Blue

Tonight, on Day 7 of 30 Days of Blogging, I'm a little tired, so I'm going to take a copout, and answer the easiest question I received:

What's your favorite color?

Blue.

It's blue.

Fit to be Tied

On Day 6 of 30 Days of Blogging, I have decided to use my friend Liz's suggestion:

You should write a blog about the ugly ties!

I have a fairly extensive tie collection. I counted this afternoon, in preparation for writing this, and discovered that I have 97 ties. I have no idea how many the average man has, but that seems like kind of a lot. At the same time, my immediate response was, "I need three more to have an even hundred." I tend to post on Facebook and Twitter every so often if I get a weird response to one of my ties, or if I find a particularly hideous one at the store, but I've never really explained why I buy ugly ties on purpose. The answer is simple, really.

It's Marge Simpson's fault.



Marge and Blinky, the three-eyed fish.

Just in case you're not seeing the connection (if you are seeing the connection, you might be my soul mate; please call me?), I'll explain. When I worked at my old school, I owned about 40 ties. I wore three or four a week, because that was the expectation for dress in my old department. When I moved here, I was still in the habit of wearing ties, but after the first year or so of working here, I kind of fell out of the habit. My boss rarely wore ties, and frequently just wore a polo shirt, so I got into the habit of wearing polo shirts, shirts without ties, and sweater/sweater vest combinations without ties. It got to the point that if I did happen to wear a tie, then people asked if I was interviewing for something. A few years ago, we got a new department head, and the tone of our department changed a little. As part of that change, a suggestion was floated to me that I might look a little more professional if I wore a tie more often.

My immediate response was resentment and annoyance.

I have six years of really good performance evaluations, where I often exceed the written expectations for my position. I work hard at my job, and I'm good at it. In what way would wearing a tie and conforming to a possibly outdated paradigm of professional dress change that? I was comfortable in my polo shirts, damn it, and I'd put on some weight, so I'd have to buy new shirts if they were supposed to have buttons on the front and collars to wear ties with. I seethed, and seethed, and seethed for a whole weekend, and then I remembered the valuable lesson of Marge and Blinky.

If you've never seen the episode Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish, that link will let you buy and view it from Amazon for two bucks, but I will also briefly explain. Bart, fishing near the nuclear power plant drains, catches Blinky, a three-eyed fish. The fish attracts media interest, and Mr. Burns starts making the rounds of the talk shows to explain the benefits of mutation, and how wonderful three-eyed fish are for the world. This media campaign morphs into Mr. Burns running for office, and as part of his campaign he decides to have dinner with the family of a random, low level plant employee. He picks the Simpsons, to Homer's delight and Marge's chagrin. Marge finds Mr. Burns repulsive, and Homer pretty much tells her to shut up and cook. Lisa comes to Marge to sympathize, and Marge explains that even though she doesn't want to cook for Mr. Burns she will, but that doesn't mean she's abandoned her principles. It just means that sometimes, when you can't act directly, you have to use the tools at your disposal.

Marge cooks and serves Blinky, the three-eyed fish.

Mr. Burns has no choice but to try to prove his point about the joys of nuclear power by eating, and promptly spits out the first bite of Blinky in front of the gathered cameras of the media. His campaign is dead before the airborne bite hits the table.

As I lay in bed, grumbling and thinking about how much I didn't want to wear a tie to work, I was suddenly reminded of this story, and thought, "You want ties. Oh, I'll show you ties."

And then I went shopping.

Along the way, though, three things happened:

1) I started to like wearing ties again. I wear them four to five days a week now.

2) The ugly ties stopped being ugly. Somehow, they started to have charm, and character. It's like I have a superpower where even the worst tie looks sort of cute when I wear it.

3) I stopped buying just ugly ties. Now, I still pick up the occasional stinker, but I also buy ties because I don't have enough green ones, or I really like that pattern, or that tie will let me wear a shirt and sweater together that normally wouldn't work.

Still, I picked through the ties this morning and kind of assembled a "hall of fame" collection of the good, the bad, and the ugly. I'm saving the best for last, but the seven before that are in no particular order.

The Tie of Subversive Thoughts



I bought the Tie of Subversive Thoughts because I thought it was striking, graphical, and artistic. I rarely wear the Tie of Subversive Thoughts, though, because every time I do at least one person makes the complaint that they feel threatened, the tie makes them uneasy, and they feel like I'm non-verbally threatening to shoot people. None of those are the reasons why I bought it or wear it, but apparently putting it on makes people uncomfortable. Oddly enough, every one of the coworkers who has complained is a Republican voter who has posted more than once on social media about their second amendment rights and how important it is to protect them. I guess those rights don't extend to images of guns.

The Misfire



I thought this tie was disgusting. It's orange, grey, and black paisley, for God's sake. I forgot, though, that I live in Tennessee. "What do you mean you think it's disgusting? It's orange." Go Vols. It is now part of my regular "Big Orange Friday" rotation, when we wear orange to work.

I Don't Get It



When I bought this tie, the girl at the register and I both looked at it for a minute, because I'd picked it up with another, more normal tie. She was like, "Oh, you found some ties! This one's really cute, and... oh. Uh...I... I don't get this one." Me, either, thrift store girl. This tie's base color is the color of vomit. On top of the vomit, there's a too bright blue and too bright pink paisley, and then on top of that there are, for some reason, mis-colored mallard ducks. What was anyone thinking when they designed and colored this? I wear it sometimes on Wednesdays, because on Wednesdays we wear pink.

Ford in '76



When I bought Ford in '76 at an estate sale, I thought it was hilarious. Ford lost in 1976. It's a campaign tie commemorating failure. Unfortunately, whenever I wear Ford in '76, people only see the elephants and they always go, "Wait, you're a Republican now?"

Rhinestones!



Those aren't tiny sequins. They're little tiny rhinestones:



I love this tie. I rarely wear it, but whenever I do people are always like, "Sparkly! That's so awesome!" It is, isn't it?

Seals Dying on the Beach



Another one that makes me wonder what people were thinking. I have a lot of ties with animals on them, cute little dogs and cats and birds and praying mantises and whatever else, but somehow this tie just doesn't work. I think it's because the three seals in the middle of the beach are clearly dead.

Kitty Cat Tie



I love Kitty Cat Tie. It's a little on the campy side, but for some reason it just makes me smile. My current supervisor pointed out something that I never noticed, though: Kitty Cat Tie only contains two fully visible cats. The rest of the tie, for some reason, doesn't show the fronts of any of the incomplete cats. Instead, it is a tie full of cat asses. Ever since he pointed that out, I love Kitty Cat Asses Tie even more.

And now, without further ado, the crown jewel of my tie collection:

Everyone Loves Hypno-Tie



The name is an homage to "Futurama"'s Everyone Loves Hypnotoad, because Hypno-Tie is mindbending. When I put Hypno-Tie down on the counter, the girl working actually recoiled, physically jerking back from it. You're probably looking at the picture thinking, "It's not that bad. I mean, it's not cute, but it's not that bad," because you can't see the true wonder of Hypno-Tie: it's lenticular. Hypno-Tie changes color from what's seen above to the paisley/tentacle pattern on an all red background, depending on what angle you see the tie from. Once I stood in the office next door and twisted my torso back and forth while the secretaries there laughed and laughed, because everyone loves Hypno-Tie.

If you don't, I'll shake back and forth in front of you until you do.

I See Dead People... In The Lobby

We're still in 30 Days of Blogging, and since we already started talking about dead people yesterday I think we'll just continue, as I tell you the story of the ghost that I saw in the lobby in February.

That's right.

Now, turn off all the lights, pull your blankets tight around you, and settle in for the least frightening ghost story ever told!

Every year in the spring we have a process called Room Selection, where the current students get to pick their room for next year. Under our current model it lasts for two weeks, runs from 7 AM to 7 PM, and is all computerized. It's very convenient for the students, since they can just sit in their room and log in, but just in case they run into trouble someone has to be in the office to answer the phones the whole time, and that's usually my job. That means that for two weeks, I come in much earlier than usual so that my computer is all booted up and ready by 7 AM. It usually means that I'm the first one in the office for those two weeks, and, as I discovered this year, often the first one in the building in the morning. How do I know?

None of the lights were on when I got there.

See, between Room Selection last year and Room Selection this year our entire building was outfitted with a new, energy efficient lighting system in all of the hallways, classrooms, and offices. Everything is fitted with motion sensors, and if enough time goes by without anyone moving in front of one the lights shut off and don't turn on again until someone trips the sensor again. In the lobbies, offices, and classrooms it turns on the whole room at once, but in the hallway it only turns on about twenty feet at a time. It's actually kind of cool and feels oddly futuristic when you walk through the building and it turns on all around you, but I digress.

Our building is built on a hill, which means that last year when I parked out back my office was four floors away, but right above me. During Room Selection, I started parking in the lot on the side of the building, which had the advantage of putting my office only two floors above me but which meant I had to walk the entire length of the building to get to it. This wasn't terrible, as I fell into a routine of parking, walking through the third floor of the Communications Building (the other half of our building; it's technically all one building since the dividing line between the two is an actual physical line in the hallway on the floor), getting a copy of the student newspaper in the lobby, hopping on the lobby elevator to go up one floor, and then walking the rest of the way to my office.

One morning during Room Selection I started to follow my routine, and something a little odd happened.

As I approached the building from the side lot, I saw someone in the lobby, at the newspaper stand. You can see this from outside, because the whole front side of the third floor is glass, as you can see in this photo where I've circled the newspaper rack:



Now, you have to understand that the lights were not on at that point, and I could only see the newspaper rack because the lights outside were shining through the windows. I noticed a man bending over the rack, wearing a suit, and a red tie, which was hanging down as he bent, presumably grabbing a newspaper. My mind was focused on Room Selection, and I lost sight of him and the rack as I turned to enter the side door at the end of the building:



As I began to walk down the hallway, still thinking about Room Selection, I still couldn't see the newspaper rack, and the hallway lights began to turn on. One set turned on here:



one set turned on here, where I could just barely see the rack next to the welcome mats:



and another set turned on here:



Look carefully at the ceiling above the farthest bench in that last photo. See a long, skinny white thing with a block at the end by the windows? That's one of the motion sensors. That particular one turns on the last piece of hallway lighting, and then when I walked past it, the lights in the lobby snapped on:



And the lobby was empty.

Nobody at the elevator, and nobody at the newspaper racks.

So where did the man in the tie go?

The answer is, of course, NOWHERE.

The hallway past the lobby was still dark, so he could not have gone that way. The lobby was dark until I stepped into it, so he could not have crossed to the classrooms at the back of the lobby or gotten on the elevator. Also, the elevators in that side of the building chime when they stop at each floor, which I would have heard. He can't have gone out the front doors of the lobby and outside, either, for the same reason that he can't have gone to the back of the lobby: Look at the lobby picture again. The motion sensor for the lobby is directly above the lobby doors. You can't open them without triggering it, and turning the lights on. As a matter of fact, he can't ever have been at the newspaper rack at all, even though I saw him there through the window, because you can't approach the newspaper rack from any direction without setting off a motion sensor.

No one else on campus seems to have ever heard any ghost stories about the Communications Building. I was too far away to see what the man looked like, other than that he had a red tie and a dark suit, so I can't really describe him to someone. I didn't feel any kind of menace or threat, and didn't realize I'd seen something impossible until I was already at my desk and started thinking, "Hey, where's that guy GO, anyway? And how come he didn't turn any of the lights on?"

I walked back through that part of the building that night when I was leaving, so that I could take these photos and so that I could try to figure out if it was possible to get to and from the newspaper rack in the space of the twelve seconds it took me to walk down the hallway while also somehow avoiding the motion sensors on all sides.

It's not.

So, like any sane, rational adult, I immediately started parking out back again and have never again walked through that part of the building after dark.

I hope he enjoys his newspaper.

Return to the Dead Celebrity Cookbook

Things have been getting a little dark during the first few days of 30 Days of Blogging, so I figure we need to move on to a lighter topic today:

The dead.

Dead celebrities, that is.

As you may recall, I treated myself to The Dead Celebrity Cookbook just after Christmas. I posted a question without context on my Facebook asking friends to pick one of these three dead celebrities, without telling them why: Bette Davis, Karen Carpenter, and Greer Garson. Bette squeaked by with the win, which surprised me since most people that I know seem to only know her because she's got eyes or, possibly, from her spellbinding portrayal of late 1990's-early 2000's Michael Jackson. In honor of her win, I cooked Bette's Red Flannel Hash, and enjoyed it.

Karen Carpenter came in a close second. I feel bad making fun of someone with an eating disorder, but her recipe for a "chewy pie" made of egg whites and saltine crackers could best be described as a warning sign for intervention. I went ahead and cooked it anyway, and I swear that eating it physically hurt me inside. Over the course of a week I managed to eat only half, and I had to soak the pie plate (which had been heavily sprayed with cooking spray prior to baking) for four days to loosen that crap. At one point I even thought about throwing the pie plate away, but it's Pyrex.

This leaves us with poor Greer, the distant third. Although she's largely forgotten by American audiences today, Greer was a major movie star in the 1940's, nominated for Academy Awards five consecutive years in a row (a record that she and Bette Davis jointly hold). I know of her from film class and books about old Hollywood (I've only seen one of her films), and also because she is a valuable piece of Oscar trivia, both for the consecutive nominations and also because she is the reason that acceptance speeches have time limits. Her speech for Mrs. Miniver was over five minutes long, and holds the record for the longest acceptance speech in Academy Award history.

Keep that fact in your back pocket for the next trivia night.

You're welcome.

Greer's recipe in the cookbook is for something called capirotada, which I assumed was British since she is, but which turns out to be traditionally Mexican. Given that Greer ended up married to a Texas millionaire, her choice of recipe is maybe not all that surprising, but I'd never heard of it until I saw it in the cookbook. It's described as "like French toast" and "like bread pudding", but it was the "what the hell?" mixture of Monterey Jack cheese, raisins, and sugar syrup that made me think, "Oh, I have to try this."

Our recipe starts with six pieces of toast:



which means that we've already exceeded the number of calories in Karen's chewy pie.

The instructions said to use a casserole dish, which meant that I had to spend ten minutes deciding which piece of Pyrex would be the appropriate size. I settled on a 1.5 quart Golden Honeysuckle, but now that I've cooked this I think I could have gotten by with a standard sized bread loaf pan. Following the recipe, I began to stack the toast in the dish:



and then to cover it with shredded cheese and raisins:



until I ran out of ingredients and ended up with what looked like the driest, least delicious sandwich ever:



Seriously, those raisins filled me with doubt.

Once the layers were arranged, I set to work making syrup out of sugar, water, and nutmeg. The recipe called for cinnamon, but I didn't have any, so the nutmeg was a substitution. According to the recipe, I needed to boil until it turned amber, which I decided was here:



Hey, Greer? It's kind of hard to see when the syrup is turning brown if you have me putting a brown spice in it.

I let the syrup cool for about five minutes (the recipe didn't say to do this, but I was not pouring boiling hot sugar syrup into room-temperature Pyrex; that's how dishes explode) and then poured it over the stacks:



and then I rearranged some of the cheese that had washed into the bottom of the bowl back on top, brushed it with melted butter, and baked it until golden brown and soaked with syrup (twenty minutes):



It smelled really good, like French toast. The book didn't say if I should eat it right out of the oven or let it cool a little first, so I scooped a piece right out:



and dug in.

It's a hard food to describe. It's sweet, crunchy on top, soft on the bottom, and the raisins get kind of soft and squishy while cooking. The cheese somehow stops tasting like cheese (no surprise since it's so mild to begin with), and the whole thing tastes better if you let it cool down to room temperature.

And, best of all, it comes right out of the dish without four days of soaking.

I didn't really hear an apology in there...

During last year's 30 Days of Blogging, I addressed a question that my friend Sandy asked, which was, "Do you have a yearbook full of crossed out pictures?" It turned out that yes, as a matter of fact, I did. Doesn't everyone? I was thinking about it at this time last year because one of the people with an X on his face had actually spoken to my mom, to ask if I'd ever forgiven him. I reflected on the idea of forgiveness briefly, and decided that no, not only had I not forgiven, but I didn't ever intend to.

Here's the thing: I don't think about those people in my day to day life. This is the luxury of growing older and moving away. I don't see those people at the mall or the grocery store or any of the other places that I go, and I pretty much only take out my yearbooks if someone sends me a Facebook friend request and I can't remember who they are. I don't wake up in the morning thinking about how much I dislike those people, but if something happens to remind me that those people exist, then most of the time I do remember that I dislike them, and for the five minutes it takes me to be distracted by something shiny I am angry and irritated and hateful all over again, but then I move on.

That doesn't mean that I forgive them. Like Natalie Merchant sings in "Seven Years", "I might forget you, but not forgive." I reflected on this last year, and was a little disappointed in myself over not being a better person and not being willing to forgive those people.

It turns out that I haven't really matured any regarding this particular issue in the past year.

How do I know, you ask?

Because that guy who talked to my mom last year contacted me on Facebook about a month ago.

For the purposes of this blog entry, we're just going to call him Mr. X. (Not to be confused with Madame X, Professor X, Malcolm X, or Dr. Double X.) At the beginning of last month, Mr. X poked me on Facebook.

I chose to ignore this.

I have nothing to say to Mr. X, and I'm certainly not going to be spurred into saying something by a Facebook poke. A long letter cataloging a multitude of sins against me, possibly including abject begging for forgiveness and several forms of groveling? That I might respond to. A Facebook poke? There's a short pier somewhere waiting for you to take a long walk.

A few days of silence went by. No further pokes, and no need for me to give this any further thought. Then Mr. X went to a photo of me on a mutual friend's page, and "liked" it.

Clearly, Mr. X wanted my attention. I began to respond, then removed all of the profanity, then made sure that it still carried a tone of hostility that would deter further contact.

I'm going to assume that you sent that poke on Sunday by accident.

Actually, I assume that you're a moron, but I'm trying not to open with insults.

Mr. X responded: Just saying Hi Joel.... It's been 21 yrs.... A lot has changed in 21 yrs..., Hope all is well...

A lot has changed in 21 years, you say? You know what hasn't changed? I still think you're a horrible person, and you still aren't apologizing. I decided immediately that this was enough dialogue for me.

Feel free to say hi in another 21 years or so, and have a nice day.

There's some traffic outside, and no one playing in it. Go work on that.

I'd like to point out that I haven't sworn and haven't insulted anyone, and that I still haven't been apologized to. Mr. X responded with a "thumbs up" graphic, and wrote: Lol! Am I gonna see you at class reunion?

At this point I wondered if I hadn't been clear, somehow. Was I not being hostile enough? Was my open rudeness coming across as humor? I'd always thought Mr. X had a kind of dumb cunning, but was it possible that he was just dumb?

Before I could answer his question, he wrote again: My kids say hi..... Thought you might wanna say hi at the reunion.....

And then he sent me pictures of his four children.

What, exactly, are those pictures supposed to tell me? Do you imagine that I'm going to think you're a changed person just because you forgot to put on a rubber four times? And what on earth would I say to them when I saw them at the reunion? "Hi. In high school your daddy was a total asshole piece of shit, and I sincerely prayed a number of times that Jesus would run him over with a school bus and set him on fire in the street. What grade are you in?" All of a sudden we're in that scene in Kill Bill when The Bride explains to Copperhead that, "You and I have unfinished business. And not a goddamned thing you've done in the subsequent four years including getting knocked up is going to change that," except in that scene Copperhead actually apologized more than once and I have yet to see the word "sorry" appear on my screen.

Once again, I bit back my urge to swear, and actually struggled to find a nice way to say "Fuck the fuck off":

I won't be at the reunion. I already see and talk to the people that I would want to.

I'm sure you feel that you're a nice person now, and you might even actually be, but you're not a person that I want to know.


That is the nicest I could have possibly been. Romy and Michele said worse things to Christy Masters than I typed right there. I showed a tremendous amount of restraint, and I lied. I don't believe that you might actually be a nice person now. I don't believe that you'd ever have any idea of how to even pretend to be a nice person. I'm willing to bet that you're so far from being a nice person that the light from "nice person" will never reach you in our lifetime. I find it more believable that you're still a bully and still an asshole, especially since you still haven't managed to apologize and you somehow think that 21 years without talking balances out 5 years of verbal and physical harassment. And the reunion? You think I'm going to the reunion to voluntarily spend time with people like you when I spent eighth to twelfth grade counting down the time until I never had to speak to you again? Someone would have to drive up to my house with a dumptruck full of money and a handful of Clark bars to get me to that reunion, and then there better be an open bar and a lot of fried cheese.

Mr. X finally seemed to understand that I didn't feel like chatting: Truthfully you still wouldnt want to know me.... and i am a nice respectful person...Just saying Hi Joel..... Take care, hope all is well.....

All was well until you started poking me.

And you still haven't apologized.

And I'm still mad about it.

I talked to my mom about this after it happened, since she apparently still sometimes encounters and speaks to Mr. X. My mom wants me to be a better person, and understands that I also want myself to be a better person, so she tried to offer some different perspectives.

"Maybe he's changed. Or maybe he's really sick. You know, thinking about his life and stuff. Maybe he's in a twelve step program."

Maybe he is.

But I realized, in thinking about this, that I don't care. I don't care what his reason is, or what his circumstances are now, because I still remember what his circumstances were then, when he had the upper hand. Every day, he made a conscious choice to make my life worse. Every day, for five years. Every day, he had a choice to be nice, or even to be neutral, and he decided to be hurtful instead. Every day, and even though those days were 21 years ago, I still remember them when people remind me. Every day he had something I wanted: to be left alone.

Now I have something he wants.

Now I have the upper hand.

And I'm no better than he was.

How about...advice you would give yourself at 18?

On Day 2 of 30 Days of Blogging, I'm going to use a topic suggested by my friend Justin:

How about...advice you would give yourself at 18?

Dear 18 year old me:

I am currently exactly twice your age, but I like to think that I remember being you pretty well. I'm hoping that you are receiving this letter through some sort of method that will make you trust it, rather than having a hideous vision from the future fling it at you from the back of a black horse while you shriek in terror. Either way, I'm writing to you on this, your 18th birthday, because I want to give you some helpful advice before your freshman year of college ends. My goal in doing so is to have you end up, more or less, the same person, but maybe to smooth out some of the bumps along the way.

At this point, I'm certain that you're thinking about how this is bound to interfere with the timeline, and that things have to happen the same way or else I wouldn't need to write to you, so the fact that I am is just proving that our efforts at change will fail, but let's pretend otherwise. In "Runaways" v2, issue #4, a comic that you will read and enjoy in 2008, Gertrude says, "The future is a threat, not a promise," and that's the premise that we're going to work from.

Change is possible, and these are my three suggestions:

1) Change your major. Keep the English half, but drop the education double major and get that theater minor that you wanted instead but didn't have time to complete while still graduating in four years. You will not student teach until your senior year of college, and you will hate it. You will then leave college with a degree that you have no intention of using, so you might as well just change it now and save three more years of classwork and a semester of teaching that you will not enjoy. I realize this is going to worry you, because your parents will be alarmed that you are leaving college without a usable skill, but we're going to cover that in Point #2.

2) In the spring semester of your current year, most of your friends are going to apply for positions as student staff members, and you're going to do it because everyone else is. Please be sure to do this! This decision will shape the rest of your life. You will enjoy working with college students, and it will make you happy. It will also become your professional career. Stay on staff your entire four years of college, like I did, and then in your senior year apply to graduate programs in College Student Personnel, like I did not until later. Get a graduate assistanceship in a housing department to pay for grad school, and then go be a hall director and stay in higher education for ever. Trust me on this one.

3) You're gay. You kind of know this already, and eventually you're going to be fine with it, but you're going to waste most of college avoiding that realization and won't really figure it out until your senior year. I'm trying to give you a three year head start on addressing that, and maybe you can go ahead and avoid that whole senior year relationship and ensuing mess entirely.

Listen carefully, and pay attention, because you need to recognize this moment when it arrives.

Right now, you have a friend in the building named Jared. You and he have the same last name, and you've become a weird sort of friend because Tami, the girl who does the mail, continuously mixes up your letters and J Crew catalogues since you have the same first initial and the same last name. She means well, but she's kind of grumpy. You will also be kind of grumpy next year and the year after, when you have her job in a different hall. You get a lot of letters because you write a lot of letters, and email isn't available on your campus yet. You also have a friend in the building named Brendan, who lives a door or two down from you. I don't remember his last name, but he has black hair, blue eyes, lost 40 pounds by smoking a cigarette instead of having a meal every time he was hungry, and dates a boy in Clark Hall sometimes. You talk to him in the floor lounge a lot, because he sits on the windowsill to smoke (his roommate with the enormous teeth is a Mormon, and won't let him smoke in the room) and you like to read your Psych 101 book in the lounge instead of your room because the chairs are more comfortable.

As you already know, since you are already in your freshman year, you go out to house parties a lot on the weekends. During one of these parties you will manage to steal one of the Deltas from the basement wall of Delta Psi Delta and will hang it in your room for the rest of the school year, which I think is kind of hilarious. Some weekend soon, when your roommate is away for the weekend (he goes away every weekend, actually) you are going to go out, and then you're going to come home a little tipsy but not full on sloppy blackout drunk. You will be buzzed, not smashed. Your friends will deposit you on your floor while they take the elevator up two floors to their floor, and you will go to the community bathroom to brush your teeth. While in the bathroom, you and Brendan will start talking about pretty much nothing, or at least nothing I remember, and he will flirt a little. Since you are tipsy, you will giggle, and then head to your room, and Brendan will start to follow.

At this point, the two of you will encounter your friend Jared in the hallway. I'm not sure why he's there, because he lives on the floor below you, but he will immediately recognize the situation and tell Brendan to leave you alone. He will then push you into your room, because he thinks he's being helpful, will close the door behind you, and will tell you to go to sleep. You will pretend to do so, but instead you will sit on the floor with your back against the door and listen carefully while Jared explains to Brendan in the hallway that you are not interested, but are instead just drunk and friendly. Brendan will argue that no, you are gay and just haven't figured it out yet (he's right; you totally are), but Jared will continue to disagree. Eventually they will both decide that this discussion is a waste of time, anyway, because you are probably passed out (you're not, because you really aren't very drunk). Jared will again advise Brendan to leave you alone before leaving, and then you will get in bed and go to sleep. You and Brendan will never discuss this again, and at midyear he will move to another building.

Speaking as adult you, my advice to you is that once Jared leaves, you need to open the door and invite Brendan inside.

Trust me, you will enjoy whatever he wants to do, even if it's just talking and smoking. I suspect that it's not.

As an honest person with a good sense of self, you figured out that you were gay within weeks of hooking up with a boy. I'm trying to move that timeline forward for you three years, and to substitute a boy who was not in the closet, didn't make you feel bad about yourself, and wasn't a jerk. Sure, he's not as cute as the other guy, but maybe you won't spend the entire back half of your senior year in alcoholic depression.

Abs aren't everything.

You may not believe that right now, but by the time you're my age, you will.

Sincerely,

36 year old you

"I surrender to destiny."

Last April I decided that I needed a kick in the pants to get me writing more regularly, so I declared that April would be the month for 30 Days of Blogging. I had a few topic ideas of my own, and asked friends to submit ideas, questions, and random topics so that I would have something to write about every day. It turned out to be a really enjoyable writing exercise, so I'm doing it again this year.

That makes this Day One, and I have a topic that was leftover from last year:

Talk about a major life change you made this year

You're probably not going to think this is really that major until I explain it (and maybe not even then), but this year I found a way to decrease stress in my life two to three times a week, and all I had to do was give up and stop trying:

I stopped caring about whether or not the baggers at Kroger mixed my cold groceries and my regular ones.

This is not how I was raised, as my mother was quick to point out a few months ago when I mentioned this on Facebook. I was always taught that refrigerator and freezer groceries went in one part of the cart (or, if you were doing monthly shopping for a family of four, often in a separate cart) and that you kept them separated when you put them on the conveyor belt at the cash register. I was also taught to supervise, and occasionally correct, the bagger if they did not properly pack the groceries according to the laws of thermodynamics. As I've gotten older, and had some really awful customer service jobs where the dumb things that people said to me occasionally made me want to smack them, I've stopped correcting the baggers, but I haven't stopped seeeeeeething when they mix the groceries together.

Over the years, I've made constant New Year's resolutions to stop wishing death on these people. I've also tried a number of strategies to try to trick them into not mixing the cold groceries and the regular groceries together. These include, but are not limited to:

1) Building a wall between the two kinds of groceries with other things. I'd put down all the cold groceries, then pause for a few moments, then put down the bread and eggs and cleaners, which are usually bagged separately, and then start putting down the regular groceries.

I cannot count the number of smashed bread loaves this resulted in.

2) Casually slipping my wishes into conversation.

"How are you today, sir?"

"I'm great. I'd be even greater if my cold groceries stay separate from the regular ones."

Awkward silence.

Stare.

3) Trying to bag it myself. Even though you don't tip the baggers at Kroger, they still get mad if you try to bag the groceries for them. It's kind of like the speech that Birdie gives to Margo in All About Eve about the wardrobe woman only having one job and being really touchy about other people doing it. The baggers are there to bag, and if you start trying to bag for them it suggests that they are incompetent, it disrespects them and the job that they are doing, and it could get them in trouble if a manager walks by.

4) Once I even brought my own bags to the store. (Thank God I work in a field where they give you a tote bag at pretty much every conference you go to.)

"I brought my own bags. This one is for cold food."

Yeah, like that worked.

So, every time I went grocery shopping, which happens a couple of times a week, I'd walk through the store with a growing sense of stress and anxiety. How are they going to screw up the bagging this time? Sour cream mixed in with soup cans? Cream cheese at the bottom of the bag under pasta and Little Debbie cakes? WILL THE MILK EVEN MAKE IT INTO A BAG AT ALL? Then I'd get to the register and watch as groceries built up between the scanner and the bagger, mixing and jumbling, and ending up bagged all willy nilly and hither and yon, seethe all the way home, then seethe some more as I unpacked the groceries and saw how scrambled and improperly bagged they were.

Then, this year at New Year's, I was about to make yet another resolution destined to fail, and instead I had a revelation:

I will never win this battle.

I gave up. I decided to stop worrying about my groceries, and to throw them upon the Wheel of Ka. I would place my groceries on the conveyer belt, set my jaw, and surrender to destiny.

And nothing terrible happened.

Now, I throw things in my cart however they happen to land. Then I put them on the belt however I happen to reach for them, and the bagger does whatever they want.

Sometimes, the bagger even sorts them when I haven't.

So, the moral of the story is that sometimes, you can win by giving up.

And that it doesn't matter if cold groceries aren't right next to each other when you only live three miles from the store anyway.