You're A Better Man Than I Am, Gunga Din!

As I see it, my options for this update were either a poster for "The Waterboy" or Velazquez's "The Water Carrier of Seville", and as usual I favored the more pretentious choice.

In both of my new jobs, either as a Milkshake Technician at Carl’s or as a busboy at Bella Fresca, people keep asking me how I’m liking the work so far. And the obvious answer is, “Well, I’d prefer it if you paid me the same hourly wage to sit around at home and not work, but until that happens, this’ll do”, but that makes me seem even more jaded and antisocial than I already am, so I usually just say, “Oh, yeah, it’s a lot better than my job last summer!”

In the fine dining hierarchy, the busboy occupies what is pretty much the lowest possible position in an industry dedicated to being a complete stranger’s personal servant for a few hours. At Bella Fresca, my job is to quickly and quietly remove the customer’s empty plates once they’ve finished eating and then wipe down and reset the table after they’re gone. The only time I’m trusted with something the customers are actually going to put in their mouths is when I make the rounds with my pitcher of icewater and fill up their glasses with the cheapest thing on the menu. The cooks prepare the uniformly delicious food that Bella Fresca is known for, the waitresses make pleasant conversation and form a bond with the customer, yet the busboy’s primary purpose is to be seen and not heard, and maybe not even seen, if at all possible.

Now, this is not a bad job by any means – in fact, I think it’s what we’d call a good job. I get free meals, and there are few things classier than sitting on a folding chair in the parking lot behind a fine restaurant, eating a free bowl of garlic crusted chicken and thumbing your nose at the hobos in line for the bottle return at the market across the street. Also, unlike my coworkers at the car dealership where I worked last year, the people here are actually kind and respectful, and they don’t brag about how many women they’ve impregnated or make fun of me for going to college. Last, but by no means least, I get paid ludicrous amounts of money to do what I do. The brilliant thing about making $10, count ‘em, $10 an hour is that it’s very easy to look at the clock and calculate exactly how much money you’re making over the course of a given period of time. If I spend ten minutes eating my free dinner, then I’ve just been paid $1.40 to eat a crazy delicious meal that would ordinarily cost $17, which is what happens at every meal in Heaven.

However, there are inherent difficulties in being a busboy. For one thing, Bella Fresca is about as spacious as a German U-boat; it scarcely had room for the customers and staff (two cooks, a dishwasher, and three waiters) before I arrived and it certainly doesn’t now. During busy periods, the staff have to operate with all the clockwork and efficiency of, oh, I don’t know, the crew of a German U-boat perhaps, and the result is a graceful dance as we dip and weave around one another in a frenzied attempt to launch the torpedo of Fine Italian Dining at the RMS Lusitania of our clientele.

The other, considerably larger problem is that human beings in general just drink too damn much water, and as the person in charge of refilling water glasses I really wish you’d all slow down just a little bit. Water is my primary responsibility as a busboy – the waiters are too busy dealing with consumables that aren’t piped into the building for a nominal monthly sum, so I spend most of my time standing quietly at the back of the restaurant and scrupulously analyzing the water glasses of our customers, which is probably unimaginably creepy to the hungry thirtysomething who wants to enjoy his shrimp scampi without being leered at by a mute, poofy haired water bearer in a black apron. The rule my boss gave me to follow is that as soon as a customer’s glass is one quarter empty (or three quarters full, depending on perspective), it’s time to boogie on over (or shimmy, or shuffle, or sidle, or ollie, or whatever it takes to navigate the maze of tables and people that is Bella Fresca) and refill their glass. Once I’m at the table, though, I’m supposed to refill everyone’s water so as not to imply favoritism or negligence, and by the time that’s done somebody else has probably quaffed 25% of their water and I’m off to do the same thing again. Of course, this is far better than the alternative, which is merely standing observantly at the back of the restaurant, pitcher in hand, and willing someone to drink enough water so that I actually get to do something. This usually happens when things are slow and there are no plates to be cleared; at times my boredom has led me to neglect the three quarters rule and start refilling customers’ glasses even sooner, to the point at which it’d be a better idea to just set the pitcher down in front of them with a straw and tell them to have fun. So really, I guess I shouldn’t be griping about people drinking too much water – nevermind me, go back to drinking as much as you want.

I suppose the main reason I’m complaining about refilling people’s water is that it’s really a pretty fruitless gesture, when you think about it. How many of you honestly go into a restaurant and just dive right into that glass of icewater, drain the whole thing, and sit there thinking, “God, when’s that busboy going to come along, I am dying for some more water!”*? I’m betting you don’t, unless you’re That Guy, Mr. “I Only Drink Water, Because It’s The Best Thing For You!” Let me tell you, That Guy, you can go straight to hell – I have very few vices to make my life interesting. I avoid drugs and alcohol and women avoid me, therefore not drinking enough water is about the only really risky thing I can do for myself at this juncture. Whenever I go to a restaurant the water is, at best, a temporary diversion until the real drink arrives, and then water is really just sort of a backup drink, an ice cold respite from calories, color, and flavor. I don’t know, maybe you might take a sip every now and again, but once there’s a distraction on the table you really don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about your glass of water. But then, suddenly, out of nowhere, here comes a busboy, intruding on your personal conversation to reach through your field of vision, grab your barely depleted glass of that liquid you don’t even care that much about, and clumsily fill it again, all while muttering apologies and not making eye contact! Does that bug you? It always bugged me, and now I’m the guy doing it, and let me tell you, it’s a little odd to be on the other end of the situation. Also, given the cramped nature of the restaurant and the awkward placement of some of the tables, I’ve had to more or less hug customers to grab their water glasses off the table for refilling, and have at other times risked involuntarily groping patrons in the pursuit of their continued hydration.

*Actually, Alexander did that very thing at a Sharis one night. He made a point of chugging his glass of icewater every time it was filled, mainly to spite the busboy, or his body, or maybe even water itself for all I know, and eventually drained three full pitchers before we had to rush his shivering, nauseated self home. For the record, he’s been invited to attend West Point.

I like my job as a busboy for the same reason I like my job cobbling together desserts out of lactose and sugar: I can see the direct result of my actions. When I was pressure washing unpurchased gas guzzlers at a car dealership last summer, I felt as though my hard work was essentially futile, and while I’m more than willing to get paid to do a job that ultimately has no point, I’d need to make a lot more than I was making back then. At Bella Fresca, however, I feel like a necessary part of a big Rube Goldberg machine designed to deliver tasty, carbohydrate rich foods to hungry people, even if my only function is to clear away empty plates to make room for full plates and fill the occasional glass of water. I enjoy work more when I’m working toward some sort of greater purpose; I also enjoy work more when I’m making $10 an hour.

Truman Capps not only made a reference to 19th century literature in the title of this update but also an art history reference in the accompanying picture – he now commands that you bow down before his giant brain.

My Milkshake Is Bigger Than Yours

“Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches across the room, and starts to drink your milkshake... I... drink... your... milkshake!”

-Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been looking for work as of late. In the past, I’ve compared my experiences in the job market to my experiences in the dating market, but it seems that those days are long over because I am now a resounding success in one of those two categories. Which one is it? Here, I’ll give you a hint: Both of my condoms are still safely tucked away in my desk drawer. Yes, I’m just as disappointed as you are.

I’ve been doubly successful in my job hunt, because I’ve not only been hired as a busboy at a local fine dining establishment (which, for confidentiality’s sake, we will call Bella Fresca – the only two Italian words I know), but also as a front staff member at a local diner (which we will call Carl’s). Let me tell you, without working a day at Bella Fresca yet and having only worked two days at Carl’s, that these are the best two jobs I’ve ever had in my life, and that’s counting my partnership in the failed lemonade stand venture when I was 9 as well as the afternoon when I was 5 that my friend’s mom paid me $1 to tear up confidential documents because her shredder was broken. Sure, work at Carl’s is sticky, humid, and exhausting, but I get paid for it, and it sure beats getting kicked in the head for a few hours every day. Incidentally, being kicked in the head for a few hours every day is horrible, but it sure beats pressure washing Chevies at a car dealership with three mouth breathers, which, as it happens, was my job last summer.

Carl’s is a neighborhood staple, a burger joint that, in all honesty, serves some of the most ridiculously delicious food in the universe. Of course, until they start serving hummus burgers there’s not going to be any completely healthy way to enjoy a slab of beef with deep fried potatoes and mayonnaise somewhere in the picture, but Carl’s, God bless it, sort of goes the extra mile. They serve a bacon cheeseburger with a fried egg on it, which is sort of like screaming, “YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD!” at your arteries and then riding off on your newly purchased dirtbike. That being said, the burger of which I speak is fucking tasty.

So about half of the menu at Carl’s is various permutations on red meat, cheese, and boiling hot fat – that’s fine. I am in no way saying that’s a bad thing. I think if more people had access to this kind of food, there’d be fewer wars, if for no other reason than that most people would be too fat and lazy to fight anymore. However, the other half of the menu is dedicated to various permutations of ice cream, syrup, and cup. Carl’s serves ice cream sundaes. Carl’s serves banana splits. Carl’s serves ice cream cones (in two sizes). Carl’s serves waffle cones (in two sizes). Carl’s serves root beer floats. Carl’s serves malts. And Carl’s serves milkshakes.

Oh, how Carl’s serves milkshakes.

Dear readers, for past two days, it is I, Truman S. Capps, who has been slaving over a hot ice cream machine to make milkshakes.

Maybe you’ve made a lot of milkshakes in your life. Maybe you’re just an old hand at it by now. Maybe you don’t understand why my terminology seems so bleak. Here’s the deal: I have never made a milkshake before, because I’m lactose intolerant, and for me drinking anything with “milk” in its name is sort of like hitting the panic button on my intestines. If you don’t believe me, I have documents and witnesses to back my claims. Just understand that, when I arrived at work and my coworker pointed to the countertop where mere mortals tame the savage elements of Soft-Serve and malt flavoring, I was going in with far less experience than an ordinary, lactose tolerant individual.

You put the cup under the Soft-Serve machine and pull the crank, and you let it fill most of the way with vanilla ice cream*, at which point you add whatever flavor the milkshake is supposed to be along with some arbitrary amount of milk. Let’s say you’re making a medium sized blackberry milkshake – at this point, you’ve got a cup filled to the brim with slowly melting ice cream, three scoops of very juicy blackberries, and a fresh coating of milk. It’s sort of precarious, and you’ve got to hold the cup very carefully lest some of its sticky contents spill over the edge onto your hand. It is at this point that you take this concoction over to a small blender like apparatus mounted behind a clear plastic screen. You stick the cup behind the screen and submerge the blades into the goopy mixture, and then you push a button that makes those blades start spinning really fast. And if they’re not going fast enough, you can adjust a dial to make them go even faster. The disaster potential in this sort of operation runs disturbingly high, as does the potential for loud and colorful language within earshot of the family-friendly restaurant’s clientele.

*Every milkshake at Carl’s is made with vanilla ice cream. Even chocolate. This knowledge sort of takes the fun out of what little dairy I can safely eat, because whenever I would risk it and order a small root beer milkshake, I’d assume that they were making it with some sort of root beer flavored ice cream, as opposed to root beer, vanilla ice cream, and root beer flavoring. Fact: A root beer float is a root beer milkshake, only with less ice cream.

I spent four hours making milkshakes yesterday, and just about every moment was pretty intense. When you get that blender thing going and crank the dial up to about 60, it’s really something to behold. The engine is just chugging right away, and the blades are splattering against the ice cream and grinding against the cup, and you’re worried that at any minute they might burst through and suddenly your hand is part of the milkshake (don’t worry Mom; I’ve checked and this is actually impossible). Sometimes it’s pretty simple – the toppings mix easily with the ice cream and everyone goes home happy. Other times, it’s what could be charitably described as a nightmare. Sometimes, those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups just don’t want to get mixed up with that vanilla ice cream and milk, and so they’ll try to escape by jumping out of the cup and dumping filthy lactose all over your hands. Sometimes the ice cream will decide against being blended, and suddenly the cup is spinning in circles, not the ice cream inside it, and you’re trying to keep a hold of the cup without breaking your wrist (again, Mom, I’ve actually got a better chance of meeting a nice girl who’s interested in me than I do of breaking my wrist making a milkshake). You can never tell which milkshake will be problematic – a hot fudge banana malt could blend without issue, and yet even the simplest flavor can strike when you least expect it. I learned this the hard way.

Someone ordered a large vanilla shake toward the end of my shift, which is about the easiest thing to make outside of a small cup of water. Since every shake is made with vanilla, all I had to do was fill a cup with ice cream, pour some milk in there, and blend the two together. It’s basically a cup of vanilla ice cream, the vanilla shake. However, somewhere in my preparations, something went wrong. Perhaps I used too much ice cream. Perhaps I used too much milk. Perhaps I just really suck at my job. But as soon as I flipped the blender on, I knew that this was The Perfect Storm. Of milkshakes.

“BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES, YOU BASTARDS, THIS ONE’S A FIGHTER!” I screamed, cranking the blades up to 100 with my free hand as I struggled to keep control of the cup with the other. Geysers of milk and creamy Soft-Serve lava floes spewed forth from the top of the cup, splattering the plastic safety screen and obscuring my view. At this point a coward would have let the cup go and given the ice cream and milk the escape they so desired; a sane man would fetch the nearest handgun and execute the rebellious confectionary. I was certainly not a coward, because cowards do not last long in the milkshake industry, and I wasn’t sane either. However, by the time the blades had stopped, I was considerably less sane than I had been before. Who knows how long it took me – ten minutes, the entire summer – but eventually my endurance was greater than that of the milkshake, and it solemnly submitted to blending, having already sprayed itself around most of the kitchen before giving up.

If you’re out there, you, the one who ordered that large cup of vanilla hell, I hope you enjoyed it. Because I sure as hell enjoyed making it. Unlike my previous jobs, where my work usually went either ridiculed or unnoticed, at Carl’s my actions have a direct influence on other people. It is this sort of responsibility that I like – it keeps me sharp. Also, I’m making bank off of that tip jar.

Truman Capps would like the customer who ordered the vanilla shake to beware – in the middle of the night it might try to burrow out of your stomach, sort of like in Alien.

Let Them Eat Legos

Product recall in five, four, three...

In the process of going to college and moving to Portland, I had to give up a lot of my old toys. Some things were easier to get rid of than others – getting rid of my squirt guns wasn’t too hard, losing the Army men was tougher, and giving away the Beanie Babies just about killed me (not because of any sentimental value, but just because I’d bought the damn things as an investment when I was in 4th grade, expecting that they would one day finance my retirement). However, I never doubted that these toys were unnecessary - I had no illusion that there would ever be a time in my adult life where I’d suddenly need them.
“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Capps, but it appears that you have cancer.”
“No, it’s cool – I’ve got some Hot Wheels.”

However, if there was one thing in my closet that I felt I absolutely couldn’t part with, it was my giant purple tub full of Legos. I feel like my life will in one way or another be hollower, because now that my Legos are gone I am unable to jump up whenever I want to and build a pirate ship crewed by dinosaurs. I loved my Legos, and so did you. It was like the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt think Legos are totally rad. It was a real shame that my family had to go and move when we did, because I had a pretty impressive Lego collection going at that point. Imagine, if you will, a solid decade of Legomania*, either bought with carefully saved allowance or received on birthdays and at Christmas. In that purple tub, cowboys intermingled with spacemen, little plastic guns mixed with miniature pizzas, not to mention loose plastic doodads and God knows how many strands of my hair. Ten years of my life and literally hundreds of dollars were represented in that box of possibilities.

*Do you remember those old commercials, with the song? “I’ve got a case of [pause] Legomania!” There was a time when I really seized on Legomania as a viable excuse for just about anything – “I can’t go to school today, Mom; I’ve got Legomania. I have to keep playing with my Legos!” My parents, evidently not understanding the severity of the Legomania virus, never accepted this excuse. Now I’m proud to say that I’ve kicked my Legomania in favor of Egomania, a common occurrence in people who grew up creating and destroying their own miniature civilizations on a daily basis.

I have never met a person who, when I mentioned one of my millions of great experiences with Legos, said, “Oh, hell no, I hated Legos. My favorite toys were my piece of string and my Bible!” Legos are, simply put, one of the absolute greatest creations of all time. They were like the DNA of fun – you start out with a bucket filled with random multicolored bricks, little smiling men, and the occasional palm tree, and then from this jumbled mass create something wholly original, like a spaceship driven by dinosaurs, or a rocket propelled covered wagon driven by dinosaurs, or a giant fortress outfitted with booby traps and dinosaurs. Legos may as well be called the “God Starter Kit”, because it’s basically a box full of opportunities to create new, exciting worlds, and then fill them with dinosaurs.

Well as it turns out, the unstoppable march of human progress has seized upon the inherent genius of Legos and combined them with the inherent genius of candy. Behold, ladies and gentlemen, Lego Fun Snacks – fruit snacks that are shaped like Lego blocks. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Is this awesome, or is this a class-action suit waiting to happen? Allow me to render my opinion.

When I first heard that they were making food that was shaped like Lego bricks, I was thrilled. On paper, Lego bricks that are made out of delicious candy are arguably the greatest step forward in toy history – not only are they functional as structural materials, but they’re edible too! For thousands of years, mankind has strived to create buildings that double as foodstuffs. We were brought up with the story of Hansel and Gretel, we built miniature gingerbread houses we longed to live in, and Ray Nagin once referred to New Orleans as “The Chocolate City”. Buildings made out of candy have been prophesized for centuries, and Lego Fun Snacks are making it that much easier for us to live out our dreams. As I mentioned before, I would often play God by creating Lego societies and then destroying them when I deemed them sinful (or when it was time for bed). It was one thing to instill fear in your Lego citizens by knocking over a building or two, but imagine how powerful and awesome it would feel to eat an entire city! If it were possible, I would drop out of school to spend my days building breathtaking creations, and then eating them.

The bad news is that these Lego Fun Snacks aren’t really Legos, because despite looking exactly like Legos in every way, you can’t interlock and stack them like the real thing. When you realize that it’s impossible to actually make anything out of your Lego candy, you’ve got to wonder why they even bothered in the first place. How could a project like this even get out of the design phase when there’s such blatant wasted potential?
“My proposal is that we make fruit snacks shaped like Legos!”
“Brilliant idea, Simmons! I can finally build my Lego dream house, and then eat it!”
“Actually, sir, we’re unable to build edible interlocking bricks with current gummy fruit technology.”
“So you’re saying we’re just going to be marketing candy that sort of looks like Legos? Where’s the fun in that?”
“No, it’s cool – I’ve got some Hot Wheels.”

Now that any hint of coolness is gone, we must turn to the flat out stupid irresponsibility of Lego Fun Snacks, much of which has already been handled in this article. The simple fact is that little kids will treat just about everything as food until experience proves otherwise. What’s really ironic is that this coupling between Lego and Kellog’s is probably intended to sell more Lego building blocks by getting kids interested in Lego fruit snacks, which is fine until you remember that only one of these two identical items is edible, and the other is just a chunk of hard plastic with a bunch of pointy bits. So what’s going to happen? A lot of kids are going to start eating their Legos, obviously – more kids than are already eating Legos, because now they’ll have a legitimate reason to believe that their toys are delicious. If it was possible to actually build with Lego fun snacks, I’d say that a few three-year-olds having to get their stomachs pumped was a fair price to pay for progress. But instead, we’re just endangering the lives of a whole bunch of little kids so that we can have the exact same kind of fruit snack in a different shape, and frankly that’s not an exciting enough prospect to sacrifice children for.

I don’t really see what’s so amusing about food being shaped like something anyway – if it’s not functional, it’s just one more thing to put in your mouth and smash up with your teeth. Just because a food is shaped like something you love doesn’t really make it all that much better; this is why I will never eat Tina Fey shaped candy. The cold hard truth is that shapes do not have flavors; however if they did, I’m betting circle would be freaking delicious.

Truman Capps would like to point out that Good & Plenty candies could cause similar problems, as they reenforce the notion that all pills taste like delicious licorice, and you should eat as many of them as possible.

A Message To My Potential Employers

See? Teamwork!

Oh, why hello there. I was wondering when you'd show up.

Why, yes, I have been expecting you. I can’t tell you how prepared I am for this – honest to Pete, if I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times from guidance counselors and professors, “Be careful what you post on Facebook or in your blog, because potential employers will Google your name! Whatever you post on the Internet is theirs to read!”

Hey, hey, don’t act all ashamed – you weren’t being nosy at all! I post this sort of thing on the Internet, don’t I? It’s out there for people to read, after all.

Yes, I am that Truman Capps, the one who came into your establishment not too long ago with a flashy resume and an even flashier smile. Welcome, Potential Employer, to my blog. By all means, have a look around! Can I get you anything? Some Perrier, or maybe a Fresca? I’ve just made some banana bread, you really have to try it.

Yep, home sweet hairguytruman.blogspot.com. Sure, it’s no Exploding Unicorn, but I’ve only been at this for nine months. I guess that, if I’d knocked up some HTML in October, this blog entry would be the screaming, writhing, passive voice using, run on sentence writing baby. Of course, the entries here on Blogspot only go back to December, but I got my start on Facebook way long ago. Oh, man, the stories I could tell you about me and Facebook – entire entries lost when it spontaneously decided to log me out of my account right after I pressed “Submit”, the ability to tag your friends in your blogs in order to exploit their most selfish urges to read what you think about them… It was fun and safe, but I had to move on, y’know? I’m motivated and I like to think big, which is part of why I feel that I’d make such a great employee.

Feel free to have a look at my Facebook too, if you haven’t already. It’ll tell you that I’m single and pretty liberal, and that I’m all too fond of Firefly and the notion of a zombie apocalypse – you could find all that crap out here, too, but you can’t play Jetman on my blog (which, come to think of it, might be why I don’t get so many hits). You can look through all of my pictures but you won’t find any shots of me smoking pot or knocking back Natural Ice or clubbing a state trooper with a sock full of batteries, both because I don’t engage in that sort of behavior and because my attacks are so swift and unpredictable that no cameraman can catch me in the act.

Perusing my blog might lead to a few awkward moments between you and I when next we meet. Yes, Large National Banking Chain, I did specify on my application that I was fluent in both English and Spanish, despite evidence to the contrary that, if you hadn’t found already, you are most certainly reading now. Saying that I’m fluent in Spanish may not be entirely truthful, but in my defense, you didn’t define your standard of fluency on the application. Sure, I’m not exactly the Daniel Webster of Spanish, but I could probably carry on a limited conversation with a small Mexican child, or perhaps a talking Chihuahua if it spoke slowly and didn’t use the future tense. For all you know, that could be how I define fluency. However, I meant every word in my cover letter about devotion to customer service and my abilities as both a team member and team leader. Hell, one of my favorite video games is Team Fortress 2 - the word “team” is right in the freakin’ title! How much more devotion to teamwork do you want? I’m not one of those half-hearted jocks who’ll talk up his ability to delegate until he’s blue in the face and then go home to play some “Me vs The World” game like Halo. I’m a team player at work and in my spare time! So whether it’s capturing the Red Team’s flag or just flipping burgers, know, Potential Employers, that I’m devoted to helping my team be all that it can be.

And since we’re having this little heart to heart, I suppose it’ll be pickles on parade if I tell you that one of the two previous jobs I list on my resume is not, in fact, a job in any sense of the word. Sprague High School Library Aide is not, and never will be, a job as you and I know it – I didn’t get paid, there was very little responsibility involved, and my supervisor was the cheerleading coach. However, my time in the Sprague Library was less than a job in every sense of the word: Not only was it less fulfilling and rewarding than an ordinary teenager’s first job, it was also considerably less enjoyable. As you are no doubt keenly aware, Potential Employers, the job that I hope any one of you will give me involves a great deal of contact with customers, even if it’s simply putting a burger in front of them or pleasantly asking for their money from behind a sheet of bulletproof glass. I think that working without pay at the front desk in a library attended only by surly 14-18 year olds and not having a major psychotic episode is more than enough qualification to work in the service industry. To be employed in a place where the clientele are at least there by choice, and where a paycheck is waiting for me at the end of every two weeks, would be a dream after spending a semester rotting amongst crusty Garfield comics and Goosebumps tomes, periodically rousting stubborn MySpace fiends from the computer lab and trolling the back room for amorous goth couples. So, yes, that was a bit of a fib on my resume: “Sprague High School Library Desk Assistant” was not a job – it was more a trial, nay, a sadistic character building exercise at the hands of the Salem-Keizier School District, from which I have emerged with the same attitude as a man who has just been cured of a terrifyingly painful disease. “Come on now, World! Is that all you’ve got!? After that, I can take anything! No sweat!"

Maybe it’s outright lunacy for me to come clean here, to lay out a couple of flaws and present myself as I actually am, as opposed to the charismatic and unobtrusive lad you all met earlier. If what you’ve read here has turned your opinion of me for the worse, be it due to my admission of fudging details on my application or my decidedly cheeky tone about the whole affair, then I’m quite sorry that it has to be that way. My reasoning was that if you, as my Potential Employers, had the wherewithal to look me up on the Internet to make sure I was legit, I had no chance of hiding the real me as archived in this blog, where I sign off with my full name twice a week. I wanted to have this relatively reasonable (and profanity free) message be the first thing you saw of my online presence, rather than my flagrant disbelief in the existence of math or my pleas to the government for an XBox 360.

If you don’t want to believe anything else about me, at least know that I’m honest and I’ve got nothing to hide. That, coupled with being able to look a man in the eye and ask him if he wants fries with his cheeseburger, makes me one hell of a good employee, in my own estimate. If I were running a business, I would undoubtedly hire myself to work there as well – but of course, if we were living in a world populated by numerous Truman doppelgangers, I’d give up on that small business owner crap right away and try to unite an army, or at least a special interest group and Congressional lobby.

The point, Potential Employers, is that I really want a job. I want more money in my bank account, I want more ink on my resume, and I really want to have a reason to get out of bed this summer that doesn’t just involve eating or the toilet.

Thanks for your time, and be sure to give me a call. Don’t be a stranger, now!

Truman Capps hopes that at least one of his Potential Employers continued reading past the third paragraph.

Movin' Out

I haven't been so much thinking inside the box as I've been thinking about putting things inside the box.

A few years ago, when clearing out my grandparents’ house after they moved into a retirement home, my parents and I were shocked to find all the stuff they’d accumulated over the 40-odd years they’d spend in their 3500 square foot North Portland abode. As veterans of the Great Depression, my grandparents held onto everything just in case they’d need it later. There was a bottle filled with the round bits of paper that come from a three-hole-punch, neatly labeled “confetti”. There was a closet filled with mayonnaise jars that my grandparents were unwilling to throw out in the vain hope that 50 gallons of free mayonnaise might materialize somewhere downtown, mayonnaise that was all for the taking provided you had the right sort of jar to scoop it into. And last of all, there were boxes. Oh, lord, how there were boxes. Every box for every item they’d ever purchased was saved somewhere in that house, usually stuffed inside of a slightly larger box, with a few smaller boxes tucked away inside of it. My grandparents could fit 10 or 15 different boxes inside one another like those little Russian dolls – the difference being that these had at one time held a microwave.

After the arduous task of separating valuable family heirlooms from containers full of containers was completed, my parents made me promise to never accumulate crap like my grandparents did. We made a point of going through all of our own stuff and throwing out everything that wasn’t completely necessary for us to live our lives.* Moving to Portland helped this process along considerably: Sure, there was some sentimental value to the dusty box full of my preschool assignments, but not enough for us to want to haul 20 pounds of dried macaroni and glitter up 60 miles of Interstate just so we could stuff it in another attic and keep not looking at it. Moving into my tiny dormitory, I made a point of not bringing extraneous crap that I didn’t need, and as space was a priority I made a point of not collecting stuff that was otherwise garbage.

*Things my family still owns:
1) Set of pink plastic boobs
2) Fake arrow-through-head prop
3) Austin Powers 3

At the time, I felt like I was running a pretty tight ship. I wasn’t one of those girls who wallpapered her room with pictures of every single one of her friends, family members, and family members’ friends, and I wasn’t one of those guys who carpeted his floor with loose paper and dirty laundry.* I had very little in the way of decoration – a print of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks on one wall and the poster for Superbad on the other, in a wonderful juxtaposition of fine art and movies that use the word “dick-demon”. Drawers were employed for the storage of clothing, garbage was disposed of in a timely fashion, and the dust bunnies never got big enough to steal my iPod. Thus, I assumed that things would be easier when it came time to move out.

*I also didn’t crap in my garbage can, Julian. Yeah, that’s right, I said your name on the Internet – you probably don’t even read my blog, so what do you care? Everybody, Julian is the one I was talking about; he was the guy who packed hot lunches right there in his own room.

The week when everyone moves out of a college dormitory is about as entertaining as the circus. SUVs and minivans furiously jockey for positions in the parking lot as parents and returning students scream at one another. I’ve been watching, and these sorts of meltdowns occur pretty quickly after the parents and student are reunited; the parents realize why they were happy to get rid of their kid in the first place, the students realize that they won’t be able to come home drunk for a whole three months, and things just go downhill from there once these emotionally strained parties have to move heavy objects down six flights of stairs. The product of all this strife is an intricate ballet that involves a lot of swearing and the occasional dropped refrigerator.

Now, the very act of moving out of the dorms sounds pretty unpleasant when you first start thinking about it. If you live in a place for long enough, even a tiny closetlike place that you endeavor not to fill with pointless kitsch, things kind of start to get settled. Stuff that came down to school neatly packed and organized in well labeled boxes starts to get spread around the place, things you need mix up with things you don’t need, you keep the same bottle of orange Gatorade in your fridge for an entire year… The more a place becomes home, the harder it gets to move it, no matter how spare a lifestyle you’re trying to lead. You stop thinking about what needs to get packed – you don’t see a power strip as a possession, you don’t think of it as yours, a thing that you own, you just start to see it as a part of the room in the same way you’d think of the wall, or the 20 year old piece of gum stuck underneath the desk. But then it comes to you that no, those power strips belong to you, and they have to go home, and suddenly you’re looking around your little room so full of stuff and you realize that you’ve got to put your entire life into seven cardboard boxes and somehow fit them into your Mom’s Prius, and you’ve only got two days to do it because you figured packing was going to be a breeze. It is now that you realize why all of your friends had been packing for weeks before. It is now that you realize why some people are renting U-Hauls and trucks. It is now that you realize that the very thought of packing and moving anything in two days or less is some straight up asinine shit.

In a move distinctly reminiscent of my grandparents, I had saved all the boxes I’d brought my stuff to college in, and in order to clear one hurdle right away I set unfolding them and taping them together once again. At that point, I had seven large boxes blocking just about all of the available floor space in my room, so I figured that the next logical step would be to start putting things in the boxes. I decided to forego the careful planning with which my father and I had packed my things before I came to school in favor of just grabbing as many of my possessions as I could find and throwing them into the nearest empty container. I continued to throw just any old thing – laundry, desk toys, free lube courtesy of Planned Parenthood – into a box until it was filled to the brim, at which point I would close the lid and tape it shut using brute force and also some profanity. At some point during my packing frenzy I realized that I could easily starve to death, blocked into the corner of my room by piles of boxes with my traditional sustenance of dark chocolate and peanut butter already packed away.

Incidentally, I bet this sort of thing isn’t a problem for Buddhist monks. If a Buddhist monk wants to move, he just gets up and starts walking. Hell, he might not even be wearing clothes! It might sound kind of nutty right now, but when I was elbow deep in material possessions and packing tape I was thinking pretty hard about taking a trip to Tibet.

The good thing about my method of packing was that when my Mom arrived, everything I owned was in the boxes and we were able to leave with about as much dignity as possible. The downside to it is that now that we’re at home, I’m not really sure which of the seven identical boxes any given item is in. For example, I couldn’t tell you exactly where my mouse is right now – it sure as hell wasn’t in the box with my computer and power cord. I don’t know why I put it in a separate box, as my memories from my packing craze are somewhat hazy – I more or less blacked out and woke up in a room full of neatly packed boxes. I’m sure my Dad* is shaking his head as he reads this, because this is exactly the sort of disorder and inefficiency that he’s been trying to teach me to avoid, but I think it’s enough of a miracle that I made it home without leaving anything behind.

*Happy Father’s Day, by the way, Dad. I know Mom got her own entry and all that, but you have even less tolerance for this sort of holiday than she does, so I figure a footnote works just as well. You’ve never made any secret of the fact that you’re proud of me, and you’ve always been my blog’s biggest fan, even when it isn’t all that funny, and for that I love you. Also, you could easily pass for Steve Martin’s brother, which I think would be an incredibly handy trick if we ever need to get into an exclusive nightclub.

As much as we try to not to pick up crap that we don’t need, I think that it’s impossible to have a home without at least some crap you don’t need in it. In fact, “home” is Latin for “place to put novelty pencil sharpeners, back issues of Maxim, commemorative coins/plates, etc.” We keep these things around because we know we’re going to be in one place for an extended period of time, and that’s sort of the base definition of what a home is, when you take out all the sappy poetic stuff. People don’t put down roots so much as they put down crap; moving said crap is what makes life so difficult, and that’s why people are so reluctant to leave home. In a few months, in order to make my new apartment home, I’m going to have to help move a couch up a flight of stairs.

Buddhist monks, of course, have no couches…

Truman Capps has just realized that he’s going to repeat this move in/move out cycle at least three more times in the coming years, a thought scary enough to make him sleep with the lights on.

Salem: The Return

All this and more await you in... Salem!

I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I hate my former hometown of Salem, Oregon. For those of you who read this and for whatever reason love Salem, that’s cool – I’m not saying that Salem is bad, I’m just saying that it’s boring and slightly depressing. As you’ll remember, I spent the Memorial Day weekend in sunny Reedsport, population 4500, and I actually found it marginally more entertaining than Salem, if not just for the novelty factor of sporadic bear attacks. There is about as much going on in downtown Salem at any given time as there is going on in downtown Reedsport, which might make sense until you consider that 150,000 people live in Salem and none of them, it seems, can think of anything to do after the The Honeybaked Ham Store closes at 5:00. Fortunately, my family moved to Portland just after I left for college, so now Salem is little more to me than a wide spot on I-5 and possibly the only city in Oregon to put a half naked golden pioneer on top of the tallest building in town.
It so happens that my friend Alexander, who once climbed 40 feet up a drainpipe on the side of a Kohl’s and would have made it the whole way if a cop hadn’t stopped him, just returned home to Salem after six months of various kinds of Army training in the deepest, darkest depths of Georgia. Seeing as he was back in Salem and there’s nothing on my agenda until this Friday at 10:00, I journeyed with some friends back up the road to visit. So yes, I suppose you could say that I did sort of go to Salem on a vacation – but in my defense, I’d much rather be in Salem than the dorms right now.*

*Somebody else vomited in the hall. I’m not even kidding. That’s two people puking in nearly the same place in our hall in practically three weeks. And the rumor is that the latest expectoration contained macaroni and cheese – and I don’t doubt it. Do you know what it smells like up here? You can’t even guess. Pick the worst thing you’ve ever smelled, and then pack it into a small space, and then have 40 guys who don’t bathe regularly live in it so that the smell will gradually get worse, sort of like interest in a bank account, only instead of generating money it’s just generating more of the absolute stankest odor in the history of stank odors. It smells like Satan’s jockstrap in here right now.

Alexander has not changed much since I last told you about him – he’s still frighteningly creative, disturbingly funny, and forever the Mozart of making silly noises. Now that he’s got Army training, however, he’s all that in addition to being a killing machine; and mind you, he was no slouch in the killing department before he went into the service (he’s really good at twirling and subsequently hitting things with sticks – it’s a wonder to behold). The main thing the Army changed about him is his physique: He used to be a lot stronger than me, but now he’s as strong as God and I’m as strong as week old celery.

One day over the weekend, Alexander invited me to go running with him. Now, I really hate running. My legs get tired, my lungs feel cold, and passing children say, “Gee, Mister, you’re sweating like a man but you’re prancing around like a lady!” In my opinion, if I’m going to be running, there had damn well better be a Velociraptor behind me. However, I’ve polled most of the girls I know and they all rate my butt at roughly a 6 out of 10, so I figured that running was my only chance of ever achieving the sculpted, Godlike ass society dictates I should have, and so I agreed to go running. I knew it was a mistake as soon as we started, because it took about three steps for Alexander to gain a considerable lead and for me to start seriously considering throwing up. Not long after, Alexander gained such a lead that I couldn’t see him anymore, and then I took the wrong path and wound up in a bizarre part of the park I’d never been to before and probably would have half jogged, half staggered all the way to Manitoba had Alexander not used his Army tracking skills to find me and guide me back to civilization (near the monkey bars).

“Relax,” He said to my stinking, panting self. “We’ll do some cooldown exercises.”

This was, of course, more incomprehensible military jargon. When I, a civilian, think of a “cooldown”, I think of my parents’ definition of the word, which generally involves gin, peanuts, and making fun of the neighbors. However, as I found out, in the military a “cooldown” is about the same thing as a “fatality” in Mortal Kombat, wherein you rip out the guy’s heart and scream at it while his dead body writhes on the ground. Alexander glibly taunted me as I struggled to do the exercises he did, exercises whose innocuous names like “leg lifts” or “push ups” don’t come close to describing the inherent horror of their effect upon the person doing them. We finished off with something called “The Body Destroyer”, which sounds like some sort of excruciatingly painful torture device but is, in all honesty, a hell of a lot worse. Lie on the ground with your arms stretched over your head and try to elevate both your arms and legs a few inches off the ground for as long as possible. Side effects include long lasting muscle aches and insanity from the white-hot blinding pain.

Salem is a lot like Alexander, in that it too has changed in a few subtle ways that cause me great anguish. The ugly billboards along Commercial Street, one of Salem’s main thoroughfares, have disappeared, replaced by video billboards so colorful that you could pour Skittles into your eyes and get roughly the same effect as looking at one. A Carl’s Jr. has opened next door to the Adult Shop out on Mission Street, ensuring that you won’t have to walk far if you want to eat a Six Dollar Burger while perusing the blowup dolls. And my alma mater, Sprague High School, decided to really sock it to the senior class by forcing them to wear bright orange robes at the graduation ceremony this past Friday, yet another Salem experience that can best be likened to pouring Skittles in one’s eyes.

However, once again like Alexander, Salem has also stayed the same in many ways. The streets pretty much roll up at 5:00 – we were downtown at a little past 6:00 and found nearly every store, including the gargantuan Salem Center Mall, to be closed. Banks, coffee shops, bookstores – everything was shut up tight. The police department closes at 7:00 in Salem, but fortunately the criminals all close at 6:30. The streets were so deserted that we could’ve performed open-heart surgery in the middle of the road. The only other people downtown were a group of middle schoolers who implied that we were gay, to which I tearfully replied that it took one to know one. Now more than ever, Salem has a vaguely apocalyptic feel – desolate, empty, and full of savage children with nothing to lose.

During one of the few moments that Alexander and I weren’t talking about Firefly or making silly noises, he mentioned that he’d never realized how much he disliked his hometown until he came back from training. I, having resented Salem for several years, was surprised that it had taken him this long, but I agreed that it was sort of a shock to come back and see how things had both changed and stayed the same. I guess, when you think about it, home is supposed to occupy some sort of special place in your heart, warts and all. But really, I think that what makes home so great is the people, and the bulk of the people I loved in Salem have gone on to bigger and better things, and/or died. When the people I formed connections with are gone, I can’t help but take Salem at face value: A suburb of a suburb, a mere place to put people, like a filing cabinet with a meth problem and poor public transportation.

Now, of course, there’s always going to be a part of me in Salem – in the teachers from my school, the parents of my friends, and my friends themselves whenever they’re home from school. It’ll be great to see all these people again over the summer; what isn’t so great is that we’ll have to make sure to have all our fun before the town closes at 5:00.

Truman Capps loves to complain about Salem’s lack of night life. He also loves to complain about the very active and loud nightlife right outside his dorm room.

Finals Week

Your tax dollars at work.

If you asked me to give you one reason I regret moving beyond middle school in the course of my education, it would probably be because I have to work now. In middle school, grades didn't even have the illusion of mattering, whereas in high school I knew that all it took was one grade below a B to completely throw my life off the rails by sending me to a purgatory of mediocrity in some God-forsaken state school. Here in this God-forsaken state school, professors are quick to remind their classes that there is absolutely none of the precious wiggle room we so cherished in our secondary educations - one slip up, one folly, one misplaced comma, and poof; there goes 40% of your grade. There is no extra credit! There are no do-overs! Welcome to the jungle! In middle school, homework assignments were simple, in middle school, girls were vaguely interesting but still too scary for me to even attempt to embarrass myself in front of, and in middle school, we did jack shit for the last month of the school year. 

Now, this is just a guess, but you probably saw The Sandlot a lot in middle school, most likely within a few weeks of the end of the school year. You saw it on the day that your teacher rolled out of bed, poured an extra bottle of Smirnoff on his Bran Flakes, and ignored his latent thoughts of suicide for long enough to decide that this dreams of being an inspiring, creative educator were never going to come true. He had realized that, if 13 year olds were hyperactive and very nearly unteachable in the dead of winter, there was about as much chance of him getting through to them in the face of summer as there was of him ever showing up to work sober again. Thus, he swung by Hollywood Video on the way to that festering citadel of education and rented every teacher's panic button: The Sandlot. It's clean, it's entertaining, and it lasts about as long as a standard middle school class period - it is what every teacher has in their back pocket for the day when there is no knowledge left to impart. It is simultaneously a white flag and a "Fuck you, kids!", a spiteful surrender from someone who has babysat the most intolerable of human beings for an excruciating seven hours a day for a full eight months, and simply doesn't have the fight to keep going for one more - certainly not for $32,000 a year. Language Arts, Math, Science, Health - from May 14th until June 14th, all of these classes were The Sandlot 101. 

Of course, in middle school we were really buckling down by watching The Sandlot, because in elementary school we'd quit doing anything even remotely educational a full three months before the end of the year.  We watched Disney movies, we had ice cream parties, entire days of recess - people are getting stupider because teachers have less and less of the perseverance necessary to teach for a full nine months. As our teachers ran out of movies for us to watch and paper for us to fingerpaint on, they grew increasingly desperate until the activities became little more than school-sanctioned vandalism. On the last day at my elementary school, our teachers sprayed shaving cream on our desks and encouraged us to spend as long as possible wiping it around our workspace. Why? Because it's there! Because shaving cream is cheap, and kids are stupid, and we've got to do something with them before we give the little bastards back to their parents for three months! What else do you want? Here's some mercury! It's a science lesson! Here's a loaded gun! We can learn about survival of the fittest! 

I had been so conditioned toward laziness by the public school system that when I reached high school I fully expected to be rubbing shaving cream on pretty much any stationary object I could find for the last few weeks. You can only imagine my shock when I found out that right up until the bell rang on the last day of school I'd be doing work of some sort. My high school teachers were made of tougher stuff than the elementary and middle school teachers - like evil cyborgs or Hilary Clinton, they refused to give up until the fight was absolutely and completely over. We took tests. We gave speeches. We wrote research papers. By and large, we actually did schoolwork for the entire time we were at school, and I for one felt cheated by this. To be fair, though, the last week of senior year before graduation was pretty fun, because at that point the senior class had realized that we outnumbered the entire school staff and local police department by a good 100 people, and therefore could do pretty much as we damn well pleased with our last few days of public education. Yes, I most certainly did play golf on the baseball diamond when I should have been in speech team - you must understand that I had become accustomed to vandalzing some part of the school after all those years of rubbing shaving cream on things, and since I couldn't find a can of shaving cream, defacing the baseball diamond was my next best choice. 

Here in college, finals week can either be pretty laid back or a torturous descent into madness. Fortunately, I consider just about every day to be a torturous descent into madness, so I've been able to weather the storm pretty well over the past few terms. The real beauty of college finals is that the only time you have class during finals week is on the day of your final; you go to the class, you take the test, and then you go on your merry way, no shaving cream necessary. Once you're finished with all your tests, you're free to go home. Now, this all sounds wonderful at first - a week without classes or homework, and nothing to do but drugs? Yeah, sure, seems great, until you consider my position: I have only one final. This final is on the last day of finals week. For the next five days, I get to sit around watching my friends go off and start their summers while I rot in this fetid dormitory, waiting to take my economics final so I can go home and not have to share a bathroom with a bunch of guys who shed like goddamn Labradors. 

So while you're off enjoying your summer, free of final exams or the nondescript B.O. of the University of Oregon, please think of me - sleeping all alone in an empty dorm on the Thursday night before my final and expecting a reenactment of The Shining at any moment. The last week of my school year will, in fact, be the least active of any school year yet, because as I'm not required to be here my professors aren't compelled to entertain me. For habit's sake, I'm going to spend the next few days sitting in my room watching The Sandlot over and over again while covering everything in sight with shaving cream. 

Truman Capps is pleased to have made it through an entry chock full of Sandlot references without mentioning Smalls, or the detrimental effect his actions have on his friends. 

An Open Letter To Mexico

If Spanish - nay, life itself - was more like this, I'd be much more optimistic about it.

Dear Mexico (et al),

Hi there! How are you? I think that in Spanish, this would translate to something like “Hola! Como estas?” And, as a matter of fact, that’s sort of what I’m here to talk to you about.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I completely love Spanish culture – the Taco Bell Dog, Salma Hayek, and the Wishbone adaptation of Don Quixote are all big favorites around my house – and I’m completely respectful of the place of the Latino in American culture, be they legal or illegal. I myself am a Mexican American; I was reluctant to accept this at first seeing as I can trace my lineage all the way back to the motherland of Ashtebulah, Ohio, but the University of Oregon is quite convinced that I am, in fact, a Latino, and you’d think that if anybody knew what they were talking about, it would be an institution of higher learning. I put all of this information out in the open just so you know that I’m really on your side as far as the whole racial equality thing goes.

That being said, if it’s not too much trouble, could you stop having your own language?

I know, that probably sounds really insensitive, but try and see this from my point of view. It’s a lot of work to learn a new language – I’m talking hours of studying here, no joke – and frankly I think that’s time that I could better spend on other pursuits. I mean, it’s not you – it’s me. I’ve already got a language; its name is English, and it treats me really well. We’ve been together for a good long time, and I can’t imagine myself with any other language at this point. I hope we can still be friends, though – I’ll still refer to my house as Casa Capps, and I promise to always sing all the Spanish parts of “Feliz Navidad”, even though the English parts are a lot more awesome.

I tried, I really did. I’ve been taking Spanish, on and off, since the fifth grade, but it’s just never really worked out for me. Come to think of it, that could well be the fault of some of my educators. In fifth grade, we had a half-hour long Spanish class once a week – it met on Fridays, for the last 30 minutes of the school day. Apparently understanding the futility of trying to make a group of 11 year olds do anything non-Spongebob related at that point and time, our teacher drilled one phrase into our tiny heads by forcing us to chant it, in unison, to him at the beginning of every class. I know now that the phrase was, “Hola, Senior Carter! Como estas, usted? Y tu? Muy bien, gracias.” However, in those 30 futile minutes before the weekend, my weary mind, inhibited cognitively from its 10:00 hazing in Math and overstimulated by the rush from the seven Jolly Ranchers earned during Language Arts, perceived this statement as, “HolaseniorcartercomoestasustedytumuybienTRANSFORMERS!” This was about the only Spanish-related thing we did in fifth grade Spanish at Shirlie Elementary; for the rest of the 30 minutes, our beleaguered Senior Carter would lead us through halfhearted games of Spanish Bingo, which were about as educational as they were entertaining.

Thanks to my lackluster Spanish education in elementary school, I floundered in middle school Spanish, although this could just as well be thanks to the teaching abilities of Senora Smith. Senora Smith was insane, I’m almost sure – offensively so, to the point that she encouraged us to remember the Spanish word for desk (“Pupitre”) by reciting the verse, “You poo, then you pee, then you carry it on a tray!”* Now, even in my early adolescence I had a decent enough sense of the world to disregard anything said by a woman who openly advocated the carrying of one’s own piss and shit around with them, and thus I made a point of not listening to her as she laid the foundations for the rest of my class’s eventual Spanish education, for I fully expected that at any moment, two orderlies would burst in and cart her back to the Oregon Institute for the Criminally Insane and the real Senora Smith would arrive to teach us actual, non-crazy Spanish.

*No, I’m not joking. I couldn’t make this up if I tried. She said this, and she said it a lot.

Alas, that day never came (it still hasn’t – according to my middle school’s website, she’s the head of the Spanish department now), and I stumbled into high school Spanish with passing grades thanks only to my remarkable abilities as a teacher’s pet. In high school, I slaved away for the two years that were required of me to graduate, and I actually became a respectable Spanish speaker by Sprague High School standards, insofar as I was pretty good at asking what time it was and could carry on an abbreviated conversation about my favorite food so long as the other person spoke slowly. However, I finished my high school Spanish education in my junior year of high school, and it was in my senior year that I started actively dating. There’s only so much room in my brain, and it got to the point where I had to choose between remembering the Spanish language or remembering the finer points of tonsil hockey, and I don’t even need to tell you what my 17 year old mind deemed more important.

So here I am in college. I am now the Wayne Gretzky of tonsil hockey – a proud career behind me but no new games in sight. Returning to the neglected world of Spanish, putting up with the same conjugations and simplified, present-tensed stories once again, I realize that this is truly not my area of expertise. I’m not good at this. I appreciate the dozens of English cognates, but I’m falling apart on remembering the conjugations for the dozens of verb tenses. I don’t think a language needs any more than three verb tenses – the extra ones are just sort of muddling things up. My problem with the overall structure of the Spanish language is one of the reasons I’m suggesting that maybe you just give the whole thing up, Mexico.

I know that it may seem crass of me to simply ask you to disregard the language you’ve been speaking for 500-odd years, but again, I’ve really been trying here, and it seems that fate is conspiring with the subjunctive and past imperfect verb tenses to keep Spanish from meeting me halfway. I think that if American school systems really intended to educate their students in a second language, they’d make a better go at it than starting the program one Friday a week for fifth graders, followed up by scatologically based studies and high school curriculum more forgettable than the majority of Steve Martin’s career for the past decade.

So, Mexico, you’ve got to understand that I’m really in a bind here. I either have to make a decided personal effort to learn a second language, or convince all Spanish speakers to learn English out of goodwill towards me. I sure hope you’ll consider this seriously – I think I’m a pretty reasonable guy.

All the best!

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps realizes that he's talked about Mexico for quite some time without mentioning that Carlos Mencia is a no-talent hack. So, Carlos Mencia is a no talent hack.

Down With The Sickness

Originally, I had intended to attach a picture to this update that had something to do with illness in general. Following my usual routine for finding images for my blog, I did a Google image search for 'disease', forgetting that SafeSearch was off. The things I saw were so hideous that I think I may, in fact, be sick all over again. My legs are kind of tingling, and not in a good way. Always use SafeSearch.

The More You Know!

Yeah, I see you there, Thailand. Don't you try and hide. I know where you live. You live in Thailand.

When people say, “I’m sick”, there’s basically two kinds of sick that they’re talking about: Runny nose, coughing sick, or gross stomach illness sick. By all accounts, the preferable kind of sick is the runny nose sick, because that’s a perfectly good excuse to take off work/school and spend the day watching Jim Carrey movies.* Sure, it’s not fun to have a runny nose and a cough, but it’s a worthwhile price to pay so that you can put your entire life on hold and catch up on sleep.

*I recommend Jim Carrey movies not because I’m a huge fan of the man’s career, but because they’re actually scientifically proven as a cold remedy, and by “scientifically proven” I mean “My Dad says so.” Two years ago, he was lying on our couch, ravaged by the flu, and happened to catch most of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on TBS, and by the time it was over he was feeling a lot better. He now maintains that Jim Carrey’s early movies have a detrimental effect on bacteria in the same way they have a detrimental effect on brain cells, and that watching The Mask and Dumb and Dumber back to back could probably cure cancer.

And then, of course, there is the gross stomach illness kind of sick. If afflictions were TV characters, a cold would be The Penguin from the 1960s Batman show, while any stomach illness would be Tony Soprano. With this sort of illness, you’re not lying on the couch in front of the TV, you’re spending a lot of quality time in the vicinity of a toilet, making some of the most horrible noises and smells that a human being can make. It’s during these bouts of sickness that you spend a lot of time observing the décor in your bathroom and wishing that you’d installed a TV in front of the toilet with a stack of Jim Carrey movies at the ready.

I am proud to inform you that from Wednesday up until about yesterday, I was gross stomach illness sick. It is not fun to be gross stomach illness sick when you have to walk down a long hallway and around a corner to use a communal restroom – keep this in mind the next time you’re planning on catching a norovirus. I don’t quite know what did this to me, but I’m pretty sure it has to do with the fact that I ate Thai food for the first time on Tuesday night.

Thailand, you have not made a good first impression. This is no way to treat someone who was interested enough in your culture to pay $6.00 for a meal, $6.00 that could’ve gone toward an Xbox 360, or food that wasn’t laced with motherfucking Drain-O. I had my doubts when I heard that American businessmen fly to you in order to have sex with children, but I was going to let that one slide if your cuisine was at least decent – I mean, hey, I’ve seen the business majors here do a lot of really disgusting things, and pedophilia isn’t necessarily the worst of them. Instead, not only did your overpriced meal make a hasty and uncomfortable exit from my body, but so did pretty much every other meal I’ve had since – evidently, you didn’t just want me to not enjoy your meal only, you wanted me to not enjoy every other meal I consumed afterwards too. Well, congratulations, Thailand – it’s on.

Getting sick in college is all kinds of awkward: For one thing, your symptoms are very public, and for another, you can’t turn to Mom for help anymore. When I lived at home, I would always go to my Mom with medical inquiries, which would start with me saying “Mom, my _____ hurts – is that cancer?” and would end with her saying “No, you idiot, here’s a band aid/Ibuprofen, dinner’s at 7:00.” As my Mom is so very far away, I’ve instead come to rely on the University Health Center, a clinic located across the street from where I live. And this, my friends, is the real reason that being sick in college is awkward – you’ve got to tell a complete stranger that you’ve got diarrhea. In a quiet waiting room. Within earshot of beautiful girls waiting for their emergency contraception after last night’s frat party. I suppose if it was really that big of an issue for me, I could have written my condition on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk to the nurse, but the thing is, I honestly don’t know how to spell diarrhea without the help of Spellcheck. Have you ever looked at that word? What’s with that H in there, or the E? And did this word, the word that we use to describe frequent and neigh-uncontrollable pooping, really deserve two Rs? I think not. I think one would have been enough. In any sense, I had to either tell the woman, conversationally, that I had a scorching case of the trots, or horribly misspell the word diarrhea on a cocktail napkin – I opted to just tell her, because if I wrote down “I’ve got diarea”, then I wouldn’t just look like an idiot, I’d look like an idiot with diarrhea, and nobody wants that.

Have I mentioned that I’m on the Dean’s List?

A nurse took me back to an examining room and I enthralled her with the details of my gastrointestinal adventures thus far. She listened with rapt attention, told me that I’d most likely caught some sort of bug, and recommended that I not take any medicines but simply let the affliction run its course. I pointed out to her that every time I went to the bathroom I was more or less playing out the D-Day scene from Saving Private Ryan in my colon, but she would not listen, and in the end I left without any high powered prescription anti-diarrhea drugs. However, they didn’t give me any shots and they didn’t try to put anything in my butt, so all things considered I think it was a pretty good visit to the doctor’s.

I’m doing much better now, though, thanks for asking. For the first time in days I’ve been able to return to the nonstop diet of stir-fry and Diet Coke that maintains my wretched shell of a body. And I guess that’s good thing about gross stomach illness – once it’s over, there’s a little while there where you don’t take anything for granted. For example – I haven’t gone to the bathroom in a few hours, and I had a muffin earlier with no negative repercussions. Most weekends that would be par for the course, but right now I feel like a king. An incredibly lame king, perhaps, but a king nonetheless.

Truman Capps does realize the irony in being reluctant to share his intestinal malady with a registered nurse and then posting all the same information on the Internet for anyone to read. It was either that, or not make a bunch of perfectly acceptable poop jokes. He is very comfortable with his decision.