A few weeks ago my eight-year-old daughter, Abbie, somehow arrived at the idea that her guinea pig, TJ, should have babies. You know, to pass on the TJ family name. To grow her posterity. To leave a legacy during her lifetime.
I don’t have any proof, but my impression is that TJ is probably more interested in having babies because she is going to need someone to take care of her when she’s old. Last I checked, she had paid virtually nothing into her 401K and IRA accounts. Also most of her life has been spent working part-time gigs and getting paid under the table, so she won’t qualify for Social Security either. Essentially, her children would be her retirement fund, and if she doesn’t get busy, she’s going to end up childless and in a Guinea Pig Hospice, delirious and telling stories about how she could run on her exercise wheel for days without taking a break. She would bore the other guinea pigs to tears, I am most certain of that.
Being sensitive to TJ’s situation, and being reassured by Abbie that we were not going to keep all the guinea pig babies, I agreed to pimp TJ out to the most qualified male guinea pig in the tri-state area. Abbie had recently been to the birthday party of a friend who received, as one of her presents, a male guinea pig. Coincidence? I think not.
So, in one of my most awkward phone conversations on record, we invited this family over last Saturday night, and requested they bring Chuck, their guinea pig, to enjoy a romp on our stud farm. It was all under the guise of our families enjoying some dessert together as friends, but essentially, it was so our guinea pigs could get it on (to coin a phrase). And I don’t care where you’re from, that’s weird.
On top of that weirdness was a generous helping of novel emotions on my part. I was suddenly suspicious of Chuck. What kind of guinea pig was he? What sort of upbringing? What kind of education has he had? How is he going to provide for this new family of his? If he’s like the other guinea pigs I’ve met, I’ll tell you how he’s going to provide for them – he’s not! And then I’ll have all these little fatherless guinea pigs running around! I’ll have bastard guinea pigs, that’s what I’ll have! The humanity!
But I didn’t have the heart to intervene. Who was I to step between two rodents in love? Plus you should have seen TJ getting ready for her date. Checking herself in the mirror every five minutes, on the phone with her girlfriends all day, writing in her diary about how this was the night she was going to give herself to a complete stranger named Chuck.
So Chuck shows up fashionably late, and man, you should have seen the look on his face. TJ is three times the size of Chuck, outweighing him by at least 2 lbs. It was a Jack Sprat situation if I’d ever seen one. And then Chuck had the audacity to look at me as if I were to blame. As if to say, “Hey, man, this isn’t the order I placed in my Mail Order Bride catalogue. I ordered Angelina Jolie, not Queen Latifah. You’ve got exactly five minutes to fix this situation.”
Assuming that guinea pigs are different from humans (but similar to teenagers) we just stuck two random guinea pigs in our backyard and fully expected them to mate. As if the difficult part in this scenario was over. “Well, thank goodness we found a female and male guinea pig. Now we just sit back and wait for babies.” It was pretty unfair for us to not even consider the social pressure we were putting on these two.
Katie had put together a delectable salad for TJ and Chuck to enjoy while they got to know each other. You know, to help with the small talk. Plus they say radishes are an aphrodisiac for guinea pigs. (At least that’s what I overheard Chuck explaining to TJ.) So the two of them sat in a grassy spot in the backyard, enjoying their salad and chitchat, all the while trying to ignore the entourage of children watching their every move. Sensing that neither TJ nor Chuck were comfortable with their role as exhibitionists, we had the kids come inside the house and we all enjoyed dessert.
About 30 minutes later our friends ventured to the backyard to retrieve Chuck, and they found him snuggled up next to TJ. Did it take? Did they even try? Had anyone bothered to explain to them how it works? Were they feeling shy? Were they just too full from the salad?
The gestational period for a guinea pig is 70 days…but I can’t wait that long to find out, so I’ll probably sneak into TJ’s room when she’s asleep and take a peek at her diary to see if we can expect a whole bunch of little TJs come early September!
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
18 Again
Once upon a time I was a College Freshman. There is never a time in ones life equal to the sensation of being a college freshman. You have essentially stepped onto the launching pad of adulthood, but nobody is expecting you to act like an adult. Which is good, since you have no intention of behaving like one.
It is your first real taste of independence. Nobody is going to force you to go to class, nobody is going to tell you that a Snickers doesn’t count as dinner and that you can’t go to Denny’s at 1:00 a.m. and order the culinary genius known as Moons Over My Hammy. And nobody is going to tell you that throwing an oven and washing machine off the roof of your dorm is a foolish notion. Though you might figure that out on your own only moments afterwards.
One of the best things about college, and your freshman year, specifically, is that you find yourself surrounded by a sea of people. With very little effort, you meet literally hundreds of people. Your dorm, your classes, the people you go to church with, your friends from back home who went to the same college, their friends and people from their classes and dorms, your roommate’s friends, people you see at the same time every day on campus until you finally talk and find out you know some of the same people, and finally, the folks at Denny’s who recognize you when you walk in and have your Moons Over My Hammy all ready for you by the time you sit down in your booth and pull out your sketch plans for how to get the oven and washing machine from the basement of your dorm to the roof.
Three of my favorite people from my freshman year were Greg, Jim, and Justin. We all lived on the seventh (top) floor of our dorm and became fast friends when we realized we all had similar tastes in movies and music, as well as a proclivity for making fun of the same people on our floor. We were thick as thieves that year (note: no actual thievery took place), and kept in regular contact for a few years afterwards. Eventually we all took different paths of study, married different women, moved to different states, and fell out of touch.
A couple of years ago, thanks to this newfangled technological advancement known to you kids as the “Internet,” combined with the mid-week doldrums of the corporate world that drive the working man to waste time on the Internet rather than do any actual work, the four of us tracked each other down. Classic inside jokes were exchanged, annual Christmas cards followed, and the occasional “congratulations on your new baby/job/house” emails were sent. And then…a couple of weekends ago… it happened. A reunion.
With Jim living in California, Justin and Greg both in Utah, and myself right in the middle, the four of us decided to gather in Las Vegas. We arranged for a room at the Luxor hotel, and it served as our home base from Friday night through Sunday morning. After referring to our brochure of Nevada State Mandated Activities for Tourists, we spent the weekend eating at buffets and other Las Vegas eateries, riding on roller coasters, walking the Strip, irritably discussing the heat, and shopping but not buying anything.
But truth be told, most of our time was spent sitting around and harkening back to a different era, trying to recall as many tales of bawdiness and ribaldry as we could. And oh!, the scandalamity that was exposed! Our own little soap opera, our first year of college was. And how delicious to dredge up the details and dynamics of each antic.
Now, here’s the thing with getting together with people you were good friends with 17 years ago (when you were younger and consistently made ridiculous and oftentimes selfish decisions) and then haven’t seen much since then: There’s a question as to how much you have changed. Here are three telltale points to help you, the third-party observer, decide:
1. The Playing of “Safety.” Safety was a game played by many of us. No board, no dice, no cards. Just a fist and a strong stomach. The rules to Safety were as follows: If you were ever to “pass gas,” you were to loudly declare “Safety!” before somebody hit you. If you said “Safety” before somebody hit you, you were indeed “safe,” as it were. Meaning that nobody was allowed to hit you at that point. If your let one rip, and then somebody hit you before you said “Safety” then it was fair game – everybody playing the game could hit you over and over until you a) died, or b) touched a doorknob. Once you touched a doorknob people had to stop hitting you. (If you died, people were allowed to continue beating you, because technically you did not reach a doorknob. I didn’t make up the rules to Safety, folks, I just played as fairly as the next guy.) It was certainly a test of manliness when we were younger. But it’s been 17 years and we’ve all grown up a bit; plus we are totally out of practice, as none of us had ever successfully convinced our wives our families should play this game.
2. Quotable Movies. The five most quoted movies our freshman year in college were as follows: Three Amigos, Uncle Buck, Weird Science, Planes Trains & Automobiles, and Weekend at Bernie’s. These were also the same five movies most quoted on this particular weekend. And I have three of these movies in my own personal movie library this very moment. (Even more alarming, two of these movies feature non-Academy Award Winner, Mr. John Candy, one of them features a plot surrounding a dead man that nobody realizes is dead, and one of them is Weekend at Bernie’s.)
3. Music. Never mind what we listened to circa 1989/1990, when the four of were at lunch on Saturday, catching a few minutes of a basketball game on television, and I started singing “Coach says to get my head in the game…” and Jim, Greg, and Justin all jumped in to sing along “Wait a minute, get my head in the game!”…we knew that the mighty had fallen. While I’m glad my six year-old doesn’t know all the lyrics to the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill…I don’t know how I feel about me knowing the words to Disney’s High School Musical.
So at some point throughout the past seventeen years we had each determined on our own that public farting should not be encouraged by being turned into a game, that slapstick comedies are still funny, and that our musical libraries would have to make room for Disney soundtracks and the capricious musical talents of Raffi.
And if the Luxor is missing an oven and a washing machine, we don’t know anything about it. But they might want to check the pool…where they landed….after we threw them off the roof.
It is your first real taste of independence. Nobody is going to force you to go to class, nobody is going to tell you that a Snickers doesn’t count as dinner and that you can’t go to Denny’s at 1:00 a.m. and order the culinary genius known as Moons Over My Hammy. And nobody is going to tell you that throwing an oven and washing machine off the roof of your dorm is a foolish notion. Though you might figure that out on your own only moments afterwards.
One of the best things about college, and your freshman year, specifically, is that you find yourself surrounded by a sea of people. With very little effort, you meet literally hundreds of people. Your dorm, your classes, the people you go to church with, your friends from back home who went to the same college, their friends and people from their classes and dorms, your roommate’s friends, people you see at the same time every day on campus until you finally talk and find out you know some of the same people, and finally, the folks at Denny’s who recognize you when you walk in and have your Moons Over My Hammy all ready for you by the time you sit down in your booth and pull out your sketch plans for how to get the oven and washing machine from the basement of your dorm to the roof.
Three of my favorite people from my freshman year were Greg, Jim, and Justin. We all lived on the seventh (top) floor of our dorm and became fast friends when we realized we all had similar tastes in movies and music, as well as a proclivity for making fun of the same people on our floor. We were thick as thieves that year (note: no actual thievery took place), and kept in regular contact for a few years afterwards. Eventually we all took different paths of study, married different women, moved to different states, and fell out of touch.
A couple of years ago, thanks to this newfangled technological advancement known to you kids as the “Internet,” combined with the mid-week doldrums of the corporate world that drive the working man to waste time on the Internet rather than do any actual work, the four of us tracked each other down. Classic inside jokes were exchanged, annual Christmas cards followed, and the occasional “congratulations on your new baby/job/house” emails were sent. And then…a couple of weekends ago… it happened. A reunion.
With Jim living in California, Justin and Greg both in Utah, and myself right in the middle, the four of us decided to gather in Las Vegas. We arranged for a room at the Luxor hotel, and it served as our home base from Friday night through Sunday morning. After referring to our brochure of Nevada State Mandated Activities for Tourists, we spent the weekend eating at buffets and other Las Vegas eateries, riding on roller coasters, walking the Strip, irritably discussing the heat, and shopping but not buying anything.
But truth be told, most of our time was spent sitting around and harkening back to a different era, trying to recall as many tales of bawdiness and ribaldry as we could. And oh!, the scandalamity that was exposed! Our own little soap opera, our first year of college was. And how delicious to dredge up the details and dynamics of each antic.
Now, here’s the thing with getting together with people you were good friends with 17 years ago (when you were younger and consistently made ridiculous and oftentimes selfish decisions) and then haven’t seen much since then: There’s a question as to how much you have changed. Here are three telltale points to help you, the third-party observer, decide:
1. The Playing of “Safety.” Safety was a game played by many of us. No board, no dice, no cards. Just a fist and a strong stomach. The rules to Safety were as follows: If you were ever to “pass gas,” you were to loudly declare “Safety!” before somebody hit you. If you said “Safety” before somebody hit you, you were indeed “safe,” as it were. Meaning that nobody was allowed to hit you at that point. If your let one rip, and then somebody hit you before you said “Safety” then it was fair game – everybody playing the game could hit you over and over until you a) died, or b) touched a doorknob. Once you touched a doorknob people had to stop hitting you. (If you died, people were allowed to continue beating you, because technically you did not reach a doorknob. I didn’t make up the rules to Safety, folks, I just played as fairly as the next guy.) It was certainly a test of manliness when we were younger. But it’s been 17 years and we’ve all grown up a bit; plus we are totally out of practice, as none of us had ever successfully convinced our wives our families should play this game.
2. Quotable Movies. The five most quoted movies our freshman year in college were as follows: Three Amigos, Uncle Buck, Weird Science, Planes Trains & Automobiles, and Weekend at Bernie’s. These were also the same five movies most quoted on this particular weekend. And I have three of these movies in my own personal movie library this very moment. (Even more alarming, two of these movies feature non-Academy Award Winner, Mr. John Candy, one of them features a plot surrounding a dead man that nobody realizes is dead, and one of them is Weekend at Bernie’s.)
3. Music. Never mind what we listened to circa 1989/1990, when the four of were at lunch on Saturday, catching a few minutes of a basketball game on television, and I started singing “Coach says to get my head in the game…” and Jim, Greg, and Justin all jumped in to sing along “Wait a minute, get my head in the game!”…we knew that the mighty had fallen. While I’m glad my six year-old doesn’t know all the lyrics to the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill…I don’t know how I feel about me knowing the words to Disney’s High School Musical.
So at some point throughout the past seventeen years we had each determined on our own that public farting should not be encouraged by being turned into a game, that slapstick comedies are still funny, and that our musical libraries would have to make room for Disney soundtracks and the capricious musical talents of Raffi.
And if the Luxor is missing an oven and a washing machine, we don’t know anything about it. But they might want to check the pool…where they landed….after we threw them off the roof.
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