Some jokes on me

Howdy, pardners, and welcome to another week of things of which I think. Sit back, kick up your feet (if you can still reach your mouse from that position), and settle in. I have a few loosely related topics I'm planning on sharing, and depending on how much I ramble, we just might get to all of them.

I thought of a story from my youth recently that I hadn't thought of in at least a decade. Therefore, if I don't write it out now, it might go away and never be thought of again. First, I shall provide a little back-story, since that seems the polite thing to do. Even though I'm often accused of being strange, I had some fairly standard aspects of my life growing up. For instance, I used to go to the mall and hang out with my friends when we were early teens. My parents lived about a mile from the mall, and so walking there and back became the thing to do when we weren't in school. In hindsight, "hanging out" at the mall meant walking around, eating, looking at cute girls, never talking to cute girls, looking at the new cassette singles out that week, and playing video games in the arcade.

In any case, it was one such afternoon in my 13th or 14th year that a friend and I were leaving the mall for the short jaunt back to my parents' place. As soon as we started crossing one of the parking lots to get to the street, I heard a voice say, "Hey!" I looked up, and there were two cute girls, probably 16 or 17 looking right at me. I'm sorry, I didn't say that right. I meant, LOOKING RIGHT AT ME! I somehow managed to say hi back (or at least mouth it), when the strangest thing happened. "It's your old boyfriend!" one of the girls said to the other. "You're right!" the second one said, and she walked all the way up to me and gave me a hug. "How are you?" she asked. "Good," I said, knowing that I was probably beet red with my eyes open wider than Delta Burke. (Why'd I go with Delta Burke? I have no idea, but she came to mind first, so it was either going with that or sitting and thinking more. I chose the former and stand by that decision with all the conviction of...the Menendez brothers. What, they were convicted, right? Maybe I should stop now.) Then, noticing my strained silence, I felt rude and asked, "Um, how are you?" She said she was good, and the two of them had big silly grins on their faces. I knew they were just messing with me, not just because I can detect tomfoolery from miles away, but mainly because I had a pretty clear recollection of all zero of my girlfriends up to that point. "Do you guys need a ride home?" my not-ex asked. Trying to play it as cool as possible, I said that we were fine walking. She gave me another hug, told me to take care, and they got in her car and drove off. We stood there for a while watching them, and they must've been cracking up with that image in the rearview mirror.

Here's what gets me about that story. It's not that they had some fun at the expense of a young, unsure, nervous version of me. I bet it was really funny for them to see my shocked face, and I wouldn't be surprised if they spent their whole car ride (or even the next five years) imitating my botched attempts at looking comfortable with the situation. What gets me is how many other things I could've done in hindsight. As my friend and I walked back, we went over those options (after he asked me about thirty times if I was positive that she wasn't really an ex-girlfriend of mine). I so easily could've foiled their plans and made them the ones with the awkward pauses and confused glances. The first thing we came up with was fairly simple: grab her ass when she hugged me. "Hey you - yeah, it's been a while. You're still lookin' fine." Or I could've called her bluff even more, my friend said, by asking her to make out with me right there "for old time's sake." Of course, adult Peter has better suggestions.

Girl 1: It's your old boyfriend!

Peter: Stop right there. You know as well as I do that you're not allowed within 50 feet of me. Please tell me you didn't bring a knife with you again this time.

I have several more suggestions of what I could've said, but in the interest of leaving this blog at least mildly family-friendly, I'll just move onto another topic.

Around seven or eight years ago, a woman with whom I worked at UCSB purchased a new BMW convertible. It was beautiful, and she drove me to lunch one afternoon to show me all of its features. "Did I tell you about the voice-activated stereo system?" she asked. "No way," I said, since this was before similar things were common in even less luxurious vehicles. "Watch this," she said: "103.3 please." In a split second, the radio changed. "That's amazing!" I said. "You try it," she offered, "but I programmed it to only recognize the stations with 'please' after them." I went through the three or four most popular stations, and it switched to all of them right away. I tried not using "please" once just to see, and it didn't switch. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, and when her side-view mirrors tilted down automatically when she went into reverse, I was convinced that I was in the most advanced car ever built.

I got back to the office, and still shaking my head a bit, I went to say hi to another co-worker. "Did Lynn show you her car?" she asked me. "Sure did; man that thing's cool," I responded. "Did she try fooling you with the radio trick?" she asked. I stared at her for a second dumbfounded, which pretty much answered her question. "There's a control on the left side of the steering wheel. I guess you didn't notice that she was pushing things there. It took me a minute to figure it out, so don't feel bad." Here's the thing: I did feel bad. I was the one who did those things to people, not the other way around. I did very similar things, in fact. I knew a girl in high school who spent a whole year thinking that the inside light of my car was turned on and off by her tapping it. Sure, she also thought that I wouldn't celebrate Thanksgiving because I was Jewish, but that's beside the point. I was supposed to be the joker instead of the jokee, and so it took me a little while to appreciate her masterful execution of the trick. I eventually did, and she confessed that she felt a little bad when she saw how into it I was getting.

Now, some people might think that there would be a moral to this story. Something nice and wrapped up in a little bow like, "Once I felt first-hand what it was like to be the butt of the joke, I took others' feelings into consideration when making jokes of my own." No, fuck that. I wasn't about to change my ways just because someone got me good. On the contrary, it renewed my faith in how funny those situations can be when they're at the expense of others. I just vowed to be a little more skeptical of technology in the future.

I'm sure it's related to that last story, but the word "comeuppance" just popped into my head. That's a weird one, isn't it? Are there any other words similar to that? I don't feel like really thinking about this right now, so give me a holler if you think of anything. Isn't delegating great?

And now, for the last time in July 2008, it's Car Watch time! (I put an exclamation there because I hoped to infuse a little excitement into this running segment. Did it work?)

My favorite brother saw this license plate and sent it to me right away: "4PETER7." Peter the 7th? If so, I guess that could be the plate on the car that my great great great grandson gives to my great great great great grandson on his 16th birthday. We'll just have to wait and see.

I saw two plates in a row that made it into the same text message to myself. Therefore, it's only fitting to have them in the same Car Watch as well. The first one was a standard issue plate, but it still caught my eye and made me laugh. It was, "5AKA272." I tried thinking of a situation in which the number 5 might go by the pseudonym of 272. Then I pictured a 5 walking into a bar and telling a very curvy 86 that his name was 272. I stopped that scene there, because sometimes even I get weirded out by my strangeness. (Oh boy, I just did it again. I was about to write something about me getting "increasingly odd," which led to me thinking, "Kind of like 1,3,5." What's wrong with me?)

The second plate I saw was, "ESSO B." Like S.O.B.? Why would anyone want that for a personalized plate? Part of me really hopes that it's an accident and the person is unknowingly driving around and proclaiming that s/he is a son of a bitch, but I doubt that's the case. I don't know what else to say about that one except that it left me confused and as close to speechless as I get.

Lastly, my homey Rockabye saw this: "FABUL(Heart)S." No, no, no! I'm a strong proponent of using the heart symbol only for "heart" or "love." If someone wants to use it in place of a letter instead, I might be ok with it on rare occasions, but I have a really hard time seeing a heart and thinking, "Oh yeah, that totally takes the place of an O and a U." Unless the person really meant to capture the word "fabulloves," I'm gonna have to disapprove of that plate.

Ok folks, I'm outstro. Have one hell of a weekend and week. During that time, Happy Half-Birthdays to our friends The Mills, Melissa, Bryan, and little Emma (who will be 0.5 on Thursday). Please email me with anything at all at ptklein@gmail.com. Shaloha, friends.