Old stomping grounds, new issues

“There's no way that moving in with your parents is a sign that your life is right on track. There's no way that you could fake this even, 'Yeah, things going great, I've got a terrific girl, making a lot of money, and if everything goes according to plan I'm gonna be moving back in with my parents soon.' It's like getting busted on a parole violation and getting thrown back into the slammer.”

So I left my job and my apartment to move home. Now I have no girlfriend, I have no job, I live with my parents, and I know the vital statistics for every Jedi in the Star Wars universe: I am now officially the biggest loser that I know.

“I can't believe this!”
“Oh, it won't be for that long.”
“How can I do this?! How can I move back in with those people? Please, tell me! They're insane! You know that.”
“Hey, my parents are just as crazy as your parents.”
“How can you compare you parents to my parents?!”
“My father has never thrown anything out. Ever!”
“My father wears his sneakers in the pool! Sneakers!”
“My mother has never set foot in a natural body of water.”

Everyone has a quirky family, and I’m not saying that mine is the quirkiest, but re-learning to live with your family’s quirks is a lot harder when at the same time you're trying to find a new job and avoid looking like a dead-beat parasite. At my dad’s recommendation I went to a job fair in Tacoma. I didn’t want to go, but I knew it’d prove to him (as much as to myself) that I was actually making efforts to find something, even when I’m not excited about the efforts required.

It turns out that the job fair was more like a convention of the world’s gayest careers ever convened under one roof. I wont mention what kind of industries were represented there, I’ll just say that they were all the type take zero qualifications to get a position with: more than half of them didn’t even prefer college grads.

“Don't you see? Women like that are like members of a secret tribe living in a forbidden city. People like me have not been inside in thousands of years...”

When I left I kind of felt like I should have known better than to think that anything would come of it. After all, looking for work is like dating: the only jobs that are actively pursuing applicants are the ones that nobody wants—same goes for girls actively pursuing boys. You can never find the desirable jobs and the desirable girls because they’re so consistently sought after that they’re never on the shelf… kind of like an XBOX 360 at Christmastime.

“Men, with no jobs, and no money, who live with their parents,
don't approach strange women.”

So, with no job prospects, I figured there was no way I’d be going on any dates any time soon. First off there’s no way I could afford to take a girl out; second, what girl is going to want to go out with an unemployed loser who lives with his parents?

“My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents.”
“I'm Victoria. Hi.”

Well, despite my pitiful situation I have a date on Friday… and not just any date: a date to a formal ball. She asked me, and ironically, she did it right after I told her that I have no job and live with my parents. Its like it didn’t even phase her when I said it.

“Ah, Ichy, you sly old dog, you.
What is this strange power you have over women?”

But don’t let the semantics fool you: this is not bragging. Just because a guy says that a girl asked him out doesn’t mean that he’s a ladies man with some mystical power over the minds of women. If this sounds too braggadocious, don’t think that when I say “a girl asked me out” that I’m saying that I’m being pursued by Jennifer Aniston or the like. And if this sounds all too familiar, don’t think that I make a practice of plagiarizing myself, it’s just that this seems to be a recurring theme in my life. Well, I think there my life has TWO recurring themes: 1.) the girls I’m interested in never like me and 2.) I never like the girls who are interested in me.

“What’s your name, trooper?”
“Malarkey, sir.”
“Malarkey... Is that slang for bullsh#?”
“Yes, sir.”

I don’t mind writing about this dilemma, but I HATE talking about it because everyone I discuss it with (with the exception of a few of my bros who suffer a similar fate) suddenly becomes a self accredited psychologist saying that I’m just the kind of guy who always wants what he can never have. I say that’s nothing but a load of malarkey. I don’t have a complex, but they DO have a point… they just have it turned around: I’m the kind of guy who can never have what he wants. I know what I want, I’ve just never met anyone who had it.

I hope that that explanation of my situation establishes enough credibility to ad sincerity to the cliché I’m about to use: the girl who asked me out is a great girl, she’s just not for me. I understand that anyone who knows me well enough to have heard me upraise a girl in the past will be quick to say that THAT was just a load of malarkey, so if you’d like a more detailed description of my opinion of the girl, feel free to give me a call and I’ll be a little less reserved over the phone. But I just saw an episode of Judge Judy (shameful: I know, but when you’re unemployed you end up watching a lot of pathetic daytime TV) where one girl was suing another for defaming words the defendant had posted on the internet, so I’m trying to keep this post as cordial as possible.

“Wait, wait! I know: ‘An unwanted creature,
but not a rat, a leech, or a cockroach…’”
“Then what?”

I could go on to repeat even MORE things that I’ve already said a hundred times about why I hate it when girls ask me out, but if you’re interested in hearing about that you can just go back and read my “Spooky October” post. I’ll just leave it at this: if a girl asks me out she can bet it will be the only date we ever go on together.

“Well, you know the solution then, don’t you?”
“Go on.”
“Next time there’s a ball, pluck up the courage and ask me before
somebody else does, and NOT as a last resort!”

When I met up with mom again after being asked, I told her the story and explained that it was all her fault (it was when I was waiting for her after church that I left myself exposed to the ask-out). My family’s great at playing hot potato with blame, so Mom was quick to point out that the solution was to already have a reason in mind as to why I couldn’t go. She proceeded to outline a list of excuses as long a Costco shopping list.

“And that’s when the attack comes, not from the front, but from the side.
From the other two raptors you didn’t even know were there.”

The truth is that this doesn’t happen to me often enough that I ever remember to be vigilant about it. And I’ve gone through this cycle enough in my life to know that the way it works is this: I WILL be extra cautious for the next month or so, during which time NO girls will pay attention to me (which probably means that I’ll like one of them during that time—according to recurring life theme #1), and that will cause me to let my guard down… and that’s when it will all happen all over again.

Return Trip

“Master Wayne, it's been a long time…
Are you coming back to Gotham for long, sir?”

Well, I’m down to my last four days in Utah. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been here for six years. It’s even harder to believe that I’ve been away from home for eight. EIGHT YEARS! Jeez, even Bruce Wayne was only away from Gotham for seven years when he left for HIS training.

“You will go to the Degobah system. There you will learn from
Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me.”

I guess in a way you could look at is as that: training. There’s a certain kind of growth that a person can’t get when he’s close to his family. Look at Superman, he never realized HIS powers until he left Smallville. And Luke Skywalker never made any REAL progress toward becoming a Jedi Knight until he left his friends and headed for Degobah.

“That place...is strong with the dark side of the Force.

A domain of evil it is. In you must go.”

“What’s in there?”

“Only what you take with you.”

Heck, even on Degobah, Luke had to face things on his own. During my time in Utah (hmm, that even kinda SOUNDS like Degobah) I’ve met some fantastic friends and have had great times with them, but I’ve also had some very solitary times. Sometimes disappointment has left me feeling alone and at other times, by my own design, I’ve arranged for the solitude of living alone. I think part of the reason that I stayed away for so long was so I COULD be alone, because despite its negative connotations solitude can help a person come into his own.

“You don't need to be helped any longer.
You've always had the power to go back to [Kent].”

The funny thing about “coming into one’s own” or discovering oneself is that it’s like discovering anything else in this universe: the thing you’re discovering has always been there, but sometimes it takes work to find it. You’ve got to put forth effort and expose yourself to it before its truly discovered. Some people find themselves very quickly and some people never even misplace themselves.

“Oh the cleverness of me!”

I’d consider myself a conglomerate of all those types of people: I’ve never like I DIDN’T know who I was and after all this time on my own I don’t feel like I’ve changed at all, but I think that everyone should take time for introspection because you’ll find that you’re a lot more impressive than you had imagined. Now… I’ve always thought quite highly of myself, so you can imagine how much more self enamored I must be now that I’ve improved upon my confidence.

“Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them…

Stretch out with your feelings.”

Every now and then I’ll have a sort of “out-of-time” experience. I say out-of-time because its like an out-of-body experience, only I’m still in my body and I’m still myself, but for a second I can feel things that I know I wont feel for a few more years. Like when I was at BYU, I can remember hating my trips up to campus because campus was always so crowded and hurried and there was always a class I was late for or an assignment that was almost due. But near the end of my senior year, still in the thick of that hustle and bustle, I can remember my frustrations stepping aside for a second and feeling like, “Wow, I’m not going to be here much longer and I can already tell I’m gonna miss this place.”

"You make it out to Utah much, Saul?"

"Not as much as I'd like."

"You should. You'd like it. I think you'd like Provo."

Suicide Watch

Seahawks 10, Steelers 21

“…4:00 wallow in self pity… 4:30, stare into the abyss…
5:00, solve world hunger, tell no one…. 5:30, jazzercise…
6:30, dinner with me. I can't cancel that again…
7:00, wrestle with my self-loathing; I'm booked.
Of course, if I bump the loathing to 9 I could still be done in time
to lay in bed, stare at the ceiling and slip slowly into madness.”

It was hard to get to sleep last night and it was hard to get up this morning. I don’t think I’ve felt this depressed since the last time I was dumped by a girl I really really liked… and since I can hardly every stand anybody, to the point that I never go on dates... that was a LONG time ago.

They say that what goes up must come down. I’m no physics whiz, but I’d guess the depth of a drop must be a two to one multiple of the height. I was riding the highs of the Seahawks train for the past 4 months. Especially in the past four weeks there have been tons of on-line media to read, watch, or listen to. And since I never do ANYTHING at work, I’ve taken in just about every ounce of it.

The bad thing is that now that its over all the down time I used to spend devouring 'Hawks media I now spend bumming out about what’s transpired.

“…I know the rage that drives you: that impossible anger strangling the grief, until the memory of your [team’s almost perfect season] is just poison in your veins. And one day, you catch yourself wishing the [team] you loved had never existed so you'd be spared your pain.”

I’ve heard it said that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. And I really AM ecstatic about the Seahawks even making it to the Super Bowl, but until they get back and win it, I think I’ll forever have a bitter taste in my mouth about how it seemed like the calls, the game, the refs, the league, and the nation seemed to conspire against the Seahawks. If you think I’m just a whiny fan, look at the game stats and tell me the Seahawks shouldn’t have won!

“You love the [Seahawks], but have they ever loved you back?”
“Who do you think you are… Dr. Phil? Go on, get outta here!”

I’ll never stop loving the Seahawks or the game of football, or even the NFL, but until they hoist a “World Champions” flag high above Qwest Field, I’ll always have my suspicions about the integrity of Super Bowl XL.

An unsettling discovery

My Seahawks have made it to the Superbowl and I couldn’t be happier, but only two teams make it to the Superbowl, leaving 30 NFL teams looking for something to blame their failed season on. Some teams fire the coach, some hope to sign a first round draft pick. But whatever the remedy, its obvious that there’s something wrong with the system.

Well, lately there’s been something wrong with my digestive system, and I’m looking for something… anything to blame it on. I think I may be lactose intolerant. I just get such bad gas and it HAS to be linked to SOMETHING. Last week I avoided any dairy all week. The closest I came to it was the one day I forgot and put margarine on my toast, but I didn’t really feel any adverse affects—is margarine even a dairy product?

This weekend I had a pizza party with friends. I popped a few lactaid pills just to be safe, but at about 4 am this morning it hit me. The eruptions came in droves and didn't let up until about an hour after I got in to work... and even though it has let up a little, I'm puckering one in at this very moment.

It hit at 4 am, but I didn’t get up (out of bed) until 6… and by that time the smell in my bed was so rancid and so heavy that I had to strip my bed covers off and drape them over furniture so they could air out. I sprayed air freshener all over the apartment and even onto the sheets hoping at if they absorbed some air freshener it might at best neutralize the rank.

And the stink is only half of it... my stomach has been jostling around like the washing machine on the permanent press cycle. I have a small bottle of both lactaid and gas-suppressant pills and I was popping dose after dose of them this morning. I'd swallow one kind of pill and if that didn't work I'd try the other, etc. I felt like a pool cleaner who keeps adding chlorine then water then clorine then water until he gets just the right pH balance in the pool.

I'm planning on eating the left over pizza for lunch today. It's probably a foolish thing to do, but I'm going to try taking three pills before my first bite (just as the bottle recommends) and see if that doesn't pacify my abdominal warfare.

Even if it doesn't, I feel like I need to experiement as much NOW as it takes to conquer this demon now, regardless of however much backfireing (pun intended) might result from each trial. After all, I'm only staying in Utah for another three weeks, so what’s the difference if everyone here hates me when I leave. Better to best this now and leave my enemies behind than to drag this problem home with me and cultivate a whole new crop of enemies there.

The ultimate sacrifice

“Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die!”

I don’t like to think about how it happened, but two of my sisters are pregnant. They’re both due this spring and one’s having twins. Getting pregnant won’t kill you but it can make life tough on everybody.

My sisters have to put up with doubling in size. Their husbands have to fake like they care what position the baby is in TODAY. I have to listen to or over-hear them talk about their cervixes or uteruses (or is it uteri?) as if talking about those things were just every-day conversation and/or inoffensive to anyone but their doctor.

“I'm sorry, I'm just a little pregnant here.”

But despite all the disturbing anatomy lessons, un-negotiable mood swings, and endless activity-distrupting trips to the bathroom, the truth is I’m totally excited to finally be an uncle and to have some little tykes in the family.

And even though I like to joke about how different my sisters are when their pregnant, they’re really both handling it very well. But from what I’ve heard, having twins can be a little risky.

I don’t really understand much about these things, so what I’m about to say will either sound helpfully informative to those who are dumber than I and profoundly ignorant to anyone else who’s ever had kids or who’s even been remotely interested in the miracle of birth enough to have ever paid attention in health class: oh, and I’m going to try to keep it as anatomically vague as possible because I really don’t want to have to think about my sisters’ anatomy.

So let’s assume that what prompts a lady to go into labor is when the baby gains so much weight that gravity’s pull on the baby is stronger than the woman’s body’s strength to keep the baby inside.

If that sounds like total rubbish, then consider the fact that my closest experiences to this sort of thing are those moments when I’ve really have to take a number 2, but for one reason or another I had to wait an hour before I could go… at about the 45 minute mark, when I need to start a dance to keep it from coming early… that’s about what I expect the last minutes before labor are like. Its in moments like that the strictest laws of physics concerning mass and gravity are in effect.

So, anyway, my sisters twins are getting so heavy that (weight wise) they’re ready to drop, but they need a few more months of development before they can survive on their own. So, in an attempt to fool gravity, my sister will spend the remainder of her pregnancy in the horizontal position.

They call it “bed rest”. I call it “two days of much needed vacation followed by 90 days of the worst case of a one-room groundhogs day jinx imaginable.”

Heading into day one, Siri was confident that she could survive with her sanity in tact. Assuming she knew what she was talking about I proceeded to offer my support in a way I knew she wouldn’t take me up on. I sort of have a talent for that kind of thing. My mom says that every time I so generously offer to help with the dishes just happens to be the same time she finishes cleaning the last one.

I offered to ship my xbox up to Siri to keep her company. Most girls don’t care much for Halo or Ghost Recon, but my xbox can play one or two old-school Nintendo games (Dr. Mario is a family favorite). Well, she rejected the offer, saying that she’d just spend her time reading or watching TV or something. But after 48 hours she left a voicemail asking for me to send it up ASAP.

“Greater love hath no man than this:
that he lay down his [xbox] for his [pregnant sister].”

To understand the gravity of the situation, you must understand the despair of my situation. Most of my friends live too many miles away to see every day. I have no roommates, and I’m sort of a homebody. So my xbox is my life. But I offered to send it and I wasn’t going back on the offer.

I padded and packaged my little electronic friend with the delicacy and care of a mother swaddling her newborn baby. I used so much foam padding that I could have sent home four dozen eggs and not one of them would arrive with as much as a crack in it.

The package arrived yesterday and Siri called with praise and gratitude for my having sent it. I hope it will help her pass the time. Meanwhile, I’m trying to pass some time of my own. I’m planning on moving home to Seattle in the middle of February and until then I kind of feel like I’m on “utah rest” and I’m in need of something to pass the time too. Fortunately, I’ve got medical clearance to stand upright, so at least I can spend parts of my day at the gym, wandering around sporting goods stores and other normal activities. During the down time, instead of dominating the NFL or conquering the galaxy (a few of my favorite xbox activites) I busy myself with movies and music I borrow from the library.

Those twins had better be the cutest nephews this world has ever known, because if all this sacrifice brings me are a couple of snot nosed brats for nephews I’ll be FURIOUS! :)

“Sports injuries”

To this day, my mom still revels in the glory of the results of a trip to the doctors office: To understand the humor of it you have to understand that my mom hasn’t done anything athletic since she was a school girl and she’d run home each afternoon—not for exercise, but because she didn’t want to miss her favorite TV program. So what made that trip to the doctor’s office so memorable is that he told her she had a “sports injury’. We kids always give Mom a hard time for being so un-athletic, and she uses that story as a counter argument. To make the story even more ironic, I think the original reason she scheduled the appointment was because she had sprained her thumb pretty severely when trying to break the ears off of a solid chocolate bunny.

In Mom’s defense (and to keep me on her good side in light of the upcoming gift giving season—remember, my birthday is just after Christmas) I’ll throw in these two disclaimers: currently, she DOES put in some time each week on the exercise bike, and there IS a SLIGHT chance that I’ve jumbled the preceding stories… none of them are untrue, but its possible that the sprained thumb and the “sports injury” diagnosis were on separate occasions, but in the interest of readability, I’ll continue with the presumption that they happened simultaneously.

I tell that story to emphasize the fact that unusual “sports injuries” aren’t uncommon in my family, and for some unfortunate reason, they’ve seemed even LESS uncommon in my life during the past few months:

Back in September I was coaching a 14-to-15-year-olds’ football team. We had an odd number of players, so during a lot of the drills I’d jump in to even up the sides. I suffered a lot of fat lips, tongue bites, and shots to the temples (they were wearing full gear and I wore none). Well, on one particular day we were doing some relay races for conditioning, and again I was needed to even up the odds. One of the legs of the relay was for the entire team to leap-frog one another for 30 yards, then turn around and come back.

I’ll emphasize again that the players were in pads and I was not. Our team was in the lead. We hurried down, about faced and hurried back. Then, when my turn came on the final stretch, I leaped over Sommerville, Darrow, Williams… but when I got to Corlett… that’s when fate turned against me. Just as I spread my legs to leap over the crouched Corlett, he suddenly looked up to gauge the distance to the finish line, but doing so brought his helmeted head squarely and solidly between the spread of my legs and into my fully exposed family jewels.

Mid-flight, I curled up in pain and collapsed on the ground in front of Corlett in the fetal position. The other players continued leap frogging and our team ended up winning the race… but I had lost the war. I was down for the count and when I mustered the strength to look around, I noticed that everyone else was rolling on the ground too, only they where holding their sides in laughter as I was holding my crotch in pain.

I NEVER go to the doctor, but the pain of that racking was so legendarily powerful that I scheduled an appointment just to make sure that the hardware wasn’t damaged. The doctor just laughed at me and said he could tell that it hurt and he reassuringly joked that someday my children will enjoy hearing me tell that story.

Well, just this week I suffered another unexpected, and yet no-less-embarrassing “sports injury”:

I like to run for exercise, and I usually jog 2-3 miles per day, but last week I decided to add some mileage in an effort to drop some weight. So now I’m jogging 4-5 miles per day. During the summer I like to jog on the high school track or on the riverside trail near my apartment, but Utah get’s too cold for my taste after about mid-October, so for the past month or so I’ve been staying indoors doing my running on a treadmill.

Some people hate running on a treadmill, but I find that if I put on Jeopardy I pay more attention to the trivia questions than to how exhausted or how bored I might feel, so I kind of enjoy it. The only draw back to being indoors is that I usually sweat a little more than I do when I run outdoors. Usually the extra sweating is no big deal, but when I doubled my distance it seemed like my body’s sweat production tripled.

Usually, when I’m done jogging I’ve got a handsome 4-inch aura of sweat around my collar, but longer workout resulted in my entire shirt being DRENCHED. In all my life I’ve only ever seen one other person ever soak their shirt with their own sweat and that was the 300 pound kid that played basketball for Meeker Junior High (ugh, I can still remember how second-hand slimy I got when I had to post up against him).

Well, a funny thing happens when your shirt gets that wet: it becomes heavier. And when you combine the extra weight and moisture of a wet t-shirt with the rhythmic sway of one’s jogging gate, the result is increased friction against one’s chest.

I don’t even know why god gave men nipples. We don’t use them. Until last week, I never really minded having them, but after five miles worth of a heavy wet t-shirt grinding away at them, I was introduced to a pain so exquisite and so unique that I found myself cursing the heavens for ever giving me those confounded contraptions. After all, he didn’t give me birthing hips or mammary glands, so why burden me with two superfluous nickel-sized relics of evolution? Luckily, only might side was “injured”.

I tried several remedies. The first night I stuck a glob of Neosporin on there and just let it soak in the healing, but when I got dressed the next morning I realized that the darn things must be non-absorbant. Before my next workout I stuck a circular bandage over it, but that didn’t work for two reasons: 1.) when I looked at myself in the mirror the band-aid made it look like my chest was winking at me, and 2.) a few minutes into the jog, once I started sweating, the adhesive came unstuck and the protection was gone.

My last and most desparate attempt requires some explanation. I started watching season one of MacGyver on DVD, and well, you know how crafty and resourceful he is. Plus, just the day before I cut my finger with a knife and used krazy glue to close up the cut. Well, I decided that the same thing ought to work for other “injuries”. So, I put krazy glue on the “effected area”. In theory it should have worked—because have you ever got krazy glue on your finger? You can’t feel a thing. Well, it didn’t quite work. Now it’s just sore and crusty. I think krazy glue has silicone in it, so I guess you can say that I gave myself a do-it-yourself boob job.

I don’t think there’s any quick fix to the problem, so I’ll just have to wait out the healing process and then if I’m going to go for a long sweaty run in the future I think I’ll just have to wear a snug wife beater tank top underneath. I hate resorting to that, especially since just this Tuesday I made fun of a friend for wearing those. But I don’t see any way around it, because as useless as those things are, I just don’t think it’d look quite right if I had them surgically removed.

Losing loved ones

First off, let me say that there’s nothing sadder than when someone close to you dies, and if someone stumbles across this post during a time when they’re trying to cope with the feelings that follow the death of a friend or family member, my condolences go out to you. The rest of this post is NOT about people dying, so I apologize if the title was misleading.

“Lois, someday…”
“Clark, don’t tell me that someday I’ll meet someone!
You’re a pretty tough act to follow, you know?”

Although I didn’t lose a relative, my recent loss DOES feel like a death in the family: in the past week, I’ve lost TWO of my very favorite shirts. I know that I’m supposed to tell myself that they’re just shirts and that there are other shirts out there that I’ll find some day that I’ll love just as much, but these weren’t just any old shirts, these had been a significant part of my life for the past four years.

They say that the clothes make the man. Assuming that’s true, then it should be obvious why I feel so devastated. These were the shirts I could count on when I needed to know I looked good. These were the shirts I wanted to wear every day, but on weekends when I had dates, I’d save them for the weekend. These were the shirts that went with everything for any occasion.

“Seems to me, that button is in the worst possible spot.

The second button literally makes or brakes the shirt, look at it: it's too high!

It's in no-man's-land, you look like you live with your mother.”

Probably the saddest part is that now I’m stuck wearing shirts that my mom bought me (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They’re fine shirts and I really do like the patterns, but the buttons just aren’t properly spaced. I can either wear the second button buttoned (which makes it look like the shirt is choking me) or unbuttoned (which feels just way too David Hasselhoff for me).

But geez! Those old favorite shirts of mine had their buttons in JUST the right places. I don’t know what I’m going to do without them! Plus, one of them had snaps instead of buttons, which is so cool because when you’re taking it off you can tear it open like Superman. I’m really going to miss those old friends of mine.

My dad had a birthday last week: I sent him the exact same pair of slippers that he already had (but his were getting worn out) and he called to tell me how perfect the present was. We got to talking and it sounds like he’s just the same as me: when I find something that I like I want to keep it forever and if it needs replacing I want to replace it with the very same thing. These shirts are so old that I don’t think they even make that sort of material anymore, but I’m willing to look for a while just to be sure.

“Wait. Why is Obi-Wan wearing by bathrobe?
…I see you got barbeque sauce on my bathrobe.”
“You have done that yourself!”
“I think I’d remember. I’m very neat. We both know I don’t eat barbeque.
I ABSOLUTELY don’t eat barbeque!”
“Only a SITH deals in absolutes.”

Of coarse, it might be best just to let it go. I once had a Nordstrom tie that I loved, but I lost it in a move. I went to about 6 different Nordstroms looking for the same tie and couldn’t find it anywhere, until I found the very same tie on eBay, so I bought it right away—the listing claimed that it was like new. Well, I was so excited to get it that I wore it to church the Sunday after it arrived. But during a boring part of Sunday School (which isn’t a rarity by any means) I was admiring my resurrected favorite tie only to discover that there were lots of tiny barbeque stains on it… “like new” my eye! I haven’t worn it since.

“Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force.

Mourn them, do not. Miss them, do not.

Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed, that is.”
“What must I do, Master Yoda?”
Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”

I think it probably is best to just let them go. One of the shirts was ruined by a tear in the elbow and I’m toying with the idea of cutting and hemming it to make it into a short sleeve shrit, but chances are that it would look dumb and my infatuation with the shirt would blind me to how stupid it looked—and looking stupid in a favorite shirt defeats half of the purpose for a shirt being a favorite.

I can only hope that this holiday season brings the good fortune of introducing a new favorite shirt into my wardrobe. So, if anyone’s looking for gift ideas for a certain me… a button down shirt is at the top of my list… one with all the buttons in all the right places and colors that go with everything (I saved swatches from both of my defunct favorites if you’d like a reference).