Last night Calvin surprised me as I came out of the kitchen, "hey dad check this out" and he opened his mouth in a gaping grin...he had a hole where a molar should be.
When I went into the kitchen he wasn't a meth head...wtf?
Then he brandished a tooth.
-what the hell dude?
-I lost a tooth
-I didn't know you had a loose tooth
-yeah I don't tell anybody when I have a loose tooth...cause they'll try to pull it
-Who the fuck is trying to pull your teeth?!
-yeah... mostly just mom.
His mom is one of those weird people who can't keep her hands off other people.
Ever know one of those people? Always fiddling with your hair and shit.
I made a comment about it and my friend Cindy said I was being mean but I had to prove my point so I said to Calvin, does your mom pop your pimples? he said "no...I had to make her stop"
How much do I fucking hate people that pop other people's pimples? Hyuk!
Seriously, are you a fucking monkey? Keep you hands off the rest of the pack. Jeebus Crispers.
(See how I substituted that for saying Jesus fucking Christ? I'm gaining sensitivity in my old age)
I had a friend in high school that used to get ingrown hairs on his back (Hyuk!) and we would be at his house and he would lay on the floor and his mom would pop them! (hyuk) in front of me (hyuk) Have some fucking decorum people!
But the worst?
Absolute Fucking Worst?
(I caution you, if this has been unpleasant up to now, you will hate me afterwards)
Some people have no sense of boundaries.

OK
we were visiting my Grammy Betty. She lived up in the mountains in northern California.
They left my sister and I at a babysitter. I remember 3 things about this experience.
1) I had withe me a Harlem Globetrotters lunchbox that contained, among other things, oreos.
2) it hailed chunks of ice the size of golfballs. (or as I like to think of it, commercially produced meatballs, the kind you get in a giant bag at sam's club)
3) the woman was breastfeeding.

Lets discuss why I remember that last bit.
I was about 7. My sister about 3.
This woman was breastfeeding a baby in the livingroom.
She had a daughter about my age and her daughter had a friend over. She whipped the boob out to do her thing, which made me uncomfortable. ( I confess, I was pretty uptight at 7, I'm much cooler now) Then the daughter asked if she could have some and the mom said sure. Then the daughter offered it to the friend! And the friend was all
"oh milk from my best friends mom's boob? hells yeah!"
I was definitely in hyuk mode ...then she looked right at me and said, "you want to try?"
It was like I was in some kind of bad vampire movie.
Everybody seems all cool and everything then they are all like "hey we drink blood by the way, that's cool right?"
What The Fuck?
Personal Boundaries people!

Uni doesn't sleep ...it waits

Ever since Cindy and I had The Uni Incident uni has become a catch-all reference for things horrible and disgusting.
Recently we were talking about how much we really want to trick others into eating it....I think if we can get enough people to do it we will be able to spread the hate exponentially and eventually I will design a t shirt that says "I ate uni" with a little pictograph of a guy making a "hyuk!" face. I'll sell them on my website www.iateuni.hyuk.com.
It's a dream...
I was discussing my plan to try to trick my co-workers into eating it. I've been going to lunch all week with the same three people and I think I may have earned just enough trust to get at least one of them to try this abomination.
Cindy told me that I should tell them it's an aphrodisiac. I said yeah because after you manage to choke the stuff down you yell out "Fuck Me!" Cindy said, "no it's an aphrodisiac because after having that shit in your mouth bodily fluids are nothing"
She commented that uni tastes like ass, I said "actually it tastes like an ass that someone wiped with an even dirtier ass" then remarkably the conversation actually devolved from there.
You may be wondering how it could have gotten worse but I am going to be merciful and spare you the details.

In other Cindy related news I got a new phone.
Which doesn't directly relate to her ....yet.

I was playing with my new super high-tech-cool-ass phone....and frankly it was infuriating me.
All I wanted to do was send a text message and I could not make the thing behave. I hadn't figured out this predictive text thingy it has and so I was trying to write "goodnight" and it thought maybe I was trying to say something about ghosts. It reminded me of talking to a person who is:
1) insanely obsessed with trying to predict what you're going to say next
and
2) very bad at it
So you say, "hey the other day I was out in the woods and I saw"
and before you can finish the sentence the person says
"the Pope shitting?!"
What? NO!
(by the way that was an extremely obscure Steve Martin reference and anybody who can tell me where that comes from gets a severely abused vinyl copy of "Lets get small")
So it thought I wanted to talk about ghosts instead of simply saying goodnight to Cindy.
Fucking great.
It has all kinds of quirks.
Oh and ? This is an unapologetic phone.
Literally.
I can not get this thing to type the word "sorry".
It may make me more of an asshole because I'm about to give the fuck up on trying to say
"I'm sorry." I'm just going to be all "I ain't apologizing for shit...'cause my phone won't let me."
But you know what? The phone learned the word "fuck" and all it's various permutations very quickly. Who didn't see that coming?
Oh, also, when I try to type the word "go" it defaults first to "ho" so sometimes if I am texting too fast I suggest to a friend that she should "ho" instead of "go".
Not good.
It's similar to T9 texting, but with wider predictive abilities. I gave up on T9. It was even more fucking weird and random than this phone.
When I complained about the capriciousness of T9 to Cindy she told me to
"put on your big girl panties and learn T9 already"
Gotta love Cindy she can be a real peach sometimes.
Thanks Peaches.

Market forces and whatnot

I have been job hopping lately and I don't much like it. I can always get a job but it's a matter of will it be profitable.
The situation with the housing market sort of took all the fun out of being a loan officer.
I went back to selling cars but even selling the best product at the best store didn't do much to help the fact that the automotive market was the only consumer segment to show negative growth last quarter.
Oops.
So, I decided to sell one of the most recession proof things I could think of: cell phones.
You may cut back on eating out or the deluxe cable package, but nobody is shutting off their cell phone.
Nobody.

So I'm sure I'll have all kinds of anecdotes to share. Don't worry, no matter where I go I see something funny.

I used to think that I hate people. I mean, lets be frank, I don't have a terribly high opinion of my fellow man. But I realized recently, I don't hate people, I just hate when they don't conform to my standards of normal behavior.
This is an interesting insight because up until now I haven't been able to make sense of the fact that I have this general animosity for people yet I love working with the public.
I'm trying to have fun with this job because it's kind of a step backwards in terms of career development, my skill set is far beyond what the job actually calls for. This gives me the ability to be more relaxed and have some fun.

I like messing with people and I have a phenomenal poker face. I can say the most absurd things in the most plausible manner. Sometimes when people say" are you kidding?" I say yes but I use the exact same straight face. This then causes them to wonder if I'm joking now or if I was really joking before.
This older woman comes in with a phone so old it has a fucking rotary on it.
Ok maybe not that old but still in cell phone years this thing is an antique. The cell phone market is like computers, almost as soon as you buy it it's yesterday's news. In cell phone years (like dog years?) this thing is old as John McCain.
I upgrade her phone and I take it to the back to transfer all her contacts from the old phone to the new one. I come back out and I hold her shiney new-hotness phone in one hand and her old- brokeness phone in the other.
I hold the new phone aloft and proudly say "I have taken all the contacts from here" dramatic little shake of the phone, "and moved them to here" dramatic little shake of the old phone.
She looks bewildered, "don't you mean the other way around?"
"Nope, I took them from here" I beam with pride as I show her her new phone, "and I moved them all here" again proudly brandishing the wrong phone.
Partially what sells this joke is that I am wearing a name tag that, in addition to my name, says "in training" It may as well say "I be an retarded"
I let her dangle a bit before taking her off the hook and saying "naw, here's your new phone, you're all set"

I had another customer come back after she had already gotten her new phone and I had taken the old one to the back. She said she needed to get her old phone because she forgot to get her memory card out of it.
Me: unfortunately it's already been chipped
Her: chipped?
Me: yeah, chipped. Have you ever seen when they cut down a tree and then they toss the branches into a giant chipper? Well we have a new program that is very "green" and exciting.
We toss the old phones into the chipper and then the pieces are recycled into various consumer goods. Park benches and stuff I think.
Her: so you're saying that my old phone has been destroyed?
Me: not at all, I'm saying it's been recycled. Maybe one day your kids will play on a slide made out of your old phone!
Her: but I need that memory card!
Me: oh it's right here.
and I produce the memory card.
she smiled at me. "you didn't throw my phone into a chipper did you?"
Me : no...it's more like a "cardboard box" than a chipper