Foot-in-Mouth Disease Strickens Socially Mobile Citizens

I’d like to take a moment to address the second portion of my blog’s title. In it, there is an omitted “How to”; a directive that is presumed to carry over and attach to “Make Friends.” But that presumption would be foolhardy to make, because I have no idea how to create or maintain social relationships. Such a thing is a mystery to me; it that functions well out of reach of the socially awkward sphere I inhabit.

Part of my problem is that I’m afflicted with foot-in-mouth syndrome—an incurable disease whose symptoms appear at the most inopportune moments: work functions, job interviews, family reunions, romantic dates. Whatever filter that exists between the brains and mouths of most human beings is curiously missing from my anatomy. I’m somewhat consoled by the fact that most people experience foot-in-mouth disease at one time or another, but I appear to have a rather severe form of the disorder. I seem unable on any given day to extract my foot from my mouth for more than a few minutes at a time.

I’m not sure what causes foot-in-mouth syndrome in other sufferers. For some it might be a neurological dysfunction—perhaps a brain lesion or a chemical imbalance or the existence of an entire extra lobe that generates inappropriate comments while deluding the rest of the brain into considering them acceptable. Others might blame childhood trauma (maybe Freud was mistaken about the meaning of the oral fixation). I do know that my own form of the disease is at least worsened, if not entirely caused, by an overwhelming fear of the awkward silence.

When the awkward silence attacks (which can occur at any time in any conversation), I feel the need to fill the empty space with whatever pops into my head, be it myth, lie, truth, or incomprehensible babble. I’ve badmouthed the Second Amendment in a roomful of card-carrying, gun-toting members of the NRA. I’ve complimented women on grandchildren that turned out to be their own birthed and bred offspring. I once informed a man with skin cancer that he had food on his cheek when the blotch I referred to was in fact a tumorous lesion.

And in case I thought I was overcoming my foot-in-mouth disease, I was sadly reminded of its severity last Friday. I was at a happy hour with a few of my work friends, celebrating a colleague's engagement. One of the girls with us that night, a receptionist named Jennifer, was leaving early the next morning on a flight to California. Having once lived in San Francisco, I suggested restaurants, beaches, and bars for her to frequent. I was upbeat and excited and apparently in stark contrast with the somber looks and muted tones my other coworkers used when discussing her trip. It’s possible I’d been told the reason Jennifer was leaving. But such information tends to get buried beneath my more important daily considerations, such as eating without spilling, walking without falling, and trying to remember where I’d last seen my cell phone, house keys, or laptop computer.

The fact that Jennifer was attending her father-in-law’s funeral and helping her senile mother-in-law administer his estate implanted my foot into my mouth at least to ankle-depth. Extracting it will probably take a good amount of forgiveness and the use of industrial-strength pliers, but this won’t of course prevent me from making similar statements in the future. Barring self-imposed social isolation, I’m considering having my mouth wired shut. My inappropriate comments might then be attributed by kind-hearted listeners to their own misunderstanding of my slurred and muffled words. And I would of course be in great shape come bikini season.

It's Time We Made Our Pets Work for a Living

My dog and I got into a fight last night. It’s a fight we’ve had many times and a fight I never seem to win: she insists on needing to go outside to the bathroom and I insist that it’s too cold/rainy/far away down a very long and laborious elevator ride to take her. I don’t find it very mature of her to keep proving her point by peeing on various items of my personal property.

My inherent laziness and unshakable belief in the intelligence of my dog led me to a natural solution—I decided I would teach my dog to use a litter box. Before you object that she’s a dog, that litter boxes are the domain of cats, rodents, and unsupervised toddlers, I offer television-based proof that dogs can be trained to do just about anything. I’ve seen them on Oprah and David Letterman: the collies that open doors, the Labradors that turn on lights, the retrievers that walk up stairs while balancing books on their heads and solving equations of plane geometry. I saw no reason why my dog, who bravely defends me by attacking statues and falling leaves, couldn’t learn to use a litter box.

After an exhaustive Internet search, I found that there were others out there, mostly those with no friends and a closet full of psychotropic meds, who shared my conviction. They’ve even published handy online instructions on how to litter train your dog, the first step of which is to get her to consistently pee on a particular object in a particular spot. Despite my dog’s fondness for saturating expensive shoes and dry-clean-only clothing, I decided to use a newspaper.

Shoving a newspaper under your dog while it’s in the process of peeing is apparently harder to do than I’d realized. Maybe the rustling sound of the paper startled her, maybe she has issues with anything other than her own nose and random stuffed animals being near that part of her body. Whatever the case, she immediately jumped away every time I slid the thing underneath her. Three more failed attempts (and a gathering crowd of onlookers who commented on how put-together I looked for a crazy person) convinced me to give it up.

I was not, however, ready to throw in the towel on the entire project. I decided to skip the next seven or so steps, buy a litter box the size of a mid-sized sedan, and see what happened. It was probably a mistake on my part to leave her alone with the thing for upwards of eight hours the first day I brought it home. It was probably also a mistake to buy a litter box made of anything other than reinforced steel. I arrived home to find litter in the kitchen, beneath the entertainment stand, between the cushions of the couch. And the litter box, which I’d placed in the front hallway by the door, was nowhere in sight. I finally found it shoved under my bed, where my dog had apparently stashed its mangled remains for later consumption.

I’ve had a hard time letting go of my fantasies of talk show fame, where I engage in witty banter with Regis and Kelly while my dog jumps through hoops of fire in the background. But I’ve realized the necessity of starting small, of not expecting too much from my canine companion. We are now working on sit, stay, and fetch, all of which would of course be easier if only she had the capacity of language and the possession of opposable thumbs. I see no point in teaching her to get me a beer if I have to open the refrigerator door myself.

Jack Bauer Beware

I’ve noticed that when other people talk about their crazy relatives, they usually reference somewhat removed relations like a distant cousin or an aunt or uncle. I’m wondering if I should be concerned that my extended family is quite boringly normal while my nuclear family is, well, nuclear. For the more intimate details, I won’t name names, but let’s just say we have a long history of neuroses, children of unknown paternity, and Russian mail-order brides to spice up our family gatherings. I would, however, like to go into a bit more detail about one of my father’s strange quirks because I find it so incredibly interesting.

For the past ten years, anyone who’s asked my father what he does for a living has been met with the response, “I’m retired.” If pressed about how he spends his days, my father’s answer becomes vague—an exercise in circumlocution. He’ll talk about the books he reads and the movies he sees, but unlike most retirees, my father has no hobbies, no odd jobs, and no contingent of grandchildren to occupy his time. He does live in a so-called retirement community in the alleged city The Villages of Florida that reportedly organizes get-togethers and events for the members of the supposed community. But I’m not convinced by any of these explanations. There’s only one conclusion I can draw from the evidence at hand, which is that my father is a CIA agent.

Before you accuse me of watching too many episodes of Alias and 24, allow me to produce that evidence:

Point 1. My father has had no job for the past ten years and therefore no income.

Point 2. We are not from money—new, old, or counterfeit—that would allow my father to live, debt-free, for any extended period of time.

Point 3. Despite Points 1 and 2, my father frequently darts off on excursions to exotic locales. I’ll receive phone calls from China, Khartoum, Maharashtra, Djibouti, in which the garbled connections make it impossible for me to tell if what I’m hearing in the background is static or the pops of machine gun fire from enemy spies.

Point 4. Despite Points 1 and 2 and in addition to Point 3, my father makes frequent expensive purchases, some of which, happily, are given to me. I asked last Christmas, for example, for a toaster, expecting one of the two-slice, Sunbeam, five heat-setting variety. What I received was a device that can toast, bake, broil, deep fry, or flambé your food, though its ability to do any of the above seems to depend more on the planets’ alignment than on pressing any combination of the buttons and knobs that lie scattered across its surface. I can only imagine how much such a toaster might have cost.

I’m not sure what any of this spells for my own future. Half the time I’m afraid the swarthy, mustachioed man looking at me much too freely on the subway is actually a member of the KGB ready to torture me for information about my father’s secret deeds. And the other half I expect to be whisked away and inducted into the family business, complete with its fun bond-like gadgets and incomprehensible code names. Either way, I hope the ordinary course of my double-agent days allows for a shower and quick trip to the bathroom. Jack Bauer must have a bladder of steel.

Do Insomniacs Dream of Hallucinatory Sheep?

I’ve always had insomnia, but since I moved to New York, it’s been somewhat worse than normal. New York is not what I would call a quiet town, and between the wailing sirens and ceaseless construction, my sleep is also interrupted by the city’s favored method of heating—some sort of hot water radiator device that, in addition to amplifying and broadcasting into my apartment every noise my neighbors make, also produces a very loud hammering whenever the heat kicks on.

Most nights, I simply lie in bed cursing Pfizer for its inability to make a sleep aid that renders one insensible to the outside world without causing brain damage. But at the suggestion of a friend, I decided I might try being productive during the many hours I’m awake and the rest of the world, damn them, is slumbering away.

So for the last week, on the nights I was unable to fall asleep, I performed one of the many chores I’ve been putting off for the past two months. I cleaned the apartment, did my laundry, washed the dishes, took apart all my mechanical appliances to vacuum out the dog hair.

These were very ambitious undertakings, and I can’t help but think they might have gone more smoothly if I didn’t take copious amounts of Ambien every night before bed. Ambien is a fun little drug that’s been known to cause hallucinations, sleepwalking, and seizures. In me, it just causes excessive stupidity. I awoke in the mornings to find dishes in the refrigerator, underwear in the pantry, and a slew of nonsensical messages in the outbox of my e-mail account.

It was also possibly not a bright idea to use this time for catching up on my editing work. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m an editor for an educational publishing company. More specifically, I edit middle and high school history texts. It falls on me to ensure that today’s youths are learning in accordance with the dictates of the No Child Left Behind Act. Perhaps not a good responsibility to bestow on someone who gets most of their historical knowledge from watching old episodes of Quantum Leap.

The changes I made would have to fall under the category of experimental editing—a new style that, somewhat like experimental writing, seeks to buck the confines of the dull, traditionalist past to create a new form of editing that makes absolutely no sense. In my sleep-deprived state, I apparently felt that the letter x has been heretofore shafted by American linguists. I inserted it between the root and the suffix of “relationship,” added it to the end of “senate,” and gave it its own billing ahead of “War” in “World War II.” And while my own writing tends toward the overuse of the comma, under the influence of Ambien I decided that such punctuation was evil, that it represented the scourge of good writing and must be stricken from use. I therefore embarked on a crusade for its eradication, deleting it from every sentence on every page of the text I was editing.

These changes wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t, in my inability to find a red pencil, made them with a bright green pen. I knew that I would have some explaining to do when I arrived at work that morning, so I crumpled the pages, dipped them in the snow, and told my boss that a pipe had burst that morning in the bathtub. Kind man that he is, my boss didn’t ask why the hell I was editing in the bathroom. But the explanation did suffice as an excuse for me being twenty minutes late. Needless to say, I will return to counting the Ambien-produced hallucinatory sheep that traipse across my ceiling during the night and not attempt any more late-night cleaning or editing projects.

A Hygienically Perfect World

I have a love-hate relationship with many of New York’s unique features. I love the anonymity the city’s teeming masses provide, but I hate the throngs of tourists who insist on blocking the sidewalk to snap photos of themselves groping the Wall Street bull when I’m already late for work (yes, he is indeed anatomically correct). I hate the prices of food and drinks, but I love that the sheer amount of bars in the city mean I will never stiff the same bartender twice. And I love the cost effectiveness of public transportation, but I hate the fact that I’m forced to ride the city’s subways and buses with other people. Public transportation would be much more pleasant if it just wasn’t public.

The morning and evening commutes are the worst, when passengers are crammed together like canned olives (I purposely avoid the sardine simile because I feel the little fish have been given too much attention at the expense of other foodstuffs whose packaging conditions are equally execrable). Winter at least provides some protection from sweating skin and germ-covered hands, but no matter where I sit, I always seem to find the spot beside the passenger with the hacking, phlegmy cough or the child whose finger resides permanently in orifices to which fingers should never be allowed to stray.

There are also the noises—those who insist on whistling, singing, ranting as though the subways were their own personal YouTube. These people might think twice about assaulting my ears if they knew the important thoughts that demand my attention as I hurtle through New York’s subterranean paths. Whether to watch The Biggest Loser or The Girls Next Door is a decision whose weight cannot be underestimated.

And then there are the smells, better in the winter but overwhelming come the heat: the body odor, the halitosis, the lingering musty scent of a thousand and one souls in various stages of cleanliness. I think the transit authority has been remiss in not addressing this problem when such an easy solution immediately springs to my mind. I see no reason why showers couldn’t be installed at subway entrances, why Scope mouthwash and Listerine breathstrips couldn’t be dispensed from containers mounted to the walls of the trains. Think of the jobs that would be created by the installation of such devices and by the organization of an odor patrol charged with the task of evicting odor offenders from subway cars.

And we shouldn’t overlook the service we’d be offering to New York’s hygienically challenged, a subset of the population whose plight (much like that of the olive) has been tragically underrepresented in the media.

Sadly, I am aware that my utopian vision of the world, like so many other of my good ideas (self-cleaning door handles, resurrecting the barter system to solve the financial crisis, teleportation), is unlikely to come to fruition. All I can do is ask that each and every one of you think of your fellow passengers before you enter a subway—if you’ve not showered in the past twelve hours, if you’ve not brushed your teeth in the past six, if you’ve recently consumed onions, garlic, or any sort of bean, do not board the train. Walk, take a cab, swim down the Hudson (preferably with a bar of soap in one hand and a loofah in the other) but for the sake of our sensitive noses, refrain from public transport.

800 Grams of Fiber

I live in a state of self-delusion: I think myself smarter than I actually am. Much smarter, as in genius-level. My conviction on this point remains unswayed despite having no basis and despite being beset by continual evidence to the contrary. A recent example serves to illustrate my meaning.

I had a date Friday night. It was a first date, and on such occasions I generally try to impress. I do my makeup, I fix my hair, and if the guy really piques my interest, I might even shower. So Friday morning when my usual cup of coffee did not result in my usual trip to the bathroom (yes folks, we’re about to delve into some pretty personal territory here), I started to worry that I’d be bloated and uncomfortable that evening on my date.

What I did next is something anyone of average intelligence might have done: I ran to the store and bought myself a box of Fiber One cereal bars. It’s what I did after that shows just how far my intelligence diverges from the norm. Because when one fiber bar failed to work, I ate another. And when that failed, I ate a salad. When that too failed, I tried more caffeine, this time in the form of a Diet Coke. By noon I was squirming under the uncomfortable results—pinging, gurgling sounds like the sputtering engine of an overworked car and strange tectonic shifts in my belly that I feared would result in an Alien­-like fiber-creature sprouting forth from my gut.

Here’s where an ordinary person might have thrown in the towel. But because I possess such an astoundingly high intellect, I not only was undeterred by previous failures, I was now taking it as a personal affront that my intestines refused to operate within the laws of chemistry; it was, at this point, a war. I gathered my arms (lentil stew, peas, a pear, a handful of grapes) and began an all-out assault on my digestive tract. And yet, 800 grams later, I had nothing to show for my effort besides a grotesquely distended belly and a rather severe stomachache.

I considered canceling the date, but that would have been conceding defeat, and I had too much honor, too much self-respect to make such a concession. So instead, I draped a flowing tunic over my disproportionate gut and waddled onto the subway, where an elderly couple offered me their seats.

“Boy or girl?” the woman asked, leaning toward me over her walker as I gratefully slid into her vacated spot.

I’m not sure if it was the effect of the alcohol or simply the fact that now was the time I did not want the fiber to kick in, but an hour into my date, my stomach erupted in a series of tremors I knew could only signal a Vesuvius-sized outcome. I tried to resist—made what I believe to be a rather valiant effort—and I can only hope my date attributed my facial contortions and constant shifting of position to Tourette’s or OCD, two syndromes I feel would be viewed in a more sympathetic light than an eating disorder based on the overconsumption of fiber.

It might be worth noting that I’m a very petite person, so 800 grams of fiber (more in keeping with, say, an elephant’s dietary needs than my own) wreaked havoc in suitable proportion. I spent the remainder of the date alternating between trips to the bathroom and concocting viable reasons for those trips. I really wasn’t surprised when after my sixth trip my date suggested we call it a night. But I am fully expecting a personal visit any day now from a representative of Mensa, who will bestow honorary membership upon me and wonder in an awe-filled voice, his head shaking with sorrow, how my genius managed to escape their attention for so long.

The Beginning of the Betterment

This being the new year and the time to begin new things, I've decided to start a blog. My reasons for doing this are many: I'm bored, I feel the need to litter cyberspace with my obviously poignant and intelligent musings, I have a limited social life.... But there are two main reasons that supersede these others: I am an idiot who does idiotic things and I have a horrible memory. You see, I keep making the same mistakes in my life because of my abysmal powers of recall, and I thought that if I catalogued these flubs I might stand a chance of reversing the pattern that has thus far dominated my days.

I'm sure you're wondering what type of mistakes I'm consistently making, and the answer to that is easy. Think of any socially, occupationally, or other-word-to-which-you-can-attach-the-suffix-ally retarded thing any of your friends, relatives, friends of a friend, third cousin twice removed have done in their lives and chances are I have done the same. I have dated losers, liars, possible felons; I have been demoted, fired, completely jobless; I have moved across the country only to realize I was much better off in my former location. The list is endless.

And so I offer myself and you, the faceless reader, this blog, whose title--because I am an optimistic soul--is more a statement of my hope for the future than any sound advice for those of you out there in the blogosphere. But--because I am an optimistic soul--I have no doubt that I will some day become a wise and sagacious woman whose ability to make it through a given day without becoming emotionally or physically scarred will be lauded, praised, touted across the talk-show circuit, made into an inspirational film, and memorialized through the annals of history.