Hooray, it’s another story with barfing in it!

Taboo, in addition to being the vehement objection of a society to a forbidden behavior, is a word game that you probably have in your closet. Either one can be fun at parties, depending on the guest list.

In the version less likely to involve grave-robbing or ritual banishment, the object of Taboo is to get your teammates to guess the top word on a card by giving verbal hints. You have to do it without saying any of the other words on the card, though, which leads to sounding like you’ve recently discovered how to use a thesaurus.

One really sound way to succeed at this game is to own an older copy that has not taken into account the last fifteen years of pop culture and technological innovation.

Probably the most effective method, though, is just to have a lot of inside references and shared knowledge with your teammates. It doesn’t take a lot of rounds to figure out which couples, siblings, and roommates shouldn’t be allowed to play on the same team.

Shortly before we fine-tuned the separation rules, one of my friends pulled off an impressive play with her roommates that ended up derailing the game while the rest of us demanded to hear the full story.

It seems that she had recently experienced an unfortunate run-in with the kitchen hygiene hazards of communal living.

The roommates in question agreed that they had not harbored any plans for sponge-sniffing escapades, but it was thoughtful of her to take that risk so selflessly on their behalf.

Of course, success in Taboo is all about personal context. Depending on your lifestyle, that same clue could potentially work for at least half the deck.

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

I overheard one of the older ladies at my office taking down an email address over the phone a while ago. She did the best she could with her existing knowledge base.

It reminded me of many, many conversations in which my brother and I were operating in entirely separate universes of understanding.

In middle school, I considered myself to be exceptionally brilliant at interpreting these communication disconnects. As proof of my powers, I pointed to my own masterful understanding of an incident that unfolded in my 6th grade World History class.

Our textbook included little historical fiction introductions to each section as a way to bring students into the moment.

When we got to the chapter on European feudalism, the introduction detailed a ceremony in which a medieval landholder granted a fief to an underling:

“I will be faithful to you and defend you,” the kneeling vassal declared. The lord then placed a clod of earth in the man’s hand. The earth symbolized the vassal’s right to use this land in exchange for his service to the lord.

This story did not help my classmate Annabelle dive into the 12th century. One word in particular tripped her up.

Our history teacher did not pick up on Annabelle’s concerns about the separation of church and state in our classroom. Instead, he gave her a helpful and informative explanation of the historical structures involved.

Personally, I couldn’t wait until we took geometry.

Extra Credit: Email address it would be really annoying to give out over the phone (from McSweeney’s) 

NaNoWriMo II: Exo-Cuter and the Statue of Liberty

We’re hitting the home stretch of National Novel Writing Month. Anyone trying to reach the 50,000 word goal needs to be about 38,341 words in by now, especially if you’re planning to take a break for your turkey-induced nap on Thursday.

I, on the other hand, already promised not to write a novel, so I’ve been turning everything within reach orange instead. See, last month I was given this forty-pound Fairytale pumpkin:

So far, the first two thirds have become three pies, three meals, three dozen cookies, and three pounds of puree for later use, plus a light spray of pumpkin paste on every surface in the kitchen.

It’s important to do my part for promoting literature, though, and I still have a crate full of spiral notebooks from elementary school. Unlike every word I wrote in high school, all of this stuff happened long enough ago that by now it’s cute instead of mortifying.

Cowrite credit on the masterpiece below goes to my brother, who was six when I was nine. He had written the original story and shown it to me. Being older, obviously superior, and entirely without my own ideas, I decided that his version was dumb and I could improve it.

The first-grader was thus responsible for the character names, setting, and plot, including all events and strategies. I was in charge of dialog tags, adjectives, and stealing the phrase “calm yourself” from Disney’s Jafar.

Our mother didn’t think my exploitative reimagining was fair, but with that reasoning Hollywood would have had to close up shop twenty years ago.

Hello. My name is Ted. We are here in TechnoWorld. Here are Ringtail, Dabson, and Exo-Cuter. We are investigators. We are on a case. We have to find the person who is scaring everyone in TechnoWorld.

Uh-oh. Dabson, do you hear what I hear? It’s the Evil Howl! We’ve got to find who’s doing it to complete our mission! Dabson, get behind this rock. Ringtail, climb that big tree and find out if you can see the culprit from there. Exo-Cuter and I will go out and find the noise-maker. We need you to tell us where to go.

“A-a little to the right,” said Ringtail. “Now straight, and to the left,” came Dabson’s deep voice from behind the large rock. “Now! You’ve got him! Throw the net over him!” cried Ringtail again, suddenly excited. “Who is he? Why was he scaring all of TechnoWorld?”

“Calm yourself, Ringtail,” said Exo-Cuter slowly. “He says his name is ThunderBeast, and that he was howling for someone to help him find the person who wants to steal the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, back on Earth.”

“Oh, Earth,” said Dabson sarcastically. “Why would we want to go back there? Didn’t we all come to TechnoWorld to get away from Earth?”

“Now, Dabson,” reasoned Ringtail, “our new friend is right. We can’t just let it be stolen.”

“You’re right, Ringtail,” I broke in. “But he isn’t exactly our friend. I mean, do you think that we can trust him?”

“Of course we can’t,” agreed Dabson. “Didn’t you hear him howling out there?”

“Calm yourself,” said Exo-Cuter a little less slowly. “Let’s trust him for now. If he tries to hurt us later, then leave him behind. But for now, let’s save the statue!”

“Yeh,” shouted Ringtail and I together. And that was only the beginning of our adventure to Earth.

My brother’s original version of the story sews it up with this tidy ending:

All of a sudden, ZAP! We’re at a race. Let’s race in it. We won!

I, on the other hand, made it my own by applying my trademark inability to finish writing anything. It's clearly better this way.

The tale of TechnoWorld teaches three important lessons:

1. Stealing from weaker people is the best source of creative material.
2. Howling is evil.
3. Exo-Cuter is the voice of reason and justice.

Happy Thanksgiving, and good luck to any novel writers.

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.)

Change Is Bad

This is my pillow.

* It is covered with pictures of African grassland animals, not a thriving biohazard community.

This is not my sleeping-at-night-in-a-bed pillow. I am a Grown-Up and I have a fluffy, white, safari-free one for that. It is my napping-on-the-couch-instead-of-balancing-my-checkbook pillow.

It is not actually very comfortable. My mom made it when I was three or four, and I used it for car trips and hitting my brother until the stuffing formed five or six large, tough clumps. This development made the pillow less satisfactory for sleeping but much more satisfactory as a weapon.


Eventually he got big enough to fight back, so the pillow was retired to a corner with the creepy stuffed cat and that baby doll whose legs were eaten by the dog.

One day in middle school, I came home to discover that my mom had been sewing. She had retrieved my decrepit pillow and lovingly refilled it with fresh, fluffy stuffing, cleverly transforming a disused childhood treasure into a functional element of my young adult life.


This was not okay.


The old stuffing had suddenly become crucially important to my emotional wellbeing. After several volleys of tearful accusations, my poor, bemused mother pointed me to the sewing room trash can, where the discarded clumps were headed for their eternal rest. I cleaned away all the clinging threads and scraps of fabric, savagely cast out the new filling, and returned things to their proper and natural state with a great sense of righteousness.

Using this pillow now is a lot like covering the ground with a sheet and some rocks and hoping you hit just right. I triumphed over the demons of change, though, and those lumps are my badge of honor. Along with the bruises on my head.

How a Ride for Five-Year-Olds Defeated Me Twice

When I was three, my parents took me to Disneyland right after Christmas, along with my aunt, uncle, and four-year-old cousin. I had recently received a baby brother for my birthday, and by Christmas he was doing fascinating things like not crawling yet. The camcorder was also new that year, resulting in hours of footage like this:

My cousin had a new baby sister of his own, and he was exactly as thrilled about the arrangement as I was. Our grandparents kept both babies while the rest of us went to California, though, so Chad and I spent most of the trip shouting “no babies!” where most kids would say “Look! Mickey!”

Most of my memories from this trip consist of the ways I thought I might die. Flying Dumbos? I will fall in the water and drown. Monstro the Whale? I will be attacked in the darkness, then fall in the water and drown. Hall of Presidents? Abraham Lincoln will kill me with his creaky, double-jointed hands, then find some water where I will drown. Splash Mountain? We did not go on this ride because my parents thought it would be too scary. I thought it sounded great.

Of all the attractions bent on my destruction, though, the most horrifying was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. By the time I had my last Wild Ride-induced nightmare around the 8th grade, my memories of it had boiled down to darkness, multicolored fire, and unrelenting full-body terror. Naturally, when I went back to Disneyland in college, I had to try it again.

My friends and I lined up behind six dozen parents with toddlers, listening to jaunty music while a giant Tigger the Tiger bounced by. I smiled at all the happy children and reflected that my memory must have been faulty—Disneyland wasn’t scary! It’s the Happiest Place on Earth!

Do you know what happens on that ride? You climb aboard a little car that speeds through Toad Hall, crashing through doors and fireplaces before it leaves through a wall and starts terrorizing the town. After almost running into buildings, pedestrians, and the river (you will drown!), you are tried and sentenced to prison. You promptly break out through the prison wall and ride through darkness until a light approaches—and then a whistle sounds—and then a train runs you over and you die. After that, you go to hell. It’s full of red light and fire and stalagmites and stalactites and laughing demons and the screams of children oh wait that’s you and WHY MR. DISNEY WHY???

If your childhood lacked this particular trauma but you want the souvenir psychological scars, try watching this video with the lights off and multiplying it by a billion.

In the end I escaped with my life, but my dignity is still lying in one of those tunnels.