the Change I Wish to See

My iCal tells me today is TMI Thursday.  Ok, well no, I haven't actually scheduled it.  But I did do that thing where you know something at a previous point and then know it again later on -- what's that word?  Right, right: "remember."  I remembered today is TMI Thursday.

Anyway, there are some new people with ready access to this blog because I use it in the signature for my official email address.*

And so, for the record, I have suffered some memory loss today.**

I have never done anything disgusting, I have never participated in anything gross and I wouldn't even understand what it meant to disappoint my parents.  I am also a great addition to the workplace and a stand-up citizen.

Accordingly, the following are 5 TMI-caliber scenarios that have never played out in my real life.  Well, one did.  But I'm going to hide it amongst the other 4 so you can't tell the difference.***


1.  At the ripe, budding age of 26, having spent 7 of the last 8 years in school, almost a third of my life has been dominated by roommate-living situations.  However, I have never had a roommate become so intoxicated that he barged into my room, late at night to give me the gift of being able to relate to the following song:
 

  
 
2.  I've never been adept at math.  Never.  I don't like having to do it anywhere.  Anywhere.  And, necessarily, that includes while on a solo road trip between DC and New Jersey, on the bottom part of the Turnpike where there are virtually no rest areas, at 2 o'clock in the morning.  So, again, math I've never done out of necessity while in a car:
 
  
  
3.  I am not a desperate man.  I am patient and kind; flatteringly so, I might add.  So, naturally, I have never gotten the "Spirit in the Dark" so badly, that I forgave a lady's overly-curious domesticated animal for thinking its presence in the room meant it was invited to participate.
 
  
4.  I have never acted out of character; certainly never in the back of a jam-packed school bus.  And so I have never done/received such heavy petting in so public of a setting that while I wouldn't have actually...
  
  
... I might have left a rather obvious "watermark," for the whole world to see, in a place that needs no identifying signature.
  
  
5.  I have never been, am not now, and by the grace of jebus will never be the kind of guy who spent the night in a female friend's bed -- an actual, honest-to-goodness, seemingly-impossible-to-believe, you-still-probably-aren't-buying-it-now, platonic, female friend's bed -- and to my surprise and hers woke up to find myself moving my hips towards her at a rate inappropriate for the platonic situation.  This is because my dreams are asexual and not vivid, and therefore the movement of my body during sleep is not vulgar.
 
  
Happy Thursday.

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*I know what I'm about to do, and I'm not proud of it.
**Spineless?  Probably.
***If you think you figured it out, click on the "Contact" tab above, or just hit me at franco.beans[at]gmail[dot]com, and we can talk about it over a drink or two.

Some preliminary matters...

Just got added to Alltop and the confirming email I got told me I would lose my life be vasectomized break an honor code if I didn't caress its tit to get my tat tell you about it to increase Alltop traffic.

Anyway, I don't know if it's something I should be excited about, but I am kind of excited about it.  Like, flatly excited about it.  Like, Michael Flatley excited about it:*

Ok.  Enough of that.  On to the real deal...
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Ladies and gents, it is TMI Thursday.  And, much to my chagrin, that means the SnugWOW was ahead of its time.  Thankfully**, the well is far from dry.  Here goes...
 
 
I started life as a virgin.  It's a shame really.  You spend so much of life trying to be anything but that, that it's really, really frustrating to realize there was a whole section of life where it was completely beyond your control -- namely the fetal stage.

And so having started life as a virgin, I fell into a rut.  I thought it was what I was meant to be.  And so I developed character traits and habits to support this theory: going to church, well, uh, religiously; pristine prudishness; not dating; not understanding why the female figure is so freaking amazing***; a bunch of other really outdated ideology.****

So my proverbial first kiss caught me by surprise.  She asked me out -- something I had only ever seen on that episode of Saved By the Bell with the Sadie Hawkins dance.

We went to see Enemy of the State.*****  Correction: my dad drove us.  Correction: and my 9 year-old brother insisted on coming along and my mom told me I had to let him.

It was a creepy setting actually, when we got to the theater: Bergenfield, NJ's Clearview Cinema 5.
 
                                                              (photo credit: johnkay1)
  
It was dark.  And a little damp, actually.  It was winter outside and there was that humid feeling because the heat was on low, but because the floor was really wet from people tracking snow in, moisture was in the air.  And there was this old guy in the rear corner of our otherwise empty theater.  Just sitting there.  Hands invisible.

So let me refresh the scene.  The young lady and I are watching Will Smith and Gene Hackman flee the hideout after Smith screwed up and gave away their location.  My 9 year old brother is sitting directly in front of us.  And there's a solitary, senior citizen in the back corner, not showing his hands.  And the air is sticky moist.

Then she jumped me.  She literally jumped out of her seat and onto me.  Now, since I look like this...
 
 
... I understood, and may have forgiven her.  But I don't like the inside of my esophagus being licked.  Call me a romantic-traditionalist.  And I don't like being forcibly straddled while my 9 year-old brother is within an arm's length.  And I don't like knowing the eyes of a guy I'd later recognize to be Herbert from Family Guy...

  
... are watching our every loins-fueled move, while he whistle-whispers sweet nothings through his gums.

Of course I didn't stop it, though.  That would've been tasteful.  I just struggled to breathe and tried to, uh, use my hands to do some, uh, stuff.  The whole hands-on approach failed miserably, of course, because it was December and she had left her huge winter coat on over her scarf and sweater.  And if you've ever tried maneuvering two bodies in down coats, silently, in a small town movie seat, you know how little space you have to work with and, ergo, how Mission: Impossible your feat is.  You don't even want to touch most of what surrounds you, let alone rub it all over you.

Anyway, at some point we stopped; awkwardly, because there was like over an hour of movie left.  And when the movie was over, as we walked out, remember that old guy?  Yeah.  He was giggling.  Giggle. Ing.
 
 
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*Please, please, please watch the whole thing.
**For whom?
***At this moment, I'd like to personally thank Salma Hayek for making a big, big difference in my life.
****Outdated for me.  I somehow actually understand if you're still at that place.  I credit this to the adage: "you can take me out of the church but you can't Eternal-Sunshine-of-the-Spotless-Mind me enough to make me forget I was there."
*****Yes, I know.  That dates me.  I'm only 26.  Secret's out.

Welcomes, welcomes.  It is Thursday.  And thanks to LiLu, who has singlehandedly altered the modern calendar, it is TMI Thursdays.  Last week, I lassoed the hitch on that bandwagon and pulled myself onboard with a puddled tale from my adolescent past.  Today, you get another story that shares a couple of those key elements: a normally clothed tool and how it played a critical role in my childhood.*



Our story starts at the YMCA.  Yes that YMCA -

Though I was just a young boy, in need of a place to go.  And since I was barely pre-pubescent, short on dough, there was really only one place to stay and be sure I'd find many ways to have a good time.

But I reminisce...


Mikey was my best friend back then.  He had a doberman pincher that scared the curdled goo out of me and that always seemed to be bleeding from the ass.  Mikey also had a mom.  I don't really remember anything about her, so for the rest of this story (and your life) just imagine her role in this as



One spring-like, Pennsylvania summer day, my then still-married parents dropped me off at Mikey's in an effort that then seemed like a favor to me, but am now sure was so that for one day their lives could go on as originally planned.  Mikey struggled convincing his mom that she should take us swimming.  He won her over when she caught Mikey attempting to induce his dog's bleedy bunghole to do our bidding and leave us a trail we could then play around: the hop-a-spot-from-Spot-or-go-lie-down-on-the-cot game.***  I was an agile youth, and was prepared to relegate Mikey to that cot in his basement, but c'mon: swimming.

Mikey's mom dropped us off and left.****  I had never been to a YMCA before.  I guess I've also never been back.  In that sense, the YMCA is a lot like Ruby Tuesday's for me: once, mortified and done.  Anyway, you were just supposed to leave your non-swimming clothes in a locker.  And since they offered no locks, and Mikey apparently never brought one, it was an honor system - which is odd, because if you ever went to a YMCA in the 80s, the character of the frequents was less that of King Arthur's roundtable than that of a disbanded gaggle of roaming thieves.

So yet another kudos to Gertrude Stein: a place that looks like a place where robbery is achieved is what it is.  While we were in the pool with middle-aged men with enough matted, wet hair to shame a monsooned Chewbacca and bellies that overwhelmed their wastes and bikinis, someone stole my vitals.

My.  Vitals.

This is important.  Not my pants.  Not my shoes.  Not my shirt.  My underwear and my belt.  A pair of Superman underoos and a nylon belt.

I tried to roll with the underoos-stealing-punches.  I put on everything left to my name and we headed out to meet Mikey's mom.  It was a dangerous game.  The only way to keep my pants up was with a hand in each pocket.  And so what happens next is my parents' fault for raising a flawless gentleman.

Mikey's mom had to stop at the store on the way home.  At some point, we got out of the car and dutifully followed her towards a storefront of some strip mall.  Without hesitation, I pulled my hands from their lawfully-mandated position and opened the door for her.  The image?


Yeah, sorta like that.

And it happened in front of a crowded parking lot and within feet of a toddler.  There was a little girl sitting in a shopping cart outside the A&P next door.  She pointed.  Her pointing was loud.  Because she screamed.

"Mommy!  Look!" she yelped, at the top of her developed-enough-to-catch-the-attention-of-dozens lungs.  She followed up her scream with a "Pee pee!" - displaying her unfortunately impressive object association skills.

Her mommy looked.  Mikey's mommy looked.  People looked through storefront windows.  People looked from their cars.  And as if it was a puddle of my own urine, I just waited, again, for way too many seconds.  And surprisingly, no one rushed to my aid.  I was standing pantsless on a strip mall sidewalk on a Saturday afternoon in daylight in a major metropolitan city.

And yes: I wasn't yet 10.  But all that means is that I was too young to be cited for indecent exposure.  I like to think I aged a lot that day.  I have a mature appreciation for this thing called "body."  How many times have your goods been on display in broad daylight for more than 30 people?  That shamery you haven't felt?  Yeah, that's called experience.  And I've got plenty.





*Yes, the childhood.  I'm new at this, and telling humiliating stories from yesteryear is a lot like making fun of a person none of us ever met (not even me).  Keep coming back and I promise the revelations will be modernized.**


**And I have to say thanks to a certain lacochran's bloggery.  I've used the asterisk approach a few times now, after being inspired by its usefulness on her blog.  Someone should give her a "Leader in Industry" award.


***I have great fact-checking abilities.  Be careful before you insist you never made child's play out of a mongrel's leaky hide.


****Now that I think about it: wtf?

Gratefully coaxed by LivitLuvit and inspired by the Top 7 Embarrassing Relics from Arjewtino's childhood, I've decided to hop on that TMI bandwagon with a horribly-kept childhood secret.

"What childhood?" you say.  "You show no propensity for having been anything other than a pod," you say.  Well.  Feast thine eyes on this:

But right, the story -

It was a day.  Kind of like a day that deserves a modifying adjective, but I don't even remember what season it was so that will have to do.

It was science class, 6th grade.  6th grade was the year when Mrs. Carlsberg inexplicably revealed that her secret sandwich stash was behind the map in an unknown cabinet in the back of the classroom, and then proceeded to eat said sandwich in front of us at her desk.  It was also the year you traveled to every single class with the same 30 eleven-year olds.  Roy W. Brown Middle School treated student scheduling a little like 1950s Mississippi treated races - intermingling only during athletics.  This is important.  It meant when Gretel intercepted the note Jack passed to Jill in homeroom, the whole peanut gallery gabbed about it for the next 6 hours, in front of them both.*

A child of somewhat recent divorce, a year younger than all of my classmates, black in northern Jersey - let's just say I had a few reasons to be insecure and had no greater hope in life than to not rock the boat and draw attention to myself.  For instance, I never left class without being asked; never.  I took that to the extreme, on this, that day for which I wish had a modifying adjective.

It was several minutes into class when it hit me.  There'd been no warning when my bladder went from

Any other kid would've grabbed the lavatory pass.  A few would've just hopped up and left sans-permission - those that understood there to be a silent agreement between themselves and Mr. Lichter that an emergency was indeed its namesake.

Not me.  Thought about the pass.  Vetoed it out of a sense of allegiance to a comprehensive attendance policy that included staying in my damn seat.  Thought about just running out.  Vetoed it out of a sense of obedience to the order of things.  Though about -

Actually I don't remember any other ideas.  I was interrupted by the flood in my pants.  I peed myself.  Heavily.  On what I'm pretty sure were khaki colored shorts.  Humiliated as much by the defeat of my willpower as the growing stain on my crotch, butt, thighs and chair, I stood up to -

Nope.  I sat in it.  Waded in it a bit.  For a whole lot of seconds, like more than a minute.  Someone watching might have thought I was attempting to soak it back in via osmosis.  I sat in my puddled chair and just blinked.  Soon I began to smell it.  And everyone knows that when it involves something that came out of you, once you can smell it someone else probably already has.  So I gave in, almost.  I raised my hand and politely insisted that there was a leak in the ceiling or something.  Mr. Lichter (bless his heart) walked over, checked out the ceiling, looked at my pants.  Everyone else did the same from their seats.  I know he didn't believe me, but he put on the best poker face you can possibly play when you look down and realize that your hand is really just a bunch of Uno cards and you're playing holdem.  But I don't think anyone else in class actually doubted what happened.  Especially that kid** in the back who shouted "He peed himself!" as I dripped, soaking, out of class.

I wet my pants at 10 in science class and waded in the puddle far longer than healthy.  There you go.



*If you don't realize the actual names have been changed...
**Hate that kid.