2

8/27/2013 8:34:46 AM

Ohhh, right. JessieJepp is the bitch that stole our fucking sandwich board.

8/27/2013 8:46:52 AM

Oh shit I'm a few stories behind. Gotta catch up.

This is still my favorite thread thank you for being awesome.

9/10/2013 9:26:09 AM

Now I'm going to tell Peru stories from when I went in 2005 through the NCSU study abroad program, which I hear is still going on and which I HIGHLY recommend to any Spanish student.

The following is one of my all-time favorite stories and explains, in a perverse way, way I decided to work abroad:

The whole experience was pretty tightly controlled, which is to say that almost every day we had stuff scheduled. At the time I thought I was having an exciting third world experience, but now I know that was ridiculous. Anyway, we had exactly one weekend off. A lot of people who had money went to various beaches for surfing and shit like that. Me and my two friends, the Punk and the Realtor (named for their musical tastes and future career, respectively) did not have money, so we went to the torture musem.

Every self-respecting South American capital has a torture museum that doubles as an Inquisition museum, a natural enough pairing since the inquisitors did most of the torturing. These typically involve torture devices and gruesomely dismembered was corpses. We went one Saturday and had fun. It may say something disturbing about us that we left the place hungry.

Hungry, specifically, for Chinese food. It is counterintuitive to most people, but Lima is positively infested with Chinese restaurants, and the vast majority of them are delicious. Normally you can't go two blocks without finding one, but we were in an unfamiliar part of the enormous city and couldn't find one to save our lives. So we asked a cop for directions, cops being the only ones who wouldn't demand money for their help. The guy giggled a little bit and told us to go three blocks down, turn left, and go two blocks.

He was giggling for a reason, one we would find out in a little bit.

Everything went normally until we got to the turn, when a lady across the street started screaming at us frantically. At the time I was nearly fluent in Spanish, but I'm pretty sure this lady was screaming at a pitch I can't even hear. All that was apparent was that she didn't want us to go that way.

"Gentlemen," I said -- and I swear to God, these are my exact words -- "something fucked up could be going on. But it could be interesting. Let's vote." It was unanimous. We continued.

Half a block later we all sneezed simultaneously, which brought into focus for the first time that something was not right. Somehow this was the first time we noticed the people running at us, their shirts covering their faces, screaming.

"Gentlemen, whatever is going on that way is definitely fucked up and definitely interesting. We have to vote again." Again unanimous. We continued.

We came around the gentle curve of the street in time to see the tail end of the riot. The main thing I remember was a rioter wrestling the shield out of a cop's hands and hitting him with it. But these were the last few people, and they were rounded up by the time we arrived at the Chinese restaurant, which was at Ground Zero of the cloud of tear gas we had unwittingly walked into.

It should be said that it was an open-air restaurant, also.

We had gone through great hardship to get this food and we were determined to eat it, in spite of what was at this point serious discomfort. The nice employees brought us each a roll of paper towels, none of which remained when we left. You would be amazed how much snot the human body can make when chemically induced to do so. And we ate.

They teach you about the pain and the mucous when it comes to tear gas, but nobody tells you that after you get exposed, you can't taste anything for about twenty four hours. Our spring rolls could've been filled with dog shit for all I know, but I'd like to think they tasted like victory.

I was also interested to notice that the employees, who were all Chinese, seemed unaffected by the gas. I wondered if it was something to do with the epicanthic fold. It might also have been because, as I discovered lately, this particularly corner of Lima got riots every week. As it was explained to me, the whole thing resembled an old Looney Tunes. Remember the one where Wile E. Coyote and the Sheepdog show up to work as good buddies, then clock in and spend the rest of the shift beating the shit out of each other as the Coyote tries to steal sheep? Then during lunch and after work they're buddies again? That's what it's like. The cops know the riot is going to happen every week. They have nothing in particular against the rioters, but it's their job to break them up. Likewise the rioters know they're going to get beat up, but hey, it's something to do.

And a we sat, blowing our noses into drenched paper towels and eating fried rice, I thought, "Now here is a foreign experience. This is fun. I want more of these."

And that's the day I decided I wanted to work abroad.

9/25/2013 11:52:55 AM

My Peruvian coworker just read and this a lol'd all over the place.

9/25/2013 12:36:36 PM

I will bump this thread to self-aggrandize myself because it is my birthday. Almost. Also I'm drunk, and telling this story the other day made me want to mention it here.

This is a story about how I insulted a Federal Election Commissioner to her face.

So I got my Masters from NC State. International Studies. They boasted a 100% real employment rate for graduates within a year, and the directrice was very concerned about keeping that record. I threatened it, because I didn't do an internship because I am averse to paying people for the chance to work.

Well, in a last-ditch effort to help me out, she hooked me up with a very temporary job helping out with a conference. Two of our professors were having a confab about Indian electoral law (that would be dot, not feather, Indian). I was to be the factotum, the guy who made sure that everyone made it to the hotel, and then from the hotel to the conference room, and that the meals arrived, etc. It was the best job I ever had, while it lasted – which was about two days. I learned shit. I got fed, really well. Important people spoke to me as though I were something approaching an equal.

Before I get to the insult, I should point out that my second favorite moment of this job was when an Indian government official asked, “What is a 'grit?'” while looking at a menu in Fosters. “Shrimp and Grits” is apparently not a big thing in Mumbai.

So anyway, one of the participants in the conference is an United States Federal Election Commissioner. There are supposed to be six of these; at the time, I think there were only four for some reason. The person who came to speak at our event was a woman, I believe the only woman in that job back then. She ended up seated next to me at a dinner.

One of the leaders of the conference (and one of my favorite professors) was sitting across from us with his wife, who was telling their life story. She mentioned that her husband used to be a lawyer.

I've been sued four times. Once for libel. Three times for a traffic accident in which nobody was injured and mine was the only car damaged. I have beef with lawyers. And so I made a not-terribly-funny joke. I believe I said, “He was a lawyer? Well, nobody's perfect.”

Like I say, it wasn't funny, but the professor laughed. His wife laughed. The FEC lady's eyes turned black and she glared at me and said, in all seriousness, “You know, I'm a lawyer. My father is a lawyer. My husband is a lawyer.”

I laughed, thinking she was playing the straight man, but nobody else did. Lady was pissed. I ate the rest of my meal in silence. But it was a proud silence. For there are some experiences that few people get to live through. There are a couple of hundred thousand morons who have joined the Peace Corps and lived in a third-world shit hole. That's not special. But I bet there aren't more than a couple of hundred people on the face of the Earth who have enraged an FEC commissioner by insulting them to their face.

A few days later, she was featured in some capacity on the Colbert Report (though I think it ended up just being her picture rather than an interview) when he was trying to start his Super PAC.

1/30/2014 5:07:14 PM

Quote :

"So I got my Masters from NC State. International Studies. They boasted a 100% real employment rate for graduates within a year, and the directrice was very concerned about keeping that record."

hahahaha yeah right. I can't stand Hobbs and she'd put down working at McDonald's as a "real" job. I won't start a rant on her here, though.

Happy birthday man, hope you're getting by alright in Benin.

1/30/2014 6:34:45 PM

This is probably my favorite story of all time. It is much better in person because it benefits from acting some parts out, but I'll do what I can. This is the Porch Story.

Back at the skinny house, we had poker games. Well, during nice weather we did. You can look at the house and tell you couldn't fit a table inside of it, but we could put one on the porch. And so the Nerd and I would invite people over to play and drink heavily. This is how he ended up with his wife, I ended up with the alcohol tolerance of a Russian brewmaster, and Anky McFall ended up a part of our usual crew.

Anky is another nerdy guy, in a more classic sense. He will talk Star Trek with you until you plead with him to stop. In keeping with the nerd stereotype, he had been unlucky in love. (And remained that way for a while. He was a virgin until he was 29, and the one time I heard of him getting a girl's number in college, she was arrested as a sex offender the very next day. Apparently she liked nerdy men and underage girls).

So anyway, Anky likes poker and Anky likes the Troll. The Troll was about three feet tall and four feet wide. I normally leave size alone, particularly with women, but this lady was such a bitch to my friend that I don't mind calling her out for being shaped like a partly-deflated beach ball. But she was a girl nerd, and she had tits that could float up the Titanic, so Anky was in love. And she came to our poker games.

One night we had a game, and I went bust early. I had an exam the next day. Anky also went out early. And often. He kept buying in and drinking more and more heavily, until a steady trickle of mixed drinks became glasses half-full of awful Canadian whiskey.

I'll skim over a lot of what happened in the intervening time, but suffice it to say that the game ended, Anky and the Troll had words, he went and drunkenly attempted to shave himself, and broke a bunch of glasses. Finally we got him back onto the now-empty porch for some air. He looked wistfully over the edge of railing, the top of which was about thirteen feet off the ground.

"Hey, man, don't jump off or anything," Nerd said with a laugh.

Anky laughed also. "No, I wasn't going to."

You know what happened next. The motherfucker jumped off the porch. Strictly speaking, he ran across it and vaulted himself over the railing with the grace of an olympic athlete in spite of being drunk as a red indian. Then he landed on his feet, collapsed, rolled down the hill into a recess under the porch, and landed on a broken television.

---

The lumberjack and I got him to the hospital, but it took convincing. "I'm drunk and underage," he slurred. "They'll arrest me."

No, no, I said. Doctor-patient confidentiality. They only have to report something if they think you're going to kill someone else or yourself.

"I tried to jump off the porch. They WILL think I want to kill myself."

Uh...right. Lie to them. Tell them you fell down.

"That's a great idea!" He was smiling now, and in fact his mood was 1000% better ever since he took the leap. "They'll believe that. I'm clumsy, I'm always hurting myself. They'll have a record of that."

Sure they will, Anky, we said as we carried him to my car. We rolled him into Rex at around 1 AM, and the triage nurse interviewed him with an open door so we heard what transpired.

"What happened to you?"
"I'm SOOOOO clumsy. I fell down some stairs."

Maybe the nurse was skeptical because the man's injuries were in no way consistent with falling down the stairs, or maybe she was skeptical because Lumberjack and I were laughing our asses off in the lobby.

"How many stairs was it?"
"I don't know. Guys, how many was it?"
Me: "I don't know, I don't live there."
Lumberjack: "Enough that I wouldn't want to fall down them."
Me: "It's not the number, it's just that last one's a doozy." (Hysterical laughter)

The nurse eventually gave up and wheeled him away. There's a lot more to this story but I've already rambled on a long time, so I'll give you the quick conclusion:

My professor let me retake the exam, because he fucking owed me one. I had once bailed him out by explaining the entire history of World War 1, which he had apparently missed. Anky had one broken ankle and one severely strained one. He dropped out of school and joined the Navy. He was happier after the leap than any of us had ever seen him before.

3/4/2014 8:07:43 AM

Your post about the job at the Annual Fund is hilarious. I got a job there the summer before my sophomore year, and I quit before I started. So glad I didn't work there.

3/4/2014 8:31:12 AM

A comment in the Africa thread made me think of this:

My first job was working as an IV tech at a pharmacy in Greensboro. I didn't deal directly with patients, I just received, inventoried, and sent out IV kits to nursing homes. It was great -- high pay, good hours, got to keep mostly to myself, and my best friend worked in another department at the same place (his mom got me the job) so we could grab lunch together.

Three kinds of people worked there. The actual pharmacists were all upper-middle-class WASP women, and in a lot of cases the "middle" element of their class could probably be omitted. The vast majority of employees were lower-middle-class black women. And there were two men, my friend and I.

One day we landed a big new client who celebrated by buying us all lunch, in the form of what I assume was supposed to be a sandwich. It was very fancy, whatever it was. Artfully arranged, in a clear plastic container with an all-green salad. The sandwich itself consisted of a number of things that were either unrecognizable as food or wholly unsuited to the sandwich milieu. The WASP ladies were over the moon over this fancy sandwich. Once I determined that it had raisins in it, I decided that it wasn't for me.

I walked into the break room where the ENTIRE African American staff was circled around a table upon which sat a single example of this fancy sandwich. They stared at it in silence for a long time. Finally, the apparent leader of the group stepped forward, inspected it for another sandwich, and said, "Uhn-uh. This is bull-shit. I'm going to Bojangles."

The other ladies nodded in agreement and I said the thing I am proudest of saying in my entire life. A lot of people don't believe this part, and I don't know what to tell you, except that I wouldn't keep telling it in the face of such skepticism were it not 100% accurate.

I said, much louder than I intended to say, "My people!"

They looked at me suspiciously, and shrugged. And we all went to Bojangles. And on that day in 2003 I knew that all racism was stupid, unless it was directed at upper middle class white people, because those are the people that put clothes on their dogs and eat raisin sandwiches.

3/26/2014 5:55:00 PM

Ha ha; great story.

3/27/2014 10:58:52 AM

Quote :

" Me: "It's not the number, it's just that last one's a doozy.""

Oh God.....Hahahahahahaha

3/27/2014 11:12:08 AM

I thought of a good one earlier that I'd forgotten. Some background: my family lives way out in the woods. No neighbor within a mile or so radius, long dirt road, etc. The neighboring properties are both camps, one for a Baptist organization and another for girl scouts. So not only do we live in a remote spot, we don't have to worry much about hunters and the like. The worst we ever get is a girl scout troop wandering into our area, feeding our dogs cookies.

A few years ago, when I was living in Raleigh -- can't remember if it was during undergrad or the intermission between that and grad school -- my mom started nagging me about how long it had been since I'd visited, so I relented and said, "Fine, I'll come down for the weekend. I'll get there on Friday afternoon." Great, she says.

So I drive down and get there a little after noon. Have to swerve around the four dogs that are all excited to see my car. My parents are at work, but my younger brother is at the house. He greets me, doesn't mention anything out of the ordinary, and after a couple of minutes of pleasantries I excuse myself because I've got the galloping shits and something needs to happen in that department most ricky-tick.

So there I am on the toilet, reading an old magazine, when the dogs start barking. You grow up around dogs like I did, and if you've had these dogs as long as my family has, you get to know the differences between barks. There's the "squirrel!" bark. There's the tentative "we think maybe we saw a thing but on second thought not so sure" bark. There's the "approaching vehicle" bark. What I was hearing was not a bark I'd heard before. It went on too long, was too panicked and erratic. So I finished up and peered out the window.

Ah, I thought. It was the "A dozen heavily-armed people in paramilitary gear walking through the yard" bark. Because that's what I saw, a group of people with assault rifles moving in formation through the woods just past my driveway, maybe fifty yards away.

We don't live anywhere near a military facility and even my brief time in ROTC had let me know that what I saw weren't actual military uniforms. This was something else. Mercifully not a white supremacist thing, because the point man was black. Still, I panicked, and I grabbed what was at that time the only gun we owned -- a .22 LR plinker -- and ran into the other room to tell my brother to hide in the basement.

You'd be forgiven for not believing me about the gun. If I were hearing this story, I'd say, "Suuuure, you were going to take on the whole squad with your little target rifle." And it's entirely possible that, had things gone further, I'd have chickened out and died in a puddle of tears. But I had hands on the firearm and thought I was ready to defend the homestead.

Anyway, brother says, "Why should I hide in the basement?"

"I don't have time to argue, there's guys with guns here!"

"Oh. They're probably just with the movie."

The fuck now?

It turns out that a movie was being filmed on the property. Not, you know, a famous one, an F-list project that was financed by my dad's very wealthy, very eccentric, and terminally ill cousin. The guy had become obsessed with indie movies and UNCG has a big film and drama program, so he met some people and decided to fund some of their more absurd projects. The family property offered an ideal setting for one such movie ("Children of the Hunt," which to my knowledge was only displayed for the public once, at a theater in Greensboro). My cousin asked my dad for permission, and my dad said, "Sure, have at it."

What nobody said to me was, "Oh, by the way, there is a film crew of more than a hundred people working on our property, so don't be alarmed if you see something out of the ordinary."

Sure enough, I went back to the door and now I could see the camera crew and directors. When the shot was evidently finished I went outside to reign in the dogs and ask, you know, WTF?

Begrudgingly they showed me to their main camp in a field a couple hundred yards away, a big setup with a mess tent, port-o-johns, and trailers. It was a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future kind of movie, so the props were interesting (including a machine-gun equipped, combat rigged ATV with longhorn horns on the front). Then it was suggested that I head on home.

My parents thought nothing of all this. "Oh, sorry, I thought we mentioned." I'm about to have a heart attack or shoot some UNCG undergrad extra in the face, and they're nonchalant about it.

4/10/2014 4:09:02 PM

where in the boro are you from, ese?

4/10/2014 4:12:22 PM

I was born in Brown Summit, which at the time was a suburb northeast of the boro and which is now an annexed part of the city.

This story and half my life, my family lived in Randolph County, near a very small town called Sophia.

4/10/2014 4:26:27 PM

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1082813/

4/10/2014 4:33:43 PM

What High School did you go to? Northeast?

4/10/2014 5:20:23 PM

I went to Northeast middle for two years before the AGIII program dragged me to Aycock for the worst year of my life. For high school I went to Grimsley anticipating and then actually being in the IB program there. For most of that time we had to falsify documents to let me go to school in guilford co. because at that point we'd moved to Randolph.

4/10/2014 5:38:07 PM

Now hold on just a cotton-picking minute... What the hell was wrong with Aycock?

4/10/2014 7:36:03 PM

Mostly the constant beatings from the students, and the verbal abuse from both students and administration. If I can ever vote for that shit heap to be razed to the ground, i will. Also if there's ever some sort of bloody insurrection in NC I will side with whichever camp (probably bbq related) that will permit me to burn it down and salt the earth upon which it stood.

4/10/2014 7:54:03 PM

Damn, that sucks. I never had any problems like that, and you would think a dumbass like me would... Jim Long was a pretty worthless principal, though, I'll give you that.

4/10/2014 10:22:28 PM

I just read this whole thread. It was an excellent waste of time. Add to my topics.

4/10/2014 11:15:59 PM

I didn't have Jim Long. It was some large, angry black woman who told my mom and I straight up that she didn't care about me getting the shit beat out of me because she didn't like the AGIII kids and didn't want them in her school. My mom responded, "My son is pretty smart. Probably smart enough to build pipe bombs." It didn't change anything, but the look on that cunt's face was priceless.

I'm trying to think of any funny stories from Aycock Middle and coming up with nothing. It was a hellhole and wish ill upon almost everybody I met there.

---

To lighten the mood I'll tell a quick story about my brief and embarrassing time in ROTC at NCSU. Because of my inability to run worth a damn I was mostly humiliated at PT sessions but I had one shining moment that earned me respect.

It was at Camp Butner, during a weekend field exercise. In this case, it was paintball tactics. My squad was defending a location in the woods and another was approaching us. Our squad leader immediately chose me and the only slower, dumber cadet than I was and put us in a forward position where we were certain to get killed almost immediately. There wasn't much tactical benefit to his plan, but I guess it got us out of the way.

We wait a long time (the attacking squad had gotten lost), and finally we think we see movement. At this juncture I do one of the most unacceptable things a soldier can do and accidentally discharge my weapon, because my finger has been on the trigger (big no-no) and I'm tense. The guy with me thinks I've made contact and starts firing at nothing. I keep it up because no way am I going to admit to an accidental discharge.

After a couple of minutes of wasting paintballs I, as technically the senior cadet, order us to fall back. We get back and our squad leader all but groans to see us again. Just then the attackers actually do make contact, so he hurriedly gives us orders to go to this exposed spot at the end of the line.

I did the only thing worse than accidentally firing and disobeyed that order because it was pointlessly suicidal. Instead I scrambled around for a minute and found a thicket to dive under. This thicket turned out to be a bulletproof cloaking device and murder factory because the attacking squad was moving single-file directly in front of it.

I shoot the first guy, he goes down. The second guy comes up, same thing. They just kept coming in spite of the clear evidence that it was a bad idea. It was a bloodbath. In the end, I got seven of them before someone took me out. There were only a dozen in the squad.

We won, which put my squad leader in an awkward position. He didn't like me to begin with, but now our victory was mainly attributable to my having twice gone against his instructions. People were crowding around, patting me on the back, wanting to take a picture, and in that moment I caught the guy's eye and tried to convey, As far as anybody else knows, all of this was because of your brilliant tactics. I am OK sticking with that fiction.

For the rest of the day I was a hero. The next day we had the rappelling wall, which put me back firmly in Barney Fife status. Order had been restored to the universe.

4/11/2014 4:38:03 AM

As I mentioned in an earlier post here, the Skinny House on Method Road used to host poker games, typically on the front porch. Usually this was an ideal set-up, but occasionally it led to us having encounters with unsavory characters.

The worst incident came one night when two scrawny white boys ran up the stairs onto the porch. Both of them wore blood-stained wife beaters. The shorter one was clearly the brains of the outfit - Don't get me wrong, he was a mongoloid, but he did most of the talking - and the taller one went along with everything. Their wife beaters aren't the only things bloody; they've clearly had a rough night.

Anyway, they run up, and we immediately start asking them to run the fuck back down. There are a number of women present at the game, after all. The cracker boys immediately yell, "You gotta call the cops! You gotta call the cops! Someone is after us!"

"Fine. We're calling them. But you have to wait down on the sidewalk."

"You want us to die, man? It wouldn't cost you nothin' to call the po-lice!"

"We are calling them, you just need to go downstairs."

Meanwhile, the Lumberjack -- who does not suffer fools -- has started stacking arms up inside the door. I wish we had a picture. At that time it included shotguns, rifles, machetes, katanas, derringers, and -- for all I know -- a goddamn mace. These were piled neatly next to the door in case things got out of hand.

After some questioning we got some idea of what was happening -- these guys said that they had been walking home and a black guy approached them, accusing them of breaking into his car and stealing some drugs. There had been an altercation, which these guys had clearly lost.

At about this point a black guy in an unseasonably heavy coat (it was early September) started pacing on the sidewalk below the porch, with his hand in said coat. To his credit, though, he didn't bother us. He knew all he had to do was wait, and even if we tried to help these guys, he knew we weren't people to harass.

Shortly after the story was told, the taller one broke ranks. He looked at the shorter one and said, "Man, what the fuck did you do?" They argued for a minute. It quickly became clear that the short brainiac had, in fact, broken into the car and stolen drugs, and lied to his friend about it. Rather than admit this, the short fucker waited until the angry black guy was at the extreme end of his circuit, and then he sprinted down the stairs and into the night. The tall guy followed, only to return a few minutes later. "Man, you all are pussies. It wouldn't have cost you nothing to call the police and help us."

"We did call the police, like half an hour ago. They're coming."

"Man, y'all a bunch of bitches, callin' the police like that."

Some things are too perfect for fiction, friends, and that exchange is among them. The conversation happened. And then, he ran off again.

A couple of minutes later, the cops showed up -- the cops we had called. The black guy vanished. The lumberjack, shirtless, drunk, and holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, went down to greet the cops. I followed.

Lumberjack described the guys. The cop said, "Yeah, we know them. They like breaking into cars, stealing drugs, dealing drugs."

Lumberjack: "Are they the kinda guys that are gonna go get their friends tomorrow and come shoot up the house for calling you?"

Cop: {ponders} "Nah. I don't think those guys have any friends."

Lumberjack: "Are you gonna go after them?"

Cop: {laughs} "Nah. They'll probably get what they deserved."

---

That covers one of the two times we had to call the police at the skinny house. The other covers a time when they had to be called to save me somebody from an angry military dwarf. That's tomorrow.

5/28/2014 7:08:48 PM

A+ thread

5/29/2014 9:07:05 AM

5/29/2014 9:41:09 AM

It's been almost a decade now, so I'm going to tell this story even though it makes me look like kind of a shit head.

September 2005. I live in the Skinny House on Method Road, with the Nerd and the Lumberjack.

Hurricane Katrina had just struck, and TWW was trying to formulate some sort of humanitarian response. A trip to the Red Cross to donate blood was suggested, and I offered to drive people. I ended up with [user]colter[/i] and the late ambrosia.

the day did not start off well. Not to speak ill of the dead, but ambrosia was being kind of a bitch. She talked shit about my car and cast aspersions on the personal hygiene of others in the vehicle. Then when we finally get to the Red Cross place, we discover that everybody in the country had had the same idea as us. The place was slammed with blood donors. The secretary, who was also being unpleasant, said, "Do you have a reservation? No? We can't take you today."

We left, having accomplished nothing. I dropped off my charges in a foul mood. I was nearly home when the Nerd, who of all things was helping the Lumberjack fell a tree for a private client, called and asked me to go to the Western Blvd. Food Lion and pick up some detergent. I said something like, "God motherfucking damn it, you fat lazy fuck, why can't you do it?" In the end, I agreed.

I pull into the parking lot and the place is packed. I've never seen it that way before or since. I'm the third car in a train of three doing circuits through the lot, trying to find a space. For a wonder, two open up, right near the front. The lead car, a massive Ford pickup, promptly pulls into both of them and the adjacent handicapped space.

Just to reiterate, this prick was triple-parked, knowing that two people were behind him looking for a space. And he took over a handicapped spot in the process. I pulled past him, swearing under my breath, and saw that the driver was an air force NCO in uniform. In other words, able-bodied.

---

I want to interject here that back in undergrad, I was even angrier than I am now. That anger occasionally caused me to do things I regret. It ALWAYS caused me to do things to double-parkers that I either regret, or should regret. There was one individual who took up two of the coveted free parking spaces that used to exist over by Clark Dining Hall. I carved a lengthy and pointed message on his trunk, using a hunting knife. Yes, this was petty. In retrospect I see that it is possible that this person was a victim forced to park this way because of an original perpetrator. Maybe I shouldn't have tattooed my rage onto that car.

But this guy at Food Lion was no victim. He was a perp. And he had to pay.

---

So eventually two spaces open up and I get to park. I walk diagonally across the lot, keys in hand, with the sole and express purpose of gouging this guy's precious truck from tail light to head light. Which I do. I walk inside, humming to myself gleefully. I buy detergent. I'm in the check out line when the offender taps me on the shoulder.

The offender was military and presumably could have kicked my ass handily by himself, but with him was one of the largest white people I've ever seen. The guy was slightly taller than my 6'6" but about 100 pounds heavier, and it looked like most of that was muscle. Neither of them were happy.

"Did you key my truck?"

"Uh...what?"

"Did you key my fucking truck?"

The ancient crone who was in front of me in line, rifling through a stack of coupons thicker than a Bible, said, "Please be quiet."

Noncom: "A lady just came up and told me you're the one who keyed my fucking truck."

Me: "I don't know what you're talking about."

Noncom: "Then why are you acting so fucking scared?"

Me: "Because you're really angry."

Noncom: "You're goddamn right I'm angry, somebody keyed my truck! Let me see your keys!"

Old Crone: "Please, can you be quiet? I'm trying to find my coupons."

I handed him my keys -- foolishly, holding out the one I had used to do the deed. There's no evidence, though. I'm shaking like a leaf because, I can no longer deny it (especially in light of what would go on to happen), I was a coward then. Maybe I still am. I'd like to think I'm not.

Eventually the old lady put up such a fuss that the guy agreed to go outside -- in theory, to call the cops. I noticed that he did not pick up his phone, though. Neither did his huge, mute friend. They just stood there, looking menacing.

I called the Nerd. They were closing in on the house, just a few blocks away. I laid out the situation -- minus the detail of me being guilty as hell. A few minutes later they arrived, parked their own pickup truck, and came inside to find me a destroyed human being.

What happened next was, I thought, a masterful exfiltration. The Lumberjack took my keys so he could get my car away without the noncom figuring out it was mine. Then the Nerd pulled up in front of the store with his truck, slowed down -- but didn't stop -- and I ran out and hurled myself into the back of it like a fucking javelin. I caught a glimpse of the noncom's incredulous face and felt pretty good about myself.

---

Twenty minutes later, I'm finally coming down from the adrenaline, and here comes captain fucking America in his keyed truck, driving slowly past our driveway, staring right at me. I have no idea how he found us. It was impossible for him to see where we went, close though we were to the store. I know -- I checked later. All he knew was that we headed towards Hillsboro Street. But no matter, he found us.

I was ushered inside and told to hide by friends who still thought I was a victim. The Lumberjack, shirtless, tattooed, and holding a beer at 11 in the morning, stared the truck down. When the truck stopped to take our license plates, the Lumberjack did the same -- writing the guy's plates on his arm with a sharpie.

The cops were called, as were other reinforcements. The cops arrived first. Lumberjack explained what was happening, and eventually they called me out. He was just explaining that my would-be assailant was a large, angry man in a big white pickup truck. At this moment a large, angry man in a big white pickup ran up onto the curb outside our house. The cops reached for their guns.

Problem was, this was a different guy. This was our last line of defense, our enforcer, our Luca Brasi. His name was Big Tim. He spoke Latin and Japanese but had decided to become a forester, a hands on guy, someone who climbed trees and chopped them down. He knew the Lumberjack through that program. He was not tall but he was built "like a brick shithouse," which was the only way to describe him. His southern accent was barely penetrable, until he broke into one of his other languages. His claim to fame was having single handled laid waste to the members of some fraternity in a fight, and then having paid for the medical bills of those who had intervened just to pry him off of their brothers. Books could be written about Big Tim. Odes. Epic Poems. This is a guy who, if he met Gilgamesh, could easily have raped him to death while calling him a pansy in Japanese.

Lumberjack explained some of this to the cops, who wisely decided not to shoot Big Tim. With those pussy ass handguns, they just would have made him angry, anyway.

It quickly became apparent that another squad car was at the Food Lion, talking to the noncom. Our cops asked to see my keys. I don't know if they saw anything on them, but they already knew beyond any doubt that I was guiltier than sin. They finally sighed, and said, "We're gonna tell the guy to go home before this escalates. This whole thing started because someone -" pointed look at me "-decided to take the law into their own hands, and we don't want it to end that way." And they left.

The Lumberjack whisked me away to Liberty, NC, just in case. It was a year or two before I finally admitted that I was a liar, coward, and all-around bitch to him, the Nerd, and whoever else would listen. They're good friends. They forgave me, and pointed out that they weren't angry at the false pretense that made them accomplices so much as they were mad that I'd felt the need to lie at all.

Probably this is the thing I've done that I feel worst about. Not the keying the truck, that asshole deserved that, but the lying about it to two of my best friends. It made me re-evaluate a lot about myself. I think -- I hope -- that I'm a more courageous person for it, that I'm willing to stand up and take responsibility for my actions. Hard to say whether I've been tested enough to know. So anyway, that's a rock I carry, but I hope it's a fairly funny one.

[Edited on May 29, 2014 at 5:19 PM. Reason : ]

5/29/2014 5:16:39 PM

let those who haven't keyed a douchebag's car cast the first stone

5/29/2014 5:58:27 PM

i was friends with a quadriplegic girl who was (obviously) in a wheelchair, and we went to an NC State game at Reynolds. We were about to pull into one of two open handicap spots and some douchebag with a handicap tag pulled into, and double parked in the parking spaces, hopped out, and briskly walked with no problem to the game (which we were already running late for).

I was beyond pissed, and wanted to pull a GrumpyGOP and key the shit out of their car, but decided I would be a man and confront them instead. but by the time we finally found another space I couldn't find them. I didn't end up keying their car because maybe they had a heart condition and anxiety about parking, and legit needed the space. (probably not, but hell i'm not anyone's judge, jury, or car scratcher.

[Edited on May 29, 2014 at 6:14 PM. Reason : ]

5/29/2014 6:13:19 PM

1) you keyed someone's car (who perhaps in a cosmic sense deserved it)
2) you got caught, by an old lady
3) you called the cops and lied to your friends to get out of it

SMH...

5/29/2014 6:16:04 PM

To Moron:

1) Yeah.
2) I have no idea who caught me, just that it was a woman. The "old lady" in the story just happened to be the one in front of me in line. It is very unlikely that she was the one who reported me.
3) I didn't call the cops. One of my friends did, without me knowing. But yes, I lied to my friends, and when suddenly presented with cops, I lied to them, too.

Let me point out that the very first line of the post acknowledged that I was a shit head.

Quote :

"I was beyond pissed, and wanted to pull a GrumpyGOP and key the shit out of their car, but decided I would be a man and confront them instead. but by the time we finally found another space I couldn't find them"

So this problem factored into my thinking. Ironically I was not afraid of confronting the guy -- calling him out would, at worst, get me punched in the face, which to my twisted mind would just enhance my moral superiority. But at that time, in that frame of mind, I thought that if I just tried to track him down in the grocery store and missed him, I'd have missed the opportunity to do anything and that would have made me a coward. Better to shoot for the certainty of a car scratch. I know now how ridiculous that logic is.

---

There's really very little to be said my defense here. I never did anything similar again, on either front -- that is, committing vandalism or lying to my friends or law enforcement about something.

5/29/2014 6:32:19 PM

Because I am required to be at this office and doing no work, I am going to revive this thread.

This story is about how I discovered the joys of cigarettes, alcohol, and living like a crazy person.

The year is 2004. I'm a sophomore living in Syme Hall. My roommate this year was my best friend from high school. Back then we were like brothers, literally. We looked alike. We had the same sense of humor. The same world view. More or less the same awkwardness with women. The same friends. The same level of intelligence.

But for the first half of freshman year, this guy -- who we'll call Douche McClintock, because douche-related insults were part of our thing -- went to basic training. His plan was to go through ROTC while being in the reserves. When he came back, he was almost exactly the same. Almost. And in spite of what people said, living with my best friend went great. Almost perfectly. Almost.

The thing was, basic training had burned off any lack of confidence he had with women, and suddenly he was such a pimp he made Shaft look gay. He went through the ladies at breakneck speed. I don't think he wanted to -- he's not the type to just try to put notches on the bedpost -- I think he was frankly confused by this newfound superpower and it took him a while to reign it in.

It really started getting annoying in the spring of 2005. On Easter fucking Sunday, I was "sexiled" from the dorm room three separate times because three separate women were coming over. But I didn't say anything. I'm a good friend, in spite of the last story I posted.

--

So that's my roommate, now let's talk about me at this time. I did not drink or smoke. I did not have sex, for religious reasons -- yes, really. That's not a cover for "nobody wanted to fuck me." I tended to be that judgey prick who tut-tutted at drunk people, though I was getting better about that.

In the fall I started getting IMs from a girl I'd graduated high school with. We hadn't been that close, so I was kind of surprised. She went to UNC-W. After a few weeks, she mentioned that she was coming up to Raleigh and wanted to stay at my place. It so happened that Douchey McClintock was gonna be out of town, so I -- terrified -- said sure.

Mostly we hung out and watched movies but the last night she reached up and started stroking my arm, which at that point was the most physical contact I'd ever had with a woman. It tipped me over the edge and I, young and stupid as I was, was smitten. I wrote her a letter saying as much a few days later. She responded with "Um yeah OK that's great I need to think about it, so in the meantime let's just pretend you never sent that," or something to that effect. So I did. We kept IMing and added texting to the mix.

Around Thanksgiving, she started pushing pretty hard to have sex, and I resisted. She backed off a little bit. Then, just after Christmas, things came to a head.

--

First, the girl wanted to come spend the weekend in Raleigh again. This time, Douchey did not have plans to leave. So I had to ask him. The way he responded, I might have been asking for a kidney. When I pointed out that I routinely left the dorm for him to have girls over and had NEVER asked the same of him before, he got even more pissy. He relented, but I was angry at him.

Then the girl's car broke down. She asked me to come pick her up. Since I was a goddamn moron, I agreed. We were halfway back when she realized she'd forgotten something at her apartment. I asked if it was important. It was, she said. I later found out they were her pysch meds. So I drove back to get them. For that weekend I was the most pathetic, debased excuse for a delta of a man that has ever lived, driving her around and basically catering to her every whim. You know how this ends. As soon as I dropped her back at her house, she started treating me like shit.

I was a nasty mix of hormones and emotions, and I posted something online complaining about how I was being treated. Douchey apologized for his behavior. The girl tried to sue me. This is why, even in conversation, I call her Lawsuit Girl.

The claim was that I had committed libel or slander (whichever it is on the internet) by claiming that she was on crazy pills. The "lawsuit" didn't get past the phase of her calling her lawyers, for two reasons:

1) I had not said anything of the sort. I had not even come close. She had literally just invented it in her own mind.
2) Even if I had said it, she was on crazy pills, and truth is an ironclad defense against libel.

I was still, barely, holding it together. Then she said something like, "I know your family doesn't have a lot of money, so maybe it would be best if you just gave up now." I hung up the phone, deleted everything related to her, walked outside, and demanded a cigarette. I smoked it, and it was good. So good that I kept doing it for almost ten years.

--

There was still one more shoe to drop, as it did when I was relating the above story to the Lumberjack. In that telling, though, I included what seemed like a minor detail at the time, one that I omitted in the story above: that on her first day in Raleigh, she had been paranoid about Douchey's webcam. It was on his computer like normal, oriented towards the beds. I turned it around.

Lumberjack said, "Hahaha, yeah, he told me the other day he wanted to catch you guys having sex."

At this point I lost all semblance of sanity. My universe imploded in on itself. Some slag hurting me was one thing. This was my brother. I marched into the dorm, intent on sending him to the hospital. In a fair fight, Douchey would take me any day, but I had the element of surprise. Fortunately, he wasn't there.

So I waited.

And waited.

As time went on, the element of surprise was lost as Lumberjack went around telling everybody so they could come watch the fight. Douchey never showed. Finally I said, "Lumberjack, you guys have liquor at your dorm, right?"

His eyes widened in terror, as though he'd had a vision of what this first drink would bring to pass. "....yeeeaaaah, we do."

"Well then. Let's go get drunk."

And I did. And it was fantastic. I went from being as angry and depressed as I have ever been, before or since, to being just about as happy as I could be. It took three hours and two cocktails of, God help me, Five O'Clock Vodka and Mountain Dew.

---

Epilogue:

Everything settled down within a couple of months. Douchey and I communicated by letter because neither of us wanted to face the other. In time, he convinced me that 1) the whole thing had been a joke, the camera was not functional, and 2) he was appropriately contrite for his sins. Maybe #1 is bullshit, but sometimes we have to lie to ourselves to keep sanity. We're still friends to this day, and lived in the same house in grad school.

I cut off contact with Lawsuit Girl. A couple of years later, she started contacting me again, and I, being an idiot, let her. At that point I DID have sex and I still wanted to have sex with her. Fortunately, even though she was eager to comply, circumstances never permitted it. Eventually she had a fresh manifestation of crazy -- faking her suicide to guilt her abusive ex into worrying about her -- and I cut off contact again.

By April I was a hard-drinking pack-a-day smoker who was willing to participate in all kinds of stupidity, including most of the stupidity described in this thread. My mother was devastated. "What will I tell the dental hygienists?" she cried. "They thought the world of you! I don't have the heart to tell them." She made me go see one of the shrinks at the health center. I got this weirdly androgynous black guy / girl (I still have no idea), who heard this story and declared that drinking and smoking were appropriate responses to my situation.

8/22/2014 5:40:58 AM

I'm sad that a girl drove you to drinking and smoking. I'm even sadder that you tried to have sex with a crazy girl that had previously tried to sue you. WTF? I constantly underestimate the powers of the vagina. As always, thanks for sharing. Write a book, plz. kthx.

8/22/2014 10:29:10 AM

Haha. My logic, such as it was, was that she had put me through an enormous amount of crap and I hadn't even gotten laid out of it, so I was going to balance out the account. Or worse. On some level I probably thought, here is a person I have so little regard for, I will feel no guilt whatsoever if I fuck her and then leave. I'm glad it didn't work out, because I would have felt guilty later -- assuming she didn't go all fatal attraction on me.

Because that's really not my style. I've had sex with three people, two of whom were long-term girlfriends and one of whom would have become a long-term girlfriend if my dick hadn't spectacularly failed me.

8/22/2014 10:34:40 AM

So why didn't Lawsuit Girl take your cherry that weekend you were driving her all over God's green earth?

Quote :

"thanks for sharing. Write a book, plz. kthx."

[Edited on August 22, 2014 at 10:43 AM. Reason : Also do you have any current news from Lawsuit Girl?]

8/22/2014 10:42:15 AM

For some reason I always pictured grumpy as a substance abuser from childhood... I didn't realize a single encounter with a girl is what turned him into a Bender-like alcoholic... but this seems like a way better alternative than a douchey preachy Christian.

8/22/2014 10:44:51 AM

Quote :

"one of whom would have become a long-term girlfriend if my dick hadn't spectacularly failed me."

did i miss this story?

8/22/2014 11:05:23 AM

Quote :

"So why didn't Lawsuit Girl take your cherry that weekend you were driving her all over God's green earth?"

I wouldn't let her. I was still shooting for the whole, save myself for marriage bit.

Quote :

" Also do you have any current news from Lawsuit Girl?"

Yeah...some funny, some sad.

After the second set of interactions with her that I had, I cut her off for a while. Eventually I let her talk to me again, not because I wanted to fuck her, but because ... pity? That might be the right word. I'd let her communicate with me until she did something crazy, then I'd stop, and the cycle would repeat.

One of these cycles began when she (unknowingly) made out with my roommate at a party. They'd never met, didn't know each other, and I wasn't there. But at some point after they started and before they could go home together, they were talking and realized they both knew me. Now, my roommate (he was in the house with Douchey and I) had heard the Lawsuit Girl story if not her name, but this started to sound too familiar. He snuck out and called me. I laughed hysterically, told him she was nuts, and wished him good luck. He ran off. She proceeded to harass both of us for days -- her texting and calling me, asking why he wasn't answering her texts and calls. Shit like that.

A while later she calls me and says, "I haven't had sex in a long time. Grumpy, do you know anybody who will have sex with me? They have to be tall, and have a beard, and..." She went on to list about a dozen things that describe me, specifically. Home girl wanted the penis. I did not want the crazy. I said, "Well, if I meet anybody like that I'll let you know."

Right before I left for Benin, she was one of several people who came out of the woodwork to apologize (sort of) for something they had done to me. I don't recall exactly what she said, but it wasn't a full-on "I'm sorry." No big deal. Then, within the hour, facebook informed her that I was having a going away party that she wasn't invited to. She flipped out, but that was the end of it...

...until February 2013. I'm in Cotonou on the internet, and she messages me. The conversation went like this:

Her: "How was your birthday?"
Me: "Eh, it was OK. Gotta adjust your standards for Africa."
Her: "Yeah. I was raped three months ago. I'm soooo sorry your birthday wasn't up to snuff."

At this point I ended the conversation and defriended her. Faking tragedies is this girl's deal. She got raped like I got a knighthood. I woke up the next morning to a bunch of messages culminating in one that said she was going to kill herself. That was the last I ever heard of her, but I can say she never showed up in the obits.

Quote :

"a way better alternative than a douchey preachy Christian."

Not to nitpick, but I was never a "preachy Christian." My opposition to cigarettes and alcohol had nothing to do with Christianity -- hell, the Orthodox are the smoking-est, drunkest Christians around.

And I didn't judge people for fucking (unless it got me kicked out of my room)

8/22/2014 11:12:02 AM

Quote :

"did i miss this story?"

No, I just haven't posted it yet because of a mix of pride and concern that it wasn't really funny enough.

So in grad school, Douchey and I have a roommate, whom I'll call Geezer because he was in his 30s. Geezer was the one who made out with Lawsuit Girl at the party. He was an unashamed womanizer.

Well, he really wanted to fuck this girl from his grad school, and one day she met the Lumberjack and I at Sammy's. She and I clicked instantly, but there's a code, and I'm not trying to cut off my friend. At one point when she goes to the bathroom, Geezer says, "If she comes home with us, stall her so I can run upstairs and take a viagra."

Well, she did, and we did. He fucked her and I was sad for me but happy for him.

Over the following weeks, though, the girl -- we'll call her Pot Head, because her one vice was an unholy love of weed -- started hanging out at our house a lot, but stopped sleeping with Geezer. He didn't care. There were other girls left to screw.

But, although I had taken the pussy down off the super high pedestal on which it once stood, I still didn't want to make a move (even though she was clearly around for me and later said as much). It's a weird situation. She had been boning my roommate. I'd heard them doing it. That was an image that would be hard to get out of my head. Plus, she was divorced -- actually, at this point, it wasn't technically even final. She was a married chick. Besides, she was moving to DC, and I wanted a relationship, not a couple of bangs.

Well, as always, I'm my own worst enemy. I still liked this girl and I've always loved DC. So I go up and visit. Nothing happens because there were other guests. She comes and visits me. I finally make a move. Things are going well. We're in bed. Titties are out. Kissing starts...then she stops.

"We should stop. I'm not in a place where I can do this right now."

I stopped and we both apologized profusely.

But then as soon as she goes back to DC she's begging me to come up there. She misses me, she says, and there is a strong implication that my presence will be the start of something.

I go up and the same god damn thing happens. We start, things go great, then she stops me. Shit. Plus I've got to crash with her for two more days for a job interview thing in the city.

The second day I try again and she doesn't stop me. Hot damn! Victory!

Well...not quite.

My dick would just not get hard.

Now, my dick works just fine. It has gone through firing drills on pretty much a daily basis since the late 90s. But between the false starts ("the vagina that cried wolf"), the stress, the performance anxiety (at this point I hadn't been laid in a year or more)...it didn't work.

She was very good about it. Then the next morning the same fucking thing happens. Of course, at this point I'm mentally shattered. I was like 26 years old. That is not soft-dick age. It wasn't her fault -- she was gorgeous.

The third day I pulled out all the stops and finally had liftoff. From the tone of this story you can probably guess what happened next. "Two pump chump" would have given me credit for about one pump too many. I'm not even sure I was all the way in.

She was polite about it. "I take it as a compliment," and all that. But when I left that day her communication with me dropped off a lot, and I was grateful. Every time I thought of her the bottom would fall out of my mental state.

This was the start of a period of intense anxiety that resulted in my taking zoloft for about a month, at the end of which I got a job and quickly figured out that employment was all the medicine I needed. It was also the heaviest drinking period of my life. When I went to the doc about the anxiety and he asked how much I was consuming, his eyes got wide but he calmly suggested "Yeah...you should drink less." He asked about smoking. "Yeah...you should definitely quit, but for the love of God, don't try right now."

Then I came to Peace Corps. Had one more false start -- the closest I ever came to a one-night stand, but we were walked in on before whiskey dick could be overcome. Then I met my girlfriend and have had zero problems ever since.

8/22/2014 11:31:40 AM

For the love of god don't talk to her again, ever. While she does seem like an interesting species to observe through a window, she's going to try to break the window and eat your neck. I did lol pretty hard about the rape comment, she really set you up for that one.

8/22/2014 11:31:58 AM

Oh no, I wouldn't talk to her again for anything. I've learned a lot since I've been here, and one is that you can't fix crazy.

Oh, and I forgot the final piece of the last stories -- Geezer was the guy who called me a few months ago and came out of the closet, saying, "I'm a dude liker. I like dudes." He's gay, or at least bi. Lives with a boyfriend last I heard. I have had sex with the same person as a gay man.

[Edited on August 22, 2014 at 11:36 AM. Reason : ]

8/22/2014 11:34:40 AM

Quote :

"Things are going well. We're in bed. Titties are out."

Quote :

"The third day I pulled out all the stops and finally had liftoff. From the tone of this story you can probably guess what happened next. "Two pump chump" would have given me credit for about one pump too many. I'm not even sure I was all the way in."

Funny stuff man.

8/22/2014 12:51:11 PM

So the Lawsuit Girl story is one of the two great sudden transitions in my life. The other occurred several years before, in high school. This is the story of how I switched religions and started wearing Hawaiian shirts.

Why did these two events happen? For the only reasons that anything important happens -- love, war, and speech & debate competitions.

---

It's August, 2001. I'm a junior in high school, just starting the real IB program. I'm also, as it turns out, an illegal immigrant -- I was smuggled across county lines every morning so I could do IB in Greensboro rather than FFA in Randleman. As a result, I typically got dropped off at school at around 7:00 AM.

The school was a ghost town at that hour, but right off the bat I found another person in a similar situation. Her name was Theo, and I was pretty much instantly infatuated with her.

Part of this was simply that she was a human female who seemed to sincerely enjoy having me around. That's all it took for me. Also, she was gorgeous. Big, beautiful eyes and bigger, more beautiful breasts; flawless alabaster skin; tall, slim without being too muscular or bony...but, bonus for me, socially awkward enough not to realize that she had become hot.

I almost had a heart attack when I got a call from her at the house one night. To this day I don't know how she found our number, which was unlisted as part of our program to disguise where we really lived. We arranged what passes for a date with people our age. It went well. We arranged another. And another.

And then, out of the blue, she cuts me off. Not only stops talking to me, but starts telling other people that she wants me to catch on fire. (A desire to see me burned alive is an oddly common theme among women I have known. I get why some of them might wish me ill, but why is it always fire in particular?)

Even now I have no idea what happened. There was no cue, no warning. I can tell you exactly what I've done wrong in most of my relationships, but here I'm totally at sea. The prevailing theory is that she was angry I had not had sex with her.

It was my first breakup, or so I thought. Now of course it's obvious we weren't really even dating, but at the time, I was an overly emotional 16 year old. If any of you invent time travel, please go back to September 20, 2001 and beat some sense into my pansy ass.

---

There's the love. As to war, observant readers will already have noticed the time frame of this story. The events of September 11th had a profound effect on me and changed the trajectory of my life in some fundamental ways, but I've nothing funny to observe about it. I mention it simply because it was one of the reasons I was mentally and emotionally a wasteland at this time.

Now for part 2...

8/25/2014 4:20:40 AM

If speech & debate doesn't seem like it belongs on the same plane as such weighty topic as love and war, well, clearly you were never on a debate team.

Grimsley never had a particularly big team and the school never supported it for shit, but we were feisty and proud. I joined sophomore year because I loved the idea of speech and debate. Unfortunately I have a pathological fear of public speaking. I'm not using "pathological" lightly. The first time I went up to give a speech, I blacked out and was later told that I was shaking the podium so violently that nobody could hear me. Later I vomited.

I was the worst goddamn debater in North Carolina, but in spite of becoming violently ill I kept at it. That didn't make me any happier when in comes Douchey McClintock for the first time. I met the prick in debate and he was a natural. He won his first event. In a year I had taken home zero wins.

Well, it turns out that the secret, at least for me, is turning off any semblance of give-a-shit. I didn't want to go to the tournament in October. I was too busy being heartbroken/butthurt over the girl and, in light of impending global war, it was hard to get worked up about debate. But I'd already paid for it, and by this point I was in charge of the club, so I went. Too emotionally exhausted to be afraid of speaking, my presentations came mechanically.

And I won.

In keeping with team tradition I carried a Hawaiian shirt to every tournament. It was the "victory shirt," to be worn in celebration. I'd never gotten to wear it, but that Saturday in Concord I had earned it. Prior to this moment, I'd only ever worn polo shirts. That was the full extent of my wardrobe. School? Polo shirt. Party? Polo shirt. Home on a Saturday lounging around? Polo shirt. You people would have loathed high school grumpy.

Putting on that Hawaiian shirt felt good. Felt damn good, as a matter of fact. I wanted to feel like that all the time. So I went home, put every fucking polo shirt around into the Goodwill box, and never looked back.

Now, the above story isn't that funny. But it answers the question that people have put to me on this board before about my, ah, expansive collection of Hawaiian shirts. (It peaked at around 80)

The same confluence of events also played a role in causing me to convert to Orthodoxy from atheism, though obviously here there were bigger theological questions involved. But it's probably true that not many people switch their basic belief system when they're in a really good mood.

Just before the debate tournament I'd had to bring my brother to the Greek festival in Greensboro so he could get extra credit in the history class he was predictably failing. He didn't get much out of it, but the church tour had a pretty big effect on me. Two weeks later I went to a service and after it I talked to the tiny Romanian priest about converting.

"Father, before we go any further, I have to ask you two questions as kind of a litmus test. One: what's the position on evolution?"
"We are not writing the science books here. Science books, yes for science, not religion. Religion book, yes for religion, no science."
"OK. Dad's an atheist. I'm not sure I can sign on with a religion that says he's gonna roast."
"We are not the...how do you say it? We are not the people who stand at the door and say, you can come in, no, you cannot come in."
"Bouncers?"
"Right. We are not the bouncers at heaven."

And we went from there.

8/25/2014 7:32:52 AM

So you've been essentially carrying around your high school trophy for over the last decade?

You should get a "We are not the bouncers at heaven" tattoo

8/25/2014 7:46:47 AM

You could put it that way, although after a while winning debate competitions stopped meaning as much to me. I wasn't the world champion or anything, but by graduation I was winning more often than not.

To me the shirts are more about embracing the fundamental shittiness of the world and trying to at least have some fun with it.

8/25/2014 7:52:33 AM

Oh. Fair enough. You should keep rocking the fancy African garb when/if you get back to the states.

8/25/2014 7:53:56 AM

I'll definitely keep wearing the shirts, but the pants...no. Because they are the same material as the shirts. African clothes look like technicolor pajamas to Americans.

8/25/2014 7:54:56 AM

But that's the best part. At least wear the matching hat thingy.

8/25/2014 8:44:38 AM

Man, I was just listening to an interview with Todd Snider talking about a book that he had just released. In case you don't know, Todd Snider is a country singer that is most famous for the beer run song that I heard you sing many times while at the skinny house, while wielding a machete, and while very drunk. Anyways, this book is basically nothing more than a collection of all the stories that he had told while he was stuck on stage and had run out of songs to play or what not, but still nonetheless needed to entertain a crowd. So, he started telling stories to entertain people, which actually ain't so easy to pull off because ppl want to hear your music and not listen to you talk. Nonetheless, over the course of 15 years or so he had them all worked out pretty good and made a little memoir out of it.

Anyways, during this interview he was asked if he had ever received any flack or fiery resentment from people that may have been mentioned in his stories in a rather unflattering manner. Todd snider then tells this guy that was interviewing him that he never pissed anybody off by mentioning them in the stories, but that he did piss a lot of people off by not mentioning them in stories that they were a part of.

That's how I feel right about now.



[Edited on August 25, 2014 at 12:55 PM. Reason : a]

8/25/2014 12:54:19 PM