Why Y2K Was A-OK

December 31, 1999 was supposed to be the end of the world, or at the very least, the end of the civilized world. All technology was supposed to go haywire simultaneously, causing massive power outages, unprecedented transportation snarls, and a permanent rift between the Mario Brothers. This was all supposed to be brought on by the fact that the internal clocks inside computers were going to turn over from 12/31/99 to 1/1/00 and the top programmers in the world had no idea what that might do. Those who get paid lots of money to figure these types of things out were torn between thinking we would experience Armageddon or absolutely nothing. Needless to say, tension levels were running high.

Companies across the globe were making all kinds of preparations for a possible doomsday scenario. The company I worked for at the time—a seedy herbal remedies outfit with a CEO who was a paranoiac Tony Robbins wannabe—was no different in this regard. My company used a lot of technology and the last quarter of 1999 was hyper-focused on figuring out how to make sure the business wouldn’t come to a grinding halt once the New Year arrived. But I really had nothing to do with these frantic preparations because I was merely the marketing writer and my knowledge of technology at the time didn’t go further than “insert floppy disk here.”

So while all the IT guys were running around the office fretting about their DOS and their ROM and their BIOS and their RAM, I had lots of time to think about what the potential end of the world might mean for me on a personal level. I was a 30-year-old single man inhabiting a small one-bedroom apartment in Tempe, Arizona. I had a low-paying job, a beat up 1988 Oldsmobile, and way too much credit card debt. Things may have looked bleak, but I did have an ace in my back pocket. I had a girl. And that girl changed everything.

Her name was Nicole and I had met her in the Fall of 1998. She was smart, funny, beautiful, and she laughed at every lame joke I told. The only problem was, she was dating someone else and for the first nine months that I knew her we were in the dreaded “just friends” zone. This was a zone I was acutely familiar with, having been relegated to it by a variety of women for most of my adult (and teen, and pre-teen, and childhood) life. But this time something felt different. There was a connection between us that gave me some confidence that I would be able to break out of the “just friends” zone and find my way into another, wholly unfamiliar, but much more exciting zone that I didn’t even have a name for yet.

We hung out a lot. When she wasn’t with her boyfriend she was with me. We watched movies, browsed at record shops, and went out to eat. One day we met for lunch at an Einstein’s Bagels at noon and were kicked out by the workers at 6 PM when they closed. Neither one of us had any idea that six hours had passed as we sat there and talked. (Although I should have had a clue when I took one last bite of my bagel toward the end of our stay and the cream cheese tasted like a sailor’s foot.)

As our relationship strengthened, Nicole’s relationship with her boyfriend weakened. I was a perfect gentleman, though, and never overstepped my bounds. But when the two of them broke up in the early summer of 1999, I was the first person she called for comfort. We went out to eat and I did bad magic tricks to cheer her up. I remained the perfect gentleman, though, and had no intention of taking advantage of her in a vulnerable situation. But apparently she had other ideas and not long after her breakup we were a couple. I had finally left the “just friends” zone behind.

Although we just started dating in July, we were building on a nine-month relationship, so we had already had tons of the getting to know you conversations. Of course, we were still getting to know each other, but we had a tremendous head start on most new couples. And that’s why, just a few months later, as everyone was making their Y2K doomsday preparations, my thoughts didn’t turn to the end of the world, but the beginning of a new life, with Nicole by my side. I decided I would propose to my girl, and what better time to do it than New Year’s Eve 1999?

I became even more frantic with preparations than the IT guys trying to stave off techno-chaos.  I intended everything to be a complete surprise, so my preparations were done in secret. I bought a ring, made reservations at a fancy restaurant, and rented a Jaguar so we could drive around in style. Days after I placed the reservation for the car, Nicole and I were driving around in my Oldsmobile when a Jaguar drove past. I asked her what she thought of that car and she said, “Uck! Jaguars are ugly.” Gulp. “What’s your favorite luxury car?” I asked. “A Lexus,” she said immediately. Next day I canceled the reservation on the hideous Jaguar and made a new one for a beautiful Lexus.

On December 31, 1999, I was a nervous man. Not nervous like most people, who were concerned about society going back to the Stone Age as soon as the clock hit midnight, but rather because I was about to ask the woman of my dreams a question I had never asked anyone before. What if she said, “No?”

I was pretty confident that she would say, “Yes!” but that didn’t stop the butterflies all throughout the day. Fortunately, the butterflies faded a bit when I picked her up in the Lexus and she had exactly the reaction of joy and excitement I was hoping for. (Thank the lord I didn’t get that repulsive Jaguar!) We went to our favorite Italian restaurant and had a delicious and romantic dinner and then we headed back to my apartment. It was show time.

Before we got out of the car, I blindfolded her. No, this wasn’t how most of our dates ended, but on this occasion there was something I had to do without her seeing. I led her into the apartment, blindfold in place, got a Zippo and began lighting the dozens of candles I had strategically placed throughout my living room and dining room. Then I put on a Frank Sinatra CD, removed her blindfold and asked her to dance. She was sufficiently giddy, but when “The Way You Look Tonight” ended and I dropped to one knee, she got even giddier. I whipped out the ring and popped the question and mercifully she said, “Yes!” pretty much right away. It was about 10:30 PM at this point and neither one of us could have been happier—even if the world was potentially going to end in 90 minutes.

Of course, 90 minutes later, the world did not end. All the Y2K disaster predictions turned out to be unwarranted and were probably just a ploy by IT guys to get paid lots of money to do busy work they knew all along was unnecessary. On January 1, 2000 life went along much as usual, except that now there were at least two people whose lives together were just about to begin. (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Nicole and I weren’t the only two people who got engaged that night.)

Nicole and I have been together ever since, as the cliché goes, “through good times and bad,” and no amount of technological doomsday scenarios will keep us apart. To this day while others think of Y2K in the context of “terrible tragedy averted,” I think “amazing future started.” (And I breathe I sigh of relief that I ditched that reprehensible Jaguar.)

Happy couple hours before Y2K hits.

What's Your M.O.?

My wife sometimes (but not often) gives me way more credit for being clever than I deserve. And when this happens, chaos enters our lives. I’m not talking about the kind of major chaos that ends with tear gas and rubber bullets, but rather the kind that ends with me being thoroughly confused and scratching my head until a small bald spot appears.

Every weekend my wife and I create a shopping list of the groceries our family will need for the upcoming week. We use a template we have honed over the years, that categorizes the groceries by aisle. This is necessary since I’m the one who usually does the actual shopping and I need all the help I can get to figure out exactly where the items are that I need to purchase.

This week, however, we did not use our shopping template. The kids finished school on Thursday and I took PTO for a couple of days, so I guess our normal life rhythm was a bit off and it led to us spontaneously creating a shopping list on a small yellow notepad, rather than sticking to our trusty template. It was pandemonium.

On a normal shopping day I go through the list carefully before leaving the house, in case there is anything I’m not sure about, like the amount of cucumbers we need, or the brand of tortilla chips we want, or what in the heck “Swiss chard” is. (Is that a cheese or a vegetable?) Even though we mostly create the list together, my wife will sometimes jot items down when I’m not in the room, so it’s good for me to review before heading to the store. But this past weekend, with our life rhythm off and the non-templated list in hand, I forgot to review before exiting the house. Mistake.

At first, everything was going swimmingly. I understood that “M&C Cups” meant Mac & Cheese cups and I correctly deduced that “Frozen Corn” likely referred to corn kernels rather than corn cobs; but suddenly, I hit a roadblock. In between “Plasticware” and “Lemons” was “M.O.’s – 4.” Hmmm…what are “M.O.’s,” I wondered. On the one hand, it was not something that came to me instantly, on the other, it must be something we get regularly, since my wife thought the abbreviation would make it obvious to a simpleton like me.

Normally, in a situation like this, I would just call and ask what this item was, but right before I left the house, my wife said she was going to take a nap. While I couldn’t be certain she was still asleep, I didn’t want to wake her if she was, so I decided to text rather than call. I figured a phone call would obnoxiously wake her, while the quick “ding” of a text would just get her attention if she were awake but not really rouse her if she were asleep. (She’s a heavy sleeper.)

So I texted, “I don’t know what M.O.’s are.” I stood for about 30 seconds in front of the pickles and got no response, so I figured she was asleep. But I wasn’t going to give up. I was determined to figure out what M.O.’s were and purchase four of them before I left. My plan was to walk up and down the aisles while I did the rest of the shopping and keep my eyes peeled for some M.O.’s, while also holding out some hope that my wife would wake up and text me back before I checked out.

Standing as I was, in front of the pickles, I happened to be next to the olives, which seemed promising. My wife loves olives and I can’t stand them, so maybe it was some sort of olive that I don’t eat. The first thing that entered my head was “maraschino olives,” but then I realized that “maraschino” is a type of cherry, not an olive. I know that “Greek olives” are a thing, so I wondered if “Mexican olives” might also be a thing. I scanned the entire olive section jar by jar, but no Mexican olives surfaced. It probably wasn’t olives.

My next thought was onions. We use onions a lot and it’s not unreasonable to think we might need four of them for a recipe, so I wondered if “M.O.” meant “mild onions.” But I don’t know if I ever saw an onion described as “mild” on one of our shopping lists. Usually we identify onions by their color—red, white, or yellow; never by their disposition—mild, jaunty, or aggressive. So I ruled out onions.

While I was contemplating produce, I considered oranges. But within the context of oranges, what could the “M” mean? As with olives, I considered the possibility of “Mexican oranges.” Living as we do in Arizona, there is a good chance that some of our oranges are imported from Mexico, but I don’t know that my wife would refer to a fruit by its country of origin. “Can you pick us up some of those Chilean bananas?” has never come out of my wife’s mouth before, so I dismissed the idea of “Mexican oranges.”

A few minutes later I walked into the cereal aisle and spent a good amount of time contemplating “milled oats,” which is an actual thing. We have occasionally purchased oatmeal and maybe even oats once or twice throughout our almost 19 years of wedded bliss, but were those oats, in fact, milled? And really, even if they were milled, why would my wife assume I would understand “M.O.” meant “milled oats,” since it may have been half a dozen years since the last time we purchased anything like this.  I stared deeply into the eyes of the Quaker Oats man, with his fancy dark blue hat and long, billowy white hair. “Does my wife want milled oats?” I asked shaking the container. Then I realized this wasn’t a Magic 8-Ball, so I put it back on the shelf and left the aisle.

Several aisles later, I found myself in front of the cookies and had a eureka moment. “Mini Oreos!” I shouted, much to the dismay of the old woman across from me snagging a box of Lorna Doones. I thought I was onto something here. While the product is technically called “Oreo Minis,” in our house we commonly refer to them as “Mini Oreos” and we purchase them on a regular basis. But my initial euphoria began to subside as I thought about this purchase more deeply. There were two main challenges to this being the solution to the “M.O.’s – 4” conundrum: 1) I knew for a fact, we had a mostly full package of these cookies at home; and 2) We never, EVER have purchased four packages of Oreo Minis at once. Why would we possibly start now? As much as I wanted this to be correct, in my heart of hearts, I knew that it was not.

I moved on dejectedly, and was nearing the end of the shopping list without one, let alone four, “M.O.’s” in my cart. I decided to stop by the bakery aisle and get my wife a slice of white cake (her favorite) to ease the pain of her husband’s failure in the “M.O.” department. As I headed to the checkout line, I continued to wrack my brain for an answer.

Minced oregano? No.

Marinated oysters? No.

Mauve orchids? No.

Maximum Overdrive? No.

Michael O’Keefe? No.

I got to the checkout line and knew that at this point there was no turning back. I started placing my products on the conveyor belt and as I put my last item down, I felt my phone buzz inside my pocket. I had just received a text. I grabbed my phone and looked at the two words on the screen—“Mandarin oranges.” Ah, yes—my wife eats those things like they’re going out of style. But that night she settled for cake instead.

Next week, we’re going back to the shopping template.

A Picture’s Worth 1,000 Words – Or in this case, 379

Can you figure out what’s happening to me in the above photo? Look closely. No, closer than that. Closer. Okay, not that close, you’ll bang your nose against the monitor.

Perhaps you think I’m inside a dimly lit tent in the middle of a dense forest during a rainstorm; or maybe you think I shrunk down to Ant-Man size and am caught between hair follicles on a dog in a bathtub; or maybe you think I’m about to meet my demise at the hands of a new Lovecraftian creature on an episode of Stranger Things. While these are all fascinating possibilities, and I commend you for your creativity, the truth is far more terrifying.

The reality is I took this picture from inside my Hyundai Elantra while going through a carwash. Startling, but true.

Now I understand that going through a carwash while seated inside your vehicle is perfectly safe and your chances of getting killed are not all that high, but the darkness and the loudness and the objects furiously beating down on the glass just inches from my face, always sets my heart a-pounding. But I’m not saying I don’t like it—quite the contrary, in the same way I like to jump out of my seat during a good horror movie, I enjoy the claustrophobic suspense provided by a good automobile sudsing. That’s right, some people seek out roller coasters for a cheap thrill ride, but for me, nothing is better than a trip to the car wash.

For all you skeptics out there who have been through carwashes many times and didn’t find them particularly thrilling, I say you are doing it wrong. Next time you need your car washed, do what I do—lean your seat back as far as it will go, loosen your shirt, take off your shoes, get out your bag of popcorn, and then stare wide-eyed while you enjoy the gripping 120-second ride of your life. Then quickly drive back around and see if the ticket-taker will let you go again!

Yes, if you do a carwash the right way, it’s a breathtaking, hair-raising, blood-tingling experience. I’m not sure how you could have much more fun…unless you went through on a motorcycle. Time to get my “Class M” license!

The Cat in the Frat Comes Back

Monday morning there was a minor mystery in the Schwartzberg household.

It started out like any other day. My alarm went off at 6:05 and I hit the snooze button. It went off again at 6:14 and I begrudgingly got out of bed, replacing the sound of the alarm with the sound of creaking—whether it be of my bed or my bones, I could not tell. I took a shower and got dressed. I walked into the living room and saw our grey cat, Muffin, standing in the hallway looking at me with her usual “feed me” stare and our black cat, Ping, curled up in a comfy ball on the couch. I proceeded to the kitchen and started making lunch for myself and my two sons.

At 6:40 I abruptly stopped mid-stroke while slathering a piece of bread with mayo and went back down the hallway to start waking up the boys. I spent 30 seconds attempting to wake each boy with barely any kind of response at all and then headed back to the kitchen to continue sandwich making. I repeated this process every five minutes, becoming slightly more aggressive with each successive attempt, until slowly, but surely, the boys started to wake up. The goal is to get them out of bed and getting ready for school by 7:00. I usually have more success with my younger son than my older son. This is our routine. It plays out every morning.

After 7:00 I was finalizing lunches and starting to get breakfast ready—usually cereal or waffles. The younger lad was out and eating by about 7:05, while his older brother was in his room with his door closed, presumably getting dressed—a process that somehow always takes the better part of 20 minutes. It’s during this timeframe that I normally feed the cats. The moment I put a finger on the cat food dish, Muffin came racing over, like a fuzzy, feline Usain Bolt. I fed her first in the kitchen, then walked down the hallway to feed Ping outside of our bedroom doors. While Ping isn’t as frantic about it as Muffin, he usually seems fairly anxious to follow me down the hallway to get fed. But not yesterday.

I walked down the hallway with food dish in hand and Ping was nowhere to be seen or heard. I called for him and heard nothing. I slowly walked back toward the living room gently shaking the food dish in the hopes of attracting him, but instead, Muffin, came running down the hall. Even though Muffin hadn’t finished her own food, I’m not surprised that she came at the sound of Ping’s food, since she seems to enjoy stealing his food more than eating her own. (It’s the same food—she’s just a brat.) And still, no Ping.

My younger son is obsessed with our cats and usually knows their whereabouts, so I asked him if he knew where Ping was and he had no clue. I knocked on my older son’s door and asked if Ping was in there with him and he said, “No,” so I moved on. I checked all the obvious spots like his cardboard mancave, the guest bathroom tub, and under our desks, but he wasn’t there. I had no idea where he could be, since we live in a small, three-bedroom house and all the bedroom doors were closed.

At 7:28 my older son finally came out of his room (we are supposed to leave at 7:30 to get them to school on time, so he now had all of two minutes to eat breakfast) and I asked him, “Are you sure Ping isn’t in your room?”

“He came in there earlier, when you were waking me up, but he’s not in there now,” he said.

Hmmm…I wondered. I went back into his room and looked around. The place looked like Delta House the morning after the toga party. It’s possible to hide several passed out frat boys under all the piles of junk strewn about, so losing an eight-pound cat in there is entirely plausible. I looked in the hole under his bed and found several dozen MAD magazines and a metric ton of Legos, but no cat. I looked under the sleeping bag, backpack and other mud-encrusted gear heaped in a corner from the camping trip he went on a month earlier, but no cat. I looked in his closet and saw piles of old clothes, video game guidebooks and schoolwork he forgot to turn in two years earlier, but still no cat. All the while I was gently shaking the food dish in the hopes that Ping’s hunger would make him surface. No luck at all and suddenly I realized that I spent too much time in the maze of pre-teen artifacts and it was now 7:32!

I ran out of the room, hustled the kids into the car and got them to school just as the bell was ringing. Normally, I would have gone straight to work at this point, but I was unsettled about Ping’s unknown whereabouts, so I headed back home. Once inside, I rechecked all the nooks and crannies in the living room, kitchen, and dining room that I had already checked and I came up empty. At that point, more than mildly concerned, I headed back down the hallway toward the bedrooms and as soon as I did, I heard the meowing…coming from my older son’s room. I opened the door and Ping casually walked out like nothing had happened. He had been hiding in my son’s pseudo frat house the whole time. Where he had been in that miasma of random junk when I searched for him earlier, I had no idea, but I quickly fed him and headed to work.

On my morning commute I made a mental note to have my son clean up his room—and search for any random wildlife that may have taken up residence.

Lessons Learned 2018

As 2018 draws to a close and 2019 rears its ugly head beautiful visage, it’s high time that I reflect on the many personal lessons I learned over the past twelve months. In honor of the upcoming New Year’s Eve countdown, I will start at lesson 10 and work my way down to lesson 1, which means when you finish reading the final lesson you need to throw confetti in the air and awkwardly kiss the person standing next to you. So without further ado, let the countdown begin…

10) Amazon Prime and Netflix are conspiring against me – It may sound paranoiac, but it’s clearly true. You would think between the two most popular streaming services, you would be able to view any movie you want to without having to pay extra, seeing as how you are already paying a monthly fee to subscribe to these platforms. Yet 90% of the time if I have a hankering for a specific film, I end up having to pay extra on Prime to watch it. Where the conspiracy comes in is the seemingly random (but clearly not) comings and goings of available movies on these separate services. On more than one occasion over the past year I’ve spent money renting or buying a film on Prime that magically appears on Netflix days later. Yes, Jeff Bezos and Reed Hastings are secretly watching me and doing everything they can to drive me insane.

9) Cats don’t like portion control – Our cat, Muffin, enjoys food. In fact, she enjoys it so much she will bully our other cat, Ping, out of the way in order to get to it. After almost a year of this behavior we started to notice Muffin getting wider and Ping getting narrower, so we decided to take action. Rather than leaving a large amount of food out at all times, we started putting a small amount of food out several times a day and feeding the cats in separate rooms. Muffin does not like this new procedure at all and has taken to incessant meowing whenever I walk within ten feet of her food dish. As an aspiring feline linguist I can tell you her meowing roughly translates to: “Hey moron, now that you’re in the kitchen are you going to feed me already??? I’ve been waiting at least nine minutes since the last time you fed me and I still gots nothing! Maybe you need a claw to the eye you simpering buffoon!” But I haven’t caved yet and the protective eyewear has been helpful.

8) Bluetooth serves a real purpose besides making people look pretentious – Nothing makes me roll my eyes faster than seeing someone walking down the street seemingly talking to themselves, before I notice they have a small electronic device dangling on the side of their face. I always wonder if these folks secretly want to be air traffic controllers but are just too lazy to get the proper training. But then one day, a couple of months ago, I needed to be on a phone meeting at the same time I had to pick my kids up from school. “Gee I wonder if there is a way I can take this call without having to hold my phone up to my ear while driving,” I thought. So I reluctantly borrowed my wife’s Bluetooth device and my eyes were opened to a whole new reality, when I realized that the advantage of this technology is that it’s convenient! Who knew? And it didn’t even bother me that everyone who drove by while I was using the Bluetooth looked at me like I was pretentious.

7) I love bibimbap! – No, I didn’t just have a seizure and hit random keys while I was typing—“bibimbap” is an actual word. (FYI – the last part of the word is pronounced “bop,” not “bap.”) It is the name of a common Korean dish, which I tried for the first time in 2018. My wife, who is Korean by birth, but was adopted by an American family when she was one, has been exploring her ancestral roots, including the food of her homeland. As it turns out, there is a Korean restaurant less than a mile from our house, which she has been frequenting and giving rave reviews. In particular, she was singing the praises of a dish called “bibimbap.” Eventually my curiosity was piqued enough for me to join her on one of her excursions and when I tasted the weirdly named entree, my mind was blown. The visually stunning dish consisted of sizzling vegetables and tofu (don’t worry carnivores, they make meat-centric bibimbap, too) on a bed of rice with a fried egg strategically placed on top. While it seemed like an odd combination of foods, causing me to insert my fork with a bit of trepidation, it turned out to be outrageously delicious. Yes, bibimbap looks great, tastes great, and is a lot of fun to say! 

6) If you miss David Bowie, check out Arctic Monkeys – Or at least check out their song Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, which sounds like they are channeling David Bowie. While I had vaguely heard of this band, I knew nothing about them until earlier this year when a young coworker and I were chatting about music and he suggested I check out the aforementioned song. I did and was glad to do so, because I very much enjoyed the ethereal, Bowie-esque sound to the tune. As a confirmed music curmudgeon who prefers stuff from the old days, I rarely go out of my way to listen to new artists, but in this case, it was the right move. Besides, how fun is it to say “Arctic Monkeys?” Almost as fun as saying “bibimbap!” (And if I ever saw an arctic monkey eating bibimbap, it would make my day.)

5) My 12-year old son has a crazy amount of knowledge about European sports cars – I’m not a car guy and never have been. If a cool looking car drives by me, the chances are excellent I will not know the make or model and would only be able to describe it with words like “blue” or “fast.” Yet in the last couple of months my older son has been constantly talking about Ferraris and Lamborghinis and Bugattis (which I had never even heard of until he mentioned it.) How in the world did he know about these cars when his dad couldn’t tell you the difference between a Toyota and a Schwinn? Video games, of course. Turns out he plays an online game where you can earn “money” to “buy” these various vehicles. Now he thinks he might one day buy a Bugatti in real life, but I looked up the price and I’m fairly sure if he attempted such a purchase he’d go “bankrupt.”

4) My 9-year-old son knows the word “DYSENTERY” – While I am rarely surprised anymore by my younger son’s extensive vocabulary, I was taken aback when he played the word “DYSENTERY” during a game of Bananagrams. I became aware that he played this word when I heard him giggling, so I looked away from my own words to see what he had played. I was initially very impressed when I saw he had played a 9-letter word, but was a bit less proud when I noticed the words he connected to it were “FARTED” and “TOILET.” Apparently he was playing a themed version of Bananagrams. 

3) The kid who played the lead in A Christmas Story went on to play Ming-Ming in Elf – My wife turned me on to this interesting factoid. It turns out that Peter Billingsley, who played the lead in arguably the most beloved Christmas movie of the 1980s, also played the elf who managed Santa’s workshop in arguably the most beloved Christmas movie of the 2000s. I’ve seen both movies many times but would never have made that connection without the guidance of my loving spouse. See, marriage really does pay off in the end!

2) The best way to unclog a toilet is through unmitigated rage – One of my sons (who shall remain nameless) has a tendency to clog our toilets. Several times a month he comes out of the bathroom and announces that the toilet is backed up, yet again. This usually causes mild irritation on my part (is the kid using a tree’s worth of toilet paper?) but I plunge away and 90% of the time clear the clog on the first try. Sometimes it takes two or three attempts, but I still finish the job without having to break much of a sweat. That is until about a month ago. Our nameless son came into the living room and made his predictable announcement, so I rolled up my sleeves, entered the bathroom and commenced plunging. Once…twice…three times—no progress. I ended up wrestling with the toilet off and on all night and even got out the auger that we had purchased years earlier, but never used before. (Turns out operating an auger is equal parts grueling and disgusting, and, in my case, completely unsuccessful.) The clog persisted into the next day when I purchased a toilet plunger (apparently I was just using a generic plunger—who knew?) specially built to tackle such clogs. New tool in hand, I continued to plunge away and still had no luck. Conversations about hiring a plumber started to occur that evening and deep down in my soul, a simmering rage began to develop, as my manhood was challenged. I slept poorly that night, contemplating having to spend $100 an hour to hire someone for a job I should be able to do on my own. The next morning, I woke up muttering to myself, grabbed the toilet plunger, and had at the clog with a furor hitherto unseen in the Schwartzberg household. Hot anger coursing through my veins, I thrust the plunger repeatedly into the bowl like a raving madman…and amazingly, the clog cleared! I ripped off my shirt and started flexing my biceps, while grunting at the toilet, as though I were the featured performer at Wrestlemania. As I calmed down I realized that I defeated the clog, not with a plunger, or an auger, or a toilet plunger, but with unmitigated rage. I recommend it highly for all your plumbing needs.

1) If I don’t blog monthly there won’t be rioting in the streets – When I started this blog in 2012, I originally thought I would write an entry weekly. After all, I had written a weekly column for the Arizona Republic for the better part of four years, so why couldn’t I continue to write weekly for my blog? Well, it turns out the answer to that question is that I don’t have a deadline and nobody is paying me, which were pretty significant motivators during my Republic days. So my weekly blog soon turned to biweekly, which soon turned to monthly. When I got to monthly, I thought I’d found the right pace, and I kept it up pretty consistently for a few years. But this year, the monthly blog somehow got away from me, and I went without an entry in February, September, and November. When I first skipped a month I thought, “Oh crap, what’s going to happen? Will I get angry letters from readers? Will people picket outside my house? Will I find a dead hedgehog in my mailbox?” But none of those things happened and life kept on clicking along. The same lack of outrage occurred when I skipped months later on in the year and I finally realized that I don’t have to put pressure on myself to write monthly. Indeed, I should only blog when I have something to say. So in 2019, I may have one blog entry or I may have 50. And I won’t stress out about the frequency of my entries. That’s right—my New Year’s resolution is to do less, not more!

The Horror of Unexpected Moisture

There is a time and a place for everything. And more often than not, one’s intrinsic appreciation of a thing is directly tied to whether or not they are experiencing it in the time and place in which they are expecting it. For example, if you go to a Def Leppard concert and it ends with the song “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” you would probably be excited. If, on the other hand, you went to a funeral and it ended with the same song, you may well be upset. Similarly, if you go to the zoo and see a tiger—happy! If you go to your hotel bathroom and see a tiger—terrified! (Just ask Zach Galifianakis.)

But of all the things that one might run into unexpectedly, the one that has vexed me the most over the course of a lifetime is moisture. Sure, moisture is great when you’re trying to improve the texture of your skin or the consistency of your homemade brownies, but when you stumble across it in most other situations it can be disappointing, unpleasant or downright horrifying.

Disappointing moisture- It’s early morning. You are sleeping peacefully. You don’t have to wake up for another 30 minutes. You turn your head on your pillow and your cheek is suddenly wet. Yes, you have just planted your face in a night’s worth of your own drool and now you are awake before you need to be. Welcome to the disappointment of morning saliva.

Unpleasant moisture- It’s time for lunch and you are going to make a sandwich. You grab the package of bread out of the pantry and toss it on the kitchen counter. You grab your supplies out of the fridge put them down and go back to the sack of bread, which is now somehow moist. Apparently the counter was wet without your realizing it and now the sack of bread is, too. It’s only the bottom of the bread that picked up the moisture, but—yuck. Guess it’s going to be a salad instead.

Downright horrifying moisture- You wake up (not from drool, but from natural causes) and start walking barefoot toward the living room. About eight steps later your left foot hits something wet and you slide, barely catching yourself before you fall. In the darkness you don’t know yet what you’ve just stepped in and panic quickly sets in. Is it a leak? A flood? Cat puke? A pool of blood? Your mind quickly plays tricks on you in the early morning darkness. You hop on your right foot to the nearest light switch and turn it on. Yup, it’s cat puke. This should come as no surprise.

There are countless other examples of times when you simply don’t want to feel moisture—when reaching into your pocket, when pulling on a pair of socks, when sitting on Santa’s lap, and so much more.

But don’t let the horror of unexpected moisture paralyze your daily life; just watch where you step, sit and place your hands. And per the advice of legendary sci-fi author Douglas Adams, always have a towel with you at all times. 

Do Largemouth Bass Like Provolone?

A couple of months ago, in an effort to help my nine-year-old son earn one of his Cub Scout badges, I took him fishing. Were it not for the fact that I wanted to be a good dad and help my son in his scouting endeavors, this is not an activity that I ever would have initiated, as these days, my desire to catch a fish is only a smidgen higher than my desire to catch influenza.

As a youth, catching a fish was something that I longed to do, but failed attempt after failed attempt left me bitter and scarred. There was the time when I was about 12 that I went fishing with my dad. I have the image of the lake we went to permanently etched in my brain. We got there, walked to the end of the pier, put our small plastic baggie of bait and hooks down and a strong gust of wind promptly blew the baggie into the lake. Within moments the lake’s current took the baggie containing all of our supplies too far out for us to retrieve it. The fishing trip was over before it ever really began. I cried.

Then there was the time when I was about 13 that my parents enrolled me in a four-week fishing class for kids at Kingsborough Community College, conveniently located right on the water in Manhattan Beach. The class was held every Saturday morning throughout November. The first week there was no fishing—only instruction on how to use all of your fishing equipment. The second week I had a nasty cold and had to stay home. The third week my mom said it was too chilly out for a frail boy like me to stand on a blustery pier for an hour considering I just got over a nasty cold the week before. The fourth week my mom said it was still too frigid out for a lad such as me, but I pleaded and pointed out this was my final opportunity to catch a fish. My mom finally relented and after ensuring I was insulated by layer after layer of thermal underwear, woolen sweaters, and burlap sacks, she had me put on my parka and took me to the class. Unfortunately, I had missed two weeks of sea-worthy tips from my instructor and ended up catching nothing while I watched my classmates reel in enough sea life to stock the Fulton Fish Market for a month. I cried.

Then there was the time when I was 14 that I went fishing with my brother Steve in the deepest reaches of Long Island. I have told this sad tale before, so I will not rehash the gory details again, but you can read about it here if you are so inclined. As you might imagine, at the very end I cried.

So while my history with fishing was not a pleasant one, I sucked it up to take my son for the sake of his development as a Cub Scout. His scout leader had already done all the pre-work with the boys—learning about types of fish, understanding fishing regulations, and even making a rudimentary fishing pole—so all that was left to do was actually go fishing. His leader—probably sensing I was not exactly Captain Ahab—said all we had to do was go to a nearby fishing pond, put some cheese on his hook, let him cast his line into the water and stand there for 20 minutes. If he did this, he would earn his “A Bear Goes Fishing” award.

The morning of our fishing trip I looked in the fridge for some cheese. My choices were cheddar, Swiss or provolone. I wondered which kind the fish would more often encounter in the wild and I realized that in general it was unlikely that fish would have good access to dairy. I was sad for them, as I’m a big fan of cheese. I settled on provolone, figuring it was the mildest of the three and would be a good introductory cheese for them. When I told my son we would use the provolone, he got a big kick out of this.

“Provolone,” he said, stretching out the final “O” and chuckling to himself.

We went to Desert Breeze Park, a few miles from our house. We had been to this park several times before, but never for the fishing. According to the sign we read when we got there, the park contained rainbow trout, channel catfish, largemouth bass, sunfish, and grass carp. Great! Lots of options. I was hoping one of these fish would be a fan of provolone.

We walked around the lake until we found a good spot. I opened up our bait box, which contained nothing more than two slices of provolone. I ripped off a small piece and put it on the hook. Excitedly, my son cast his line and stood there with a wide grin on his face.

I didn’t have high hopes that my son would catch anything and I braced myself for the very real possibility of ending this trip empty handed and in tears like all of the fishing excursions of my youth. After about ten minutes of standing there, my son pulled his line out and we watched as the provolone slipped off the hook into the lake. My son immediately started laughing and said, “Provolone,” with that drawn out final “O.” He shook his head amusedly as we rebaited the hook with the cheese.

He cast his line again and we stood there pleasantly chatting about this and that.

“Would you be surprised if I caught a fish wearing a collar? Like some kid lost his pet fish,” he joked.

“Yeah, that would be a surprise,” I said.

“This is fun,” he said, staring happily into the lake.

As I stood there watching my son contentedly holding his fishing pole, I thought maybe I should temper his expectations about catching a fish. I’m no marine biologist, but the more I contemplated it, the less convinced I was that there might be a largemouth bass lurking in this lake who happened to have a hankering for provolone.

“I’m glad you’re having a good time,” I said. “Just don’t be too disappointed if you don’t end up catching a fish.”

“I don’t want to catch a fish,” he said.

“Wait—what? Why not?” I asked, taken aback.

“Because if I catch it, I’ll have to touch it to take it off the hook and that’s just gross,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Good point. So you’d be perfectly happy if none of the fish go for your provolone?” I asked, somewhat relieved.

“Yes. Besides, I don’t think fish would really eat provolone,” he said, laughing.

We ended up hanging out at the lake for close to an hour, casually chatting while my son went through the motions of fishing. Every ten minutes or so he would pull his line out of the water so we could put a fresh piece of provolone on his fishing hook. Finally, when there was only a little bit of cheese left, my son said, “Let’s feed the ducks.” About 20 yards away there were a few ducks in the lake, so we strolled over and my son ripped off bits of cheese and tossed it toward the water fowl. Every time he did it, he would say “provolone,” and chuckle. The ducks were much keener on the provolone than the fish seemed to be. Once all our cheese was gone we headed back to the car.

“This was really fun,” my son said. “We should do it again. But next time, let’s use cheddar.”

I laughed so hard, I cried. Fishing trip complete.