Jack & Diane

I'm kind of all over the board with power ballads right now. Just read the blog update.

If I had to rank the things that graduates of my high school were good at, it’d look something like this:

4) Going to Tonga to convince people to become Mormons
3) Getting into a hoity-toity East Coast school
2) Growing/selling/smoking marijuana
1) Getting married

Now, of course, my rankings may be skewed by the people on my Facebook friends list, but in spite of all the nerd cred I repped in last week’s update, I’m Facebook friends with a wide range of people from my high school, and for every one of them who is selling weed to high schoolers, there’s at least two who have up and gotten married since graduation.

I usually find out about these weddings in one of two ways: Either Facebook proudly announces that the happy couple has been married, accompanied by pictures of the two of them clutching onto one another for dear life, or I see an update in my newsfeed from some name I don’t recognize.

“Mary Rubinowitz started playing CafeMafia?” I’ll say to my computer. “Who the hell is Mary Rubinowitz?” Then, upon further investigation, I figure it out. “Oh – it was Mary Anderson. She married Steve Rubinowitz two weeks ago. They already have 15 kids and a minivan.” And then I go back to eating Chef Boyardee out of the pot that I cooked it in because we don’t have any more clean bowls.

Marriage to me is a lot like home burglary or soccer fandom: It’s one of those scary things that always happens to ‘other people’, and when it strikes within your circle of friends you’re completely blindsided by it. It could happen to you too! Lock your doors! Don’t like the same sports as people from Europe! And above all, don’t ever grow emotionally close to anyone!

It’s always struck me as one of those traditionally adult activities that you begrudgingly do later in life, not unlike a colorectal exam. Picking one person who you’ll ideally spend the rest of your life with seems like such a monumentally important decision that I’m shocked anybody can make that kind of decision without a solid few decades’ worth of life experience.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a girl in the band who’d been awkwardly flirting with me invited my main bro Alexander and I to go to the Oregon State Fair with her and her friends – because that’s what you do when you live in Salem and it’s August.

Alexander and I went to the fair with them, but they seemed wholly uninterested in talking to or even looking at us; this is presumably because Alexander and I were a couple of codependent nerds who spent most of our time making highly obscure in-jokes about The Fifth Element and Mystery Science Theater 3000. Of course, any idiot would’ve known that from the get-go, so why bother inviting us in the first place?

Within an hour, the girls ditched us by the 4H pavilion, and, bemused and rejected, we spent the rest of the afternoon making fun of barnyard animals.*

*At one point, a cow we were looking at unleashed this neverending geyser of piss, and Alexander started pumping his fist and chanting, ”Go! Go! Go!”, and all the farmers were giving us dirty looks, and it was fantastic.

Shortly after graduation, that girl moved to a barely-inhabitable Southern state and got married to some guy there, and is now raising his toddler son from a previous marriage. Every morning she wakes up and sees her husband off to work, takes care of a young child, cooks dinner, makes pancakes on weekends… You know. Mom stuff. Earlier tonight, Alexander called to tell me he and his friends were going to WinCo to buy 300 sparklers so they could make a bomb and blow shit up in his backyard.

These are the sorts of things I think about when I see that yet another of my graduating class has found him or herself a spouse. Are they more or less mature? Lucky or unlucky? Was there a point at which they decided that they’d had enough of their freewheeling, responsibility-free 20s and wanted to jump right into an institution so classically nerve wracking that mankind has no recourse but to crank out terrible sitcom after terrible sitcom about it?

Usually my first reaction to finding these wedding announcements is a bit on the scornful side – I look down my nose at my Facebook newsfeed and think up something snide about how my high school cranked out a bunch of people who are in just too big of a hurry to grow up, and then go back to watching the video of the penguin farting in the other penguin’s face.

But that’s kind of hypocritical, because one of my absolute best friends from college is married and I’ve got no problem with that at all – the only difference is I know that he and his wife are one of those high school power couples who really love each other, and also appreciate the lucrative financial aid situation offered to married people.

Hell, the only reason I’m staying in Oregon as long as I am is because I want to go to another friend’s wedding in mid-July, and I’m totally thrilled that they’re getting married. If there wasn’t a free meal involved I’d probably downgrade my emotion to ‘approval,’ but that still beats my gut reaction to the nuptials of my graduating class.

Maybe it’s actually the opposite of what I said earlier – maybe marriage is something that I only expect to happen to my people, in a way. It makes sense when my friends get married to their significant others because I’ve seen them together, I talk to them a lot, and I can tell that it’s two people who know what they’re doing.

It’s different when it happens to obscure acquaintances I haven’t seen since high school, because I tend to assume that they haven’t changed in the slightest since then. I can’t get my head around that girl playing house in the Deep South because my last memory of her is her and her friends giving Alexander and I the slip in a large hot tent that smelled like manure. Some mother she’d make. Because I have no new picture of these people in my head as they are today, I’m imagining a bunch of hormonal, catty 18 year olds traipsing down the aisle together, and that’s probably not true for at least 20 percent of them.

Hey, and in other news, how about that gay marriage thing in New York? About time the government quits sticking its nose in peoples’ personal lives and minds its own damn business.

Truman Capps is just as shocked as you are that he keeps updating late when he’s living at home with no job.

Shirt Guy

Hey, that shirt's pretty funny. I should totally buy- Wait, shit.

The only time in my life that I have ever cared about fashion was for a few months in 1994, when some enterprising footwear company debuted a line of childrens’ sneakers that had a small reservoir of blue and black goop enclosed under a clear plastic window at the toe, and when you pressed it, the goop would swirl around in there and change colors.

The commercial was great – a bunch of kids are hanging out and having fun in the 90s, perhaps enjoying the powerhouse economy or planning to get on a plane while drinking a soda purchased elsewhere. Suddenly, an alien in a spaceship comes down and, in the process of meeting these awesome 90s kids, spills some sort of high tech alien goop on the toes of their shoes. The kids then touch the shoe-goop, and it changes color from blue to black.*

*This commercial was later remade as the movie Avatar.

The kids react with glee – between first contact with advanced shoe-enhancing beings from another world and the fact that it was still the 90s, this was probably the best day ever.

The combination of weird goopy chemicals and the opportunity to integrate science fiction into my daily life proved too much, and right away I began badgering Mom to get me a pair. Money was on the tighter side at the time and I didn’t get a lot of the brand new shit I wanted, but I damn well got the alien goop shoes – I think it was mostly because Mom was so shocked that I was expressing any interest whatsoever in clothes, of all things.

Since then, though, I haven’t given-

What, you want to know the ending of the alien goop shoes story? Okay.

I wore the alien goop shoes to school for a while, and at first the other kids were all really interested and all ran up to me and wanted to press on my toes (acceptance at last!) before losing interest a week later when some smelly kid from the sticks wet himself during PE and became the next most interesting thing.

Yeah, I know. Sort of anticlimax. That’s why I wanted to move on.

Since then, though, I haven’t given two shits – nay, even one shit - about clothes or fashion. I have no idea which colors should be worn together or what pants will make me look gay, although I’m inclined to say ‘all of them.’

Part of my problem is that during my formative fashion years I sort of lived in isolation among nerds. Out of my core group of friends, I was the only person who didn’t come to class dressed as either an anime character or Chewbacca at some point in high school*, and pretty much everybody else in my social circle wore T-shirts from Goodwill and fifteen year old jeans.

*I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that even though my friends liked it, if I had the opportunity I would throw everything even remotely pertaining to anime into a volcano, and then take a dump in the volcano.

It was a fashion vacuum. All of my friends dressed the way I did or worse, so I assumed that my style of dress was normal and never really developed a fashion sense. (This vacuum applied to other things – I was also completely unaware that anybody at my high school was having sex, because, believe it or not, the heavily Mormon infused marching band and debate team crowd wasn’t quite the casual fuckfest that you might expect.)

What my lack of interest in fashion led to was the proliferation of my wardrobe as it exists today – pants of differing lengths and a wide array of T-shirts. I don’t deviate from this pattern because I know that, while it’s not high fashion, it also isn’t cause for overwhelming mockery. Any attempt to mix it up would be a blind stab; I have literally no idea what the verdict is on blazers with jeans right now, but I’d care not to find out firsthand.

The problem with a T-shirt based wardrobe is that T-shirts are generally a vehicle for graphics or phrases, which, in many cases, will turn out to be ironic or otherwise pithy.

Perhaps you see where I’m going with this.

I began accumulating ironic T-shirts when I was in high school – at the time I didn’t see anything wrong with wearing them because I thought they were funny and, as you will remember from earlier, I was under the impression that nobody at my high school was getting laid anyway.

Over the past few years, though, it’s come to my attention that ironic slogan T-shirts are more the purview of rotund men in their late 30s with ponytails and cell phone holsters* than that of the cool, funny, well adjusted men I hope to one day slightly resemble.

*My father is a slim, distinguished, fashionable guy who also happens to have a cell phone holster, and I’d like to make it clear that I am in no way mocking him. Your cell phone looks quite comfortable, holstered there on your hip. Right above your giant, mostly empty pocket.

So, sometime in the next three weeks, I’m going to dive headfirst into the perfect storm of things I hate – 1) Shopping for 2) clothes, that are 3) trendy, at least by my standards. This will also require 4) research about 2) clothes on 5) fashion websites so that I can know where best to 6) spend my money.
I don’t know that the clothes necessarily make the man, but in my experience they definitely can make the man look like a flaming idiot, which, as always, is what I’m trying to avoid.

Truman Capps is so wary of polo shirts.

In The Middle

Yeah, still waiting for THIS to happen...

Ten days ago I walked across a stage wearing a green bathrobe, shook hands with a guy I’d never met, and got handed a leather carrying case with a University of Oregon Alumni Association advertisement inside it. This process was somehow meant to signify that I was now officially smarter, as certified by the Oregon University System, but the entire time I kept expecting Ashton Kutcher to pop out of nowhere with a camera crew.

”You just got Punk’d! Oh, man, we got you so good! You didn’t think that was what graduation was actually like, did you? Man, you’re an idiot!”

(I have never in my life watched an episode of Punk’d. All I know is that there are cruel pranks and Ashton Kutcher is involved, so please forgive me if I screwed up all the details besides those two.)

Also, I carefully guarded against any sense of accomplishment or finality, because I had some very serious and well-founded doubts about whether I had actually passed my last class or not. Attentive readers will remember that my last class was a 100 level geology lecture that was also the only class I was taking.

You would think that only having one rudimentary class to concentrate on would be a piece of cake, but in my case, that piece of cake wound up being really unpleasant and difficult to eat – like a cake made of rocks, or one of those cardboard cakes with a stripper inside, only the stripper has been dead for a few days.

What I discovered was that when taking 16 credits, the sheer amount of stress forces you to muster work ethic to finish the work for all your hard classes, and then momentum alone carries you through the work for your easy gen ed classes. When taking four credits, though, school becomes a very small and inconsequential part of your day-to-day life.

While it may be no sweat to read 11 pages about the fossil record after a day of editing video footage and transcribing interviews, when the only thing you have to do in a given day is read 11 pages about the fossil record, it’s way easier to blow that one obligation off and get drunk in the backyard with your roommates.

So when I stood around sweltering in my expensive, ugly bathrobe, I was facing the very real possibility that I might have to be one of those sad, unfortunate souls who still has classes to take after walking at graduation.

Somehow, though, I pulled it off – I scored a C- in geology, which, because I’d taken the class Pass/No Pass, went onto my transcript as a big, friendly P. Just today I received a congratulatory email from the dean of the journalism school; I’m not sure if he was aware when he wrote the email that I’d achieved the ‘momentous milestone’ he was congratulating me on by eking out a passing grade in a 100 level class with only four percentage points between me and a summer geology course at West Los Angeles Community College.

So now I’m a college graduate with a degree in a dying industry in which I have no interest, living at home with his parents for a couple weeks until moving to a brand new city where he’s 80% sure there’s a job waiting.

Right now, though, I’m in the middle, and when I say the middle I want you to think about the Jimmy Eat World song ‘The Middle’, not the hit or miss sitcom The Middle which consists largely of jokes about Indiana.

I’ve left the boozy, mouse infested world of higher education and am bound for the boozy, douche infested world of entertainment, but right now I can’t really lay claim to either one. In between college and real life, it seems, there is a boring month at home where you spend a lot of time checking email and putting off unpacking, culling, and repacking your possessions for the eventual move.

This, in turn, makes for pretty lousy blog updates. That’s why this one was so late – I had to choose between writing about college reflections or something about anticipating the move to Los Angeles, but four out of my last six updates have been about those subjects, and I’m a firm believer in the idea that everything you find interesting is at least 85% less interesting to everybody else.*

*And now all of you who invited me to see your band play know why I never went.

You’ve probably quit paying attention to this update if you’re even still reading my blog. Poop. Monkeybutt. Anybody out there?

But, like Jimmy Eat World said, it just takes some time, something-something-something-something, in the middle, something-something… You get the idea. I’m cooling my heels, (kind of) packing my bags, and very purposefully not spending money in preparation for the next big stage of my life, and as we get closer to the day that I leave Oregon* there will probably be a sharp increase in the amount of nostalgic bullshit you’ve already been putting up with.

*I leave on July 18th. Everyone else who asks me will be redirected to this update.

2011 is just a nostalgic year, I guess. The end of my marching band career, the end of my college career, the end of my Oregon career, and the beginning of my Southern California career. I promise to try and get us through this with the bare minimum of sentimentality, if any at all.

Truman Capps just needs to go out and get in a high speed police chase just so he has something to write about on Sunday.

Overflow

It's only a slapstick comedy prop until you need one, at which point it's a godsend.

There is absolutely no greater panic in suburban life than when the toilet, finally fed up with your shit (literally), starts backing up.

When it happened to me a few days ago, I tried to talk my way through the situation, which quickly turned into me trying to convince the toilet to stop backing up, first through diplomacy, then through threats and profanity, the pitch of my voice rising as fast as the water level in the bowl.

“Oh, fuck me, no, toilet! Don’t do that! That’s the opposite of what I want you to do! The water is supposed to go down, not up! Look, just stop! If you stop now you won’t get anything on the floor, and we’ll just call it good. No hard feelings! What- No! God fucking damn it, it’s all over the floor now! What the hell, toilet? I thought we were friends! Why are you doing this – do you think you’re better than me or something? You think you’re too good for my bodily functions? Fuck you, toilet! I don’t need you! I can crap outside! Oh, fuck it, my shoes! Shitting cockfucks!”

But really, what else can you do? We sort of take for granted the idea that the toilet is the one place in the house that we can put things we never want to see again – from body waste to dead spiders to as much cocaine as possible before the FBI breaks down the door. I never really considered that the toilet might spontaneously decide to bring all these unwanted items back up, because the thought of a human excrement geyser in your house about eight feet away from your toothbrush is one of those things so horrible you try not to think about it until you have to.

So I was watching the water rise, yelling at my toilet, wracking my brain in search of a solution. All I could come up with was ‘Call a plumber’, because that’s The Thing You Do when the toilet breaks, just like rolling on the ground is the go to solution for catching on fire and calling 911 is the thing to do when a hobo attacks your front door.

Of course, calling a plumber is really sort of a long term solution, and by my own estimate I had about four seconds to convince the toilet to quit backing up before I had to make Sophie’s Choice regarding which of my bath towels I was going to sacrifice to the cleanup effort.

It just doesn’t seem right. When your lamp breaks, it doesn’t shine uncomfortably bright – it just quits illuminating the room. When your car breaks, it doesn’t automatically drive off a bridge into the river and lock all its doors – it just refuses to turn on or go anywhere. But when your toilet breaks, rather than simply not flushing it actually reverses itself and promptly creates more problems. Now not only do you have a broken toilet, but you’ve got to clean and disinfect your floor.

I had a vague recollection of a time a couple years ago when something similar to this had happened at a friend’s apartment, and while we dithered and yelped in confusion her roommate shoved past us, leapt into the line of fire, and heroically turned a small knob behind the toilet tank, which, as she later explained to us, shut off the water flow to the toilet and prevented outright disaster.

I called up that little memory an instant before doomsday, and a moment later I was bent over the toilet, my chin less than six inches from the rising water, my hand wrapped around the knob set in the wall behind the tank. I made an executive decision and started twisting it to the right as hard as I could.

“Righty-tighty!” I whimpered, a waterfall cascading down the side of the porcelean. “Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey! RIGHTY-TIGHTY LEFTY LOOSEY!”

Whether the toilet quit overflowing because of my cranking or because it had grown tired of the game, I’ll never know. What’s important is that it did stop – but not before coating the floor with water.

I threw some towels down and called Dad at work.

“Hey Dad,” I said. “Have we got a toilet plunger at the house?” I did my best to sound nonchalant, as though I wanted a toilet plunger for some innocuous, non-plunging oriented task, or perhaps because I was just making an alphabetical list of all the things that we had in the house and had just reached ‘P.’

“Yeah. There’s one in the garage, by the refrigerator.”

“Great! Cool. So that’s… Where that is.” I was hoping to wrap up the conversation quickly lest he question me and find out that even with a bachelor’s degree I still can’t be left alone in the house without fucking something up. “Garage it is, then.”

“Yes.” He was silent for a moment, choosing his next words. “…is there a problem, Truman?”

“Uh,” I muttered, looking over my shoulder and seeing that a trail of water had escaped one of the towels and was working its way across the tile toward the carpet. “No. Well, yes. But it’s nothing I can’t handle. I mean, I’m handling it now, as we speak. The plunger will help me handle it.”

“Great.” My Dad said, probably while shaking his head. “I’ll see you in a couple hours.”

I went to the basement and fetched the plunger – a plastic, accordion looking affair – and then returned to the toilet, which had mostly drained by now. I set to work plunging, but the rigid plastic plunger didn’t seal right and didn’t so much plunge the toilet as it created massive, frothy air bubbles that splattered more toilet water onto the floor, which was just what I needed at that point.

Dad returned a few hours later, produced a far superior rubber plunger from elsewhere in the garage, and had the toilet running smoothly again after only two solid plungings.

What’s the moral of this story? One, happy Father’s Day. Two, toilets, like the environment, are systems of incredible power that we should not take for granted lest they rise up and destroy us.

Truman Capps is happy to know he can always rely on his old friend potty humor for a few laughs.

The Things I've Learned

I did not learn how to artfully crop pictures.

1) Public Bathrooms Are Pretty Much Okay

I mean, use common sense of course, but there comes a time when you’ve got to lose that high school mentality of, ‘I have to poop but I’m going to hold it until I get home because all public bathrooms are full of AIDS.’ You’re going to hurt yourself if you try to live that way at the University of Oregon. If it looks clean, you use a seat cover, and the bathroom in question isn’t in a place that hobos can easily get to, you’re probably golden.

Lillis and LLC South have the best bathrooms on campus, followed by Allen Hall and Willamette. The EMU and library are iffy. You’d be healthier going to the bathroom inside Chernobyl than in the bathroom at Rennie’s Landing.

2) It Isn’t Stealing If They Left It In Your House

If you’ve gone to the trouble to throw a house party, anything that you find there the next morning is yours to keep. Those beer cans people left all over my floor? They’re mine now. And generally, I choose to throw those new possessions in the recycling.

That half-full fifth of vodka that you left in the kitchen? That is also mine, and I choose to put it in my liquor cabinet, with all of the other liquor that is mine. If you call me asking if I found your vodka, I’ll say no, because I didn’t – I found my vodka. If you want it, you can come over and clean the house and I’ll go to bed.

(If The Ex Girlfriend is reading this, the aforementioned rule only applies to alcohol in post-house party situations. I want my DVDs back.)

3) Drunk People Never Know When They’re Going To Throw Up

It’s not like when you’ve got the flu and you can feel it coming. With drunk people, the terror alert level goes from green to red in probably one second. Every time you ask a drunk person if they’re going to throw up, they’ll say, ‘No’, and that word is immediately followed by their vomit.

If a drunk person looks suddenly concerned or preoccupied, you have a choice to make: Are you going to be a hero and swiftly move that person into a bathroom or out of the house, or are you going to get the hell out of Dodge and watch the fireworks from a safe distance?

(Protip: If it’s a girl, ask her if she has a hair tie. Then you don’t have to hold her hair back and can concentrate on finding a place to empty out her garbage can when it’s full.)

4) 80% Of Men Are Slobs

For three days I watched hundreds of ants swarming a big chunk of hard boiled egg sitting on our kitchen counter, spread on there so thick and dense that the whole thing just looked solid black. When I finally asked my roommate who’d made the potato salad to clean up the ant infested chunk, he took a look at it and said, “Oh, gross! I didn’t even notice that!”

The same goes for the roommate who drank milk in the shower or the dormmate who preferred to shit in plastic bags rather than walk down the hall to the (reasonably clean) bathroom in our dorm. 80% of men are slobs. That’s why my roommate didn’t notice the ant laden hard boiled egg, and that’s why I put up with it for three days before saying anything about it.

5) End Your Day With Taquitos

Yes, it’s unhealthy to eat a deep fried tortilla wrapped around melted cheese and red meat within an hour or two of going to bed. Of course, if you were that concerned with your health, you wouldn’t be eating something at 7-11 anyway, would you?

If you’re going to have a taquito, you’ve got to do it at the end of the day. Eating a taquito is one of the best things that can happen to a person; if you start your day with that, you’ll be hard pressed to top it, and then you’ll probably be bitter that your day peaked at breakfast.

6) 80% Of Women Are Late To Everything

I recently sat down with a pen and paper and tried to calculate up the total amount of time I’ve spent waiting for women in my life, and the answer I came up with was exactly seventeen hojillion years. It’s gotten to the point where I’m thinking about just saying, ‘Meet me at 7:30’, so when I show up at 8:00 I only have to wait 15 more minutes for her to get there.

I get it, I get it – a lot of women are more concerned with their appearance than men and take longer to get ready. All I’m saying is, people compliment my hair every damn day and I got here early.

7) FinalCut Pro Works Better When You Eat Candy

One night two years ago, Mike and I were set up in one of the edit bays to cut together an episode of Writers. Mike, a wizened veteran of digital video editing, turned to me and proceeded to teach me one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned about the creation of electronic media:

“This is going to take us awhile,” he said, and then produced a crusty, wrinkled $10 bill from his equally crusty, wrinkled acid wash jeans and shoved it into my hand. “You need to go to the vending machine and get us a candy feast. There should be Almond Joy in there, somewhere.”

Did I utilize candy in all of my FinalCut work this past year? No. The videos where I didn’t eat candy are the bad ones. The good ones were brought to you by Reese’s Pieces.

There’s a historical precedent for this:

Clearly, the inferior film technology of the 1940s required a lot more candy. And maybe some deep fried pork chops, too.

Truman Capps also learned that list based updates are a great way to circumvent writers’ block.

What Good Are Notebooks?

This is what my last four apartments have looked like.

Four times, now, I’ve stood in the middle of my room, looked at all the stuff in it, said, “Fuck, why do I own all this shit?”, and then started to dismantle it, piece by piece, and put it into boxes.

Most of the time, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape when it comes to not being like somebody from Hoarders. I’ve got no problem throwing useless shit away, and I don’t bring things home just because they’re free. Not only do I refrain from keeping stacks of newspapers in my house, I go one step further and refrain from reading newspapers in the first place. I don’t even start to put myself at risk.

But then, when the time comes to put my whole room into boxes and take it home with me, I start to regard my lifestyle with the same sense of exasperated bewilderment as we reserve for the people on TV who bottle and catalogue their own urine for years at a time, just in case they need it.

For example, I’ve been trucking the same box full of notebooks back and forth up and down I-5 for four years now. Nevermind that I don’t take notes in the first place, or that handwriting is both a laborious and painful process for me – at least I know where they are in case I need them, right?

Well, no, actually, because every year I forget that I have a box full of notebooks until I’m moving, when I open the box, see that it’s full of notebooks, and think, “Huh. Box full of notebooks. I should put this in a blog.”

I think a lot of my problem is that I tend to store things in cardboard boxes. And when I say cardboard boxes, I mean the boxes that I moved them in. And when I say ‘store’, I really mean, ‘bring the box from the car into my room, set it down, and leave it there for nine months, unopened, until I pick it up and take it back out to the car.’

Of course, it would make more sense to unpack everything and put it up on shelves or in drawers, but I don’t have any shelves or drawers because if I bought them I’d just have to assemble and disassemble them every time I moved, and who wants to go through all that nonsense when you can just have a desk surrounded by boxes and live like you’re in a refugee camp?

Really, nowhere I’ve lived for the past four years has felt like home, because every time I’ve moved into a place, I’ve done so with the knowledge that I’ll be moving out in nine months.

As a freshman, I knew I didn’t want to live in the dorms next year, because the only guys who spend a second year in the dorms are the ones who stand awkwardly by the bathroom and try to hit on the towel clad girls going in to take showers – not that there’s anything wrong with that; I just prefer to be a more subtle type of pervert.

As a sophomore, I lived in a decrepit quad with management whose heads were lodged so firmly up their own asses that they probably felt more at home inside their rectums than I did in the dirt cheap fleabag room I was reluctantly inhabiting.

As a junior, I lived in a three story townhouse that was just as luxurious and perfect for parties as it was insanely expensive, requiring me to spend at least two hours a day fretting about how much of my college fund I was pissing away to rent an apartment with a walk in closet to store my 16 T shirts and two pairs of shoes.

And this year, I live in a closetlike alcove in a duplex miles away from campus, and while it’s nice enough, I’m graduating. The only way I’d live here a second year with no scholastic obligation to stay in Eugene would be if my roommates were replaced by three Christina Hendrickses, in which case I’d spend every day standing awkwardly by the bathroom and trying to hit on them as they went in to take showers.

I never make an effort to make my living space truly livable because my housing is always temporary. I’ll go to Ikea and get all excited about the classy, super efficient model studio units they’ve got set up all over the place, but then I think about how much setup time must’ve gone into creating that tiny Scandinavian paradise. I mean, an Ikea dresser weighs more than an aircraft carrier and requires a degree in engineering to build (plus a degree in hieroglyphics to read the fucking instructions) – who wants to go through all that mess every nine months?

But in LA,* I’ve found a place where I can see myself living for a long time – a place where my roommates are as nerdy and anal retentive as I am, where cute girls reportedly live upstairs, where there is a restaurant nearby that sells deep fried tacos.

*Yeah, that’s right, assholes, I am talking about LA again. I used to talk about marching band or Battlestar Galactica - at least my new fixation doesn’t immediately cockblock me like the old ones did.

I’m going to hit up an Ikea (if they even have those down there) and start grabbing every piece of umlauted furniture I can find, because I’m tired of living out of boxes. I want to have a grown up house for my grown up life, even if my grown up life includes a poster of a painting of robots and humans swordfighting.*

*Not cockblocking myself online, you see, frees me up to cockblock myself in real life.

Will furnishing an apartment make me feel at home in a new city? Maybe. Will surrounding myself with heavy, near immobile furniture prevent me from turning tail and moving back to Oregon as soon as the going gets tough? Definitely.

Make your laziness work for you, people.

Truman Capps becomes a college graduate tomorrow, by the way.

Girlfriend Is Worse

I love when exactly the image I was looking for pops up right away.

Hey, remember how I was going to make a movie this term? Yeah, me too. Honestly, I was kind of hoping you’d forget, because I didn’t make a movie this term in spite of all my bravado and preparation, which rivals my senior prom insofar as public humiliation and frustration is concerned.

Let’s dissect why this happened, and why I’m so ashamed of it that I seriously debated even calling attention to it with a blog post until I realized I had nothing to write about and I was already a day late:

I hate being lied to, first and foremost. I mean, I guess there aren’t a lot of people who enjoy being deceived, but I really take it personally when somebody straight up lies to me – not in the, ‘I asked you how I looked and you said I looked great when really you thought I looked mediocre but you were being polite’ way, but in the ‘I asked if you shot my dog and you said no but you actually did’ way.

I feel as though if somebody is going to do something, they ought to be able to own up to it. Sure, actions speak louder than words, but being willing to use your words to acknowledge your completely heinous actions is worth at least half points in my book.

What I hate even more than garden variety lying, though, is people who make a habit of lying to themselves.

Sure, at the outset it sounds harmless – if somebody is willing to delude himself, well, then he deserves what he’s getting, right? – but in my experience, people who lie to themselves get so confident that they are, in fact, all that and a bag of chips that other people start buying into their bullshit and get dragged down with them when their façade collapses, Inception style.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a senior named Andrew decided to take me under his wing and ‘mentor’ me. Through a series of awkward, ham fisted monologues at arcades or during drives to speech and debate practice, he tried to impart some clumsy life lessons about morality, ‘doing the right thing’, and what it meant to be a man.

For my part, I felt as though I’d already picked up a decent sense of these values from my parents’ upbringing, but I was flattered that somebody saw potential in me and so I sat still for his regurgitated Boy Scouts of America life lessons and generally came to value the connection we had.*

*As I write this, I realize that this situation looks at least a little predatory, so I’d like to point out that at no point in these proceedings did anybody touch my wiener.

After several months of this, his girlfriend, a close friend of mine, broke up with him, and he spent the next year or so stalking her, showing up in tears on her doorstep, trying to manipulate her away from other men, and playing every cheap, dirty trick in the book to try and get her back, no matter the cost to her or anyone else’s feelings. Somewhere in the mix he also found time for an affair with a married woman and a subsequent bonus affair with one of his coworkers’ girlfriends.

He’d wanted so badly to be a role model that he just convinced himself that he was, but as soon as the chips were down he actually turned out to have about as much strength of character as mayonnaise that’s been left in the sun for too long. Watch one of your supposed role models do something like that and you might just have to start a cynical comedy blog in college.

So to tie this back to me:

I wanted very badly to make a film this spring – a snappy, dialogue driven comedy to serve as a portfolio piece showcasing my talents as a writer and my friends’ talents as cinematographers, editors, and actors. Unlike most student films at the University of Oregon, my movie would go beyond just talk and actually get made because of the intelligence and professionalism of everyone involved. I had no hard evidence indicating that I was up to this sort of thing, so I just told myself that I was and hoped for the best.

We went through a rigorous audition process and found six exceptionally talented actors to fill out the roles, made a crapton of phone calls to potential shooting locations, and got a head start eyeballing film festivals in which we could enter the finished product. I felt certain that we were going to make something great.

But then, nothing happened.

And I could write a whole other blog about the ins and outs of why nothing happened with my movie. But the simplest way to put it is that making a movie is, surprisingly, really fucking hard, and I’d deluded myself into thinking that I was somehow qualified to overcome all those obstacles when in reality I handled them with all the grace and poise of an old man falling on an escalator, which, in turn, was a waste of my cast and crew’s time.

In a way, Andrew turned out to be a really good role model by being the exact opposite of the sort of person I want to be. Whenever I’m at a crossroads in my life, I ask myself, ‘What would Andrew do?’, and then I do the other thing. Likewise, this failure and embarrassment has taught me some pretty valuable lessons about how not to approach independent filmmaking, so I wouldn’t label the entire term a wash.

Maybe people lying to themselves is the only way anything gets done in the world: People try to overcome their insecurities by telling themselves they can do things that they clearly can’t, and while most of them fail, some succeed against improbable odds, and those are our Sam Raimis, our Kurt Vonneguts, our Batmans. Maybe, one day, if you lie to yourself enough, your fantasies just might come true.

That being said, I’ve got myself fully convinced that my transition from Oregon to Los Angeles will be painless and almost immediately lucrative in both a financial and social sense. Sure, it sounds unlikely, but what if?

Truman Capps is just murdering these deadlines.

LA Craigslist

I recently spent a great deal of time searching for cheap housing in Los Angeles with the help of craigslist. I was fortunate enough to find a great place in a great neighborhood at a relatively great price, but only after wading through the absolute dregs of humanity to get there.

And now, because I lack the inspiration to throw together a cohesive, well written update, I present to you my findings, with my comments attached:

(For those of you who just got here from 1996, click on the pictures to make them larger and readable.)

Unhelpful

Cozy

Live In Girlfriend

No He Or She

Janiture

Truman Capps is seriously going to call that Iranian guy, though.

Last Class

I finished my journalism education in a geology class taught in the business school. Go Ducks?

I rarely skip class. If I had to count the number of times I’ve skipped class in four years of college, I’d say I’ve probably skipped around 15 times, total. Maybe 20.

These classes cost money, goddamn it – not to me, of course, but that almost raises the stakes. I’ve been blessed with a college education on someone else’s dime; it’d be practically fraudulent for me to take that money and then not utilize the product it’s buying. Well, maybe not fraudulent. Perhaps ‘cocktacular’ is a better term.

That said, when I get to class, I seldom if ever pay attention. I mean, shit, I gave up on taking notes sophomore year and never looked back. A lot of people take notes because it helps them pay attention, which was exactly why I stopped – all that paying attention bullshit was really getting in the way of my daydreaming, which I think is far more important to a writer than an intricate knowledge of the cultural impact of voodoo in the colonial period. Evidently my professor agreed, because he gave me an A-.

I paid close attention in the following classes: Feature Writing I, Feature Writing II, Intro To Electronic Media, Advanced Electronic Media, Writing For The Media, and Media Aesthetics. These classes were interesting to me and relevant to what I want to do with my life, so it wasn’t even a struggle to pay attention.

In my other classes, though, I go, sit down, and divide my attention between the front of the room and the clock for however long the class lasts. I don’t text or fuck around on the computer – I just sit and let my mind wander. It’s a very peaceful and meditative time. No wonder so many free spirited girls from the suburbs become Buddhists in college.

Perfect attendance and lackluster participation have earned me a 3.53 GPA. I’m not telling you this so that the girls who read my blog and reportedly “really like me” (thanks, Anonymous!) will tear off their clothes and line up for a chance at my clearly superior genetic material;* I’m telling you this because I think it reflects way more on the University of Oregon than it does on me.

*To make up for what could be considered egocentric bragging, here’s this story: Once, while trying to mount my bike, I caught my leg on the seat, lost my balance, and fell over into a clump of bushes, dragging the bike down on top of me, in front of a large group of people. In my defense, I had only learned to ride a bike three months earlier. I was 20.

Going to a state college is a lot like running away from a bear: You don’t have to run the fastest, you just have to run slightly faster than the other guy. In the bear scenario, the other, slower guy gets mauled horribly by the bear, giving you time to escape. In the college scenario, the guy who never shows up to class gets a C or an F, while the guy who shows up, smiles, and doesn’t pay attention pulls at least a B+, because a lot of the classes here are structured to penalize poor attendance more than poor attention.

Man, if there was an ‘Analogies For Writers’ class I would so take it, and all of you would thank me.

Of course, exams are ostensibly there to make sure you’ve been paying attention, but fortunately for me, almost every professor I’ve had has released an itemized list of topics that will be covered on the upcoming exam, so the night before I can go down the list, familiarize myself with those terms courtesy of Google/Wikipedia, and be set the next morning. I don’t even buy textbooks anymore.

I’d been woolgathering my way through a particularly dull geology lecture today – evolution, for all its controversy in the south, is still seriously boring – when, with three minutes left until class let out, I realized that this was the last college class I would ever attend.

The next three minutes were very wistful and melancholic as I tried to savor every last second of classroom education before it was gone forever, as opposed to ignoring it and wishing it would end faster like I’d been for the past four years.

The thing is, it’s easy to savor every detail and form an amazing mental picture of something like a sunset or a wedding, but sitting in a lecture hall full of freshmen who keep dropping their iClickers somehow does not lend itself quite as well to sentimentality.

I wound up thinking a lot about my first college class, back in fall of 2007: COLT 101, Intro to Comparative Literature.* Sitting in class that first day, I paid rapt attention and took meticulous notes, because college, I knew, was a big deal. There were no second chances, and as we’d been told in our orientation seminars, we couldn’t expect to just coast through four years and get a diploma.

*The Comparative Literature department had recently changed its four-letter class abbreviation to COLT from CLIT, presumably because lots of business majors were signing up.

I learned a lot of important stuff in college, but I’d say that the bulk of that learning took place at Taylor’s, or somebody’s apartment, or Fathom’s, or a motorcoach, or Rennie’s Landing. Very little took place in a classroom, because I wasn’t interested in learning most of what was being taught.

The way I see it, my family didn’t buy me an education, they bought me an opportunity to get a piece of paper that tells employers that they have to pay me more for some arbitrary reason. Everything I’ve picked up along the way – friends, social skills, improved writing abilities, a taste for whiskey – is part of the package.

Truman Capps will feel like an ass if he fails geology now.