Hey Nineteen

This post was first made on November 28th, 2007, on Facebook.

So every morning I wake up at about 5:00 AM when my alarm goes off, only it isn’t my alarm, it’s the massive food trucks that are backing up to the University Catering loading dock that happens to be right outside my uber-expensive single dorm room. It so happens that these trucks’ highly obnoxious backing up sound (BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP) is the exact same sound as my Proton 320 Clock Radio (BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP). Now, I don’t want to bitch too much about this, but I’m going to because it’s highly necessary. Whoever drives these trucks really relishes backing up. I mean, it’s probably his favorite thing in the universe, because every morning I get to listen (BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP) as this wretched teamster practices his hobby for a good 20 minutes without a single break. How long could it possibly take to back up a truck!? I’m trying to sleep, for God’s sake.

That got a bit ranty, let me just hit the reset button here…

So every morning I wake up, crawl out of bed, slink over to my computer, and check my email, hoping that perhaps one of my blogs has garnered more comments or that my picture on hotornot.com got a rating above 3.3. Usually I get one or two emails, nothing particularly exciting, so you can imagine my excitement yesterday when I checked my email and found out that literally everyone in the world had posted on my wall to wish me happy birthday. That was surprisingly awesome, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for being glad I was born. Trust me, you’re not even half as happy about it as I am.

The biggest question I kept getting on my birthday was, “Do you have anything special planned?” and I guess that the people who were asking me this didn’t understand that I’ve planned something special a grand total of maybe two times in my life. I stopped having proper birthday parties when I was in middle school*, I think, and for the next few years my family would celebrate by taking me and a few friends to a movie and then having Mexican food or something, and by the time I got to high school my birthday had become so low key that I usually didn’t even tell most people about it (this is largely because the Sprague High School Band tradition was for everyone to sing very loudly and poorly to whoever had a birthday, usually cued by someone shouting, “HEY GUYS, GUESS WHO’S BIRTHDAY IT IS…!”). I managed to make it through my 18th birthday without being humiliated by public singing, which I saw as a victory, if not a slightly lonely one.

*I add these footnotes a lot, and I don’t intend it to be a gimmick, it just keeps happening. Anyway, when I was in 4th grade, I was having one of my last few birthday parties with maybe a dozen friends. Everybody got me nice 4th grade boy things, like cap guns and Lego sets and toy cars, except Steven. Steven was arguably richer than any of my other friends (gated community style rich, I mean), but there was no present from him on the table. Once I’d opened all the other presents, he shuffled over and handed me a folded $10 bill. At first I was thrilled, because, hey, $10!, but then as I unfolded it I found out it was some recruitment tract from a local church that was designed to look like a $10 bill when it was folded a certain way so people would pick it up. That was it. That was all he got me. Early on in high school, Steven got into drugs and dropped out. I hate you Steven, I hate you so much, that gift royally sucked, and I will never, ever, ever forgive you.

Thanks to the fact that nearly all my friends are on Facebook now, though, my birthday this year was a fairly public occurrence. Everywhere I went, people wished me a happy birthday, and despite my best efforts to prevent it the members of my Freshman Interest Group sang to me, but I took it like a man and I feel stronger for it. I ate stir-fry with friends and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Quest of the Delta Knights – a classic!) and then returned to my dorm to find that the guys in the hall had taped every sign they could find onto my door:

It's like a bulletin board threw up!

Long story short, the entire birthday was pretty damn special, and the best part is that I didn’t even have to plan it. I’d sort of figured that my first birthday away from home would be even lower key than before, but in fact it was one of my most enjoyable birthdays in recent memory. This just goes to show that The Power Of Friendship™ is the second greatest gift of all, behind Half Life 2, which my parents got me.

Truman Capps, despite the sentimentality of the above blog, is still a bit disappointed that he didn’t get the #1 item on his birthday wish list: Tina Fey.

Thanksblogging

This post was first made on November 21st, 2007, on Facebook.

In chronological order:

1) Greyhound sucks. No, really, I mean it, it’s like a black hole in its pure suckitude. I got to the Greyhound station in downtown Eugene and for a second I thought it’d been caught in the middle of a race riot or something, what with all the graffiti and burned out parts and broken windows. You know in movies when they’re in a really crappy bus station, and you look at it and think, “Oh snap! That’s got to be artistic license, bus stations couldn’t possibly get that bad!”? Well, I waited in that bus station for an hour and a half. I think I’m a heroin addict just for breathing the air in there. Also, I’m pretty sure they have cockfights in the men’s bathroom. Chickens or penises, whatever – I wouldn’t be surprised. It stinks like both.

2) My parents moved to Portland after I went down to school, and this is the first time I’ve seen the new house now that they’re in it. It’s strange to come home from school to a house that you’ve never slept in before, especially when your parents aren’t finished making it their own. For example, my room is a dark shade of purple that seems to suck up all the light from the single 3-watt light bulb in the ceiling. It’s like having a sleepover, only instead of going to a friend’s house by yourself, you go with your parents to a stranger’s house while they aren’t there and go through all your holiday rituals like it’s your house, but we haven’t done that since the restraining order.

3) Our new house is in a very trendy neighborhood, the sort of neighborhood that’s still converting from ghetto-ish to yuppie-tastic. Example: today I took a walk to our beautiful new branch library, which was nice, and then I bought a taco from a taco stand nearby* and walked back toward the house while eating it. Three blocks away from the house, a homeless guy asked me if I could spare any change. There I was, half a taco in my mouth and half a taco left on my little paper plate, and since I’ve been conditioned by my father not to give money to bums on the street lest they use it to buy drugs, I told him through a mouthful of delicious savory meat that I didn’t have any money. I felt really bad as I walked away, because I still had half a taco, and a real saint would’ve given it to him because after all, you can’t buy drugs with a half eaten taco (to my knowledge). This would never happen in South Salem: a library, good food, and homeless people.

*You couldn’t do that in Salem, let me tell you. The only time I saw a food stand in Salem was during the summer when I was in 6th grade, and a guy had a hot dog cart at the transit mall. I remember that at the time I was fascinated by the concept of food carts because I assumed they’d all sell delicious, hearty, ethnic food like the ones in New York, so one day I went up to him and bought a hot dog. I don’t remember what I put on the hot dog, or if there were any other kinds of food available from the cart, or even how it tasted – I just remember that when I walked up to the guy he grinned at me and said, “You a hungry man?” A few weeks later he disappeared and I never saw him again. My experience with the tacos was much less frightening.


4) My new neighborhood is also chock full of antique shops, just lined right up next to one another. You really would not believe how many damn antique shops there are here until you see it for yourself. This is probably where some language-hating bastard coined the phrase ‘antiquing’. 100 years ago they didn’t have antique shops, they just had really cheap shops, and then all the other shops started paying top dollar to stock new crap, while these shops kept keeping the old stuff, and eventually they just stuck the word ‘ANTIQUE’ on the sign (in front of ‘SHOP’), and then people magically started buying stuff that had once been considered a cut above garbage. I mean, what, old rusted Coca Cola signs that people hang up in their houses now? In 50 years they’ll be hanging up AOL CDs, mark my words.

5) Since most of my extended family has much better things to do on Thanksgiving Day than spend time with one another, they and my parents agreed to have Thanksgiving with my grandparents at our new house last Saturday, while I was still at school. This worked out fine for me, because frankly I’ve got much better things to do on Thanksgiving Day than spend time with my extended family. They did the whole Thanksgiving thing: turkey, stuffing, pie, ritual slaughter of a virgin, cranberries… Naturally, they couldn’t finish everything, which means that our refrigerator is full of Thanksgiving leftovers on the day before Thanksgiving. My parents have been eating turkey all week. I had turkey lasagna for dinner tonight. We’re probably going to be having turkey on the Fourth of July. If I lapse into a coma, it’s from the tryptophan.

6) I love Thanksgiving – my Thanksgiving memories each year are more vivid than my Christmas ones. Every year my parents and I watch Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which is one of the funniest movies ever and if you don’t agree you’re stupid. Every Thanksgiving my family finds a way to shirk our duties with the extended family (see #5) so that we can do something fun – last year we rented a nice cabin on an island in Washington, and for two years before that we went to the coast with friends. So in a way, I guess, it is a holiday tradition for me to spend Thanksgiving in a place I’m not used to.

Truman Capps wants you to know that his birthday is November 27th, and talking about Christmas before National Truman Capps Day is a federal offense, punishable by fines of up to $200 (which, as usual, double in a school zone).

Toys for Tots

This post was first made on November 14th, 2007, on Facebook.

According to my grandpa, back when he was growing up this was the only only thing in the Toys R Us catalog.

It's two weeks until Thanksgiving, and you know what that means: the Christmas toy ads have really started to ramp up. Every year I'm shocked at the crap that they try to sell to kids - not just the kind of crap, but the sheer volume! Toys R Us puts out a dictionary sized catalog* every year at this time, packed cover to cover with with things that parents will no doubt beat one another up for on Black Friday. The most amazing things I'm seeing advertised, though, are the things for the absolute youngest demographic.

*Have you seen the commercial for this year's Toys R Us "gift book"? Mom and her little girl are sitting together in bed with the book, and Mom says, "I think it's about time for bed", and then the girl says, "Raise your hand if you think we should pick out a few more toys!" and the camera pans around her room and we see that she's raised all the hands on her 40,000 stuffed animals, and then Mom laughs and they pick out more toys. Yeah, okay, I'm just putting this out there: if my kid ever tries something like that on me, no dice. I will take every last stuffed animal out of out of her room and replace them with presidential commemorative plates, and on Christmas morning every gift will be Battleship!, the granddaddy of all mediocre gifts. Are you reading this, future children? I am so freaking serious. I hate that commercial.

Babies are apparently geniuses now (and no, I'm not making reference to the movie Baby Geniuses or its landmark sequel, Baby Geniuses 2), because their toys are officially more complicated than than a game of Risk. During The Office they air a lot of commercials for family cars and affordable middle class jewelry, but the commercials that stand out the most are the ones for infant toys and accessories. Have you ever noticed that the ads for baby toys are written like they're directed at babies, despite the fact that the parents are the ones who are watching the ads, understanding them, and (most important, now) paying for the products? Observe:

[Authoritative man's voice speaks while a huge black SUV drives around]
"The Cadillac Escalade XTI-2000: It's so big that other cars are literally crushed by it, which means it's the safest choice for your family! Ride in style in a fully climate controlled interior with leather seats, four DVD players, a latte bar, hot tub, Chuck Mangione, and the entire state of Michigan. Crank up the stereo and you can't even hear those stupid liberals complaining that it only gets .3 miles to the gallon. Cadillac: Fuck the environment, yo!"
[Fade to black. Then we see bright colors and hear happy marimba music as a toddler gleefully runs around with bears. A woman with a creepily happy voice narrates]
"There once was a baby who knew what was best,
The Happy Bear Forest Play Adventure Quest(tm)!
With super cute bears the baby will play,
And have lots of fun, all super-cute day!
Good mommies and daddies who stand out from the rest,
All buy the Happy Bear Forest Play Adventure Quest(tm)!"

The ads for baby toys are written and edited like some sort horrible marriage of nursery rhyme and infomercial ("Old Mother Hubbard took a sip of her Coke/'Thank God it's not Pepsi - that shit makes me choke!") that I suppose is meant to set off the 'Awwwww' factor in mothers so strongly that it overpowers the father's "What the hell does my kid need with bears!?" factor.

But seriously, folks, take a look at the stuff that they're selling. Light up indicator panels for infants' cribs that make noises when they kick them and trains that sing and drive around on their own - why? Out of everyone, everywhere, babies are without a doubt the easiest to entertain. You know why babies love peek-a-boo so much? It's because they don't know where you are when your hands are in front of your face! Why spend hundreds of dollars on high tech crap when you can magically disappear and reappear by hiding your face?

Maybe all of you are fabulously wealthy and had all kinds of high tech late 1980s toys, like an interactive Dan Quayle doll that teaches spelling, but my toys were simple and fun. There was this seat that I had that hung from elastic straps in a doorjamb, and pretty much all I'd do was sit in it and bounce up and down for hours. I loved that thing! It didn't light up or make noises, it just bounced me around a lot, and sometimes the dog would run underneath me and spin me around. That was all I needed - screw light up talking choo-choo trains, to hell with Kodiak bears, all I needed was a bouncy chair and an excitable bull terrier and I was set for days. The resulting brain rattling is probably responsible for the nature of my blog.

Truman Capps is wondering whether he should have left that Dan Quayle joke in, because the only one of his readers who will get it is his dad.

It's The Halloween Update, Charlie Brown!

This post was first made on October 31, 2007, on Facebook.

"ROLL 2D6 TO HIT THE ICE DRAGON LOLOLOLOL"

Halloween was always a difficult holiday for me as a child. On my first Halloween (I was probably three) my parents took me to only a few houses at around 2:30 in the afternoon or so. That night I had one piece of chocolate (all that my mother would allow) and, coincidentally, had the stomach flu later on that night and for a long time after associated chocolate with violent nausea. When I was four, I went trick or treating again: I would run up to the door, ring the doorbell, shout "Trick or treat!" at the person who opened the door, and then, when they started to give me candy, say, "No thank you, I don't like chocolate." I went on to be the vice president of the high school debate team and not kiss a girl until I was 17.

Even after my bumpy start and the realization that I wasn't allergic to chocolate, Halloween was pretty stressful for the young Truman Capps. Every year I insisted on going as something different, my reasoning being that if I was going to get candy for free then I damn well ought to put at least some effort into the affair. I didn't like Power Rangers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which severely limited my choices, and every horror movie character scared me far too badly to try to impersonate one, which meant that every year I had to think up more and more obscure things to go as. In fourth grade I put on a white cardboard box with black dots drawn on and went as dice, which, while pretty lame, is kind of funny when you consider that I wound up playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons later in life.

I gave up on Halloween after my little dice adventure (my friends kept shoving me in an attempt to 'roll' me, and it's really tough to get up when 3/4ths of your arms are stuck inside cardboard) and never looked back. Every year I'd fret for weeks about what to dress up as while everyone else just went as the Red Ranger again and again, tolerate all the antics of 11-year-olds hopped up on Pixie Stix for the entire evening, and then get home with a buttload of candy when I really didn't even like candy all that much. If the custom was to give out garlic bread, or meatloaf, or pornography, I'd probably be trick or treating right now, but instead I was going through an awful lot of heartache and trouble for something I didn't even like that much in the first place ("Congratulations, you've won the Boston Marathon! Here's a wet sock.").

So I stopped trick or treating, and everyone else kept trick or treating. As they got older, my classmates started to care even less about what pretended to be. By high school, half of them had ditched the notion of a costume altogether and just went trick or treating in jeans and a T-shirt, and then came back through the neighborhood a few hours later with eggs and rolls of toilet paper and baseball bats for unsuspecting pumpkins (ironically, I'd seen at least a few of these kids crying in elementary school after their pumpkins had been smashed). The other half kept up with the costumes, but they started to get dirtier. A lot of the girls who had been princesses and fairy godmothers when I was eight were now going as naughty nurses, naughty policewomen, naughty businesswomen, naughty astronauts, naughty fry cooks, naughty newpaper editors, naughty nuns, naughty bloggers, naughty UN Secretary Generals, and so on and so forth into naughty infinity. A great many of the boys would spend an afternoon shopping for tacky clothing at a thrift store and go trick or treating as pimps.*

*Fun fact about pimps: they beat destitute, emotionally fragile women with pipes if those women don't give them enough of the money they've made having sex with anonymous men who might be serial killers. Just keep that in mind next time you're trying to think of who you want to pretend to be.

Now that I'm in college, Halloween is less about trick or treating and more about getting dressed up and drinking, explaining why I'm sitting in my room writing this at 10:00 on October 31st ("No thank you, I don't like beer."). The University Housing system, in its infinite wisdom, decided that it'd be a good idea to have parents bring their toddlers into the dorms to trick or treat, and right now little kids hyped up on sugar are running up and down the halls among big kids hyped up on something different (I suspect marijuana cigarettes).

And that's what's so brilliant about Halloween: in the spirit of a holiday with origins in paganism and witchcraft, parents in a largely Judeo-Christian culture dominated by media-bred fear of the outside world are willing to take their children into a dormitory full of college students celebrating the same holiday in a very different way. On Halloween, people go out of their comfortable little houses and neighborhoods and interact with other people on a wide scale, save for certain extreme Christian sects and the occasional lonely blogger. On what other holiday do millions of people go out, talk to strangers, give candy to people they’ve never met before, and then head home again? Not on Kwanzaa, that’s for sure.

Happy Halloween, everybody! Next week’s blog will be funnier, I promise!

Truman Capps means no disrespect to those who celebrate Kwanzaa. Both of them.

Treatises On Why I'm A Slob

This post was first made on October 17th, 2007, on Facebook.

Those of you who've known me for awhile will remember that I'm a pretty damn neurotic sort of guy. I like things clean and orderly. I like an uncluttered desk and a clear floor, cans and bottles stacked neatly in the recycling bin, the bed well made, and everything perfectly organized. Nothing makes me happier than walking into my dorm and seeing it perfectly neat and clean.

That's never happened, of course, because while I want to live in an Adrian Monk world of meticulous organization, I'm far too lazy to actually do all that work. The picture accompanying this article is of my recycling bin. Well, see, it's a picture of the general area where I assume my recycling bin is - I'm damn sure it's somewhere under all those recyclables. What sucks about living in the dorms is that when you take out the recycling, you have to painstakingly separate everything: bottles, cans, glossy paper, white paper, colored paper (remind me why we're segregating our recycling bins?). This is a royal pain in the ass, especially to a guy like me who has literally thousands of hot girlfriends, and thus no time to separate out his Aquafina bottles from his Diet Coke cans. I've been here for six weeks now, and I've emptied my recycling once. It's gotten to the point where when I'm done with a piece of paper or a plastic bottle, I just throw it underneath Desk Beta and hope for the best. Every morning I wake up and look at it and think, "You know what? Today's the day. I'm just going to spend an hour trucking that stuff downstairs and separating it, and then I'll be done." And then that night, as I go to sleep, I think, "You know what? Maybe this just isn't the right week to take out the recycling." I don't think there's any particular rush - it's not like recyclables decompose and attract rats or anything. If any rats did come and infest my aforementioned Diet Coke cans and Aquafina bottles, they'd probably be really clean, nerdy rats, and instead of crapping all over the place and eating my food they'd probably just use my TV to watch anime while I was asleep.

There's other stuff too - my jacket stays on my bed, instead of in the closet, and the various sheets of paper I accumulate in my academic life just get piled on my shelves. Every so often I go a little crazy and clean the whole thing up, but then things gradually get dirty again over the course of about a week. I start to make excuses for why I leave crap out. "Oh, why bother putting my Ibuprofen back in the drawer? I'll just leave it on the desk for the next time I have a headache." "Oh, what the hell, I'll just sleep with my jacket on the bed. It'll be that much easier to get to in the morning." "You know what? I'm going to leave that Nalgene bottle on the floor. I mean, it's bulletproof, for Christ's sake, what's the worst that could happen down there?" Before long, everything in my room has been set on top of something else. Sometimes, it results in my printer looking like a totally cool dude:

Eyyy!

Other times, it results in my $25 book of poems for Comparative Literature sliding into the netherworld between my bed and the wall. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to get that back yet, because my bed is more or less bolted down (I guess university housing was afraid I was going to steal my bed).

This is the curse of being anal retentive and also seriously lazy: the lazy keeps anal retentive from organizing the room most of the time, and when anal retentive finally takes over for an hour and does, lazy is always there for the long haul to screw it all up again.

In the time it took to write this blog, Truman could have emptied his recycling five times or studied for his journalism midterm

Four Observations (Examples Included!)

This post was first made on October 7th, 2007.

I'm Larry Craig, and I approve this blog. Also: still not gay.

1. People Just Can't Believe That I'm Lactose Intolerant

In case you didn't already know, then I'm coming out of the closet: due to an increasingly common birth defect, my body is unable to process milk. I consider myself lucky, because some lactose intolerant people can't have cheese or ice cream, but in my case milk is the only thing that really gives me trouble. Do you find this boring? Lord knows I do. The hundreds of millions of other lactose intolerant people in the world are probably just as uninterested in their condition as I am. Yet for some reason, I have had countless conversations like this:

Person A: Hey, Truman, you want some milk?
Me: No thanks, I'm lactose intolerant.
(Person A's mouth falls open and his/her eyes widen, filled with a look of the utmost shock and disbelief, as though I have just admitted that I'm Jesus Christ in disguise and this is the Second Coming)
Person A: R-really?
Me: ...No, actually. I was lying. I can't help it - I envy those lactose intolerant bastards and I'd give anything to be one. You know, if you get the runs when you drink milk, you can have any woman you want!

2. Being Wet And Cold Sucks

...or, at least, that's one man's opinion. I'm sort of an expert on what it's like to be wet and cold, seeing as I live in Oregon and all. Why, just tonight on the way back from the library I was caught in the rain without a hood, and as I hurried back to my dorm I thought to myself, "Wow, I really don't enjoy this. This just isn't my thing." You know how it feels when the rain soaks all the way through your parka and it starts to stick to your skin, and then you're sweating under your parka and it gets all hot and humid in the space between your arms and the coat, but your face is all cold and your hair is all wet and sticking to your head? Do you enjoy that? No?

Well, you should, because you're an Oregonian (I seriously doubt that I have any out of state readers). At least, this is what people tell me. When I show up to marching band rehearsal wearing my rain hat or when I duck into a nearby building during an impromptu rainstorm, people around me always get offended and say, "What the hell are you doing? You're an Oregonian! I love the rain!" I guess because it rains so much here, I'm supposed to enjoy being wet. I apply similar logic in the following example:

Southern Californian: omg cali 4-evah!!!1
(Gang Member shoots Southern Californian)
Southern Californian: argh wat r u doin!?!??!
Gang Member: Oh, come on, you're from Southern California! I love gang wars!

3. I Don't Like Tea And I Never, Ever, Ever Will

"Hey Truman, you want some tea?"
"No, thanks, I don't really like tea."
"What!? I love tea. Tea is the best thing in the world! I'm saving up for an experimental procedure in which my blood will be replaed with tea!"
"I don't know, I guess I just really don't like the taste."
"Oh, then you just aren't drinking the right kind of tea! Here, try this this Lotos Sunblossom Julip tea! It's the best!"
(I take a sip)
"Yeah, it pretty much tastes like hot water with some leaves dropped in it."
"Well, sometimes it helps to add a little cream. Here!"
"No, actually, I'm lactose intolerant."
"R-really!?"

My parents drink tea. My friends drink tea. Barack Obama probably drinks tea, and I'll bet you anything he looks damn charismatic doing it. I, however, do not drink tea. As you can see from the above conversation (which I have had a lot), people aren't so accepting of my opinion on the matter.

I'm not saying that tea is bad. I'm saying that when I drink it, I 'taste' something weak and unappealing that is either too hot or cold and unrefreshing. I don't care what kind of new age bling-ass tea you drink, I guarantee you that I won't like it. If it's tea, I won't like it. Again, if it's tea, I won't like it, because it is tea, and I don't like tea. Maybe my inability to process lactose has also impaired my ability to taste tea. For all I know, tea could taste like Lucy Liu looks. In fact, if it did, I'd probably shower in the stuff. But until stem cell research allows us to replace whatever defective body part is keeping me from appreciating the glory that everyone around me seems to be taking part in, just keep this in mind:

T is for Truman
Tea is also Truman's least favorite beverage

4. DS Is An Asshole

An Actual Conversation, circa January 2007

Stephanie: Hey, DS, did you know that Mr. Howard wanted us all to dress up for this All City rehearsal?
DS: Yeah, I knew.
(DS is wearing cargo shorts, flip flops, and whatever kind of stupid t-shirt an asshole like DS would wear)
Snively: So why didn't you?
DS: Eh. I didn't really care.
Truman: Yeah, but your band director - who controls your grade - told you to do it. It's in your best interest to keep him happy.
DS: I don't really do dress up stuff.
Truman: ...but... He's going to give you a bad-
DS: GOD! This is why I hang out with South people!
(DS storms off)

Elementary School Reflections

This post was first made on September 3rd, 2007, on Facebook.

My parents are moving to Portland about three days after I leave for school, so all three of us are packing our stuff and deciding what we want to move and what we want to leave. Yesterday we moved about a thousand boxes down from the attic and today we started sorting through them to figure out what was worth keeping and what wasn't. A whole lot of my toys went to the Union Gospel Mission, along with such gems as an LP player and my old stroller. We also had to sift through lots of empty boxes because my father insists on keeping the box for every piece of technology he buys. Do you think that the box for an original Apple printer is worth anything? If so, feel free to root through our recycling bin.

What we also kept up there were all my preschool and elementary school assignments. As I brought these assignments home from school, graded, at the end of every year, my Mom and I would decide that there was too much sentimental value there to throw the items away, so instead we did the next best thing: we threw them into big cardboard boxes which we then hauled up to the attic. To this day I maintain that forgetting about things in the attic is the best way to deal with them. The downside is that when you move, you do have to deal with stuff again. Today I went through these boxes to find out how much of my old work was, in fact, significant and worth saving. During this search, I discovered two things:

1) Had we given the mouse in our attic maybe another month, he would've probably eaten most of the evidence that I had ever gone to elementary school, and then pooped some more on whatever was left.

2) The stuff that was left uneaten makes for prime blog material.

When I look back at the work that I used to do, I can easily spot indications of my desire to be a writer, even though at the time I probably would've resented the idea of being anything but a tow truck driver. Several journals from first grade are full of pages where I'd scrawled down nearly incomprehensible entries, most of them beginning with "I wish...", accompanied by huge and bizarre illustrations that give the viewer a disturbing peek into the mind of Truman Capps, age 6. Rather than writing down what had happened to me during the day, which I'm sure my teachers wanted me to do, I would instead write down what I had wanted to happen to me that day.

I WISHE MY DADE WAS A USED CARE SALESMAN (I wish my dad was a used car salesman) - Having spent most of my summer around car salesmen, I'd like to retract this one.

I WISHE I GOT A MONTAN CABEN (I wish I got a mountain cabin) - Where did this come from? I really don't know. I've always had some form of vertigo and I never really enjoyed 'roughing it'. Most of my fantasies at the time came from movies that I watched, so I'd probably seen something on TV about the mountains before I wrote this.

I WISHE I HADE A MOBIL HOM (I wish I had a mobile home) - As you can tell from the original spellings here, I had a lot of trouble with writing as a little kid. To this day I have terrible handwriting and it hurts my hand to use a pen or pencil for too long, and it was even worse back then. In order to get my overly creative fantasies onto paper, I would instead draw what I saw in my head. These pictures usually featured the characters from the Mario video games involved in epic car chases ripped off from the James Bond movies I watched. The illustration for 'MOBIL HOM' (on permanent display at the Guggenheim) was of a boxy mobile home that was probably well over eight stories tall and included a swimming pool and gym. So I guess I still do want a mobile home, but only if it's that mobile home and I don't have to drive it through any tunnels.

I completed half of first grade at Columbia Heights Elementary in Longview, Washington, a pleasant little paper mill town that always smelled like cat pee. After Dad lost his job there, we had to move, and that was how the Capps family wound up in Oregon. I really hated the move: my new first grade teacher, Mrs. Whotam, was a fat lady who always seemed to go out of her way to be mean to me. Once, during lunch, she walked past me and stole my Twix bar, probably intending to make some sort of joke. She left the room with it sticking out of her back pocket and I got right up and followed her. I trailed her out of the classroom (it was against the rules to leave the room without permission) and into the supply room (strictly off limits due to all the dangerous craft tools), where she turned around, saw me, and scolded me harshly for breaking the rules. Well, bitch, what did you expect when you stole a candy bar from a goddamn six year old!?

Ahem. Long story short, I really hated it in Salem, so I was really happy to receive a letter from my first grade teacher back in Longview, Mrs. Ellis. I wrote back to her (I don't remember what I wrote, but it probably had a lot to do with what I wished Salem was like), and then about a week later I got a big envelope in the mail, full of letters that she'd had my entire Longview first grade class write to me.

(Note: In case you didn't know, I went by Scott, my middle name, until I was a Freshman)

Brianna: "Daer Scot Yore cooL. Ps rite bake."

Kyle: "Dere scott I hop you are haveing a good Time aT Salem. our clas miss you ho and reemember wen you goT in a fite wiTh That Kid and me and Kyah helpt you" - Maybe I remembered then, but I certainly don't now. A fight? Me? That doesn't sound right at all. Also, I like how Kyle called me a ho in there.

Spencer: "Dear Scoot why did you adopted a wolf p.s. read this to the family" - My Salem first grade class 'adopted' a wolf in some wildlife refuge up in Alaska or Canada, by which I mean Mrs. Whotem mailed some conservation society a few dollars every month (money she probably made from fencing stolen Twix bars, the old whore) and they sent us updates periodically about what our wolf had been doing. I guess I included this in the letter that I sent to Mrs. Ellis and she told the class, but Spencer evidently didn't hear much beyond 'Scott adopted a wolf'.

Brianna: "Dear Scot I hop yore haveing fun in Salem. I wish you wr in are clas. yore nise scot. I Like you Scot."

Matt: "Are you having fun in Salem? The rats dide. And we got guinea pigs."

Brianna: "Dear scot I Like you Love Briana"

Alicia: "Dear Scott. Why did you adopted a wolf. Did you know that when it grows up it is going to be a wiled Animal?"

Brianna: "Daer scot I Love you Love Briana"

For the life of me, I can't remember who Brianna was.

Hot Bathroom Action

This post was first made on August 29th, 2007, on Facebook.

Oh, Spuddy Buddy... We've failed you.

So in one week not only do we lose Alberto Gonzales, but we also find out that Republican Senator Larry Craig of Idaho was arrested for disorderly conduct in an airport bathroom. Now, of course I'm happy that Alberto Gonzales has left office (his flaming pants were doing some damage to his chair - him being a liar, and all), but the arrest of any political figure always brings more joy to my life for the following reasons: 1) The arrest is always for some vaguely worded but thought provoking offense ("Poultry misconduct in the first degree... Hmmm...") and 2) The politician arrested is always, always, always an outspoken critic of something closely tied to the charge ("Representative Speer is a member of the House Subcommittee on Poultry Morality"). The same holds true for Larry Craig, but what bothers me is that this whole scandal is just so lame.

Due to complaints of sexual activity in the bathrooms, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has begun an investigation into exactly what kind of business travelers are taking care of in the restrooms. Now, before we go any further, let me just say that I think this is exactly what airports today need. What better way to spend the time between flights than with a few anonymous sexual encounters? I mean, if not for the airport bathrooms you'd have to go find a highway rest stop to do that sort of thing at, and honestly, who has that kind of time? Regardless, part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport's investigation included sending a plainclothes officer into the bathroom to sit in the stall and wait for something to happen.

So that's exactly what some intrepid law enforcer did - he walked into the men's room, got a stall, and was paid to pretend to go to the bathroom. I see this thing as sort of like fishing: you cast your line (sit down in a stall) and hope you get a bite (traveler in search of homosexual encounter). It took this officer - by his own account - a mere 13 minutes to get a bite, who just happened to be the Republican senator from Idaho. You know when you're fishing in a lake frequented by gay fish, and then the fish you catch is a Republican senator with a strong stance against gay rights? It was probably a lot like that.

Up until now this is all sounding pretty juicy, but get ready for disappointment. Did Senator Craig begin loudly praising the virtues of gay porn? Did he clamber over the stall wall wearing a negligee? No. No, ladies and gentlemen, he started tapping his foot. A direct quote from the officer:

"At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moved his foot closer to my foot."

So there it is. That's what we're arresting on. Foot tapping. I hate to defend a senator, but for all we know he could've been listening to some Beyonce on his iPod, and come on. If that doesn't get your toes a-tappin, you're probably dead. Of course, Senator Craig doesn't have a spotless record when it comes to sexual orientation - his alleged homosexuality has been a subject of heated debate among members of Idaho's bustling social scene since the early 1980s. Recently, a gay man alleged that he and Senator Craig engaged in some hanky panky in a bathroom at Union Station, which would indicate that the senator seems to prefer transit hub bathrooms for this sort of thing. Craig responded by saying, "I am not gay and I have never been in a restroom in Union Station having sex with anybody." Which is fine as a denial, I guess, but I doubt people would really give him too much grief for having sex with a woman in a train station bathroom. In today's murky moral climate full of self loathing, closet homosexual politicians, I think we'd all be relieved to see a senator violating the vows of his marriage and his party's 'family values' with an adult woman for a change.

Craig had a ready explanation for his actions in the bathroom stall in Minnesota. He said that he had "a wide stance when going to the bathroom", and implied that if his foot touched the officer's, it had been an accident. Now, despite what I've said earlier, I think that Senator Craig is guilty, and his alibi is why. This man is so desperate to cover up his true intentions that he just enlightened the entire country as to how he takes a dump. This isn't the first time such a thing has happened - who can forget President Nixon's famous quote, "What tapes? I wasn't there, the 'ol chili express was leaving the station at the time, if you know what I mean."

The other reason that I think Senator Craig is guilty is because he plead guilty. Craig issued a guilty plea in Hennepin County, Minnesota court, because he'd hoped that it would "handle the matter quickly". I guess he didn't remember that the downside to pleading guilty is that it constitutes you personally saying that you're guilty, in this case of trying to get a man to have sex with you when you're an anti gay senator fighting accusations of homosexuality.

Long story short, I'm glad that I heard about this, because now I know that listening to Beyonce in the bathroom could land me in a whole heap of... Well, if not trouble, then certainly something else nasty.

College Roommates, And The Lack Thereof

This post was first made on August 11th, 2007, on Facebook.

I have a single dorm. This makes me incredibly happy. Yes, I am thrilled to not have a roommate.

Now, don't take this to mean that I'm antisocial, because I'm really (sort of) not. I like people well enough. I've got friends and I hang out with them a lot. The thing is, I'm an only child. When I'm done with my friends, I go home and I go into my room, where it's just me and my computers, and I'm not obligated to be sociable or pleasant or even to wear clothes if I don't want to. I enjoy being around my friends, but at some point everybody needs some time off. I mean, everybody likes donuts, but you wouldn't eat donuts for a week straight, would you? Of course not - you'd steal away some time here and there to have some quiche or garlic bread, or maybe just a lot of Pepto, you fatty. If I had a roommate, I'd finish up with my friends and head back to my dorm, and then there's my roommate, and even if I loved him like a brother I'd still probably not be so jazzed about having to maintain my public persona for even longer. I'm just used to coming home and being alone, being able to spontaneously air guitar along with Boston and not have anyone see it. I think everybody has two personalities - the 'with people' personality, which is wacky and extrovert, and then the 'alone' personality, which is the guy who isn't trying to please anybody and just sits around eating hummus and watching Scrubs. Those of you who share living space with siblings probably spend a lot of time in 'with people' mode - maybe you aren't funny and extrovert per se for your brothers and sisters, but you sure as hell aren't acting as if there's nobody else around. I, on the other hand, spend a lot of my time around the house in my 'alone' personality. We go through a lot of hummus.

Yes, college is a place of learning, and I suppose that I should learn to spend a lot more time around people, but is it really hurting anyone because I like to spend an hour or so alone with my thoughts (and goat porn) when I can? Everybody has quirky elements of their personality that they hold on to. Kristin Vanderburgh writes down song lyrics when she's bored. Michael Snively loves his calculator. Dan Speer tries as hard as possible to be a douchebag at all times (or maybe he's just a natural). And I just happen to like to be able to spend some time away from people every now and then. That and I'm germophobic, distrust all politicians, and will periodically blog about my life when I'm bored. The other upshot of my living arrangement is that I've spared some innocent student the experience of living with me for a year.

2x Computer

This post was first made on July 18th, 2007, on Facebook.

I'm living a double life right now - a life of clunky, slow PCness, and also a life of freewheeling, bohemian Mactacularity. When I graduated from 8th grade, my dad got me a Dell laptop as a sort of graduation gift to replace my seriously old desktop PC. That laptop (which was the stickiest of the icky in 2003) weathered all four years of high school. It served me well, but now it is old and beaten, not to mention packed to the very gunwales with goat porn. My father, being awesome (and not just because he reads this blog) bought me a brand new Macbook a few weeks ago, and I've been having a wonderful time getting to know it. I can't help but wonder if an Apple will do better after four years of college than PC would...

My Mac has built in wireless capacity so that I can get Internet anywhere in the house, a built in webcam, it's much lighter than the PC, it has more hard drive space, it moves faster, it looks cooler, I look cooler when I use it, and frankly, this thing is so damn convenient that if it started shooting coffee out the CD drive I wouldn't be all that shocked. As I write this, I'm lying on the couch in my living room, listening to a CD as I rip it onto my hard drive, and enjoying the pleasant sensation of having something warm in my lap. My heavy PC is in my room, tethered to the desk by multiple wires and cables that Steve Jobs has somehow done away with entirely in his design. If I wanted to surf the Internet on the patio with my PC, I'd have to unplug all the wires, shut the lid on the computer, wait for it to power down, then grab the AC power cord and hurry out to the patio before the malfunction-prone batteries died. Then, I'd have to hastily plug everything in, then ask Dad for the wireless card, then plug it in, then have the computer give me some sort of error, then ask Dad for help, then get a very spotty, slow version of the Internet, about which time it starts to rain. While my PC was a laptop, it felt like more of a desktop because the desktop was where it always was. Understandably, I'm having a ball with my light, convenient, easy-to-use Mac that I can take anywhere.

We still have my old PC, though, which is sort of making me uncomfortable. Every day when I go back to my room to go to bed, my PC is there, virtually untouched all day, watching me from the desk. "Oh, well look who decided to come home." It's saying. "Did that new little slut of yours get tired of couch time? I guess because you can't take pictures with me or take me with you everywhere I'm not even worth using, is that it?"

The thing is, I still do need the PC, not because I enjoy it, but because all of my music is still on it, and because at the moment I'm too lazy to redownload all the Firefox extensions for a browser based RPG that I play. So sometimes I'll be lying in bed with my Mac while listening to music being played with my PC, which is the technological equivalent of Julia Roberts fooling around with her current husband while making Lyle Lovett watch and play 'Cowboy Man'.

I come by this honestly - my Dad owns seven computers, three of them Macs - but it still feels bizarre to be able to alternate between computers while one is loading a page, or to take a picture of yourself with the built in webcam on one computer and have your old computer be in the background. Sometimes, I put the Mac next to the PC and recreate those "I'm a Mac" "I'm a PC" Apple ads (although if my PC were John Hodgman I wouldn't neglect it the way I am). Eventually, once we get the music transferred, we're going to get rid of the PC and I'll have to try to cope with having only one computer in the house, which, after a few weeks of this, is going to be a bit of a change. Most of the time now I leave my Mac plugged in on the endtable in the living room, so if I get the sudden urge to Google something (or, y'know, hit the goat porn) all I have to do is decide whether I'm closer to my room (at one end of the house) or the living room (at the other) and go toward the nearest computer. After this sort of convenience (that, once again, the Mac is responsible for) it'll be hard to go back to walking.

Oh, and Congress had a slumber party. Yeah, wonder if that fixed the country...

Facebook Applications Are Great... For Me To Disapprove Of!

This post was first made on June 11th, 2007, on Facebook.

These are the eight people I care most about, ranked in order of just how much I love them:

1) Truman Capps
2) Alexander Jasper
3) Dylan Petrie
4) Your Mom (zing!)
5) Joe Wales
6) Jesus
7) That girl who goes out with Joe Wales
8) George Clooney (but if he likes the script I sent him, he's going straight to #2)

If you're not on this list, it's a result of your own personal negligence, and probably a manifestation of the antisocial tendencies you want so badly to believe you don't have. Come the apocalypse, be it nuclear, viral, or zombie oriented, these eight people will be the ones with whom I share my house, my supplies, and my chainsaws*. The rest of you are on your own - unless anybody on my Top 8 takes me off of theirs, in which case Kristin Vanderburgh will be allowed into the Truman Capps Postapocalyptic Fortress of Doom.

*Offer only valid in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

If you're still reading, and I sincerely doubt that, you're probably wondering why I'm bitching about applications when it's clear that I already have two - the Compass and the X Me function, and also the Movies function which I just remembered. This is because I think X Me is actually pretty funny, and the other two because they seemed cool at the time, 'the time' being just before I realized that Facebook is sliding down the slippery slope of, well, I don't want to call it 'doom' for fear of overusing hyperbole, but doom comes pretty close to describing it. I will delete two thirds of my applications after I publish this note.

We live in a world at war. This is not a war for justice, or, more importantly, oil, but instead a war for the online profiles of millions of people. We can choose to post our information on Myspace, which is 40% middle schoolers, 40% corporate interests targeting the middle schoolers, and 20% indie rock bands hoping to be picked up by the corporate interests (child molestors, pornographers, and general perverts are in there too, of course, but keeping track of them is like trying to chart all the trees in Oregon, or all the stupid people in Los Angeles). If Myspace's bizarre milieu of angst and commercialism doesn't please, the alternative is Facebook, which you no doubt already know everything about considering that you're reading a blog published on Facebook. Until recently, when asked about the difference between Myspace and Facebook, I would glibly reply "Facebook is for smart people." Now, I'm not so sure anymore.

Facebook is better because it's safer than Myspace. Safety isn't exactly a prime concern of mine, because I doubt that the majority of online stalkers are in the business of seeking out long winded 18 year old boys, but if I had a kid I'd want him/her to use Facebook. The problem with Facebook is that the main good thing about it - The Class - is oh-so-swiftly disappearing.

If you view a random Myspace profile, well, you'd better damn well like My Chemical Romance, because as soon as the page opens you're going to have "The Black Parade" blasting out of your speakers, and you won't be able to find the Back button because your eyes are so badly blinded by the hot pink text on a yellow background. Did I mention that an optional script has caused a string of hearts to follow your cursor around? Well, uh, it has. Your browser has also been stretched to the limits by gigantic pictures of Jessica Simpson while yards of poorly spelled, highly emotional postings spill downwards toward the bottom of the page. This is what customization does.

Choice and opportunity are both wonderful things, but by using Facebook we choose to forego many staples of Myspace. If a person signs up for Facebook, you can assume he or she has weighed the options and decided that they don't need to have an interactive flash powered animal "Buddy" to make their online persona complete. Then again, I've posted like four notes that have pictures of rabbits in them, so maybe a Buddy would be a good choice for me. Point being, Facebook users don't expect the extra add ons of Myspace, and they certainly don't need them.

But we're getting them anyway, additions by private companies that Facebook is allowing us to install at will. I currently have invitations from 14 such applications, scrolling all the way down my profile's sidebar. I don't need them. I don't want them. I wanted three of them, but now I don't want two, and they're going to be gone soon. Facebook profiles are starting to become just as cluttered and illegible as Myspace, and pretty soon it's going to be hard to tell the difference, save for the fact that an illegible Facebook profile is that much harder to see than an illegible Myspace profile.

What makes Facebook great are its restrictions, its bare bones layout. Never doubt the value of some good old fashioned simplicity. Giving people the option of sprucing up their layout has devestated the simplicity in favor of pizazz. Before the applications, Facebook was a to-the-point database of personal information and photographs with some fun group elements thrown in. Now, with the additional choices, the site is attempting to become something it's not, like a 50 year old with a leather jacket and a Harley.

Yeah, mid life crisis. That's my metaphor. Yes, Truman, you are a good writer...