State of the Tulane Chris: Part II

Tulane Chris is Relieved: Wacky Wanda is gone! We thought she left a while ago, but then she kept knocking on the door. We never saw her move out, but she hasn’t been seen in weeks. There’s no sight quite like two grown men crouched on the floor, taking shallow breaths through their mouths, gauging the distance to the knife drawer as the door goes tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. She had a long, emotional hallway goodbye with Girl-Who-Slams-Doors, thanking GWSD for all the “positive energy.” On the free table, Wacky Wanda left some tea, one small box of Sun-Maid raisins, one shoe, and about fifty CDs. They were all what I think of as 90s lesbian music (confirmed by Giant Camel, whose mother was a lesbian in the 90s): the Cranberries, Melissa Etheridge, Indigo Girls, Sinead O’Connor… This raises so many questions. She was so weird in big, huge ways that the thought of her being weird in an everyday way like being a lesbian just blows my mind.

Tulane Chris is Underslept: The other day, the fire alarm in our building went off for three hours. “The wiring” had gone wrong and no one could get it to turn off. The super lives an hour away and the alarm company’s 24-hour helpline is an answering machine. You know what Philadelphia’s like in the middle of the night? We tried to take a walk, but turned around when we saw a man literally fighting his reflection in a store window. Later, an extremely drunk African-American lady showed up and started making small talk. She asked if we were standing outside for some kind of protest. The woman she was talking to didn’t feel like dealing with a drunk just then so she left, causing the drunk lady to open up to Giant Camel and me about her experiences with racism. She was sure we’d had them too, because “you know how white people are…” Now, Giant Camel is technically white but ambiguously brown in appearance, but Pocahontas aside, you cannot look whiter than I do. If I were an X-Man, my superpowers would be getting sunburned, avoiding racial profiling, and getting good service at restaurants. I didn’t know how to answer this so I just said, “Oh, I think we’ve all had a bad night,” to which Giant Camel helpfully added “HE’S PRETTY WHITE, THEY CAN DO AN X-RAY ON HIM WITH A HUNDRED WATT BULB.” Later, when the alarm finally got shut off and we all went to bed, the drunk lady just went right on upstairs, but I’ve never seen her again, so I don’t know if she lives in our building or was incredibly confused in the morning.

Tulane Chris is Meta: I wrote a whole post about how it’s uncomfortable to blog about looking for jobs when you know prospective employers might read it, and then didn’t post it because I didn’t want prospective employers to read that. Then I got a job interview. So… good call?

Tulane Chris is Reflective: I started writing a memoir. My goal is to avoid being described as “the poor man’s Augusten Burroughs at risk for diabetes.” The first chapter is about my mother’s obsession with her reproductive organs and is called “Female Trouble.” There is also, apparently, a performance art piece about endometriosis called “Female Trouble,” which you can see a preview of at www.femaletrouble.org. I feel no need to see it because, as you will read in my memoir, most of my childhood was a performance art piece about endometriosis.

Tulane Chris Has Vague Opinions about Prominent Women: The night of the horny goat weed, I wrote “MICHELLE OBAMA JANE LYNCH” on the page of blog ideas in my notebook. I think my point about Michelle Obama is that she’s one of the very rare people who look better in still photographs than when actually moving and speaking – she moves her face a lot when she talks and I find it distracting. I don’t know what I wanted to say about Jane Lynch, but I like her.

Tulane Chris Learned Something Amazing: Roseanne made a kids’ sing-along video called Peanut Butter and Jellyfish. It’s enough to make me have children.

Tulane Chris is Judgmental: I saw two people at Starbucks who had taken chairs away from another table so they each had a chair just for their coats. The one was yammering about real estate on the phone, and the other was doing something on a Mac with a “Nightmare Before Christmas” sticker placed on it so that Jack and Sorry-Don’t-Remember-Her-Name were silhouetted in from of the apple. Don’t you feel like you already know way, way enough about them?

Tulane Chris Likes Labored Jokes: I want to start a band that sings about skin cancer awareness and immigration reform. It will be called “Irregular Borders.”

Tulane Chris Likes Social Commentary: You know what I realized the absolute defining activity of our generation is? Our Woodstock? Using food stamps at Trader Joe’s. We will absolutely reminisce about that in decades to come. (Guess what I was doing when I realized this.)

Tulane Chris has Body Issues: I have exactly the wrong amount of chest hair. If I had more or less I could manage, but as it is it looks like my torso was just now sodded. It’s also asymmetrical. This makes me feel like a freak.

Tulane Chris Remembers Childhood Summers: What the hell was that Tiger Blood flavor? Just grenadine? I got it because little boys like tigers and blood, but it didn’t taste good.

Tulane Chris Remembers High School: Do you agree that there’s such a thing as a High School Name? For example, I went to high school with someone named Amber Pajeski. Doesn’t that just sound like the name of someone you would have gone to high school with? Nathan Langford. Chase Hawn. Katharine Cunningham. Bill Schaffer. Sarah Brinsley. (I tweaked the spelling of these for obvious reasons.) I could name a dozen more. And these aren’t just people I happen to remember – I barely knew a couple of them, and am not in touch with any of them now – but they have such High School Names. They fit so well into the sentence “______ let ______ get to third base in his car and ______ told everyone.” I tried to generate fake ones as examples, but I couldn’t – you just know when you hear one.

Overall State of the Tulane Chris: C+