My Pathetic Geek Story

Probably unlike the rest of the world, I don't regularly read the Onion for the comedic news, though I do think they're usually hysterical. I actually prefer The Onion A.V. Club, I guess what you'd call their serious side. It's filled with reviews of movies and videos and music and great feature interviews (like the one they did with the four Daily Show correspondents -- beautiful stuff). But I mainly read it because I hate to miss out on the comic strip Pathetic Geek Stories by Maria Schneider (an Onion staffer).

Each week, she takes a story submitted by a reader and turns it into a few panels of painful hilarity. These are usually tales from  20 and 30-somethings looking back on something they did in their early teenage years that ended in embarrassment that does more than redden the cheeks -- it is public humiliation that scars the person for life.

I often think about what my own adolescent pathetic geek story is. I once walked through the cafeteria at the Hornell Middle School for the entire lunch period with my fly open for all the world to see my tightie-whiteys. Not being able to do much of anything in gym class is embarrassing, but I don't exactly have a lock on that one (though I was okay at the square dancing. Yes, we did square dancing in phys ed. Isn't that pathetic in and of itself? The school system should be ashamed.).

What's most embarrassing to me is something that really only was between me and one other person.

She was the first girl I fell in love with.

I first saw Susan when I was in the first grade at the Lincoln School. It was my birthday -- always a big deal back then, since you had to bring cupcakes to class, enough for everyone. So everyone in class knew it was my birthday. We were all lined up in the hallway outside our class room, probably getting ready to go down to the cafeteria (we had to line up a lot back in those day) and the other first grade class marched by us. A boy named Nicky (who I remember as being famous for throwing up near the water fountain once) told me there was a girl in that class with the same birthday as me, and he pointed her out. She was a towheaded little angel I thought. I was smitten. For pretty much the next five years.

To bad I didn't have a blog back then, so I'd remember more of the details. But I don't. I know I became friends with her, went to her place over in Maple Court Home apartments, met and befriended other people she knew over there. I was devastated when they announced that as of the beginning of fourth grade, all the students who lived there would have to start going to Bryant school -- a stunning piece of bureaucratic idiocy even for the 1970s, since Lincoln school was about six blocks away from them, while Bryant School was about three miles. (All students in Lincoln were conditioned to hate Bryant students.)

Still we stayed friends, and as of the fifth grade, all students in both places were merged together in classes at the Middle School. Susan's mother had by then moved her family to a house that was situated almost directly between my home and the middle school, making it a breeze for me to walk her home after school.

Looking back on it, I can't understand why I believed she didn't know I was madly in love with her. Her older brother certainly knew it, and tortured me over it in a playground scuffle -- okay, less of a scuffle and more of an ass-handing-to. My other good female friend of the time, Patsy, I once heard had got in an argument with Sue -- over me. I think at the time I considered this wishful thinking. In fact, I still do.

So the fifth grade was rolling along nicely and I decided that keeping my feelings about Sue to myself anymore was too much torture to take. Unbearable! I couldn't handle it. I had to let her know. So, one day, I think around out mutual birthday in December, I sat in my room and carefully crafted a hand-written multiple page note to her that spelled out everything I felt about her, how wonderful she was, how I wanted to be her boyfriend and not just her friend-who-is-a-boy. (Oh, what I would give to see a copy of that note today).

I gave the note to her the next time I walked her home --my heart was beating like a night at Stomp -- but I made her promise not to read it until she was in her house and I was safely away.

And I never spoke to her again.

I laugh and laugh whenever I see a movie or tv show where the friend character tells the romantic lead, "You've got to tell her how you feel or you're going to lose her!" Idiots.

What happened was, I gave her the note, and even then, before I was old enough to have pubic hair let alone a clue about romantic entanglement, I was awash in fear and worry. The thought of her rejecting my advances was too much for me to bear. So, my defense mechanism was to act like it never happened.

So, when next I saw her, I avoided her. I looked away from her gaze, I used different hallways at at school, and I found a new route to walk home that wouldn't take me within a mile of her house.

I did this for about three years.

Susan's family moved to Corning. Instead of relief, I felt terrible. It wasn't like I didn't know what I was doing all that time -- I was well aware of what a retarded way of handling it was. But I guess I always thought I'd have time to rectify it. Should my body ever generate the guts and fortitude needed for such a move. (Doubtful.)

I figured I'd never see her again. Not true. She actually was very good friends with a friend of mine in Hornell, Karen,  and for senior year, Sue moved back and lived with Karen so she could go to school and graduate with us.

I had a girlfriend now, mind you. I had friends and a modicum of notoriety in school for things like being on yearbook staff, and the plays, and my grades, and I like to think not even the worst of the jocks hated me like I hated them. I was a different person, so far removed from the pathetic loser in the fifth grade who poured his heart out and then tried to ignore it.

But you know what? I did it again. I saw her in the hall one day before I knew the circumstances of her return. I can truthfully say I was utterly entranced by her. And it was like all the years since 1981 hadn't even happened. I couldn't speak to her. I couldn't look at her. Catching her glancing my way made my face burn with shame.

Eventually, by the end of the year, we had to speak occasionally (never say never). When I signed her yearbook, she remembered how much I liked to draw back in our Lincoln School days, and asked me to draw something. I think I drew some shots of 'Mazing Man, a favorite of mine at the time.

I just looked in my high school year book and she wrote in part: "Eric - I can still remember back - way back in those dasy at Lincoln schoo when Patsy and I would get in arguments over you. You used to go crazy over Spider-man!! That seems sooo long ago but I can still picture it in my heas as if it were only yesterday. Those were the good ol' days!"

Good ol' days indeed.

That wasn't even totally the end of it. I saw Sue and Karen at my ten year high school reunion and we talked for a bit. After that, Sue and I even corresponded for a time via e-mail -- she'd since become a chemist -- but that pretty much ended when she started dating a guy who I think she has since married and had a baby with.

So I guess it ended well, 20 years later.

But for many, many years, let's face it: I defined the term loser with my actions. Or inactions. I can't think of a bigger pathetic geek story for me, ever.

Boy Scouts? Ha!

I remember vividly as a pre-teen flushing an entire pack of my parent's cigarettes down the crapper. I felt I was doing a major service to them. After all, my father was the same person who once sat my brother and I down in front of a screen on which he showed a series of slides depicting the very, very worst in things that could be taken out of the human body. The slides depicted everything from Cirrhosis of the liver caused by too much hooch to, of course, the charcoal black lungs of a lifetime smoker.

I like to tell the story to anyone who will listen of what cured me in an instant from ever following my parents down the road to smoker-dom. My aunt and uncle and my cousins used to come over to our house on New Year's Eves when I was small. We'd eat pizza, watch "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and get to stay up past midnight. On one of those evenings, I was thirsty and apparently I thought a half-full can of warm pop (we call it Pop here, dammit!) seemed like it would be adequate to quench my thirst. I found one on the end table in the living room, took a swig with gusto --

And swallowed a mouth full of carcinogen ash, swirled in with the soft drink.

Thanks to one of the smokers in my family, I'd just done the equivalent of lick it the ashtray clean. I hacked and coughed and spit and drank glass after glass of water, my mom standing over me giving each cup full as I needed it, as I tried to get the foulness out of my mouth.

I got phobic about cigarettes after that (and I still am). During one week each summer, my brother and I were conscripted -- as were the children of all who worked for the Hornell fire department -- to do early morning cleanup at the grounds of the annual Fireman's Carnival. This consisted of getting up at 5am to walk around the rides and games and pick up trash and place it in bags. Ninety percent of this trash was cigarette butts.

I wouldn't touch discarded butts unless Dad got me some surgical gloves from out of the city ambulance.

It's not that I don't understand addiction. My own experience is, I suppose, reasonably boring since it involves only caffeine, a problem I share with 90% of Americans. I was hooked on the sweet nectar of Coca-cola well into college, where my job with dining services meant constant access to free-flowing Coke. I would drink it throughout a shift and then fill up a travel cup to take with me to classes or my dorm on the way out. And as a student, I had to eat there anyway, so I drank it even when not working. I realized this was a problem and by the time I began my sophomore year, I'd kicked Coke for good -- shifting instead to the limon taste of Sprite. (In 1998 I shifted to Diet Sprite and after about a year of hating it, have now come to like it more than the sugared kind).

I like to think that dropping Coke signals that I went caffeine free, but it's not true. Chocolate took over quickly as the primary way for me to ingest the most legal of addictive, diuretic cardiac stimulants, and still is. If I could kick chocolate, I'd only have starchy, carbohydrate filled items left -- life without anything based on grain or potatoes would be no life at all.

And I like mayonnaise. A sandwich without mayo is like driving without a steering wheel. It can be done, but it's ridiculous to contemplate.

That doesn't stop me from busting on my wife constantly for her ever growing need for morning coffee. That beverage is another thing my parents turned me off of as a child, specifically my mother, who would frequently request we get her a cup, usually as she was getting ready for her 3pm to midnight shift at the ICU. I'd put the water on the stove and whip up a cup of instant 'fee, mixed with a dollop of milk (Mom now drinks it black) and attempt to carry it up stairs to her in the bathroom, usually spilling the steaming liquid on my hands, forcing me to rush back down to the kitchen to wash the stench off. The smell of coffee is strangely welcoming, but the bitter taste of it still turns my stomach. I try to make sure Bon gives me a kiss good-bye in the morning before she's touched the cup to her lips.

All of this is a round about way to explain to you the horror I felt, how I actually feared for my life for a split second this weekend, when I broke Bon's coffee pot. I was putting it in the dishwasher, it clanged against a plate, and the entire pouring lip chipped and fell off. I panicked for a split second. This wasn't like the flushing of the cigarettes -- my parents probably never knew that even happened, or if they did, shrugged it off and went out to get another carton.

This was more like stealing all the glass pipes and syringes in a the entire city just as the junkies are coming back to the crack house! This was a coffee maker we'd bought in Massachusetts -- the chances of getting the exact carafe that works with it, especially before Bon returned from her weekend travels, was unlikely.

I was already planning on going out to buy her a completely new coffee maker to stave off her low-caffeine wrath when I remembered... knowing it was a glass coffee pot, she'd purchased a second pot back when we originally got the maker. It was safely tucked in a corner of the garage and has now been washed up is ready to go into use. She'll never know it's the replacement. Well, until she reads this.

But it just goes to show you, addicts are always prepared.

A Night with Joel Grey

Cool -- I just won tickets on the radio to JOEL GREY: The Road to Cabaret, an Evening of Conversation, Music, and Q & A . The question they asked during WICB's Best of Broadway was "For what 1985 film did Joe Grey get nominated for the Golden Globe?"

I knew the answer, but cheated with a quick google (it's a verb!) anyway to confirm the full title: Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. The announcer came back on the radio to congratulate me and called "The Adventure Continues" (which it might have had that film not tanked). So I didn't need to be anal.

So, that's $100 worth of tickets to see a Broadway legend, which is pretty nice. Of course, I'd most like to ask him what it was like to work on the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer....

Finger and Thumb in the Shape of an L on Her Forehead

I have a confession to make.

I don't know left from right.

Well, let me clarify, since I certainly do know how to find out which side is on my left and which side on my right -- I just don't know left from right instantaneously.

Something must have happened when I was a child. I don't know what. Did one of my parents do this? Did an older cousin teach it to me backwards as a cruel joke? Did I get confused by a teacher who did the left/right lesson facing the class instead of facing the chalk board?

It no longer matters. It's a disconnect that's been in my brain for as long as I can remember. If I'm calmly plotting a route or giving or listening to directions, no problem. But if I'm quickly snapping out directions to someone, you can count on them getting a wrong turn thrown in. If I'm called upon to immediately turn one way, I always veer in the wrong direction.

I don't think I ever even knew how bad it was until one day in high school driver's education class. We were out in the car with the extra brake on the passenger side, the one Mr. Printy would gladly slam on to without warning if he saw a potential problem. We were going over a bridge on the end of East Main Street and he told me, as we were in the middle of the bridge, to go right.

I immediately turned the wheel to the left. He slammed the brake down and we all got jammed against the seat belts.

"Your other right," he said with barely controlled rage.

Since then, I've gone to great pains to correct this tendency toward misdirection. I've sat in the car during long rids and quizzed myself. I even took to naming my left hand "Clinton" in hopes that would help (but turns out when someone says "right-wing" or "left-wing," I still have to stop and think about which is the liberals).

My only hope is that eventually I'll find some trick, a mnemonic, a cheat that will instantly give me the data I need when I need it. Either that or its back to writing a big L and R on the back of my hands. Maybe cufflinks would work... if only I had cuffs.

Geek Proof

I read this today -- the Blog of Galactus -- and just about wet myself laughing. Of course, if you don't know Galactus, the eater of worlds, or Uatu the Watcher, well, some of it might not be funny, though you'll certainly be able to see how the blog of a being of infinite power is so like that of your average shmuck off the Interstate. So I proclaim it damn funny either way. (Or as the cosmic devourer himself put it, "ftobwmp! (flooding the Orion belt with my piss!)".