After Thanksgiving...

Apartments

Last week, Dave and I viewed two apartments.

The first apartment was a stucco building in view of a cemetery. There was a stone owl on the roof, which Dave explained was meant to scare away real flesh-and-feather owls and evil spirits.

We were greeted by an older man with a Magic School Bus T-shirt. Until that moment I had forgotten that Magic School Bus and Miss Frizzle existed. Do you suppose she’s married now? I should have asked the landlord, since he seemed to be a diehard Frizzle Fan.

We passed a tiny front yard full of Fisher-Price toys (probably belonging to the landlord) and followed the landlord into the building. The first sound I heard was the wail of a crying infant.

“Already?” I sighed.

After three flights of stairs, we reached the Lucite crystal door handle of our apartment. Inside, the dark hardwood floors were newly installed and recently waxed. The powdery walls were freshly whitewashed and blinding. Every surface was fuming. I looked to the windowsill, where a bottle of Orange Glo, Windex, Lysol, and a box of Raid conspired. I slowly quickly became unpleasantly intoxicated by household chemicals. The window panes beyond the sill displayed the somber view of a cemetery.

The landlord began to glide his Swiffer mop around the parameters of the living area.

“I just discovered Swiffer mops,” he explained. “They’re amazing.”

We opened the bedroom closet, which had been nonsensically whitewashed from top to bottom. I began to suspect that a heinous crime was being covered up in this apartment.

“What do you think?” Dave asked.

“I can’t think,” I responded as 1,966,254 of my brain cells fizzled to a combustible pulp in a single second. Dave informed me that my face was turning unusually red.

“Do you have any questions?” asked the landlord from the other room, swiffing his Swiffer.

“Can I paint it?” I asked.

“That depends. I don’t want you painting the walls some obnoxious color, like black. Just give me a color and I’ll tell you if you can paint it.”

I suggested yellow as the most inoffensive color I could produce without a functioning cerebellum, and permission to paint was granted.

“Yellow,” he said thoughtfully. “I actually like yellow. That’s nice.”

The kitchen was green and yellow, with appliances that were older than my parents. I glanced at the stove, missing two spiral burners on the range.

“Does the stove work?” I asked.

He told us it did, and to prove it, he set his Swiffer against the counter and turned on the gas. I cringed, expecting the volatile apartment air to ignite. Luckily, it did not.

The landlord showed us the inside of the refrigerator, which seemed to have yellowed with age like a fine artisan cheese.

Dave and I thanked the landlord and took the forms for the apartment to the car. We drove around the area, admiring the parks, the ponds, and the proliferation of Dunkin Donuts establishments. There was a nice indie movie theater and a university, but otherwise the area was rather barren.

We talked ourselves into the apartment, which was pretty reasonable for our price range.

Just as we came to a conclusion, Dave’s phone rang and the landlady of a studio apartment invited us for a viewing.

Perhaps I was still loopy from the first tour, but the second apartment seemed great even though it was in the basement of somebody’s house. Perhaps it was the neutral aroma in the air, or the owner’s furniture filling the rooms, but I actually could imagine this apartment sustaining life. Little ceramic mushrooms decorated the fully-functional stove.

The couple that lived there had a closet full of board games and a hallway stacked with DVDs and CDs. Dave and the owner bonded over a board game. In the end, we were chosen to be the lucky tenants because of Dave’s good taste in obscure board games.

I imagined someone viewing the first apartment, chatting ecstatically with the landlord about the superiority of the Swiffer and discussing educational television. Somewhere out there is the ideal tenant for that place, too.

A Spoonful of Neutrons

I know a precocious young boy with an IQ of bazillion. One day he walked up to me at my retail job and said, "Let me guess: this is your holiday job. You graduated from college and you work here?"

I recently spent a long, intimidating ride home eating ice cream with this young fellow. As usual, he made me question the value of my college education as I stuttered out answers to his questions with my palms sweating profusely. After spewing out a mouthful of scientific trivia, he said, "It's amazing what you can learn on Yahoo, isn't it?"

At one point we argued fiercely about whether zombies would be considered human and attempted to draw parallels between cells and viruses. We discussed the probability of the apocalypse in 2012 and whether the local drive-in movie theater would bother tacking up a “Closed Forever” sign in the event of such a global catastrophe occurring at the end of the season.

He asked me many questions, some with familiar answers, others which merely baffled me.

Do you know how much a spoonful of neutrons would weigh on Earth?

Do you understand how the Mayan calendar works?

What has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?

Do you know any “yo mama” jokes?

Did you know that a virus isn’t a living cell?

In fact, I did know that a virus isn’t a living cell, thank you very much. So that is one point for me against an elementary school child. You think you can beat me at this game? There must have been at least one biology class that I did not spend drawing cartoons of myself sleeping.

The really shameful thing is that I don't know any yo mama jokes off the top of my head. Not even one.

Nematodes in Popular Culture

In Season 1, Episode 1 of Doug, called “Doug Bags a Nematode,” Doug captures a nematode to become the hero of Bluffington. The supposed nematode, which resembles a small, lumpy moose, turns out to be Doug’s dog Porkchop under a coating of mud.

In Season 3, Episode 2 of Real Housewives of New Jersey, Melissa says, “The nematodes looked just like spaghetti. I’m Italian, so I know what looks like spaghetti.”

In the film Inception, Dom Cobb’s team is forced to move more quickly through the second level of Robert Fischer’s dream as nematodes infiltrate the labyrinthine dreamscape.

“Nematodes” is a song by Billy Currington, on his album “A Little Bit of Everything.” In the chorus, he sings:

I’ve been down some ugly roads

But at least I don’t have nematodes

“Nematode” is a song by Of Montreal, on the album “The Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy.” The song makes no mention of nematodes, but it is characteristic of the band to fuse a titular reference to a devastating parasite with buoyant melodies and hooks.

In the Soap Opera “General Hospital,” 12 year old Michael Corinthos III falls into a seemingly permanent coma after a nematode infection causes damage to his brain. Two years later, Dr. Patrick Drake removes the nematodes using an experimental surgical procedure and awakens the now 17 year old Michael, now played by Drew Garrett.

My Future Illustrating Career

My senior project is becoming an ugly comic book. During my last senior project meeting, my adviser suggested that I draw an image for the cover. "I'll get to work on some stick figures," I said. "Whatever you want," she said. After advising me for several months and watching me turn my original project into an extensive series of sex jokes, she no longer expects me to be serious. This is for the best.

The following cartoons are illustrations,from my short story collection (with one dramatic work), "Grownups." Once again, I have resorted to the impressive technology of photographing them with my digital camera and shamelessly posting them on the internet. Please talk me out of using them.

Cover?

The Diary of Stanley Amadeus Pope

Babymaking

Magic Tricks

Grownups (The play)

or

or...

Perhaps I won't be an illustrator when I grow up after all.

Czech Word of the Day #225: Familiar, Known

(znah' mee)

Czech Word of the Day #49: Behind

Wood

I have about two and a half weeks before I leave for Prague, so I’m trying to focus on the important things that absolutely need to be done before I leave, such as refurbishing antique furniture. The furniture in question—two dressers, a headboard, and a matching mirror—is not necessarily antique. My mother acquired these pieces at a garage sale over the weekend for an unusually low price. They are going to replace the rickety wicker set that my cats have been using for a scratching post for the past fifteen years.

The pieces seem to be oak, and they are probably not actually antique. I noticed nearly the same set in Home Décor Magazine under the title “Inspired by Paris Flea Market Finds” and surrounded by several dozen Eiffel Towers of assorted sizes.

On Monday, my sister and I tackled the smaller set of drawers and we began to realize why the pieces were so inexpensive. We attacked the splotches of sticky goop in the top drawer with lemon juice on an old sponge. I was going to use an actual lemon, but my mom berated me for cleaning with an expensive citrus fruit. I used a bottle of Nature’s Nectar 100% Lemon Juice from Concentrate, which Mom insisted was the same thing anyways.

Since the lemon juice is far less precious than the lemons themselves, I made sure to use as much of the juice as possible and cleaned the entire dresser with it, as well as the mirror and headboard. If there was anything sticky, I avoided it early on.

After the lemon bath, there seemed to be several infinitely impossible problems to tackle. Cleaning the top of the dresser, I noticed the name “BOB” carved into the wood. I was annoyed that it could not have been a more imaginative name. A name more appropriate for furniture that seems to be inspired by Art Nouveau would have sufficed. I think “ALGERNON,” for instance, is a charming name. There’s something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence.

A few inches away I discovered “STEVE.” I could find only one place where the varnish was somewhat intact. It looks as if there was a table runner at some point protecting the wood from such crude adolescents as BOB and STEVE. The condition of the long dresser causes me to suspect that it was left outdoors for a while, but that the table runner was left in place.

I can think of no methods for removing the names that don’t involve destroying the wood or burning the dresser to the ground. The chips in the wood and the rusted pulls I can take, but the names make me feel as though I’m locked in a room with a bunch of insider jokes that I’m not allowed in on.

My sister and I took out the drawers. When she set one of the lemon-soaked sponges onto the unfinished wood inside of the drawer-crevice, it instantly turned black in the dust, which was at least an inch high. We broke out Venus, my pink vacuum cleaner for my dorm room. My sister vacuumed the drawers while I lemoned up the mirror. Every once and I while she would start screaming “Spiders! Spiders!” or “There’s cobwebs in the drawer! They’re black! Why are they black?!?” Then I would take over until the spiderly remains were careening down Venus’ rubber tube.

We were about to start vacuuming the inside of the dresser when my sister pointed out some paper in the top drawer-crevice. “Is it a forgotten private manuscript?!?” I cried, diving into the drawer-crevice for the stack of loose-leaf. I have been reading Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard, which unfairly raised my hopes. Unfortunately, the yellowing lined pages did not contain a philosophical correspondence between BOB and STEVE. I was disappointed to find them all blank.

My sister had to vacuum the inside of the dresser because the sound of the brush attachment on unfinished wood, for me, is like nails on a chalkboard or a screaming kitten. I did need to assist with the removal of a spider, the species of which may have become extinct since the last time the drawer was removed about a hundred years ago.

I polished all of the rusted pulls with a paste of vinegar, salt, and flour. When I got the paste on the wood, I promptly wiped it with a wet sponge. After a few hours of this tedious work, I realized that the wet sponge was just spreading it around. I wiped it thoroughly with a second wet sponge. This time, it looked as though I destroyed the varnish. The catastrophe was much like the time Spongebob and Patrick got white paint on Mr. Krabs’s first dollar.

I had about a day’s worth of anxiety that I ruined new old furniture. Last night at about ten I was unable to bear the suspense and I wiped the dresser with a polish that was essentially homemade salad dressing. This seems to have done the trick. The only thing left to do now is get the smell out of the drawers. Baking soda and vinegar don’t seem to be doing the trick. I’m worried that the smell is mothballs, in which case all the plastic in the world will decompose before the smell dissipates.

Today I intend to tackle the taller dresser in a similar manner. I’m on the lookout for new species of spiders and a carving of “BOB+STEVE 4EVER.”