Gulp.

Right now, I'm sitting in the Stansted Airport in extreme northern London, waiting for a plane to take me to Amsterdam. I'm trying to keep myself focused. I'm trying to think only about all special fun that can be had in the Netherlands. But try as I might, the practical part of my brain keeps interrupting all my pre-flight fantasies to remind me that, oh my God, there is no way I can afford to do this.

When I booked the flight three weeks ago, I thought I could swing it, and I had every good reason to. After all, my dad had hooked me up with a sweet job at WorldFly, where I would be making 10-14 pounds/hour writing internal memos and fetching staplers and preparing bag lunches for important people. At 16 hours a week, that amounts to some serious scratch. More than enough, I thought, to travel to Amsterdam for a weekend.

I only had to have a successful interview with WorldFly's Vice-President, Steve, to clinch the position and claim my ticket to Fat City. I had the interview two weeks ago, though, and last week I found out that WorldFly "no longer has a position for me." 

This news upset me, and it made my dad furious, and my dad made a very angry phone-call to Steve to find out what happened. Steve told my dad that the whole problem had something to do with my appearance. I found that pretty odd, and maybe illegal. "Is Steve saying I can't work there because I'm ugly?" I asked Dad.

"No, Steve's saying you can't work there because your clothes are bad."

That makes a little more sense.

And now I'm paying the price for counting my chickens. I'm in the Stansted airport, en route to Amsterdam for a trip that will cost me the very last of my funds. 

On the bright side, this presents a lot of exciting questions for me. "How will I eat on Monday?" Who knows! "Can I find another job?" Who's to say! 

Stuff is only a little uncertain, because I'm sure my parents will float me by until I find some way to sustain myself. But still. Every time I open my wallet and a little moth flutters out (like in the cartoons), I get a big, greasy ball of anxiety in my throat. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you love me, mail me money.

A Pretty Dumb Game

I'm going to tell you two stories that I made up, and one that actually happened to me. It's up to you to tell the truth from the fiction.

Can you spot the fibs?

ONE

Last night at like 2 AM my British next door neighbor banged on my door and told me to "cut it out with the orgasm noises!" She said that I was oo-ing and "oh God"-ing loud enough to hear through the walls and I guess she assumed I was masturbating, and she came by to tell me that I needed to stop it, "cuz that's gross, yeah?" 

But I wasn't making orgasm noises. I was shopping for shoes and shoe-related things on the internet, and the internet was giving me a hard time. For whatever reason, bigshoes.com (Their slogan? "Because Big Feet Need Big Shoes! Dot Com!") just wouldn't let me buy socks. The little "add to cart" button didn't click, even after I restarted my computer and tried using Firefox and all the other little bullshit tricks that help me to pretend I know things about computers.

Nothing worked. So of course I started groaning, and saying stuff like "Oh God, oh God why can't I buy socks?"

And that's when the British neighbor-girl came, and also when I stopped shopping. 

TWO

A while ago, I was riding the bus to class in the morning, and this girl got on who was obviously, and bafflingly, drunk. I say 'bafflingly' because it was nine in the morning on a Wednesday, and she couldn't have been more than fifteen. She also couldn't have been more obnoxious. As she got on she tried to walk with a sexy model's strut, but because she was so plastered she kept wobbling and toppling into people in their seats, and once when she fell onto some guy, she pushed herself off him and yelled "Don't fuckin' touch me, prick!"  

The guy, aghast, looked around after she had passed and everybody who met his eye gave him a sympathetic nod and a shrug. "Nothing we can do," I bet everyone was thinking. "Let's just give in to her demands, and ride this out quietly."

But she didn't want quiet. Oh no. She wanted yelling. Once she found a seat in the back, she yelled "ROSIE!" as loud as she could. I don't know why. Nobody answered her or anything. She did it again, "ROSIE!", and then I did a stupid thing--I turned to look at her.

She glowered at me. "What the fuck you lookin' at, prick?" 

As everyone knows, there's no correct verbal response to that question, so I just tossed up my hands, in a way that I like to think makes me look whiny and indignant, but probably actually said to this girl "You wanna fight or somethin'?"

She took me up on my nonverbal challenge. She marched over to where I was sitting and she grabbed the shoulder of my coat. "Hey asshole," she said as she shook me by my shoulder, "Don't start shit with me, alright?"

Now, I didn't want to fight her. Not because I think it's immoral to fight fifteen year-old girls or anything, but because I was really, really afraid she was going to beat me up. I said to her "Sorry," and she said "Goddamn right," and she slapped the 'stop' button on the bus. The bus stopped, and she drunk-strutted off it, hopefully drunk-strutting out of my life forever. 

THREE

I had this horrible dream last night about me being the pilot of the Hindenburg, and my co-pilot was a baboon, who was holding a human skull in his hands and using the skull's jaw to snap at my face. 

I know it's a metaphor for something. Probably about how my future is a 'zeppelin' piloted by 'ferocious, old-world monkeys', and it's going to 'explode' soon.

THE END 

How about it, readers? Do you know which one is true?

Well, you're wrong. They're all lies. Have a great day. 

'Tis the Season

At this point, I should just accept that I attract humiliation. There's just something about me, and it's so reliable that it could be expressed like a syllogism: If am in public, then I am embarrassed.

This simple truth proved itself again this Christmas Eve. That night my dad brought my brother and I to his girlfriend's parents' house for  dinner. Things went well, at first. I talked about babies, to the delight of all. I ate more than fifteen cheese-cubes and no one noticed. I was dishing out shallow compliments like they were shrimp cocktail. But then my dad's girlfriend's dad's car pulled into the driveway, and my dad's girlfriend's sister's friend said: "Oh, Matt, you'll have to go get Linda."

Linda is my dad's girlfriend's sister. She uses a wheelchair, and she is not small. To 'get' her entails pulling her up the stairs into the dining room, and the duty fell to me because I was the biggest male available.

So I did the best I could. I smiled and I wished her a Merry Christmas. Then I stepped behind her and grimaced as I gripped the handles on the back of her chair. I noticed that, at that point, my dad, my brother, and everybody in my dad's girlfriend's family had all come to watch.

I wheeled her to the first stair, I lined the wheels up to the step, and I pulled. I strained and tugged and jerked, huffing as I felt the strain taking its toll on my back. The wheels rolled slow over the stairs, but after a few minutes Linda and I were near the top. "Just two more!" I said to her.

Then my noodly arms failed me. My left gave out, letting Linda's left wheel fall, and my right couldn't bear the load on its own so it failed to, and Linda tumbled unevenly down the whole flight of steps, accidentally snapping part of the railing off in the process.

Thank God she landed upright. A more able-bodied uncle took up the job after me. He had no problems.

 I was pretty quiet during dinner.

X-Giving

I had a great Thanksgiving. It started with dinner, and it ended right after dinner, when I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for 13 hours.

See, just before the holiday, I pulled four consecutive all-nighters while working on this big paper about Moby Dick. I didn’t sleep at night, I slept maybe three hours during each day, and on the car-ride down to Nebraska, I didn’t sleep at all.

And so it was an uphill fight to muster up enough energy to eat. But I did it, guys. I beat the fatigue and shoveled spoonfuls of turkey and potatoes and peas into my mouth, and even managed to not collapse on the table.

But immediately afterward, I learned the true meaning of ‘alienation.’ I was talking with my grandma in the living room, and she was reminiscing about old times and telling me how nice it was to have me back in the house, and I just fell asleep in the middle of one of her sentences.

I woke up on the couch, alone, watching the Dallas Cow-Girl cheerleaders celebrate the erotic side of Thanksgiving on ABC. My grandma was in the kitchen, doing dishes.

Of course I tried to engage her again. “You were saying something about the fifties, gramma?”

Without looking at me, she grumbled “Why don’t you just go to bed, sweetheart," and left me to my television. I tell you, no guilt hurts like grandma guilt, and under its weight I couldn't bring myself to enjoy the Texas-midriff-extravaganza on TV. I slumped off to my bedroom instead, knowing that I'd have to work to earn back the love I just lost.

But I slept for thirteen hours after that! Boy am I refreshed!

The Deed

You know what's on my mind? Doin' it. Do you know why? Because behind a door less than three feet away from me, some athletic people are screwing like crazy on their rickety-ass dorm bunk-bed. It sounds like a really fast ping-pong game, or like a pop-corn machine that moans every few seconds. It's gross, it's arousing, I'm sick of it, and I'm mad-jealous.

When am I gonna get some, huh? I think I missed the season or something. Oh well. 

Sudoku

Yesterday, I looked at the notebook that my professor writes on during class. I had never seen it before, but I assumed that he had been using it to observe us, to mark down our comments so that he could evaluate them later. 

Not so. When I looked at the notebook, I saw that, for all of class that day, my professor had been making and solving his own Sudokus. 

I wish I could get mad at that, but I bet I waste his time way more than he wastes mine. I show up, my mind a voided vessel, ready to absorb anything except what my puzzle-master prof wants to teach. Instead I notice dumb things about my classmates.

Like how that fat girl, whenever she talks, waggles her eyebrows like Groucho Marx; like how that African guy has the tiniest ears I've ever seen; or how the guy next to me writes on a notebook with a brand-name called, no shit, "x-treme notebook".

These are the details my life is made out of, and boy are they stupid. 

First post!

I'll get us started with some biographical details:

- I'm gradually shrinking.

That's all for now!