The Commode

A friend of mine wrote me a poem today, a poem so worderfully delicious that I think it must be shared for all.

Ah, what would my life be without paul?
like a rusty spoon, never able to take a bite out of life
or a flat, airless rubber ball

and ere i went to school
who would be there to prove me a fool
and torture me at all

who would persuade me that black is white
with whom would i be obliged to fight
and pretend to be in gall

and just in case that i forgot
he’d remind me just how hot
he is to drive me up the wall

and this poem is getting way too long
the cheesy flavor is so strong
it should be against the law

but, yeah, i guess it’d be okay
if he decided to call me someday
i’m sure we’d have a . . . i ran out of rhymes

If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.

This is an update to the previous story about the missing shirt.  Arthur called Academy and they said that while they couldn’t find the shirt, he could come in tomorrow and get one for free.

You have to wonder what type of company just gives merchandise to a person that calls and says they must have left it there but can’t prove it because he paid cash.  I guess that when you let a teenager making just above minimum wage make decisions about giving away merchandise it could go either way.  Either they don’t care and will give you whatever they want to keep you from bothering them, or they will do whatever they can to bring misery to your life because that makes them happy.  Schaudenfruede.

I miss the days when I held a person’s happiness in the palm of my hand, ready to plant it or crush it depending on a whim.  Who am I kidding, I always screwed over the company for people that were nice to me.

Last night I noticed my housemate Geoff grabbing a banana. This dialog ensued:

Me: Oh, so that’s who’s been eating my bananas.
Geoff: These are my bananas. Are you the one that’s been eating them?
Me: Yeah, I’ve eaten two or three. But I bought those.
Geoff: I bought them on Saturday, but I’ve only eaten one, and now there are only two left!
Me: Oh, well I bought some earlier in the week. I guess these probably are yours.

So, I decided to pick up more bananas to eat and to replace Geoff’s, though I wonder where exactly mine went to. While at the store with my other housemate Arthur, we had a similar conversation:

Me: I need to get some bananas to replace the ones Geoff ate.
Arthur: Geoff has bananas?
Me: Yeah, they’re on top of the fridge.
Arthur: No, those are mine.
Me: So, you’ve been eating those too?
Arthur: Yeah, but I bought a few more earlier today because someone was eating them all.

I wonder how three people can all pay for the same set of bananas at different times. Are they some special type of organic time traveling bananas? Grow one set of bananas that exists in all times and dimensions simultaneously, and think of how many times you can sell it! Those sneaky farmers and their crop raising techniques!

I took my roommate, Arthur, with me shopping today because I it’s just a lot more fun that way. We started off by going to Academy Sports, where I picked up some unmentionables, and he picked up a cheap t-shirt that said “TV is more fun than homework.” Cute.

Skip this paragraph as it’s relatively superfluous. After stopping by Cingular Wireless for me to get a new phone, and then HEB for groceries, we headed home. Unloading groceries from the trunk was pretty quick, and ole Art started packing the mini fridge with sodas. I headed back out to my car to bring in my phone box and secrets. I glanced around for his bag, but didn’t notice it. Arthur asked me to bring in his bag, but I replied I didn’t see it. He and I went back out and spent a few minutes searching around in his car.

Between purchasing a shirt and walking to my car, Arthur somehow managed to lose his shirt. When you have two people, each with one item that is so small it could fit into your pocket, walking on a completely uninterrupted patch approximately twenty yards, how do you manage to lose what you are holding?

Last Friday I was at a pool party with a bunch of friends. Mostly acquaintances, but friends were there too. And one enemy. You know who you are. I was chatting it up with this one girl, discussing how the both of us were lacking suits to go swimming in, as well as the possibility of simply jumping in as is. She insisted this was not an option given the presence of a cell phone in her pocket. I feigned throwing mine in, to which she smirked, “you’re not going to throw it in.”

After staring at her inquisitively, she bet me $5 that I wouldn’t throw it in. Now, unbeknownst to her, the antenna on my phone had broken off a few days before rendering the phone barely usable. I still needed it as my link to work, but I also knew I needed to replace it. Besides, this was like calling Michael J. Fox a chicken. Some things you just can’t back down from.

So, I threw it in.

This shocked her, and a number of other people around quite a bit. Ah, who’s turn was it to smirk now. I had just won $5 off of some poor, unsuspecting girl. Ha!

What was most surprising about this was that after about a minute of being under water, when someone swam over and pulled it out of the pool, it was still lit up, though it turned off completely shortly after being pulled out. How the heck does a 4 year old Samsung SPH-a500 phone with a missing antenna spend a minute underwater and stay lit up on ever light?

I only mention the phone-in-water incident because it is relevant to what happens next.

I start to chat with another girl. I’ve known her and her brother for several years, but never very well. I really enjoy chatting with her, but the opportunity for our lives to interact is just not that common, so I figure I should probably try to spend some more time with her. I mention that the next day I am going to the Texas Parks & Wildlife Expo and that “I would ask someone if they wanted to go with me, if only they said they wanted to go.” She responded, “if someone asked me to go, I would say yes.” After staring at each other in complete silence for about a minute, I asked her if she wanted to go, and she said yes. But it was conditional that it not interfere with her stopping by her niece’s birthday party and another meeting she needed to go to. I figured this wouldn’t be a problem as I also had my own niece’s birthday party to go to, being celebrated Sponge Bob style at the Bikini Bottom. She told me to call her and let her know what time I would be by.

After chatting for a half hour or so longer, it occurred to me that I did not have her phone number, nor a convenient way to obtain it once I was home. I started to say, “I just realized that I can’t call you because…” and she jumped in, laughing, about how my phone was wet so it wouldn’t work. That was also true, though I could always use a housemate’s cell. I pointed out that no matter how many phones I had, I would still need her number to actually call her. She replied that she did not have a pen, and I certainly did not have a phone to enter the number into. I said we should find a pen and get that number written down. She didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

After a while, she mentioned something about restrooms and headed off. I called off that if she wanted to go to the expo, to give me he number sometime. She muttered something affirmative while walking away. She never came back.

I think I was politely dissed.

Maybe it sounded like I was trying to ask her on a date or something? Maybe petting crocodiles and checking out birds and stuff isn’t very cool to girls? Whatever it was, I’m still a little confused. I’m just going to guess at this, but does that mean I’m not supposed to ask her to do anything else?

After the party I went home and tossed my phone in the oven. It didn’t seem to be drying off, so I turned of the heat. And promptly forgot about it. Once the odor of burning plastic reached my nose, I sprinted to the oven knocked my phone out of it. Other than some bending of the plastic, it looked fine.

I forced the battery back into it’s misshapen notch and the phone powered up fine. Calls on a phone without an antenna, and a battery that likes to pop out, are still a bit unreliable, but it will work into I can find another.

My mother just returned from visiting her sister. We are all proud of her, taking time away from her busy schedule to visit family, in Bermuda! If I can ever find someone to work with me, I plan on taking time off to visit the same family. The first thing she does after getting home is send me this email:

I FOUND A WIFE FOR YOU. SHE IS DARLING & SHE PAID CASH FOR A PORSCHE!

Now, I’m not one to turn down the proposition of having a relationship with someone that can drop cash for a porsche, but that doesn’t really sound like something that should be a primary motivating factor. As corny as it sounds, I’m a lot more interested in being able to have an interesting conversation with someone than playing with their expensive toys (note: I will probably regret having said this later in life).

Still, it does make me curious what kind of person my mother imagines hooking me up with. When she says she “found a wife” does that mean in some type of wife shop? Or maybe she got involved in some local Bermudan custom where one trades a certain number of cows to a nice man in return for their daughter. I imagine either being a possibility where my mother is involved.

Or if she didn’t bring this woman home with her in her luggage somewhere, how exactly does she expect me to get to know her while she is two thousand miles away on an island in shark infested waters?