People Who are Important to Me: My Little Brother Who's a Super Freak

God, I suck at updating this thing. When I started it I was hoping for internet fame like some of the more popular blogs that I follow, but thing is, they update regularly and have a pretty solid following. Also, they have pictures, and mine has none. Oh woe is me, I will never scale the ladder of internet fame!

But anyway, a new post! Huzzah! So the latest installment of blog posts about the people I'm fond of (which started with a story about one of my best friends conning me as a small child) is going to kind of cover my little brother. The thing is, my little brother, who is 17 years old and not normal in any sense of the word, is like most beautiful and important things in this world. Just as you cannot define the truly important things in life like love, justice, and beauty in words without somehow cheapening the deeply personal connotation each individual human carries with them deep against their soul, you cannot define or really describe my little brother and do his person justice. I just reread that, and while it conveys the thought I want, it's really long winded, so let me rephrase. You cannot set a definition to a word without excluding all of the other possible definitions, and while that is perfectly fine for words like "banana" and "platypus," it'll hardly do for those abstract words that we use to describe the really important parts of our lives. And the same principle applies to Paul, my younger brother. So this blog will probably have a series of posts about him, and eventually I might paint a picture of him that comes close to the reality, but for now, just giggle and try not to judge too much.

So I'll tell you about the thighs. Yes, thighs. I really wish I had a picture I could show you of him doing this, but Paul's got some sort of strange sixth sense about when anything with recording capacities turns on. One minute he'll be stalking through the kitchen making velociraptor noises, and then someone will turn on a camera upstairs behind a closed door and he'll stop.

THIGHS! is kind of my brother's battle cry, and weird as it sounds, it evolved from SCKREEE! but before I get there, I have to explain something about Paul. He's brilliant, hands down the smartest person I know, but he is also lazy as all fuck. I don't know if "lazy" is really the right word, but Paul will do absolutely nothing without coercion or bribery unless he "sees the point." And that point almost always has to be entertainment value. If it's not fun, he will not do it unless someone is bribing him, threatening him, or physically moving his body for him. This applies to homework (he surprisingly doesn't have a problem with school) and chores mostly, and while he's figured out how to really dig his heels in about homework, he's developed an evolving defense mechanism to avoid taking out the trash, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, and etc.

When I was his age, so he would have been in middle school, whenever we asked him to do anything, Paul would pretend to become a velociraptor. He'd get up on his toes and stalk around like the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, which was pretty amusing, but didn't impede our ability to talk to him. He solved this problem by screaming SCKREEE! every time we opened our mouths, which was funny the first couple of times. Until, of course, we got fed up and just covered his mouth. It's hard to scream like a velociraptor with two hands over your mouth, but he'd try it anyway.

From this dinosaur phase, though, he developed a kind of disturbing way of walking. He'll get up on his toes and skitter around with his legs bowed. If you've ever seen those mating dances that crabs do on their hind legs, it kind of looks like that, but giant. He's a buck ten after eating a Thanksgiving turkey by himself, but he's also pushing 6 feet now, so he looks like this but without a suit because he'd never change out of his pajama pants (that are too short, by the way) if he didn't have to. So picture the Slender Man doing a crab dance with bowed legs, and you've got a pretty good idea of how Paul likes to walk around the house.

I mentioned the pajama pants, right? Remember them, they're important to THIGHS! because jeans just don't cut it for this. Anyway, Paul typically doesn't wear anything beyond pajama pants that don't go past his ankles, which is how this whole thing started. He's damn skinny, almost to the point that we're afraid if he walks past an open window someone will call child services. Not to mention that he's Edward Cullen pale, and hunches like this guy (just showed that picture to Paul, telling him I found a really good picture of him on the internet. He didn't think I was funny), so he looks pretty freaking strange to begin with. The high-water pajama pants are really just icing on the weird ass cake, because he's funny looking all on his own. But he won't get pants that fit, since he hates clothes shopping and inherited my father's deep rooted fear of change. We used to tease him about it, asking if a pipe had burst in his room, and after Japan's tsunami we started asking if he was planning a vacation (my family is made entirely of assholes).

His response, god help us all, became to pull his pajama pants up as high as possible, like Urkel. When that became old hat, he started grabbing his pants at the ankles and pulling them up so high that it looks like he's wearing a flannel diaper.

Picture this: the Slender Man in a flannel diaper and nothing else hunched like Quasimoto and pale as death. Now make him skitter.

If I've done my job right, you just wet yourself with laughter, because that is almost always the reaction he gets when he does this. It is so effective at crippling the entire family with laughter, that he'll squint and whisper "THIGHS" and we break into hysterics just thinking about it. The word has become a threat, so conversations go like this:
"Paul, take out the trash"
"Thighs"
"Grurk (that's the sound of someone choking on their own laughter). Paul, I'm not asking again."
"THIGHS"
"Paul, don't!"
"THIGHS!" and then the pants are up and he's skittering away. I'm laughing just thinking about it.

How to "Ladies Night" at a College Bar

So I officially ended my sophomore year at college this Wednesday, drank myself into projectile vomiting, and then moved everything I own (while still projectile vomiting) out of my on campus apartment the following day. And I couldn't help but notice while I was packing all my knick-knacks between worshiping at the porcelain alter that this year has been super educational. I don't mean boring stuff like "I can now speak rudimentary Russian, including both telling someone I love them and then breaking up with them" or "I now understand how the Banking system works and can derive forward exchange rate quotes" or that kind of crap. No, I'm talking about learning how to be 20 years old. See, in my mind I have not had a particularly normal college experience, which is another way to say that until about April I more or less hated college. I still hate college, but at least now I know how to stave off the loathing for a night. See, in April I finally got close with my roommate, Alexa, who more or less is the driving educational force behind this post. Alexa, though being my age, has her older sister's ID, and can get into campus bars in the area. She managed to find one that I could drink at Wednesday nights through a combination of showing up really fucking early and being a white, skinny, attractive female who clearly does not know the first thing about avoiding being hit on at seedy college bars. So, for your entertainment at my own expense, here are the things I learned about bars at the Wednesday ladies night down the block from our apartment.

1) Even if you're not 21, if you're surrounded by friends who have legitimate IDs, the waitress tends to give you the benefit of the doubt and serve you anyway. Part of the reason we got to the bar so early was because there was a trivia thing Wednesday nights that Alexa loved going to, and we'd always get a pitcher of light beer and drink a little while we googled answered questions. And every single week, everyone would show the waitress their ID, and she'd get to me and I'd give her a line about losing my wallet or forgetting it at home, and she'd say "Nah, don't worry about it." Every single time! And the best part was that I know I was not the youngest person in that bar.

2) For the love of God, do not stick your ass out into the aisle while leaning against the table unless you want to get hit on. Or just have your ass grabbed. To be fair, this was totally the first night I'd ever drank at a bar, I was so excited to be drinking in a bar that I didn't think about it, and I learned my lesson pretty quick. Anyway, we were all sitting at one of the taller tables with bar stools, but my seat got jacked when I went to go get another drink. I didn't think it'd be a big deal, so I just put a leg up on Alexa's chair and leaned against the table. To give you a really solid image, I was like Captain Morgan in skinny jeans. It was seriously less than five minutes before the nastiest, oldest, sleaziest guy in the bar came sauntering up to me, declaring I was the "sexiest girl here." And not knowing any better, I thanked him and then tried to get rid of him for the next 20 minutes because he wouldn't stop repeating how sexy I was and I couldn't stop thanking him because I'm an idiot when I'm drunk. Once I got rid of him, I went back to standing like Captain Morgan's slutty cousin and got my ass grabbed at least twice in the span of 60 seconds. I went home shortly thereafter.


3) When a nasty ass guy is hitting on you, declaring you're lesbian and have a girlfriend in Texas is the worst defense you could think of. I was trying to get rid of the nasty guy who kept toasting to me being some sort of underaged sexy bar goddess, when I decided that if he thought I batted for the other team, he might leave me alone. Nope. Instead, we stopped toasting how hot I apparently was, and started toasting to "pussy," at which point I figured I was so offended by this slimy man that I'd just ignore him. Twenty minutes after he started lauding my ass-ests, I figure out that ignoring creeps is the best way to get them to go away. I guess a secondary heading to this point could be Manners do not apply in a bar.

4) No matter how hung over you are, Thursday classes are too important to miss, so you'll go wishing a bus would hit you just to make the hangover feel less awful. Also, Gatorade is pretty much the best thing ever in that state of being. My hardest class was the International Economies class I had Tuesdays and Thursdays, aka the Day Before Drinking and the Day After Drinking, and no way could I afford to not go. So I'd go, and spend most of the class wishing for death. Thing is, I get SUPER hung over. At any given point of time, I'm probably dehydrated because of a couple different naturally occurring conditions in my body. Darwin would say "let her die," but instead I've spent the last twenty years of my life staving off death-by-dehydration by constantly drinking some sort of fluid. Now, if you've ever taken a freshman orientation class (or a "Please don't drink yourself to death because we'll be responsible" class), you know that alcohol is a diuretic like caffeine, and a hangover is really just the unpleasant combination of alcohol withdrawal and dehydration. So, if I replace constantly drinking water with even a little bit of liquor, the next morning my body basically tries to shut down. I've more or less dealt with this since I started drinking by just constantly having a water bottle with me while I party, and then also not drinking when I have plans the next morning. Neither of these safeguards work super well for the Wednesday night festivities, so I once spent an afternoon wishing for death until 4 because I had such a horrible headache. At one point, a classmate whose drunk debauchery would put Bradley Cooper to shame told me to drink Gatorade instead, and that usually halves the hangover. Which is super necessary when "Hangover" is synonymous with "Oh God, just let me die!"


5) People get really easy to talk to when you can't hear them. This one is probably more reflective of me, but I'm really bad at small talk, and it makes meeting people in random places kinda hard. Usually when you liquor someone up, the problem goes away, but even drunk I have a hard time with small talk. I found, though, if you're in a bar and can't hear half of what the other person is saying even while you yell, the conversation suddenly becomes awesome! I once had a conversation about Shakespeare at the bar with one of Alexa's friends, and the next morning I got a text message from him saying "I didn't know you were so interested in physics!"


I've still got a year before I turn 21, and Alexa is studying abroad next fall, so I really won't have a reason to be at that bar Wednesday nights. This might give my liver a chance to recuperate... but something tells me I'll miss it. Even if being "normal" means hangovers and getting hit on by creepers, it is weird how much I value that sensation every now and then.

How to Lobotomize Yourself with 14 Hours, a Car, and the State of New Mexico

Quick Note: Oliver, keep all your comments in one post, and if you continue to correct my grammar, there will be a reckoning akin to none this realm hath seen.

ANYWAY - So, like the four of you who read this know, I'm in a long distance relationship. My man-boy is in the Air Force, specifically in the Intel bit of the Air Force, and for whatever reason, he was assigned to work with the Special Operations macho-masochists. Maybe the small animal he sacrificed to the God of Interesting Military Assignments wasn't a virgin, or he didn't do it under the full moon or something. Now, I know working with the SpecOps sounds really cool, like he's skydiving out of a plane while doing calculous on his watch to triangulate the exact degree at which he needs to shoot a missile in order to prevent WWIII with minimal civilian casualties and save the love of his life (someone else, please - I just can't miss my test on Thursday to be dangled over crocodiles AGAIN), but that's not actually what happens. I know, right? I was really disappointed too. No, he spends his days in a small, concrete room for 12 hours watching a computer screen. He's not really allowed to tell me what he sees, and I'm probably less allowed to tell the internet, but he's equated it with watching grass grow, and since he's watching a desert, there's not even that thrilling escape from boredom.

Now, this wouldn't be quite so bad if after work or on the weekends he could go do something exciting, but that would require being stationed somewhere larger than our high school. No no no, that's not a bad metaphor - that's literal. The town he's stationed in is the size of our high school, or about 2,500 people, if you don't include the military. Including military stationed there, it's probably, maybe, the size of the four major high schools in our area. Fly poop is more densely populated that this place. And since none of the military members want to actually stay there more than the required three years (OH GOD WHY?!), there's not too much investment in entertainment around. There's two chain restaurants (one of which is the major corporation I work for, as if I didn't eat enough of their food already), a Walmart, a gas station, a Hastings (which is something akin to the love child of Blockbuster and Borders but sneakier), and a plethora of Thai restaurants. Why Thai, you ask, in this God forsaken speck of spittle on the map, this place where couples have matching tooth decay from tobacco use? I have no clue, but I counted three, and that's like one on every block. If there was a Hell on Earth, this place would be the waiting room.

He's only been there since December, though, so not long enough to go insane and start wearing the skins of his coworkers yet, and the weekend before Valentines Day was the first weekend I had the time to go see him. Now, I was hoping to have a certain other serviceman drive down with me, but the timing just didn't work out, and all told it's not a hard drive as long as the weather is nice, and it's not long.

Not long.

Only 7 hours one way if you drive like a bat out of hell.

Not long...

As you can imagine, though, it'd been two months since I last saw my man-boy, and I was ever so excited to go see him. I spent the week before meticulously preparing. I picked up a box of stuff his mom wanted me to take down to him, which was slightly akin to herding cats in an old fashioned diver's suit, I burnt myself all sorts of CDs, I had books on tape, snacks, energy drinks, and I was good to go! Boyfriend, here I come!

12:30 pm - Fill the tank of my CRV and get two greasy slices of pizza that are sure to save well, plus a bottle of water. Call my mom to tell her I'm leaving, and then hang up to begin my sing-a-long with the radio.

1:00 - Energetically sing-a-long to Toxic, Animal, Sexy Back, and then notice that the stations I want to listen to are getting fuzzy. Turn the radio to the oldies station, continue sing-a-long to Hotel California, Taking Care of Business, and American Pie, and try not to pretend I'm singing without my dentures.


1:15 - Radio is totally dead, leaving only ominous sound of static. I pop in my first book on tape, Lies my Teacher Told Me. Try to respond to the tape like I'm having a conversation, including fake laughs, arguments, and vigorous nods. Convince myself it's entertaining.

2:30 - Bolt into the truck stop to pee.

3:00 - Call my lazy ass boyfriend, who doesn't answer, leaving me alone to the open road and the impending madness. All around me is flat and barren, the kind of post apocalyptic scene Cormac McCarthy described in The Road, yellow and grey and decayed with the occasional buttress of forlorn rock standing stalwart against the horizon like a soldier's corpse still defending his post after the bomb had gone off.

4:00 - Beginning to question my own sanity, and frantic that my man-boy was not picking up the phone (therefore rabid wolverines ate him in his sleep and I was driving not to a weekend of love and relaxation, but a tragic funeral where I would have to dig the grave with my own hands because in this town "back hoe" means a prostitute specializing in anal), so I called my mom. After a debate over whether or not my sister joining the "Go Green" club at her elementary school would drive my father into a righteous rage over a consumer's right to all the plastic bags he wanted, I had her call the man-boy on his Skype. Praise jesus, he lives! He was sleeping while I was trekking to see him, but still, he lives!

4:30 - Stop in an even sketchier truck stop. Afraid manager will make me buy a can of chew and say "purdy" to use the bathroom.

5:30 - Turn off the book on tape, quite sure that the narrator's drone would be the soundtrack to my madness. Already I am contemplating getting out of the car and finding a cow to tip just for the sake of something to do. The only reason I don't is a fear that the cow will try to eat me instead.

6:00 - Find the last piece of civilization self-aware enough to have two whole gas stations and today's newspaper. I stop and get a Subway sandwich and try to make conversation with a clerk while buying Advil. At this point, I feel like my spinal cord is only duct taped into my spine, and turning my head has the distinct sensation of pulling the duct tape loose. The clerk is uninterested, and tells me that I have at least another hour and a half, two hours, to the Air Force base like it's the typical drive to the super market for her. The withering look she gives me when I choke makes me want to take her hand and say "There are places you could go, honey. Places better than this, if only you dare to dream!" But I take my Advil and get back in the car, making sure to empty my bladder again because I can "hold it" just about as well as my one year old cousin.

6:30 - Start to panic, because as empty as the drive has been thus far, I did see the occasional house or car going the opposite direction. But now it's dark, and I don't know where I'm going on a one lane highway, and I feel like I'm one busted tire away from Halloween 27. Speeding towards either my own demise or my boyfriend, I can't tell which, I catch up with a red Mustang going only slightly slower than me. Rather than pass them, I being following at what I think is a reasonable distance. Another human being, thank god! I'm not in the Twilight Zone! Apparently, though, what for me was a reasonable distance was to them aggressive tailgating, and after about twenty minutes, they try to shake me. They slow down, I slow down. They speed up, I speed up for fear of losing them. Finally, they pulled over to force me to pass, and I almost wanted to pull over too and explain "I'm not going to kill you, I'm just scared out of my mind and I don't want to be eaten by mutant tumbleweeds in the middle of nowhere." But that had a distinct possibility of not ending well, so I went past and drove alone.

7:30 - I finally pull up to the base gate, and see my boyfriend waiting for me in the cold, a big grin going ear to ear. After seven hours alone, when he pulled me out of the car for a hug and a kiss, the sensation of another's touch seemed so alien. But then I got used to it. Heh.

The drive back was almost the same, with two distinct differences. I did the really boring stretch I'd done at night in the morning, so I could see exactly how desolate the surrounding area was. At first I was counting tumbleweeds, but after fifteen or so minutes I hit triple digits and decided to stop. I was, however, convinced that someone was going to jump out of my back seat and shout "It's a twista! It's a twista!" The other change was that instead of listening to the book on tape and letting it lull me into a complacent state of insanity in which I might try to kill the president, I listened to my only Regina Spektor album three or four times in a row, picking apart the lyrics for religious meaning.

The moral: I hope New Mexico falls into a sink hole next time my boyfriend comes home. Also, Regina Spektor is probably a secret disciple of the new Moon Goddess.

Big Scary College Bear

Umm, so hi, I didn't die. I just got lazy. Turns out that school motivates me to blog, so being out of school saps all my desire to vent angrily to the interwebs. But anyway, that's not what you're here for. You're here for a story! (Yay story time!) Well, this month I don't have a story. (Ohhh, no story time?) I have an extended metaphor because my boyfriend is an idiot. And I mean that in the most loving way possible. You see, it all started this afternoon when I cut a painfully large check for my parents. Writing it in blood could not have made the sum hurt more. Writing it in blood while being mauled by a lion might have made it hurt more; however, I'm not really willing to test that one. But those parameters can probably sum up the amount of money for you, depending on what you consider lion-maulingly painful. When I was trying to explain to my boyfriend why I was paying my parents a check written in my own life blood (which my mom would claim is technically hers to lay a claim on), it turned into me trying to explain how the whole college loans thing works. The man-boy can understand ancient politics, debug a 5 year old computer without a manual, and reads Voltaire for shits and giggles but for some reason he can't grasp the concept of staggeringly large amounts of debt three years from now, so after a half hour of banging my head against his proverbial wall, he asked me to explain it in really simple terms he can understand, like bears and cookies.

I don't understand why this blog keeps coming back to bears.

So picture this. Me, dressed for some reason in a black version of the Little Red Riding Hood costume because I'm an emo kid, skipping merrily through the Woods of Life. These woods are boring, and I've been walking for what seems like an eternity, but is in reality a small blip of time. I decide what I need to spice up my walk is a friend, preferably a very large scary predator because I'm a moron and all the other morons walking through the forrest tell me that large predator friends are a must. Something about protecting me from other walkers and their scary predators or a steady income or some other hooha that doesn't really fit cleanly in this metaphor. But these predators aren't going to just hang out with you. They'd much rather eat you, so you must bribe them for 4-8 years with cookies to keep them appeased. Well, running through the gambit of wolves, tigers, lions, bears, and Gary Busey, I realized I just don't and won't ever have enough cookies to get a really cool meat-eater, like a white bengal tiger with wings and a samurai sword.

So I settled with a pit bull. He was pretty boring, honestly, but he had a pretty moderate appetite, and he at least sounded scary in a "fuck, don't go over there to that meth lab, that pit bull has a taste for human flesh" kind of way. So I raided my cookie jar, that was significantly diminished by the Recession Ants that made off with a good chunk of my cookies, and my dad did some figuring. The Muffin Man of the Forrest (ok, this one is kind of random. He's the federal government) said, "Hey, you're young and that pit bill is probably going to eat you, so I'll bake you 8,000 cookies a year, and you can pay me back at an interest rate of 6.8% after he's sated and you've become friends in four years." My dad told me that was a good idea so that we could milk what was in my cookie jar, and he'd add a little out of his own cookie jar, and we'd all be happy. But a couple things happened with that pit bull. First, when you get a scary predator friend, you have to go where he wants until his appetite for either your blood or cookies is appeased. And this pit bull lived in a neighborhood far away from my home and full of crack houses. Second, and stemming from the first problem, the other people hanging out with that pit bull were negligent at best and maliciously sadistic at worst. The whole year I spent hanging out with that pit bull was the equivalent of having a squirrel chew through my neck - slow, painful, and scarring.

So I ditched the pit bull as fast as I could and decided to upgrade to a bigger predator that lived closer to home. I could have gone up to Boulder and hung out with a stoned buffalo, but he's neither scary nor particularly coherent 90% of the time and we didn't have any common interests, so I declined.  I could have hung out in Fort Collins with a... goat? I don't know, it's got horns and is most interested in the sciences. No thanks to that too. And then I met this bear. Oh my god, this bear. He's beautiful, and he's smart and we had so much to talk about! But... he's really fricken hungry and the Recession Ants were really mean to me. I thought there was no way I could possibly hang out with this bear without being eaten alive in the first month. But my dad, who is in reality a mystical voodoo money man and in this metaphor is a magician who can pull cookies out of trees at the expense of sacrificing a small animal, sat down and did his spooky math thing.

While I was convinced that the only way to make this work was to in-debit myself to the Muffin Man to the tune of 50,000 cookies in 4 years, my dad managed to lower to amount of money cookies I'll have to borrow down to 33,000 plus the 6.8%  interest. Now, this interest on the cookies is weird. Half the sum of cookies I borrow in a year, the interest starts ticking immediately although it doesn't have to be paid off immediately. The other half for that year doesn't begin accruing interest until after bear has decided it's no longer hungry for my flesh. And this happens every year. I could probably sit down and calculate each individual sum, but despite being an Econ major and the daughter of a Mystical Voodoo Money Man, the idea quite frankly makes my head spin. The other part of cutting down how much I'll have to borrow is that I have to bake (?) 5,000 cookies a year by myself to appease the bear, and my parents will wave a magic stick and hope to be able to cover the rest. And rather than have a million checks for paltry sums flying at the bear and confusing everyone involved, we pool it all in my dad's cookie jar and pay the bear out of one pot. Every. Single. Year.

So now that this probably makes sense, go back and replace "cookies" with "money" and I can start loving you again because you're smart.