adult, I lead a fairly quiet life on more or less my own terms. I may spend days on end eating dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets and obsessively re-reading books about the Mitford sisters, but I have my own apartment and, for the first time in my life, no one comes in to tell me I'm being weird.

Except, of course, when they do. My landlord gave me about 36 hours’ notice that an “appraiser” was coming to look at the apartment. I was especially busy that week and didn’t have time to tidy up, so the appraiser saw my habitat as it generally is:

-Mess, everywhere

-Mardi Gras beads, everywhere

-A “Christmas Angel” doll that a friend sent me because one of her legal aid clients bought it for her because it looks exactly like my friend

-Twenty pictures of pugs cut from calendars arranged in a large grid on the wall

-An orange electric wok in the hallway (because there’s not room in the kitchen)

-A drawing Giant Camel made me of a narwhal leaping over the Eiffel Tower

-A bottle of holy water in the bathroom, because Mom made me take it when I went to college and I’ve had it ever since and WHAT do you do with such a thing and it usually gets packed with my toiletries

-A two-foot-high plush pug I won at Dave and Buster’s

-A garden gnome holding a panda

-A pile of salt I spilled on the carpet that I haven't gotten around to borrowing a vacuum to clean up

-etc.

This sounds like I’m bragging, “oh look how wacky I am,” but keep in mind that I expected no visitors and was actually annoyed by having someone in my house. This is how things are when I’m home alone.

Any doubt I had that I would be known to posterity, if at all, as an eccentric was finally laid to rest in June. I only keep in touch with two friends from high school, and this June one moved onto a goat farm where the farmer anoints the goats before slaughter, because “goats are people too.” The other married an inmate live on the radio.

“What’s he in for?”

“Oh, some gun thing. You don’t really want to know.”

She’s right about me not wanting to know, but aren’t a huge number of crimes technically “some gun thing?”

Anyway, I’ve gotten used to my apparent eccentricity. It may have ruined a few dates, but it’s gotten me second dates when my other charms fell short. It’s never gotten me a job, but it’s kept me a job – no one wants to fire the guy who comes into the break room with circles under his eyes not because (or not ONLY because) he’s hung over, but because his mother called him at midnight to talk about lepers. It’s lost me a few friends, but it’s won me some hilarious enemies. It may not be useful, but it’s mine.

Speaking of lepers, and to work blue for our new readers, here’s my favorite joke:

“What did the leper say to the prostitute?”

“Keep the tip.”

See you Monday!