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23

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#23. I worked for a brain surgeon when I was twenty-three years old.

Which is not to say that I actually performed brain surgery, you understand. Oh, they’d let me stick my hand in there to feel the squishy brains, of course, and occasionally I’d get to sew up afterwards, but I didn’t get to perform actual surgery. Which was kinda disappointing. I mean, it’s not rocket science or anything. Feh.

But really, the only time I was in the surgery room was to pick up nasty little pieces of brain and bone to take back to the lab. Very Frankenstein, don’t you think? It was the highlight of my day at the time. Usually, I’d stick a pillow on my back under my shirt and shuffle in like Igor, asking whether the patient’s name was ‘A.B. Normal’. Yeah, the docs didn’t dig that too much. It’s amazing that I lasted for nearly two years, when you get right down to it.

22

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#22. I was kicked out of graduate school when I was twenty-two.

Yes, gentle friends, ’tis true. I was unceremoniously booted from an institution of higher learning, and not for streaking down the hallway, or pissing on the trophy case. Well, not just for that, anyway, if you can believe the court proceedings.

No, instead, they told me I was ‘inexperienced’. That I needed more ‘seasoning’, to ‘build my skills’, and to ‘get a fucking clue’. But these vague, unspecific homilies — though probably kinder than stark reality — were of little use to me, and I set off to find my way in the world. Well, actually, I played an awful lot of golf. And yes, if you’re keeping score at home, I played an awful lot of awful golf. I never promised you Arnie Palmer, folks. Or even Rosy. Get over it.

You see, the institution of higher learning which decided I was unworthy of their educational efforts made one small error when they shit-canned me. They did it in June, but had to pay me through August. And a finer summer of libation, slothery, and golfitatiousness has never been seen before or since, I daresay. I took a couple of weeks out of my busy schedule of sleeping, drooling, drinking, and putting to line up a job for the fall. And then I dove right back in. My golf game, my tan, and my alcohol tolerance were at their utmost during those heady, magical times. Sometimes, I look back in wistful longing of the days when I had no job, and yet was getting paid to do one.

(Hey, wait… that’s my situation now! What the hell? I’m not tanning, or golfing, or even particularly boozing these days. What gives? No, instead I’m painting and mowing and doing laundry. When the hell did I get lame and uncool, anyway? Harrumph. I blame the house for all of this. Back in apartment-land, it never went down like this. Scarier, and messier, and often with cops involved, but never — never like this. Man, I’m old.)

So, anyway, long story short(er), I hopped into a job after getting the professorial boot. At the hospital attached to the medical center for the same school, as it happened. You know, just so I could keep an eye on those bastards, to see what they were up to. Miserable dickheads. I skulked around at that job for two years — two — just waiting for them to slip up, when I finally got The Idea™. I decided to get back into school. The same school. Only in a different program, where everyone would love me and I’d make lots of friends and be the star of the class. The absolute shining star! That’d show those bastards back in the old program that I was not just some clueless, unseasoned, unskilled boob. No, dammit. I was a clueless, unseasoned, unskilled boob not to be trifled with! So there!

So, I applied for this other, fancier, program and got in. And lorded it over the people I knew from the ‘other’ program, who were now entering their fourth years. I gloated that my program was better. They gloated that they’d be out making money before I ever ran out of classes to take. We each agreed that the other party was a raging dickhead. And we laughed it off and went out for beers. It was all very well-adjusted, I assure you.

Then I was back in school, in my shiny new program. Taking classes, and cramming for tests, and reading papers. I wasn’t the ‘shining star’ of the class, exactly, but I did well enough. I got good grades, and made lots of drinking buddies, and played all the requisite reindeer games. It was cool. So, of course, at the end of my second ‘first year’, having shown my old profs a lesson or two, I dropped out. Just left, without all that much warning, frankly. Betcha didn’t see that one coming, did you?

But see, I had discovered another profession that I enjoyed more than what I was studying. It was hot, and interesting, and downright sexy. You know, in a manly sort of way. So, after giving it a few weeks of secret thought, I jumped ship. I decided I’d had enough of school and ditched it, and never looked back. It’s one of the better decisions that I’ve ever made. Well, sober decisions, anyway. Most of those don’t turn out to be nearly so interesting, or life-altering.

So, do I miss school? No, not really. I had some laughs in both programs I was a part of — probably too many laughs, if I’m being completely honest. And I didn’t get a degree from either. I’m stuck with just my BS degree from my BS college. So, yeah, it would have been nice to go through the whole shebang, and come out the other end of the meat grinder with a PhD. ‘Doctor Charlie,’ I could have been. But it was too much work and not enough reward, so I bagged it for something I liked better. Lots of people do it every day, so I don’t feel too bad.

Still, my wife did it. Got her PhD, that is. So there is a ‘Doctor Missus Charlie’. But she’s cool. She doesn’t lord it over me, or make me call her ‘Doctor’, or anything like that. Well, unless we’re playing doctor, of course. Then, she’s the naughty general practitioner, and I’m the innocent patient, coming in for a routine ‘full physical’. It’s all business until she asks me to cough, and then, look out! That’s when the tongue depressors and cotton swabs fly, and my stethoscope starts heating up. ‘Oh, doctor! Oh! Doctor! Oh!‘

Okay. That really doesn’t happen. I just didn’t have a good way to end this post. Sprinkling a little sex in there seemed to be a good idea at the time. But, of course, I was corrected by my wife, and asked to pen this retraction note. So, no, we don’t play doctor that way at all. (We do play it another way, though, which is… oh. Right. Sorry, hon. I’ll be good now.) So forget the whole doctor-playing thing. I never should have written it. I should have run that by my wife before I slung it out there for all to see. She’s the smart one in the family, you know. I just don’t have very good judgement in these matters. Maybe I should have stayed in school, yes?

21

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#21. My first, and last, interest in politics came when I was twenty-one years old.

I was in college, and was nominated for fraternity secretary. Now, you have to understand — this was a pretty low-key position. There were a couple of official duties, but the main responsibility was to write and distribute a newsletter each week to the constituency. A humorous newsletter, with some wit and sarcasm mixed in to break up the actual news items. Dammit, I was born for this fuckin’ job!

So, the day of elections came. It turns out that I was up against a guy that was known as a slacker. A do-nothing, lie-on-the-couch, irresponsible layabout. But a popular layabout. When he wasn’t shirking responsibility and mooching other people’s food, he was getting along swimmingly with a certain faction of our group that was well-liked and respected. He was part of the ‘in’ crowd, I suppose you could say.

Still, I thought I had it won. Clearly, the guy wasn’t going to actually do anything if elected. Surely, people would see that. Plus, the guy wasn’t funny at all. If it was laughs they wanted in their weekly rag, then I was the man for the job. And what’s more, I wanted to do the job. I knew I could handle it, and I’d enjoy doing it. It was a perfect match.

So, of course, I lost. We left the room for the vote, so I don’t know by how much, but looking back, it may well have been a landslide. I hung with a smaller, less visible group of friends, and even a lot of them probably went with the crowd, just based on their personalities. Plus, I was never much of a ‘glad-hander’, nor am I very good at tooting my own horn. So while I knew that I could do the job, and wanted the job, probably few other people did. And so I lost.

And that was it for me and politics, or anything like it. I’d never been interested in elections or campaign details before, on any level, and this experience only deepened my distaste for such things. It was even more obvious to me than ever — elected offices are not filled on merit; they’re glorified popularity contests. It’s even worse in national elections, where most people vote like sheep for their chosen party, all the way up and down the ballot, ignorant of the virtues and vices of any of the actual candidates. But even at the lowest level, the ones who are elected are those with the right friends or the loudest trumpets, or both. And I’m not really the sort to have either, nor do I agree with any organization being run based on those criteria. And so, I’ve never really been interested in politics since then. Too many ignorant or mis-informed people sway the vote in any election; the signal-to-noise (or intelligent-informed-voter-to-blithering-idiot, technically speaking) ratio is just too low for me.

So, I choose to sit on the sidelines. Not the most noble way to handle things, I suppose, but I’m awfully busy with other shit in my life without trying to inform the masses of the various stances and platforms of every politico who throws his or her hat in the ring. Not to mention the fact that many people wouldn’t listen — it’s ‘Democrat all the way!‘, or ‘Republican till I die!‘, or even ‘Give me Green, or give me death!‘. Who can battle against such near-religious fervor? And who the hell would want to try? Not me. All I want to do is write funny notes, and sprinkle in a few news items now and then. So that’s what I’m doing. And I didn’t need anyone to elect me to the post, either. Suck on that, fraternity saps!

20

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#20. I had a long-distance relationship with my wife for twenty months.

It was just about the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Sure, we saw each other from time to time during that year and a half or so — it’s not like I flew to Venus and back — but it was still tough to handle. I was in a new city, where I didn’t know anyone (or what the hell I was doing at work, as it turned out). She was still at school, filling her days and nights with classes, parties, and old friends. It was a pretty stressful time for me.

Of course, I learned to make do. I picked up a few friends, and we found the ‘quarter draft’ nights at the local watering holes. I even became a regular at one particularly good Mexican restaurant-bar combination. So life wasn’t all bad, by any stretch of the imagination. I even got in a lot of work on my golf game the first summer I was there, through a set of circumstances that included having a lot of time on my hands and getting paid for two months for a job I was asked to stop doing.

But day to day, it was tough. My now-wife and I (you know, as opposed to my then-wife, which didn’t exist) talked just about every night, and shared a weekend once a month or so, but it was a far cry from the near-constant companionship we’d had back in college. We went to a small school, with a tiny campus, and spent most evenings after dinner together. And then suddenly, my evenings were spent watching ‘Sanford and Sons‘ reruns and eating Ramen noodles. Quite the shock, let me tell you. And I wasn’t going to cuddle with Lamont. No, sir.

But we worked at it, and we made it through. You can’t imagine how happy I was when she moved to town the summer after she graduated. Even if she did choose to go to rival Carnegie-Mellon, rather than my beloved University of Pittsburgh. But no matter — we agreed that both schools had their merits. Pitt had a bunch of slobbering idiots in its classes, but they’d wipe the field — or court, or ice — with any team CMU could offer up. And Carnegie-Mellon, while its student body was littered with nerds and geeks, would run logical circles around most Pitt students and leave them a confused, quivering collective lump of overheated gray matter.

And to top off my joy, she moved in just down the block. Right across from my parking lot, even! Goodbye, long-distance plans and flying a thousand miles for a smooch. Hello, walking — yes, walking — two hundred yards for a hug. Ah, life was finally good again.

And they’ve been good ever since. We did spent another couple of months apart when we moved to Boston — she took longer to finish her PhD than I did getting out of my job responsibilities in Pittsburgh, so I moved into temporary housing for a few weeks, until we could find an apartment of our own. But that was nothing like the long-distance hell I endured after graduating college. Oh, sure, I was back to Ramen noodles for a while, but that’s because I was lazy, not poor. Well, not as poor. And Sanford and Son had been replaced by Seinfeld and the Simpsons, so the entertainment was far superior, too. So even though I didn’t know anyone (again), it was only for a couple of months. I threw myself into my new work for a couple of weeks, and then found a nice pizza joint and a couple of bars to frequent, and pretty soon it was time to haul my wife and the rest of our things up to Boston. All in all, not too bad a time.

But I have to say, I wouldn’t recommend the long-distance relationship. Not if you can avoid it, anyway. We got through it, but we had almost two years’ worth of dating under our belts before we tried it, and it was still no picnic. It’s lonely, and nervewracking, and altogether crappy. I only hope that if we move again, we can go at the same time, so there’s no more of this shit that I have to endure. Or at the very least, maybe I’ll send her first next time, so I can stay here and hang out with old friends while I say goodbye. On the other hand, maybe that’s not such a good idea. My wife might get pissed off, and then when she finds all the good bars, she won’t tell me where they are. Yeah, I don’t think I can risk that. Some things are more important than paybacks, you know.

19

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#19. I won a weekend trip for two to Washington, D.C. when I was nineteen.

I went with my girlfriend at the time, who later turned out to be a raving psycho lunatic. Which I should have known, because she dated a friend of mine the year before, and he told me, ‘Do what you want. But she’s a raving psycho lunatic.‘ Well, I figured maybe he was just a little bummed, or jealous, so I asked a mutual friend of ours what he thought. He said, ‘Do what you want. But she’s a raving psycho lunatic.‘ So I asked some more friends. They told me — in unison, even — ‘Do what you want. But she’s a raving psycho lunatic.‘ Hmmm. I’m starting to see a pattern here.

Still, she was still friends with her old boyfriend, and hung around our house sometimes. How bad could she be? So when we got drunk at a party together and ended up sitting by a low wall on the edge of campus, laughing and talking and sharing some concoction I’d made from random liqours and juices, and she started kissing me, I had two thoughts. One, as you might expect, was this: ‘Do what you want. But she’s a raving psycho lunatic.‘ But the other was this: ‘You know, she’s kinda hot. And she’s kissing me. I didn’t start this shit. How bad could she be?‘ And so, I didn’t stop, and we ended up lying wrapped in a blanket on her dorm room floor, kissing and talking and basking in our lusty drunkenness. We dated for a few months, but it didn’t work out. We had our differences, and broke up. Well, I broke up. Over, and over, and over. Because she turned into a raving psycho lunatic, and I didn’t know what to do. The prophecy had come to pass, and I was the one standing there gaping, as though I’d never been warned. Dumbass.

But wait. Aren’t I supposed to be telling you about our trip? Yeah, definitely. And it was still early on for us when we went, too, so we actually had a very good time. Didn’t do a whole lot of sightseeing around the old capital, I’m afraid. But we had a very good time, nonetheless. Who needs sightseeing, anyway? I got your ‘Washington Monument’ right here, baby!

(Okay, I didn’t really say that. How embarrassing for me.)

Anyway, none of that — though riveting, I’m sure — is particularly germane to the story. You see, the real story is how I came to go on the trip in the first place.

You see, I’m a lucky bastard. Really, I am. I’m not sure that I believe in luck, exactly, but fortune does seem to smile on me rather often. As it did on a chilly Autumn day back in my sophomore year of college…

*wavy flashback lines* *wavy flashback lines* *wavy flashback lines*

Our school sponsored a ‘Flyaway’ contest every year. Maybe a lot of schools do this; maybe your school did/does/will do it. But just in case it didn’t/doesn’t/won’t, I’ll explain. Our ‘Flyaway’ worked like this: on Monday through Thursday, you could sign up for the contest. I forget where or how, but you only had a couple of days to get in, and you could only sign up once. No duplicate entries allowed.

Before I go any further, I should tell you a couple of things about the school I went to. First, it was vanishingly small, with about nine hundred students — even smaller than the high school I attended. Secondly, the college was in a small sleepy family-oriented town of about ten thousand people, in a ‘dry’ county, with few immediately available options for meals. This meant that almost everyone lived on campus, and most of us ended up eating in the cafeteria for lunch and dinner. Dinner lasted from five til seven, and was usually a major social event. Various groups and cliques staked out tables throughout the dining hall, and sat there day after day, meal after meal, year after year. By five-thirty, half the student body was usually crammed in there, and most of the rest piled in by six.

Hopefully, knowing all that will help with the rest of the story. If not, then I just spent five minutes telling you how depressing, isolated, and backwards my college experience was, for no good reason. Yip-fuckin’-pee.

So, anyway, just about all the students signed up for ‘Flyaway’. (Really, what the hell else did we have to do?) And it kicked into high gear on Friday at dinner. At five o’clock, the ‘fun committee’ or ‘Flyaway team’, or ‘losers who couldn’t get into the A/V club’, or whoever, dammit would write out the names of everyone who’d entered, and paste them along the walls of the main dining hall in the cafeteria. Picture a few hundred strips of paper, with names scrawled in magic marker for all to see, pasted high and low in a large circular room with fifteen=foot-high ceilings. Got it? Good, okay, that’s what it looked like.

From there, the rules were simple. At five, they started pulling names out of a hat. Your name gets called, your paper gets ripped from the wall, and unceremoniously flung onto the ground. Or crumpled and thrown away, I guess. Either way, nothing good would come of your paper. (Or you, for the purposes of this contest.) The last name standing won the prize, which was two airline tickets, leaving that night and returning on Sunday evening, and hotel accomodations in the target city in the meantime.

The selection process took two hours, right up until cafeteria closing at seven. And, of course, you couldn’t leave the place until your name was called, just on the slight chance that you’d beat the odds and be selected to escape to civilization for a weekend jaunt. I’d been there for the contest the year before, and been ridden out of contention in the first half-hour. I really didn’t expect anything different in my sophomore year, and I had shit to do that night. Important shit, like playing cards and watching TV back at the fraternity house. And I wasn’t gonna win the damned thing, so I wanted to hear my name called, so I could get on with my life.

My attitude changed from annoyed petulance to cool disinterest around six thirty. At that point, there were thirty or so names left. The herd had been thinned considerably; only the strongest had survived. Still, there was no way. Nobody wins these things.

By a quarter till seven, my heart was pounding. I still tried to seem calm and collected, but I perked up and looked expectantly around the table every time someone else’s name was called, and their banner was stripped from the wall. We were down to a dozen names or so left. From time to time, I’d steal a glance across the room, where my girlfriend was sitting with her sorority sisters. (Yeah, I said we were cliquish, didn’t I? You sat with your friends at dinner, and then you had the rest of the night to go make smoochy-smoochy with your significant other. It really was a fucked-up place. You had to be there.)

Six fifty-five. Four names left. By now, the name-calling had slowed to a crawl, the better to draaaaag the contest out to the full two hours. And the better to let the remaining hopefuls fidget and squirm in between names, of course. I did my best to maintain my composure and not hope or plan for anything. For one thing, I didn’t want to jinx my chances. More importantly, though, there were a lot of people staring at me, which made me very uncomfortable. I had to try to look cool. (Hey, I was still a teenager. Cut me some slack.)

At six fifty-eight, the next-to-last name came down. It was dowm to two. Me and some other dude. Some other dude and me. All the guys still at the table were cheering me now, slapping me on the back. ‘Hey, what if you win?‘ ‘Wow, wouldn’t that be cool?‘ ‘Dude, that trip’s gonna rock!‘

And in my head, the reply: ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!‘ Damn, didn’t they know they were jinxing it? And how was I going to look disinterested and unflapped when they were very clearly interested and flapping all around me? The next minute and a half seemed like an hour. Or the pause between the first time you say, ‘I love you‘ to someone, and their reply. Or calculus class. In other words, a goddamned lifetime.

Ah, but you know the end of the story already, don’t you? The suspense is lost on you, you big smart readers, you! Of course the next name called was some loser’s — not mine — and I stepped up to the podium to receive the tickets and learn that the cab would arrive in one hour to transport me and one guest of my choice to the airport. By that point, my guest of choice was standing by me, holding my hand and beaming. And we each left with our respective posse of well-wishers to go back and pack for the weekend.

My roommate (and best friend) was a bit disappointed that I didn’t take him along. After all, we’d known each other longer, and got along just swimmingly. And if we’d both been of drinking age — or even had convincing fake IDs at the time — I’d have given it some serious thought. We could have done a lot of damage together in the capital city that weekend, to ourselves and others (but mainly to our livers). But I wasn’t convinced that we’d be allowed to do it, no matter how well-practiced and ready we were, so it really was a non-starter. Plus, he wasn’t gonna stick his tongue halfway down my throat, or do a racy striptease at the foot of the hotel bed. Nor would I ask him, or even allow him, to. So I took the girl, as planned. T, I can only hope you forgive me. I was thinking with my nethers, I’ll admit, but you have to understand — she wasn’t a raving psycho lunatic yet. Not to me, anyway. So I took guaranteed hotel sex over possible drunken debauchery. Really, what else could I have done?

So, I won’t bore you with the actual trip. I think you’ve read plenty already about it. We got a ride to the airport, flew in, saw a few sights — but just a few — flew out, and caught a ride home. It may be the most exciting thing that happened to me during my college years. Not the best, or most life-altering, even, but certainly memorable. I’ll never forget sitting at that cafeteria table, trying not to look at anyone in particular for the last ten minutes of the contest, and hoping that I didn’t look like a damned dork, while secretly sending voodoo vibes to the lady at the hat to NOT. CALL. MY. DAMNED. NAME. (BITCH.) And it worked! How’s that for luck, boys and girls?