Category Archives: Updates

A traditional update in the grand update tradition

Old people

Updates

I was walking my roommate’s dog the other day when an elderly couple confronted me to ask what type of dog I had. I told them it was an Australian Shepherd and they said, “We’ll how about that! Is that right! Oh heavens! Well I’ll be!” They went on like that for almost a minute. Meanwhile I could have told them it was any breed in the world and they would have reacted the same way, since old people are astonished by every minor detail. Try handing an old person a jar and they’ll say, “Well don’t that beat all! A container to place some preserves! Oh lordy what a world we live in. Holy mother of Christ what an amazing jar.”

This is assuming you’re dealing with a cheerful old person and not an irate old person. Those are the only two categories of old people–either they walk around being impressed and delighted by everything, or they take everything as a personal affront. You can spot one of these irritable old people from the fact that their faces are frowning twenty-four hours a day. If you made the mistake of handing them a jar, they would whip it at your head and shout, “Get this damned jar out of my face you ungrateful little shit!” I recommend avoiding eye contact with these types of old people. In fact it might not be a bad idea to just avoid old people altogether.

Napping

Updates

This week I have begun a personal campaign to give up napping. Napping is fine every once in while, but recently I had been taking upwards of four naps a week and it became apparent that I was no different from a common baby. To be honest, I didn’t nap nearly this much when I was younger. Back then naps were anathema to me, and once when I was about three I remember my daycare supervisor having to send me downstairs to play while all the other kids slept. I was the only one in the basement and there wasn’t anything to do down there except dick around with a few jankety toys, so I thought I was being punished. This was very confusing, because why should I be disciplined for not being tired? What if my supervisor forgot about me down there? All I could do was just sit quietly at the bottom of the stairs and cry and cry.

What I’ve realized about napping is that when your body becomes accustomed to naps, it expects them every day. Even if you get seven or eight hours of sleep, you’ll still begin to feel a little drowsy right around 5 or 6 in the evening, and there’s not much you can do about it but curl up in a little ball in the corner of your bed like the pathetic infant you are. You may as well wear some diapers and forget how to shit in the toilet while you’re at it, because by this point you’re basically just a ridiculous baby. Then when you wake up from your nap, you have no idea what time of the day it is or whether or not you’ve overslept or what your teacher has been prattling on about for the past forty minutes. Have we really been reduced to this? I say it’s time to start toughening up and acting like adults for once and actually remain completely conscious throughout the entire day, no matter how little sleep you got in the nighttime. But I’m still going to keep a regular juice time, because if I don’t get my treat of juice and crackers at 2:40 in the afternoon I become really crabby untill dinner.

Euchre

Updates

If you ever want to ostracize yourself from a social group, I recommend agreeing to play Euchre while being a little shaky on some of the rules. I’ve actually learned and forgotten how to play Euchre over twenty times, because my brain refuses to permanently remember any details of this wretched game. But Euchre is very popular in lame places such as Michigan, so I’m constantly finding myself beginning a game with the naive presumption that I’ll remember how to actually play before I make an embarrassing mistake. The problem is that in Euchre you’re paired with a teammate who expects an unrealistic level of competence and nonverbal communication, and this pressure causes me to freak out and trump him or volunteer to play a hand alone with the crappiest cards imaginable. I usually don’t make it ten minutes before being forcibly removed from the Euchre table, but by that time I don’t care. I know they’ll always be another opportunity to play Euchre, and I’d never pass up a match with a group of hardcore super-serious Euchre players. That’s because my favorite thing in the world is to put an insane emotional investment in shitty 19th century card games I don’t know how to play.

My eating habits

Updates

My diet is basically that of an eight-year-old’s lunchtime diet, and the approach I take to preparing my meals reflects this childlike lunchtime dynamic. I use the stove, but only for very simple things such as spaghetti or macaroni and cheese, and it’s a good day indeed that I don’t end up burning myself. Usually I stick to what one of my friends used to inexplicably call the “three C’s”: cereal, soup, and salad. Sometimes even those are a bit ambitious. This evening for dinner, for example, I ate nothing but a pound of green grapes, which were delightful, but after awhile grapes start to lose their meaning. I do like a little variety with my convenience, which is why I’m so excited to have discovered so-called “baby food,” which are complete, nutritious meals all fixed up for you in a nice little jar.

Just kidding, but my point is that simplicity in diet is very important, and I hate microwavable food. Therefore probably a good 50% of my diet is cereal, and the other 50% is the milk which mixes with the cereal. I think it’s extremely presumptuous when cereal bills itself as “part of a complete breakfast,” because that implies that I have the time and resources to consume an entire bran muffin and a glass of orange juice. How can cereal be “part of a complete breakfast” when it consists of an entire lunch and dinner? I’ll decided for myself what a complete breakfast is, Mr. Count Chocula, and if you think it’s anything other than straight cereal you’re out of your chocolatey mind.

School IDs

Updates

Even though I graduated a few years ago, I like to think that a part of me is still a student. I don’t have school pride or a desire to continue learning or anything so outlandish. What I do have is much less superficial: it’s my Michigan State University student ID card, which for more than six years has entitled me to endless discounts and exclusive student deals. It is true that the photo that appears on my ID is a disoriented, seventeen-year-old child version of myself who could pass for a son, and that the ID itself has been through the washer more than most of my clothing, but none have ever questioned the veracity of this decaying ID—and since these cards don’t technically expire, I’m going to see exactly how far I can take it. My ultimate goal is to transition right from student discounts to senior-citizen discounts, or even try to see if anybody will give me a double discount for being a sixty-five year-old student. Probably the bus driver I’m trying to pull this off with would never have seen anything more pathetic in his entire life and he’ll just let me ride for free. He might be right, but a free bus ride is a free bus ride, and I’ll need to get to the grocery store somehow to deposit my trashbag full of cans.