Cleanliness is Next To Godliness

Let's take a trip in the way-back machine (my memory) and talk about my college days for a bit. I want to let you all know that I was a ladies man and I had myself quite a bit of fun-ication (like fornication, but fun!). And I think I have just the story to display my magnificent skills as a closer. I've often been called the "Mariano Rivera of taking ladies to pleasure town." Well, maybe I've never been called that, but I just came up with it now, so that counts for something.

The time is winter of 2005/2006 and I'm fully engorged in my senior year of college. I've got life by the balls and I'm not afraid to flaunt that. I had it all: a crappy apartment with 3 other guys, crippling student loans building up, 3/4 of a philosophy degree, and a '91 Honda Accord with 185,000 miles on it. Yup, living the dream.

A friend from High School (let's call her Steph because that's her name) asks me if I wanted to go to a party with her because she doesn't know anyone there. As fate would have it, I had been invited to the same party because I was the most popular guy on campus and everyone wanted me at their shindigs. See, I called it a shindig, how awesome is that? After several cancellation calls I had to make for prior engagements, I was able to free my night up for Steph and we decided to head out to the party together. I have to remember where I came from and it's friends like Steph that got me to where I am today. See how amazing I am?

As we rolled up to the party, I made my entrance with much fanfare and no fewer than 3 confetti cannons. Everyone was amazed and I made sure to introduce Steph to everyone I could. Okay, maybe that was a bit of an embellishment: there were only two confetti cannons. I was on a college budget, I couldn't go totally overboard.

After a few beers and some mingling, I managed to catch the attention of a fellow partygoer. As it turns out, I had met her a few times before and it was her house we were partying at. I knew one roommate quite well from our times in the dorms together, so I was glad to meet a lovely lady that could keep up with my type of people. After several suave conversations, things were clear that this young lady was into yours truly and I was suddenly very aware that the party had started to die down and guests were leaving.

Being that I knew one of the residents, I offered to help clean up and keep drinking as I did it. At this point, Steph said she wanted to take off home and asked if I needed anything. I knew that love was in the air, so I politely asked if she could get home by herself (we lived in the same apartment building), to which she replied she could. That, or I slurred at her that I needed to stay at the house for what I liked to call "a little p in v action". Subtlety is not always my strong point.

As I cleaned up, my new infatuation started to talk to me and asked me if I could help her get to her room. I knew what that meant and I was very excited... until I realized that they had taken one of their couches out of the living room and propped it in the hallway to block unwanted guests from entering the bedrooms. She literally needed my help to move the couch to get to her room. Great, now I had misread the situation and I was going to walk home alone. But wait, as I move the couch, she grabs me by the hand and leads me into her room! I knew all along that this was the plan because I'm amazing at picking up signals from women.

As we entered her room, she closed the door behind us and wrapped her arms around me. Being that I'm about 6'3" and she was no more than 5'5", I enveloped her in my lanky embrace. She looked up at me with her big brown eyes (or maybe they were green... or blue. I have no idea), smiled, and said to me, "What are you thinking about?"

A million things flooded my head and at least 950,000 of them were sexual in nature. I glanced around her room and contemplated for a moment what to say. I wasn't going to ruin this moment and I was going to have the best response ever to this question. I'm a philosophy major and a witty motherfucker, so obviously I can slay this. I thought for a moment, looked down at her, smiled, and said:

"Your room is really clean."

Now, if that isn't the smoothest thing you've ever heard, you've probably literally heard most anything else said ever because that was terrible. To make matters worse, all the booze I had been very intelligently drinking in moderation (25 beers in about 4 hours plus countless shots) started to hit me and I got staggeringly tired in that exact moment. I released my embrace, walked out the door, and promptly passed out on a couch in their living room.

And that is how I never once talked to that fine young lady again. Lady killer right here.

D.A.R.E. to be Different

As many of you may be aware, D.A.R.E. stands for "Drug Abuse Resistance Education". This was a program where officers would come to your classroom and tell you the dangers of drugs. It was a way for kids to learn about how drugs turn you into a loser and get you tossed in jail for just thinking about them. If you smoked or drank, then you were heading down a slippery slope towards harder drugs, prostitution, jail time, awesome sunglasses, anal rape (receiving, not giving), and probably death. It was a lot like being a celebrity, but more private and a lot less money involved.

What D.A.R.E. really did was teach you about all kinds of awesome drugs and what their effects were. As a 10-year-old kid, I had no idea what LSD or Ecstacy was, but a cop was suddenly coming to my class to tell me about hallucinations and tripping balls (probably not in those words). All I know is that when they started talking about how you could see dragons and shit while on drugs, my 5th grade mind suddenly found drugs incredibly intriguing. It was like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" come to life, only you just had to drop acid, sit back, and enjoy the ride! How could that not be awesome?

Oh yeah, the jail time and such. Come on, I was 10! Like I actually listened to everything. I heard hallucination and was immediately daydreaming I was Lancelot, riding my trusty steed to slay the dragon Yawgmoff, saving the princess Amgala and getting lucky (which at the time I assumed was like kissing but way grosser). D.A.R.E. pretty much held kids' attention right up until they started talking about the bad things drugs do, which is exactly what it shouldn't have done. In short, it was a disgusting failure as a preventative measure.

But, nonetheless, once you got done with it, you were able to go through a graduation ceremony. Which meant a certificate, pizza, cake, and (if you were lucky) a chance to write a speech to say in front of a crowd. Well, take a wild stab at who got chosen to speak? This guy. So I got pretty excited about being able to show off my awesome speech and let everyone know what kind of a great, drug-free kid I was going to be (read my previous posts to show how awesomely drug-free I ended up being).

Well, 3 years prior to this, my sister had gone through D.A.R.E. and never went to her graduation. Not because she didn't want to, but because my mom thought it was a waste of time and told her not to go. When it came time to go to my graduation, Mom still didn't want to go. Considering I had to give a speech, she decided to do what any good mother would do: she offered me five bucks not to go. Of course, being the avid drug resistance person I was, I refused the money and insisted on going regardless.

Nah, I'm just fucking with you. I took the $5. It's five dollars! When I was 10, that could buy an X-Men figure! I was gonna get Gambit instead of going to my stupid D.A.R.E. graduation! Ho-lee shit!

Years later, I would get to be president of Red Ribbon council (our high school's anti-drug program) and even participate in a mock accident scene we put on to show the horrors of driving drunk. I was such a role model for younger kids, it was actually kind of scary. All that in spite of the fact I never went to my D.A.R.E. graduation. Sure, I still got my certificate the next day, but it wasn't quite the same because I wasn't at the actual ceremony. But hey, it all worked out just fine.

That is, until I was arrested.

Now, the arrest itself wasn't anything remarkable. I was arrested for possession of marijuana, possession of paraphernalia, and underage possession of alcohol. Yep, when I go, I go all out. Now I should point out it was found in the same car that I happened to be riding in and it wasn't actually mine (I swear officer). I did get charged because no one in the car fessed up (thus they charged all of us). Eventually I went to court, they "lost my case file", and all charges were dropped. No lie. Thank you, ineptitude of small town court systems!

The point of this meandering story is to tell the tale of my mother picking me up from the sheriff's station that fateful night. It was 1:00 AM and she came to get me. She said nothing to me the entire ride home, sitting in irate silence for a good 20 minutes or so. I was reeling at the verbal lashing I was going to get, wondering just exactly what was going to happen. I couldn't bear the thought of a lecture on this from my mother considering if I got a "B" on my report card, that warranted a 15-minute lecture itself. We pulled into the driveway of our house, and Mom stopped the car. She looked at me with that "I'm so disappointed I don't know what to say" look that all mothers have and my heart sank. She said only one thing:

"I just want to know why."

These words hit me pretty hard and it was almost worse than a huge lecture. I had to come up with something to respond with and it had better be good. I replied with the best thing I could think to say:

"I think it's because you made me skip my D.A.R.E. graduation."

Mom sat in stunned silence for a minute and I thought, for a brief second, she might actually slap me. Instead, she chuckled a tiny bit, and merely said, "Go to your room." I bolted up the stairs, heart racing, finally realizing what my brain had failed to filter out. How did I get away with it? I have no idea. I was asked to step down as Red Ribbon president (shocking), but the joke was on our school because it lost funding the next year and Red Ribbon was laid to rest. I had to go to court and, as I said before, charges were dropped. I had to go through some bad experiences, but hey, everything sort of worked out.

Years later, Mom asked me how I had worked up the nerve to say such a thing at a time like that. I said I figured I was already screwed, so I might as well try to make some humor of the situation. Because the charges were dropped, she was okay with everything that happened and I never got arrested again.

So in a way, skipping my D.A.R.E. graduation was probably the right thing to do. At least it made for a great snappy comeback.

First date story number one

Well, as you will discover with this blog, I am world renowned (okay, in my world at least) for my abilities to never succeed on a date, especially the first date. I am exceptionally thick with women, as every man is (or at least claims to be to not have to listen to them), but pretty receptive to at least trying to get along with them. This particular story is about a girl and a foreign film she wanted to see.

I happened to meet a girl in a bar one night and struck up a pretty decent conversation with her. Now bear in mind, this was during my college time, so for me a "pretty decent conversation" probably meant that I didn't fall asleep or throw up on her. That's a feat in and of itself, because I was generally highly intoxicated at bars and would have to have been to be talking to a girl (you see, in addition to being terrible with women, I am terrified of them). Well, we exchanged phone numbers and I actually followed up and called her a couple days later. Eager to go out with this girl, I suggested a pretty standard first date: dinner and a movie. I let her pick the restaurant and movie as I am nothing if not a consummate gentleman. She chose the restaurant (nothing too fancy, but a decent little sit down place) and I asked what movie she would like to see. This is where my woman skills start to shine through.

It's no secret to those who know me that I am a huge horror movie fan. In fact, I've started a horror blog in addition to this one here. So, there happens to be a great Japanese director named Takashi Miike who is pretty well known for being the reason people say "Japanese people are fucked up". His movies are generally very violent and often strange, but well shot and interesting. He had a little movie called Audition that came out in Japan in 1999. Well, a few years later (ie. when I was on a date with this girl), it had finally started making an appearance in the states. The movie is about a man who holds fake auditions to meet women after his wife dies. He meets one and really likes her, but finds out that she is batshit insane, to the point of keeping a man in her apartment in a burlap sack and feeding that guy puke. She ends up torturing the guy in a pretty gruesome scene. Now, it's an unsettling movie at best, hard to watch, but incredibly well done and very tense. It's a movie I greatly admire and still find it enthralling, but hard to watch. Miike has also made some other great movies like Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q, Imprints, and my recent favorite, Sukiyaki Western Django.

So, this girl mentions that she heard there was a great foreign film playing at the student union that night. Well, I bet you can see where this is going. She said it was called Audition and she had heard it was a bit of a thriller. Now, I have already seen this movie at this point, so what I should have said was, "Hmmm, I've already seen that and I don't know if it's a good date movie," or at least warned her about the graphic torture scenes and the overall theme of the movie. Instead, what I said was, "I would gladly see that movie again. Let's go!" Yup, dating mastermind.

The dinner was quite good and we headed to movie theater in a fairly pleasant mood with full bellies. The conversation over dinner wasn't quite as enticing as I had remembered from the night before, but then again nothing is when you aren't drinking. She also managed to say a couple of things during the date that struck me as a bit shallow, like asking me to admire her Prada purse her sister had given to her. When I asked what Prada was, I was met with a stare of contempt and amazement (at the time, The Devil Wears Prada was just a book I hadn't read, not a movie I hadn't seen). Oh well, she was still okay, even if she did mention to me that I didn't really match what she had worn. Well, I apologized for not coordinating outfits with her, which got a bit of a chuckle, but I had the sense that she really wasn't kidding about that comment. On the way to the movie I was planning on warning her a bit about the content when she said something to the effect of thinking farmers were selfish and taking up government grants (I don't remember how the topic came up). Now, I am a farm boy, born and raised. I paid my way through college by milking cows, so I know that farmers don't make that much money and quite frankly could use the grants. But hey, that's just me.

So at this point, she's made it pretty abundantly clear we aren't working out as a couple. I decided not to tell her the content of the movie. Well, at the peak of the torture scene, I happened to exchange glances with her and if there were a way to say "I'm never going on another date with you" with your eyes, hers said that to me right then. We walked out of the movie and she just laid into me about how I should have said something to her to warn her about that and how she couldn't believe that I had agreed to see that with a girl. I shrugged, said I still liked the movie. She said she was going to go home and responded by walking away and saying "O.k."

Needless to say, there wasn't a second date.