Fictional Characters Who I Would Totally Date If I Were Single And They Weren't Fictional:

1. The guy from the American Office.
2. The guy from the American Office.
3. The guy from the American Office.
4. The guy from the British Office, maybe.

I'm back! And a fine vacation it was. Too much happened to recap in full here, but we went to two excellent, though totally different, parties (Eoinstock and Robbie's grandmother's birthday party), made paella, went to a really good museum in Salem, visited the Ganny, ate a lot, and got to see Robbie's dad and his men's chorus dance to "Oops, I Did It Again," which was worth the price of a plane ticket right there.

And now I'm back and it feels like fall, and there's lots of stuff to get done around here, especially considering that we're hosting Thanksgiving. I'm really excited about it, but I'll be more excited when the rooms are actually all painted and everything else is fixed up. A guy is coming around lunchtime to give us an estimate on fixing the front porch railing, though, so that's good, and our sofa and porch furniture should be arriving soon too. Not that I really see us using the porch furniture at Thanksgiving, I suppose.

And now I'm going to go test out the dining room paint.

It turns out we aren't done after all--Tizzed has just sent me his brother-in-law story, a tale of conflict that will both horrify and amuse. Here you go:

First of all, I want to stress that this story is completely true. Well, except for the parts that I made up. It’s been about 8 years or so since this actually happened, and like any good story that is told through the oral tradition, things get lost, changed or otherwise manipulated to make me seem like less of a jerk in the retelling. I’ve been working hard on how to craft the story to be told so well over email. I think a lot of it comes from gestures and other physical acts during the telling of the story, so it might not translate perfectly. It has become the epic of my life, however, kind of like ‘Beowulf tizzed’ if you will. I just learned that a friend of a friend who knew me for 5 years or so, also knew of the story for a while, but just this year learned I was the protagonist. So, here we go.

The setting is Christmas Eve, sometime in the late 90’s. I can’t remember the exact year, but the best guess would be 1997. So, with that in mind you can imagine our giddiness to see ‘Flubber’ and ‘Titanic’, as well as looking forward to that new Nathan Lane sitcom on NBC, all while listening to the CD ‘Are U Still Down’ by Tupac Shakur. There, you have an appropriate setting. Like any good holiday in Wisconsin, I was sucking down the Miller Lites. Even more so since I had just turned 21, and now felt obligated to drink. Not like you need an excuse in Wisconsin to drink, but for some reason I drank more after my 21st than before, and not purely due to the fact that procurement was easier. Face it, it was pretty easy before that.

We were over at a cousin’s or aunt or something’s house. The hosts are my mom’s mom’s sister’s daughter. Whatever that makes us, they throw the exact same Xmas party every year. You can always count on cheesy potatoes, hot beef sandwiches and mixed nuts. This year was a little different, as I was to meet my second oldest sister’s boyfriend. I’d heard a little about him, but not too much. Dating wasn’t a huge priority for our family during high school. Only my oldest sister dated a guy regularily, and he was a bit of a scumbag. I liked him though because he’d play video games with me. Not having a brother will definitely cloud your judgement on your sisters’ boyfriends. What I had heard before the party was that this guy was sometimes a little hard to deal with.

So, we were all sitting around and playing games. Now, I have to stress to you that I was pretty spineless at this stage in my life. You could pretty much verbally snap at me, and by then I’d heard them all. What you didn’t do with me was insult my intelligence. Everybody had to create some sort of a niche in order to survive high school, and I embraced that of ‘nerd’. I knew that I was smart, and took pride in it. So, when playing a game of (appropriately enough) Family Feud, I became more than a bit enraged when the following occurred.

I couldn’t think of an answer for a given question, and then maybe thought a little too far out of the box. Nothing extraordinary for me, and a good example would be that if the question was “Name an appliance in your kitchen:” I’d maybe say something like “Breadmaker”, knowing full well that it would get a strike, but it was what I could think of at the time. Anyways, he starts going on about “Man, that was such a stupid answer!”. Huh? You don’t come over as a guest to my place (okay, my mom’s mom’s sister’s daughter’s place) and say that to me. I think it then escalated to a ‘Give it up dude’ on my part, to which he said ‘Make me’.. or something to that effect. This was before I started to seriously work out, so I was a pudgy 220 or so. He weighs probably 140. I figured I had the edge in any physical confrontation. So I got up from my chair, put an arm around his head (in an inoffensive way as possible.. much as I would do as if I were mockingly putting someone in a headlock) and before I knew it he had grabbed my scrotum. Sitting down, he pivoted, cupped his hands and took a hold of my junk, which was more startling than painful, honestly.

Okay, to be honest, my fighting experience up to that point was rather small. I once got punched in the head in a mock punch gone awry in the 7th grade, but that was the extent of it. What I did know was that the fist-grab of the ol’ nutsack was generally viewed upon as either dirty tactics, a last resort or a test of whether or not I was a transvestite. Needless to say, I was startled, so I probably tightened my grip on his head, and then we were soon separated. No harm – no foul. He went outside to be de-briefed by my sister, as my other two sisters tried to figure out what the hell happened. “Ted… what happened? Why did you grab onto him like that?” “He grabbed my SACK!” Stunned faces.

The epilogue is that he is now my brother in law, and I have to deal with him during family functions. Last year, we drew names for Xmas gifts, and naturally I got him. There was discussion of an appropriate gift, but none was found. The other best part to the story was me defending myself on the ride home. My parents were obviously embarrassed, and my two sisters were fascinated at the altercation. I remember re-explaining everything, and my mother and father just kind of shaking their heads, and saying .. ‘Uh.. let’s just not talk about it…” “But mom!” I yelled, “He grabbed me in the family jewels, you don’t find this odd?” “Still.. I don’t want to talk about it.” And to this day, even though me and my sisters re-live it almost every Xmas, my parents still have a moratorium on talking about it.

Well, no one else seems to be submitting any stories, so I think this walk down memory lane is officially finished. Oh well.

Anyhow, I'm here in Rhode Island. Today we went sailing, during which I came perilously close to throwing up but did not actually do so, and mini-golfed and tried to shop for discount clothes with minimal success. Oh, and I've been reading 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which is kind of depressing because I've seen about 20 of them and thus am way off pace unless I'm going to live to be 1500 years old, which I believe to be inadvisable. (Although by then they'll probably be delivering sushi to our homes in pneumatic tubes, and that might be worth it.)

The rest of the week promises to be just as madcap. I'll keep you all posted.

Dr. J has granted me the privilege of telling you the story of what happened at her high school reunion. Though quite short, this is the greatest story in the world because (and I say this with all due respect to Dr. J, who is an excellent person, with greater forbearance than anyone else I've ever met, and who could come into your house, rewire it, redecorate it, present you with a fitness plan, and do your makeup on any day of the week) once you hear it, you'll never feel bad about anything you say ever again. I'm going to get great whopping chunks of detail wrong, and I forget the names of the main participants so those are obviously fictional, but rest assured that the fundamental aspects of the story are unchanged.

As background to my retelling of this story, I should tell you all the circumstances in which I originally heard it. When we were in Germany last October we went Dutch for a day, and it was the sort of day that was objectively possibly a failure, travel-wise, in that we kept showing up at places that were closed or not what we expected and also it rained an epic amount, but we were all easygoing and enjoying each other's company and so it ended up being one of the most fondly remembered days I've had, traveling or otherwise. (On reflection, I think it was the happy memory of spending eight hours eating pretzel sticks in the back of an Opel that made me think it was probably fine to watch all 22 episodes of "Arrested Development" with Dr. J and Big T over New Year's rather than, you know, seeing stuff.) We were all getting a little punchy by the end of the day, though, and we'd somehow gotten lost somewhere along the Netherlands-Germany border on our way to see Coesfeld, and it was dark and I remember Big T making some very dubious but also totally awesome U-turns, and Robbie and I were pretty keyed up anyhow for getting to see Coesfeld, which I think had become a sort of mythical place in our minds, like Camelot or, I don't know, Narnia. So we were giddy, and although there was probably actually something that precipitated this story, as I remember it Dr. J, who was pretty seriously hepped up on crepes, started telling it out of a clear blue sky, in a lull in the conversation. And as I remember it she said:

"When I got to my fifth high school reunion I saw this girl I'd kind of known, Mary Black, and she seemed obviously pregnant to me, I mean, she was really big in the stomach, really huge. So I went up to her, and I said, 'Wow, Mary, congratulations, when are you due?' But it turned out…"

(And this is where the story passes into greatness, because you think you know what's coming but oh ho, you do not)

"… that not only was she not pregnant, it wasn't even Mary Black…"

(And then you think you are hearing a slightly better, more embarrassing story)

"… and not only was it not Mary Black, it actually was this guy from my class Joe Smith. Who had really let himself go."

(And there, it is now the greatest story ever told. I couldn't breathe for about ten minutes for the laughing. I should add here that somehow contributing to my enjoyment of this story was the fact that a few days earlier, when I'd asked her what exactly one learns as a young lady at cotillion classes, Dr. J had given me a demonstration of her small-talk skills that was so terrifyingly perfect, or maybe perfectly terrifying, that I'd actually flattened myself against the wall in fear.)

So, I don't like to be able to see the time when I'm in bed, a holdover from when I had somewhere to be every morning and panicked in the middle of every night I couldn't sleep because I could measure exactly how tired I was going to be the next day. In the bedroom I have an alarm clock and a very nice atomic clock that I use to coordinate my important phone calls, but neither of them are lit. Somewhere along the line Robbie picked up on this hangup, so although his alarm clock does light up, he turns it away from him before going to sleep. Thus, the time is not visible to either of us without getting out of bed.

Usually I think this is sound policy, but every so often I find myself in an absurd situation, like now, when I got up for the day at 12:30. True, I'd gone to bed at 10, but even so. I knew it was dark out, but I figured, hey, maybe it's 5 or so, get up, make some coffee, send Dr. J an email, and watch the sun come up, nothing wrong with that. Dr. J isn't even at work yet. I am the only person awake in the entire world. Generally I think this, just as a sort of state of being, but now I think it actually might be true.

I think that in addition to being the Summer of the Mulberry Scone, I'll remember this summer as the Summer of Insomnia. It's not that I'm not tired--I'm actually pretty tired right now--but there's been so much competing for what is apparently dwindling space in my brain, jobs and moving and packing and houses and cars and various plots and schemes, that I'm having a hard time telling it all to shut up for the night on a reliable basis.

I do have work to do, fortunately, so it's not a total loss. I'd like to get back to sleep eventually, though, so I'm not totally sure about the wisdom of making coffee. But I might just go for it.

Good morning! I've been up since six, am working on my second cup of coffee right now, and am generally full of vim and vigor. Yesterday morning Robbie had to get up at 5:30 for his bike ride, which left us pretty tired by yesterday evening. I will refrain from telling you what time we went to bed, except to share with you this snippet of conversation after we turned the lights off in our bedroom:

Robbie: Hey, it's still light out.
Me: Yep.
(pause)
Me: We are the lamest people ever.
Robbie: Yep.

Anyhow, this morning I got up bright and early to find in my inbox the first in what will hopefully be a series of guest entries. Without further ado, I present EV and her story about falling out of the Tiger Storage truck.

Almost Red Asphalt, or, “How Old Navy Saved my Face”
By EV
Mrs. Sedgewick, 3rd period

So at Princeton they have these student agencies, which are student-run businesses that provide services to the campus community for a bargain at half the price. One of these was (and probably still is, unless they had one too many incidents like this one) Tiger Storage, which was basically three lacrosse players, six huge storage trucks and an empty parking lot behind the football field. Being broke-ass as we were, Jess and I decided to throw caution to the wind and store our stuff with them for the summer between freshman and sophomore year. When we arrived on campus in September, we were told that Tiger Storage would be relinquishing everyone’s crap at said parking lot, so someone’s parents or other gave us a ride out there to collect our boxes.

When we got there, one of the lacrosse dudes looked up our names on like a napkin or something in his pocket, and I learned that my boxes were in Truck 6. Due to insurancelessness, it turned out we had to climb into the trucks and find our boxes ourselves. But you know, whatever, I’m cool. Plus I’d gone all Slimfast that summer, and thought I was wicked hot. So I hoisted myself into Truck 6, scurried around inside the truck until I found my boxes, and chucked them out the truck (or maybe handed them down to someone, but I like the idea of having been buff enough to chuck them).

I don’t remember how I’d gotten into the truck, but when I went to get out, I was aware that the cargo hold was like six feet off the ground with no ladder or ramp or anything. But no problem, I could just sit down on the edge and jump out. So I sat down on the edge and pushed off with my hands. Just at that moment, everything went slo-mo and I realized that I’d been sitting too far in the truck and not close enough to the edge to clear it—I cringed as I waited for the back of my thighs to scrape against the edge of the truck from the back of my knees to my ass. But phew, that didn’t happen.

What happened was that my thighs cleared the truck, but my shorts didn’t—the hem at the back of my left leg caught on one of the hooks that was part of the cargo lock. Before I could say “Flying Spaghetti Monster,” I was dangling from the truck, parallel to the ground like a retarded seagull, all of my weight pulling my face toward the concrete. I totally panicked and screamed, as no one else was near the truck to have seen my fancy trick. One of the dudes turned around from the check-in table, yelled “Holy fucking shit!!!,” and ran over. I was too heavy to just lift off the hook, so he grabbed my shoulders and flung the sad helpless sack of me back into the truck. I think I lay there like a beached whale for a minute before I pulled myself up, unhooked my shorts, and scooted ever so gingerly to the tippy edge to slide down to the ground to weep.

Besides being embarrassed as all hell, the only significant injury I sustained was a bruise the size of a small banana across the front of my thigh where my shorts, holding me by a khaki thread to save me from facial disfigurement, had dug into my leg. Even when the bruise faded like three months later, I had a crevice across my leg for the rest of the year. And less than two months later, I lost my virginity.

THE END

~Epilogue/Prequel~
And also, when I was sixteen, I fainted at the DMV because I didn’t bring my proof of insurance and they told me they didn’t have an open driving test for 11 days so I’d have to come back then for my license. When I came to, the first thing I heard was “oh my! Dear, do you think you might be pregnant?”. My econ teacher was with me, and he told everyone in school about it the next day.

I have an idea that may be a little crazy, but just might work. Now that Robbie's new job and the move and all are over (well, OK, it's an exaggeration to say that the move is over, I suppose), I think this blog is getting a little bit dull, and I was thinking I could jazz it up in this late-summer lull with a series of my favorite humorous brief anecdotes that I've heard from other people over the years. I was making a mental list of funny stories I could tell when I realized that the originators of these stories all read my blog, and should just email me the stories I was going to tell and I could post them here in their own words. Serial guest-blogging, if you will.

I made a list of five, which I present below in no particular order except the last, which is my favorite:

1. EV, the story about falling out of the Tiger Storage van.
2. My mom, the story about the Ryans.
3. An anonymous reader, the story about his brother-in-law. If we use pseudonyms, would I be allowed to post it?
4. Robbie, the story about Brett and the pencil. I don't know why, because other of his family anecdotes are objectively funnier, but I like this one the best.
5. Dr. J., the story about her high-school reunion.

These are actually all pretty short, except for the story about the Ryans, which is an epic on the scale of (and in many ways not unlike) the Odyssey. So who's in? Remember, you can make things up if your memory has gone fuzzy or to tart your story up a little bit. Lord knows I do.

I'm sure you'd all like to see a photo from my regatta, right? The one I've been training for diligently for a month? Right? My first foray into team sports? Right?

Well, here you are.

I meant to post this yesterday--I got to wondering what one of my freshman year roommates had been up to, so I Googled her, and it turns out it was this.

Pretty awesome, huh? She's a really, really nice person (even if she did always call me "rugrat") and I'm glad she's getting to do what she wants, especially since it's so cool too.

First of all, mad, mad props to Brett, who just got a real, permanent, full-time, and very good job. This is fantastic, and no one could be more excited about this than I am. (Well, OK, Brett probably is. And Amy. And his parents. And Adam. And possibly his other brothers too. Other than that, though? No one.)

Second, I got the extremely exciting news today that Dr. J will be gracing our home with her presence in November. Although I'm sorry that Big T won't be with her, still, this is really something. I've already told her not to expect much in terms of weather, but even after living in Germany for two years, I think her "not much" may still be too much for Pittsburgh in November. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it; for now, all I can do is start laying in our supplies of shredded wheat and Dreft.

And finally, last night I had my last dragon-boat class. I feel like I finally got the stroke down, but I'm really tired today. We paddled all the way down to Point State Park, which is pretty far. The regatta is Saturday, so look for rare sporting photos of me to be posted here soon.

This week's It Was Really Funny, But You Probably Had To Be There:

I was telling Adam about this guy I knew in college who, as part of his seduction technique, would play the Marc Cohn CD that has "Walking In Memphis" on it until it got to "True Companion," and then very dramatically get up and turn off the CD and say that he'd made a pledge to himself never to listen to that song with anyone except the woman he was going to marry. This story always made me throw up a little bit in my mouth, and I was horribly embarrassed for my gender at the success rate he had doing this. Anyhow, so I told Adam this whole story and he said that sure it was cheesy, but then, he'd had a lot of success doing the exact same thing with "You Put the Lime in the Coconut." And I laughed and laughed.

(Although--raise your hand if that would've totally worked on you. That's right. That's why you're all my pals.)

I'm watching the shuttle landing coverage on CNN, and I've noticed that the two current astronauts they have doing color commentary and the shuttle manager are all women. (And also, apparently all Texans.) I think this is pretty cool, especially because I think they were picked for CNN because of their color-commentary and astronautical skills and not just because, you know, chicks rule.

Anyhow, the big news in the 'Burgh is that Megan's here. We stopped by her apartment (which, by the way, we're fairly sure is larger than our house) last night and helped her put together her bed, which is lovely, and met her neighbor, who plays the drums every day. I anticipate a rollicking time in the future.

Other than that, I've just been working (a lot, actually--I'm not really sure where this early-August rush came from, but it's been a slow year so far so I'll take it) and anticipating our upcoming trip to Rhode Island. Oh, and buying birthday presents. Robbie is convinced that September is the only acceptable month to be born in, a sentiment that I know is shared by quite a few of my regular blog readers, but the human toll on those of us who have to buy, let's see, five presents, all for very important people, is tremendous. I think I'm almost done, though.

Today I'm premiering a new blog feature called Ethics Questions for Frivolous People. Today I have two questions, one short-answer and one essay.

1. Is it ever acceptable to buy a song on iTunes that comes in "Extended Wedding Version," even if you are buying the regular song and not the Extended Wedding Version itself?

2. (With apologies to Adam, who has already heard all this and given me his opinion) Is it time, age-wise, for me to start kissing people on the cheek in social settings? I was sort of hoping this would never ever happen to me, but at Matt and Courtney's wedding people kept springing it on me, people I'd never met before, and my strategy of standing stock still and thinking of England proved remarkably unsuccessful. Right now I have three strategies: hug with squeeze; regular hug with even pressure or its less enthusiastic counterpart, hug with pat; and handshake. I'm perfectly happy with these, and also perfectly happy to start kissing any of the half-dozen people who would otherwise receive a hug with squeeze, but it's my understanding that cheek-kissing would actually substitute for, maybe, hug with pat, and I just don't know how I feel about that. I can't remember the last person I kissed on the cheek, actually, although I'd bet that it was either Heather or Dr. J. (Wait, no, I think it was Robbie when he and his mom picked me up in Providence in March. We've been trying to get by without anyone's family noticing that we like like each other, and I think we've been doing pretty well for nearly a decade now.)

After I finished the house page, I decided to order the photos I've been meaning to have framed too, which led me to go through all the photos we've taken with the digital camera, and I had to put this up. I'm not sure if anyone else will like it, but of photos that I've taken, this is my favorite.

Five Things, and This Week's Installment of It Was Really Funny, But You Probably Had To Be There:

1. I met our neighbor on the other side today. She, too, is very nice.
2. There is no road anywhere near my parents' house that isn't under construction at regular half-mile intervals. Did Melissa Hart get some plush committee assignment recently that I don't know about?
3. I was just looking at Dr. J and Big T's photos online. Dr. J has to be the only person in human history to move from Santa Barbara, outdoor/fitness/fresh food capital of the world, to Germany, the land of schnitzel, for heaven's sake, where it rains and snows and they yell at you if you go too fast on the elliptical trainer at the gym, and actually get skinnier. If I could have a doener every day, I'd look like the side of a barn.
4. You can see photos of our house here. Enjoy.
5. If your first reaction to #1 was to think "Oh, did you hit her house too?", then congratulations, you too could be a Sedgewick.

And now, this week's installment of It Was Really Funny, But You Probably Had To Be There, which came when I was talking to AJ yesterday online. I'd recently heard a rumor that AJ had come back from summer camp one trillion times smarter than he'd been before, so smart that you can actually now see his brain glowing from your house at night, so naturally when I saw him online yesterday afternoon I scampered to find out what pearls of wisdom he'd now be able to cast my way. And then we had the following exchange:

Me: AJ! How have things been going since you got back from summer camp?
AJ: Pretty good, I just got Grand Theft Auto so I've been starting a lot of gang wars.

And I laughed and laughed.

Sorry, I meant to post sooner about our jam-packed weekend, and doubtless you'd all thought I'd beached the car somewhere else in the meantime, but no, I've just been busy. I learned how to mow a lawn (which, especially with our adorable unpowered mower, is a lot like shaving a lawn--I never realized that lawn had a grain until I tried to cut with it, with mediocre results), we got a new bed, and we cut up and rolled the upstairs carpets that had been stacked on the front porch, so now we look a lot less like the Clampetts. (To our credit, we did try to put the carpets out for bulk day, but it turns out they won't take them unless they're cut into three-foot lengths and rolled, so we suffered the ignominy of public garbage rejection right after we moved in. They'll take entire sofas, so try to figure that one out.)

Oh, and I set up the dining room (temporarily, as the furniture that's in there now is not going to stay). I find I'm disoriented by the concept of a dining room, which I would not have predicted seeing as how I knew they existed and all, but something about having an entire room devoted to eating, in a two-person household, seems off to me. Actually, thinking back, I've never really lived anywhere where the dining room was in frequent daily use. Well, maybe at my great-aunts' house, but they had a TV in the dining room, so functionally it was a lot like eating in the living room. It does seem reasonable to have a dining room when people are over, though, so I guess we'll just have to do that more often. Which is to say, ever.

And other than that, things are kinda normal. I had my second-to-last dragon boating class last night, which was fun. I think I started off with really good stroke technique, but as the weeks pass I'm pretty sure it's getting worse. I like the other people taking the class more and more, though, so I guess since I signed up partly to be sociable, it's all evening out. Oh, this cracked me up, though--there's a group of five or six women who all signed up together, and they're really nice, but although I like them they've kind of been driving me a little nuts because they talk to each other all the time, even when we're getting important instruction about how to avoid hitting the person in front of you with an oar or how not to drown. I know that I have the soul of a hall monitor, but I kind of don't get why you'd sign up for a dragon boating class if you didn't care about learning how to dragon boat. Anyhow, I knew they worked together but I didn't know what they did until last night. Can you guess? Why, they're teachers, of course.