Facebook Knows

You know that one person who seems to make a point to know every single detail about your life and then judges what you might like to talk about based off of those things? To a certain degree, we all do this, and it might even be a good thing in moderation. When it's all they talk about, though, I start to feel like that person is convinced that that is my only interest and saying absolutely anything else to me will make me either run off waving my hands in a fit of anger or drop dead spontaneously from the insurmountable task of comprehending this new, foreign concept. This is the way Facebook has been treating me lately and I don't like it.

Facebook has always tried to act like it knows the lives of its users. This used to manifest itself in really helpful features--People You May Know and Recommended Pages, for example. Most recently, they began to personalize their advertisements, which is a really good idea on paper. The problem is that the service, when implemented, is a bit... single-minded.

I'm one of those lucky people who lives in a town where I can be at least 73% sure that putting my sexual orientation on my Facebook will not result in a congregation of devotees performing an exorcism outside my door. (Although, come to think of it, I do live three doors down from a church...) One night, after watching a really sappy frustrated-gay-men romcom my mom put in the Netflix queue for me as a teaching moment, I got up the courage to fill the "interested in" box on my Facebook profile. Either no one saw it or no one was surprised (I can't imagine why; I'm totally the motorcycle-riding football-watching boob and beer enthusiast type), but one thing did come of this: Facebook's advertising engine became that friend that always talks about the same thing.

The trouble is that Facebook's advertisements aren't always tactful, either. Of the ads I see, 3/4 of them roughly resemble these two:



Don't get me wrong, I understand their arithmetic.

Male + Interested in: Men + Single + Almost always online on Friday nights + Watches romantic comedies frequently enough to suggest desperation = Interest in dating services

They just don't have to be so accurate.

Then, sometimes, they just get offensive, like this one:



I mean, come on, Facebook. Really? Does it really look like that's a book I'd-- nevermind. Don't want to know the answer to that.

The Time Delusion

I've become convinced that the governments of the world have been keeping a secret for centuries. An earth-shattering secret that would expose every clock or time-telling device you have ever purchased as the shameless liar that it is. A secret that would make fundamental questions we consider "obvious" uncertain. Does gravity really exist? Is air really there? Would the world be a better place if science found a way for Jacob Pitts and Joseph Gordon-Levitt to combine their gametes and make a baby? After this, we can't be sure.

The secret? Are you sitting down? (I'd be surprised if you weren't--the mental image of the beautiful man-baby offspring of those two men is something I'd consider enough to make just about anyone need to sit down)

The 10 minutes between 7:16 AM and 7:26 AM do not actually exist.

Due to my sleep deprivation on most nights, I am actually sleepwalking for the first thirty minutes I'm awake, so things tend to fall in place the same way every morning. (Being remarkably good at shaving while asleep is the only thing that has kept my carotid arteries intact.) I usually come down the stairs at around 7:14 AM, give or take a few minutes depending on how much time I spend panicking over the fact that nothing in my wardrobe seems to match that early in the morning. (Some traumatizing childhood memories have made me very fastidious. I'll leave it at warning you all that wearing a red t-shirt and green sweat pants will very quickly net you the nickname "Christmas boy.") It has to be around the same time because the first sight I'm greeted with every morning is a close-up of Meredith Vieira's face on the TV screen. This is such a frightening sight that it's hard to forget.

From there, I usually go into the kitchen, grab whatever derivative of cake that society deems acceptable for breakfast, prepare my caffeinated substance of choice and begin the effort to make it through breakfast without falling asleep. It seems to be barely seconds later when I hear the Wicked Witch of the Today Show caterwaul,

"It's 7:26 AM. Now let's take a look into the preparations underway for the Royal Wedding--"

This is around where I start thinking about how little I care about two attractive heterosexual people in positions of power getting married and how Kate Middleton is a total bitch because she's flawless and she's about to become a princess and have a really attractive husband and I don't even have the luxury of a creeper that sends me suggestive text messages, much less a member of the royal court--

Wait a minute, holy shit. 7:26 AM!?

I used to blame myself for this phenomenon. I used to chastise myself for moving too slowly or being too tired, but I will not accept the blame any longer. I know the truth. Why do you think NBC always puts advertisements on around that time? Because it's imaginary advertising, intended to lull you into thinking that time is going by while stuffing your brain with corporate slogans and promotional material.

If I suddenly disappear from the internet and this post is deleted, you know what happened. They couldn't handle the truth coming out. But now you know, and never again will you be tricked into thinking that you have enough time to eat breakfast and still be on time to school.

Down By the Water

My grandmother made me obsessed with water. To her, it was imperative that any drive--be it to a restaurant for dinner or to CVS to use a coupon--was accompanied by a drive along the shore of Lake Erie. I couldn't blame her. Lake Erie, like many things in America, is really pretty from a distance. Driving along Route 5 in my grandfather's teal Chevy Lumina put us just far enough away from the water to ignore the (often aromatic) brownish sludge on top, but close enough to satisfy my grandmother's desire to watch each wave come to completion.

When I was little, driving to the Dunkirk Pier wasn't just a nice evening out, it was a religious experience. Luckily, the pier is one of the few places in Dunkirk where you can park your car and expect to drive away with all four tires and both side view mirrors intact. When it was nasty and cold outside, we'd go to the Greek restaurant that's situated right by the lake and insist upon a table near the big windows at the back, where I could stare wide-eyed out the window at the seagulls and the waves and ignore my parents' conversations about clients and the court system. But when it was nice out, we'd drive into downtown Fredonia, go to a little sub shop called the Bomber House (I spent years trying to explain to my friends while telling this story that this was not a bomb shelter and we would not get in trouble for talking about it on school grounds), and bring our tinfoil-wrapped dinners to the pier where I could stare creepily at fishermen and ask inane questions about the marine life and the power plant you could see in the distance. At that age, there was nothing better. However, soon after I entered my teenage years, the proprietors of the Bomber House went back home to Puerto Rico (I think) and took their subs with them.

Fast-forward to now. I can't seem to watch any movie, regardless of the subject matter, without ending up a mess of thought and reminiscence at the end; I'm a glutton for introspection. I went to see Water for Elephants last night with a couple friends. Although I drove in the opposite direction on Route 5 to get to the movie theater, it was the same Route 5 and the same Lake Erie, and although Tim Hortons isn't quite the Bomber House, the bagel I ordered at the 24-hour drive thru had enough carbohydrates to send me into a fit of nostalgia. I needed a pretty place to park by the water and I needed it urgently enough to pull haphazardly into the first road I saw going in the direction of the lake. Unfortunately, the actually really pretty place to park had already been discovered by a couple of shady-looking guys standing in the dark (this was at midnight), and had been discovered long before that by the Town of Hamburg, who put up a very intimidating and persuasive sign saying "PERMITS REQUIRED" right at the entrance. My grandmother would have been ashamed. No one should be deprived of the opportunity to sit by the lake and reminisce.

Great Expectations

Happy Easter. I don't know about your family, but in mine, Easter has been relegated to "dinner holiday" status--we make an effort to avoid the microwave and use the more neglected parts of the kitchen, but that's about it.

More relevant about today is that it's the second-to-last day of my spring break, which means that it's my day to wonder where the time went, remember where the time went, and then hate myself, in that order.

Ever since I have been imprisoned without bail in the public school system, every break has gone almost exactly the same. We don't typically go on vacations, because the Buffalo area in the middle of April is way better than any of that Florida or Bahamas nonsense where the sun is actually visible and people actually go outside. If life were like current-generation video games and kept you participating with unlockable accomplishments/trophies, this is what every break would roughly look like:

Date: The Friday before break begins
Accomplishments I'm Trying For

- Clean room
- Actually catch up on the 15+ games I was so eager to buy but haven't even bothered to touch, half of which are still in shrink wrap
- Do at least part of my homework before the last day of the break
- Lose weight, or at least avoid gaining it (it's a game of expectations...)

Yes, I know, my expectations are high and I'm just setting myself up for disappointment.

Date: The Sunday before break ends
Accomplishments I've Actually Managed

- Go one week without moving a single piece of clutter in room
- Pick up 3 games you haven't played, glance at them, feel guilty for not playing them yet, and then set them back down and go play Scrabble
- Manage not only to avoid doing homework for an entire week, but also forget half of the curriculum of every course taken this year in school
- Gain some weight because half of the meals you ate over break were fried, based on heavy cream, or both, but dismiss it as totally waterweight
- Go to Applebee's twice in two days
- Spend enough money on coffee in a single week to need to take a trip to the ATM to withdraw more money, and stop for coffee right after

Don't be jealous. It isn't easy to live the thrilling life, but with some work and practice, you could be just like me someday.

Bowled Over

I am not a sporty person. I am known in the physical education department at my school as the kid who "tries really hard and totally gives 110 percent"--the tactful way of saying "your kid seems to intend to move the ball in the right direction, but we've never seen it happen." Although I have no illusions about my athletic aptitude, I've never really been satisfied with it. I was always jealous of the people who actually got the ball passed to them--even if people wanted to pass me the ball, no one was ever quite sure of what team I was even on.

When I was 15, a really good idea called Lucky Lanes presented itself to me. Bowling is kind of a sport, I thought. It involves movement and a ball. Besides, it can't be that hard. There are leagues for old people. Thinking my logic was infallible, I took the next opportunity to schedule a bowling trip with a couple of my friends and eagerly awaited my breakout performance.

When I got there, I realized two things: I am way more hopeless than I ever could have expected, and there are really fit old people in the world.

I didn't even get to an alley before I realized I had miscalculated. I couldn't find a ball that fits me. I have... big-boned fingers, meaning any bowling ball with the standard size holes accentuates every throw with the super attractive half popping, half squeaking sound of my fingers grasping for space. This meant that I had no choice but to go for the balls with the obscenely large holes. Unfortunately, these are also accompanied by a lot of weight (apparently, the assumption is that all overweight people have a lot of upper body strength, which... well... I'd like to see the study that concluded that) and if you're bad at aiming a ball that's light, you're extra bad at aiming a ball that's heavy. By the end of one game, the number of balls I had gathered to "try out" was greater than my average score per frame. When you consider that I was with three other people and only about seven balls fit on a rack... I don't want to talk about it.

Fast forward to now. I am still a terrible bowler--I proved that Thursday night with a group of friends. I made it into the newspaper recently for being recognized for making it into some list of top students in some other newspaper (see, I'm not totally useless...). I'm sitting with my grandfather and my mother at lunch on Thursday afternoon, eating a deliciously unhealthy plate of chicken and biscuits, when my grandfather turns to me and says:

"Oh, by the way, what's your bowling average?"

I had luckily just finished taking a sip of water. That isn't a question I'd ever have expected, and it's not information I'm keen on sharing. "...Why?"

"The newspaper said that you were on the bowling team."

At least the local newspaper is creative.

Don't You Want Me, Baby?

I cannot stand the idea that anyone I come in contact with throughout the day, no matter how brief the encounter, might leave with a bad impression of me. I put tremendous effort into avoiding this, and it works most of the time. (Or at least I think it does. Please don't tell me if it doesn't.) The problem is that babies seem to have a built-in judgment of me that they are born with.

For some reason, be it my dashing good looks or my fatherly emotional stability, I am always the person a parent chooses in a room full of young adults to interact with their child. I don't usually mind this, since the kids are usually between the ages of 3 and 11 and are thus old enough to consider me a likable person, but it becomes a real problem when the child is a baby. It invariably goes down something like this:

1. Parent offers child to me to either talk to or hold. Understand that I am not, under any circumstances, given a choice in this matter--the parent wants the baby to have attention now, and any attempt to escape is almost guaranteeing my permanent banishment from their home and entire social circle.

2. I reluctantly accept the offer and either make a very lame attempt at holding the baby (after 18 years, I still have no idea how--I have a lot of respect for those 16 and Pregnant girls only because they are not only able to hold a child properly, but do it in front of a camera) or try to strike up some sort of conversation. I cannot and will not do baby talk, which is usually what the parents are expecting me to do. When I was a baby, I found baby talk demeaning and objectifying. Probably.

3. The baby does one of the following:
- Begins to cry loudly enough to mobilize local police stations
- Attempts to slide off my leg (if I'm sitting down) or wriggle out of my arms (this option seems highly illogical, since if the baby is successful, they will fall on the ground and cause themselves brain damage, but I guess talking to me is that bad)
- Stares up at me really awkwardly until the situation gets awkward enough for me to give the baby back to his/her parent voluntarily

4. The parent snatches back their child, scoffs at me with disapproval, and probably whispers apologies and criticisms of me into the baby's ear as if I can't hear them. Any attempt I make at tension-easing conversation (i.e. "Wow, he/she wasn't having any of that! Hahah...") falls flat.

The strangest part of the whole sequence is that I never really did anything in interaction with the baby. The parent's outstretched arms towards me, intending to transfer the child into my possession, are enough alone to send the baby into some sort of attack of writhing and bugged-out eyes. This is only made worse by the parent's repeated baby-talk utterances like, "You want to sit over with Kelly?" or, "You want to talk to him now, don't you? Don't you?" I don't mean to tell other people how to be a parent, but I'm thinking that a baby mimicking a seizure while you're trying to do something is probably a pretty solid hint that they don't want it to happen.

Hungry Eyes

Yesterday, I discovered my latest nemesis: tables that face each other.

I like to watch people. I know that sounds creepy, and it probably should, but it usually isn't with any sort of prurient interest. I just like to see what's happening in other people's lives and pretending to be a part of it. This is usually something I get away with, since I am very well trained at avoiding eye contact (I am a master of the "look over your shoulder at someone but pretend you're actually looking for your lost child" move), but it is impossible to avoid eye contact when you are sitting at a restaurant table facing someone directly across from you.

Making accidental eye contact in this situation at least once is to be expected, but you know you've screwed up when he turns his head a full 90 degrees after he's caught you looking at him for the fifth time... to look at his wife... who is there with their kid.

It's undeniably best to just brush a situation like this off and pretend like it never happened, but I have this insatiable impulse to go over and say something to someone when I've done something that made them feel awkward. What the hell do you say to the patriarch of a happy family of three after you've been caught staring five times? It would come out something like this:

"Hey... uhh... I know you caught me staring at you a couple... I mean, I wasn't staring at you on purpose, it was totally accidental... I wouldn't stare at you on purp--I mean, I totally would stare at you on purpose if I had the choice since you are a pretty attractiv--I mean, uhh... Your kid is super cute! Bye!"

And their chicken hibachi dinner at the Fuji Grill is completely ruined by some creepy kid who just totally hit on someone who's old enough to be his father.

Have you ever been caught staring in a really awkward way? Is staring at someone considered harassment? ...Do you know the number of a really good lawyer? Let me know.

Love in a Real Starbucks

You are in a dim-lit room scented by coffee beans and cream. Soft jazz tones float through the air from a speaker you can't see, but can feel. You are staring at a list of options, pondering your choice between vanilla and mocha, as you catch the eye of someone on the other side of the counter. You grin coyly to yourself.

What could possibly ruin this (slightly creepy) romantic scene? You and the Starbucks employee you're courting are clearly destined to spend the rest of your lives together, cultivating coffee beans in the sunny landscapes of Colombia and swaying in your future living room to Miles Davis vinyls.

And then he calls you "buddy".

Perhaps it's all due to my inappropriate and misguided interest in retail employees (nobody can quite convince me that they are paid to pretend to like me...), but this scene is way more heartbreaking than any scene of any movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. There is actual kissing in those. In the rain. All I do in the rain is lose my car.

The bigger problem is that this word follows me like it's my real name--this is not the only time this has happened. (You can see that I have a real problem with retail employees...) "Buddy" is probably the most unsexy word in the entire dictionary. It's what fathers call their sons right before slapping them on the shoulder and putting on baseball caps. It's what older brothers call their younger brothers right before... some manly thing that I've never done and know nothing about. It's what people name their dogs! I'm going to start carrying around a dog mask around and every time an attractive guy calls me "buddy" I'm going to put it on and yell, "IS THIS WHAT I LOOK LIKE TO YOU!?" Then I will probably have to get my coffee elsewhere and there will probably be a newspaper headline the next day about a crazy guy in a dog mask making a scene at a Starbucks, but that is the price of making my point.

Do you have a name you hate to be called, but it always seems to follow you? Let me know. But don't call me buddy when you do. Please.

The Abominable, Unanswerable Question

"What kind of music do you like?"

I always feel as though people who ask me this question are using it as a way to judge me. Since being judged frightens me more than anything else, my mind immediately jumps to a series of potential answers and their outcomes:

The Self-Deprecating Response: Oh, you know, anything that could be found on 80s Teen Pop Hitzzz Deluxe.
Result: Asker concludes that I sit all alone at home on Friday nights in a Saturday Night Fever tribute costume attempting to dance the Electric Slide. Person walks away.

The Mass Appeal Response: 50 Cent and some Drizzy, since that's how I roll, G.
Result: Asker wonders how someone who could ever claim to like "50 Cent" and "Drizzy" uses the word "since" and such proper grammar and concludes that I do not have the proper amount of gold-colored accessories to pull this identity off. Person walks away.

The "I'm Too Cool For You, Be Jealous" Response: Oh, you know, a little jazz here, a little ambient there. Totally a Brian Eno fan.
Result: Asker wonders who the hell Brian Eno is and concludes that I am a pretentious bastard completely undeserving of their attention. Person throws the nearest sharp implement at my head and walks away.

The Actually Truthful Response: My favorite artist is definitely Janet Jackson, but Lady Gaga, Metric, Scissor Sisters, and Utada Hikaru are definitely up there...
Result: The world ends. The person walks away, or at least they would walk away if the world hadn't ended. Unless they're a cockroach, in which case they survive the end of the world and they walk away from whatever is left of my body. But I don't think cockroaches usually care what kind of music anyone likes, so I don't think that's likely.

You can see the common denominator here easily--the person walks away, I am left alone to drown in an ocean of self-pity, and the asker becomes the latest entry on the long list of people I risk my life to avoid contact with. My mind decides that none of these answers will work and instead tries to ad-lib it:

"Oh, you know, a little of everything... a lot of stuff... I could totally tell you if I had (device) to pull up (website)... but you know... that's such a hard question to answer... yeah..."

Remember the ocean of self-pity? Yeah. It pours right out of the cold stare of the person who asked the question.

This wouldn't be a huge problem--yeah, it's an awkward moment, but it's something that can be gotten over relatively easily--if I didn't think about it the whole rest of the day. Everything I do throughout the day reminds me of an answer I could have given that would have made me look totally cool. At this stage, opening my iTunes and scrolling through my library reduces me to a sobbing mess on the floor.

This is kind of related to my problem with band shirts. You don't even know how long it took me to get up the courage to wear my Born This Way t-shirt from the Lady Gaga concert I went to. I'm afraid that I'll accidentally walk into a room full of people who are members of an anti-Gaga coalition that will tear my shirt to shreds as a political statement and burn some sort of insignia into my back that makes sure that everyone knows that I am one of those people who listens to pop superstars.
(can't resist: I almost typed "to shreds" as "to threads"... totally punny)

I'm guessing I'm going to have to learn how to deal with this at some point. How do you answer the abominable question? Do you tell the truth, or do you make up a spiffy lie? Does the world end? Let me know.

Accidental Comedian

Remember the 90s, when everyone was fascinated with hidden talents? Okay, maybe not everyone, but certainly people who watched Figure It Out know exactly what I'm talking about. The whole premise of that show was celebrities solving puzzles so that super-skilled children would reveal their super-special hidden talent. I probably should never have watched that show, since seeing people my age do more interesting things than I could ever do gave me a huge inferiority complex and made me genuinely concerned that my parents would not love me if I could not walk through a hoop in my own arms without disconnecting my hands or mimic the sound of a domestic animal. But now, 18 and still unable to do any of these things (hell, I can't even roll my tongue up in that weird way everyone does...), I may just now have the chance to finally win my parents' love. I have the hidden talent of being an accidental comedian.

Before you get jealous, it isn't quite as fascinating as it sounds. It doesn't really make me a superhero, since I don't even have any sort of special costume (yet). But it would definitely be enough to get me a spot on Figure It Out, if it was still on and if it wasn't creepy for an 18 year old to go on a Nickelodeon show.

The talent is that I can make people laugh only when I am not trying to be funny. When I try to be funny, it results in crying babies and an awkward staredown. Awkward staredowns are especially awkward and uncomfortable when they take place in elevators. I will explain that later. (I would assume that it goes without saying that crying babies are also significantly worse in elevators, although, come to think of it, I've never been in an elevator with a baby.) The best way to explain all of this would be with examples.

Last Friday, in physics class, we were talking about cell phones and how they relate to radio waves. Our teacher got on the subject of frequencies and how, back in the day, there were only a certain number of frequencies available (I can't remember exactly how many because I was too busy laughing about the fact that he said "walkie-phone") and now there is a broad spectrum of frequencies for security purposes. He brought up that the government could use that to spy on you and tap into your phone conversations. Upon hearing this, my mind immediately snapped to a mental image of a person wearing a tin foil hat. The association makes perfect sense to me:

cell phones -> frequencies -> government spying -> tin foil hat

So I turned around to my friend, who was on the opposite side of the room, and said quietly, "Everybody put on your tin foil hats!" I expected a weak giggle, maybe even a chortle. What I got was room-wide uproarious laughter and it puzzled me, because I wasn't really at all intending to be funny.

Now we'll contrast that with a situation in which I tried to be funny. If this was real paper and not the internet, this is the place where you'd start to see tear drops on the paper--that's how difficult this story is for me to tell.

I was on the elevator at a convention I went to a couple weeks ago. My best friend was beside me and the elevator was filled with people I had met a day earlier at the convention, but didn't really know well enough to be social. Someone had pressed all of the buttons on the elevator, so we stopped at every floor. The people at the front of the elevator were talking about it, one of them having done it. I saw this as my golden opportunity to convince everyone in the elevator that I was totally a person worth getting to know. I waited for the perfect time to strike and said, "Can anyone identify the individual who pressed all the buttons?" The one who didn't do it pointed to the one who did and said his name, and the guy blushed a little. I could've stopped here with a slight groan and just come off as a slightly disgruntled, ornery man, but I felt the beautiful beams of opportunity shining down on me between the cracks of the elevator door and I wasn't about to let it go.

"Anyone have anything to cut the elevator floor with? It's a pretty long drop..."

A pause.

Silence.

I turn to my best friend, desperate for some sort of assistance, and I see her red-faced, chuckling to herself (note: at me, not with me), only able to choke out "that wasn't funny... that... wasn't funny at all..." Unable to come up with a compelling reason to get off at floors 4, 3, or 2, I stood in an elevator as the doors opened at every floor alongside people who genuinely thought I was a psycho with a murderous streak who threatened to kill people who press every button in elevators. All for trying to be funny.

I would try to think of a way to end this post wittily, but that would involve me thinking and trying to be funny, and you now know how that ends. I might end up saying something about burning your house down or poisoning your baby brother or making your breakfast tomorrow morning explosive.

The Romantic Comedy Blues

I have a problem.

No, it's not with alcohol, and it's not a bitch. It's with romantic comedies.

Stop judging me for my effeminate movie tastes, we all have guilty pleasures. The problem is that this guilty pleasure causes me more pain than it does enjoyment. They are all predictable; I know that by now. Guy and girl meet under some awkward circumstances, one of them is already involved with someone, person they're involved with turns out to be an asshole, guy and girl hook up, guy and girl dramatically break up, one of them dramatically runs to the other's side to get the other back and all of it ends happily ever after. Every time. I think that might be where the problem starts.

Under normal circumstances, I'm not naive enough to think that that stuff actually exists. But by the end of the rom com of the day, when my brain is a gooey mess and my face is buried in my coat with that signature warm-and-toasty feeling, I start to think.

Where the hell are these people in real life? All writing has to be based on some fact. Some guy, somewhere in the world, must have existed at some time to set the standard for the romantic comedy heartthrob. At least one, right? The human imagination isn't that powerful. It can't create things from scratch like that... can it?

Then I need an espresso shot and a targeted mass of carbohydrates to set my mind straight.

It just isn't a good combination. My mind, hopeful, impressionable, and at its deep roots, even optimistic, depends on concepts like that. By that time, it's hopeless; Paramount Pictures has punked me again with a textbook frothy box office sweetheart.

I always leave the movie theater and remain completely taciturn on the ride home, not necessarily unwilling to speak but unable to find any words to say or any reason to say them. The reason for this, in reality, is not because I'm depressed; it's because my mind is scoping out my entire viewing area, planning to pounce on the next spotted moving object that resembles Ashton Kutcher.

Even if the resemblance is a stretch.

...A big stretch.

Oh christ, Valentine's Day is in less than a month. God help me.

Lenguas

About a year ago, when I applied to work at the friendly neighborhood grocery store, the application wanted to know what languages I spoke at the time. I checked English instinctively and then saw the next check box down, "Spanish," and a wave of pride and self-congratulation large enough to make me check that box as well washed over me. I had dreams of telling customers where the bathroom was and that the juice was in aisle 1 while my coworkers stared at me, jaws dropped, in awe of my bilingual skills.

Tops did not want me, so I never got to live out my dream of locating the juice for los hispanohablantes, but that was probably for the best. I did not realize the mistake I had made until much later.

I have not made my knowledge of Spanish a secret. It's something convenient to brag about, and most of the time, just saying a basic sentence like "Me gusta tu mochila" is enough to satiate people. Of all of the people I've shamelessly boasted to, the person who is undeniably most impressed is my mother, so I take every possible opportunity to speak Spanish when I'm speaking to her and relish the fact that A) she can't understand me and B) she doesn't care, because it proves to her that her son can do something she considers exceptional.

Yesterday, when I was in a Greek restaurant with her, I told the waitress that I wanted a side of tzatziki with my spanakopita. My ability to say these words impressed my mother beyond explanation (I didn't have the time to explain to her that I could only pronounce them because my friend works at a Greek restaurant and she taught me) and, somehow, in my mind, this translated to an opportunity to speak Spanish. My sentence was simple -- "Puedo hablar lenguas diferentes" -- and the chance for making a mistake was minimal.

Nonetheless, when my mouth opened to deliver the punch, I choked a little. I said the sentence so fast that it sounded like one word and my face turned rojo. Instantaneously, I started freaking out, looking around me to see if anyone surrounding me was speaking Spanish and trying to determine if they had heard me. My embarrassment was massive.

I thought about it for a while and determined that I was probably embarrassed because, at the end of the day, I feel fake. I know that my Spanish is tinged with a hint of my awful Western New York accent, and even though I take care to pronounce all of the vowels correctly, I can't do that fancy stuff with "t" or "rrrrr" and that gives me away. I have a nightmarish image in my mind of saying something in Spanish and looking behind me to find an entire family that was on vacation from Spain staring right back at me, coldly, judgmentally, forever exiling me from the group of people who are allowed to speak Spanish and shielding their children's ears from the horror of my speech.

I may have the ability to say "el jugo está en el primer pasillo", but I'd probably run away first. Especially if the people asking have cold, judgmental eyes and children.

Eight, Eight, Before It's Too Late

Yesterday, as I was fumbling for the fast-forward button on the remote to skip the ads in a DVR'd episode of The Suze Orman Show, an ad came on for a local gym. People were smiling unrealistically wide for the camera while using treadmills and watching what looked like the morning news as a cheerful female voice boasted the gym's early open time.

I'm paraphrasing, forgive me:

"Yeah, it's really great that the gym opens so early. Most of the people who are in here get up at 5 and are in bed by 8 so this is the only chance they have to work out."

Getting in bed by 8 is what elementary schoolers and really old people do. The only other excuse is mononucleosis. It is not what functional, normal, middle-aged people do. My brain insisted upon this repeatedly as concrete fact.

Then I thought about it for a second and realized that I know little about middle-aged people, less about normal people and nothing about functional people. The time I go to bed is determined by the time that my eyelid droops to the point where I can no longer see the top of the computer screen. This does not ever happen by 8 PM and would probably not be considered by many to be the behavior of a functional person.

I just can't get past the idea of how boring that life would be. How do you do anything? How do you watch The Suze Orman Show? You don't. Unless you DVR it, but that's not as fun, because Suze's brand of insanity is much more satisfying when it's late enough for you to laugh at just about anything.

I have to wonder, though, if that's the reason for the unrealistically wide smiles in the advertisement. Does getting more sleep make a person happier? There are a lot of things I might do if I got more sleep -- I'd get to school on time, I'd be less cranky in the morning, and I'd spend less time writing blog posts about sleep. Maybe I'd do my homework earlier, work out more often, eat healthier, find a cure for cancer, save the world, invent the Presto Change-o Gay Ray I've been dreaming of for so long and fire it at Joseph Gordon-Levitt and be happy for the rest of my life. None of it matters because I am not physiologically permitted to go to sleep before my eyes begin caving in.

I can't really remember a time in which I wasn't this way. Even as far back as when I had that old creaky wooden bedpost with cupboards that faced the door (I section off epochs of my life based on when the arrangement of my room furniture changed), I used my cheap-o Mad Catz screen light to play Pokemon games on my Game Boy Advance until the obscure hours of the morning. Now I play Scrabble and watch CNBC's late-night programming.

I might always be tired, but I will always have one of the larger vocabularies in the room and I know not to ever take money out of my 401(k) once I have one because Suze told me so. Ever.

Home Sweet Home

From as far back as I can remember up until a couple years ago, my mom had a garden craft out on the lawn with a "down-home" style boy on one side, disturbingly domestic-looking girl on the other, and my family's last name prominently displayed in the middle. This garden craft made my efforts to hide the fact that I was a young boy living in a pink house futile, as anyone who walked within a one-mile radius of the sign's black font on wood painted cream white knew who lived inside.

The craft was intended to be a warm object with appreciable sentimental value -- one of those pieces that "makes a house a home." But I never liked it. To my mother, it was a symbol of love, peace, and clarity; to me, it was a glaring symbol of mediocrity. It appeared to me as if an artist sat down one day and pondered how to best capture what it looks like when life gets boring.

A flood happened in my village a couple years ago, and its waters swept away the girl, seemingly permanently. My mother spent months discovering lost garden decorations buried in the garden, some ours and some belonging to the neighbors, but the girl had escaped permanently.

My mother lamented, but I quietly cheered. The girl had moved on. I fantasized about her eloping with a burly garden gnome, or maybe she was alone, trying to rediscover the excitement life had to offer before she got married to a boy in a straw hat and hitched herself to a cream white wooden sign to be ridiculously exhibited in the garden of a middle-class American family.

The truth is that I'm afraid of the phrase I used to give this post a title. "Home Sweet Home" doesn't conjure up any warm images of fireplaces and tree swings. I imagine an endless winter in which the only things to get up for are work and bill payment deadlines. That life terrifies me.

It's enough for many people. Making a family, buying a modest home, covering it in pumpkin-scented candles in autumn and windsocks with pastel blue skies and puffy white clouds in spring.

I can't imagine how.