Stranger Than Fiction

I make things up.

The stories I tell on this blog are true, allowing for a little artistic exaggeration and simplification. But in real life, I’m prone to telling anecdotes that I think would have been funny, whether or not they actually occurred.

I also feel compelled to invent common ground in uncomfortable social situations. This happens a lot in my receptionist job because silent people hovering near my desk make me nervous, so I feel pressure to make conversation about something. Also I’m fairly confident that I won’t ever see them again and have to remember my story.

I’m trying to limit this habit, because it’s going to get me some day.

My conscious mind isn’t the only one with this problem, though. Secret portions of my brain regularly invent stories without permission and pass them on to me as truth.

In 7th grade English, we spent a few weeks on song lyric analysis. One of the groups picked “Eleanor Rigby” for their project, and in the days before easy online music access, I borrowed my parents’ copy of The Beatles 1 for some extra home studying.

I also carefully explained to them the assignment, its purpose, and the specific song I would be playing, because somehow I had come to believe that the Beatles were an objectionable, adults-only source of entertainment off-limits to me, like The Simpsons. I didn’t have headphones or a Walkman until high school, so I sat by our 1990-made boom box and conscientiously stopped the disc after my assigned song. Once I turned the volume way, way down and let “Penny Lane” play next, fearfully waiting to be caught or corrupted.

My parents, of course, had no problem with the Beatles and were happy to have their children listen to this music (perhaps with a few exceptions). Six months later, they rented A Hard Day’s Night to get us some more culture. I had no reason to attach a stigma to the Fab Four—my brain just wanted to mess with me.

I should have expected this cerebral betrayal, having fallen victim to a similar trick the year before.

In 6th grade orchestra class we learned to play “Jamaica Farewell,” which features this chorus:

I’m sad to say I’m on my way

Won’t be back for many a day

My heart is down, my head is turning around

I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town

The teacher noted that her 5-year-old son had a kids’ version with some lyrics changed to avoid mentioning the singer’s girlfriend. I was puzzled because my mind had informed me years earlier that this song was about a kindly bus driver. Clearly, the little girl didn’t have enough money to pay the entire fare, so he couldn’t take her farther than Kingston. He was really torn up about it.

Whatever is wrong with me, it has evidently been going on for quite some time.

Moving forward, I’m trying to deal with my predilection for fiction by at least recognizing when I’m making things up.

I’m still refining my approach.

Have Some Candy

I might be the teensiest bit anal retentive.

I work at the front desk in my office, which puts me in charge of the candy jar. I have plenty of prior training for this job responsibility, thanks to my lifelong social skills compensation technique of offering people sweets as an inducement to like me.


I am also thoroughly provisioned because the nearby yuppie grocery store sells saltwater taffy in individual bins, so I can count out an equal number of each flavor.

It’s important to ensure proper flavor distribution in the jar, so I sort out all the taffy into little piles on the desk and then layer them in. One of my coworkers caught me in the middle of this process last week.





You can’t let all the strawberry ones end up on the bottom.

Come to think of it, this compulsion toward order is probably behind my inability to appreciate the “shuffle” feature of my MP3 player.

When I finally get tired of listening to the Muppet Movie album on repeat, shuffle always sounds like a great option. But then every song that plays reminds me of two or three more I want to hear. The buildup of music options is compounded by uncertainty: With 8 gigs of music, it could be weeks before I get around to “Uptown Girl.” Worse yet, what if I change my settings in a moment of weakness and disrupt the shuffle cycle? Then it’ll start replaying stuff I’ve already listened to, and my thirst for '80s falsetto will lie unquenched amid the horde of other songs stabbing at me all over.


It’s a lot of pressure.

TANGENT: I also get anxious around comic strips that repeat the same word a lot of times for effect, because I have to read it all thirty times even though I’m aware that that’s stupid. Panels like this take me ten minutes in case I missed one:


Luckily, I’ve discovered a solution to the music attack problem. My player lets me run through all the songs in alphabetical order, irrespective of artist or album. The effect is a lot like shuffle because “Babylon” is followed by “Back in the USSR,” but I can feel secure in the knowledge that I will eventually get to everything that’s on there.


This method is also good for discovering that I have three different copies of “Hakuna Matata.” The only down side is that now I want to make graphs of which letters are most common for starting song titles.

Ain't You Heard of My School?

I'm going to post something with pictures soon, but just now I experienced a moment of transcendent revelation and could not deprive you of the same joy.

I was in my car listening to the Classic Hits station and thinking about how vapid and inane modern radio is in the shadow of the Glory Days of Music in the (your favorite decade here).

Then the Music Memories DJ played this song. It was a top 10 hit across the nation.

As it turns out, the '60s had tripe, too. We usually just forget about it because of Rubber Soul and stuff. I kind of feel better now.

The moral of the story: When some loud braggart tries to put you down and says his school is great, tell him right away, "Now what's the matter, buddy? Ain't you heard of my school? It's number one in the state!"

(P.S. The Beach Boys wrote a lot of cool songs. That does not make this one of them.)

Your Mother Should Know

I made Muddy Buddies this weekend. That’s where you soak Chex cereal in calories to create the most divine chocolate-peanut butter snack food ever to exist.

I was making them late at night for a Halloween party, and of course I had to keep tasting to make sure they came out okay. The following chart summarizes my experience with this process:

As it turns out, eating a pound and a half of sugar at midnight is not just a bad idea right then. It is also a bad idea the next morning.

Waking up with the digestive equivalent of a hangover was the latest in my body’s series of educational seminars, together titled “Your Mother Was Right.”

Apparently, “All that sugar will make you sick!” is an actual fact of nature and not just a way for parents to suck the fun from Halloween and birthdays. Who knew?

I also owe my mom credit for “It’s past your bedtime!” Sleep deprivation has been an awesome way for me to accomplish important stuff like reading Chuck Norris jokes online, but I’m gradually realizing that it has legitimate consequences such as exhaustion and acting stupid.

Extreme sleepiness routinely makes me too dumb to get another blanket or go to the bathroom when I wake up cold or...whatever. But I reached a new low last week when I woke up at 4 a.m. too dumb to roll over.

I had fallen asleep immediately upon contact with the bed, and it took a couple of hours for my body to work out that it was really uncomfortable and try to get my brain to fix the situation. Unfortunately, when I regained consciousness with my neck bent like an elbow, I couldn’t work out what to do about it.

So, Mama, I’m going to bed now. And I ate real food for supper along with my ice cream. I’m definitely going to keep swallowing watermelon seeds, though.

Extra Credit: Though she was born a long, long time ago...

Odometer

I got into my car a few days ago and noticed that the odometer looked like this:

YES! In only 9.2 miles—within the course of the day’s commute—all the digits would be lined up in order! For a precious tenth of a mile, I would attain a fleeting taste of obsessive-compulsive nirvana. All I had to do was pay attention until the Great Conjunction came.

Anyone whose heart has never thrilled to see a clock reading 11:11 may as well stop reading here, but it’s up there with seeing a straight flush come together in your poker hand. I’ve spent a lot of time awake in the dark waiting for 12:34 or 3:21, as well as any time that reads the same way upside down or backwards.

I also like to check the page numbers in books to know when I’ve reached the exact middle. If I don’t read the numbers for a while and overshoot, I’ll backtrack to the right page and skim it again for any special import or hidden messages. In elementary school I got into the habit of mentally doubling and halving every page number just in case I was missing something exciting.

The odometer is more urgent than clocks or pages, though, because this sequence of numbers will never come again unless you drive a magic car that can run for more than a million miles, exceed the number of available digits, and start over again at zero.

So on the day in question I started driving, glancing down at the gauge every three seconds for about a mile. Then suddenly I had to change lanes. Then I turned a corner. Then my usual route was closed for construction, and a school crossing guard stopped traffic, and a song I liked came on the radio.

All at once I was in the parking lot at work, checking the dash to see when I should buy gas, and I saw it:

I had let that precious moment slip away, and it was gone forever. How could I forgive myself? How long until the next magical number would come up? Would I miss that one, too?

I feel like I’m betraying my car. It’s as if I’m the mother and he* is a small child who keeps trying to show me fabulous gymnastic feats, but I’m always looking away at the moment he backflips off the monkey bars.

Every time I fail him, he finds something else to show me—how about 0987678? 0987890? 0988888? I missed them all by a few miles. For the last one I even dangled a sheet of paper on the dashboard over the display to remind me to watch carefully during my next drive, but I was still led astray by the senseless frivolity of paying attention to traffic.

Now my only hope of anal-retentive satisfaction is to watch like a hawk for 0989898. In about 24,000 miles I’m going to need a failsafe system for catching 1234567, or my brain will probably implode. Meanwhile, I have to get back to my book, because I’m almost to page 222, which is half of 444, and if you read the last letter in every line it spells out your secret enemy’s Facebook username and password.

A note to parents, roommates, and coworkers: Not everyone who obsesses about this stuff is crazy. At least that’s what the voices tell me.

*Maybe your cars, ships, and trains are all female. Mine has an established personality and can be coaxed or encouraged verbally. He likes a pat on the driver-side front quarter panel. He loves me back. Go define sanity your own way somewhere else.