Two Drawings, assorted randimosity of my weekend, and my Dad is cool.

I had an extremely hectic but totally satisfying weekend, the highlight of which was Dylan Coffman's little league baseball game. Dawn Coffman was out of town and Bill brought me in off the bench to help him watch the other three hooligans while he cheered Dylan on in his second ball game ever. I did some truly inspired child wrangling which included but was not limited to: pushing children in swings, playing tag, doling out snacks (popcorn, cheesesticks, and Capri Suns), racing, swinging kids around by the arms, picking up kids and "flying" them, mediating minor sibling disputes, and ALMOST catching little Will as he slipped off the wet bleachers and smashed his head with an unpleasant hollow banging sound.

Don't worry, he recovered quickly.

After the game we all went back to the Coffman's place for dinner, where the kids treated me like a long lost family member and I was presented with this picture drawn by Sarah Beth.

That's me with the crazy hair, obviously. That's what I like about kid drawings, they so often cut to the heart of things. It does hurt a little bit to know that my UHS is recognizable even to a five (six?) year old. I've been trying to hide it for so long...

Also this is yet another drawing by a Coffman child that features me in a canoe, which brings my heart great happiness. If only I had time to canoe as much as they THINK I do...

Dawn and Bill treated me to a delicious dinner of baked spaghetti, bread, salad, and other deliciousness. Thanks guys. It was an awesome evening. Your kids almost make me want some of my own, like, right now.

Almost.

Speaking of drawings and family, this one was inspired by a telephone conversation with my Dad.


If you've been looking for someone to occasionally blame for the content of this blog, you can pretty much point at my Dad as the origins of my twisted sense of humor. As proof, I offer these extremely strange article where he was interviewed.

http://www.whatsuppub.com/showArticle.asp?articleId=5266

Thanks Dad, for being the bizarre, twisted, amazing person that you are. I hope to one day half the father that you've been to me.

--A--

*NOTE* I've been feeling a little family oriented lately. Can you tell? Future posts will include cartoons inspired by or dealing with other members of my immediate family. So don't get jealous, Mom, Ben, and Megan. Your spotlight is coming!

The SPICY Baconator

Yes. They've improved the Baconator with Pepper Jack cheese, a spicy sauce, and jalapeños. Now the blasted thing is even more tasty and more destructive to one's sensitive internal organs. Curse you Dave Thomas! *NOTE* Click on the picture to view it larger in another window. This might help reading the text.

Some Random Doodles

I had a few minutes today and I scribbled some things down on a few sticky notes. I should probably upload these a day at a time so I have some stuff to post about, but whatever.

*Note. These are not done with Sharpie so they are not, in fact, sharpie doodles. But they are close.

Midnight Pasta

I can't get to sleep. Lot of things on my mind lately. So I'm making spaghetti. As an intellectual excercise, I'm giving myself the time that it takes my noodles to boil to write a relevant post and draw a picture for it.

Starting now. 11:58. Go!

There were a lot of strange things in the news today but I can't remember any of them, so I guess they aren't really worth talking about.

What with one thing and the other, romance has been on my mind a lot lately.

Gah! Blather! I just wasted a good six minutes whining about stuff nobody cares about. I deleted it. Drivel.

Oh wait! I have a shocking resemblance to novelist and satirist Kurt Vonnegut! Or rather in sixty years I WILL look just like he looked when he was 80. This was pointed out to me by a girl I see maybe once every two months in the parking lot of a Chik-Fil-A that I randomly decided to go to. Now how is that for strange. Had I sat at a stoplight earlier in the day for twenty seconds more, that conversation would never have happened and I wouldn't be writing this right now. Sometimes the world just astounds me.

Water is boiling and noodles have been broken and added! Time grows short!

Somehow there are NO forks at my house. Zero. I know when I moved in here with Tim we had some. Ten at least. Now there are zero. Okay, well I know where one is. It's down in my room, dirty from the LAST time I made spaghetti. (I'm a single guy, okay! Geez.) But other than that...zero forks.

I have to draw something fast. The noodles might already be ready because I have no way to check them...they keep sliding off the spoons!

*He rushes downstairs, grabs pad and marker out of backpack, and draws furiously*

Done!

Not my finest attempt at art, but it will have to do. Plus, I really think this might be what is going on.

I just realized no spoons either. I'm going to have to eat this spaghetti with two knives like dysfunctional chopsticks.

This has been a strange post. I apologize. Time's up.

12:14 Time to eat!

NOTE: Ten minutes elapsed while I scanned this picture in and spellchecked. Everything else is true.

I got this card from the Coffman kids for my birthday this year. It is, without a doubt, the greatest card I've ever gotten.


That's me there in the hat. Apparently I'm in a canoe with all the kids.

No reason to put this up, I just saw it in my room and wanted to share the awesomeness.

--A--

Syndromes

The first day of spring is here! Go, go on my friends, go outside! Fall in love, water flowers in your gardens, pick out shapes in the clouds, all that jazz.

Or, stay inside and read my blog! Huzzah!

Okay, so today’s topic is syndromes. Namely this: I have a new favorite one! Up until today, my favorite medical syndrome of all time was *Restless Leg Syndrome. But thanks to a little browsing on **GoogleTrends yesterday, I now have a new favorite. Yup. You guessed it. Uncombable Hair Syndrome.

This is a real thing, people, a medically proven ailment suffered by a small percentage of human beings. Basically, it’s a slight deformation of the hair shape and follicles that makes the hair slightly rougher and super sticky uppidy. In other words, uncombable. Don’t believe me? That’s cool. I have done my research and if you are too lazy to do yours, it’s no problem of mine.

So my research into UHS got me thinking: what other personal problems can be written off to strange genetics?

How about UTTTGCS (Youtigeeks): Unable To Talk To Girls Comfortably Syndrome—affects millions of young men across the country. This regrettable condition relegates these sad, greasy young men to having conversations with the opposite sex entirely on the Internet. Treatment: as of yet undiscovered.

And then of course there is CSOHS (Seesohs): Compulsive Sniffing Of Highlighters Syndrome. This terrible ailment is much more widespread, with it’s only serious side affect being some people with brightly colored nostrils.

Got any more strange ailments? I’d love to hear them.

Enjoy the first day of spring, my lovelies. Until next time, as the dolphins of Dinotopia say, Breath Deep. Seek Peace.

--A--

FOOTNOTES:

*Restless Leg Syndrome is a real thing. I guess. If you have RLS and I have offended you, I’m sorry. But not sorry enough to not think the commercials are funny. As a person who can barely even speak without jumping and jiving all over the place and who can’t get to sleep unless I’m totally, physically exhausted, I have little pity for you.

**Google Trends is a fascinating thing. You can look at all the data for the top 100 Google searches for that HOUR, as well as compare those results with related searches and so on. It can be quite instructive to see what the country is googling at the moment, and it brings up some interesting questions. For instance…Why is “Mr. Rodgers” the 65^th most Googled thing from twelve o’clock this afternoon? And what is “Sweater Day”? And how are the two related? I’m not going to tell you…but you can find out at www.google.com/trends

THINGS THAT HAPPENED THIS WEEKEND AND A HOW TO TELL IF YOU AREN’T GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP.

(If you don’t care about my life, and I don't blame you if you don't, skip the first two paragraphs and go to "How to tell If you Aren't Getting Enough Sleep)

Well my weekend turned out to contain everything I thought it would times ten. In accordance with Sharpie Doodles tradition, I won’t bore you with details that you don’t care about but instead give you the broad strokes: I got some things straightened out and reestablished an important friendship, I watched Smokey the Bear watch a forest fire, I drove through hail in a soft top jeep, I shared a chocolate brownie cake thingy with two lovely ladies on Pi Day, I sent an e-mail to a woman in Brazil whom I’ve never met before, and six separate people told me I needed a new pair of cowboy boots.

So let me just address this issue right now: I’m not getting a new pair of cowboy boots. I like the pair that I have. They fit me. They are scuffed. They are scratched. They are wearing a bit thin. Some might say a little too thin…a sentiment I’ll grudgingly agree with. But these boots are special. They are my year in review. They have been worn down as I’ve been built up. They are reminders of my family in Texas, my time in Savannah, my move to Atlanta, the rebuilding of Andrew Marshall. These boots have the dust and muck and soil of three amazing cities ingrained into their worn leather and paper thin soles, even the money I bought them with has special significance, and they ain’t going anywhere until they fall off of my feet. If that means I have to use gaffers tape to keep them together…so be it. (It’s kind of a specialty of mine…I’ve become fairly adept at keeping things from falling apart using cable ties, twisties, and gaffers tape. Mostly it’s a skill built up from years of owning terrible cars and being very poor.)

So. Anyway. On to the actual post.

WAYS TO TELL THAT YOU AREN’T GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP

Numbah Ones: Your toothbrush is still wet from the night before.

Numbah Twos: In a similar vein…you can still taste your toothpaste from the night before.

Numbah Threes: Eye goo and crusties do not have time to accumulate.

Numbah Fours: You starting making lists entitled “Ways to Tell That You Aren’t Getting Enough Sleep”.

Numbah Fives: Co-workers begin to assume that A: there has been a death in your family, B: You’ve started taking drugs C: Aliens have taken over your brain or D: All of the above.

Numbah Sixes: You find the intentional misspelling of the word “number” to be the height of Swiftian witticism.

Numbah Sevens: All of your fantasies begin to involve a tribe of beautiful young Amazons capturing you while on a safari in Africa, taking you back to their village, throwing you down on a huge, soft, king sized bed, tucking you in gently, kissing you on the forehead, and singing lullabies to you as you drift slowly into slumber.

Numbah Eights: You begin repeating yourself.

Numbah Eights: You begin repeating yourself.

Numbah Eights: You begin repeating yourself.

Numbah Nines: You wake up one morning and realize that you were getting more nighttime snooze when you unloaded trucks at Target OVERNIGHT.

Numbah Tens: You know there MUST be ten ways to tell that you aren’t getting enough sleep, but you just can’t think of number ten, so you resort to cheap tricks to fill the slot.

--A--

The Best of Times.

There are times of the year when my spirit soars.

One such time is the leading edge of April, the very cusp of spring where everything in the world seems to hesitate with breathless anticipation, a fragrant riot of green bursting forth from every crack and crevice of creation. Then there's the finale of fall; the air crisp and heavy with the smell of approaching winter, a few rusty brown and yellow leaves still clinging hopefully to the bare scratched knuckles of the hardwoods, only to be blown off by the autumn wind to meet a final crunchy, satisfying end in the middle of a laughing child's oft rebuilt mound of jumping leaves.

Frosty, grey winter days spent indoors watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and drinking hot chocolate.

Soft summer nights overflowing with stars and stolen kisses and whispers, broken hearts and tears unthought of, undreamed of, unmentioned.

Beautiful, bittersweet, bountiful times; each of them carving out a special place in the increasingly crowded corridors of my heart.

But even the most cherished autumn, even the liveliest spring and most haunting winter will never hold a candle to the greatest season of all. The fifth season. The special time of the year that we are currently occupying, wrenchingly short, incredibly sweet.

Yes. You guessed it. Girl Scout Cookie Season.

Oh Thin Mints! How do I love thee? Let me count the ways! Your scent, hovering sprite like above the green of your cardboard carton is a delightful tease, hinting at wonders to come. Your silky, milky chocolate skin is a vision in ebony; black and mysterious. Your delicate crunch is a promise fufilled; demure and delectable. Your chocolate graham interior is an exercise in taste bud titillation...scrumptually sumptuous.

And above it all, floating angelic like the final glowing notes of a master symphony in an empty concert hall...is the mint. Thin as promised, no more than a good dream half remembered, gone before breakfast but still living somewhere deep in the murky electricity of the mind, perhaps to be recalled days, weeks, years later in an elevator or on the interstate or while walking the dog, bringing with it a rush of nostalgia and a slow, growing, crooked smile that no one else understands.

To taste heaven in a cookie! Ah...Canaan revealed!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I like Thin Mints. A lot.

I don't have a problem. I have a passion. And my passion just happens to arrive in a green box with a carefully chosen ethnically diverse mix of rope climbing girl scouts on it. So be it.

--A--

Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day everyone!

If if I have time later I'll do a post about pie/pi.

But in the meantime, this is a pretty sweet picture of, well...everything that makes Pi Day awesome.

Updates and Stuffs!

Hello my dumplings!

No great stories for now, but several brief items and updates on previous posts. Sorry postings have been sparse lately, but never fear! I should have some good stuff soon. This weekend is shaping up to be quite interesting; chock full of events likely to spark interesting thoughts: a bluegrass festival/control burn shoot that may or may not happen depending on the rain, one last quality time hangout with my old (brand new?) friends Carolyn and Megan before they head back to UGA, and a late night waffle house dinner loaded with potential for resumption as well as redemption and hope and of course, hash browns. Also this weekend Shelby begins teaching me a programming language…because we’re going to re-invent the way that video games are played and we both thought that we didn’t already have enough to do (Him with his full time job, wife, child, house, etc…and me with my two jobs and various other pursuits). Those of you with whom I’ve already spoken of Orb Quest (it’s sort of a comedic venture into the gaming world. Ex. There are no Orbs in Orb Quest)…the time is drawing nigh. That sucker is getting made.

So, in the meantime, here are a few housekeeping items to hold you over until the next interesting thought arrives in my brain.

First off, the female readers of this blog have raised great public outcry concerning my thoughts about the apparent uselessness of cotton balls. Apparently the puffy little things have more of a use than as snowmen or clouds glued to construction paper: they seem to be an essential tool for makeup removal. Who knew? Okay, so about half the population of the world knew, but I didn’t until just now, and I’m willing to bet a lot of my fellow men didn’t know either, so there you go. I’ve helped society.

This strange bit of news out of Kansas is worth a look:

http://www.kctv5.com/news/15573118/detail.html

That’s the thing about the internet. It’s even harder than it used to be to pretend that the world is basically a sane, rational, well ordered place. Kudos to Caitlynne and her sis for dredging that up out of the Midwest.

Other interesting factoid out of the headlines of the last few days …1 in 4 young women has a sexually transmitted disease. Frolic at your own risk. Suddenly my complaints about the difficulties of abstinence seem a little (more) silly, huh? I’d like to see the numbers on STD’s in young men. Do we have any reason to think they would be any different? If so, why?

Something equally as disturbing? It cost the government one point seven cents to manufacture a penny.

--A--

Cute Baby, Ugly Baby...what's the difference? It Still Has Disturbingly Cute Toes.

I have baby blindness, apparently.

You know how some people are color blind and can’t tell the difference between red and green? I have a similar problem with other colors. I also have this problem with babies.

First, the colors. I have difficulty distinguishing between navy blue, charcoal, and black, as well as between some shades of green and brown. As practically every item of clothing I own is one of these colors, this little problem has been the endless frustration of nearly every woman I’ve ever dated, as well as my mother. Imagine a scenerio in which I’ve been asked to wear the green shirt with the brown pants, and out I emerge from my room in the BROWN shirt with the GREEN pants, and suddenly whomever I’m dating at the time thinks I’ve done this on purpose just to frustrate her. (Granted, this is a fair assumption. Something twisted in my personality enjoys intentionally misunderstanding my girlfriends. It’s almost like my way of flirting. Some people tickle. I pretend to think you meant THIS when you actually meant THAT. Lets face it folks. I’m a strange fella. My dad calls it “strategic incompetence” and it’s how he gets out of doing the laundry sometimes.)

Anyway, when people ask me what my favorite color is, I always say green AND brown, because, really, to me, they pretty much ARE the same color. At least certain tones of them are.

I have the same problem with babies. To most men and ALL women, babies can be divided into two categories. The first category, and by far the largest, is the “cute” babies. Lets face it, we are genetically programmed to think babies are cute. That’s because if a lion tries to eat one or an Emu tries to kick one or if anyone from a reality TV show tries to come within fifty feet of one, our genetic programming will kick in and we’ll drop everything to try and save it, even if it isn’t ours. So…cute babies is category number one.

Category number two is, naturally enough, ugly babies.

Most people will look at a baby and say “oh! That baby is so cute!” and they will genuinely mean it. Or they can look at a baby and say “oh! That baby is so cute!” and NOT genuinely mean it because what they really think is that that baby might as well have just stayed in the oven and baked a little while longer…cause that sucker ain't done.

So that is most people. I, on the other hand, am completely incapable of distinguishing ugly babies from cute babies. Not that I’m saying I can’t distinguish physical features. I’m perfectly capable of telling my friend Tracy’s baby from my friend Ashley’s baby. But what I couldn’t tell you is which of those two babies was cute or which was ugly. It’s the brown shirt/green pants dilemma all over again.

Fortunately, human nature provides me with a way out of this problem. Because while there is usually SOMEONE around who doesn’t mind telling me that I’ve managed to wear one black sock with one navy blue sock*, there isn’t anyone with the "huevos rancheros**" to correct me if I accidentally call an ugly baby cute. It’s just one of those little white lies that everybody tells to keep life running smoothly…the all too necessary grease between the cogs of human interaction. All I have to do is give all babies the benefit of the doubt and call them all “cute” and nobody ever calls me on it. After all, that’s what everybody does anyway, right? The only difference is, I actually mean it, cause I don’t know any better.

All this discussion of little white lies reminds me of the summer I decided I was going to stop telling them. Period. Just to see what happened. It was an adventure, maybe I’ll write about it soon. But for now, and until next time, my dear friends, my neighborly readers...adios.

--A--

FOOTNOTES

*I solved this problem by not bothering to match ANY of my socks, no matter the color, style, or degree of disinigration. I will frequently wear one navy blue dress sock with one short ankle white gym sock. If you swing that far along the sock matching pendulum, past mismatching and straight on into pure chaos, people just look the other way and pretend not to notice. Hey Kids! Want to really make people uncomfortable?! Walk into the Banana Republic with mismatched socks pulled all the way up under plastic flip flops and tell the attractive salesgirl that you like your style but you are looking for something a little less dignified. It's buckets of fun!

**A traditional Mexican brunch of of fried eggs, salsa, and refried beans served warm over a tortillia. What were you thinking? Geez.

WORD OF THE DAY

Ablation

Dictionaries Are Your Friends, Children!

This is an old doodle (three, four months?) but it still goes with my post from a few days ago. I just got my scanner working so each new post will be accompanied by a new doodle! Huzzah!

Your life just got a trillion percent better.

Word of the Day (part two)

Sub-surface exhalation.


dig on it, baby.

Word of the Day

My insomnia is wicked tonight.

Word of the Morning!

Fluvial Geomorphology--the study of why rivers flow the way they do. Neat, huh?

--A--

Maiwage…Maiwage is Whut Brings Us Toogethu…Towday.

You ever have one of those months where it feels like everyone you know is getting married, engaged, or pregnant?

Yeah? EVERY month feels like that?

Yeah, me too. You’d think we’d run out of unmarried friends, wouldn’t you, at the rate this is going.

I guess I’m just in that time frame in my life…where a lot of people I know found their soul mate during their last two years of college, and now they are just going to town, baby. Booking it down that aisle! Bring on the nuptials!

Not that I’m (that) jealous. I’m a romantic, after all, and I’m uber happy for you. I’ll come to your wedding with a smile on the inside and outside, I’ll take pictures if you want me too, I’ll fail at dancing the electric slide for the zillionth time and I’ll eat all the sausage balls while I’m doing it. I’ll hug your grandmother and shake hands with your brother and, by golly, I will completely refrain from telling your mother that there is a fifty percent chance this whole dealie will end in a bitter divorce in less than ten years.

Hey, so I’m a CYNICAL romantic. As far as I’m concerned, cynicism is just another facet of romanticism.

Which is to say again that I’m not jealous. At least, I’m not jealous of the FACT that you are getting married. Was it really a year and a half ago that I actually thought I was ready for marriage? That I was actually BUYING A RING!? What in the crispity chrunchity crap was I thinking?

I’m really not ready for that kind of…life altering, soul binding, cleaving* of a man and a woman into one person. If you are, then more power to you. Let the flowers be chosen and the thematic colors be agonized over.

No, what really irks me, what gets my goat, what I AM jealous about…well…lets just be clear, blunt, and come right out and say it without resorting to silly metaphors.

Yes, I’m talking about The Horizontal Hokie Pokie.

Lord help me, I’m abstinent until marriage, a virgin by choice, and boy, does it get on my nerves sometimes. Okay, so mostly I’m fine with it. Obviously, I wouldn’t have made it this far into my adulthood if I didn’t feel like it was the right thing for me to be doing. (Or NOT doing, if you will, ay gov’ner, say no more, say no more)

But I’ll tell ya…never do I get more irritated by it than at a wedding. At a wedding, sex is the obese elephant in the room, stepping on toes and bumping into you at the bar and not giving a damn either way. It’s the unspoken promise. The bride and the groom are headed for a night of fun, and here’s the kicker…so is almost everyone else in the place. Cause weddings get people frisky, don’t they? A little nostalgia perhaps…a little anticipation of the future, a little dancing, some champagne…conditions, as the man says, are perfect. And don’t forget about that silly old elephant, spiking the punch and spraying magical good juju into the air with his trunk.

Yes, weddings are but the warm up to the real party for most people. But what about that one percent of folks who are that increasingly rare combination of A) not married and B) choosing to remain abstinent until marriage…

Well, we get to go home, sort through the pictures we took at YOUR wedding, have a rootbeer, eat the last crumbly sausage ball we stole from the reception, climb into our hammock, and read until we fall asleep, and our last thought as murky darkness slides in is that if we meet the girl of our dreams TOMORROW that we wouldn't be ready for marriage, so it MIGHT, it MIGHT be a year and a half until we get let into your fun little club.

Okay, like I said…most of the time I’m fine with my life choices. I don’t need encouragement. I don’t need “hang in theres”. I’m not going to break and I’m not going to bend. I’ll make it.

But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. I feel I have every right to complain. God gives me a physical body that basically exists to eat, sleep, and have sex, and then says “Ah ah ah ah…not yet, sucka fool! Not till you’re married!” And I say “What? Don’t sleep until I’m married…that sounds bad but I think I can make it—“ and then God interrupts and says “I’m not talking about SLEEP you blinkin idiot, I’m talking about SEX!” And I say, “Sex? ONE OF THE THREE PRIMARY DRIVES OF ALL LIVING CREATURES, that is what I can’t do until I’m married?” And God says, “yeah man.” And I say “Oh…well that sucks!” And God says, “Deal with it man. I’m God.” And I say, “True enough, true enough, you have a point.” And God says “umm…yeah. I usually do. But I tell you what. You’re free to look at as many sunsets as you want. How awesome is that? I’ll even throw in sunrises and mountains and paintings by Monet and all that.” And I say “That’s pretty freak’n awesome, God, I’ll admit. But what about the people who aren’t married and having sex? They get to look at sunsets and Monet paintings too.” And God says, “Look, you’re kinda missing the point, man…don’t you think?” **

And so on…

For more information regarding my thoughts about God’s sense of humor, see my earlier post concerning yogurt, mouthwash, and Paulie Shore.

Anyway, I forgot where I was going with all this…so I guess I’m done for this post. Here’s one last fun fact before I go. I just found out today that my parents read this blog. So, Dad, and especially Mom, I’m sorry you just had to read my rant about my sexual frustrations. Look on the bright side. At least I’m able to humorously complain about success as opposed to sorrowfully rue failure.

Enjoy your evenings, folks. It's the hammock for me.

--A--

Footnotes
*Fun Vocabulary Fact! The verb “cleave” has two definitions that are the total opposite of each other! Have Fun with Dictionaries, Kids!
**For some reason, God went from being a gansta to a cockney brit to a hippie in three sentences. Don't ask me. I just write what I feel.

A Dancing Fool is Thrice the Fool He Normally Is

There are places that I feel completely at ease. Self assured. Confident.

Behind a camera, for instance, or in front of a computer screen. In the woods, walking up a mountain. In a canoe, paddling downstream.

Then there are places where I feel the opposite. Less like a fish out of water and more like a fish in Jello…the difference being that a fish in Jello feels like he SHOULD know what to do, that he COULD swim through this water-ish mess if only he could figure out the correct methods. Poor fishy…he just doesn’t realize that there is nothing he can do, there just isn’t any way he can comprehend his situation. And so he continues flopping about uselessly on the dance floor…er…in the jello. Yes. The jello. Not the dance floor.

Okay, fine, yes, the dance floor. The modern style of dancing to rap music is the strawberry jello to my puzzled fish. It is completely beyond my abilities to comprehend, physically and mentally. Granted, I haven’t really tried all that hard…And I’ve only ever attempted the feat five, maybe six times in my life. (Four proms, one bar, one club, the club attempt being just this weekend)

Having once again failed spectacularly to do what would appear, at first glance, to be an easy task (stand there and sway back and forth to the “music”) I realized that I had to do something. After all, I find it likely that I’ll wind up on a dance floor a few more times in my life, and I like to at least APPEAR competent even if I’m not.

So I’ve given it some thought, and based on my previous experience I’ve come up with a battle plan to, if not impress on the dance floor, at least blend in. Some little white lies for little white guys, if you will. Feel free to take notes. This plan might work for you!

NUMERO UNO: Pat the Invisible Tall Guy on the Top of His Invisible Head

This is one of my favorite dance moves. You know the one I’m talking about…where everybody in the club suddenly raises one hand, palm down, and bounces that hand up and down slightly. The key here is to DO IT WHEN EVERYBODY ELSE DOES. Pay close attention to the music…usually it’s on some kind of beat or shouted lyric. (Ex. “What we gonna do to women? Objectify! Objectify!” What! What! Sweaty Balls!)

NUMERO DOS: Sniff Your Own Armpit

Similar in nature to NUMERO UNO, except for now both hands are raised, the eyes are closed, and the head is twisted around to one side or the other. This move has the advantage of not having to be used in conjunction with anyone else, as well as that it gives you something to do with your awkward hands.

NUMERO TRES: Make Em Laugh

Become the Comic Relief. If you are funny, start trying to make people laugh and stop trying to actually dance. If you are not naturally funny, and you are twenty one…then drink. Once you have become the comic relief, all the pressures of actually dancing well evaporate. SPECIAL TIP: Start out with cheesy dance moves like the Fishing Line or the Water Sprinkler, then feel free to add your own. Try the Sitting in Traffic, or the always amusing Getting Your Car Oil Changed…how about the classy Microwaving a Pot Pie…the sky is the limit. **NOTE** Hey Kids! Don’t Drink Unless You Are 21! Scruff McGruff will take a bite out of your face and send you straight to the emergency room for stitches and twenty rabies shots to the stomach!

NUMERO CUATRO: Minimize Your Impact

Go get drinks for other people. Escort people to the bar. Go get some fresh air. Engage a bouncer in a political discussion because you are “interested in people” All these things make you look like a nice guy and minimize your time to seriously mess up on the dance floor. KEY NOTE: Do not avoid the dance floor entirely. That defeats the purpose of going and worries the people who invited you. Instead, space out your “breaks” strategically.

NUMERO CINCO: Move Your Mouth More Than Your Body

Chances are you don’t know the words to whatever is playing. (I’m assuming this based on the fact that you have made it this far into this entry) Not a problem, my friend. The decibel level in any given club is level with the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport runway. Nobody can hear you anyway. Simply mouth along as best you can, or at the very least, mumble “watermelon, watermelon, rhutebegah, rhutebegah”. Take it from an old drama geek…it works.

NUMERO SEIS: Apologize Once…Then Do Your Thing.

It might be wise to admit your lack of dancing ability upfront to the group…ONCE. Then don’t mention it again. This covers your basis and lets people know what to expect if you blow numeros UNO through CINCO and pleasantly surprises people if you manage to get it right.

Well, that’s my plan. Remember, the goal is not to dance well. A fish, after all, can never swim through jello. But he might, with some sly tactics, manage to LOOK as if he COULD. And that might be just enough to win the girl/impress the date/ please the friends…or achieve whatever it is you’ve set out to do by dragging your flabby white butt out onto the dance floor.

Happy grooving!