Appendix A

Trust me, nobody wants to look at a picture of an appendix. Instead, enjoy this picture of me in ten years.

Things I’m scared of:

1) Slugs
2) Appendicitis
3) Identical twins standing in hotel hallways

If I could make a pie chart of all the feelings I’ve had in my life, it would probably show that I’d spent a solid 10% or more of my time on this Earth worrying that my appendix has become infected and, unless quickly treated, will burst, filling my body with toxins and killing me. This is especially impressive because I only became aware of appendicitis three years ago.

When I was a senior in high school, a girl I knew was spontaneously struck down with appendicitis – an ordeal that began with a lot of puking and ended with her being rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery. Up until then I’d been aware of appendicitis, but had never known how quickly and severely it could strike. Once I figured it out, appendicitis quickly usurped cancer on the List of Ailments I Automatically Assume I Have When A Part of Me Hurts.

What scares me about appendicitis isn’t that it could kill me. 1 in 15 Americans gets appendicitis at some time in their life, and basically all of them survive after a few days in the hospital. The thing I don’t like about appendicitis is that it sounds like a nasty case of the stomach flu coupled with a trip to the hospital – I hate hospitals – wherein a bunch of complete strangers will proceed to cut my body open and take a part of it out.*

*I guess I shouldn’t have a problem with the notion of strangers performing surgery on me, because when I look at the company that I keep I’d much rather have my life be in the hands of people I don’t know than the people I hang out with on a regular basis. I also shouldn’t get too sentimental about my appendix, a body part that I don’t use anyway whose only purpose seems to be to try and kill me when I least expect it, like a ninja hooked up to my large intestine.

I suppose that you could say everyone isn’t enthusiastic about appendicitis for these reasons, but I’m outright obsessive about it because I know that having my appendix removed is something that will only happen once (hopefully), and I desperately don’t want it to conflict with any major school deadlines, football games, or episodes of The Office. I guess in that respect – desperately wanting to control every aspect of a big event that only happens once – I’m sort of like the Bridezilla of appendicitis. The difference is that I doubt that many women are willing to acknowledge that there’s a good chance they might not get married and are seriously hoping that that’s the case.

The one surefire test that I know of to be sure whether you have appendicitis or not is to poke the lower right side of your stomach. If you feel searing, blinding pain, something might be wrong, whereas if you don’t, you’re probably okay (unless you’re experiencing the phenomenon known as “silent appendix,” in which case you’re pretty much fucked). I take this test (which even Wikipedia admits isn’t especially accurate) more seriously than I take most of my schoolwork, and will not hesitate to start prodding my stomach in public if I feel so much as a twinge of pain anywhere on my body. Better safe than sorry – you will notice that the word “dignity” isn’t anywhere in there. Sometimes I poke the right side of my stomach so much that it actually does start to hurt, and I have to remind myself I’m not feeling pain because of my appendix, but because I’ve been relentlessly jabbing myself in the side for 20 minutes.

Today I had a particularly bad appendicitis scare during the humanities class in which I’m a teaching assistant. On my way to class I felt a quick burst of pain on the right hand side of my extreme lower abdomen. Like, almost too low. As in, if it were maybe half an inch lower, it would be in the general crotchal region that I do my very best not to talk about on the Internet. That being said, this pain wasn’t actually in my crotch, but again, dangerously close.

Once I got to class, I took a seat at the table the three other teaching assistants and I sit at – off to the side of the room and more or less in plain view of all the students. I opened up my laptop and quickly went to the Wikipedia article on appendicitis. Whether this was actually appendicitis or just something going horrifically wrong inside my body (near my crotch), I was determined to find answers – if I could prove to myself that my appendix was not in danger of rupturing, I knew my mind would be at ease. As far as I’m concerned, a mysterious and inexplicable pain is far better than one where you know it comes from a useless, bacteria filled time bomb.

The Wikipedia article did not necessarily confirm my fears, but it certainly gave them fertile ground to flourish. As it turned out, the location of the appendix can vary from person to person, and I was not about to rule out the possibility that my appendix could have been located remarkably close to my crotch. I mean, hey, it’s an evolutional dead end anyway – maybe Evolution decided to get creative with its appendix placement.

My next option was to press the affected area and see if it hurt. This presented a problem, being as the area of pain was, as I’ve mentioned, pretty damn close to my crotch, and I was being paid by the University to sit within plain view of a large group of students and be generally helpful. Touching the area very close to one’s crotch (an area which, at a distance, might even look like the crotch) is not traditionally known as helpful, unless you’re demonstrating proper crotch touching technique.

The rules of etiquette are somewhat flexible when it comes to things like standing when a lady leaves the table or which fork one uses to eat a salad. However, there is no debate about the fact that if you give 40 people reason to believe that you’re masturbating, you have clearly done something wrong.

So let it be said that I offered up a very sincere prayer to whatever force governs the universe before I started mercilessly prodding at an area strikingly close to (but not actually) my crotch.

Happy ending – not only did I not have appendicitis, but nobody saw me and thought that I was trying to surreptitiously whack it during class.

Today was a good day.

Truman Capps prodded his stomach in search of appendicitis six times in the course of this update.

3 Things To Remember About the University of Washington

Boomtown.

Hello, folks - I wrote this a few days ago for the Oregon Marching Band newsletter which they hand out on the busses to keep us occupied on long road trips, such as our recent jaunt up to Seattle (the land God forgot). I understand that probably 98% of my readership is the marching band and has thus read this already, but screw you guys - I have homework to do.

1) NEVER BE ALONE

This doesn’t just apply during the game – as a general rule, being alone anywhere on the University of Washington campus is a surefire recipe for getting stabbed in the face. Why? Because while the University of Washington may have international recognition for its science and literature departments, little has been said about its remarkable ability to generate necrophile rapist serial killers.

In 1965, Ted Bundy transferred to the University of Washington. He worked odd jobs to pay his way through school, volunteered for political campaigns he supported, and was possessed by a burning desire to murder people and violate their corpses. Yet another everyday, ordinary Husky.

Bundy eventually went on a cross-country killing spree that made him one of the nation’s most prolific serial killers. He murdered 36 women, escaped from jail twice, and when they finally caught him he acted as his own attorney in the trial. Clearly his alma mater taught him a lot about how to be slippery and amoral.

You may think that it’s stupid to assume that the University of Washington is a maven of serial killers just because one really dangerous serial killer went to school there. But that’s the thing: Ted Bundy, who killed almost enough people to fill Bus 1, is the only one the world found out about. All the University of Washington’s other serial killers – and I assure you, there are thousands of them – haven’t slipped up and gotten caught yet.

Never. Be. Alone.

On a side note, while Bundy did represent himself in the trial, he didn’t win – in his defense, the University of Washington is not really known for winning things.

2) WATCH WHERE YOU STEP

The University of Washington has chosen to sully the reputation of the Alaskan Malmute, a fine and intelligent animal, by latching onto it as the mascot for their unrelenting campaign of losing football games and necrophilia. Rather than have a cheerleader put on a big animal suit like all forward thinking and generally good schools, though, UW has an actual, living Husky trotting around the sidelines at all of their games, presumably to energize all 38 fans in the stands.

Again, the Husky is a wonderful breed of dog, but no matter what breed of dog you’ve got walking around the sidelines of your football game, there’s still a better than average chance that it’s going to take a dump at some point. And then there’s dog poop, on your football field, while you’re playing a game – that being said, in light of Washington’s standard of play, dog poop is probably the most interesting thing going on on the field.

The point is, make sure to look around when you’re going onto the field for halftime. While I doubt that there will be enough Husky students around to throw paint at us, it’s pretty much certain that the real Husky will leave at least one land mine for us by the sidelines. The UW Band has gotten pretty good at stepping over their mascot’s crap – that is, after all, why they march in the ridiculous way that they do.

3) DO NOT BE ALARMED WHEN YOU ENCOUNTER HUSKY FANS

Either at the game or around the hotel, you might bump into people wearing purple and gold who are not hanging their heads in shame the way they’re supposed to. These are called “Washington fans.” They do not appear to be ashamed of their school because they are stupid. This is in keeping with the motto of the University of Washington, “We are stupid and nobody likes us.”

They’ll probably yell stuff at you, perhaps rhyming the word “duck” with “fuck,” and it’s an absolute statistical certainty that they’ll mention their recent victory over USC. It’s science. However, no matter how tempting it may be to remind these creatures that USC hasn’t won a single game in Oregon for the past four years, don’t. Also, do not remind them that the University of Oregon has been to a bowl game in recent memory.

Just smile and let them say their piece, maybe offering a helpful, “Go Ducks!” along the way. But in the end, nothing you say to them will have any effect. They’ve completely bought into their silly little school and no amount of fact or reason will convince them otherwise.

Also, it’s not nice to argue with retarded people.

Truman Capps is vehemently opposed to blind hatred and intolerance, two qualities the University of Washington wholeheartedly embraces.

On Art

This... This I would frame and hang on the wall behind my headboard.

Anyone who is enough of a pretentious bastard to have taken an art history class will tell you that during the Renaissance, art was a big industry. Young boys with rich parents and an interest in art were apprenticed to established masters of the craft, who in turn would make them into great artists themselves, provided there wasn’t a plague outbreak and nobody got punched in the face so hard that their nose was permanently fucked up. After their apprenticeship was completed, young artists could make a healthy living in cities like Florence or Rome, which were full of rich patrons who were eager to blow hella ducats to commission paintings and sculptures for their houses.

Art today is a big industry as well, but in a way that most people would agree has far less cultural merit. The good news is that unlike Renaissance art, popular artwork today is not entirely made up of pictures of some poor man nailed to a piece of wood. The bad news is that some of the most popular artwork today is manufactured by Painter of Light™ Thomas Kinkade, who many people would argue should be nailed to a piece of wood.

A lot of Thomas Kinkade’s criticism revolves around the fact that his art is mass-produced and sold on QVC or in mall galleries. Yes, it turns out that when you drop hella ducats on a Thomas Kinkade painting, what you’re actually getting is a high quality digital print on a canvas which has had some paint daubed onto it by a migrant worker in the Thomas Kinkade Artistic Sweatshop of Light. People say that this is dishonest and manipulative – that making a career out of painting sub-par artwork is fine, but that printing the sub-par artwork on sub-par materials is bad.

Thomas Kinkade makes glorified posters – but that’s kind of the new style. Posters are our art.

If you walk into a room occupied by a college student, you have about as good a chance of seeing one of the following posters as you do of smelling severe body odor:

1) John Belushi in a sweatshirt that says, “COLLEGE”
2) The poster for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
3) Bob Marley doing pretty much anything
4) Tony Montana

When I first came to school, I saw these posters so much that I honestly thought that all students at the University of Oregon only bought posters from one predetermined source so as not to create too much unwanted cultural diversity. Imagine my surprise a few weeks later when I found out that I was right – more or less every poster on campus comes from a poster vendor who sets up shop at the once-a-term University street fair.

Every time I’m at the street fair I browse through the poster guy’s selection in hopes of finding a poster for a movie I like so much that I’m willing to spend $20 to hang an advertisement for it in my room. This has yet to happen, because posters for the things that I’m interested in are definitely underrepresented at the street fair.

There are pictures of bikini clad women with big boobs, and let me say right off that I wholeheartedly support bikini clad women with big boobs. I am all about that shit. At the same time, though, I’d feel kind of awkward hanging a huge poster of a bikini clad woman with big boobs in my room, because it’s more or less saying to everyone who visits you, “Hey! Guess what I look at when I masturbate!”*

*There are also realistic drawings of fantasy-style topless elf girls with big boobs, which say, “Hey! Guess what I look at when I log out of World of Warcraft long enough to masturbate!”

There are pictures of huge disasters, like old-timey train crashes or the Hindenburg exploding, accompanied by the words “OH SHIT!” in huge block letters. Don’t get me wrong – I love laughing at the misfortunes of others, but if I died in a horrible train or zeppelin accident and found out 70 years later that some 19-year-old douchebag had a glib picture of the disaster on his wall, I’d be a little bit pissed off. I’m actually sort of worried that in 70 years there’s going to be an “OH SHIT” picture for September 11th.

And then there are the movie posters, by which I mean, the posters for 300, Scarface, Donnie Darko, and Moulin Rouge!. No other movies exist in college.

The only reason that art patronage ever happened in the first place was because people wanted to spend money to have things they liked in their homes. The primary reason that people hired artists to create their decorations was because there was no such thing as mass produced art one could buy on the street – also, 300 had not come out yet.

Now, though, people still want to adorn their houses with things that they like, but since everyone sees the same movies and posters are easy to make and cheap to buy, that’s what people wind up going with. Even a non-college student is far more likely to go with a high quality print of his favorite Rembrandt than dig up a living painter (if they even exist anymore) and spend considerably more money on an original picture that he may or may not like when it’s finished. I’m sure that if during the Renaissance patrons had a way to get cheap, high quality copies of the finest art mankind had to offer, a lot of them would have done that instead of taking this kind of risk.

So yes, mass produced art may be driving original artists out of business and limiting artistic progress. But apparently the customer is always right.

Truman Capps has a high quality print of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” hanging in his room, so he’s part of the problem. However, he has also ordered a print of a fake oil painting of humans doing battle with evil robotic Cylons, so say what you will about that.

Wait, I Do A Blog On Wednesdays?

I'm getting teabagged by journalism and physics at the moment, so don't expect my update until sometime this evening once everything has blown over and I've had a chance to wash the taste out of my mouth.

Recent Thoughts Of Richard Heene, Self-Proclaimed 'Psyentist' and Father Of "Balloon Boy"

October 3, 2009

Oh my God, what am I doing with my life?

I mean, really? “Psyentist”? That’s what I’ve been calling myself? That’s a title that I willingly self-applied? Psyentist!? It sounds like some sort of faggy electronic music duo! For God’s sake, I don’t even have a psyence degree! I just like fucking around in my garage and following tornadoes around!

Where did I go wrong? This contracting business isn’t working out at all, the UFO search is turning up bubkis, and nobody takes my psyence seriously!

Well, actually, in their defense, me spelling it like that probably isn’t helping matters.

Man, what I wouldn’t give to be on Wife Swap again. Those were the days – attention, cameras, craft table, people listening to me… I mean, in that regard I really was a pioneer in the field of psyence – the first psyentist ever to be on Wife Swap! Sure, that Duane Burroughs asshole on www.realamericanpsyentists.com has his grainy footage of Bigfoot masturbating, but did he get to trade in his wife on national TV? Twice? Yeah, that video might have made him the darling of the psyentific community for now, but sooner or later his 15 minutes will be up, and he sure as hell isn’t going to have a complimentary box set of the first five seasons of a certain ABC reality program.

That’s what I really need – I need to get another 15 minutes of fame. Only this time, I won’t waste my time swapping wives; I’ll dazzle the world with untold psyentific wonders and stand proudly before them, a bold new American god!

Easier said than done, though. How am I going to get the country’s attention? To get in the national spotlight, you need to use something that everybody finds interesting. Like children. Or things that fly.

…oh, dear, I do believe I’m onto something.

October 5th, 2009

Why didn’t I think of this sooner? I’ve had the balloon back here all along – sure, if I send one of the kids up in it I won’t be able to use it for all those alternative transportation experiments anymore, but on the other hand the Segway pretty much has me beat there anyway.

All I’ve got to do is give one of the little bastards a fiver and have him hide in the attic while I cast the balloon off, and viola! I’m in the spotlight, I can blame the kid for tampering with the balloon and squandering thousands of taxpayer dollars, and then I unveil my blueprints for the hydroelectric urinal on national TV!

God damn, I love smoking crack.

I should smoke this much crack every day.

October 14th, 2009

It’s settled. I’m using Falcon. Here I’d thought it was going to be difficult to decide which of my kids I was going to humiliate on a national stage, but then Falcon up and hit me with a “Wild Draw Four” when I was about to school his ass at Uno last night. It’s like, why do they even put that card in the game? Do they want you not to win?

Family game night shall be your undoing, young Falcon…

October 15th, 2009, 11:30 AM

Shit. You called the news station before you called 911.

No, it’s cool, it’s cool – nobody’s going to notice. Who checks these things? And who’s going to give you any shit about it? Remember, your son is supposedly trapped in a homemade balloon flying across the state. You’re a frightened parent! You’re under a lot of emotional duress! You’re so worried about your son’s well being that you neglected to call 911 right away! That happens all the time, right?

Shit.

October 15th, 2009, 1:40 PM

“To the editors of www.psyentificamerican.blogspot.com: I received your request for an interview regarding my son’s tragic balloon escapade, and would like to respond with a request of my own – kindly jump up my butt!”

That’ll teach those sly bastards to call Amanda Snuggie a genius when everybody knows she just stole my prototype for the Blanket With Arms 2000.

Oh, hey – looks like the balloon finally landed. Figure I’ll let Falcon sweat it out in that box for a couple hours before I “discover” him.

Not so big without your Wild Draw Four card now, are you? Huh?

October 15th, 2009, 9:05 PM

He did not just say that. Oh shit. He did not just say that. Did I… Yes. Yes, I’m about 89 percent sure I just pooped myself a little.

“We did it for the show”!? What’s your angle, you precocious little shit? Don’t play dumb – was the $5 not good enough for you? Did you want a later bedtime? Did you want me to lift my ban on grape Kool Aid? You could have had it if you’d just goddamn asked, instead of blowing my whole plan out of the water in front of the entire country, not to mention Wolf fucking Blitzer!

And all this right before I was going to segue into my pitch for the hydroelectric urinal! “Say, Wolf, did you ever wonder if, by putting turbines in urinals, we could generate electricity? Well, I sure did – and I’ve got the blueprints right here for a system that could generate enough peelectricity to power Denver for a year!”

Nope! Not anymore! Way to go, Falcon – your greed and inability to negotiate has deprived the world of a revolutionary form of alternative energy. Good luck getting laid in high school now, douche-nozzle.

Okay, easy now Rick – cameras are still rolling. Just play it cool. Laugh it off. You can deal with that little walking condom advertisement later. Just say what you need to say to keep your ass out of the frying pan and end this interview.

So help me God, I will use that peelectricity line some day…

October 16th, 2009

Wow. This is some boy I’ve raised. Most kids would only vomit once on national television, but my Falcon? Twice. Both times when asked whether the balloon thing was a hoax or not – arguably the worst times to do something that implies that your conscience isn’t clear. Like, y’know, puking.

He’s like some kind of special robot designed to ruin his father’s life.

If he’d only puked once, we could have covered for that. Kids puke. It’s just a thing they do. Or if he’d puked for two different questions. But twice for the same question, on two different shows? Nobody can deny that there’s a correlation there. It’s psyence.

I am so fucked.

October 17th, 2009

Hey, who knew ordinary citizens could call press conferences?

Some old colleague of mine sold me up the river and from the sound of things the sheriff, the National Guard, and the FAA aren’t too pleased. So what does Richard Heene do?

He solves the problem.

All I’ve got to do is call a press conference and tell everyone I’m going to make an announcement. When the press gets here, I have them write down their questions on pieces of paper and stick them in a cardboard box. Then, I tell them I’ll read their questions and answer them later.

Then I just head on back into the house and peace the hell out to Mexico in the balloon. Meanwhile, I have the family tell the cops I’m hiding in a box in the garage. By the time they figure out the box is empty and I’m actually in the balloon, it’ll be too late.

I would’ve got away with it, too, if it wasn’t for that meddling kid.

This was supposed to be my day in the sun, and instead Falcon gets all the attention! Balloon Boy, they’re calling him! Who designed the balloon? Who created the boy? Nobody cares!

And is that selfish little bastard giving any credit where credit is due? No! He’s just sitting there at the center of a media circus I created for him, and I haven’t heard so much as a “Thanks, Pop!”

I can’t imagine how somebody could have so little regard for a family member’s feelings.

Truman Capps thinks that "Wife Swap" didn't have any credibility to lose.

Responsibility

Pic awesome, yet unrelated.

I’ve always been profoundly lazy, but I feel as though recently I’ve been less vigilant about being lazy, and my laziness has fallen into a slump of general productivity and mild efficiency. Don’t get me wrong – I still calculate the route of every bicycle trip I make based on how best to avoid riding up hills and on two or three occasions I’ve come very close to calling my professors late at night and asking them if they could maybe bump their 9:00 AM lecture back by a couple of hours. Alas, much like Duran Duran, my best work is behind me.

If we’re going to continue with the Duran Duran metaphor (and if there’s one thing I love, it’s continuing lame metaphors), senior year at Sprague High School was my “Hungry Like The Wolf.” Not only did I not want to do any work, I was openly contemptuous of the very notion of work.* I took as many campus releases as I could, worked as a classroom aide, and shelved books in the library in lieu of actual classes like AP English or European History. What little homework I had I threw together at the last possible second.

*No matter how good I got, though, I could never outdo my classmate Ashley, who during the spring told all of her teachers she was on the tennis team (she wasn’t), so that every time the tennis team was called away on the PA system for a game during the school day, she’d get up and go home. Genius.

This laziness contributed to my somewhat lax scholarship search. Sure, I wrote a few essays and filled out a few applications, but had I applied myself with the same tenacity as some of my classmates I’m pretty sure I could have gone into my first year of college with more than $400 from the Dean’s List. I suppose my strategy at the time was to ambush the school with my academic prowess rather than making my intentions known, hoping that they would be so pleased and surprised at my good work combined with my humility in not asking for money that they would spontaneously give me $30,000 or so, no strings attached, along with a new car and maybe a lifetime supply of Hostess Fruit Pies.

Maybe you’re laughing, but it actually half worked – in the spring of my freshman year I was surprised to find that I’d been awarded a $600 Hendricks Scholarship on top of the $400 I was already receiving. What I later found out was that I got this award because I had filled out the University’s general scholarship application when I first applied, which made me eligible for a variety of different types of money the school was tossing at students. Still, even though I didn’t surprise the school into giving me money, they definitely surprised me by giving it to me – and let me tell if you, if you have to be surprised, free money is the best way for it to happen.

I took the money and didn’t ask too many questions about it, which I recently learned was a bad idea – however, if I had to learn that anywhere, I’d much rather figure it out with a college scholarship than with a loan shark.

The $600 scholarship did not come through on my bill for this term, and after talking to the somewhat testy counselor at the financial aid department I was surprised to find that the Hendricks Scholarship is one that you must reapply for every year. I had not known this – I’d figured that since I was receiving it thanks to the same application that got me the Dean’s List scholarship, which does not need to be renewed, that the school would continue to shovel money in my general direction without so much as a second thought. It is, after all, a government institution.

At first I was pissed that the school had not so much as sent me a letter to remind me that I needed to reapply for my scholarship. After all, how was I supposed to know that I needed to renew it? I could find no information anywhere on the Internet about the Hendricks Scholarship, and I hadn’t heard so much as a peep out of them after their first letter informing me that they were going to start giving me money, the bastards.

But then I realized that there had probably been something about needing to renew my scholarship in that initial letter, which has since been lost to the sands of garbage in my room. So really, the person at fault wasn’t them for not notifying me, but me for not taking the initiative to 1) Hold onto the letter and B) Remember that this was a scholarship I would need to renew.

Because, really, what’s in it for them if they remind me to keep taking their money? If I’m not with it enough to stay on top of my paperwork, maybe that in and of itself is an indication that there’s somebody far more intelligent and responsible who deserves the money more than I do. After all, what sort of organization awards a scholarship to somebody who has proven himself to be irresponsible?

Oh, right.

One of the reasons I was so lethargic and spiteful toward high school in my senior year was because I felt like I was well and truly finished with having my hand held and being told what to do. I was looking forward to the independence of college, where everybody backs off and lets you make your own mistakes. At the time, I had assumed that I would not make a mistake in the next four years – I was doing pretty well, too, but then I paid money to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That mistake, however, only cost me $8 as opposed to $600.

You win this round, University of Oregon. But I’ll remember this.

Truman Capps would like to take this opportunity to inform his father that he plans to apply for roughly $3600 worth of scholarships over the next two weeks – it’s under control.

What the HELL, People

Future recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize!

There are times in my life when I go onto Digg and see a news story on the top ten and my first reaction is to assume it’s a joke story from one of those fake news sites like The Onion or Fox. I usually make this assumption when I see something so outlandish that I actually can’t believe that it happened in our world – something fanciful and impossible that can only exist in the world of science fiction or rap music.

So when I saw the other day that President Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I was all, what? For serious?

Don’t get me wrong – I love Barack Obama. I think he’s a man of exceptionally high moral fiber and a damn good leader. I do not think he is a socialist, Nazi, or Muslim, and while I do hold out hope that he might in fact be a secret atheist, I’m pretty sure he isn’t. That being said, out of the 205 people nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, I would say he’s pretty far from the best choice on the list. To be honest, I’m still waiting for Ashton Kutcher to make an announcement to the United Nations revealing that everyone on Earth just got Punk’d by the Nobel Committee.

The nomination deadline for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize fell just two weeks after President Obama started work at the White House. At this point, he’s been in office for nine months – this time last year I was still deathly afraid that Tits McGee was going to wind up one heart attack away from the Oval Office. And now he’s got a Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”?

I feel like I do a pretty good job with current events for a college student. Sure, I don’t read the paper or watch the news every day, but my patronage of Digg keeps me abreast of all the top stories and I swing by the websites for CNN or MSNBC every couple of days to see what’s shaking in the world. When I’m at home in Portland, NPR is always droning out of one of our many radios and I subconsciously absorb information like a big political sponge. And from where I’ve been sitting over the past nine months, I haven’t been aware of a lot of groundbreaking foreign policy decisions coming from President Obama.

I know that he made a speech in Egypt about fostering communication between the United States and the Middle East, and I know he’s pursuing diplomatic relations with Iran, and I know he was recently at the G8 summit. He’s probably done a lot more for international relations that’s slipped under my admittedly faulty radar.

But hear me out: If the man won a Nobel Peace Prize after nine months in the White House, I’d God damn well better know about something he did to create world peace. For him to go from a Midwestern junior senator on the campaign trail to a Nobel Peace Prize recipient in the space of a year, Barack Obama should have done something so phenomenally, overpoweringly brilliant to end human suffering that everyone on Earth, right on down to Tibetan monks and unborn fetuses, knows about and is impressed by it.

You know what I have heard a lot about? I’ve heard a lot about President Obama busting his ass to get a public healthcare option for all Americans and I’ve heard a lot about him sending more troops to Afghanistan. I’m pretty glad he’s doing both of those things, but neither one of them contributes an awful lot to world peace. In fact, one of them is kind of antithetical to world peace.

The Nobel Committee explained that they selected President Obama because, “We would like to support what he is trying to achieve.”

Emphasis on trying.

Hey, People magazine! I’m trying to lose some weight – how about showing some support for what I’m trying to achieve by picking me as the Sexiest Man Alive this year?

The problem with awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to someone based on what they’re trying to do (as opposed to what they have done) is that it puts the very credibility of the prize and the organization at risk should the recipient fail to live up to his goals.

That being said, the Nobel Committee has already done plenty of damage to their credibility by giving Nobel Peace Prizes to Yasser Arafat, who could be charitably described as a terrorist, and Henry Kissinger, who spent a lot of time in the 1970s working to topple democratic Marxist governments in South America in favor of right wing capitalist dictators with a penchant for chopping off hands.

One of the nominees for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was Greg Mortenson, a former US Army medic who has spent the last 16 years traveling to remote parts of third world countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan to build schools, with the express aim of promoting literacy among girls. In the process of building these schools, Mortenson has been shot at by Afghan opium warlords, had fatwas declared on him by Islamic clerics for trying to educate girls, been kidnapped for eight days, and received death threats from Americans for trying to educate Muslims.

But the Nobel Prize Committee gave the award to President Obama based on what he’s trying to accomplish in the international arena.

I’ve got a lot of faith that Barack Obama is going to do some really great things over the course of the next eight (God willing) years, and I think that there’s going to be plenty of time once he’s out of office to reflect on his accomplishments and give him awards. Right now, though, he still has to prove to the world that he can do what his supporters think he can do.

Truman Capps hasn’t been this frustrated by an award recipient since Crash won Best Picture.

On Cooking

We're gonna need a bigger bowl.

My roommates from last year will be the first people to tell you that I’m no good at cooking. They say this because over the course of last year I displayed very few culinary skills, opting instead to patronize Subway and my good friend Chef Boyardee. I also learned a lot about canned soup last year.*

*If you ever see a can of soup with some sort of meat in it, you’d do just as well not to buy it, because every kind of meat in every kind of canned soup will always taste like socks, and not necessarily clean ones, either.

I have to say, though, that while I may not have shown a lot of proficiency with knives or stoves or ovens or Dutch ovens,* I got really good at the microwave. If you want to make a quesadilla (in the microwave, naturally), first you’ve got to take your tortillas and put them in the microwave under a damp paper towel for 45 seconds on 70% power. They’ll come out of there tasting like you just got them from an authentic street vendor in Guadalajara (who bought them at Safeway and microwaved them, that is).

*Forgive me for being footnote heavy here, but thanks to the Internet I’ll never be able to respect the Dutch oven as a cooking tool.

My old roommates gave me a lot of grief because while they would spend half an hour cooking our frozen mini pizzas in the oven, I would spend three minutes microwaving them. Their argument was that oven cooking ensured bubbly cheese and crispy crust; mine was that no matter how you cook it it’s going to be a shitty frozen pizza, so you may as well do it fast so you don’t have time to get your hopes up.

It was by observing my old roommates that I finally learned how to make pasta. I’d never paid much attention to the (phenomenal) cooking that my mother did while I was growing up, preferring to merely enjoy the end result, and I guess I’d never noticed the steaming pot filled with slowly cooking pasta before. I think I’d assumed that pasta was delivered hot and fresh in the same way people used to deliver milk to your door. Or maybe I believed in some sort of omnipotent pasta fairy. My childhood memories are murky and highly perplexing.

Last year, though, I discovered that pasta was purchased dry or frozen and then cooked in a pot of water, after which a sauce is added – usually one that comes in a bottle that says “Safeway Select” on the side. Later on in the year I discovered that sauces could be created independent of Safeway’s influence. It was an exciting time.

A lot of what prevented me from cooking last year, aside from outright stupidity, was the fact that our quad-style apartment’s kitchen was set up as though someone had put a set of cabinets and an oven in the middle of a narrow hallway, either as a cruel joke or a means to ensure that nobody ever enjoyed using the kitchen, ever. This year, though, I’ve been blessed with a very spacious kitchen that affords ample room for both cooking and, more importantly, beer pong.

So I’ve decided to get into cooking (as opposed to beer pong*) – partially to stick it to my old roommates, partially to take advantage of whatever talent I’ve inherited from my mother, and partially because Mike is also an excellent cook, and once the two of us are able to get together and swap recipes we’ll have no trouble winning the Gayest Straight Guys 2009 title.

*I just really don’t like beer, and I have too much dignity to play and let somebody else drink the beer for me like some high school cheerleader at a frat party. It’s a Go Big or Go Home situation in which I opt to Go Home.

In these first few weeks I’ve been sticking largely to simple pasta sauces, just so I can get an idea of how cooking works and what happens when you put splattery things over a fire. The good news is that I’m getting the hang of it, sort of. The bad news is, for the first few weeks it was really kicking my ass.

Only in the last few days have we acquired a garlic press, and so up until then I was mincing the garlic on my own, which is a very time intensive process. Therefore when I was first experimenting with sautéing garlic in olive oil I was very cautious to avoid burning it, as I had learned during a failed cooking venture with The Ex Girlfriend last year that burned garlic is what Hell tastes like and was unwilling to risk ruining the food I’d spent so much time preparing. As a result, many of my early garlic and olive oil sauces were essentially olive oil with chunks of raw garlic floating in it.

Tortellini, I’ve found, is a double edged sword. One edge – the good edge – is the euphoria all humans experience when they’re eating something and they discover that it’s filled with cheese. The other edge is that that very cheese filling makes it tricky to cook. Maybe it’s just me – maybe I’m really bad at cooking tortellini – but every time I’ve tried so far it’s resulted panic and profanity.*

*When I get nervous in the kitchen my first response is to start talking to the food. Thus: “Alright, just gonna throw a little salt in the- Woah! Fuck! Slow down, tortellini, what did you do to the water? Why are you making it boil over like that? Fuck you! I’m just gonna turn this shit down a bit, and… Okay, tortellini, I turned the heat down, why are you still boiling over? You got to hold up your end of the deal, tortellini – I turn you down, you stop making the water boil over! Piss! Shit!”

Most recently, I tried to make a vodka sauce, wherein you make a standard tomato sauce and then add cream and vodka to it – basically, if I added Kahlua it’d be like dumping a White Russian into my marinara sauce. What I discovered when I tasted what I’d made was that the sauce was unsettlingly creamy and sweet for something that I’d put two full onions and God knows how much garlic into, forcing me to toss it with a fair amount of red wine vinegar to try and make it taste less like a dessert. Even now it doesn’t taste so great, and at the moment I can’t figure out if I fucked up or if I just don’t like vodka sauce.

What I find encouraging is that, unlike most of my many failures, this one has yet to produce any significant embarrassment or self-loathing. Up until I inadvertently poison myself, cooking could turn out to be a pretty worthwhile hobby.

Truman Capps has plenty of mediocre vodka sauce that he might not be using, if you’re interested.

H One N One

It was either this or find a picture of a real pig.

It’s really wonderful how after a couple decades with no massive global pandemics they decided to have one just in time for me to be in college, rubbing elbows (at the very least) with 20,000 other people in close proximity. That being said, I’m pretty happy the swine flu is happening while I’m in college as opposed to while I was a student at Sprague High School, where the ventilation system piped the same air from one roomful of coughing students to another, making regular attendance about as healthy as eating a piece of raw chicken you found behind the toilet on a Greyhound.

In the past, I’d worried that The Media would whip everyone into a frenzy about swine flu, leading to massive panic about an ailment that really isn’t that big of a deal unless you’re really old, really young, or otherwise ill. What I’ve found in the past month back down at school is that authority figures have whipped themselves into quite a frenzy while the students have opted to sit back and let everyone else do all the worrying.

The Oregon Marching Band is a hotbed of new and interesting diseases, maybe 10% of which are not venereal. As such, on the first day of band camp two nurses paid us a visit and made an announcement about good ways to avoid catching the swine flu – for example, they recommended that we avoid eating out of shared food sources like bowls filled with chips and refrain from sharing drinks.

And yeah, all of that sounds great, and I’m sure lots of people our age would do those things, but when you’re at a party and everybody is snacking on a big bowl of taco flavored Doritos and everybody wants to try the glass of vodka that has bits of gold floating in it, all those health-friendly tips go by the wayside. When given the choice between becoming a part of a global pandemic or being a buzzkill, a college student will always choose the global pandemic. After all, nobody wants to hear about the time you were lame and healthy at a party, but if you mention that you had the swine flu, there’s a pretty good chance someone will buy you a drink.

I can’t really tell whether the swine flu has had a massive impact at the University of Oregon yet, because my primary social outlet is the marching band, and people are always sick in the marching band. Every year during band camp roughly 40% of the band winds up getting sick with something as students’ immune systems, weakened after three months’ rest, are put to the test against puddles of freshly emptied spit and impromptu spooning. When I was a freshman something like ten people made the mistake of eating at Muchas Gracias and paid the price for several days. During my sophomore year at camp, one senior trumpet player was so badly stricken with the trots that our section leaders decreed that if you soil yourself, you’re excused from rehearsal, no questions asked.*

*For the record, each member only gets one of these per season; otherwise there would be an easy (if not necessarily dignified) way out of rehearsal every time there was a downpour.

Not helping matters is the fact that the primary bathroom for the OMB’s practice field is an aging porta-potty chained to a lamppost which, according to a sign posted on the inside of the door, is only intended to service 10 people over a 12 hour period of time before being emptied, as opposed to 200 people for two weeks (or more). I don’t know if stench translates to overall infectiousness, but I will say that if there was one person who wasn’t all that worried about stopping the spread of the swine flu, it was the guy who waited a week to come and empty out the porta potty.

I’ve always been something of a germophobe, and so the presence of a global pandemic really helps to legitimize a lot of the behaviors that people used to think were crazy, such as carrying Purell and opening the bathroom door with a paper towel. The problem is, in light of the swine flu some peoples’ germophobia has begun to outpace mine, and now I’m encountering people who carry larger bottles of Purell than mine and wear surgical masks in public. Suddenly, my old standards of germopobia aren’t good enough anymore – for hand washing to be effective, apparently, it has to last 20 seconds or more, and touching of the eyes and face is right out.*

*Sometimes I’ll get home after a long day of not touching my face, gives my hands a thorough scrubbing with soap and hot water, and then spend five minutes just touching the shit out of my eyes to make up for all the times I couldn’t during the day.

The primary reason I try to avoid getting sick (aside from the fact that being sick isn’t necessarily fun) is because being forced to miss class in college is a quick way for your grades to tank. However, now that the University administration has whipped the faculty into a frenzy over the swine flu, many of my professors have noted on their syllabi that they’re willing to make special provisions for students who are sick with the swine flu.

What this means for me is that if I’m feeling stressed out and want a little vacation during midterms, all I have to do is find the nearest frat party and start licking people until I pass out. This global pandemic stuff really isn’t all that bad.

If Truman Capps actually gets the swine flu, he hopes his professors will recognize the last paragraph as the lighthearted comedy that it most definitely is.