eight ways to make jon wallace miserable
1. Force him to spend a full day making cookies, hanging lights, decorating the tree, and doing Christmas crafts with two holiday spirit-crazed females, namely me and his mother.
2. Cause him to miss the best surf of the year by volunteering him for a full day of Christmas cheer activities...see #1.
3. Take so long getting ready that you no longer have time to grab dinner before the movie you've planned to go see, thus forcing him to eat movie theater popcorn which always gives him a stomach ache.
4. Wait an extra long time in between shifting gears in his beloved truck so that the engine revs loudly and then always slam on the brakes. A lot.
5. Make him "share" the comfy sofa chair with you so that you get to cuddle and he is squished into a space half his size for the duration of a movie.
6. Drink all of his water.
7. Repeatedly ask him what he's getting you for Christmas until he says, "Do you really want to know?" and then scream, "NO!" Of course I don't want to know, you moron! No matter how much I beg you, you are not supposed to even enterTAIN the idea of telling me! Duh." to which he will undoubtedly respond, "Then why do you keep asking?" which means he obviously doesn't understand the game and you must forge ahead in this circular argument for approximately ten more minutes. This one is particularly vicious and not recommended on an empty stomach.
8. See numbers 1 and 2.
Posted by Poka Bean at 4:01 PM
the three people you meet in the bathroom
Let's be honest. There are three kinds of women in this world: Sitters, Squatters, and Seat Cover Nazi's. Most women fall pretty clearly into one of these categories along the germaphobe spectrum when it comes to using public restrooms. (Surely there is a similar breakdown for men but as I am not privy to the goings on in the men's bathroom, urinal and male toilet stall etiquette are beyond my realm of expertise.)
Well, I feel compelled to confess that, for the most part, I am...(gasp)...a Sitter. A straight up, bare-flesh-to-public-toilet sitter. I know, I know...not the most popular option of the three but I assure you, I choose my toilets wisely. For example, at my office the bathrooms are extremely clean and as I work at a church, I feel pretty confident that I run a low risk of contracting a horrible disease from my fellow church staff by sitting directly on the office toilets a couple times a day. If I use the bathroom at a reputable place of business whose facilities appear up to code and my own cleanliness standards, I'm inclined to do the same. Maybe I'm naive, but I'm completely fine with this.
But I promise I'm not completely disgusting. Clearly if I have no choice but to use the restroom in a questionable facility, I take the necessary precautions. And clearly, the "necessary precautions" I am referring to are scooching down the germaphobe spectrum to the Squatter designation and not in the direction of my nemesis, the Seat Cover Nazi.
I don't know what you Seat Cover Nazi's think that thinner-than-air piece of porous tissue is actually protecting you from but let me be the first to shout it from the blogging rooftops...you morons are kidding yourselves. Not to mention completely wasting your time unfurling those "perforated" buggers and getting them to balance on the seat just right so that the center strip doesn't drown and pull the whole thing under with it in a Titanic-like disaster. You might as well be sitting on pantyhose so I say, SUCK IT UP, PRINCESS! and take a good, old fashioned skin-to-plastic seat on the throne. If you're so concerned about being hygienic, then you should eliminate contact all together. Save a tree, give your thighs a work out, and squat.
Now I'll admit that I've used a seat cover a time or two. I'm not proud of this but I've walked into a bathroom with someone I didn't know very well and heard them wrestling with one of those paper demons and didn't want them to think I was a disgusting person so I played along. But I will not fall prey to that trickery again. No, no. I will stand by my word...
Sit, squat, or go home.
Posted by Poka Bean at 3:26 PM
the notorious KPV
I finally got my license plates in the mail for my new car and have to say I'm quite pleased with the outcome. I was really worried I would get a bad number-letter combination that would not only bug
me for the rest of my life (read: the amount of time it will take for me to pay off the car), it would bug all of the poor, helpless motorists who will have to stare at it as they drive behind me as well.
California's standard issue plates come with three letters sandwiched in between four numbers. That three-letter combo stands out pretty well and I don't think I'm alone in thinking that there is definitely something inherently good about certain letter combinations and something unquestionably wrong about others. For example, something like UVF is clearly bad and SBZ is pretty cool. YUI is bad. AKJ is good. FHD, bad. RLA, good...and so on and so forth.
Then, of course, there are borderline combos like BRL or GHP in which the final good/bad verdict must be decided based upon the number combos that accompany them, but for the most part, I think the call can be made based on the letters alone. It's pretty cut and dry.
Well, the good news is that I got a marvelous letter combo: KPV. Really, it doesn't get much better than that. In light of my mom's recently issued DOM which seems awfully ominous to me (sorry, Mom), my roommate's NGS which I think might be some sort of racial slur, and my former VLB which might as well be code for some unknown female body part, I consider myself quite lucky.
And even though I didn't need good numbers to accompany a letter combo as good as KPV in order to really put my plates over the edge, I got some. Sorry I can't share them with you...even though
I am getting dumber, I'm not dumb enough to publish my entire license plate number on the internet lest some psycho use it for evil and start stalking me or something. Not likely since my weekly readership totals on this site presently average approximately 2.5 harmless friends who have nothing better to do than to read this junk and who immediately disregard the pointless crap I've written about anyway, but you never can be too careful.
So I just wanted to report this mini-victory to...uh...you. My faithful 2.5 harmless friends who will actually read this. And who will hopefully not read it carefully enough to fully realize just how weird I really am. Oh, who am I kidding? You 2.5 already know.
Posted by Poka Bean at 10:42 AM
i am getting dumber
Exhibit A
On a recent trip to Round Table Pizza to pick up dinner with my roommate Emily, I noticed a large poster on the wall advertising a veggie pizza named "Gueneviere's Garden Delight". I became extremely confused and paused for a moment of reflection...
Me: Oh my gosh, Emily. That's so weird! Why on earth would they name that veggie pizza
Gueneviere's Garden Delight? As though the name Gueneviere has anything at all to do with vegetables or pizza. What were they thinking? That is so stupid. There is nothing medieval about veggie pizza!
Emily: Abby...we're at
Round. Table. Pizza.
Me: Oh.
Exhibit B
While driving to my office Christmas party last week with my beloved co-worker Krissie (who, I should mention, is notably blonde and fair), we had the following conversation...
Krissie: Hey, you know that volunteer that's been sitting by me recently?
Me: (Nod in acknowledgment of middle-aged black woman who has been sharing her cubicle.)
Krissie: Today she told me I look like Bo Derek.
Me: What!?! Krissie, if anyone in this scenario looks like Bo Derek, it would be your volunteer.
Krissie: Huh?
Me: Wait...who is Bo Derek? Isn't he that black guy that played all the professional sports?
Krissie: No.
She's that famous blonde model/actress. I think you're thinking of Bo Jackson.
Me: Oh. Cool! Then maybe you really
do look like her!
Honestly, what has become of me?
Posted by Poka Bean at 8:51 AM
