It's beginning to look a lot like I got screwed.

I have long believed that Christmas, as a holiday, is badly in need of a complete overhaul. Too many holidays combine the same boring old elements--food, family, love, laughter, gifts, joy. It's enough to make you want to puke. I have some ideas of how we can spice up Christmas, and give it a unique, special quality that sets it far apart from the other run-of-the-mill holidays.

First, there's the whole "reward" system--it's ridiculous. We insist on lying to our children by telling them that if they're good all year, they'll be rewarded with presents, since Santa keeps tabs all year on whether we're naughty or nice. It's just not true, and the kids are laughing at us behind our backs for saying so. First off, everyone knows that most kids are total rat bastards all year long, and yet an avalanche of presents gets dumped at their feet every December anyway, in spite of their appalling behavior. I say we chuck the whole false reward system and implement instead a punishment system--not just for kids, but for every man, woman and child.

Yes, Christmas should be a time for people to get punished for their yearlong binges of rudeness, deceit, laziness, greed and general assholery. Instead of spending the entire month of November racing from store to store searching for expensive gifts for everyone you know, how about instead spending the month of November--or the whole year, if you're the plan-ahead type--plotting elaborate ways to hurt and punish and possibly even maim the people you feel have wronged you all year long? Wouldn't that require a lot more thought and effort--and therefore be more personal--than buying some dumb crystal photo frame made in China and sold by the thousands? Think about it, people.

Yes, if I ruled the world, Christmas would be a time for retribution. Which means 99% of you would have awakened this Christmas morning to find scores of tiny little hoofprints in your back and sleigh tread across your face.

That's what my Christmas blog post was going to be about--but then something happened which made me feel as if my mind was being read from across many miles, and my plan to change Christmas was already being implemented--against me. In other words, that's when the FedEx truck arrived with a Christmas present for me from Common Wombat. And this present is one that punishes. Don't believe me? Take a look at this photo and see if you don't feel like your eyes sockets are being raped by a band of Zulu warriors: Yep, that's him. A tiny, horrible little replica of of The Thing That Should Not Be. It burns the retinas, doesn't it? What did I do so wrong in 2007 to be punished like this? I'd understand if I deserved, say, a beating, perhaps a small amputation, or even being blinded with acid or sodomized by Vikings. But this? Even in my revised plan for Christmas, there is such a thing as excessive punishment, and this gift is the very embodiment of that.

Don't ask me where he could possibly have gone to commission the creation of such an unholy image, but I must admit, it is (unfortunately for me) pretty lifelike, as you can see from the photo of the real thing, taken here in Texas the last time I saw him. I was hoping it would be the last time I ever saw him--but now this tiny little plaster bust of evil has invaded my home, and stares angrily at me, silently hostile save for the occasional screech of "Nevermore!"

It just goes to illustrate the unfairness of Christmas in its current state. Have you ever given a really great gift to someone--say, a bottle of expensive gin, or the complete DVD set of all four seasons of Soap--only to receive something criminally crappy in return, like wind chimes or flavored popcorn? That's what I felt like this year, considering the great gift I got this turd. I got him a shirt any one of you would kill a newborn baby to get, one with this logo on it:

And that, folks, is the kind of unfairness that can permanently sour a person against gift-giving, and holidays in general.

That's why next year, I'm doing it all differently. I'm carrying out my lifelong dream to make Christmas into the kind of holiday that we can all, finally, appreciate. I'm going out today to buy a huge notebook, where I will keep copious notes on each tiny infraction committed against me by every last one of you shitheads, and when December 25, 2008 rolls around, you better take cover. Because the apocalypse is coming, baby.

You may be anonymous to your wife and your boss, but you're someone special to me

Once again, The Man is trying to keep me down.

I didn't want to switch to New Blogger. Despite the energetic attempts of my login screen to get me to switch, I refused on the grounds that I knew the longer I waited, the more bugs would get fixed. However, last weekend I was forced (forced!) to make the switch or not log in at all, so I switched over...but to demonstrate my defiance, I did so while holding a picket sign that read, "No means NO," one that read, "Hell no, we won't go," and one that read, "Know Jesus, Know Peace." (That last one didn't seem to apply to the situation, but I figured three displays of defiance are always better than two, and since I had stolen it from a homeless man at Mardi Gras a few years ago and had yet to make use of it, I felt it was a shame to let it go to waste.)

Naturally, I have complaints about the switch. Namely, some of your comments that were previously linked to your profiles and websites are now marked "anonymous." In fact, of the 42 comments I received on the post about my stinky, sweaty mentor, 15 of them (previously linked to actual bloggers) have suddenly been anonymized. (It is too a word. It's what happens when you anonify something.) Someone suggested this had something to do with whether you Blogger users had already made the switch to New Blogger yourselves before leaving your comments on my site, but the answer to that is 'no.' For instance, Dyckerson left one comment that remains linked to his blog and profile, and left another comment to the same post that has been anonymized. Granted, if there were a god, everything Dyckerson says would be be anonymous, but sadly, this is not the case. Besides, some but not all of the anonyified comments came from Blogger bloggers. Anonymous Coworker was included in the anonyfication, and although I'm thankful because I try daily to forget him, it's confusing because he's not a Blogger user. Maybe the smartasses at Blogger purposefully anonyfied his comment while chuckling, "Let's put the anonymous back in Anonymous Coworker.")

The blitzkrieg of anonyification continues throughout my post archives, although it thins out the deeper we go into 2006. It appears that the oldest posts have been left intact, while the newest posts suffered the most plundering.

This makes me sad because I love each and every one of you. Okay, I admit it--that's a baldfaced lie. Some of you make me want to plunge to my death from atop a snowy mountain peak...but I love most of you. Or at least like you somewhat. Or at least harbor no ill will toward you. For the most part. At any rate, I like to occasionally, when I'm on house arrest and very bored, revisit the links left by commenters in my old posts. Now, thanks to Blogger, you and I will be separated forever, like tfg and every woman he's ever seen or heard of.

It's an outrage, a cause for mourning, a catastrophe of epic proportions. I suggest you immediately write to your congressmen, storm the Capitol, or at least wake up from your heroin nod and acknowledge this travesty with a grunt or a sigh of some kind.

I'm sure this bug will eventually be fixed, but until then, I have a backup plan. For now, any time you comment, include your home address, home phone number, cell phone number and work phone number so that I'll still be able to get in touch with you even if you fall victim to the anonymizer. For safe measure, include the full credit card numbers from no less than three of your credit cards with the most available credit (and don't forget the expiration date and the three-digit code from the back of the card). This may seem a bit drastic, but I'll do anything to ensure you and I don't get separated again. You're that important to me.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 11

Boobs have many uses.

I've cried on your shoulder(s) before about my dental hygienist. I love my dentist, and have been going to the same one for about 11 years. And for 11 years, I've had the same deep and abiding distaste for his dental hygienist. She's a very nice lady, but one I find so irritating I've often considered biting her and then fleeing the scene. What can I say? Sometimes incredibly nice people inspire me to bite. This is why it's much safer for me to hang out with total assholes. But seriously, is it necessary to talk to me in the same high-pitched squeal you'd use for a toddler? It it necessary to press your face right up against mine when you patronize me with goofy questions about my Christmas plans? And must you ask the same boring chit-chat questions every time I come in, and always when my mouth is open and I can't reply? All I've ever wanted from a dental hygienist is for her to be very, very quiet while she does her work, but this one doesn't shut up for one minute.

By some stroke of luck, though (hmmm...that's a weird phrase, isn't it? I know some stroke victims who would object to such careless use of the word "luck") that particular dental hygienist is now gone from my dentist's office! Did she retire? Was she fired? Did she die? Is she on the run from the law? Was she exiled to Romania? Was she kidnapped by a holdover Black Panther group? Who cares. All I know is when I went to my dentist for a cleaning yesterday, she had been replaced by a very nice, and very unirritating, lady. Yay me!

All was well and good til the sexual assault.

As she was hacking away at my gums with a tiny pick axe, I felt something soft and comfy pressing up against my shoulder. Her boob! My natural instinct would have been to shift slightly over to make room for these massive, bullying beasts, but when you're being stabbed in the gums with an ice pick, you tend to think differently. I felt I had no option but to remain snuggled against her mammaries, at least until the hacking stopped. That was probably her plan all along--to trap me at pick-point and then force her sizable boobs on me while I was frozen in fear. Luckily for me, the situation resolved itself when she moved away to fetch that little suction hose to vacuum the blood out of my gore-soaked mouth. During the Wetvac process, the menacing boobs kept their distance.

But then! Just when I thought my virtue was safe, the woman began flossing my teeth. Flossing is a process which demands close proximity, and, as you can imagine, those ample boobs wedged their way right into the middle of the procedure. This time one of them planted itself firmly against my head.

What would you do if this happened to you?

Right! You'd begin formulating a blog post. So, sprawled out in my dentist's chair, that's what I did. But when I got to the part where I imagined describing myself laying in the dentist's chair with a middle-aged boob mashed up against my skull, I snorted with laughter. You try laughing while your mouth is split open like the Grand Canyon, and a pair of hands are crammed in there, sawing a string back and forth between your teeth. No, really. Go ahead, open your mouth as wide as you can and stuff both your hands in there. Now laugh. It doesn't exactly look like laughter, does it? It looks like the onset of a heart attack, or maybe an asthma attack. And it happened three times, because each time I composed myself, I went back to formulating my blog post, and the seizure came on again. I'm not sure what the well-endowed hygienist thought was happening to me, but she ignored it and went about her business, finally removing her hands from my mouth and her boob from my head, and sending me on my way, feeling violated.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not anti-boob. I'm totally pro-boob! There are definitely some boobs I wouldn't mind having on my head:

However, the boob I was brow-beaten with in my dentist's office yesterday isn't exactly what I had in mind during my extensive boob-on-my-head fantasies.

All in all, despite the rape, I still vastly prefer this dental hygienist over the last one. And for all I know, maybe she is just as irritating as the last one, but the boob-beating distracted me from that. Maybe she asked all the same dumb questions and prattled on in a condescending voice as if I were a little kid, but I was too preoccupied with the inappropriate touching to take note of it.

And I guess that's the moral of the story: If you want to distract someone, press a sexual organ against their head.

Day 1: The Kidnapping

Well, I aged 20 years, but I did survive the Wombat Invasion.

In my last post, I told you Common Wombat would be staying at my house for the weekend. I won't lie to you, I was scared shitless. Surprisingly, though, the weekend passed without the loss of a single human life--I consider that a success. However, my neighbors did object strenuously to having this miscreant near their homes. They didn't care for the sight of him stumbling around the neighborhood in nothing but a filthy, open bathrobe, chain-smoking and making passes at the neighborhood children. They called the police no fewer than 6 times to report a foul odor emanating from my house. And when 18 of the neighborhood pets went missing in a single evening, they all seemed to agree he had a hand in it.

Jake seemed to really take to him, though. The good news: Wombat potty-trained him in one weekend, which is impressive considering Jake is only 20 months old. The bad news: Now Jake sits on the toilet for an hour at a stretch, reading Hustler magazines and cursing at no one in particular, and smearing the walls with misogynistic graffitti.

I knew you’d want to see some photos from the weekend, so I have several to share—some were taken with my digital camera, some were taken by police investigators. In this first one, a trained hostage negotiator might notice that something’s definitely amiss. Here we are in the abandoned warehouse where Wombat dragged me, kicking and screaming, and proceeded to hold me hostage for a time, in an attempt to elicit an astronomical ransom from my panicked loved ones.You can see the meanacing grip he has on my now-bruised arm. You can see my brave smile as I try to broadcast to my family that I am so far unharmed. What you can’t see is the gun Wombat is jamming into my ribs under the table—nor the suspicious brown stain on the back of his pants. All ended well, though, when, just moments after this picture was taken, I shouted, “Look! A balloon!” which caused Wombat to spin around, delighted, searching for said balloon, giving me an opportunity to take the gun from him and pistol whip him unconscious. Later, I forgave him for kidnapping me, and he forgave me for pistol whipping him, and after I forced him to change into a clean pair of pants, a group of us went to a martini bar for drinks.

Much, much more happened, but I’m still too exhausted to recount it all in one sitting. Stay tuned for parts 2 through 9,267 of The Stench That Ruined My Wall-To-Wall Carpeting….

This could be the last post I ever write

Ever have a really horrific experience with a houseguest? Was there ever a time when you generously opened your home to a friend or family member, only to have things quickly spiral into madness once it became apparent that the houseguest was rude, thoughtless, ungrateful, messy, and possibly dangerous as well?

That's never happened to me, but I think it's about to. Believe it or not, this asshole is going to be staying at my house this weekend. He claims he's going to be in town "on business," but I think it's safe to assume that's code for "skipping a parole hearing."

If you've been a reader for awhile now, you may recall that I narrowly escaped death last time this creep was in town. But just because I made it out alive that time doesn't guarantee I will fare so well this time--after all, we only met up for dinner that time. This time he'll be staying at my house. I shudder at the thought.

But don't worry; I've taken some precautions. I'm not so naive that I would let a shady character like this stay at my house for the weekend without taking some steps to ensure my family and I live to see Monday morning. Here are a few of the protective measures I've taken:

-I've rented a port-a-potty for him to use. I don't think my (or anyone else's) body produces enough antibodies to battle the kind of superbacteria this guy's nether regions are breeding.

-To prevent him from "accidentally" forgetting to use the port-a-potty, I've had both bathrooms in our house destroyed. Rebuilding again them after Wombat leaves will be expensive, but like my grandma always said, avoiding hepatitis C is priceless.

-I've hired 6 off-duty police officers, 3 firefighters and 5 EMT workers to stay at my house around the clock for the whole weekend. It's comforting to know they'll be here in case my houseguest causes a true disaster, but the bonus is they'll be able to help me keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't steal anything. As an extra precaution, I've taken inventory (including photos) of my panty drawers.

-I've retooled and updated my will. If Wombat should kill me during the course of his stay, whatever personal belongings of mine that aren't ruined by blood splatter during the murder will go to my sister and niece in Alaska.

-I've scattered several dead animals around the house and yard. Hopefully, these will satisfy his thirst for blood and keep him from turning to me and my family for sustenance.

-I've tented off the room he'll be staying in. It looks like a nuclear quarantine area, which clashes with the rest of my decor, but my policy is "safety first." After Wombat leaves (or is shot down by police helicopter), I'll burn the furniture in that room and put the house up for sale.

Have I missed anything? Should I alert the FBI now, just so there's a record they can look back on if anything illegal or fatal should occur? Your input is appreciated.

In the meantime, to illustrate just how messed up this dude is, let me show you the picture he sent to my cell phone about an hour ago: What IS this? Is it a picture of his penis? Is it a dead animal? Did he just point the camera toward the toilet and take a photo? I don't know exactly what this is a picture of, but I know it's something dirty and wrong. Did I make a mistake inviting this loon to my home? I really need to think before I speak from now on.

Beware of strangers bearing candy

Did I ever tell you about the time I was sexually assaulted by met Hoss, of Old Horsetail Snake? If you're a reader of his blog (and who isn't?) I bet you've bought into his portrayal of himself as some sweet old guy, hanging around the old folks home chatting up the nurses and cracking a joke or two. Forget that. The man's a cad, 100% pure evil.

He was passing through town on his way to visit his friend Tish (don't call her "Trish," or she'll gut you like a flounder), and would be at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for a short layover. The plan was for me to meet him at his gate and have a nice visit with him before his connecting flight took off. There was no time to go anywhere for a meal or a cup of coffee, so we would just sit in the airport and chat each other up.

Little did I know what fate really had in store for me.

I showed up at his gate with an expectant smile on my face, looking this way and that for what I pictured him to be: A sweet older gentleman sitting politely, hands folded in his lap, giving an amiable nod to the travelers who passed by him. As I was scanning the area for someone who resembled the friendly-faced fellow in the cap pictured to the left in this paragraph, two hands grabbed my ass and I felt hot breath on my neck as someone growled, "Hey baby, you come here often?" Naturally, I was shocked and outraged, and quickly spun around to slap the offender across the face, when I recognized him from the pictures I'd seen on his blog--it was Hoss! I immediately began to stammer and stutter, completely at a loss for how to respond to this incredibly inappropriate "greeting." He just smiled and swatted me on the tush again and said, "Yeah, I'm used to that. The ladies are often stunned at my good looks." True, he was dashing, as most villains are, but his bad-boy good looks were not enough to make up for his lecherous, depraved behavior. This man was just bad, through and through.

Oh, alright, I confess: This whole post has been a lie. Well, the part about meeting Hoss in the airport is true, and the part about him being dashing is true too, but the ass-grabbing bit was pure fabrication. He was every bit as sweet and charming as I expected, and a perfect gentleman, at that. He was just as smart and funny and kind as you'd assume from reading his blog. The truth hardly makes for edge-of-your seat reading, though, so sometimes I have to throw in a celebrity tabloid-style lie or two to keep you folks interested.

I doubt Hoss will be foolish enough to try to meet up with me again, though--I gave him a Spam snowglobe as a gift in the airport that day, and while that sort of thing is inexplicably hilarious to me, it just makes most people think I'm mentally challenged in some way. So unless he wants more questionable gifts heaped upon him, or another libelous blog post written about him, old Hoss will follow his gut instinct and stay far away from the Dallas/Fort Worth area in the future.

9 our of 10 polled say they'd rather remove their own spleen with a corkscrew than attend a baby shower

There is no feeling worse than the fear and dread that overcomes me when I find a baby shower invitation in my mailbox. I'd rather clean the rhino cage at the zoo with my toothbrush than go to a baby shower. For those of you men who don't know what goes on at these colossal bore-fests, they're pretty much all exactly the same, and they go like this:

10 to 50 ladies arrive in skirts and sandals, wearing Brighton jewelry and bearing gift bags. They sit around making stiff and uncomfortable small talk with one another, fake smiles plastered on their faces, for a good 45 minutes while waiting for God-knows-what...more guests to arrive, the food to be arranged in a pretty semi-circle on the table, whatever. The aforementioned small talk always involves labor and delivery stories. Anyone attempting to strike up a conversation that's not related to the pain of pushing a human head out of one's hoo-ha is swiftly punished, as the other ladies close in on her and pummel her about the head and neck with their handbags. The guest of honor and her mother work the crowd, appearing unspeakably thrilled to see each guest. Hair and shoes are complimented even in cases where a person would have to be high on glue to really like the hair and shoes in question. Finger food and some kind of non-alcoholic punch is available on a table nearby, but no one goes near it until the hosts physically shove a few people toward the table to get the ball rolling. Meanwhile, a couple of the expectant mommy's friends scuttle around handing out whatever accoutrements are necessary for the 45 tedious, insipid games that will be played throughout the affair. These games appear to have been created by grade-schoolers for grade-schoolers, so it's no problem to use only a couple of brain cells to play them while you use the rest of your brain formulating your escape plan. "How much time do I have to put in here before I can leave without looking like a dick?" The comedy is that every single smiling skirt-wearer there is thinking the exact same thing, and when one person finally does bow out politely with a made-up excuse, the rest of the attendees practically trample each other following suit. It's like a stampede of well-dressed cattle, mooing, "Congratulations!" as they body-block each other trying to get to the door first.

The truth is, I've been to a couple that weren't so bad. In fact, the one I went to in December for my neighbor was downright nice. The good showers all have one thing in common: Booze. I know, it sounds just plain wrong to have booze at a baby shower, but I'll argue that there's no situation where it's more necessary. My own shower had plenty of it, even though I couldn't drink any. (I didn't mind, though; I was high on coke at the time.) How else but half drunk can a person be expected to listen to a throng of women shriek in perfect union, "Oh my God, so CUUUTTE!!" each and every time a gift is unwrapped? The unwrapping of the gifts takes forever, and is mind-numbing to everyone but the guest of honor and her mom. After the 26th chorus of "It's darling!!" I always feel like jumping up and yelling, "Okay, we all agree! Itty bitty dresses are goddamn adorable! Let's move this thing along!"

So let this be a public service announcement to all you women. A baby shower doesn't have to be torture. Follow these few simple rules to prevent a trampling death at your shower:

1) No games. None. Okay, I understand this suggestion might just break the heart of your mother, who, for some inexplicable reason, has her heart set on some baby shower games. Fine--two games max, then, and let them be along the lines of "Guess how many diaper pins are in this bowl" rather than, "See who can diaper a baby doll fastest." Under no circumstances should a game be incorporated that takes more than 4 seconds to play.

2. Provide booze, I beg you. Make it clear on the invitation that booze will be provided; this will greatly increase the number of attendees, and therefore, gifts. You can try to keep it classy if you must, with white wine or some kind of froofy champagne spritzer hell, just as long as there's alcohol involved. No one should be expected to buy you a gift and put on a skirt without at least getting a glass of wine in return. Hopefully several. And a handful of pills.

3. Have it at your own house. I realize others are probably throwing this shower for you, rather than you throwing it for yourself, but they can just as easily throw it for you in your own house. Your mumsy and girlfriends can do all the setup and cleanup for you, just as they would if the shindig were thrown in some other location. This is important because a good half the reason these affairs are so uncomfortable is most of the attendees have never been to the house of the aunt or girlfriend who is hosting your shower, which adds to the oddness factor. And it's odd enough without trying to cram in extra oddness where it's not absolutely necessary.

4. Open your gifts quickly. You can still coo and squeal over each hat and each stuffed bunny, but coo quickly, for Christ's sake. I know it seems like everyone is thrilled to see each gift, judging by how loudly they're screeching at every pair of tiny booties you hold up, but trust me, they're only doing this to mask how incredibly uncomfortable they are, or to keep from nodding off. Possibly both. Plus, it's a sociological fact that any time you throw a crowd of total strangers in a room and deprive them of alcohol, they tend to get nervous, eventually turning shrill and bird-like. If you don't want one of your coworkers pecking one of your cousins to death, pick up the pace a little.

5. This is an option for girls who, like me, have mostly male friends: Don't make it a "ladies only" affair. If you're thinking there's no man alive who would attend a baby shower, then you're underestimating the draw of free booze. Probably 50 people attended mine, about half of them men. Besides, no one wants to go to a baby shower alone because they're expecting it to be so godawful boring, so lots of couples will attend in cases where, had it been ladies only, the lady might have sawed off her own foot just to have a valid excuse not to attend. As in, "Oh Cindy, I'm sorry I couldn't be at your baby shower--I was so mad that I had to miss it! I was at the hospital getting fitted for my prosthetic foot, and couldn't hobble away. But I know your mother took photos of you holding up each and every single bib and box of diapers that was given to you, so make sure I get to look at those sometime soon! I'm dying to see!"

That pretty much sums it up. Please, pass this advice on to any expectant mothers you know. Especially the ones you and I both know, so that the next time I get invited to a baby shower I don't have to resort to self-mutilation to get out of attending.

Allegations have been made...

...and I will be contacting my lawyer. The monkey part is true, but the rest of it...well, it's just libelous and wrong.

I was attacked by an internet predator--and lived to tell about it

Well, okay--I wasn't exactly attacked. And he's not exactly an internet predator. But wouldn't that have made for an interesting post? I almost wish I could have teetered on the brink of death just for a moment or two, to make the story more compelling.

As mentioned in a previous post, Common Wombat was in the Dallas area for a few days hunting down children and killing them doing some design work at a local mall. Obviously he's alienated himself from all the potential jobs in his own hometown, and has to travel far and wide for work now.

We were scheduled to meet at a restaurant at 7 PM--but God tried to intervene on my behalf and prevent me from attending this meeting by putting me in the midst of some crazy backed-up traffic, which made me, my husband and my friend Brooks (who were in the car with me) about 20 minutes late. My friend Vanessa got to the restaurant on time, and met up with Wombat first. He had mentioned in a recent post of his that he is sometimes the target of gay guys looking for love, so I told Vanessa to be on the lookout for a panicked fellow surrounded by a pack of gay dudes, but apparently our Dallas homosexual crowd is pickier than the Baltimore gays, because he was strolling along unmolested when Vanessa spotted him. By the time we arrived, Vanessa lay dead at Wombat's feet in a pool of blood the two were cheerfully engaged in conversation. Wombat was disheveled and fidgety, and had a swastika carved into his forehead turned out to be a nice, normal-looking fellow. I patted him down for axes, nunchucks, machetes, bayonetes, carving knives, pistols, dentist's drills, and bone saws, but found nothing. Assuming he must have keistered his weapon, I vowed to be wary anyway.

Over the course of the next three hours, Wombat tried to bite and strangle each of us repeatedly we had a lot of fun talking and eating. Seriously, the guy is demented in all the right ways, and fit in perfectly with our similarly demented group, as indicated by this photo. So in summary, I did survive! I was not killed, maimed, skinned, hobbled, burned, bitten, punched, poked, scratched or even given a flea dip. I can safely vouch for the relative harmlessness of the Wombat. He was funny, charming, pleasant and completely odorless. We loved him! It's just lucky for us that Baltimore and Dallas are so close together, so now we can hang out with him and his wife Sally on a regular basis. (Hmm...wait a minute. I might need consult a map before I swear to that.)

Lessons I've Learned, Part 6

It's not enough to simply lock your bedroom door.

The story I told you about my 4 ridiculously messy roommates got me reminiscing about that (incredibly filthy, roach-infested) year we lived together. There was yet another lesson I learned from that time.

My roommates and I were all in ROTC...which might lead you to believe I'm a military chick, but that would only be true in the sketchiest sense. I was only in the Reserves, never the active Army, and I did it because it was either that or drop out of school after my sophomore year, since my mom could no longer afford my tuition, and the Army would pay it for those remaining two years. So I was in the Reserves and ROTC for my last two years of college, and after college I fulfilled my Reserve obligation and then got out. It was a great experience, and I had a lot of fun and learned a whole lot, but if you knew me you'd know that I am just not the military type. So I got out when my obligation was up, and went back to being the person of questionable morals and behavior that you've grown to love.

The ROTC department at my university was small--maybe 40 students in all, with only 4 or 5 instructors. The instructors were active Army people, not college professors. While the 7 or 8 seniors in my ROTC class did attend classes taught by the other ROTC instructors, we were primarily assigned to Cpt. Mitchell, while the juniors in ROTC had their own instructor, as did the sophomores and the freshmen. So the 7 or 8 of us seniors (including my roommates) spent the majority of our ROTC class time with Cpt. Mitchell, and we became very familiar with him. Maybe too familiar, as my story will illustrate.

One weekend there was a party at our house. I was not in attendance, since I had driven home for the weekend to see some friends, but apparently this was a hell of a party. Cpt. Mitchell was there, and had appointed himself bartender. He stationed himself by an open window and used a table as his bartop, where he poured tequila shots and basically badgered people into taking them. Every so often he would stick his head out the window and puke into our hapless bushes, then pour himself another shot and carry on, like a true soldier. By everyone's account, this was apparently a great party, probably largely due to the tequila shot pouring prowess of Cpt. Mitchell. When I returned on Sunday, my roommates looked like something that had crawled out of the sewer--each of them was sprawled on various pieces of furniture, moaning and squinting and retching and cursing God. I went into my room to drop my bags, and noticed my bed had been made--which was odd, since I hadn't made it before I left. In fact, I had locked my bedroom door before I'd left. I peered out my bedroom door into the adjacent room, addressed the crew of living dead and asked, "Who slept in my room?" Suddenly, life crept into the eyes of the roommates, who instantly looked guilty. They fumbled. "Um. Well.... Uh," looking from one to the other and back at the floor. I went back into my room and took the sheets and blankets off the bed, thinking the guilty looks of my roommates surely meant that someone had not just slept in there, but possibly banged a hooker or a farm animal, so I might as well wash sheets now and ask questions later.

That's when I saw the tighty whities.

The only thing worse than discovering that some unidentified couple had sex in your bed is discovering that they left their vile little undergarments there. And am I crazy, or would it have been better if it had been the girl that had left her underoos there? Somehow it was worse that it was men's underwear than women's. I wanted to burn my bed to the ground.

Now they had no choice but to tell me the story. Here are the incredibly seedy details:

Party ends at our place, guests crawl home. Cpt. Mitchell remains, and in spite of being so drunk that he has puked several times and looks like Charles Manson instead of the clean-cut Top Gun he had resembled at the start of the evening, he wants to go barhopping. Drunk roommates actually try to resist, but Mitchell insists--and he was, after all, our superior officer, and we were accustomed to taking orders from him. They go to a place so seedy that it actually has big, dark blue sheets thumbtacked up to cover the windows so that you can't see into it from the street. It looks like something you'd find in a warehouse district. Once inside, Cpt. Mitchell picks up some skank. He defiles the skank in my bed after picking the lock to get in, while my roommates stare wide-eyed at each other in the living room, unable to believe this turn of events.

But here's where the story gets even more madcap, more zany.

Our fearless leader and his skank fall asleep in my formerly bacteria-free bed. Just as daylight begins to break, there's a knock at the door. A hungover roommate peers out the window and realizes it's Cpt. Mitchell's wife! Everyone tries to ignore the knocking. She persists, then leaves--but returns again a few minutes later, banging even harder, crying, and calling "I know he's there! His car is parked right here!" Cpt. Mitchell scrambles into his clothes--most of them, anyway--instructs the girl to stay put and not make a sound, then sheepishly answers the door. His crying wife has the baby in her car; the family retreats to the Mitchell household, for what must surely have been a daylong crying and fighting session. (Let me also note that Mitchell had brought his wife to the states from Germany where he'd met her a few years before. She still had a thick accent and had no family here in the states.)

My roommates are then left with Cpt. Mitchell's...friend. Eventually someone takes her home, and soon I arrive to find the filthy evidence at the crime scene.

Naturally it would have made sense to throw his filthy little panties away. But I found his behavior nauseating, particularly since a big portion of his time spent training us to be leaders involved instructing us to behave with strong moral character. So I didn't want to let him off the hook so easily. I picked up his putrid little bloomers by hooking them onto the end of a pen (which I promptly disposed of) and put them into a paper bag, and delivered them to him as he sat at his desk Monday morning. He was embarrassed, horrified, ashamed, etc. I can't imagine a bigger scandal that could have rocked our small ROTC department. He had crossed a boundary by even attending the party--and then, of course, he bludgeoned several other boundaries plum to death. (And no, Cpt. Mitchell isn't his real name.)

The lesson: Locking your bedroom door is never enough when you live with a house full of guys. Someone will get resourceful and find a way to degrade themselves and someone else in your bed. Consider sprinkling glass shards in your bed before you leave for the weekend, or perhaps leaving a wolverine with newborn cubs under the comforter.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 5

Beware the horror lurking in your microwave

This edition of Lessons I've Learned will shock you, if only for the fact that, unlike my previous Lessons, it does not involve copious alcohol consumption.

For a period of time in college, I lived with 4 guys. Yeah, I know--that's a recipe for disaster. Of course, I knew they'd be slobs, since, well, they were guys--but naivete prevented me from understanding or predicting the unbelievable extent to which their slobdom would spiral. How can men live like that? These normal-looking, well-behaved, reasonably attractive guys blithely strolled from room to room in our cute little off-campus dwelling, kicking litter hither and yon as they went, sidestepping piles of clothing, stacks of dishes, and food items that had fossilized weeks before. I had two choices: To become Snow White to their 4 Dwarfs, thanklessly cleaning up after them day in and day out, or to stubbornly ignore it, hoping beyond common sense that they'd eventually muster up enough pride to tidy up after themselves. I knew it was the longest shot conceivable, but I'm an optimist, so I chose the latter. Who knew--perhaps eventually they'd grow ashamed of the filth, and each would start to pick up after himself just enough that the house would begin to exist in a general state of, if not cleanliness, then at least acceptable clutter.

This shows how dumb I was.

Time went by and the filth reached epic proportions. I can tolerate constant disarray, if I must, but what I can't tolerate are cockroaches. I can't stand insects of any kind, but roaches are an unspeakable horror. I cannot sleep if I've seen one in my home. I will perch in a crouching position on the center of my bed, holding a shoe in one hand and a can of Raid in the other, head swiveling from side to side, on the alert for anything that might resemble scurrying. I had signed a lease with these zoo animals, and had no place to move to in the middle of the semester, and yet I could not sleep at night if there was even the remotest chance that a roach might amble across the bridge of my nose as I slumbered. And our tiny kitchen was home to, seemingly, about 40% of the US population of roaches. I couldn't move a coffee cup for fear of igniting a storm of activity that would cause me leap 3 feet in the air and shriek like chimpanzee on fire. In fact, once when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I screeched like banshee when I saw a huge roach sitting comfortably on the bristles of Sid's toothbrush. On the bristles! His big, disgusting body covered the whole head of the toothbrush. This was not an acceptable living situation. I needed a solution.

Here's the best I was able to come up with: I moved into the basement room. The house had four bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs in the basement. I traded with one of my filthy cohorts, who was glad to get an upstairs room. My hope was that my room was far enough removed from the kitchen that the roaches would be too lazy to make the trek, especially considering my room was also scrupulously absent of any food items or even a sweet-smelling, potentially roach-attracting candle or tube of lip gloss. For good measure, I also kept a towel stuffed under my bedroom door to ensure that the crack that an insect might potentially enter through no longer existed. And, for my final display of genius, I kept a can of Raid handy, which I used every single night to spray the entire perimeter of my room before I went to sleep. The nightly inhalation of insecticide fumes lo those many nights may explain some of the questionable things you've read on this site, and which, if you know me, you've heard me say on a regular basis. But far more important than the health of my brain is the fact that I never once saw a roach in my pristine basement hideaway, so my plan worked. But that's not where the lesson comes in. Are you ready for the lesson? I don't think you are, but you wanted something to read today, so basically you're asking for this. You're going to be sorry, though.

Eventually I moved out of that litter box and into a house with my nice, clean boyfriend. I was careful to clean the hell out of everything I owned before bringing it into my new pad, and my boyfriend helped out in this task. As it happened, he was the one who cleaned out the microwave, and he was incredibly thorough, even taking apart the housing so he could get to the fan part. That's where he found the roach graveyard.

A nice little pile of dust had accumulated back there, and it wasn't hard to determine what that dust was made of, when you took note of the fact that there were also the dried husks of roaches in various stages of pre-dustification. Roaches would get in that little fan compartment and die, the heat would dry them out and over time, turn them to dust, and then the little dust particles would presumably FLY AROUND INSIDE MY MICROWAVE while my food heated up! I had often contemplated the security of my microwave from roaches, and considered the inside of that appliance to be a safe zone. After all, bugs can't get in there unless you leave the door open, right? Who the hell would think about them turning to dust and getting sucked up through the f!&*@ing fan? Oh, the cruel, Godless irony--I had been tediously soaking the carpet around the periphery of my room with Raid every night to ward off the roaches who might or might not wish to crawl, relatively harmlessly, about in my room, when in fact, I was even then digesting the roach dust that had coated the pizza I had reaheated and eaten earlier that day! I have been reeling from this revelation for years, my friends.

The lesson? GOD IS CRUEL! No, that's too simple. The lesson is this: Cover every single thing you heat in a microwave. If it's a bowl of soup, put a lid on it. If it's a burrito, put it inside a Tupperware container and put a lid on it. Even if you don't live with 4 of the filthiest jackasses to ever walk the earth, and even if you don't have a roach in your house--there's just no way of knowing what dead things might be, even now, decomposing in the depths of your appliances.

I have to go kill myself now.