There was an enormous bowl of trashcan punch, and I told my friend, “Let me tell you a secret: I love fruit punch.” He said, “Well, that’s good because this has everclear in it.” I immediately recognized this as portentous news because a) I love fruit punch, b) I can’t stop drinking fruit punch, and c) My fragile baby girl physiology could only withstand maybe one cup of this fruit punch.
When I growl at people I dislike, no one says, “What a conceited jerk. Maybe he should work on his social skills.” No one says, “There’s nothing cool about being unfriendly or aloof.” They say, “He is a wild animal, a noble carnivore, an exalted arctic predator.”
Look into my eyes. Gaze into my soul. Take off my shirt. Don’t you know who I am? I’m extremely talented and important, you dumb idiot.
I go through phases where, in the foggy dreamlike state before sleep, I begin tapping out text messages over and over, detailed explanations for how I would like our imaginary relationship to proceed, messages that are painstakingly edited dozens of times before I finally delete them.
You see, this is how I’ve chosen to devote a small portion of my finite time on this planet — looking at images of ducks in airplanes, ducks yelling at yetis, and ducks eating top hats. Like dressing Kate Moss in clothes from the Gap or feeding Anthony Bourdain a plateful of McNuggets, so I treat my intellectually malnourished brain to an illustrated narrative concerning duck people.
In the sixth grade, I played the role of Oliver Twist in a musical medley extravaganza organized by the choir department and performed in front of the student body, their parents, teachers, and staff. This event, this blight upon my memory, this noxious black stain on the time-space continuum, was my own personal spiritual apocalypse.
I’ve seen Legends of the Hidden Temple a thousand times, and I know this is where everyone fails, this room, the self-esteem crusher, the ego death chamber, the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. But not me. I will not fail…
I can’t overstate the importance of people not having sex on the sofa bed next to my door. It’s simply unthinkable. It absolutely must not occur for my mental machinery to run properly during the daytime for I am a pure soul of delicate sensibilities, and I do not wish to be tainted by the lurid perversions of my morally deficient roommates.
In dealing romantically with women, there is, I am told, a complicated system of rules governing behavior. The more apparent one — do not head butt her, do not sit in a car parked outside her house all night, do not text her fifty times a day and then start screaming and then guzzle Drano — I understand. The subtler ones I tend to fail on.
He doesn’t understand that I’m like a squirrel or a small bird — fascinated by fast movements and images played in sequence, the same reason I’ll suddenly find myself enraptured by TVs playing football at bars during lulls in the conversation.