Grown-up foods I wish I liked‏

I feel I would be more of an Acceptable Adult if I liked the following foods:

Asparagus
Strawberries
Lobster
Ribs
Anything involving barbeque sauce
Broccoli
Sashimi
Shrimp

I cannot stand and never eat any of the above foods.

The Pickle Song

The summer I turned five my family went to Estes Park, Colorado for vacation. All six of us (my youngest brother Jonny wasn't born yet, and Ben was a baby so he stayed at home with my grandparents) packed into our station wagon for the cross-country trip. During that drive, I made up a song that I enjoyed the sound of so much that I sang it the entire way there. The only lyric was simple yet satisfying: "Pickles, pickles, I like pickles."

My brothers yelled at me to stop singing, they begged my mom to make me stop singing, but I just had to sing! I didn't like pickles when I was little, still don't like them, but that song was just so hypnotically catchy!

That vacation was great. My parents bought us all down coats. My brothers' coats were brown, mine was green.

We all got these little furry animal hides (rabbit?), and I got this Madame Alexander Little Huggums doll that I picked out myself and promptly named Timmy. Timmy and I were tight for a long time; I slept with him until sophomore year in college. It's creepy to have a doll on your bed as an adult, so now he lives on a shelf in my closet.


He's old and threadbare now, but this is what he would have looked like back in 1978:


I might buy a new Timmy on ebay as a Christmas present to myself, not because I would ever want to replace Timmy himself, but because he deserves a new outfit. As a Christmas present to my parents and my older brothers, I'd like to book some studio time so I can officially record my number one hit, Pickles, Pickles, I Like Pickles.

Meatballs

Have you ever seen the movie Meatballs? It's hilarious. The synopsis on imdb is "Wacky hijinks of counselors and campers at a less-than-average summer camp." ("hijinks"!! Best word since shenanigans!) That explains the basic idea but you can't begin to comprehend the laughs without seeing it.

When I was a kid, this one St. Louis tv station used to play the same movie pretty much the entire weekend. One weekend the movie was Meatballs and my brothers and I watched it maybe 10 times in those two days. I've loved Bill Murray ever since that fateful weekend.

I distinctly remember my mom walking in on me and my two little brothers all laying on the floor of her bedroom watching it on the tiny tv from our van and asking incredulously "You're not watching that again, are you?!" Then she told us to go play outside, which we didn't. Then she came back in later and got mad because we were watching it yet again and none of us had moved an inch the entire time. That tiny tv made the rounds of rooms in our old house when it wasn't actually in the van, though I can't really explain why the floor of my parents' bedroom was ever a good spot for it. The screen was maybe 6 inches and the picture was always terrible, but when you love tv you make certain sacrifices.

Jonny just quoted "Don't you change" from Meatballs this weekend, and we both throw out "What, no mustard?" on a weekly basis. I can sing you the entire C.I.T. (Counselors In Training) song on request. Quotes from Caddyshack come up quite regularly as well. God bless Bill Murray! A while back I went on a couple dates with a guy who admitted that he didn't really remember lines from movies and I'm not kidding when I say that that was one of the reasons why we only went out a couple times.

I'm a huge movie re-watcher to this day, using the skills I learned as a child. The last Chicago apartment I lived in didn't have cable so I watched Bottle Rocket every day for six months in lieu of tv. I don't currently have a "go to" movie, but the last time I did it was The Darjeeling Limited. Thanks for all the good times, Wes Anderson!

Jonny watches Polar Express all the time, and he has this funny bit where if somebody walks in while he's watching it he pretends the remote control is broken as if that's a valid reason for watching a kid's movie for the 100th time. [Jonny wants me to point out that this bit originated when he used to watch Beauty and the Beast on VHS constantly and if somebody walked in he'd claim that the vcr was broken and he couldn't get the tape out.]

Speaking of remote controls, my family has always referred to ours as "the mote." I wonder if anybody else calls it that.

The Grass is Always Greener

Remember when you were little and it was always more fun to go play at somebody else's house? There was absolutely nothing wrong with our house; our house was a very very very fine house. There was always someone around, tv to be watched, a big backyard with a sandbox and swingsets, yet I usually preferred our next-door neighbors' house. The vibe was more relaxed over there, plus someplace else often seems more interesting just because it's someplace else.

The dad at that house was a Playboy fan, evidenced by framed photos of him and his dad (and accompanying bunnies) at a Playboy club hanging in his office, a super-cool Playboy pinball machine in the basement, plus a stack of Playboys in his bathroom. My parents are pretty conservative, and were even more so when my brothers and I were kids, so to know someone in our very own neighborhood that seemed to flaunt a hearty interest in pornography, soft though it was, was kind of a big deal (in my head).

The laid-back atmosphere at the neighbors' house was in such stark contrast to my house where we weren't even allowed to say words like poop or fart or boobs. My brother Rich made the mistake of saying "Ow, my nuts!" when he and my brother Mike were roughhousing one time when we were kids, and he got disciplined by my dad with a good belt-spanking for using "that kind of language" in front of me. Seriously, that happened.

But enough about the hilarity of corporal punishment, let's get back to the neighbors' house -- the fun basement housed two (count 'em, two) pinball machines, a jukebox stocked with Olivia Newton John hits, and mats on the floor that my best friend and I used to practice gymnastics and make up dance routines. We spent so many countless hours down there that I could probably still remember some of our dances, and I definitely get the song that the Playboy pinball machine played stuck in my head every once in a while.

Upstairs, they had a microwave in the kitchen, a couple of marlins on the walls of the family room, and a real life babysitter. We didn't get a microwave until I was in junior high, so theirs was a real novelty. On the days when the mom worked this lady named Mona watched the kids and, speaking as Kid# 4 out of six kids, the idea of a babysitter who wasn't a sibling was a novelty to me too. I remember her name after all these years because she is the only Mona I've ever known, not counting Mona from Who's the Boss. The marlins were just cool.



This is like the one the neighbor's dad had. You can hardly tell it from this image, but one of the four women in the hot tub to the left of Hef is an old granny with gray hair in a bun, glasses, a big nose and chin, and old lady boobs.

Unrelately, I haven't stopped listening to the Avett Brothers except to sleep for the past couple days straight.

Today I Became an Adult / Meet Mr. Coffee

I've been growing up slowly but surely for a lot of years now, but I think I finally reached Grown-Up status by purchasing this coffee maker.

Isn't this the cutest thing you've ever seen?