The Curse of the Gypsy

This Blog entry is actually a journey back in time. This is a prelude to my modern life. I hope it explains some things. Free your mind from the bonds of cruel Father Time. Float with me back to the year 1998. Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times, and in all dimensions.

Crash. We're here. Everybody out of the time machine. We've a story to tell.

So when I was a senior in high school, I was a compulsive litterer. I got the biggest kick out of throwing the biggest items out the window. One weekend, I went camping with some Foof's (Friends Of Other Faiths), or "gentiles," as Brigham Young would have called them. They packed along a drink called "Red Devil." It was Caffeinosaurus Rex, basically. Now, I don't ever drink caffeine. In fact, at that point in my life, I never had even once. My friends thought it was so funny to act out the stereotypical "non-members tempting us with beer" routine, only with this caffeine drink. All weekend, it was, "Come on, Smurf, all the cool kids are drinking these," and, "I bet he's just too chicken," and, "are you going to let you bishop and your parents run your life?" They had once found some seminary video, and liked to think that we Mormons needed the high-school level persecution portrayed therein to feel truly Mormon. So they obliged me. Anyway, I played into their little scenarios like a good Peter Priesthood should. "You guys, you are my friends, but I respect my body too much to be putting harmful substances into it." This went on sporadically for the whole weekend.

The final day, we were packing up to leave, and there was one Red Devil left. My friend reached for it, but before he could get it, I reached out, popped the top, and didn't stop 'til I'd slopped the last drop. My friends were flabbergasted, but then highly amused. We piled up into the car and began the tortuous journey home.

As I'm perpetually ravenous, I soon began to bug the other guys about stopping for some grub. We drove-thru a Taco Bell, and I ate a ton. But soon the effects of the Red Devil, the windy road, and the "Mexican" food combined, and I knew I was going to retch. So, I totally blew chunks in the plastic Taco Bell bag. It was unpleasant, but not as bad as ralphing KFC, I'll admit. Now we were driving down the freeway with a bag of vomit in the car. And remember my propensity toward littering....

Without a second thought I chucked the upchucked muck out the open window. The bag landed on the windshield of the car behind us, smearing throw-up everywhere. The driver turned on the windshield wipers, but the bag was stuck to one and the vomit spread everywhere. There were napkins and wrappers and things, too; it was terrible. After the bag o' barf dislodged itself and flew off, the victimized vehicle caught up to us. I was yelling at my friend to outrun it, but we were in his big ol' honkin' station wagon, "Ecto 1," and it just wasn't going to happen. I looked nervously over, and who do you think I saw?

It was a gypsy woman (or maybe a Mobu priestess). She had a silk cloth around her head, and baubles, bangles, and beads on her wrists. In her swarthy hand she clutched what looked like (and we very well could have been imagining things) some sort of bone with feathers tied to it. She was shaking it at me. At ME. And she was shouting something that we couldn't hear because her window was rolled up, but we just KNEW it was some foreign language. My friends recognized the signs immediately: "Dude, she just put a curse on you!"

Could it be? Could the woman really have put a curse on me? I'm not so sure. However, from that moment on, nothing has gone right for me until it has gone wrong a hundred times. On the mission, they called me "Elder Maldecido," or "cursed elder." Everywhere I went, chaos followed. When my little town started flooding, and we got evicted, and robbed, and we were starving to death, and our members lost their houses and we had to help them find them, and everything was going wrong, I thought back to that bag I'd hurled into and out of the car on the freeway, and I wondered.

One day we were down by the train tracks near the gypsy encampment. It was a rainy day (actually, the only moments it didn't rain during those three months were the moments it was hailing). As we reached the top of the berm near the tracks, we came face-to-face with an old gypsy woman. She looked me in the eye, and said, "Tu eres maldecido. Sal de aqui! Dejanos tranquilos!" You are cursed. Leave here. Leave us alone. I hear the sun came out the day I was transferred.

A few months and a different mission later (I had come down with some mysterious disease of the autonomic nervous system that was never identified, and I'd been transferred stateside), I was in the mission office on my way home (sick again). The office had an elderly couple who handled all the mission affairs. At that time, we had two couples; one was training the other, as it was just about time for the first to go home. As I sat there, looking forlornly out the window at the overcast sky, waiting for the mission van to pick me up and take me to the airport, I heard the old old guy say to the new old guy,

"Everything will go fine until your last eight weeks here. Then everything that can go wrong will. You'll have more sick missionaries, robberies, evictions, car accidents, bike accidents, lost credit cards, and hospitalizations during that time than you had the whole rest of your mission."

Eight weeks. The exact amount of time, to the day, that I had been in that mission. And everything on that list had happened to ME during those eight weeks. I just sighed and kept my burning eyes focused on the stratus clouds out the window, trying not to think about a certain gypsy woman (or maybe Mobu priestess) and a particular ballistic bag of beans, beef, and bile that I had so carelessly tossed out the window years before.



I don't litter any more. I've never drunk caffeine since then, either. But still, my life is a circus: entertaining and chaotic. And still, whenever I go back home, I have one eye out for a dusty beat-up Volkswagen Rabbit with a mystical, scarf-headed woman inside, so I can find her and somehow make amends. Like take her to Seven Flags Car Wash, where it's a two-for-one special on Tuesdays. You know, something like that.

Not with a whimper, but a bang.

Work update! Tonight was friggin' awesome! So here's what happened (are you ready?):

The managers decided to have their big manager party tonight. One of the lead waitresses was going to act as proxy. Then somebody decided to accept a reservation for 70. So we reserved the whole front room for the party. It turns out it was for some Provo Youth Hockey team, so there were tons of obstreperous eleven-year-old boys everywhere. We had two parties upstairs, also.

We were sizzlin'. Then we ran out of quarters. "Here are seven dimes; I'm sorry." Everything's still fine. Until the power went out. I guess the power went out for at least six city blocks. We had some emergency lights and flashlights, but it was basically pitch black. We couldn't print checks, place orders, cook food, get drinks, or anything. The little kids we had packed into the front room were wailing and crying and screaming. It was just like 3 Nephi 8:23. The fans turned off in the kitchen, and soon the heat was oppressive. All the poor Mexicans were just huddled quietly in the muggy darkness, tring to use their keychain-lights to identify the food that was ready. The waitress/managress was on the phone with the managers, the owner, the city of Provo. People were asking for their money back. Some woman claimed that she had already paid before the blackout, but her server insisted she hadn't. Some people were impatiently trying to pay with credit cards; others had just come in and were insisting that we seat them right away. Fortunately for me, I had already printed my tickets so I could save a trip to the computer (others were having to calculate tax with a calculator), and my food was ready shortly after the darkness fell. One of the nice Marias grabbed my order book and went around the kitchen gathering everything I needed for me. I told my tables I had made arrangements to create a more romantic setting, just for them. They all tipped me very well after all was over. Fifteen to twenty minutes later, the power came back on. The computers were still down for a good while after that. One of the managers was there helping by that point.

The surprise of the lights coming back fell into the umbrage of the scene that it illuminated, however. The hockey children had thrown chips and salsa everywhere. Some were on the tables throwing pinecones at each other (the head mom had brought pinecone decorations for some reason!). About six of the brats had taken off their jackets and were IN THE FOUNTAIN collecting everbody's wishes and splashing the elderly couples who were seated nearby. Before we could ask them to get out, one of the kids grabbed the sides of the terra cotta fountain and tried to climb on top. It toppled over, cracking the whole thing. We got the enfants terribles out of there, and by that time, there were so few other customers that they let me clock out, on the condition that I help them rearrange the tables and clean up the slops. So I did. Things were almost back in order, except for the computers and the fountains, when I clocked out and went into the bathroom to change my cothes. The toilet was overflowing. I did what I felt was the right thing; I left without saying a word to anyone.

Skipping Has its Drawbacks

So I saw Ocean's 12 last week. When it was over, I had no idea what had happened. I didn't get the plot at all. Wiggle and the Man on the Oatmeal Box had to explain it all to me. I was disconcerted, mostly because I've never seen a movie without being able to catch the clues and understand the plot at least by the dénouement. There was key factor that I missed: the identity of the Night Fox. They told me it had been given away when he pointed at something. That explains a lot, considering my nonverbal learning disorder. Still, though, I shouldn't have been as confused as I was. I was starting to think maybe the movie was just poorly written and my friends were reading too much into it. Then I had a flashback.

7 hours earlier:

I was at work, and just in one of my unaccounted-for cheery moods. I was humming along with the Christmas music and skipping about the restaurant like some sort of nancy. The problem is that I skipped through a low archway and smashed the top of my head. OOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW. White flash! I was on the ground, blocking the arch with my over-long body. I stood up and felt the swelling on my head, and there was blood on my hand when I pulled it away. I had to run and keep serving my tables, though. Luckily my good mood wasn't at all affected by the concussion. However, my brain seems to have been. When the lump on my head goes away (it's been five days and there's still a scab and everything) I'll go see the movie again. Hopefully nothing permanent happened there. If so, oh, well. I'm still happy!

Toasteroven and L'afro

I have lots of friends. Boatloads of them. Sometimes, though, new people come around that I want to be REAL friends with. Not the kind where we hang out and junk, but the kind where if they needed something I'd want them to think of me. The kind that I can actually relate to and be understood by. I also think I'm good at quickly assessing people and seeing their goodness. And I see that in these two friends I've made recently. I don't know if they like me or if they ever will, but I have a respect for them both. Both are trying to do what's right, and that's really cool. TO is a guy, and I have lots of guy friends, but few that seem to understand the importance of life the way he does. Plus he has great taste in music and stuff. We might be roommates soon, and I think that would be good for me. We'll see what happens. And then there's L'afro. She's a girl. And I have lots of female friends, but not too many that I really think of as intellectually stimulating. L'afro seems like that type. Maybe I shouldn't get my hopes up, you know? On either of these cases. I just feel that a lot of people see me as just the guy who cheers people up, and never really try to learn what I'm about, and these are two people who are introspective, and maybe might be able to get me. They'll probably both read this and be like, "Dang, smurfs. You are obsessed. You hardly know us." But I feel like I do, or at least I want to. Yeah. So I'm nuts. Or at least lonely.

Gravy's Christmas present

I woke up late. I had only a few minutes to get to work. And my bladder was ready to splode!

I dashed down the stairs to the bathroom, but it was locked. Roy was showering. I decided to go in the back yard. No good; we don't have one. The front yard wouldn't do, either, since it was wide daylight. I had only one option. This story is not for the weak or faint of heart.

I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a cup. We're talking a pretty big 16 oz. or so tumbler here. I ran back to my bedroom. I was in a lot of pain. I started to fill the cup. Then I finished filling it! What to do!? I couldn't very well run back to the kitchen! Then I noticed an identical cup on Gravy's desk. I snatched it. Soon it was half-way full (or half empty?) and I was all the way not full. Roy was still taking his saccharine time in the shower, so I started getting ready for work.

I ran around like like a pickpocket at the Worlds' Fair, grabbing my apron, my shoes, my clothes, my nametag, my order book, my glasses.... Crap! My glasses were in the bathroom, where Roy was STILL showering! It was approaching that fatal minute when I would be late for work if I didn't leave right then, so I stepped out into the street blindly and ran to the restaurant.

After I'd been there for a few hours, I remembered those two lone cups of urine, sitting heavily upon Gravy's desk. Dum dum dum dum.

After work, I rushed home, and was delighted to find that he wasn't home yet. I looked in our room, and the cups were still sitting there on Gravy's desk. I grabbed them both, sneaked into the bathroom, and started to dump them into the toilet. It was only at that moment that I realized that something was amiss. The cups had both been marked in permanent marker with my name, the date, the word "urine," and a line to show how full they were. I guess Gravy HAD been home. Merry Christmas, buddy!

Stone Moon Fro

When I was a boy at scout camp, my friend Don and I came across a cassette tape in the woods. When we played it and listened to it, we found that it was an odd amalgam of Oasis, some ghetto rap, classical music, and what we later learned was a Cheech & Chong album. It seems the tape had been recorded over so many times that all the sounds were coming through at once. We would sit there in a trance and listen to it. It seriously would keep our brains so busy trying to process the different noises and pitches and rhythms that we would go into a stupor. It was fascinating to listen as the different arcs of music came into the foreground and then faded back. We called it Stone Moon Fro.

Sadly, it was lost shortly after camp. It's been years now, and we still pine for it.

Well, until this week, that is. My best friend Brad reproduced it for me for my birthday. It's amazing. He made a very professional-looking cd with a case and everything. It's the most creative and thoughtful gift I've ever received. He even had to buy the Cheech & Chong cd. It has some of my favorite Oasis and Bone Thugs songs, too. It sounds clearer than ever, and it's really great. I love to be able to listen to MoMurda, Wonderwall, The Nutcracker, and Bassetball Jones all at the exact same moment!

I popped it in Sunday evening around six. The next thing I knew, it was 9:00 Monday morning, and I was lying amid an entire box-worth of Twinkie wrappers on a bare mattress, still in my church clothes.

Man, that is some good music. I think I might get another hit of that tonight. Thanks, Brad.

Thankfulness

here are some things I'm thankful for:

Denny's and how open they are even at midnight on Thanksgiving.
My mom and the courage she showed in leaving my dad and allowing herself to find happiness anyway.
My testimony of the gospel.
That I'm not an Eskimo.
Rudy.
The banana chocolate cream pie that Wiggle made for me for my birthday.
My friends.
My bike.
My awesome job working for honest people.
That I live so close to the grocery store.
That God seems to have faith in me.
The Barenaked Ladies.
That I'm not addicted to video games like my loser 29-year-old roommates.
Whimsy.
Chrisy, and that she bought me dinner tonight, and that we had a good talk.
Bro. Celaya and the Fairfield Institute of religion.
The Hundred Hour Board.
The Redwoods.
My rock collection.
That my prayers are answered.
Little children.
That I've been waking early lately.
Brad, who's always there, though never here.
Mubba Jean, for inviting me to Thanksgiving Dinner.
BamaBeau, for the dark chocolate orange cheesecake. Mmmmm.
My books, and my passion for words.

Life is great.

Brain (and Hair) Wash

I had to use a girls' shower the other day, and I spent a good fifteen minutes just reading all the bottles in there. I don't understand what they are all for. I mean, I do, because they say on them. There is shampoo for dandruff, shampoo for horses, shampoo with vitamins, shampoo with juniper, heat-activated shampoo, orange-scented shampoo, shampoo with aloe, shampoo with conditioner, shampoo for permed or color-treated hair. There's fortifying conditioner, leave-in conditioner, conditioner for body, conditioner for control, conditioner that makes your scalp tingle (and hurts like the dickens if it gets in your eye). There is hand soap, face soap, non-soap, soap with special little snowflakes in it, raspberry scented soap, exfoliating soap, glitter soap, I-can't-believe-it's-not-soap, soap with cucumbers and melons. There is body wash, body scrub, apricot face scrub, facial cleanser, and facial cleanser with special acne-fighting agents, there are oils and oil-removers and bath beads and bath salts and bubble baths and lufas and shaving cremes and shaving gels and shavers themselves in multifarious colors.

The packages are interesting, too. There is a shampoo for every color of the rainbow. There are some in English and some in French and some that seem made up, with words like "ClAriTee" or "cleen". The bottles have a few curved lines that are supposed to represent naked women, as far as I can tell. The backs of the bottles have simplified pictures of bubbles that represent molecules and vitamins and list unpronounceable words like "methylisothiazolinone" and "hydantoin." There are tall bottles and square bottles and round bottles and stumpy bottles and bottles that hang down instead of stand up and there are tubes.

Shampoos have their own vernacular. They don't "clean," they "cleanse." They moisturize, revitalize, rejuvinate, add vigor and sheen and shine. They give a noun called "bounce." They are allowed to add anything that sounds like it was grown in a jungle: "With pineapple husks!" "With ginko!" "With treefrog venom!" they exlamatorily point out.

I hate them.

There is shampoo that says "For silky luxurious hair." I think I can understand what that one does. Then next to it is one that says, "For dry or damaged hair." Now I don't know which one to use. There is shampoo that says "Now with witch hazel!" Are they claiming that it's magic? Next we'll be seeing "Now with eye of newt!" But really, how dirty can three single girls get? I think I'm missing something.

War and Pizza

Was it Roy in the Kitchen with the knife? Was it Jayson in the conservatory with the fork? Perhaps Gravy in the den with the remote control? Whichever way you slice it, somebody ate the rest of my pizza!

Last night while I was hanging out with Uffish Thought and Phoenix, I ordered three large pizzas from Domino's. We really only needed maybe one and a half, but it was cheaper to buy them wholesale, and since I can't cook, I decided to buy the extras and just leave them in the fridge to last me a few days. Tonight, they were all gone. Well, actually, there were two slices of sausage left sitting on the counter, and they had apparently been there all day.

Now, normally I'm all about sharing what I have. However, in recent times I have become shriveled and envious of the cooking abilities of others (particularly my roommates). I don't even have an assigned cupboard or fridge-shelf, because I don't ever have any food here. It's become cheaper to buy food ready-to-eat at the store than to keep burning and ruining my groceries. I have a spot atop the fridge for some cereal and Doritos. That's really all, though. Every night I get home and there are three or four individual dinners being cooked on the stove. My roommates sit there and feast on the most sumptuous meals while I pathetically scrape Doritos dust off my fingertips with my teeth.

So tonight I am excited because I'm going to have a real meal (Well, cold pizza is a real meal to me. Oh, and it's cold because apparently our microwave broke yesterday. Hopefully that'll get fixed if and when the landlord comes to repair the toilet), but I get home to find the carrion that is three empty pizza boxes and some crusts and flies. Okay, maybe the flies were thrown in for dramatic measure. Anyway, you can imagine my despair.

And the worst part of it is, I go over to the referigerator, and I open it up, and all that's in there is my roommates' food. And that consists of ingredients, and not actual food. Like some kind of special flour, and raw meats, and vegetables that I don't think grow in the U.S. And the only bit of food I still have in the house is a single bottle of black horrid Noni Juice.

I don't know what I'm going to do, but I've considered just downing a whole little baggy of that special yellowish flour. Maybe that will cause in them the same kind of empty helpless longing that the missing pizza caused in me. First I need to make sure that stuff is really flour. I am suddenly reminded of yeast. I wonder what happens if a person eats that much yeast. Maybe this war will have to be a cold war.

Rugged or Overrated?

I know a guy who labels everything either "rugged" or "overrated." Rugged is good. Overrated is bad, but not necessarily overrated. So, in the spirit of James Evans, who recently did not get married, here's my own list of all things rugged and overrated complete with defenses for the ones that might need it.

Wedding receptions: overrated. I'll go to my own, if I have one. That's about it.
Cats (the animals): overrated. Scary, too.
Into the Woods: rugged! That play has so many great morals to it. It's better than some books of scripture.
Corn: rugged! Especially fresh off the stalk, and raw.
My psychology textbook: rugged! I read it for fun.
Calvin and Hobbes: rugged!
Remedial basketball: rugged! (close call, though, but I think I love it)
Capital I's: overrated. Most of the time i forget to do it and have to go back and fix it.
Grandpa Joe: overrated. That's a scary, crotchety old man who dispenses bad advice and a worse example.
Logan: rugged. Prettier than provo, but also freezing in the winter, I've heard.
The Marx Brothers: rugged!
Banjo Kazooie: rugged! I wish I lived in that game sometimes.
Bagpipes: overrated. What's with the constant buzzing noise? The instrumet clashes with itself.
Africa: overrated. Well, that was kinda arbitrary.
Stripes: rugged! But they have to be horizontal. I'm pretty skinny.
Conrad: rugged!
SunChips: overrated.
Saturday Night Live: Rugged! Probably nothing I do in this life could make my parents prouder than my being on that show.
Shawn James: rugged! If you know him, you already agree.
The word "scuttling": overrated. Kinda creeps me out, whatever it means.
Mulan: overrated. And offensive.

That's about it for today. Thanks, James, for the idea, and may your next attempt at marriage be much more rugged.