Top Ten Things That Make My Heart Drop

10. An "Elevator Out of Order" sign.

9. Waking up on a Saturday and realizing it’s actually a Thursday.

8. Hearing my wife say, "We need to talk...."

7. Hearing glass break in the next room.

6. The check engine light in my car.

5. Pulling into the parking lot and realizing I forgot deodorant.

4. Seeing a minus sign in front of my account balance.

3. Flashing red and blue lights in my rear view mirror.

2. Hearing the words "card" and "declined" in the same sentence.

1. Getting a phone call from my wife that starts with, "Okay, don’t be mad...."

"I Love You, Fridge!"

You may remember me mentioning in the past that I'm "a bit of a prude." Well, my older brother is the same way. For instance, neither of us condones recreational drug use. We've never done illegal drugs or abused prescription drugs... on purpose.

A few years ago, my brother had surgery on his arm. It was just a broken bone, but they had to set it with a pin and needed to put him under anesthesia for it. So when he left the hospital, they prescribed him some super-powerful pain killers. My brother was pretty large back then as he is now, and I'm sure the doctor assumed a few things when filling out the prescription:
A) "This guy probably has a high tolerance for medication because of his size."
B) "This guy probably drinks alcohol like most people his age, so his tolerance is probably even higher because of it."
C) "This guy probably knows that if he only wants to take one of the two pills, he can do so."

I wouldn't be telling this story if he was right about those three things. So the doctor prescribed a dose of pain killer big enough to floor an NFL offensive lineman. And he didn't explain to my naïve brother that he could take one pill instead of two if he wanted. So my brother went home and obeyed the instructions on the bottle to "take two as needed for pain." He figured, since he was in pain and he was given this dosage, he could just overlook the fact that the pills were the size of shotgun shells. And this is where I blame my brother more than the doctor. Knowing his low tolerance for medication, he should have tested it out on one pill.

So long story short, my brother woke up screaming because he was being chased by the letter "R" and then cried because the edge of his pillow looked like the top corner of the letter. Then he told us that he was telling his arm all about it later and getting a response. It took a few hours for the effects to wear off, but not before we saw my brother play peek-a-boo with himself in the mirror. And luckily not before he started whispering loudly about how scary the other people in the room were:
"That man over there has an evil forehead, and it's looking at me."
"Okay, that's Mom."

But it always seems that my video camera is not around when things like that happen. I can never get the blackmail material I need. And unless you have video confirmation, it's impossible to convince someone that they were hugging the refrigerator if they don't specifically remember doing it.

You Had Me At "The Club"

When I was in high school, I drove a 1994 Geo Prizm. It was thirdhand by the time I got it. It was my father’s work car, then my older brother’s car, then my car. When it was my father’s car, it was just a small piece of junk. Then my brother used it for two years and transformed it into a small piece of abstract art. The trade-in value depended on how much gas I had in the tank. My brother is about six and a half feet tall, and people of that height are not meant to drive vehicles the size of a Geo. I’m pretty sure they named the company “Geo” because they knew they couldn’t fit any word bigger than three letters on the side of that tiny car. My giant of a brother had to fold like a lawn chair to get behind the wheel. And he had to lean the seat back so far that his head could be seen through the backseat window. The result his size had on a car that small was fairly predictable. He destroyed almost everything he could.

The seatbelt was forever in the “extended” position from being pulled beyond its capacity so many times. This resulted in me having to tuck it into the headrest behind my neck so it didn’t flop uselessly to the floor. And his knees had crushed the dashboard so much that only one air-conditioning knob was left. So I had to remove it and use it on whichever aspect of the air I wanted to change. If I wanted to change the air to cold and defrost my windshield at full blast, it took about ten minutes. It was like a master key for the A/C. And if I ever broke down, I’d need a coat hanger to turn on the hazard lights. His knee had also crushed that part of the dash, so the hazards button was about 6 inches deep and impossible to reach without some kind of improvised tool. And I couldn’t get a signal on the radio, because my brother had grabbed the antenna for support one day while getting into his seat and torn it clean off. And since the CD player was a $30 gift from our grandmother, it obviously wasn’t very reliable. So I was usually stuck listening to a Ray Stevens cassette that I found in the junk drawer at home.

I think the damage to the car was due to a combination of my brother’s size, his clumsiness, and the Geo’s cheap engineering. It was the perfect storm. So by the time I inherited it, he had turned it into a junked up, trashed out eyesore. And let me tell you, your stock with the girls goes way down when you drive a car like that. If there were some high school girls in existence who thought it was funny enough to give me a chance, then I didn’t know them. It wasn’t until college that the car became funny. By then, the shocks had stopped working on the passenger side so the tire scraped the wheel-well with every left turn. And the passenger door handle was fractured, so you could only get out through the window. I took my wife on our first date in that car. As an added joke, I locked the steering wheel with “The Club” from the 80s. She thought it was hilarious. That’s when I knew I’d met my soul mate.

Give Myself a Hand

I consider myself a fairly intelligent person. I’m not a genius by any means. But, I do my own taxes. I went to college. I can add large numbers without using a calculator, pen and paper, or my fingers. So I am not generally confused by a lot of things and rarely do my friends have to say, “Come on, man! It’s not rocket science!” And a long time ago, I vowed to always use my powers for good. With great power comes great responsibility, after all (thank you Spider-Man).

But there are certain times when any semblance of intellect seems to fly right out the window. Like when my alarms go off after just five hours of sleep. I turn into a complete moron, flailing like a crazy person to figure out what is making that horrible noise. The problem is that I have been forced to outsmart myself. I have an alarm clock that my hand has memorized. So when it starts to buzz, my hand wakes up before my brain and skips right past the giant “Snooze” button and finds the teeny-weeny “Off” button on the side. And having a hand with a mind of its own has one drawback in this case. I was always late, because I hit Snooze about 9 times without even knowing it. So after a week of waking up really late, I decided to add a second alarm on my cell phone and then put the cell phone upside down on my side table. I figured that if I did that, my hand wouldn’t have enough time to decipher the cell phone puzzle before the buzzing woke my brain up. I know, absolutely brilliant.

The problem I encountered, and still encounter to this day, is that my brain can’t figure out the two-alarm issue either. I just start hitting stuff and pounding on Snooze buttons that don’t exist. I can’t keep anything sharp within five feet of my side table for fear of impaling my smart hand. And it usually ends with my wife physically shaking me and yelling, “Get a hold of yourself, man!” Then she calmly walks over to my side of the bed, turns on the light, and hits “Off” on both alarms (which have been forcibly moved to the floor). It takes another ten minutes for me to get it together (stop crying) and another five minutes to figure out how to get out of the covers.

So now I have to find a new system that is smarter than my hand, but only as smart as my brain. Otherwise, I’ll have proven that I am actually smarter than myself.

Fall From Grace

I like to race people a lot. Not on foot obviously, but in my car. I like knowing I can beat people to something, even if they’re not aware that we’re racing. So I’m the guy who switches lanes at the last second so he can be first in line at the light. And I’m the guy who crosses the double white line when exiting (I know. Hardcore, right?).

The problem is that my race mentality has started to spill out into other parts of my life. So now I can finish eating in about 3 minutes. I barely taste my food sometimes, just so I can be the first to clean my plate. And it only takes me 4 seconds to brush my teeth. (Top, bottom, spit.) But there is definitely a downside to always racing other people. I now have heartburn, gingivitis, and nine speeding tickets.

A few years ago I decided it would be a good idea to race someone on foot. It was, of course, not a good idea. I’m 6’3” tall and at the time of the race, I weighed about 300 pounds (a.k.a. “peak physical condition”). And I chose to race a friend of mine who I outweighed by about 90 pounds. And before you think I’m a fool for wanting to race this guy, you have to know why I wanted to race him. First of all, I didn’t think I would beat him. In fact, I knew I couldn’t beat him. Second of all, he runs funny. Really funny. He’s particularly slow for someone his size, and he runs like his knees are tied together. It’s like the part of his body from his shoulders to his knees is not allowed to move, but his arms, head, and lower legs can flail about as much as they want. So I figured it would be a good way to embarrass him by challenging him to a race that everyone was watching. Oh, and I forgot to mention that we scheduled this right outside our office building and hyped it to the entire company. He talked a lot of smack and made himself look like an idiot, and I assured everyone that I was going to lose soundly. Everything went fine for the most part. We had some pre-race interviews that we staged, and the “gunshot” to start the race was our boss popping a balloon. Predictably, I was behind pretty early in the race, and lost by a good 10 yards.

Now if I had just left it at that, I would have loved this story. I lose like I’m supposed to, he wins like he’s supposed to, and he makes a fool out of himself by talking smack about being faster than a fat guy. Nothing to lose, right? But instead of losing like I was supposed to, I slipped in the last 15 feet of the race and skidded in the mud across the finish line. I guess all these years of diligently avoiding exercise finally got to me. I couldn't run 200 feet without falling. I slid a good 10 feet and did so while being filmed from two separate angles. So all his ridiculous personality flaws were overshadowed by my youtube-worthy finish. I almost quit my job out of shame. And if you want to see it, look up “race to save face” on youtube. You’ll get some good insight on the reason I decided to lose some weight.