Pause-itive memories

Ah, Thursday, or as the Canadians call it, "Thursday." They're wacky like that. Good morning, gentle readers. I usually avoid doing mathematics, but I couldn't help but notice that this is my 175th post on UOPTA. It's not the roundest number, but a milestone nonetheless. I wonder if there's a word for the 175th of something. I remember when California was 150 years old and our license plates started proudly proclaiming our "sesquisentennial." My first thought when I saw that was, "Oh come on, you couldn't wait 'til 200?" Meanwhile, Virginia's looking at us and thinking, "Back when I was 150, we were getting ready to fight for our independence. What are you fighting for, cleaner automobiles? Ooh, must be rough, young feller." Don't mind Virginia, she gets cranky sometimes.

Well friends, I've got two stories for you today from my past. Someday maybe I'll write a post about stories from my future just to switch things up a little and keep 'em fresh. That day is not today though.

Back before I had my driver's license, I spent a good amount of time in the car with my mom. We often listened to the oldies station, and having been raised that way, it wasn't long before both of us knew every song they played. Weekly, the station did some weird call-in advice show called "The Art of Dating." I'm not sure why she never changed the station, but we listened to the idiots who would call up and talk to a stranger about their problems and believe that the one-line answers would fix everything. The thing that stuck out the most though was the way the disc jockey would say the name of the bit. He always said, "The Art..................of Dating." Yes, that's six ellipses in a row on purpose, for the pause was way longer than a normal one.

Being, well, me, I started to imitate the announcer guy. My pauses went from about two seconds long all the way to a minute long. And then one day, I turned to my mom and said, "The Art." She waited a little while, and then she asked, "Of Dating?" I shook my head no. "What, you're not speaking now?" she asked. I shook my head again. We were sitting there playing cards, and after about ten minutes, she tried to get me with a quick, "Peter!" It didn't work though; I was committed to my new silence.

After about another half an hour and a few "You're really not going to talk?" questions, we finished playing and my mom went upstairs. I was doing some homework and feeling pretty pleased with myself when the phone rang. My brother and I had our own line, and I could tell from the ring that it was ours. He wasn't home, and being a teenager, I couldn't just let the phone ring and miss the opportunity to talk with my friends. The phone rang again, and I started moving near it, still undecided as to what I was going to do. It rang again, and finally I yelled, "Of Dating! Shit!" I picked up the phone, and before I could even say hello, I heard my mom's hysterically-laughing voice on the other end saying, "Of Dating!" She's still quite proud of that moment, and I can't blame her one bit. She got me; she got me good.

My second story is actually quite similar, though in a different set of circumstances. Senior year of college, my friend Greg and I took a Linguistics class together called "The Structure of English." I took it because I had some elective units still and found the topic right up my alley. Plus, I had just taken "Word Origins" from the same professor and liked his oddball style. Greg took the class because he had one General Education requirement left and figured we could hang out more if we had a class together. It was a fairly interesting course, but way more difficult than I had anticipated. I won't get into how incredibly detailed the assignments were, and you should thank me for that.

The class was not without its regular doses of odd examples from our professor. To illustrate some type of clause that I've since forgotten, he used this sentence: "I punched him because he wouldn't give me the God damn tickets." Neither Greg nor I knew what he meant, but that just made it all the better. One day, he used this example for something else I forgot: "If I said, 'Here's a knife for you with which to cut the bread,' it would sound weird, right? But if there's a pause in there like, 'Here's a knife for you...with which to cut the bread,' it sounds perfectly natural." We completely disagreed with his point, because both sounded very unnatural to us. Disirregardless, the whole walk home was filled with us saying that line over and over again. Sometimes it was just a long pause, sometimes we had big hand gestures and faces to go along with it, and sometimes we added a Conan O'Brien-like "ehhhhhhhhhh" before the second half of the sentence.

This didn't end that day, my friends. All week long, Greg and I kept handing each other knives (both real and imaginary) and saying the line over and over again. One day the following week, we were walking together after class, and we got to the place where Greg turned left to go home and I kept going straight toward where I worked. When we were about 30 feet apart, I called after him. He turned around, and I said, "Here's a knife for you!" I kept walking, and he stood there waiting for the second half. I smiled and kept walking, and he put his arms up in the air as if to say, "Really? You're leaving me in this state?" I kept on smiling and walking until I was fully out of view.

Later that evening, I came home and made my way down the long hallway to my room. Greg was standing there with a very serious look on his face. "Hey man," I said. "Don't you have something to say to me?" he asked, still quite seriously. I wracked my brain for a second wondering what I could have done, but he jumped in, yelling, "WITH WHICH TO CUT THE BREAD!" I had completely forgotten during the hours I'd been working, and I apologized profusely to have kept him waiting so long.

To this day, every once in a while my lovely wife or I will say something unintentionally close to "Here's a knife for you" while cooking dinner and then laugh. The other of us naturally finishes the thought, because it's almost impossible not to do so now.

So that's it for today, gentle readers. Tune in tomorrow for another Follow Up Friday. Shaloha.

Game, set, match

My senior year of high school, my friends and I went to a cool and kinda hidden coffee house above a record store to hang out. We were good and nerdy kids, so we often hung out at places like coffee houses, Denny's, or our parents' houses. I know how incredibly boring that might sound to some of you, but we always had a good time.

Anyway, at this particular coffee house, we were pleased to see that they had board games available. The first couple of games appeared to be missing some crucial pieces, so I grabbed one I'd never heard of called "Acey-Deucey." I brought it back over to the group and sat down with it. "Do you know how to play that?" Lisa asked. "Yeah, it's a lot of fun," I said, even though I couldn't tell you at that point a single thing about it. Lisa, who's normally quite good at detecting my bullshit, missed it somehow and seemed genuinely excited for me to teach her this new game.

So I did. Over the course of the next half hour or so, we "played" Acey-Deucey. To paraphrase Holden Caulfield, I was laying it on thick. I made up rules left and right. "We start at opposite ends of the board," "If you roll a 6 on your first turn, you have the option of switching sides," etc. "What about that stack of cards?" she asked, about ten minutes into the game. "Oh, that's for advanced play only," I told her. On this went for way longer than I expected, until finally I confessed that I had no idea what I was doing.

Lisa's very bright, but not a single time did she stop me to consult the directions or ask if I was making it all up. This bothered her in retrospect, so she would bring it up fairly often over the course of the next several years. For the record, here's what Wikipedia has to say about the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acey-deucey

Fast-forward about 11 years. My wife and I were having dinner at a Mexican restaurant with Lisa and her husband. We had some margaritas, shared some laughs, and then Lisa asked, "Hey, do you have any single Jewish male friends?" She was inquiring for a friend of hers who she really wanted to see happy and in a good relationship. I told her about my co-worker, the only one who came to mind right then, and we decided that we were going to set up her friend and my friend. Neither of them knew about it, but we'd convince them that it was a good idea.

Setting people up on a date is always tricky business. In fact, not much has ever come from my past attempts. I introduced Dusty and The Mills, and they've been happily together for years, and I introduced Dave and Twilight who have been married for about a year and a half. In neither case did I set them up on a date though. I was just the center spoke on the Wheel of Cool People, and they took it to the dating level. Don't get me wrong, I remind them often that I'm responsible for their happiness, but I can't say that I sized them up and thought they'd be romantic matches. (As a side note, writing "romantic matches" gave me a vision of something that could be in the "adult section" of a novelty store. I'm not sure how they would work, but there would have to be bad puns about "the fire in my heart" involved. And I would have to make bad jokes about seeing a doctor if the burning sensation lasts for longer than four hours. Maybe it's a good thing these matches only exist in my head.)

Back to the set-up: After the first date, my friend said it went very, very well. He offered to buy me lunch the next day, and I jokingly told him, "Just get me a nice groomsman's gift." After a couple of more dates, Lisa joked that should those two ever get married, our heads wouldn't fit at the same table. Every time I saw Lisa over the next couple of months, she would ask, "How are our little lovebirds doing?" I'd tell her that everything seemed to be going extremely well, and we'd shake our heads in pleased wonder at how this was turning out. Then the lovebirds moved in together, and Lisa and I started practicing how we would dance at their wedding. And then last week, he proposed and she said yes.

Lisa and I are so giddy it's obnoxious (and our spouses agree). We think we might actually be good at this matchmaking gig. We've even joked about quitting our jobs and starting a matchmaking service to showcase our unmatched talent at finding true love for others, even though we started it spontaneously and without any background in the field. The company's name? You guessed it: Acey-Deucey.

Happy Monday, everyone. Now get back to work.