And now we continue on with the "Top 10 Most Embarrassing Moments" countdown (if you’re late, skip down one post to #6-10), Part II

5) The time I tried to take a nap at school
Truth be told, there’s nothing inherently funny about this particular embarrassing moment. I don’t look back on this one and laugh. The closest I can get to funny is awkward, and this represents perhaps the single most awkward five minutes of my life. If I propositioned a prostitute in the parking lot of my church in full view of the exiting congregation this very Sunday it wouldn’t be this awkward unless the prostitute turned out to be a guy and the guy dragged me out of my car and beat me up. Even then it would only be as awkward. Anyway, I’m just saying, this isn’t funny.

So, it’s my senior year and as a reward, a bunch of the juniors got to cut class to help decorate for the senior prom. When I got to the gym with the other 200+ juniors we were all loosely assigned to a task. I have no idea what mine was – making fake treasure chests or something – but it became apparent pretty quickly there were way too many people for the handful of jobs that needed to be done. Quickly making one of the least logical decisions of my life (and that’s really saying something), I decided I’d slip into one of the gym offices and take a nap. Why, I have no idea. It’s not like I was going to catch a two-hour nap. At best I’d have laid somewhere for two hours constantly worrying about getting caught. It didn’t take nearly that long, fortunately.

The first office I looked in was empty and was attached to the boys locker room. I assume this was the basketball coach’s office, who I’d never met before. I looked around the locker room. No one home. Looked back out into the gym. No one coming. Then I decided I’d just slide down between the desk and the wall to catch some zzzz’s. I should mention that the side of the desk I was on was the side where the person would sit. So IF I’d fallen asleep and IF the coach had come back, he’d had tripped over me sitting down in his chair. How would I even explain why I was sleeping on his floor? It’s like I’d spent the morning huffing paint or something. About the time I came to my senses, the coach came in with another student. As I peered up over the desk, the coach saw me and said something to the effect of “What in the hell are you doing on the floor behind my desk?” If I’d been a magician I suppose I could’ve thrown one of those smoke bombs on the floor at his feet and disappeared. If I’d been a professional wrestler I could’ve thrown either salt or fire (whichever I was hiding in my trunks) in his eyes and suplexed him or something. I was neither of those things so I just stood there completely unable to formulate any kind of coherent excuse. I think I said something about not feeling well, which he bought about as much as a hobo would buy a brand new Mercedes. He threatened to kick my ass back to class and I skulked back out into the gym with my face as red as a stop sign. My brain still likes to take that sequence of events out and fondle it from time to time like it’s a rubix cube that can be solved if I just think about it long enough. Here’s a tip, brain: stop wasting your time because there’s no explanation for this one.

4) The many, many times I spent talking about He-Man
You might be interested to know I played Division III soccer my freshman year of college. I’d have played all four years, but I transferred to a school without a soccer team. Not too bad for a kid that didn’t start playing organized soccer until the 5^th grade, huh? You might also be interested to know that before I started playing soccer on the mean playgrounds of East Heights Elementary I spent recesses with my best friend, Barrett Goodman, walking around the soccer field over and over talking about He-Man while every other boy in our class played soccer. We talked about He-Man the way Chris Matthews talks about politics. Like Warren Buffet talks about money. If talking about He-Man made you taller, I’d be the single biggest reason the NBA decided to change over to 15-foot rims. I’d have led the league in blocked shots every year since my rookie season. I’d accidentally block my teammates’ shots by walking in front of the rim. “And there’s another block!” one announcer would say. “Wow, he’s a behemoth!” the color guy would say. “I think that shot hit him in the thigh” they’d both agree. Anyway, at some point I guess I kicked Barrett to the curb to give soccer a try, but for that glorious year and a half we were passionately in love with six-inch, impossibly muscular, plastic, action figures, most of which wore loin cloths. Remind me again how I didn’t end up gay?

Note: From the “You-Could-Never-Get-Away-With-This-These-Days” file, we used to divide up the soccer teams by playing blacks versus whites. Amazingly, every one was ok with this. We’d just split up and play soccer. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but no one seemed to mind.

3-2) The two times I made an ass of myself trying to run fast
I cannot run fast. Not now, not ever, really. I always had moderate speed on the soccer field. As I got older I started to learn when to apply some tactical speed, but strictly speaking, I’m not much of a sprinter the way Jamaicans really aren’t bobsledders. Unfortunately I did not come to this realization until much too late in life.

In grade school, I was still convinced that I was faster than any girl simply based on genetic superiority. One day I challenged a girl in my class who was considered fast to a foot race. I should preface this story by letting you know this particular girl, Leslie Hay, went on to win several state track titles. And in case you’re wondering, she didn’t just get really fast all of a sudden. No, she was fast in 4^th grade. Like, Scooby-Doo-running-from-a-ghost fast.

She gladly accepted my challenge and proceeded to absolutely annihilate me. We raced 30 yards and back twice. She beat me both times by roughly 15 feet. On the second attempt she began taunt me as she to coasted to another easy win. Her friends laughed at me. My friends laughed at me. I think I remember saying I’d be much faster if I didn’t have on jeans, but the truth that was painfully obvious to everyone but me was that Leslie could’ve run underwater in one of those old-timey copper scuba suites with the big round helmet and she still would’ve beaten me by two steps.

The second time I made an ass of myself while running was the very next year. I hadn’t gotten any faster, but somehow I had the 20^th best time of any male 5^th grader in the 40-yard dash. So, field day rolled around and it was time for the 20 fastest kids to race one another to determine the overall fastest 5^th grader. I jogged over to the starting line with 19 other kids and we all took our place on the starting line. I’m remember I was wearing jeans again. It’s hard to run fast in jeans, especially if you’re already slow to begin with. I felt like I was trying to run with rolled up carpets wrapped around my legs. There’s a reason world-class sprinters don't run in denim. Anyway, someone blew a whistle and everybody took off. I ran like I had on 30-lb. ankle weights on. At some point I actually fell down. No one saw it because by that point I was well behind everyone else. Apparently one of the officials must’ve had a stroke during the first race because he or she convinced the other officials that I’d have done much better if I hadn't fallen down. So we raced again. And I finished dead last again. Only this time I had a huge grass stain on my Bugle Boy jeans. Thankfully, there was no reprieve and I walked away with a ribbon for participating, like a dog that takes a dump on the Astroturf at the Westminster.

1) The time I farted in class
You know how you have memories from your childhood that you wonder how much actually happened and how much you’ve just sort of mentally filled in over time? Well, this is not one of those kinds of stories. Every ounce of this story is 100% true. Except for the date and what I was wearing, I can remember every other detail about this moment exactly as it happened. I was in 8^th grade French class. Mr. Gilmour was my teacher. He looked a little like Gargamel from the Smurfs, but he was nicer.

I was sitting in his French class when, due to some freakish colon spasm, I may have allowed a little bit of noxious gas to silently escape my anal cavity. The smell clung to me immediately, the way a Russian child frantically clings to a parent being dragged away by the KGB. I swear, if my pants had been made entirely of Glade plug-ins I couldn’t have begun to fight the smell. The stench of sulfur and eggs gone bad was so powerful, though, that it began to permeate the general vicinity. It was out there and it was eye-wateringly strong.

So, I’m sitting there calculating how many people are close enough to the smell to potentially share the blame when a strange thing happened: people started moving. The people seated around me left their seats and moved to the back of the room as though drawn by some invisible force promising fame, fortune and fresh air. Mr. Gilmour actually stopped in the middle of the lesson to watch the four or so people who just moved to the back of the room leaving me sitting by myself. And then he looked at me and here’s what I said: “I don’t smell anything”…pause…”oh wow, yes I do” and I moved to the back of the room also. Very, very smooth. I’m sure my denial was as convincing as O.J.’s.

My Most Embarrassing Moments, Part I

I can’t exactly recall what set me down the path of recalling the most embarrassing moments of my childhood, but the more I thought it, the more I realized it could be vaguely therapeutic to list them here. I’m a big believer in self-deprecation and I can’t think of anything more enjoyable than reliving some of the most embarrassing experiences of my youth. My short list all seem to have happened at school. Frankly, the list could be hundreds of instances long. Seriously, I was that big of a douche bag. (I might still be.) But for the sake of tradition, I’ll limit it to the 10 most embarrassing. Here’s part 1 of 2:

10) The time I got pants’d in 5^th grade
I’m channeling the voice (and the rockin’ bod) of Sophia from Golden Girls when I say, “Picture it! Henderson (Ky.), 1984!” I was in fifth grade at East Heights Elementary School. It’s superfluous to this particular story, but I associate that year with my first real crush. Her name was Gretchen Enyart. She was a cheerleader for the mighty Cardinals of East Heights. All these years later I don’t mind letting the cat out of the bag because I assume she still has no idea who I am. She was only a year older, but decades hotter than I was in fifth grade. And that little nugget is pertinent to the story of my getting pants’d.

You see, I was a bit of a late bloomer. For the more mature boys, wearing sweat pants would have been needlessly reckless given the inherent lack of structural integrity in the groin area of most sweat pants, especially the velour kind my mom bought at JC Penney. (Why did every pair seem to be maroon?) For me, though, the cruel hand of puberty was not yet playing havoc with my loss of junk control, so I brazenly wore sweat pants, sometimes more than once a week. On one such day, some complete jackass dropped my sweat pants in the gym in front of what was maybe five people standing in our little group, but in my head it seemed like the crowd at an American Idol audition. Fortunately, this guy (and I can’t remember who it was) did not also drop by briefs. Those of the Fruit of the Loom variety. In hindsight, that would’ve been even more mortifying, especially if, somehow, miraculously, Gretchen had been looking at me longingly during that instant. She would not have been impressed and I suspect I would have literally died in the gym. An autopsy would have later confirmed the cause of death: embarrassment. The coroner's postmortem notes might also have referenced my freakishly tiny equipment downstairs.

9) The time some girl said I was gay
Eighth grade is a tough time for most boys and I was no exception. I liked lots of girls but had no idea how to talk to them. Karl from Slingblade would look like one of the Baldwins compared to the eighth grade me. French fried potaters would have been, intellectually speaking, a step up from whatever I spent most of my time talking to girls about. Probably Nintendo or the Beastie Boys. Anyway, I was in eighth grade when a particularly skanky girl took a shine to my 98-lb. frame. We all know the drill. She asked a friend to ask a friend to ask a friend to find out if I liked her. It’s a miracle I didn’t pee in my pants. I can remember be saucer-eyed, literally (well, actually figuratively) frozen in place. I’m sure I stammered something about similar to, “Sorry, I’m not interested. I’m really busy with the second Zelda just now. Check back after I beat this one.” Regardless of what I said, this wasn’t the answer my skanky lady was looking for. So, she started a rumor with a fairly wide circle of people that I was gay. I’m not sure how she supported this particular accusation but I don’t imagine it was “because he won’t go with me.” It probably involved me and another dude in a bathroom stall right after lunch. Who knows. All I know is the rumor followed me for a good six months and it was truly traumatic for me. Maybe it’s not a big deal for gay kids these days, but it was a helluva big deal for a straight kid in 1987.

8-7) The time I was in “A Computerized Christmas” (It’s a two-fer!)
Once upon a time I was in play called “A Computerized Christmas.” From the title alone you can surmise this wasn’t exactly Ibsen. As I recall, somehow a computer helped save Christmas by joining forces with Father Time and Santa Claus. Sounds riveting, I know. Yours truly landed the lead role of Father Time after several rounds of auditions where those going after the role were asked to sing the correct words loudly. I sang the most loud. (This was fourth grade and winning this role really helped set me apart from the other super geek in class.) Once all the parts were determined, we started rehearsing with the music teacher every afternoon in the amphitheater.

(Note: The amphitheater doubled as the room where we watched film strips for the last two weeks of school every year and where the boys and girls separately convened to discuss puberty in “health” class. I got a turquoise pamphlet w/ cartoons in it showing private parts. I bet my parents still have it.)

So, on day one of play practice (my God, this sounds so queer) I raised my hand and innocently asked the music teacher who had the most lines of anyone in the whole play. I already knew the answer, of course, but wanted her to affirm my awesome-ness. When she said, “Well, Chip, I guess you do” I followed it up with, “So, would you say I have the most important part in the play then?” At this point and as I’m typing this I’m cringing to the point of getting cramps in my stomach. I was such a complete tool bag. I can’t type anymore. It hurts too bad.

Fast forward about a week when we actually started rehearsing on the stage. One of the teachers volunteered to provide Father Time’s cane, you know, to make a three-foot fourth grader with a beard made of cotton seem more like a thousands-of-years-old time keeper. Apparently this particular cane had been hand-carved by her recently deceased father. She begged us all to be very careful with it. I broke it in half on the second day of practice while I was screwing around on stage. Now who’s laughing, cane lady?

6) The time I tried to say something funny
This one comes from all the way back in 1987. Ms. McCroskey’s science class. Mister funny guy always gotta be the class clown, always gotta say something funny. One sunny day on a Monday spring morning, Ms. McCroskey welcomed us all back to class and remarked to Mark Smith, one of my fellow seventh graders, that she’d seen him at the park with his dog over the weekend. Now, before I tell you what I said, I should point out that I had no business making fun of Mark Smith. He, along with me and a guy named Brian Crafton, was among the 3 shortest boys in our entire school. I shared a tiny kinship with Mark that should’ve been enough to keep me from trying to make a joke at his expense. (Fortunately, he never held it against me and we played tennis together many times once we got to high school.) Anyway, so Ms. McCroskey finishes with something like, “Hey, Mark. I saw you at the park this weekend with your little dog.” Then, from across the room, inspiration strikes the short kid in the corner and I say, “That wasn’t his dog, that was his sister.” All these years later, even if I pretend I don’t know what Mark’s reply was, this just isn’t funny. This is about as funny as when my daughter butchers the same knock-knock joke for the 35^th time, except she’s three and I was 12. No, what’s funny is what Mark said. Without raising his voice and with only the slightest hint of contempt, he said quietly, “My sister is dead.” Touche.

5 Sayings that make no sense
This is actually a post I started back in 2004 and, since I have nothing of any importance to say this week, I thought I'd finish this one up.

1) When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
I'm sorry. I wasn't aware that when life gave us the lemons, it also gave us a pitcher and sugar and water. As far as we know, life just gave us the lemons. We can squeeze those lemons if we want, but that won't make lemonade. It'll just make lemon juice, which is bound to get into a paper cut so life wins twice. Maybe if life gives us bread crumbs next time we can put it together with some nice chicken cutlets, a little italian vinegairette and some sweet basil and make a nice chicken parmesan. While you're at it, ask life for some twice-baked potatoes. Oooh, I know, see if life has an old transmission is his garage and we'll go ahead and build a fleet of rental cars. The bottom line is, you can't make something out of stuff you don't have.

2) What doesn't kill us, only makes us stronger.
This is just nonsense. I don't recall Christopher Reeve pulling any buses with his teeth like the world's strongest man two months after he fell off that horse.

3) A penny saved is a penny earned.
You know what, if you're saving for retirement a penny at a time, you're not earning enough money and you'll eventually die at work, probably while you're in the men's restroom. You'll be found slumped over on the can by your co-worker and trust me, that's going to be embarrassing. Anyway, enough about your untimely death, you ought to be investing, chump. Start turning those pennies into nickels. I'd say a penny saved is a penny wasted.

4) A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
You really don't hear this saying much anymore, probably because people now realize birds are filthy and disease-ridden. Why you would want a live bird in your hand is beyond me. The lorikeets at the zoo like to land on my daughter's head and even that creeps me out. But all that aside, I think this saying means that being able to control one thing is twice as good as two things you can't control. I guess my thought is, if I can do anything I want with this bird in my hand isn't he worth more than two of those birds in that bush over there? This bird I have here is worth hundreds of those birds, maybe thousands. I made a tiny curly-cue mustache for this little guy and I borrowed a bowler hat from one of my Tombstone action figures. I even made him a small bird vest with a fetching argyle pattern. Once the tiny novelty pocket watch and cigars arrive from FancyBird.com, this guy will look like he's ready for a night on the town with the other late 1800's banker birds. Those bush birds over there are living claw-to-mouth at best. They spend all day at the park fighting with the squirrels over hot dog buns, whereas my bird is high-society. This bird here is worth a small fortune. And he looks the part.

5) Hindsight is 20/20.
As any person with an advanced degree in optometry or opthamology would gladly explain to the layperson, 20/20 isn't actually perfect vision. So, if the sentiment of this saying is to convey that things are perfectly clear once they've already happened, then I think we owe it to the fine folks who routinely price gouge us for eyecare to make this saying technically correct. As some enormous nerd (ironically, he probably has very thick glasses) with too much time explained at wikipedia:

If the optics of the eye were otherwise perfect, theoretically acuity would be limited by pupil diffraction to 0.4 minutes of arc (minarc) or 20/8 acuity. The smallest cone cells in the fovea also have sizes corresponding to 0.4 minarc of the visual field, which also places a lower limit on acuity. The optimal acuity of 0.4 minarc or 20/8 can be demonstrated using a laser interferometer that bypasses any defects in the eye's optics and projects a pattern of dark and light bands directly on the retina.

You see that? Minarc...fovea...laser interferometer! I rest my case! Clearly the quote would be accurate, then, if we began saying, "Well, you know what they say, 'hinsight's 20/8.'" But wait, what about the metric system? Apparently in parts of the world where the metric system is the unit of measurement flavor of the day, "20/20" doesn't mean anything. Sort of like in Pulp Fiction when Vincent is trying to explain to Jules they don't sell Quarter Pounders at McDonald's in Paris. In Europe the old saying would be, "Hindsight is 6/6." Granted that sounds pretty stupid, but then again these are the same people that shower far too infrequently and kiss each other upon meeting for the first time. Stupid euros and their metric system.

Irony is Not a Family Value
I'll admit to being a little detached from the presidential race since my guy Huckabee was eliminated a few months ago. I still have my Team Huckabee membership card in my wallet. This little baby gets me discounts on guns and ammo at Wal-Marts all over Arkansas. Now that my side of the race is decided, I've been following this Hillary/Obama free-for-all. I got a pretty good laugh this morning when I got an email from AdAge with a teaser for this story.


If you don't care to read the article, allow me to summarize. It seems three metrosexual dudes wearing garrishly-branded Abercrombie & Fitch clothing were standing behind Obama during his recent speech to Indiana supporters following his loss in Pennsylvania. The fashion statement was so blatant, in fact, some in the media questioned whether A&F put these guys up to it.

For A&F's part, they deny the whole thing and I think they're telling the truth. So, what makes this story funny is that these three dudes came to the event together and either a) didn't notice they were all basically dressed the same or b) just didn't care or, worse yet, c) they thought it was cool. Apparently they also missed the irony that three white guys who dress and act alike are supporting the black candidate whose platform is all about change.

What I think is doubly hilarious is the prevailing theory this was a stunt by the Obama camp to reach out to the gay community, a stronghold of the Hilary camp. There's some irony there too: that Obama would pick the straightest place on earth -- Indiana -- to appeal to the gay community.

Whether this is an Obama stunt or not, I'm guessing the guy on the left is openly gay. The guy in the middle is on the down low and he's only told his best girl friend, Kelsey. (Of course, the dude he made out with in the bathroom at his junior prom has suspected he may be gay for some time.) And the poor guy on the right, that guy is straight as an arrow but now that he's on TV with the two gayest guys at the University of Evansville, everyone will just naturally assume he's gay from now on.

I guess Alanis was telling the truth. It really is like rain on your wedding day.

Scrumtralescence at its Most Scrumtralescent
Neil Armstrong takes one small step for man. The Berlin Wall comes tumbling down. OJ Simpson is acquitted of double murder*. All profound moments in television history to be sure, and yet, measured against the pantheon of world-altering events captured on camera during our lifetime, these are essentially middle school talent shows compared with the gravity, the spectacle, the pageantry of last night's season two wrap up of Rock of Love (click the link for Brett's super-fake crotch bulge...somewhere a girls fast pitch team is missing a softball). To borrow a made up word used by Will Ferrell while impersonating James Lipton, it was scrumtralescent. If you missed it, you should feel like less of a man or woman. Just watching the fight sequence on YouTube is enough to cure pink eye. I would not be surprised in the least to find out some viewers were cured of real diseases like diabetes or melanoma or necrophilia after watching last night's episode in its entirety. I assume people lucky enough to be in the live studio audience will live forever. That, folks, is how awesome it was. If you missed it, be sure to catch it on DVD.


*Editor's Note: I am, of course, referring to OJ's acquittal in the criminal case. You probably recall the jury returned a verdict of not guilty based primarily on the idea that "the glove doesn't fit." That same piece of evidence didn't work out as well in the civil court as the judge, perhaps a glove expert in a former life or maybe just a fan of Dan Marino's commercial work, understood that it is physically impossible to make a glove "fit" while your hand is completely open and all your fingers are splayed out. I mean, my three year old sometimes struggles with this concept when we try to put on her snow gloves but I'd expect an adult on 12-person jury to have put on a glove before. Maybe that's asking too much in Southern California.

You're Only as Old as You Look
My 34th birthday is on the horizon. It's still three weeks away, but it might as well be tomorrow. In fact, I might as well be turning 50. For the last few days in particular, I've felt my birthday lurking in the shadows. Watching me. Deciding when to strike. Noticing how nice my ass looks in these pants. Feeling confused and exhilarated at the same time. Maybe my 34th birthday is very gay. Hard to say for sure, but it's there and I can sense its presence. I feel old.

Making matters worse is that I bought some v-neck undershirts over the weekend. Nothing says "I'm an old man" like a v-neck undershirt. Well, that's not exactly true. Book shopping for Louis L'Amour titles is definitely an old man thing to do. Wearing shorts with dark socks is pretty old man, too. I'm not quite to that level yet even with my new undershirts, but I'm scared I'm just a few weeks from buying a Lincoln Town Car and humming when I eat.

In my defense, I couldn't help it. I had to buy them because I seem to have so many dress shirts that have the next-to-the-top button in no man's land and when I wear the standard crew neck undershirt underneath, the top two inches is visible in the gap between the collars of the dress shirt (great article here about undershirts, fellas). Not a good look if you ask me. So that's why I bought the v-necks. I'm wearing one today as a matter of fact. My chest hair sticks out a little at the low point on the V and I kinda feel like disco dancing. Fortunately, my chest hair is not visible to my co-workers. I imagine displaying my chest hair instead of the two inches of the old crew neck collar wouldn't exactly be an even tradeoff for them, nor would it be a style upgrade for me.

So, anyway. This is just the latest example of me realizing I'm not going to live forever. The clock on my computer says it's 11:31 a.m. I'm already an hour late for lunch. Suppertime will be here at 4 and then it's a warm glass of milk and off to bed right after the 7 o'clock news.

Bad Carma
In case you missed it in BusinessWeek, Carma Needlecraft by my house is going out of business. I've lived within a mile of this little store for nearly a decade and my family and I frequently walk past it on our way to Sonic or Brusters. If I had nickel for every time I've said to my wife, "You know, this little store would be so handy if only we'd gotten into knitting instead of decoupage", well, I guess I'd have enough to buy a small spool of deeply discounted orange thread. I've never actually been in this store but for whatever reason I find it hilarious that the owners could carve out a living based on the profit margin of selling needles and thread. Maybe they sell lottery tickets too. And heroin.

Only in America would someone pour their heart and soul and life savings into selling needlecraft and needlecraft supplies in a tiny strip center far from the beaten path. Those crazy kids. So headstrong, so naive. If they'd only known that one day the big superstores like Needles N' More would move in next door or that Thread, Thread, Thread would set up shop one block over. If they'd known, maybe they'd have given this whole crazy scheme a little more thought.

Anyhoo, I wish the owners well in their next endeavor. I think I read something at Forbes.com about them having just signed a long term lease for a space above a blood bank downtown where they'll be selling really high-end car tape decks. We're talking top of the line brands -- Alpine, Pioneer, JVC. I think we all know cassette decks are making a serious comeback because, let's face it, cassettes have never been matched for portability or sound quality. One day people are going to wake up and they're going to throw out their satellite receivers and their mp3 players and when they do, the new owners of TapeDecks Plus (formerly of Carma Needlecraft) will be right there waiting. Above the blood bank. Downtown. Across the street from the shoestore and the gay bar. By then, it'll be called the Tape Deck district.