Donuts

When I was in preschool, I used to scribble on a piece of paper and say that it was a drawing of a donut. I think I knew that it didn’t look anything like a donut. It was roundish, at least, but thats where the similarities ended. It didn’t have a hole. It was all squiggly with crayon lines going every which way. It was tree green or sky blue or whatever color I pulled randomly out of the box. But it captured at the time what I must have felt when I thought of a donut. And sometimes, when I’m in Dunkin’ Donuts or Tim Hortons, I still think of those squiggly crayon donuts I used to bring home.

Kiki

Kiki was my sister’s hamster. She got this pet for her 8th birthday, making me 5 at the time. I always had the habit of calling Kiki “he.” I guess little boys tend to assume that all animals are male. But since it was my sister’s pet, we assumed it was female. We didn’t find out that Kiki was actually male until we took him to the vet. He had gotten some fabric caught on his teeth, which were badly in need of a trim. Of course, by this time, I had finally accepted that Kiki was female, and it would take some time thereafter for me to get used to calling him “him” again. The name Kiki would be awfully traumatic for a male hamster. This might have been the root of his emotional problems and subsequent misbehavior.

Hamsters are funny animals. They sleep all day. They can be moody and bite people. I guess that makes them pretty similar to professional musicians. They have this little useless half-inch of a tail. Kiki couldn’t get the hang of the hamster wheel. He would never actually get inside the wheel and run. He would kind of get next to it and climb up the side and spin it around, a little like that big wheel on “The Price is Right.” He was pretty resilient considering the abuse he faced. One time my sister stuck Kiki in a plastic toy airplane, and we had a hard time getting him out. He bit all of us at least once. If you got him riled up, he’d let out this pathetic little hamster squeal and then bite your finger or whatever body part was closest to him. Maybe he thought we were sticking a carrot into the cage when we stuck our hand in. He also bit the annoying neighbor girl a couple of times.

One time Kiki just got fed up and ran away from us. I guess my sister had him out of the cage, and he ran down into the basement. Our basement was, and still is to this day, a hopeless mess of a junk storage space, with lots of places a hamster could hide. We were never sure exactly where he went. There was a little hole in a corner of the basement wall, and we think he spent most of his time there. We got one of those humane traps meant to catch small rodents without killing them. It was the kind of mechanism where the animal would walk in and step on a trigger, causing the door to close behind. Each night, we would put a hamster pellet on the inside, past the trigger. Each morning, we would come back to find that the hamster pellet had been taken, but that the trap remained open. Finally, after about a week, we used peanut butter. We put it on a coffee filter or some little piece of paper, and put that in the trap past the trigger. That kept Kiki there long enough to trigger the trap. So after a weeks vacation in the basement, we had are cuddly, beloved little pet back, safe and sound.

Topper

My friends in high school were kind of strange. They were members of the drama club. They were also the majority of the scrabble club. In fact, I think they started that one just to have a club just for themselves, though they were pretty open-minded when other people would want to join. They had a locker cluster which they named "topper." It was named after a local weather guy on the news, Topper Shutt. I think the idea was that when all the lockers were open, it would be "Topper Open" but when they were closed.... They had a website dedicated to topper. I don't know if I was ever considered an "official" member of topper. I never had my own locker in the cluster. I was assigned one once, but it was before I was friends with them, and I was ousted. I did have honorary membership by senoir year, and my own page on the website. The name they gave me was Bobq, and my animal was "mynabird from the planet zork." I don't know how I feel about that. I've always felt that Zebulon was a better name for a planet. Its also a town in North Carolina, I think. The Bobq part was my own. I would always joke that my name was Bob, spelled with a silent q at the end. It was French. They like strings of silent consonants at the end of words. My friend even made me a bobq the mynabird email address to try to get me to use Yahoo personals. She had recently met some people that way and thought I should too. As it turned out, she met her husband that way and became the first in our group of friends to be married and, not surprisingly, the first to be divorced. Frankly, I was appalled at the time, and the email address got little use until I decided to use it as my extra, anonymous email address that had no connection to my real life. I still use the email occasionally, when I want to remain disconnected from whoever I'm talking to. Usually, at some point I'll migrate them to my real email address. But that email is pretty much the last remnant of much of my high school life.

Goatee

I had long hair and a goatee for a long time growing up. I kept the goatee for almost 10 years, and the long hair from middle school until my second semester of college, one semester too long. To make matters worse, since it was the late 90s, I had one of those Kurt Cobain, shaved underneath, overgrown bowl cuts. I grew the goatee a few years after growing my hair long, when I was 15. There are a couple of reasons for this decision. In middle school, I would occasionally meet people who were unsure of my gender. I wouldn’t meet them as much as respond to their vocal “criticisms” as I walked down the halls of my school. I was a few years past the age where the telemarketer on the phone would ask if I was the “lady of the house,” and I had no desire to relive those experiences.

The main catalyst in my decision to grow a goatee came when I was 15. I was playing in a jazz group that met and rehearsed at an assisted living group home housed in an apartment building in northwest DC. The people who lived there would come to watch us each time we met. They’d saunter or limp in to the best of their ability, assisted often by a walker, or sometimes they’d be wheeled in by one of the nurses. They brought with them the smells and sounds and complaints of old folks. They thought it was a concert, and would clap when we stopped in the middle of a tune. They must have wondered why we often played tunes several times in a row. It must have been about the second or third rehearsal that we had an especially crowded room and the only available seat was next to an elderly woman. After a minute or two, she turned to me and said, “Are you a boy or a girl?” in her thin, raspy, old lady voice. I was pretty used to this kind of question, so I said, “I’m a boy,” and she replied, “Then show me.” I was shocked, and decided to point at my somewhat shaggy sideburns. I didn’t realize at the time what I might have shown her to prove my masculinity. The thought didn’t even cross my mind until at least a few hours later. Instead of dealing with these questions, I decided to grow a goatee.

Box of Pants

I had a friend tell me once that he doesn't wear a pair of pants for more than 8 months. He wouldn't drive a car that's more than three years old. This blog is dedicated to the idea that pants are just pants. I'd like to open a store called Box of Pants, or maybe register a boxofpants.com, where for 7 dollars, you can buy a box full of pants. Assorted pants, different colors and styles. Maybe you pick a size and get to choose between mens or womens, maybe not. But there's bound to be something you like. And if there isn't, you can send it back.

This blog is kind of a random assortment of my life. I don't intend for it to be flashy. It is not supposed to be opinionated, full of rants and raves on various political issues that I may or may not know anything about. I'm not here to tell the world how it should be. This is just a window into who I am, or who I choose to present in a web forum open to everyone. No rants, just pants.