#41 Dear Diary,
Dear Diary,
What a week! I mean most of the time, I want to believe in a higher power and all of that, but then sometimes, life gives me so many darn lemons, that I find I can’t keep up with them all, and as I try to make lemonade, I only end up screwed over, not believing in a benevolent higher power, and stuck in a bitter, sticky mess! That was how this last week went for me, and so I’m damn glad to have finally put this week in the history books! Let me see if I can recapitulate exactly what drove me insane this week for you!
First of all, as you know, I dearly love the house that I’ve been living in since June; I mean we have a beautiful large garden, perfect for summer bonfires and barbeques, and the inside is equally spacious, with nice soft wooden floors. But as you know, the owner of the house has decided to reclaim her own home, forcing me to finding a new place. New apartment searches are exciting, but also daunting. Fortunately, I found a new apartment, with some great friends to live with, but this week still marked the end of an era in which I moved out of one of the greatest homes that I’ve ever lived in.
So instead of lounging and relaxing on my days off this week, I got to pack up everything that I own (for the fourth time in the past year and a half), and threw it all in my car, and then I got to carry everything up three flights of stairs, into my new top story apartment. But I need not complain; moving isn’t that hard, at least it isn’t when everything you own can fit in your car. I’m sure if I owned bookshelves and couches I’d have a lot more room to complain (get it, room? Ha!). So really, that aspect of my week wasn’t that bad.
But Monday morning, oh god, Diary, that was rough! I woke up, feeling a strange and awful pain in my head. Every time I rolled over I would wake up from the pain, and it felt like the pain was centered in between my two front teeth. After brushing my teeth that morning, I went to blow my nose and felt an even more horrendous pain! It ends up that I was finally “lucky enough” to experience something that I’d only heard of from other people; I had a pimple on the inside of my nose! Now I know what you are thinking: that’s disgusting, but hey, Diary, it’s just between you and me, right? I mean, no one else has to know, and I really feel that I need to vent, because this pimple lasted almost four days, and hurt worse than the time I got punched in the nose by those rowdy high school kids with cinder blocks who were attacking my friends at our house party!
The strange thing about having a painful, hidden pimple is that because it hurts every time you even twitch your nose, and because it feels so large (even though you can’t really see it), you get kind of paranoid, and your mind seems to insist that everyone else you encounter can see the bugger, and that they’re thinking in their own heads about how disgusting it is that you have a large, painful pimple inside of your nose. But really, people can’t actually see it, even though it feels so prominent that you imagine that your nose is actually larger than normal to make up for the new tenant leasing space in your nose. Does this constitute as yet another so-called ‘irrational fear’ of mine?
But the pimple wasn’t even remotely close to the worst thing that happened this week. I’m a pretty responsible guy, right? I mean, I get my work done on time, I’m on time and I almost always show up to wherever it is that I say I’ll be, and I keep track of my personal finances. But on my way to band practice this Tuesday, I did something pretty out of character, and irresponsible. While bicycling the five and a half miles from my old house to where our band meets to practice, I heard something smack the pavement, but pretty much ignored the noise and continued to bike. Well, when I arrived, I realized that that noise was none other than the sound of my cell phone falling out of my pocket and hitting the cement. It was too far to go back and search in the rain-soaked, dark streets for the stupid thing; so instead, I rode over to the Sprint Store to buy a new phone.
Now, you will recall that I don’t exactly have a good, healthy relationship with Sprint. From my perspective, the deal works something like this. A long time ago, in the fall of 2000, I was tantalized and wooed by Sprint to purchase one of their sleek new cell phones so that I could call my long-distance girlfriend at the time for cheaper than from a landline. At first, things went great. But then there were some arguments between Sprint and me. They claimed I made a 200-dollar special roaming call during a power outage crisis, while I claimed that they were more full of shit than Bill Clinton, George Bush, and the sham we call democracy, combined. They told me they didn’t really care what I thought, about politics or customer service, because if I refused to pay, they were going to call a collection agency and ruin my credit rating. And so, despite their fecal odor, I gave in and paid them for their ridiculous service fees. I was strong armed by the man!
After that debacle, I switched to AT&T, but their service sucked worse than Sprint’s, so I went back to Sprint. But every time I change any aspect of my plan with Sprint, be it changing how many minutes per month I have, or adding text messaging to my plan, I am forced to renew my ‘wedding vows’ (read: contract) with Sprint and pledge another two-year tour of duty (till death do us part, sigh). Seriously, cell phone contracts are actually like military contracts; they’re automatically renewed without your permission, and you never really have a say as to when you get to leave, you just hope that someone high up has a change of heart, or even just a change in mind for their policy, cross your fingers, and wish for the best, or if you quit mid tour, you face serious legal challenges.
A lot of my friends asked me how come I didn’t have ‘cell phone insurance?’ Diary, can you believe that? You know how much I hate insurance! I mean, it’s like the biggest scam of all time; you give your money every so often to someone who promises that if something bad happens, the person you gave money to will ‘have your back.’ But this leads frugal men like myself to basically feel like I’m getting ripped off unless something bad happens to me, which means that if I pay for insurance, I’m going to start rooting against myself, which to me, is counter-intuitive in all realms of life. So I don’t have cell phone insurance, and so when I lost my cell phone, I decided to purchase the cheapest phone at the store. Well, the cheapest phone on the current market is now $180 (Damn single crossed dollar sign, could things get any worse?)! So I bought the $180 phone.
Sprint, on the other hand, seems to think that I should be grateful for paying only $180 for the newfangled thing because it has a camera on it – whoopee! The only thing that I wanted to do with the new camera phone was to track down the bastard Sprint marketing executive who made camera phones mandatory in all phones so that consumers have to spend even more to get a stupid phone, and then take a picture of him to send to the Better Business Bureau, and maybe his mother, so she could see what kind of monster she created. I mean, seriously, what am I supposed to do with a phone on my camera? I don’t like to be in pictures, I don’t like to stop having a good time to take a picture to remember it later, and my other friends take pictures all of the time. So I feel duped having been forced to pay for a luxury good that is neither good nor luxurious for me!
I mean the camera phone is a neat idea, right up there with the key chain toothpick holder, but if we’re really going to boldly step into the future, invention-wise, then I’d like to see something a little more impressive. Like how about a phone that can remind me what someone’s name is whom I’ve met several times before but can’t remember, this way I will never again have to meekly shake someone’s hand, and say “how’s it going, Jim?” only to have them reply, it’s going well, but my name is George, Mike.” (Why does the other person always remember your name in these situations?) Or even better yet, how about a phone that remembers where I left my keys so that I’m never late to work again because I can’t find my keys? Or how about a phone that makes cars in front of me aware that they are traveling at five to ten miles under the posted speed limit?
But I’m really not all that bitter, I swear, it’s just rough when you lose your phone and then have to publicly humiliate yourself by emailing every friend you have to ask them for their phone numbers, as well as any other tangential friends whose email addresses I may not have. And then their replies are always so witty and clever that you feel even dumber, yet oddly loved, because they bothered to reply (Kennedy, you’re so clever!).
And speaking of replies, how come not one single girl from my entire column subscription list replied to my query about drunken girls puking in packs at the bars? None of these girls where shy at all about telling me how sweet my parents’ wedding tribute was, but I ask one serious question about female behavioral science, and they all clam up like I asked them what it feels like to wear a tampon or something! I mean, I thought it was a candid question; one that could perhaps improve the sexual dialogue between men and women – well, I guess I was wrong. Maybe my nose pimple was karma’s way of saying “mind your own business, go back to obsessing over your fantasy football team like the overgrown Neanderthal meat head you are!” My dear Aunt tried to reply to my query, but she only addressed the issue of females heading into restrooms like a pack of wolves, and not the puking part of the equation. I also had a great friend from the past reply, and he told me that ever since he donned long hair, he has found out, the hard way, that long hair makes solo puking kind of difficult. So he assumes that girls need a friend to hold their hair back, so they don’t return from the bathroom with puke in their hair – but he still said he braves the consequences, and pukes alone, like a man!
At any rate, despite the occasional week with little hang-ups like the nose pimple and the cell phone incident, I think life is still great, and I’m still having one hell of a time here on Earth. I still haven’t figured out how to get so rich that I can retire by my 26th birthday this June, but maybe I should just sack up and plan my retirement for thirty, I suppose that I could manage to work for a living for another four years or so. Thanks Diary, I feel better already; you’re a great listener! Let’s keep this between us, okay?
