Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

June 29, 2007

I always have trouble when I want to mark an occasion or say something with a card. Don’t get me wrong–I have nothing against cards. I’ve gotten some very nice ones (the cat unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper is one of my favorites) and given a lot that pretty closely approximated what I wanted to say. The hardest part is finding the card in the first place because of all the categories: Holiday, Birthday, Congratulations, Anniversary, Condolence, Get Well, Thinking Of You, Blank, Belated Birthday, Belated Anniversary, Belated Blank, and then it breaks down into Funny, Serious, Religious, Funny Serious, From Both Of Us, From Just Me, From Them. The funny ones always have things on the outside like, "Congratulations on turning 39", and on the inside they say, "…for the fifth time!" Or they have a picture of a Mafia guy saying, "Have a whacky birthday…" on the outside, with the punchline, "…anybody who forgets it gets whacked!" Save that one for when you get the belated birthday cards.

And then there’s the anniversary card that, on the outside, says, "Darling, this year I’d like to take you somewhere you’ve never been…" You open it up expecting a tropical paradise or European capital and instead see, "The kitchen!" I think that one comes with complimentary divorce papers. Where do these come from? I imagine there’s a sweatshop full of retired performers from the Catskills who do nothing all day but sit around come up with these. Then there are the hunky, shirtless guy cards, which continue to be produced in spite of the fact that no woman will ever, in her life, buy or receive one of these cards, and the girl in a bikini cards that are produced solely for guys who have no wives or girlfriends and who, if they have friends who give them that kind of card, never will have wives or girlfriends. Where’s the section for the card I really want, though? Where’s the section for the card that says, "Please do not mistake my difficulty expressing myself for a lack of deep, sincere feelings for you. Here is a nicely designed piece of heavy paper that, I hope, will somewhat approximate the emotions I can’t quite verbalize." Where is that section? I guess that would be all of them.

June 22, 2007

There used to be a rule in advertising that sex sells, and sex is still being used to sell a few things, mainly liquor, motorcycles, potato chips, and body spray. Body spray, of course, is men’s cologne in an aerosol can. They could put it in one of those old-fashioned atomizers that snobby women used to keep in their breakfast vanities, but it’s manly to destroy the ozone layer. And the advertising for body spray always promises that, if you wear it, you will be attacked in the streets by strange women. They’ll tear down the walls of your house, throw cars at you, put you in the hospital, and eventually dig up your grave and do horrible things with pieces of your corpse, so it’s not hard to understand the incredible popularity of body spray for men.

But I digress. Advertising used to be pretty simple: two people having sex on a washing machine, for instance, but oddly enough that turned off a lot of consumers so advertising seemed to take up a new principle that surrealism sells. Two guys sitting in a car talking about the alphabet, for instance, is supposed to make you want to buy a root beer float, or a giant robot running down the street will convince you to buy aspirin. Then there’s the friendly-sell, like the commercial about the car salesman who drove three-thousand miles because some guy who lived on top of a mountain expressed an interest in one of the cars. I’m not sure what the message was there because, if someone drove three-thousand miles to sell me a car, I’d be afraid to buy it because then I’d have to drive him home.

Lately, though, advertising is taking on the scare tactic. For instance, there’s the commercial where a guy’s walking down the street and a homeless man asks him for some change. The guy says he doesn’t have any and walks on. Another homeless man asks him for some change. The guy says he doesn’t have any and walks on. Then his head explodes, and the words, YOU NEED LIFE INSURANCE NOW flash up on the screen. That’s not convincing me to buy life insurance–that’s just scaring me. That’s worse than the singing navels, or the two sumo wrestlers slamming into some poor guy from opposite directions. The scary commercials aren’t convincing me to buy anything. In fact they’re convincing me to leave the room whenever commercials come on. If they get any worse they might convince me to stop watching television. Now that’s really scary.

June 15, 2007

The other day I got an e-mail telling me I owed #7.58 for something. Now, depending on your computer, # may look like a cursive L that’s been stabbed a couple of times. It’s the symbol for the British Pound, and since Pound starts with L it’s designated with a symbol that really looks like it should only be used by Liberace.

But I digress. On my computer, and on a lot of other computers, the # symbol looks like the square you draw for a game of tic-tac-toe, and any game of tic-tac-toe will always end in a draw unless you’re playing me. Honestly, I’m so bad at tic-tac-toe I should be ashamed to admit it. And that same symbol is under the number 9 on all the phones I use. When I was growing up the # symbol was known as the number sign–as in "We’re #37!", which was the rallying cry of my school golf team. When did it become known as the "pound" sign? And can we # the person who decided to change it? Why did they choose that key? Okay, you can’t get rid of !, especially in business where the incredibly important messages like, "You moron" wouldn’t carry nearly the same weight without it, and @ finally found a place in e-mail. Do you ever wonder what medieval monk was copying manuscripts and finally decided that "at" was too time-consuming to spell out? It was probably the same person who invented &, which I always have trouble with. And then there’s *, which directs you to a footnote somewhere at the bottom of the page*. & if you have more than one footnote, why are they footnotes and not feetnote? No one knows. All I know is that when I reach the state of mind where I’m spending this much time studying my keyboard I probably need to be #ed. Or my days are #ed.

*^%}{~

June 1, 2007

Whenever there’s a holiday and I get a long weekend it always throws me off because Monday ends up feeling like Sunday, then Tuesday feels like Monday, Wednesday feels like Tuesday, and so on until I end up feeling like I’m missing a day of the next weekend. And this last week it was even weirder because on Tuesday I said to a guy, "It feels like Monday," and he said, "No, it feels more like Thursday." And that’s just all wrong because Thursday feels like that moment in a marathon when you get your second wind and you know you’re going to make it to the finish. At least I think that’s what it feels like because the closest I’ve ever come to running a marathon was once when my dentist pulled out a really big needle and I was five blocks away before I realized I was in the middle of the street wearing a bib and with a mouth full of cotton balls.

But I digress. And even though everybody hates Mondays it’s really Tuesdays that are the worst. On Monday you at least come back refreshed and it’s not so bad when you have to drive by ten phantom parking spots–those places where you think you see an open spot from a distance but when you get close you realize there’s a compact or a sub-compact or a soap-box derby car already parked there. Mondays lull you into a false sense of security, and then on Tuesday you think things are going great until you pull into a parking spot and you hear a sickening crunch because you just parked on top of a mini.

Who named the days of the week, anyway? We can blame the Scandinavians, who have given us so many other things: the Vikings, yogurt, round pastries with fruit in them, wooden shoes, tulips, Thor Heyerdahl, that Scream painting, legalized marijuana and prostitution, ABBA, and reindeer. For some reason they named most of the days of the week after their gods. Wednesday, for instance, was named after Odin, and Thursday was named after Thor, which is weird because most people get hammered on the weekend.

But I digress. What I can’t figure out is why the weeks are always off-kilter with the months and years. There are seven days in a week, but either thirty or thirty-one days in a month, except February which has twenty-eight days except every four years, and then there are three-hundred and sixty-five days in a year so things never come out even. Shouldn’t the year always start on a Sunday, or maybe even a Monday? Then again for most people New Years’ Day is a holiday, so it would still feel like Sunday.

May 25, 2007

Scientists recently announced that coffee is good for you. I think this makes at least the fourth time that coffee has been declared to be good for you after it’s been declared to be bad for you. First there was the caffeine which was bad, then there were anti-oxidants that were good, then the caffeine was beating up the anti-oxidants, and now there are flavonoids or something that have stepped in between the caffeine and the anti-oxidants. Why don’t scientists ever discover that brussels sprouts or lima beans are bad for you?

What the world needs most is another show about doctors.

Colleges are trying to prevent students from selling tickets to graduation ceremonies. Some tickets are selling for hundreds of dollars on online auction sites. Why is this a problem? Colleges charge students twenty-five thousand dollars a year so they can learn to make twenty-thousand dollars a year. Why not let them pick up a little extra cash on their way out the door?

Today is national Drive-Through Window Day.

For a long time it was believed Houdini died from being punched in the stomach. Now scientists are saying that’s impossible and that he died from something else. The important thing is that if someone comes up to you and asks if they can punch you in the stomach you should say yes. For all we know Houdini died from not being punched in the stomach.

You know what word doesn’t get used often enough? Xenium. And it’s so easy to use in a sentence. For instance, "What the hell is xenium?"

Press 1 to listen to our hold music for twenty minutes. Press 2 to listen to our hold music for twenty-one minutes. Press 3 to listen to our hold music for half an hour. Press zero repeatedly to finally get through to an operator who has nothing to do because everybody who’s called today is still listening to our hold music.

The scientists who say Houdini couldn’t have died from being punched in the stomach could be the same scientists who can’t make up their minds about coffee.

When life gives you lemons make orange juice.

May 18, 2007

Summer is almost here, but I don’t look forward to it as much as I used to. When I was a kid and in school summer was great because it was at least two months of no school, two months of not having to read those stupid textbooks that would always have those really stupid questions at the end, questions like, "Did the main character die in the story? Explain." or "Do you breathe oxygen? Explain." The one word, "Explain", I realized, was the textbook author’s way of saying, "I was too lazy to come up with anything more complicated than a yes-or-no question, but your teacher needs you to keep working long enough for her to duck out for a smoke."

All this was supposedly preparing us for the standardized tests we had to take at the end of the year, but the standardized tests were always multiple-choice and we never had to Explain anything. The worst part about the tests is that we had to take them right at the end of the school year when it was hot and sunny outside and it was impossible to concentrate on anything because we’d been locked in cold classrooms having to Explain all winter. Since these tests were supposed to find out what we didn’t know anyway we would have been better off if they’d given them to us at the beginning of the year, right after we’d spent the entire summer forgetting everything we learned the previous year.

But I digress. That word "Explain" taught me that those who can’t do teach, and those who can’t teach write textbooks. I think the fear of having to Explain even the simplest questions made us all neurotic and led to the creation of one of the most insidious fads of my childhood: the Rubik’s cube. It was bad enough that we were worried about nuclear annihilation, the tanking economy, children staring in Africa, and the complete lack of anything good on television because cable hadn’t come to our neighborhood yet. We had to go and invent something that would make us feel even more insecure. And the Rubik’s cube wasn’t enough by itself: we had to invent more of those insane puzzles shaped like boxes and barrels and pyramids and snakes and Studebakers because so many people were catching on to the way to solve the Rubik’s cube (hint: don’t take it out of the package it came in) that we had to make ourselves feel dumber. What worries me is that the Rubik’s cube is actually coming back. It’s not just coming back–now there are people solving it blindfolded or with their feet or just by breathing on it. There’s a guy in Bangladesh who can disassemble a Rubik’s cube, swallow the pieces, and vomit it up complete and solved. But I digress. I don’t look forward to summer like I used to because I have to work now, and I’m not going to get two months off from work in the summer unless I move to Norway. Still, it’s warm, it’s sunny, and when I do get away from work I can spend time outside. That’s something to look forward to, right? Explain.

May 11, 2007

So a husband and wife are sitting at home and the phone rings. The wife picks it up, listens, then turns to her husband and says, "It’s just a lot of heavy breathing!" The husband grabs the phone and yells, "JACKASS! Haven’t you got anything better to do with your life that harass decent people?" He listens for a moment then turns to his wife and says, "Our son’s car broke down and he had to push it two miles uphill to the service station."

I thought about this joke because one of the elevators in the building where I work broke down, and one of the remaining two is being used to haul new office furniture for some people who inexplicably got tired of sitting on the floor at work. So there’s one elevator available for a building of thirty-seven million people and whenever I come into the lobby there’s a large crowd waiting for it. As soon as the doors open everyone crowds in. The sign in there says "Maximum occupancy: 23", but I think that’s assuming twenty-three people who are built like Emo Phillips. And there are at least twenty-seven people who crowd in there because no one wants to wait. That reminds me of something my father used to say: "If more people took advantage of public transportation it would be better for the air, save gas, and I wouldn’t have to look so hard for a parking spot."

But I digress. After all those people crowd in there one of them will always hold the door and look at me expectantly, as though saying, "There’s room for one more!" And then one of them says, "There’s room for one more!" Do they think this is a game? Remember those golden college days when we used to see how many people we could cram into a phone booth? Probably not. If you remember that you also remember wearing a raccoon coat, riding around in a Stutz Bearcat, and having goldfish-swallowing contests.

But I digress. I look at all those people stuffed into the elevator and suddenly climbing stairs seems like a great idea, even though it’s ten flights at a 40-degree angle, and I’m not a sherpa. Some people join fancy gyms and pay a lot of money so they can climb stairs. I get to do it for free, and the only thing I’m missing is a fancy sauna, a jacuzzi, a bunch of mirrors, a big window onto the street that allows the entire city to watch me soak a t-shirt with my own sweat, and some big bald guy named Dirk screaming at me for eating a chocolate bar last night. But I digress. So I get to my office panting, puffing, trying to catch my breath, and the phone rings.

May 4, 2007

So scientists are all excited because they’ve discovered a new planet that, they claim, is so much like Earth some of them are calling it "a new Earth", mainly because there’s a hope of a chance of good odds of a probability of water on this planet. I think they’re jumping the gun a bit here. First of all these are probably some of the same scientists who decided Pluto was no longer a planet. It’s big, it’s round, it orbits the Sun, so what is it? A bagel? Actually I think that demoting Pluto was a good idea. I don’t have anything against Pluto, but it was about time school textbooks got revised. When I was in high school my science book had a chapter called, "Will We Ever Reach The Moon?" It was right after the chapter about how the flu is caused by an excess of yellow choler.

But I digress. And let’s consider some of the other facts. This planet is orbiting a red dwarf star. Now, Red Dwarf might have been very funny, but do you really want to live in a British science fiction television show? This planet is also 20.5 light years away. That’s roughly one-hundred and twenty trillion miles (do not attempt–stunt professional on closed course) and that’s one unbelievable road trip. Even if you have one of those newfangled mp3 players (I’m thinking of trading in my Victrola myself) that holds the equivalent of 38,000 CDs you’d need a whole case of those things just to have enough music to get you through the trip. And believe me: you’d want it. I was once on a long bus trip where the only tape we had to listen to was The Joshua Tree. After a while I couldn’t sleep because I was having nightmares of Bono showing me his spoon collection.

But I digress. This planet also has gravity 2.2 times stronger than Earth’s. If you think you need to diet now you’d never eat again once you more than doubled your weight just by stepping onto a new planet. And can you imagine trying to move your stuff there? I’ve helped friends move because they’ve said those three little words–"beer and pizza"–but I’m not sure I’d want to help anyone move to a place where everything was 2.2 times heavier, not even if their apartment building has an elevator. Imagine just trying to get the refrigerator into place and then, after you’ve done that, realizing you forgot to plug it in. Still, these scientists could be wrong. After all these are the same people who are trying to tell us Pluto is a bagel.

April 20, 2007

When I was five I had two really good friends: Taylor and Sean. The sad thing was that Taylor and Sean didn’t get along, which still seems crazy to me. We were all the same age, we all lived in the same neighborhood, and, at five, about the only major issue was whether girls had cooties, and we were all unanimous in our agreement on that. Sean and I really liked Japanese monster movies and Taylor didn’t care for them, but that wasn’t a big deal. There was one other tiny, almost unnoticeable detail, something so unimportant I’m not sure it’s even worth mentioning: Sean was black, while Taylor and I were both white. It didn’t make any difference to me, and it didn’t concern Sean either, but I have this funny feeling it mattered to Taylor. He didn’t want to be around me when Sean was around. So Sean and I got this idea that we would offer Taylor a peace offering, and by "peace offering" I mean "practical joke". We were five so we couldn’t come up with anything sophisticated involving, say, a fly in an ice cube in his highball, or fake vomit, or a can that said it contained peanut brittle but really had spring-loaded snakes inside, or having eighteen pizzas delivered to his house. What we did was take a piece of candy, split it between us, then shaped some mud so that it looked like candy and put it in the empty wrapper. When we went to Taylor’s house his dad answered the door and we gave him the candy and asked him to pass it along to Taylor. The funny part is the next day his dad was sick and spent three days in bed, and I later found out that Taylor never got the candy. He never even knew we’d come to his house. Maybe it was just a coincidence, and I’m not sure whether there’s any lesson in it. Sean moved away a few months later.

A few years after that I was having one of those really long, boring summer days so I took a long walk to a different neighborhood. As I was walking along five black kids came out to talk to me. I wondered if they were going to take the same attitude toward me Taylor had always had toward Sean, but they just needed another person to even out their kickball teams. It was great because, in my neighborhood, only the older kids played kickball and all I could do was watch and dream that, someday, I’d be picked for a team. I never saw those guys again, but only because I got grounded for being late coming home and I never went back to that neighborhood. I did learn a very important lesson that day: I’m really bad at kickball.

April 13, 2007

Water was coming into the basement from the crawlspace, threatening a decade’s worth of junk. What else could I do? I unrolled the hoses, filled my mouth with muddy water at the downhill end, and let the vacuum do the rest. Those rubber snakes spread across the gray driveway like a blue-green medusa and spilled the basement’s dirty secrets for eight hours. The problem was the gutter on the uphill side. I’d neglected to clean it even though scrabbling birds got me out of bed every day for three months. In a circle of lightning I carried my aluminum ladder to the far end of the house and climbed up as high as my fear of heights would allow. My hand grappled around above my head, pulling out twigs and leaves, foil and grass, but the downspout didn’t wake up until I pulled them–two bare-skinned birds with eyes like pouches that had split their seams–and dropped them to the ground. I wondered whether the mother would come looking for them even after the rain stopped. How big does a life have to be to be important? When I have to get away from my job my only escape is through a stairwell so dry moths have dehydrated in mid-flight, the water sucked out from under every scale. I don’t know how they even get there. One of the birds opened its mouth and wouldn’t close it again. I stayed up there on the ladder, afraid to come down, afraid of how much bigger they would get.