I am sure this paragraph has touched all the internet users

I’ve started getting a lot of spam comments on this site. Of course, it’s perilous to assume—maybe I just have a lot of anonymous fans who really want to get me a deal for online casinos and Spanish real estate.

Most of these comments don’t appear on the blog itself for some reason. Blogger sends them directly to my email, though, and they’re starting to add up.

Of course, now that the election is over, I needed something to fill the extra space in my inbox.

By far the most popular post among my artificial adherents is this one I wrote in 2011 about cleaning refrigerators. I never expected my humble message to touch so many lives, but recent responses indicate that I have rendered humanity a great service.

Thank you, robots. I don’t know what to say.

But my vomit-prevention skills are not all that I have to offer. When it comes to frenzied eradication of vermin, I live to serve:

Also, my inability to function without caffeine could set me up for a major career change:

Not everyone is so congratulatory, though. For example, this fellow doesn’t find my pre-barf noises convincing because I failed to cite authoritative sources.

Despite familiarity with the concepts of spambots, internet trollery, and general sanity, every time I read this post I’m tempted to track the guy down and “unite the ideas” for him.

Intellectually I know that none of these comments, positive or negative, come from entities that have even glanced at my writing. That doesn’t keep me from reading them, though. It’s a lot like checking horoscopes—if you try hard enough, you can arrange to believe that they actually apply to you.

That’s why I keep clicking on the notifications—because of the possibility that A. Nonymous really does want to give me a shout out from Porter, Texas via his Russian blog.

It’s also why I’m applying extra vigilance to my spellcheck regimen:

Yet despite it all, jumbled in with the deceptions and false compliments, there lie a few noble spammers who still believe in straightforward honesty.

Extra Credit: http://xkcd.com/632/

Secrets

Lots of people have life-altering secrets.

Some of them aren’t even Harry Potter characters.

I have a few secrets of my own, and of course they are clearly in the same class.

There’s an art to keeping this stuff out of the public eye. Like the Dread Pirate Westley up there, I invest a lot of energy and cunning in misdirection and subterfuge to keep the people around me from discovering the dark truth.

The need for secrecy comes from a firm conviction that none of them share in my transgressions, and that the full revelation would be too much of a shock to bear.

It’s not as if I imagine other people to be devoid of complicated inner lives. I just tend to suspect they might be better than I am.

Also, no, we never had a second flavor of pudding. Why do you ask?

Take One Down, Pass It Around

The music teacher at my elementary school, Mrs. Collins, was very serious about her role in molding the morals of America’s future leaders.

She did not take chances.

That is why we all learned this song in the second grade:

Ten bottles of milk on the wall,
Ten bottles of milk,

If one of those bottles should happen to fall,

There’d be nine bottles of milk on the wall.

Mrs. Collins edited a few other songs as well, including removing all the racy bits from that salacious ditty “Let It Snow.”

I was already familiar with the flexible nature of song lyrics, though, thanks to one of my family’s several vaguely twisted hobbies. Early on, my dad taught us the John Denver favorite “You Fill Up My Sinuses,” along with Willie Nelson’s classic “Squash a Toad Again.”

Naturally, the improved editions of popular children’s songs were also a big hit at school.

It turned out that my family’s sensibilities were not quite a match for the Mrs. Collins School of public decency. I’m just glad she never found out about “The House at Poo Corner.”

Extra Credit: Popular Song Titles Which Have Been Altered so as Not to Offend the Very Prudish

Speedy Grease

I recently got an oil change at an establishment that, to avoid attention from their legal department, I will call “Speedy Grease.”

My town has almost 20 Speedy Grease locations, which is good because I can never return to any of the three I have used so far. The first time I couldn’t figure out how to pull up to the service bay, so now they know that I’m not competent to care for a vehicle. The second time I absentmindedly tried to get in my car without paying, so that crew knows about my tenuous grasp on the conventions that govern society.

In my shame, I slunk away to a third Speedy Grease shop. This time I managed the whole transaction with only minimal failures of sentience.

All that success went to my head, and it took until Monday to notice the impressive constellation of scratches on my windows. These new decorations can only have come from that adorable little dance where they pretend to wash your windows, presumably using an old sweatshirt stuffed with gravel.

I was upset for about ten minutes, and then the battle joy started seeping in. After work, I got to go yell at Speedy Grease!

I love the prospect of a conflict that calls for righteous speech-making. Planning out a biting diatribe satisfies my primal need for occasional violence, with the added bonus of minimizing the bloodshed. On the other hand, 100% of confrontations work out better in my head than in reality. Typically, I’ll plan something like this:

…but thanks to a genetic tendency toward anger-crying, I usually discharge that frustrated energy through my eyeballs in the most humiliating way possible:

This is the same recipe by which I accidentally got a grade changed in college. It only takes a few key ingredients:

One misunderstood assignment...

One attempt to explain...

A double handful of panic about damaging a GPA over an elective music class...

…and one terrified grad student instructor who did not see this coming.

Ultimately, though, I did not so much as sniffle at the Speedy Grease guy. I also didn’t get such impressive results. In fact, the reward for my little wrath spree doubles as its own punishment: I have to go back and face that same crew to redeem my 50% discount on another oil change.

At least now I know which direction the door opens.

P.S. If you are forming a band, you can have "Wrath Spree" for free.

How I Keep Injuring Myself in Progressively Lamer Ways

Someone gave me a diary when I was about six, and all through elementary school I would unlock it once a year or so to write another variation on “My brother is anoeeing when he trys to play with my freinds.”

Shortly after the entry on a possible monster with bloody eyes in the church basement, there’s a whole page dedicated to “I want a Broken arm or fott please.” This sentiment was inspired by numerous classmates who, unlike me, were awesome enough to arrive at school with day-glo casts for weeks at a stretch.

Broken limbs didn’t just get you special permission to sit in the rocking chair for story time; they also proved that you led a life of incredible daring.

I could not compete.

My childhood lack of grievous bodily harm has matured into a lifelong talent for injuring myself in spectacularly undramatic ways. I still get hurt occasionally; I just do it in the least interesting manner possible.

A Few Examples:

• I grew really fast one summer in middle school, which made my legs hurt a lot. I also spent half of 7th grade limping due to not damaging my knee in any discernable way.
• In high school I developed an ingrown toenail, and then I contracted a case of Persistent Wrist Pain Caused by Nothing.
• In college I strained my shoulder by reaching too enthusiastically for a salt shaker, and one morning I was physically unable to get out of bed because I had coughed all night and worn out my core muscles.

Given this history, I wasn’t too concerned a couple of weeks ago when my right arm developed a sudden enthusiasm for random, stabbing pains. Since I could still scoop ice cream, the problem wasn’t seriously affecting my way of life.

Pretty soon, though, my shoulder wouldn’t rotate much without expressing its rage. I started feeling like a poorly designed action figure—one where you try to activate the Kung Fu Grip, but his arm won’t come back all the way because his veiny bicep collides with his rippling pecs.

After a few days of using my left arm for everything, that hand started to hurt, too. A small part of my brain acknowledged what was logically happening, but the rest of it was busy panicking.

Finally, I woke up to a right arm that couldn’t even reach my face and the firm belief that every movement was sawing away at permanent nerve damage. My roommate found me on my bed waiting for the clinic to open, whimpering quietly and imagining the worst possible things that could happen.

When you arrive at Urgent Care with a case of “my arm hurts,” they smirk and send you to sit next to “I have the sniffles” for a couple of hours. My roommate sat patiently while I talked determinedly at her about anything except how I was probably dying.

When my frothing anxiety and I finally got to see the doctor, he revealed that I had an acute attack of tendinitis caused by something thrilling like typing wrong. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was worried. It’s probably not physically possible for me to be injured in any interesting and dramatic way. I’ve never even had strep throat—I’ve just had a lot of cases of, “Oops, never mind, it turns out that’s just another cold.”

I ended up with a sling, some low-end drugs, and a diagram of goofy-looking rotator cuff exercises.

This episode has been the crowning achievement of my lame injury history so far. I had an immediate visual representation of my suffering, but nothing good to back it up when people asked what happened.

I wore the sling for the better part of a week, and I spent most of that time trying to come up with a better story.

Also, it turns out that tendinitis sticks around for quite a while once you develop it. This means that I’m still putting the sling back on about once a week, and all the same sympathetically eager questions crop up again.

(P.S. If you were naming an affliction of the tendons, wouldn’t you spell it “tendonitis”? So would I.)