» School Projects

The most ill conceived school project ever
I majored in Anthropology in college, and for my senior project I had to do a paper or project on material culture in the modern world. I chose to do mine on Russian prison tattoos. I was not what you'd call a "motivated" student, (I finished 22nd from the bottom in my class) so it got to be a couple days before it was due and I hadn't even started.

There was no way I was going to be able to write a 20 page paper in a couple days, so I opted for the project instead. What arose in the next couple of days has become the stuff of legend at my school, and the professor still uses my video as an example in class. I decided to videotape myself getting an authentic russian prison tattoo on my ass. Words fail to describe the experience, so I'll let the video do the talking.


www.vspworld.com/vsp/?p=20

Oh yeah, I got an A.
(Fri 14th Aug 2009, 18:06, More)

» Banks

Not my story, but my parents.
I think my parents have one of the best "how we met" stories ever.

It was the late 70's and my father, who was in the Air Force, had just been transferred to Washington D.C. He was a bit of a ladies man back in the day, and he was always on the lookout for a pretty girl. He was making a deposit at the bank, and a young girl working as a teller there caught his eye. He went back there a few more times, always waiting a little extra so he could be at her window. They chatted and flirted a few times, and one day he decides he is going to ask her out.
Before he goes in, he writes a little note with a restaurant and time and his phone number, thinking he is so smooth doing it this way. He waits in line and slides the note under her window. She doesn't even bother to read it, assuming it is a holdup note, and presses the silent alarm. He is casually flirting with her while she is growing more terrified and confused wondering when he will ask her for the money.
The police show up soon and try to arrest my future father, the whole time he has no idea what is going on. (He's a wonderful guy, but a bit clueless.) Eventually he gets the cops to read his note, and the confusion is cleared up and they let him go. He got the date, and a few years later they were married with one of the coolest "how we met" stories ever.
(Fri 17th Jul 2009, 0:04, More)

» Teenage Parties

I could have been on Cops...
I hardly ever got to throw parties when I was a teenager, because I was kind of a juvenile delinquent and my parents didn't trust me one bit. (rightfully so.) So imagine my amazement when they announced that they were going to china for a week in July and leaving me alone. Everything was in place, my brother, who is a complete douchebag and would most definately have dropped the dime on me if he was there was at summer school, my sister who is very nice but prone to annoying fits of integrity was working in Colorado at a summer camp, so I had free reign. We kicked off the party with just my close friends and 6 flats of Milwaukee's Best. After some serious alcohol consumption we decided it would be a great idea to get some meat, then dig a huge pit in my backyard and roast it all over an open fire. We needed fuel for the fire so we raided a neighbor's house that was under construction and took all the wooden pallets that they had, which ended up making a stack about as tall as a person. Needless to say the meat was inedible because of all of the gasoline we used to start the fire, but the fire had an unexpected benefit of attracting just about every single young person in the area. Now my house was full of all kinds of strange people I had never met before, but I was far too drunk to care. Out of the blue at about 4 AM, my best friend comes up, furious that his bag of weed was missing. Now instead of chalking it up to loss, or blaming one of the dozens of random strangers running around, he becomes convinced that I was the one who stole it. I suppose heavy drinking combined with enough meth to keep an army awake will do that to you. I was just sober enough to keep calm and gently explain that I never touched his bag, and that I would be glad to help him find it, or even buy him a new bag if he needed it. This was not good enough. A few drunken swings at me later, and a couple that actually connected, the limits of our friendship were being seriously tested. i earned some points with the other people at the party by actually being able to restrain myself from hitting him back. When my other friends tried to calm him down, he swung at them too and then wrestled free, got in his car, and sped off, yelling obscenities over his shoulder, most of the mdirected at me to the tune of "I can't believe I wasted my life being friends with you you motherfucker." I was worried as hell, but far too drunk to drive after him, so I called his cell phone a few times. No answer, but a few minutes later he called me back with another stream of obscenities, and this time accusing me of making him drive drunk and that he had now blown a tire and it was all my fault. I asked him where he was, and was barely able to make it out with all the cursing he was doing, while vehemently denying that he needed my help, and besides, even if he did I would be the last person he would take it from. In spite of that, and the probably close to .30 BAC in my system, I got in my car to go help him out before he got himself arrested. Well, as much as I was trying to keep him from ending up in jail, he was apparently concentrating on doing whatever he could to get himself there. When he realized who it was pulling up behind him, he got out still cursing, but this time holding a tire iron. First he threatened to smash all of my windows in, then threatened to hit me in the face. I didn't back down, but instead yelled at him to fucking try it. At this point some woman leaned out of her window and shouted that if we didn't shut up she would call the police. In our only moment of solidarity of the entire night we both yelled "shut up you cunt" at exactly the same time. Well she made good on her promise, and a few minutes later the police showed up. Luckily by then the adrenaline had sobered me up enough that I was able to speak for both of us and explain that no there was no problem here and yes that tire iron was only being used to fix the flat and no I did not want to press any charges. They looked suspicious, but left us alone once I promised to drive my still crazed friend home after locking his keys in his car. He woke up the next morning with apparently no memory of what had happened the night before, but did manage to ask me, "I think I did something terrible last night, have you seen my car?" He still owes me big. I was now left with the monumental task of cleaning up, which I was in no mood to do, so i raked all the beer cans to a corner of my yard, filled in the still smoldering hole, and made my escape to Colorado to take shelter with my sister so that I was safely 2000 miles away when I got the inevitable "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO MY HOUSE?!?!" call from my parents. They never left me alone again.
(Tue 18th Apr 2006, 22:10, More)

» Work Experience

More temping laziness
Another job I had, actually with the same friend, was as cameramen for a "whole mind and body expo," which was really just one big snake oil convention. People claiming to take pictures of your aura and selling wheatgrass cure-all vegan protein shakes. Our job was to film the lectures, then give the DVDs to a guy at the booth that was selling them. I have never seen such bullshit in my life as these lectures. One guy was teaching people how to use these brass rings called the Rings of Odin, which he claimed would cure any illness by waving them over the affected area. He said he made the rings by shooting them with a beam from a machine which he invented in a dream. The saddest part was people were actually buying these things. Another lecture I had to film was "Transcending the Spirit Plane Through Love," In which an obviously Italian guy with a New Jersey accent dressed up in an indian costume (feather indian, not dot indian) and told everyone to close their eyes. He went around kissing everyone and then said: "open your eyes everyone, we just transcended the spirit plane through love." After the first few lectures I realized that not only was it incredibly boring but there was no way I was going to be able to keep myself from laughing, so I started just putting the camera on a tripod and leaving the room and coming back when the lecture was supposed to end. One time I did that I came back to an empty room. The camera was still recording and I have no idea how long it had been since everybody had left. Another time the speaker walked out of the frame and stayed there for the entire lecture. I'd feel sorry for the people who bought these DVDs, but it serves them right for going to a snake oil convention. I have to say, I did have a little fun while I was there. The best times were eating a Wendy's double bacon cheeseburger in the middle of a lecture on healthy vegan living. There was also a lecture by a "real life ghostbuster" who claimed to have a crack ghost fighting team consisting of 11 archangels that only he could see. It was my job to hand out nametags for that lecture, so I started giving people tags pre labeled with "Egon Spangler," "Gozer the Gozerian," "Rick Moranis," and things like that, and refusing to give people another blank tag. God I hated those poeple.

Length? 2 days, 10 hours a day
Girth? have you ever seen a 350 pound vegan? How do they get that way?
(Fri 11th May 2007, 16:32, More)

» PE Lessons

I loved PE
I don't know about you Brits, I've heard stories of your "public" school buggery and all that, but here in the states, the PE teachers leave the inappropriate sexual contact to the priests and generally just make you run round for an hour doing whatever sports haven't been banned by the state as being too violent or dangerous or too prone to hurt kid's feelings, except for my middle school PE teacher.

Mr. Patty was, at the time, terrifying, although looking back the things he did were pretty hilarious. He was about 7 feet tall and fresh off the boat from "Trinabago," which is what he called Trinidad and Tobago, because "dey mey be two islands, but dey are one country!" He looked just like Issac Hayes in Escape from New York.

Mr. Patty ran his PE class like a drill instructor. You even had to tuck your T-shirt into your athletic shorts Any infractions, no matter how minor were punished by "de pooshups," 20 at a time. If you complained, he would go on a tirade about how easy us kids have it: "You don know what it's like in Trinabago boy. Dey have you in de cane fields choppin a machete 12 hours a day. You tink de pooshups are hard? I send you to Trinabago and you see what's really hard."

His favorite thing to make us do was play a game he invented called Smittyball, which was a lot like kickball, except you played it indoors on a basketball court, and you used a basketball instead of a soft rubber playground ball. The only way to tag someone out in Smittyball was to hit them with the ball. Headshots were encouraged.

But the highlight of my PE experience didn't even come in PE class. It was at a school dance, when Mr. Patty had the misfortune of having to be a chaperone. To get himself through this harrowing experience, Mr. Patty showed up blind stinking drunk, probably off of some sort of high proof sugar cane moonshine that he cut down and distilled himself. He was pretty jovial at first, dancing with the kids and having a good time, but his good time soon turned sour. When a parent complained to him that they didn't think a chaperone should be intoxicated at a middle school dance, Mr. Patty wound up and socked the parent right in the jaw with a haymaker straight from the islands. The resulting brawl lasted the better part of 15 minutes until the police arrived and broke it up. Mr. Patty was suspended and had to issue a public apology. The parent went to the hospital. nobody complained about "de pooshups" after that.
(Sun 22nd Nov 2009, 16:03, More)