Was She Hitting on Me?

So, I'm getting my haircut by this woman. Not a fancy place. A $20 haircut. We were chatting as people in this situation often do and she tells me that she has a daughter and that she's divorced.

"It's hard" she says, "to meet people these days."

She finishes the cut and is just trimming the back with a razor, and adding final touches.

"I see you have some hair on your ears," she says. Sadly, this is true. I don't know why, but my ears grow hair like crazy. And not from the inside, I mean all around the outside of my ears.

"I know," I say. "It's weird. My wife won't shave it for me so I usually do it myself. And I tend to end up bleeding."

"I'll take care of it for you," she offers and proceeds to gently shave my ears for me. "That's better," she says.

"Thanks."

"Well, if I was your wife, I'd shave your ears for you anytime," she says.

There was a significant silence. And not one of those comfortable silences between two people who know each other well. It was that other kind, that puts people in cold sweats and makes their genitals shrink. The kind of silence that usually follows someone saying "I like you as a friend," or "I'm late."

I thanked her for the cut, paid and headed out, left to wonder this: Was she hitting on me?

Scenes From a Marriage: Vol. 2

"Oh, weird," my wife said.
"What?"
"You have a long hair growing out of the back of your shoulder."
"Is that weird?" I ask.
"No. I guess it's more disgusting."


Good times.

Pranks Part 1: A Taste of Success

While in college, my friends and I pulled two pranks. One that resulted in police action and another that ended with us hanging our heads and being scolded. One of these was a success and the other, a short lived failure. I know they won't seem like much to some of you, but while I have put my share of Port-a-Pots on cafeteria roofs, we've always been fairly harmless and gentle pranksters.

Tonight, I'll describe the success. Why? Because it was a success. Who wants to talk about failures?

I have a friend from high school who was a really good looking guy. The kind of guy who could throw up on a random waitress' shoes and still get her number as he was put into a cab. (true story) Girls were easy for him. As I write this, I still wonder how we became to be friends. We weren't at first. He entered my school in 4th grade immediately did 2 things that became famous in our grade. First, he farted loudly during class. Secondly, he did an oral report about his brand new indoor pool. I disliked him immediately.

Years later, we'd become friends, then went to different colleges but stayed in touch regularly. But none of that matters. The prank unfolded thusly:

Phase 1: My then girlfriend (and now wife) calls him and - using a slutty voice - pretends to be a girl that he'd met the night before and had sex with. Despite his denials, she tells him she got really drunk and doesn't remember much, but is sure she left her panties in his room. She has to get them back because they were a gift from her boyfriend and he'll kill her if she loses them. Needless to say, my friend is confused. He insists they never met, but nevertheless tells her that he's looking around his bed for the panties. She reiterates how drunk she was but she knows his name and that freaks him out a little bit. He asks her if his friend PJ (not me - and a name I had never before. I stored this nugget of information away to be used later) had put her up to this. She tells him no and starts to fake cry before finally hanging up the phone.

My friend (and one-time co-blogger) Jon has 3 talents: He can play piano, he can make a realistic looking vagina with the extra skin on his knees and he can drop his voice about 3 octaves and sound menacing on the phone. One of these skills was put to use on this night. Another was put to use every other night that week.

Phase 2: After about 15 minutes, Jon picks up the phone and calls my friend. Jon pretends to be the slutty girl's boyfriend and he's pissed that not only was his drunk girlfriend taken advantage of, but her birthday panties are gone. He keeps using my friend's name which makes him a little afraid. Jon used some perfectly scripted lines:
"I know guys like you and I hate them."
"She drinks too much sometimes and assholes like you take advantage."
"Somebody needs to teach you a fucking lesson."
"How about I come down there and we talk this out man to man?"
It's worth noting here that I knew my friend's address and Jon made sure to mention it. This seriously freaked him out.
"Listen man, fuck this. I'll be down there in twenty minutes."
He slams the phone down.

I have something of a habit of calling people at exactly the wrong time. It's not on purpose, it's just the kind of timing I've always had. You know that friend at the bar who's always turning and knocking people's drinks over, or pointing to something and hitting a waitress in the face? That's me. I've called 2 friends within minutes of a devastating break up and another just moments after learning of a parent's death. Basically, if you see my name on your cell phone, I'd check around and make sure the people you care about are okay.

Phase 3: I casually call my friend. I hadn't talked him in a few weeks, so nothing seems out of the ordinary. My friend picks and immediately tells me the following:
"I can't talk now. The cops are here. I'll call you back later."
He hangs up and I shit my pants.

I didn't know what kind of call tracing equipment the police have. I didn't know if living in a dorm would protect my phone from being located. But I did know that if the calls could be traced to my dorm room that I was up shit's creek without a paddle, a boat, a map or even a lifejacket.

So, for about twenty minutes the three of us sat in silence, exchanging nervous wordless looks like a couple of teenagers staring at a home pregnancy test.

The phone rings. It's my friend. "What a night," he says.
"Why were the cops there?" I tried to sound innocent.
"It's a long story." And in what I think might be the cruelest part of the whole ordeal, I allow my friend to relate the entire saga to me in painstaking detail. He tells me about the cops standing watch at his place for an hour while back at the station, they were trying to trace the calls. And after he gets past the part about how the police were unable to successfully trace the calls, I offered a possible solution.

"You know what I think," I say. "I think your buddy PJ might be behind all this."

There are different kinds of silence. This one was long, and difficult only in the sense that it was hard not to laugh during it. The silence was eventually broken by what sounded like his lower lip being torn apart by his front teeth as he shouted one of the strongest, and quite possibly the angriest and most emotional "FUCK" I've ever heard. It was a vicious "fuck." One with wide eyes, lots of spit and possibly a few burst blood vessels.

Now, I'm not the kind of person who holds a grudge. I wish I could say the same for my former friend.

My Mortal Enemy

So the wife and I took our dog to Huntington Beach. Best known to us for having a mile long stretch where dogs are allowed to play in the surf, or in the case of our dog, allowed to run away and cower in fear of the water.

Now, I'll keep this short, but just let me give you a little window into an average day in my life. While at the dog beach, we walked that mile stretch a few times to mingle with other people and their dogs. Something happened to me twice on this beach that has never happened to me before on a beach. And no, it wasn't stepping in dog shit.

I was stung by a bee. Twice. About 45 minutes apart. And where you might ask? On the bottom of my foot. Apparently, and for reasons known only to them, bees like to hang out at the water's edge, sitting in the wet sand, waiting for unsuspecting beach goers to step on them and be stung.

Let me tell you one thing about bee stings. I'm 30 years old and they still fucking hurt like a bitch.

Why the fuck are there bees by the ocean? What the fuck are they doing there? There are no flowers in sight. No pollen anywhere. Do they go to the beach to die? Or were they having a relaxing day at the beach only to be disturbed and martyred by a giant? I don't know, but insects and I have had a strained relationship from the start, particularly bees.

When I was about 7, I was taking food out to our pet rabbit's hutch in the backyard (Our rabbit's name was Stefan. Named by my sister, who at 13 wanted to marry a swedish tennis star named Stefan Edberg. She's now 33 and married to a swedish man named Stefan - some people just know what they want). I accidentally stepped on a bees nest in the ground. I was stung upwards of 20 times. There were bees in my socks.

A few years later, I found bees in my window, between the glass and the screen and we later discovered a huge hive in the attic. And by discovered, I mean I picked up a box and got the fuck stung out of me again.

Finally, when I was about 12, I was diving into my grandparents' swimming pool when I was stung on the bottom of my foot. That part of my body couldn't have been exposed for more than a second. That bee had been planning the attack all day. Timing my jumps and setting his course. He probably left a note behind, something like "I regret that have but one life to give for my hive." Asshole.

You don't think they're smart enough for that? Just ask my wife. When she was a little girl, she would spend hours in her backyard singing. Until one day, when a bee flew into her open mouth and stung her on the tongue. You think that was coincidence? I'll tell you right now, every creature in that yard - birds, insects, snails, squirrels, her dad - had a meeting and drew straws. One of them was going to put a stop to that singing. And one of them did.

And let's not even get into that time I was attacked by fire ants, because that just sucked.

I know I've heard people say that if bees disappeared off the earth, humans would die out in a few years, but fuck it. I'd rather be dead than continue to live with bees. I can certainly live without honey. And if there were no flowers, we'd all save about $50 every February. All bees do is scare us and they're more than happy to give their lives just to cause us pain. They don't serve any fucking purpose. Like Sarah Jessica Parker or softcore pornography, they're useless to the world.

The next time you see a bee, run it down and kill it. It ends now.