matthearn.com

Things that make me happy:

• Trying to find a video game version of Cricket that’s playable on an American PS2, failing, discussing the expensive possibility of convering my PS2 so I can play foreign games, and then realizing, hell, I’ll just get the PC version and save a lot of trouble.
• Discovering a Torrent that has a downloadable CD image of the game, thereby saving $59.99. (Not that I would ever do this, of course, as it’s immoral and unjustifiable and wrong. Still.)
• Thinking to myself, “Damn, I’m hungry. I wish I’d brought lunch today,” and then realizing a few minutes later, “Hey! Wait! I brought fried chicken! It’s in the refrigerator!” This, in fact, made me so happy I did a little dance, and might have peed a little bit.
• My birthday.
• Aged scotch.
• Diet Sunkist soda.
• The English.
• New Strong Bad Emails.

That’s about it. And, uh, that’s about it.

My birthday is on Saturday! I’m old, I think. I’m definitely starting to FEEL old, what with my 5 years of marriage, my home-ownership, the impending birth of my progeny, my expanding waist-line, my ever-increasing need to moisturize my neck, and the fact that I dyed my hair blond in order to appear more youthful. (Sometimes I apply sunless tanner to complete the “horrifically obese surfer” look I’m going for. Laird Hamilton better watch out, ’cause he’s Old and Busted®, and I’m the New Hotness^TM!)

Anyway, I’m sure you’re all absolutely wildly looking for presents for me, but to be honest, I don’t need much. My friends, my family, an endless supply of quality single malt scotch, neck moisturizer: these are the things that I need. Maybe an iPod, or a widescreen TV. A 1970 Chevelle would be nice, too. Or somebody to clean my house. But I’m getting far afield of my topic, which is:

Honestly, I don’t really remember. Let’s see: birthday presents; Laird Hamilton; hair bleach; my wrinkly, leathery neck; oh! My birthday, and why it is awesome and should be a national holiday on which everybody but my company will be celebrating with a day off and a bottle of Glenfiddich.

This is why my birthday is important: it is because I am special. Or so all of the self-esteem-building stuff I watched on TV in the early 80s said. I am special! Which would seem to indicate that no one else is as awesome as I am. Of course, considering these programs were wildly watched by thousands, nay, millions of young children, it would seem that everybody’s special, and equally so, at that. Which would seem to indicate that no one is special at all.

Except me.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I don’t really have anything valid to say. Which makes this pretty much the same as any of my posts. Except that today, I’m wearing new Christmas present pants, which I didn’t wash before putting them on, and so they are making my legs itch very, very badly. This is an example of something that quite literally does NOT make me happy in my pants. Everything in my pants is quite angry right now.

Note to all: anger in one’s pants is something to be avoided. And now I must return to scratching. See you tomorrow, when I’ll have even LESS to say! HA HA!

I’m not sure what to think. Should I be pissed off that DelDOT (The Delaware Department of Transportation (and possibly Lugubriosity)) saw fit to tear up the streets of my neighborhood for the second time in six months? Should I be overjoyed at the fact that they managed to completely tear off several hundred yards of roadway and replace it in a SINGLE DAY? Should I be outraged that they can do that, and yet the same part of I-95 has been a construction zone for roughly 18 months?

I don’t know what to think.

You might think that yesterday lacked a post because I was off and relaxing, but no! It actually lacked a post because I worked so hard during the day that I had no time for an update! Ha ha ha! Good times! I’m trying to figure out how to word my letter to Jesse Jackson to ask what he thinks of my company not giving us a day off on MLK Jr. Day.

We had a nice weekend, though. Friday night I went over to my buddy Bill’s for an evening of music playing, which we try and do every couple weeks. The next day we spent putting away all the Christmas stuff (the tree had been up for a record 7 weeks! Woohoo!), and doing some general cleaning, such that our house doesn’t look quite so much like Santa took a dump on it.

That evening I worked, and then we went out with Sarah’s mom to pick out some sexy new cabinets for our kitchen so I can store more than 2 cookie sheets and a bundt pan. We then got dinner at “Steak and Ale.” I had prime rib, although to be honest, I question whether or not the meat was actually prime-quality. It had all the toughness and lack of internal marbling that seemed to indicate “Select”-level meat. It wasn’t bad, though. Good vegetables.

Sunday we had church (1 hour and 45 minutes! WHOOOO!), followed by fixing the gutter on my roof which had almost completely separated from the house in high winds. I forgot to take a picture. MY BAD. Then we went to my parents where we met with old friends and ate fried chicken.

It made me happy. (In my pants.)

I am overwhelmed by guilt.

I’m sure many of you have heard me reference my irritation with people in the drive-thru at fast food establishments several times, including twice in the past week or so. What can I say? I have strong feelings that can’t be expressed any other way, like latent homosexuality, or fear of bears. One of my basic rules is: if you want to make a special order, you need to go inside. The drive-thru lane is where you go when you want to get a standard order and get it quick.

Yesterday, in the drive-thru, I placed a special order. I know, I’m sorry. I don’t think anyone behind me was inconvenienced, but it hurt my soul. Oh, how I cried.

A little background is in order: on Tuesday, I went to McDonald’s and got my usual order, 6 double cheeseburgers and a large diet coke. When I pulled up to the pickup window, I met a very friendly woman who asked me, “Wow, are you gonna eat all those?” I responded, “Well, I’m on a low-carb diet, so I eat the meat and just throw the bread away.”

“Well, why didn’t you just order them without the bread? We can do that for you!”

Because every time I try to do something like that, each meat hunk gets wrapped in its own individual plastic container, which not only slows down my eating, but is a horrific waste of plastic. That’s not what I said, of course. I said:

“Well, I just figured it would save time.”

“No, it actually would save time to just have ordered ’em without bread!”

“Oh well, sorry about that!”

She smiled. “That’s okay . . . you’ll know for next time!”

Now, I was fairly certain that there was no way that having to individually wrap up 6 hunks of meat and cheese in big plastic containers, as opposed to just throwing them on buns and wrapping them in wax paper, was not going to save time. Unfortunately, I have a very specific problem: I am a wuss. And I knew yesterday that if I returned and ordered in my usual manner, there was no way to predict what this woman might say or do when I got to the pickup window.

In my defense, she was a terrifying sight. She had plucked her eyebrows completely off her forehead, Whoopi Goldberg-style, and then painted them back on very thinly about 3/8″ from her hairline. Also, her teeth were interesting. She didn’t seem to be missing any, but everything appeared to be artfully rearranged, such that she appeared to have a canine in the center, a molar to the left of that, and then a slight gap between it and an incisor that had been twisted about 90 degrees on the vertical axis. I try not to irritate people like that by basically saying “your idea was retarded, I’m going to continue ordering it my way and damn the consequences.”

I worried that she might leap from the window and apply that weird center canine to my eyeball, or something.

So yesterday I arrived and ordered 6 double cheeseburgers with no buns, and cringed. I paid, got to the pickup window, was handed my soda, and then got the horrific instruction: “Sir, can you please pull up to the parking spot up there?” That’s right, the “waiting for a special order” parking spot. It’s like being put in the corner.

So I pulled up, dried my tears, and waited 5 or so minutes for my order. Then I peeled out of there and drove to my office, where it turned out having all the little plates made eating the food a lot less messy.

STILL.

Anyway, next week I plan to show up, order my cheeseburgers WITH BUNS, DAMMIT, and I expect to face the wrath of the eyebrow lady. At least this time I’ll be able to say, “Yeah, I tried it your way last week, and it took 10 minutes. SO SUCK IT, CRAZY LADY.”

Hopefully she’ll cry a little. Only then will I feel redeemed.

ThURLsday’s back, with some brand new inventions:

• Just turn the sound up, and click here. Feta Cheese it out.
• I could see spending 10 grand on bitterness and angst, myself. That’s why this? Not surprising to me.
• OMG, like somebody‘s all bitter that the the Chronic(WHAT?)cles of Narnia Rap is more popular than they are! Like, double-u tee eff, right? LOL!
• All they have to do is come up with some rules like these (developed for Monopoly) for Cranium, to help clear up some gray areas (for example, like if in “Copycat” questions, you have to actually act like the famous person, or can you just spout non-name/place facts about them?).

  Whoops, spoke too soon, although they don’t much help.

• This counter-telemarketer script seems like it wouldn’t really be all that useful. I can’t think of any way to keep the telemarketer on track, although if the old story that telemarketers are never allowed to hang up on a potential customer is true, maybe after a while you could break them down.

  Me? I’ve always been partial to saying “Mr. Hearn? Just a moment, I’ll get him.” Then I leave the phone off the hook until they finally hang up. Usually they’ll sit on there for a good 5 or 6 minutes, which I figure is 5 or 6 minutes that they aren’t bothering somebody else. I do this is a public service for you, the American citizen, and no, you don’t have to thank me.

  Sometimes my father puts Norwegians on the phone to confuse the callers as well.

Over the last month or so, Sarah and I have been wondering when we were going to get to feel the baby moving around inside her belly. We weren’t…concerned, specifically, since the late-December ultrasound definitely showed that little booger dancing like we were playing Jamiroquai at it. Sarah was just looking forward to actually FEELING the movement.

Well, finally, on Friday, she felt it shift or kick or do the humpty dance or something. Totally awesome. And apparently the little bugger hasn’t stopped since.

• Friday morning, Sarah in a particularly boring class and getting hungry: the baby kicks a bunch of times to say either “HEY I’M HUNGRY DAMMIT” or “OH MY GOD THIS PROFESSOR IS SO DULL I THINK I’M GOING TO KICK YOU IN THE KIDNEY.”
• Friday night, at a birthday party for my homeboy Ian, baby kicks during a Bon Jovi song. I figure this means one of three things:
  1. The baby was dancing to Bon Jovi because she’s a girl.
  2. The baby was dancing to Bon Jovi because he’s gay.
  3. The baby was kicking Sarah to ask why the hell we were listening to “gay-ass Bon Jovi.”

  I’m hoping for the last response. Not that I am against having a girl or a gay boy, but simply that I’m against Bon Jovi.

So that little honky is in there dancin’ around, and I couldn’t be happier. Unless it comes out dancing like Kenny Mayne on last week’s “Dancing With The Stars.” Poor Kenny: he’s a lovable fellow, but his dancing looks like a pee shiver.

You know, I really respect the guy that came up with the idea of the automatic bathroom paper towel dispenser. I mean, the guy clearly is missing key sections of his frontal lobes and therefore didn’t think things through, but the idea in and of itself has merit. I mean, who really wants to have to touch the handle of a towel dispenser? Knowing that 75-85% of the guys that actually bother to “wash” their hands don’t use soap? Just thinking of the nasty stuff that John Q. Public has on his wang that he then casually wipes on the towel dispenser makes me want to crawl into a corner and weep.

So the original plan was good. Just wave your hands in front of the thing, and poof it spits out a certain amount of paper towel, which you then tear away and use to dry your hands, face, and crotch (which is usually wet from accidentally leaning against the counter, since the average American male apparently cannot wash his hands without splashing water around like a 4-year-old in a bathtub). Good plan, but subtly flawed:

1. Significant sensor issues. For one thing, manufacturers can’t agree where the sensor should be. Sometimes it’s on the front; sometimes it’s on the bottom; sometimes there’s a thing on the front that looks like a sensor, but it appears to be decorative. Coupled with this issue is the fact that whatever sensor they use isn’t sensitive enough to note my frantically waving my hands around it like a spastic in a Taekwondo class, and the entire concept of not having to touch the device and share germs is negated by me punching it until the front of it falls off and I can retrieve my own goddamn paper towels, thank you very much.
2. Paper amount. When you finally convince the thing that yes, you really do want some paper, and you’re not standing there waving and screaming because you’re practicing Evil Yoga, it gives you a piece of paper approximately 8″ by 8″. Which is about the amount that I use to dry one side of my thumb. Dammit, I need like 5 square feet of paper to dry off my massive meathooks! So, I end up standing in front of this stupid device, frantically waving my hands all around it, and periodically tearing off a small piece of paper to dry my hands, repeat 8 or 9 times while crying.

You know what I’d like to see on the dispensers? A big button, right in the middle, that says “press here if the bloody sensor has gone retarded.” That’s a fair compromise. I might get germs on that particular finger, but odds are I’ll have it in my ear or nose within 15 minutes anyway, so there’s no great loss.

You may have gathered from last week’s McDonald’s post, I’m back on my low-carb/no-carb/hohoho-carb diet. The reason for this is simple: at about the end of last summer, I was around 230 pounds; now I’m around 260 pounds. Bad, bad, times. Last summer I was wearing pants with a 36″ waist, and now I’m back up to a semi-snug 40″. Totally weak.

SO. I’m back on the low-carb jaun, which I hopefully didn’t ruin on Saturday night at Ian’s birthday party by doing a couple shots wit’ my peepz, yo. In the spirit of this, I wanted to share some of my “favorite” (the quotes indicate Sarcasm^TM!) low-carb recipes with alls of y’alls, so here it be at:

• Microwaved Meat Chunks: purchase a flat hunk of sirloin, and throw that bad boy in the microwave and cook it on low for like 40 minutes, aka the amount of time it would probably take to do it in the oven anyway. I told you: I’m clinically idiotic. Like, a wonder of medical science.
• Roasted meat chunks: Do the above in an oven at 300 degrees, maybe even throwing the temp up to 500 at the end in a failed effort to get a nice crispy crust on the outside. Ha ha! It doesn’t work! You just overcooked your meat! It was still reasonably tasty, due to buying a cut of meat that consisted of at least 73% fat. Yay: fat.
• Beef Jerky: Invest in a food dehydrator. They are beyond awesome. I just throw a chunk of low-fat meat in the freezer for a little bit so it’s easier to slice. Once duly sliced and whatnot, I throw them bad boys in a freezer bag with roughly a gallon of Worcestorshire (pronounced: Northolt) Sauce and let it fester in the meat drawer of the fridge for 24-48 hours. Then, I put the slices on the trays in my meat dehydrator, salt them liberally, and get to the drying. Within 6 hours, I have enough dried chunks o’ meat to make sure I need dental floss on me at all times for almost a week.
• Egg Salad: First, boil the eggs (it’s best to use old ones; they’re easier to peel, and give you that musky aroma that normal humans associate with cat urine) thusly: throw them in a pot with water, bring to a boil, boil for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat, and then drain the water and replace with cold. Peel the eggs. Hand the eggs to Sarah Hearn, who mutters something about her “preciousssss,” disappears for 20-30 minutes, and reemerges from unknown climes with the best egg salad ever devised.
• One Dozen Warm Meat Patties: Go to McDonald’s. Buy 6 double cheeseburgers. Throw away bread. Eat remainder (pickles optional).
• Mung: Uh…nevermind.

That’s basically what I’ve eaten for the last week, and what I will continue to eat for at least another week, until such time as the little pee strips I need to go buy indicate that my body has entered Super-Duper Fat Burnin’ WOOOOOO Mode. Challa!

(Note: This diet precludes the actual consumption of challa.)

Yesterday, much to your considerable chagrin, I described the source and nature of my issues with medical intervention in the crotchial region (yes it’s a medical term) and the discussion thereof. Today: how I’m going to beat this, and figure out a way to not pass out when the doctor says “Mr. and Mrs. Hearn, I’m afraid this baby has the largest head that I have ever seen in 17 years of delivering babies, and that means I’m going to have to cut you like you’ve never been cut before.”

Which, if you’ve ever measured my head and that of my father-in-law, is a very real possibility.

On Monday, Sarah and I were down at the Rehoboth Beach Outlets, doing a little maternity-wear shopping. This means that I was wandering the store holding a few items of clothing that Sarah intended to buy, while she tried on other things in the fitting room. Picture this: a very, very large man, unshaven and smelling faintly of the previous evening’s scotch, in a wool skull-cap and heavy winter coat, wandering around a maternity store fingering the nursing bras. After a while, I realized that there was a good chance that the clerk running the place might forget that I had come in with a woman and call the police, so I figured I’d better find a book to read or something.

Luckily, this store had several racks of parental reading material; What To Expect When You’re Expecting, 54,000 Hippie Baby Names, The Other Man: How to Tell Your Husband You’re Pregnant With Keith Richards’ Baby, and the like. One book in particular caught my eye: So You’re Going To Be A Dad, by Peter Downey. I had already read one book on pregnancy written from a man’s perspective, but I figured I could look this one over while Sarah tried some things on. So I flipped to a random section and began reading, and after a few minutes was guffawing uproariously. (It’s still a wonderment to my why the clerk didn’t call the cops. Instead, she offered me a chair so I could stop leaning against her display of maternity-style pantyhose.)

Anyway, I decided to buy the book, and over the course of Monday evening, read the entire thing. It’s not particularly informative, basically giving you a humorous overview of pregnancy and the first couple months of raising a child, but it did make a number of salient points, and offered one EXTREMELY useful suggestion, which was this:

If you know you are likely to have a problem with being in the room while your wife gives birth, you need to basically confront that fear head on. Anyone who has conquered a fear of spiders will tell you that avoiding them and constantly being afraid of accidentally coming across a monstrous 8-legger in your house is not going to do the job. You need to go find a spider, study it, talk to it, maybe touch it, and eventually let it crawl into your hand. You probably need to piss it off and let it bite you a few times.

From what Dr. Downey (who is, oddly enough, not an obstretician; his doctorate is in Education, and he teaches high school English somewhere in Australia) says, what I need to do is go rent (or probably buy, since I think this might take a while) a movie that has either actual footage of a live birth, or a very very very realistic depiction thereof, and watch it a bunch of times until I can get through it without getting woozy.

I’m guessing that the first time will have to be done with remote in hand, ’cause I have a sneaking suspicion that a small bloody baby will pop out and I’ll need to immediately stop the video and turn on Alton Brown or something like to prevent myself from passing out and having my wife come home to my still form on the living room floor and fearing I’ve had a stroke. But I’m really hoping that after the first few times, I’ll be able to watch the whole thing through without getting too queasy.

Of course, it’s entirely different when it’s in an unfamiliar location, like, say, a delivery room at Christiana Hospital. So I’m not sure how to get around that, other than maybe pretending to be a nurse and just sneaking in there sometime to watch some woman pop out her firstborn so I can be prepared for Sarah’s doing so. Might be illegal, though, and in any case is probably highly ill-advised, what with doctors having access to scalpels and phenobarbital and all.

Anyway, I have question for all the fathers out there: Even assuming that my inability to deal with genital medical intervention is rather beyond the normal queasiness, I’m guessing that most guys weren’t terribly thrilled with the prospect of witnessing childbirth. If you have done so, how did you get through it? Did you pass out? Did you just show up with a bottle of scotch and some crystal meth? How, dammit, HOW?

Have a superb weekend. Hopefully you won’t have to think much on birthin’ babies and can relax a bit.

What with Hearnwife and I having a baby, the following topic frequently comes up in conversation: “Dude, so like, are you gonna pass out during the delivery or something? Ha ha!”

The reason for this is that I have a bit of a history when it comes to medical activities on the, um, Area, as my sister likes to call it. It first manifested itself in the 7th grade, when during Health class we were discussing the fact that occasionally little boys’ testicles do not naturally drop as they grow out of their early years, and sometimes require surgery.

I calmly raised my hand to tell the teacher I felt queasy, and then I remember dreaming about trains and waking up on the floor of the classroom with Ms. Kupchick and her righteous mullet hovering over me with a look of abject terror on her face. I did get to miss a couple days of school over it, and then most of another day next week when I got to go to the hospital and have an EEG to ensure that I hadn’t had a seizure of some kind. It was all very interesting at the time, although to be honest it didn’t even occur to me until just now how terrifying it must have been for my parents. So, uh, sorry about that, Mom and Dad. My bad!

A few days later I went back to health class and didn’t even make it to my seat before the simple act of returning to the scene of the crime caused me to go down like a lump. The rest of that term, I spent health class in the library. I think I may have been required to do some kind of research project to make up for the fact that I was going to miss a significant portion of required subject-matter, but I don’t remember much about it aside from the fact that I can virtually guarantee it didn’t involve the subject of testicular surgery. (Even typing the words now, roughly 15 years later, makes me have to close my eyes tight and take deep breaths for a moment.)

The following year, I went into Health class with a certain amount of trepidation, but luckily there was no discussion of nad slicing. There was however, much discussion of what childbirth was all about. Honestly, it didn’t really bother me too bad, until the day that the teacher said “Hey, we’re gonna watch a video of a delivery!” She then turned off the lights and rolled the TV over, right in front of me (I was in the second row of seats), and hit play.

We didn’t even get through the credits before I was on the floor.

That year, I spent just a few weeks going to the library during period three, and was able to return to Health class after the reproductive unit of instruction was complete.

In high school, the situation seemed to largely have rectified itself. There were two cases in which I did actually pass out in high school: in health class, in which I think we were discussing my usual favorite topic; I just went to sleep on my desk and nobody even noticed, and I just woke up at the end of class when the bell rang; and in biology. I don’t remember what Mr. Twilley had been discussing, but I know I hadn’t eaten all day. On the way out after class was done I slumped against the wall and slowly eased my way onto the floor. I didn’t even get sent home afterwards, since I just had one class left, and it was in the band room, my usual safe haven of misbehavior.

In college, I majored in music and computers, two subjects that tend to steer away from the discussion of genitalia, so I was pretty much safe.

Sarah and I were having difficulties getting pregnant, however; we’d been trying for over a year, with no luck. Sarah went to see her doctor, who poked and prodded (ew) and reported that everything was fine. Either we just hadn’t gotten lucky yet, or something was wrong with ME.

Well, this affront to my manhood was going to be disproven, dammit, even if I did have to have my nads examined by a doctor. So I steeled up my courage and had Sarah drive me to a very nice specialist in Male Fertility. He had me drop my drawers and copped a lengthy feel, which was definitely FAR more detailed than anything my Primary Care Physician had done, and which caused me to have to sit down, screw my eyes shut tight, and take some deep breaths.

Then he began discussing some things that he had felt that might be problematic, and my having sat down came in handy, because my head flopped back and my tongue lolled out. I obviously don’t remember much, except that I vaguely recall dreaming about something that was so horribly terrifying that when I woke up, Sarah said my entire body tensed like a flexing body builder. She had caught my head to keep it from breaking the window behind me (my noggin has some serious destructive power, along with several orbiting satellites), and the doctor had put my feet up on the examination table to rush some bloodflow to my head.

Now, in my defense, I had given blood that morning. And I stupidly hadn’t eaten anything aside from the silly cookies they give you afterwards. So I was probably low on iron, or hemoglobins, or something that prevents you from looking like a big wuss. But still, the only thing that kept me from crying like a little girl was the knowledge that the doctor’s visit had turned out to be largely unnecessary; we had found out just that morning that Sarah was finally knocked up.

Anyway, you can imagine my friends’ and family’s dismay at the very strong possibility that I won’t even get two steps into the delivery room before I faceplant into an instrument tray and have to have a speculum removed from around my eyeball.

Tomorrow: my plan to alleviate the rather bizarre issue I face.