My Feelings

[Hi there. K. Griff giveaway results will be announced as soon as Dan gets to work and sees the email I sent at 5:30 this morning asking him to text me random numbers as soon as he sees this. Although truthfully I'll probably be asleep by that time, soooooo...here's hoping I eventually get the energy to get out of bed, find my phone and take it off vibrate, huh?? FINGERS CROSSED!!!!!1XOXOXOX]

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Just kidding, this one is mostly shit jokes, although I do want to thank the commenters who said they would help me move. I appreciate it and would have taken you up on it, except for the fact that the few times I’ve met readers I’ve tried and hopefully succeeded in making a decent impression, and I didn’t want to ruin my track record by having you see me standing in a dusty room, things strewn everywhere, holding a butter dish to my chest while weeping and murmuring “Ethel! We have to hide this before Ricky gets home. Help me, Ethel. What will Ricky say when he gets home? Oh, Ethel.” I don’t have a lot of dignity, but I do prefer to have my nervous breakdowns in private. I am very grateful, though, and will definitely enlist you to help me move a body should the occasion arise. (Does anyone else have recurring nightmares that there just happens to be a corpse in your house for some vague reason that you have to hide?)

One of the many, many crosses I bear in this life is the increasingly intense mutual admiration between Meg and my father. When I was elevated to Other Bird, I told Dad about the blog and he read some of the archives and sent me an email saying in essence “You’re funny, but Meg is something mystical, almost more than human. Her laugh brings tears of joy to the eyes of old men, and the sound of her voice brings an end to war. Every word that flows from her pen redefines the English language as the tongue of angels, and her beauty and grace fill churches with former atheists.” I was advised to cling to Meg like a bird on a rhinoceros, eating the little fleas of fame that might jump my way. (Which was of course good advice and which I have done.) Meg, for her part:

“Your dad is a calm older man with a good job right, yes?”

“Yes…”

“Is he married?”

“Not technically, but…”

“Chris, do you think I’m pretty?”

“Yes…”

“Do you think your dad would… I mean, you wouldn’t have to call me ‘Mom.’ You would on the blog, of course, for professional reasons, but not at home or anything. Unless of course there was company. Tell your Dad I have strong Jewish ovaries and could give him sons.”

“He has a son.”

“Right, but…”

At this rate, they’ll be using me to pass notes at study hall within the week. The most maddening thing about this is that, since Meg is not his actual child, our behavior is judged by different standards. For example:

Meg drinks too much beer and falls down in the middle of the road: “She’s so zesty and full of life.”

I drink too much beer and fall down in the middle of the road: “Oh, Chris.”

Meg sits around in her underpants all day eating peanut butter with a finger and watching Shark Week: “She’s doing research for the blog. Sharks are funny. What a trooper!”

I sit around in my underpants all day eating peanut butter with a finger and watching Shark Week: “Oh, Chris.”

Meg gets paid five hundred dollars for a well-written freelance article: “I’m so proud of her.”

I get paid fifty dollars for going to a man’s house I met on craigslist, cleaning his oven wearing only an apron, high heels, and pearls, and then telling him he’s been bad and to wait until his father gets home: “Oh, Chris.”

The worst example of this is laziness. I’ve been in trouble consistently from birth for being lazy. Before birth, actually, since I was three weeks late and only starting trying to get out when I smelled pumpkin pie. All my life it’s been “Chris, do your homework. Chris, get a job. Chris, shift your weight so you don’t get another bedsore,” while Dad actually said “One of the most endearing things about Meg is her extreme laziness.” Oh, my God, can you please love me for who I am like in a TV movie about ice skaters, please?

Now that I’m a grown up who ostensibly pays his own rent, I can be lazy. I have done essentially no unpacking from the move. I’m still sleeping on the floor, surrounded by beer bottles and Wendy’s bags. If I were a constellation, I would be “The Embarrassment.” Invisible to the naked eye, the Hubble Telescope has documented it by recording waves of disgust emanating form a point near Polaris.

So, since I haven’t yet emptied the box labeled “Cookware, pornography, and miscellaneous” so I’ve been eating a lot of Wendy’s. You know how most of the shit jokes around here are about diarrhea? Well, I “expanded my range” and got so constipated I literally feared for my life. All I could imagine was bursting in a shower of Baconator feces and how people would react:

“2 Birds 1 Blog regrets to inform you that Tulane Chris died late Thursday when his colon burst, covering an entire one-bedroom apartment in partially digested beef. He died as he lived.”

Mom: “I told him to get more fiber.”

Dad: “Meg would never die of a meat-shattered bowel.”

Butter Legs: “It seems like only yesterday we were watching the Super Bowl and he couldn’t keep it in.”

Some priest: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to mourn the passing of a foul-mouthed hedonist who died because he ate so much meat that the very structure of his body gave way under the strain. I’m supposed to offer a few comforting bromides about salvation, but he died of unexpressed meat shits. Let’s not get our hopes up.”

The girl I went to high school with who pooped in her prom dress: “Oh, thank God, now people will stop telling my embarrassing poop story.”

Having absolutely no dignity, I called several people to commiserate. Meg proceeded to taunt me with a new story about her having had diarrhea (“Don’t put that on the blog yet because I have a date tonight with a reader and I want to keep just a shred of discretion. I’m a woman, dammit, not just a source of colonic hilarity.”) The best line of the crisis came, as ever, from Dad:

Me: “I’m so constipated I might die.”

Dad: “Is it just nervousness from using a new toilet?”

…

…

…

…what? I could say a lot about that, but I think the most interesting implication is that, when I have a purely physical symptom, my father just assumes it’s because I’ve gone completely, irrevocably insane. “Backed up? Oh, you must have formed an obsessive attachment to the toilet in your old apartment.” It’s not because I eat too much bacon and exercise as much as a dead sea anemone, it’s because I’m afraid of the toilet. Apparently he’s been expecting me to manifest the family madness for so long that everything I do seems bonkers.

So, of course, I bought some senna and washed it down with milk of magnesia and washed that down with beer. Went to work the next day and learned, among other things, how well sound carries in houses built around 1750. It was absolutely a scene from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. There are two toilets at work: the one in the hallway the tours go down, and the one right next to the office that doubles as a storeroom. I chose the hallway and could hear, between, uh, other sounds, the entire fucking tour. Which implies that they heard, between bits of the tour, other sounds.

“Did you learn anything interesting?”

“No, it was all drowned out by the sound of some unseen person’s bowels opening like the sky on the Day of Judgment.”

So now all is in balance and things are back to what passes for normal. Thank you for offering to help me move and laughing at my bathroom humor, and I’ll see you later.