Some stuff about college, but mostly stuff about John Mayer

Much like most people’s experiences, my freshman year of college was a confusing time.  Between dating a bobo (an extra super attractive bobo, but a bobo nonetheless), gaining all of the Freshman 15 and dwindling down my group of friends until only my soul mate was left (my Lady!), all I really wanted was to pass my classes, drink some cheap vodka and find and keep a roommate who didn't want to stab me in my sleep (true story: my first roommate slept with a pair of scissors under her pillow because of the people I hung out with…apparently all of my friends were members of Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock gang).

But this isn't about my struggles to find my place in the 2700-student, mostly Caucasian private suburban college.  Although a lot of struggling did take place, I ended my four years with a Lady, a Halbastram and a degree that impresses absolutely no one.

No, this is about how much John Mayer I listened to during that year and why the sound of his voice is now like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.  Or Adam Carolla’s voice on anything.

It started the spring before my freshman year.  I had done an overnight visit on campus, where I stayed with a freshman in her dorm (where major drama ensued*).  On the door of the person living directly across her was a John Mayer poster.  I thought, “he’s kind of cute” and used that as the springboard to purchasing his album and paying over $30 for that same poster on eBay (the early days of eBay, where you could still send paper money in exchange for your goods).

I listened to the album sporadically until I actually started college, at which point my bouts of isolation and depression could only be soothed by the calming whisper-singing of John Mayer.  And I think that whisper-singing business is why he could convince so many pairs of underwear to come off (that phrase goes many different ways…choose your own adventure): as Jerry Seinfeld once said, it doesn't matter what a woman is saying to you, as long as she’s saying it in that low sexy voice.  Same with Mr. Mayer: that comforting “Mr. Sensitive” style of singing wraps itself around every lonely woman and convinces her that he’s singing directly to them and that he’s the perfect guy that all of those regurgitated articles in Cosmo were talking about.  He feels what you’re feeling, he’s a great listener and, above all else, he’s fucking SENSITIVE!  And isn't that all the ladies want?

So I’d be lying in my depressing XL twin bottom bunk, headphones on, listening to Mr. Mayer whisper sweet nothings into my ear: songs about holidays, road trips, how he says things that he later regrets, that stupid song about my body being like an amusement park.

It was all so wonderful.

Even into my sophomore year, after I had met Halbastram, I still had those daydreams where I would meet John Mayer & oops! Somehow my clothes came off…might as well have some sex.

My fantasies weren't complicated.  I grew up with static-y Skinemax: I’m not fighting through the blurred & scrambled screen just to see some talking.  That’s what the crystal-clear HBO is for.  If I’m on Skinemax, we know what I’m looking for.  Same with my John Mayer fantasies: I don’t want you to sing for me- I have the CDs for that.  We don’t have anything to talk about- that’s what my therapist is for.  I’m here for the goods.

And then he opened his stupid mouth and ruined everything.

Now…I’m not saying that his “David Duke penis” line offended me- he’s entitled to be attracted to whoever he wants.  Sure, it puts a damper on all of my previous fantasies because they've become meaningless: if I had to do a gritty reboot of them, he’d have Michael Richards stop me at the door and tell me exactly why this isn't going to happen.  Anyway, by the time he’d made his dick-preferences known, I’d already discovered Jake Gyllenhaal and moved on to pouty-er pastures.

Naturally, my beef was with the phrasing.  There are 101 ways to say that you prefer to bone women of a particular ethnicity without sounding like a douchecock.  The man who wrote the song comparing a woman’s body to Six Flags did not hit that mark.  He somehow found #102, which is Douchcock Territory.  Perhaps he figured he was being clever, witty, and poetic.  After all, the man writes songs for a living: words should be his thing.

Words absolutely failed him that day.  And it was like the table being bumped at the party and the record screeching to a halt.  And something in me just clicked.  Somehow, his music just stopped working for me.  Maybe it was because the fantasies no longer made sense, so I couldn't fall back into dreamland when I listened to his music.  Maybe I was completely turned off by his shitty turn-of-the-phrase.  Maybe I just finally realized that John Mayer was a bit of a man whore anyway and hey, look at Jake Gyllenhaal & those perfect lips.

Whatever it was, now, whenever I listen to “Room for Squares” I go through three rapid stages: 1) nostalgia for freshman year; 2) remembering old fantasies; 3) “I wonder if he actually calls his penis ‘Mr. Duke’ when he whips it out …”

*Bonus story: when I stayed overnight at the college that one time, the girl who was hosting me was having a little trouble with her boyfriend.  Wait, did I say a little?  Because what I witnessed turned into a full-blown episode of ‘Maury.’  While we were getting dinner in the cafeteria, she saw her boyfriend dining with another girl.  Not necessarily anything amorous.  He just happened to be eating at the same table as another female.  While we were eating (or attempting to), my host’s roommate kept egging her on, telling her that she needed to confront him.  For what, I don’t know.  Like I said, he wasn't doing anything.  Apparently eating at a coed table is not ok when you’re dating.  Or something. 

Anyway, the rest of the dinner was pretty rushed as she wanted to confront him right away.  She didn't even seem to notice that I saw still there: she was out for blood.  So when she saw he was leaving, we hurriedly tossed our food, grabbed ice cream and followed him.  Seeing that action was not being taken swiftly, the roommate threw my host’s ice cream on the sidewalk and made her confront him right on Chicago Ave., which just happens to be a very busy street in downtown Naperville.  At rush hour.  For the entire world to see.  At this point, the bf was no longer with the girl he was dining with- they parted ways in the cafeteria.  Had she talked to him there, we could have avoided what came next. 

She storms up to him, and demands to know who he was dining with.  He tried to explain that she was a friend from some class, but then came the Maury antics: “some friend?  I never met her.  What class?  You can’t have dinner with me but you’re having dinner with her?  She didn't have anyone else to eat with?  I know when you’re lying to me.”  Bam, bam, bam!  He couldn't get a word in edge-wise.  When he tried to just walk away, it was at this point that she slapped his ice cream cone out of his hand (it really was a beautiful day for ice cream- if no one slapped it to the ground). 

Having accomplished this one little victory (I guess?) she turned and stormed away, with me and the roommate trailing behind her.  The rest of the night was spent in her dorm room, where she bitched about the boyfriend for the entire night until I finally fell asleep.  Early the next morning, I quietly slipped out to my mother’s car and went home, completely confused about what it was I was supposed to take away from that visit: boys are scum?  Roommates are instigators?  No one likes to actually eat ice cream, but rather they prefer to feed ice cream to the ants?  This is the 1950s and boys and girls can’t co-mingle at the dinner table? 

College is weird.

Positivity in the Bizarro World

Back in the distant past that was 2008, I started having a few health problems.  Nothing major, but noticeable enough that I realized that my zero years of medical training probably weren’t going to help me out this time.  After a brief visit with my general physician, she advised me to head over to the Building with All the Machinery in It so that I could have an ultrasound conducted.  I was also told that I needed to drink roughly ten gallons of water [citation needed] an hour beforehand, making the trip to the Building the longest drive of my life- and I’ve been stuck in L.A. rush hour traffic before.  The 405 has nothing on dodging stop lights and soccer moms in suburbia while carrying a full bladder.

As I arrive at the Building, I park my car a little too eagerly (read: completely jacked up and in multiple spots) and hop out so that I can get the deed over with.  As I’m closing the door, I hear a woman speaking, so I turn to find the source of the voice.  There is a woman sitting in the driver’s seat of a brown sedan parked three spots down.  I see she’s looking directly at me, so it’s safe to assume that she’s addressing me (possibly about my shitty parking).  Because I was currently living in the suburbs and my “you probably shouldn’t approach a strange person’s car” meter was in the shop that day, I walked towards her car.  She then repeated what she apparently had said earlier: it’s going to be ok.  I spoke to Him and he said that whatever’s wrong with you, it’s going to be ok.

Now, I’m a very spiritual person, but I’m also a realist.  If a person tells me that they have specific information about the Other World, but that I would need to part with all of my worldly possessions to access this information, I would tell them where they can cram their information and then take my worldly possessions out for ice cream just so they know that I’d never give them away.  But I also believe in the power of positivity.  The right positive energy dispersed at the right time can have the most amazing effects and I’ve never been bamboozled by people spouting positive, feel-goodery before.  So I walked away from Brown Sedan Lady feeling like this was going to be the most awesome medical-related visit of my life.  Who knows, maybe the Ultrasound operator would find gold bars in my insidey parts and refrain from asking questions.  So into the building I walked, with a new sheen of confidence and an urge to pee unlike any other I’d ever felt before in my life.

Long story short, I don’t know how much my enemies paid Brown Sedan Lady to come and give me false hope, but I bet they feel like it was money well spent.  Not only was everything not “ok”, but everything turned out to be one clusterfuck after another that would see me visiting a gaggle of doctors, specialists and even the E.R. in the span of a year.  It was like I was living in Bizarro World, where positive thinking and positive words only made things worse.  I ran out of health insurance (and, let’s be honest, energy) before my doctors could positively ID just what in the hell was actually wrong with me, but I’ve been assured by them that “it’s not really life-threatening, just inconvenient.” 

You’re telling me.

For the most part, I’ve been managing without the luxury of doctor visits for the better part of five years now (although sometimes I do wish those sweet latexed hands would comfort me in my worst moments).  If I’m the victim of some sort of “Stephen King’s Thinner” hoax, I cannot stress enough how I want to apologize or make amends for whatever or whoever I crossed.  In my mind, I’m starting to think that I need someone to approach me in public and give me a good, “hey, fuck you!” just to reverse the Bizarro spell.  But that’ll probably just make me cry.  So please, don’t do that. 

A Brief History of My History with Snow Days

My history with snow days.

I am a product of private school.  And as such, I became used to the idea of school closing down for whatever reason the administrators deemed necessary.  Too much rain?  School’s closed.  Fifty degrees below zero?  School’s closed.  One of the million varieties of religious holidays?  School’s closed.  (Just kidding.  I went to Catholic school.  We only acknowledged our holidays, of which there was one approximately every three days.) 

So when my mother decided that we had run out of money and I had to attend a public high school, I was given a very unfortunate reminder that the CPS apparently shares the same creed as the Postal Service: “neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night…”

As a kid, I would sit in front of the tv, anxiously awaiting the moment that my school would scroll across the bottom of the screen as part of the school closures.  Being a Catholic school with a name towards the end of the alphabet, the anticipation was always almost too much to bear.  But alas, the school’s name would scroll past and I would kick off my uniform, climb back into bed and watch eight hours of Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, Donahue, Jenny Jones, Ricky Lake, and our other forgotten national 90s talk show host treasures.

I never gave it much thought that Chicago Public Schools were suspiciously missing from the scrolly list because, well, I saw my school’s name and to hell with everyone else.

But, oh, you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

In my four years of public high school education, I don’t think I’ve ever had a foul-weather cancellation (but, oddly, Pulaski Day was always a school holiday…and I had to learn about Pulaski on my own, as he wasn’t even taught in school.  “Here kids, take the day off to commemorate a Polish hero that none of are even remotely aware of, aside from the fact that he’s a prominent street name in Chicago.”).  By my senior year, I started having to make my own snow days. 

Don’t get me wrong: I understand why some schools might want to remain open.  A lot of children will probably rely on the schools as warming and feeding centers.  But I lived a good twenty minutes from school (oh, the joys of attending a non-neighborhood Magnet school).  So if nothing was plowed or shoveled, a lot of my classmates and I were sludging through hell just to get to a building where we were going to behave like jackasses and pay attention to absolutely no one.

(Just kidding!  We were absolute angels!  Like, cray cray adorbz.)

Of course, my childlike mind saw any accumulation or drop of temperature as a potential Roland Emmerich movie and couldn’t understand why two inches of snow couldn’t be the standard closure measurement, like in Marks, Mississippi (according to family member accounts).  Looking back on it, perhaps I was being bratty.  Perhaps I was spoiled by my private school days.  Maybe CPS was just looking out for our best interest (which is evident by the amazing number of school closures in the past few years).  But, in the end, we’re Chicagoans.  We laugh in the face of “lake effect snow.”  A negative temperature reading won’t stop us from going to a Bears game.  But I didn’t appreciate this until I became an adult and realized my bosses didn’t give two flying fucks about a “snow day.” 

Wait…this sounds suspiciously like high school…