Zinging in the rain

Bienvenidos, mi gente de la casa. I hope each and every one of you is doing well. It rained here in Los Angeles during this past week, so naturally we all freaked out and refused to go about our daily business without first consulting the Live Mega Doppler 7000 HD. In the end, it turns out that rain is really just some water falling from the sky, so naturally we all survived.

I want to spend a little time today writing about teasing. Not a strip tease, mind you, but the poking fun variety. My group of friends has no problem whatsoever when it comes to needling one another. As time passed and we got to know each other better and better, that just led to more focused fun-poking. Those are the ones I appreciate the most - even at my expense - because they show a deep knowledge and understanding of our dislikes and shortcomings (as opposed to our likes and longcomings).

A perfect example of this happened recently when hanging out with some of my friends. We were starting a board game called "Time's Up," in which each card has the name of someone famous on it. You're allowed to discard two of the cards that were dealt to you. (The rest of the game details are inconsequential for right now.) Our dear friend Twilight tossed a card into the discard pile and said, "Who the hell is Tenzing Norgay?" When no one spoke up, I said, "He's the sherpa that helped Sir Edmund Hillary be the first to climb Mount Everest." It was silent for a second, before my sweet, adoring, and lovely wife asked, "Are you fucking kidding me?" Everyone laughed, and I surmised that what I said wasn't exactly common knowledge. My friend Dave then chimed in with the absolutely perfect zinger: "Yeah, but ask him where the windshield washer fluid goes in his car." He totally got me, and it was great because it demonstrated how well he knew me (and my competing areas of expertise and cluelessness).

Dave's not alone in this fun-poking activity. In fact, I can think of a few more recent examples right off the top of my head. First, my friend Greg was coming over to our house one day. It was about ten minutes before he was supposed to arrive when I got a text message: "Are you standing and looking out your window yet?" Sure enough, I was. Knowing me and how silly I am with time issues, he took a pretty safe gamble with that text, and it paid off beautifully.

Just a couple of weeks ago, our friend The Mills had a 30th birthday party. I saw a good friend's ex-girlfriend whom I hadn't seen in years. We exchanged pleasantries (what's one step up from 'pleasantries?' It was nicer than that.) and then half-smiling, she said, "I see you haven't branched out in your color schemes." I smiled the smile of one who has just been zinged. You see, years and years ago, her ex-boyfriend used to say that I only wore the colors blue and gray. While that was an exaggeration, those colors did make up a good deal of my wardrobe. So here, about eight years later, I'm standing before her wearing a light blue shirt, blue-gray jeans, and a gray hat. Her comment was perfect, and though it caused those around me to point and laugh, I still appreciated the zinger.

The last recent example that comes to mind happened this past December. I went to the holiday cocktail party of a company with which I often work. There were a bunch of people from other companies there, and I mixed and mingled to the best of my ability. Later in the evening, my co-worker Jamie came up to me laughing hysterically. "What's so funny?" I asked, but even as I asked it, I had a feeling that her tears of laughter were at my expense. Through her remaining chuckles, she told me the story. Apparently, she and our co-worker Rob ran into a very nice guy with whom I've joked around for a couple of years named John. They said hi to him, and he said hi back before adding, "Where's Peter? Oh wait, let me guess - he's probably off telling people what they can spell with his name." I'm not sure Jamie's stopped laughing yet, and it's been over two months now since well-placed tease.

There are countless smaller versions of these teases that happen almost daily. It might be someone mocking my lack of sense of direction, my hyperpunctuality, or my dislikes (i.e. mustard, Carl's Jr. commercials, etc.). All it boils down to one main thing though: familiarity. And I love it. They couldn't make those pointed comments without really knowing how I tick, and I relish in it. A relish without any mustard in it, naturally.

Like most humans, I enjoy feeling comfortable in my surroundings. What I like even more is the rare occasion in which I can pinpoint the inception of that comfort. Allow me to explain via example: During the winter quarter of my freshman year of college, I took a large lecture course on human anatomy. My lovely wife (nee girlfriend) was in the class with me, along with about a dozen people on my floor of the residence hall. For the final, all of us from the floor went into the lounge, spread out our books and notes, and went through what we expected to be on the test. A couple of hours into the study session, I was getting pretty fried mentally. I rose from my seat on the floor, leapt onto a little side table next to one of the couches, and half-sang/half-mumbled a few lines from a song while accompanying myself with the air guitar. (The song was "Possum Kingdom" by Toadies, by the way, and I'd had it in my head the entire day until that boiling over moment.) When I was done with my music, I stepped off the table and went back to my books on the floor. Here's the thing: no one even batted an eye. "Wow," I thought, "these people really know me!" It was one of my favorite memories from the entire freshman year, and believe me, that's saying a whole hell of a lot.

While I can't pinpoint the exact moment, I've felt more and more accepted and truly known at my work recently. This is evident by how freely I'm now sharing my strange and bad ideas with them. Last week, I stopped my boss in the hall on his way out of the office. "Wait, I came up with a kick-ass ad campaign for a gym." (Here's the part where I should point out that our company doesn't do stuff like that, so this was truly out of nowhere.) "Ok, let's hear it," he said. "Be Here or Be a Sphere!" I said. "What?" "You know, like 'be there or be square.'" "But why a sphere?" he asked. Jamie chimed in: "You mean, like, fat?" "Yep," I said. "Yeah, I don't think so," my boss said. I started to plead my case a little but then gave up, realizing that even I didn't like it that much. It was the extra syllable with "a sphere" instead of just "sphere" that bothered me. By the time I came to that conclusion, my boss was out the door and my other co-workers were back doing whatever they were doing. If I had pulled that same move two years ago, they would've been staring at me and shaking their heads, but since we've reached the necessary comfort level, it was just a momentary blip on the radar that hardly registered at all. While one might argue that it's more of a desensitization than an acceptance, I'm just happy to feel like I belong in the places I spend most of my days.

Now let's ride our imaginary elliptical machines on over to the Car Watch.

I saw a license plate frame and I didn't quite know what to make of it. On the top, it read, "This is where the." In the split second I had before reading the bottom, I contemplated the possibilities. "Party starts?" "Ladies flock?" "Trunk resides?" I didn't come up with a good answer, and so I read the bottom of the frame: "HEARTBEAT STOPS!" Well I clearly wasn't expecting that. So basically, the driver is saying that this car kills people, right? I don't think I'm reading too much into that at all. But how? Does it kill them by hitting them with the car, or do they die within the car (from fear or more likely, embarrassment)? Maybe s/he needed another license plate frame to clear up what this first frame meant.

My homey Rockabye saw this license plate on a Lexus SUV hybrid: "HRDTOGT." What is - the driver or the car itself? I've seen a number of those vehicles around, so I'm assuming it's the driver asserting his or her hard-to-get-ness. Doesn't that take some of the fun out of it? It's been a long time since I was in the dating scene, but isn't a major point of playing hard to get...not telling the seeker what you're doing? It seems like it would lose much of its efficacy if the gameplan was common knowledge.

The same homey Rockabye saw this bumper sticker: "My other transport is the Millennium Falcon." He didn't tell me what kind of car it was, but I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit on that. First of all, unless it was Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, or even Lando Calrissian driving, then the person is either a liar or they bought the Falcon second-hand from some intergalactic used spaceship lot. Let's assume for the moment that the latter is true. There's one huge problem with this still (I know, probably more than one): the Star Wars double-trilogy happened "a long time ago," not to mention "in a galaxy far, far away." For the sake of argument, let's say that the closest that something "far, far away" can be is...the next closest galaxy. According to Yahoo! Answers, that would be between 25,000 and 42,000 light years away. So even moving at light speed (with the Millennium Falcon certainly can do), it would've needed to leave that galaxy tens of thousands of years ago to reach that used spaceship lot. And that's without stopping for bathroom breaks, mind you. Let this be a lesson to all of you: nobody makes outlandish and obviously-false claims without facing the wrath of Peter the Debunker. You have been warned.

Ok, that's enough bullshit for now. You all have lovely weekends and weeks, and feel free to drop me a line at ptklein@gmail.com with anything at all. As for the small crop of happies during that time: Happy half-birthday to my father-in-law tomorrow, and happy half-anniversary to my favorite brother and sister-in-law next Tuesday. Take care, folks, and I'll see you next Friday. (By the way, you can't spell "strip tease" without Peter.)