Frank (Slept Here)

Unexpected benefits

Frank — Wed, 30 May 2012 23:45:53 +0000

I’m getting back into running after a couple of weeks off with tendonitis, and it feels as if summer is getting into the swing of things as well. It was close to 90 degrees yesterday and was well north of 80 today and, save for a window unit in the bedroom, the apartment is not air-conditioned. Heat and humidity completely kill my appetite for food, so that plus the constant sweating and increased exercise means I’ve lost some weight. I weighed myself last week before my first run and again this morning. Not surprisingly I’m a bit lighter, close to seven pounds lighter, in fact. If you are keeping score at home that is close to a pound a day. At the current rate I will disappear in approximately 150-160 days.

My great grandmother’s last words to me were, “You’re getting chubby.” I’ll show her by starving to death. Who’s laughing now, great grandma?

Coming off my three day weekend

Frank — Tue, 29 May 2012 23:47:08 +0000

Morning coffee – 6:45 AM

First time cursing traffic – 7:56 AM

First time someone asked “Is it Friday yet?” – 9:00 AM

First embarrassing Freudian slip by Frank – 9:15 AM

When discussing an issue over email I intended to type “I’m glad we trust one another,” but it came out as, “I’m glad we tryst one another.”

Welcome back to the weekday grind, Frank.

Revisiting the recent past

Frank — Sun, 27 May 2012 14:02:47 +0000

I should tell more embarrassing stories here. Earlier I was looking at my site counter and saw that someone was reading an old post about one of the most traumatic moments of my childhood. It was terrible when it happened, but with time (and therapy) come healing, and now it’s probably one of my favorite posts on this blog.

Here it is, from December of 2008:

The last time I was home, I came across some pictures from a preschool ballet production from 1990 or 1991. Unbeknownst to the casual viewer, somewhere on that stage was a boy living a nightmare. It wasn’t the fact that I had wet myself that day during nap time (a humiliation that included changing into a pair of the preschool’s “oops” pants, which were bright blue, baggy, and let everyone else know that you’d had an accident), or the large bee that had chased me around the yard during recess. It was what I was wearing.

If clothes make the man, I was a little girl on that fateful night. My parents have always insisted that us kids invest ourselves in extra-curricular activities. In elementary school, I played T-ball and soccer in the city league. In middle school, I ran track and cross country and played trumpet in the band. It was the same in high school, and I eventually earned the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts as well. But before all that, my parents had cast onto me the ultimate preschool embarrassment. They put me in ballet class. I was the only boy. I had to wear a form-fitting leotard and white ballet shoes. With my spindly little body and oversized head, I looked just like a Pez dispenser, except this Pez dispenser was expected to do a ballet dance on stage in front of an auditorium full of people.

From the house to the theatre was a blur of rain, traffic lights, and some lovely insults from skateboard-bearing teenagers directed at the boy in tights. By the time I was backstage, I was feeling about as good as you’d think I would, and when the show started I was so humiliated that I really just didn’t care anymore. It was short and painful, consisting of slow piano music, about twenty tutu-clad girls and one boy in tights meandering about the stage with no real synchronisation or harmony. The movements had been marked on the stage floor in white tape, which looked a lot like an NFL playbook, but that didn’t stop us from spinning off cue, falling down, bumping into one another, or staring off into space and picking our noses.

I burst into tears when I was reunited with my parents, who seemed shocked that putting their son onstage in front of a crowd of parents and teenagers while dressed in a leotard might be upsetting to him. In vain, my dad tried to lighten the situation:

“Why don’t we go out to dinner?”
“No, I don’t want to.”
“Why, because you’re dressed like a girl?”

Needless to say, I was unhappy for several days after. It would be a long time before I would trust my parents with anything again.

Betting on the house

Frank — Thu, 24 May 2012 22:16:56 +0000

For a short period when I was in college I took part in a weekly poker game. I knew nothing about poker (I still don’t) but my lack of skill was compensated by the fact that the other guys I played with didn’t know much about poker either. None of us had much in the way of money to bet – usually whoever won ended up with about $20, but $20 can go a long way in college, and when someone won it was expected that he’d call the other players the next day and tell them how he’d spent the money.

Generally the calls went like this:

“Hey (insert loser’s name), it’s me (the winner) and I just wanted you to know that I’m out getting (blank) with the money I took from you last night.”

For the final blank spot the items purchased were normally things a college guy would buy – music, movies, pornography, or food. Then you could say things like, “Hear this song? You bought the album,” or, “Hope you like the pizza, you paid for it.”

I played every Sunday for a couple of months, during which time I won exactly once. The next day I was out getting some things for my apartment and I thought it would be an appropriate time to make my phone call. “Hey losers, it’s Frank…just did a little shopping with the money I took from you guys…bought me a new tea kettle.” I realized immediately that I should have lied and said I’d bought ten copies of The Dirty Dozen or a blow up doll – anything except a tea kettle. My time in the poker group was short-lived after that point. I could only take a few weeks of the guys saying things like, “Hey Frank, can you get those doilies now?” before I finally stopped attending. To this day whenever I see one of my college friends there’s always a point in the conversation when he’ll bring up the time I spent the poker money on a tea kettle.

When I was moving out of the apartment I took the tea kettle from its perch above the fridge and tossed it in the garbage. I could no longer use it knowing I had bought it with money earned gambling.

Plus I had just purchased a lovely coffee machine with some cash I won throwing dice.

Reminding myself to recall

Frank — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:06:58 +0000

Because I often find myself very busy during the day, things don’t always get the attention they deserve. Over the course of a day, usually when I’m on the phone at work, I’ll leave myself notes for things I need to do later. These things usually fill Post-Its or receipts or margins on work documents until they start to pile up and I throw them out. Earlier today I decided to go through a small stack of them before I tossed them in the garbage. Among the things that need more of my time and attention:

-Ice achilles
-Get Joe to meet me in NYC
-Cubs fans are babies, the franchise is not cursed just historically bad
-iTunes – Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage
-All my roads have bends / there are no clear-cut beginnings / and so far, no dead-ends
-Wilco at Cooperstown July 28th
-Too many phone messages for one day
-Need more time, less space

Hopefully I’ll get to all of those thoughts in time. If anyone can get to them for me I’d appreciate it.

Golden blunders

Frank — Sat, 19 May 2012 14:12:24 +0000

A few minutes ago I turned my clocks back to 2005 to pick up a few things I’d left behind. I took the note that said “don’t drink so much,” and the Velvet Underground T-shirt that my girlfriend at the time gave me. When it was time to root through my CD collection I knew that a lot of them were left behind for a good reason but I grabbed them anyway, returned to 2012 and I traded them in for the entire catalogue of The Posies. Then I kicked myself for not doing this sooner.

I missed The Posies in their mid 1990s prime – for many years I had no respect for power pop but my hard stance was my loss. I didn’t get wise to the band until fairly recently. Since 2005 my appreciation of music has gotten deeper, expanding past three chords, I heard harmonies and I liked them. Despite a hiatus and various solo projects after the late 90s, The Posies started putting out new music again a few years ago – most recently they put out a tremendous record called Blood/Candy. Here’s a track from it:

If you like that, and you should, you should buy the album, and the rest of their collection for that matter. I give you my personal guarantee that it will be awesome. In fact, if you listen to some of their stuff and don’t like it, you can come out here and punch me in the face. Is it a deal?

A stupid thing I did

Frank — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:33:16 +0000

You wanna hear about a stupid thing I did the other day? Get this, I managed to hurt my leg from running too much. I never thought I’d say that again, especially since I’m running about half as many miles as I did in college, but I managed to hurt my achilles, regardless. I believe I have what’s called “tendinitis,” but in plain English, I fucked it up. That’s not the stupid part, though – the stupid part is how I made it worse.

A couple of weeks ago, after a road race, I started getting a nagging pain at the bottom of my right calf. I knew that it was the achilles and that it was probably tendinitis, but the discomfort was manageable and it didn’t seem to get any worse, so I kept running on it. Flash forward to this Monday. After my run I had some time before Ella got home, so I flopped down in front of the TV and promptly dozed off. I woke up when I heard her unlocking the door and I tried to do the old “I wasn’t sleeping, I’ve been thinking about presents to buy you” move. I quickly tried to stand but my right leg slipped and my achilles went from sore to oh my god I’m going to need a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I’ve run close to 70 miles since it started bugging me, but the straw that broke the camel’s back was an awkward movement while waking from a nap. I’m such an idiot.

Thanks, mom

Frank — Sun, 13 May 2012 12:32:34 +0000

I’d be a worse son than I already am if I didn’t wish my mom a happy Mother’s Day – I know she reads this blog but I’ll give her a call later today as well. For a while I tried to (slightly) censor myself here because I knew she was reading, but over time I’ve decided that I’ll write what I want to write. I’m an adult and if she doesn’t like me using words like “fuck,” then that’s too bad. Anyway, she describes my stories about my childhood as “mostly fiction,” anyway, so I would hope she doesn’t give my words too much weight.

Mom is a unique character with her very own special brand of parenting. When it came to feeding us, she was obsessed with “broadening our horizons,” so she’d go to ethnic grocery stores and stock up on foods in bright packaging and no English on their labels. Opening our lunch boxes at school became a kind of Russian roulette, because you never knew what you were going to find. Sometimes we’d get lucky and discover that a green package with cyrillic writing was actually full of fruit snacks. Other times a packet with Japanese writing turned out to be full of something like pickled squid. I think it was this lunchtime anxiety that scared my brother into eating little except familiar things like cheeseburgers and Coke, a practice he continues to this day.

One of the parenting rules my mother repeatedly broke was playing favorites, specifically she’d tell me, my brother, and my oldest sister that she liked my sister Veronica the best. “No offense,” she’d tell us, “she’s just the best student out of the four of you and never gets into trouble.” Also, my mom taught me that respecting authority was conditional. When my third grade teacher became convinced I was retarded and tried to put me in a special education class, my mom called the school to say that my teacher was the retarded one. Many years later, when that same teacher died, I told my mom that I felt bad for always hating her when I was in her class. Mom quickly replied with, “no reason to feel bad – she thought you were retarded.”

Looking back I can’t really complain about her methods. All four of us have our limbs intact and we’ll never starve because in a pinch we’ll eat things that other people in Western society might not consider “food.” Happy Mother’s Day, mom.

Listomania

Frank — Sun, 13 May 2012 01:57:59 +0000

The old “seven things” meme seems to be making its rounds again. I was tagged in it several times back in 2008 now it’s reappeared on a few of the blogs in my reader. I generally avoid memes and I was pretty sure that I’d done this one before, but a quick check of the blog archives yielded nothing. For lack of anything better to do on a Saturday night when I’m sitting in front of the computer with a bag of jellybeans, I’ll jump on the meme bandwagon just this once:

7 Things I Want to do Before I Die:

1. Find a baseball cap that fits me properly
2. Punch a clown
3. Write something that will outlive me
4. Appear on Jeopardy (this is technically my second choice but Cash Cab was cancelled)
5. Buy a house
6. Trust my parents
7. Have children

7. Things I Cannot Do:

1. Swim
2. Say the word “penetration” without giggling
3. Pass up cookies
4. Say no to a frisbee game
5. Stop hating the Chicago Bears
6. Drive stick
7. Skate

7. Things That Attract Me to the Opposite Sex:

1. Questionable morals
2. Sense of humor
3. Nice smile
4. Gang tattoos
5. Lived in attic for two years, kept diary, killed by Nazis
6. Not vegetarian
7. Likes robots

7 Things I Say Most Often:

1. It only hurts at first.
2. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
3. No, I did not eat all the cookies.
4. I don’t know how the floor got sticky.
5. This hasn’t gone as well as I’d hoped.
6. I’m tired.
7. Large coffee, please.

7 Celebrity Crushes:

1. Does Anne Frank count?
2. 1960s Joan Didion
3. Diane Neal
4. Sara Benincasa
5. That girl from the Kindle commercials (I hate the Kindle, but she’s like the siren calling me to wreck my ship of paper on the shores of e-reader island.)
6. Neko Case
7. Judy Jetson

7 People I Want to do This:

You can do it if you’d like but I’m not going to force you.

All the right notes

Frank — Thu, 10 May 2012 01:42:00 +0000

It’s one of those nights where I should be getting ready for bed but I’m too wrapped up in listening to music to move. I could stay here all night and listen.

Ella is out late with some friends so after running and dinner I sat down for some quality time with my music library.

Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has run its course, time for a new album.

Tacoma Narrows was a Chicago band that released a five-song EP and an eight-song album before entering an “indefinite hiatus” as their Facebook page put it. Only thirteen songs total but if someone told me I could only listen to these thirteen I don’t think I’d be that upset – they were that good.

Cueing up their EP…track 1 – “Author Unknown”

Author unknown
Speaks in foreign tongues
I suppose these are the only words
That he knows

Hidden away
Stark reminders of heady days
Why he always failed
Couldn’t say

Who turned the light off to darken the shade of my heart?
I can’t turn it on
Who cracked the doorway that opened to past loves forgot
I can’t shake it off

Lock it away
Keep the keys in case
Lonely days
We were made this way

If anyone needs me I’ll be here for awhile.