An Ungrateful Friend

It was my friend's birthday yesterday, so I wrote "Happy Birthday!" on her wall and then poked her.

She woke up and immediately and called the police on me for breaking and entering and vandalism.

The Courting Jester

Guys have been looking for ways to pick up women since the beginning of human history. Archaeological evidence suggests that cavemen, in an effort to win over the ladies, invented the club for the sole purpose of bashing other male competitors on the head. The miracle of evolution has dramatically developed the courting habits of males to the point where we presently employ far more sophisticated techniques of impressing women. So now we wear helmets when we bash each other in the head, and we perform such attractive displays of masculinity in the name of football.

Modern guys have discovered many ways of picking up women, as men with larger muscles, larger wallets, larger brains, and larger taste in women have found it easier to land themselves a girl. Not every guy has such attributes, however, and in these cases an alternative method of impressing women must be adopted. Fortunately, guys can effectively attract girls through a good sense of humor, and I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life trying to perfect this skill. I assure you that I have not yet found success in this technique, but perhaps you can learn from my failures.

I started using humor as a social skill in 6th grade when I began to notice that, strangely, I did not seem to hate girls as much as I used to. It was time to start impressing them, but I had no idea how to do it. I was astonished and disappointed when I found out that girls, as a matter of principle, were not attracted to guys who owned a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card and could fit 57 M&M’s in their mouth. So I began trying to get girls around me to laugh, which really wasn’t too hard. Puberty made me funny to any girl, and they would laugh at the fact that my voice was higher than theirs. My awkward appearance also generated plenty of giggles, as my growth spurt had left my limbs so disproportionate that I resembled Gumby after getting tortured on a stretching machine.

Despite being the mayor of Awkward City, I did manage to trick one girl into dating me. I figured that I could use my humor to keep her interested and have her fall in love with me and marry me, which I estimated would happen in about six weeks or maybe even sooner if I got my braces off early. Unfortunately my plan of eternal love backfired after I sent her what I thought was a very funny Valentines Day card: “Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m schizophrenic, and so am I.” I thought it was hilarious, but she broke up with both me and myself.

Over the years I’ve learned that it isn’t safe to assume that women will share the same sense of humor with guys. Although it may seem like the funniest thing in the world to you, women don’t generally like it when you laugh at someone who falls down the stairs, especially if it’s her. You also need to be aware of the things that your love interest cares about, and make an effort not to make fun of them. For instance, it’s not a good idea to refer to her group of friends as the “nerd herd”. Also, if one of your buddies has a few too many adult beverages and gets sick all over her handbag, avoid using the opportunity to crack a joke. Trust me, it won’t make her feel any better when you say, “Well, I guess your Gucci bag is now your ‘Gucky’ bag!”

Potential Names for My Future Kids

Sometimes I like to imagine what I might name my future children. There are so many possibilities, and a person's name can really affect the direction of his or her life. My parents - I am not making this up - came very close to naming me Thor, but, for the sake of my future social well-being in middle school, ultimately settled on Eric.

I've got a few ideas of my own for future baby names. Part of me would like to name my son or daughter something original and exotic, like maybe "Pogtaj". This would be a perfect name because I could totally mess with people on the phone when they ask me how to spell it. I would tell them, "It's spelled just like it sounds: "P" as in "Pneumonia", "O" as in "Ouija board", "G" as in "Gnat", "T" as in "Tsunami", "A" as in "Aisle" and "J" as in "Jalapeno".

I think it would also be pretty cool to follow the example of Gwyneth Paltrow and her baby, Apple, by naming my child after something edible. It would really inject some levity into otherwise tragic occasions: "Oh no! That circus lion just ate Peaches!"

If I had to choose now, I would name my future kid "Waldo" so if I accidentally lose him at the mall Child Services can't blame me because hey, it was his destiny.

If you'd like to read some further thoughts that I have about names, check out my article "Names That I Don't Trust" on Collegehumor.com.

The First Subway Station

The other day I was at a subway stop that displayed a sign claiming it was the first ever subway station in the U.S. I bet business was pretty tough initially for the very first station in the country: "Alllll aboard! Next stop: Here!"

My Birthday

Today, September 20th, is my birthday. When I was little my parents would always tell me how I was born on the last day of summer. Of course I took this quite literally, and felt ashamed that I had killed the season.

I am 23 now, and I have to say that this birthday isn't quite as exciting as some of my past ones. At 13, I became a teenager. At 16, I could drive. 21, I could legally drink. 22, I was a palindrome. All 23 has going for it is the fact that it's a prime number. Not so exciting, but I'll be sure to enjoy it while it lasts, because it'll be another 6 years before I am indivisible again.

Dumb Things That I Say: Volume I

There are certain things that I say all the time, and I have no idea why I say them. Here is today's example:

"God Bless You"

I always say "God bless you" after someone sneezes, and I really shouldn't. I mean, it's just a sneeze. Does the person really deserve that I bestow God's blessing upon them? This isn't the 14th century (when the saying was first coined) where you sneezed twice and you were a goner for sure. Back then people needed all the blessings that they could get, because a single sneeze meant you had like, two weeks to live. But with modern medicine today, it's time that we retire this polite expression. Sneezes are not a big deal anymore. It's just unnecessary for me to waste my breath saying "God bless you" just because you are slightly allergic to a cat named Whiskers.

I also feel stupid when people sneeze like, 4 times in a row and I have to say "Bless you" after each one. I hate repeating myself, but what am I supposed to do? Stop after the first sneeze? That sends a bad message. If anything, the person needs even more blessings if they are sneezing multiple times. I suppose I could just wait awhile after the first sneeze to see if there will be any more, and then say just one big "Bless you" at the end of the string. But what if the person only sneezes once? Then I'm saying "bless you" 30 seconds after the sneeze and the person will think that I'm a little slow upstairs. Enough people already think that I'm a few fries short of a Happy Meal, so I don't really want to add to it.

The Cutting Room Floor

As a writer, I keep a notebook around me at all times in case, in a rare moment of lucidity, I have a good idea to write down. When it is time for me to update my blog, I review my notebook and breakdown my ideas into two categories: the stuff in the “horrible” category doesn’t make the cut, while the stuff in the merely “unfunny” category makes it on the site. I thought I’d share with you some of my jokes that did not make the cut. Often, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, dazedly write down a joke, only to wake up in the morning to discover that it didn’t, in fact, make any sense at all. Sometimes these rejected jokes are borderline offensive, or are way too subtle for people to figure out, or a just plain stupid. To be honest, even I don’t understand some of these, so please let me know if you have any ideas…

-I’m no weatherman, but I can tell you that most showers happen in the morning...

-If LifeSavers candy really lived up to its name, then my friend’s pet rabbit would have survived after we fed it 7 packs.

-How do you describe chocolate ice cream that is very plain?

-My A/C is “too cool” to include “B”.

-Presidential candidates often mention the “gas crisis”, but ever since I moved away from my college roommate I’ve found that I complain less about gas…

-Rain is an organic car wash.

Funny Video of the Week: "Oprah Show" Audience Goes Crazy

I don't know anything about "The Oprah Show", or for that matter, about women. But I just can't imagine what could possibly be so amazing about "Oprah's Favorite Things" that would warrant such a reaction from the audience. I mean, they were screaming, jumping, and crying tears of pure happiness. I'm pretty sure I even saw one woman in the back that went into labor. Sure, I get a similar reaction when I tell people that there's a new post on erickester.com, but I never knew that Oprah could generate excitement to this degree.

So what's so special about "Oprah's Favorite Things"? I know that the audience must be getting something, because as much as Americans love stimulating talk-show discussion, I doubt that they would get this excited if Oprah was simply going to sit down and talk about random stuff that she likes. So assuming that the audience is going to receive "Oprah's Favorite Things", I've tried to imagine which gifts would cause an audience full of women to literally lose their minds. Judging from their reaction, I bet "Oprah's Favorite Things" are: beachside mansions, yachts bedazzled in pink diamonds, and the DVD of Sex and City, Season 6. Oh yeah, and Tiffany's Jewelry…not just a specific piece, but the entire store.

Women can be silly sometimes. Guys like me try to reserve such extreme expressions of happiness for more deserving occasions, like when the Patriots get a first down.

A Country Song by a Guy Who Has Never Been to the South

I have never really been to the South, but thanks to movies and country music I picture it as the most peaceful place on earth where everything is simple and pure. I literally have avoided visiting the South because I know there is no way that it could possibly live up to my lofty expectations. All country music lyrics seem to paint a similar picture, so with them as a model I decided to write my own country song about what I imagine the South is actually like:

I want to go to that place where the sun is setting all the time,
Where the pies cooling off on the windowsill smell sublime.
I want to play in a tree-house that is my imaginary palace,
And never wear shoes so my foot turns into one big callous.

My friends and I will play stickball in our backyard,
Setting up the field won’t be very hard:
First base is the stump of a fallen oak tree,
While second is a pile of stones where our well used to be.
Third base is an old boot whose owner is long unknown,
And home plate is our first dog’s gravestone.

We’ll play ball all day and smile with every swing,
Until Ma comes out and we hear the dinner bell ring.
But before going inside I just have to take a peek,
If there are any nice bullfrogs to catch down by the creek.

After dinner we’ll sit out on the porch and eat our pies,
No need for a screen when the only bugs around are fireflies.
When dessert is done we relax as my dad strums his banjo,
And I’ll join the music by picking up an empty jug to blow.
(Insert Jug Solo Here)
Everyone will sing and clap without a care,
Even grandpa adds to the music with the creaking of his rocking chair.

Later I'll sneak out to meet my Love, gathering every dandelion that I can pluck,
And we lie down and watch the stars on the hood of my dad’s pickup truck.
The daughter of the sheriff, she’s the product of all the best things in the South,
And the color of her sandy blond hair matches the piece of straw in my mouth.

She’ll whisper to me with that soft southern drawl that I’ve come to admire,
Ever since we were kids and played telephone with two cans and a wire.
And when the moment is right I’ll get down on my knee and take her hand,
Presenting her a ring that I bought with the money from my lemonade stand.

Moving Back Into the Empty Nest

This is a strange time of year for me. It’s the beginning of September, and for the first time in about 18 years, I am not going back to school. With my older sister already out of the house and my younger sister recently moving back to college, I am enduring a new experience in my life: living at home with my parents as a 22-year-old “only child”. While living at home certainly has its advantages over living by myself –like the luxury of using actual plates for my food instead of a frisbee –it still presents me and thousands of other recent college grads with a whole new set of challenges.

For the most part, my parents have granted me the freedom that a 22-year-old with the maturity of an 18-year-old deserves. There are times, however, where their parental instincts become overwhelming and they just can’t help themselves. It’s the little things that I notice, like when my mom walks by my room while wondering aloud whether or not I am getting a haircut anytime soon. Or like one time when I was awoken on a Saturday morning with a barrage of intense questions about my short and long-term goals. “Well,” I mumbled, “my short-term goal is to sleep for twenty more minutes, and my long-term goal is to sleep for two more hours.”

Just as my parents don’t understand many of my ramblings about technology and sports, I have difficultly interpreting some of their conversations. For instance, the other day I walked into the middle of this exchange:

“…I’m just concerned she’s never coming back. I heard them fighting a few weeks ago and after that she just took off and left.”

“I know! And he’s been acting strange ever since the twins were born. I bet it wasn’t easy for them, moving into a new home with the babies. I just hope that we didn’t do anything wrong. I would never forgive myself if she left because of us!”

Excited about this juicy gossip, I asked, “Which neighbors are you talking about?”

“We’re talking about the pair of white-throated sparrows that used to frequent our feeder.”

Since then, I’ve been kept up to date with the heart-wrenching chronicles of bird life in our backyard: Anger. Love. Betrayal. Regurgitation. It’s the soap-opera that keeps my parents captivated all season long, and it doesn’t take commercial breaks. It really isn’t easy living with people whose mood depends on whether or not there are squirrels on the feeder.

If you were to rank my relative importance on the Kester premises, I’m pretty sure I would rank slightly above the birds, but far behind our two dogs. I’m not jealous or anything, but I just don’t understand why I get less attention than two furry numbskulls who consistently confuse human legs with potential mates. I could come home from work with a promotion, but the topic that would dominate dinner conversation that night would be the fact that Rudy was “smart” enough to puke on his dog bed instead of our floor.

As anyone with siblings knows, sometimes your parents will mistakenly call you by your brother or sister’s name. You can’t blame parents for the occasional slip-up, as sometimes they have two, three, or even four names that they have to keep track of. It’s bad enough if my parents mix-up my name with my sisters’, but it’s even worse when they mix-up my name with one of my dogs’. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it is to have some friends over at my house and hear my mom yell to my dad, “When you get a chance, will you take Eric out back to poop?”

I could go on and on about other difficulties I face living at home, like how I get blamed for any technological issue in the house (“We never had any problems with the Internet when you were at school!”), but nature calls and I have to go beg my parents to let me outside.

Interventions

My friend is totally addicted to that reality TV show "Intervention", but I don't know how to tell her.

Lost In Transition

It's September, which means one thing: the start of football season. Oh yeah, and the start of school I guess. With thousands of freshmen moving in to college now, I thought I'd share this article that I wrote about my experience as a freshman. Entitled "Lost in Transition", it was originally published in The Boston Globe on September 3rd, 2005.

Entering Harvard for my freshmen year in college, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I imagined a campus wrought with students who recited the first 30 digits of pi to themselves as they meandered through the Yard, and expected my roommate to be at least a finalist in the Scripps National Spelling Bee at the age of 9. As soon as I arrived on campus, I found that my image of Harvard was completely wrong: students muttered the first 30 digits of e to themselves, and my roommate had already locked himself out of our room twice.

Thus began my year as a “Frosh” in college, a year in which I, along with every other college freshmen in the country, sought to discover some relief for the burden of “potential” that I always overheard my parents talking about as I played Super Mario. My plans to seamlessly fit in with the college crowd did not go exactly as planned. It appeared that the only way to impress people was to have discovered a sub-atomic particle, uncovered a feasible solution to the national deficit, or to be getting sued by Apple. In the hallway of one dorm, I saw one of my classmates showing her gold medal from the summer Olympics in Athens. I quickly put a sweatshirt over my “#1 Grandson” T-Shirt. I was distraught to hear that some of my classmates already had net-worths. The only statistic that I was concerned about was Manny’s batting average. I overheard two students discussing the inherent differences between the psyches of Melville’s Queequeg and Cervante’s Don Quixote. I often wondered if Harry Potter and Hermoine Granger would make a good couple.

My struggle to adjust to college extended to the classroom. When I signed up for my Calculus course at the beginning of the year, I was unaware that the professor had a propensity to schedule tests during World Series clinching games for the Red Sox. So at 8:05 on October 27th, instead of watching Johnny Damon’s lead off homerun against the Cardinals I was figuring out the rate of change in volume of a pig trough being filled with water. It may relieve you to know that my professor was kind enough to keep us updated on the score of the game on the blackboard, however he wrote it in such a way that in order to figure out the score, one had to solve a differential equation and have at least partial knowledge of Newton’s Law of Cooling. I quickly tried to solve the equation, and I was distraught to discover that the Red Sox were losing 143 to 3pi.

I was sure that football would remain unchanged from high school. I figured that would strap on a helmet, run full speed into some other guys, grunt, and show off my “battle wounds” (bruises) to girls, just like old times. But alas, even parts of football change upon entering the NCAA. My coaches did me the great service of introducing me to hours I never knew existed in high school, namely the period between 5 am- 7 am. So I found myself waking up to go to football practice at the same time my roommate was finishing up his final round of internet poker and going to bed. While getting up so early certainly has its drawbacks, like the inability to run straight or speak in complete sentences, it also has some advantages. Walking across the river to the Stadium at such early hours gave me the perfect setting for some alone time to contemplate deep thoughts, like, for example, “where is the sun?” and “are the Yale players in their beds?”

Just when life as a freshman in college seemed so overwhelming that I began wondering if I would be better off growing a beard and moving to a cabin deep in the forest where I would live in solitude as I became one with the squirrels and pinecones, I finally got an indication that I was indeed going to survive freshmen year. About a month into my first semester I ventured down to the laundry room to clean my clothes for the first time (sorry, Mom). A nerve-racking two hours later I began unloading my drier full of clothes, and to my surprise and delight everything seemed to have gone smoothly. My clothes even smelled like a mountain breeze, as my detergent had advertised. My pride was soon crushed, however, as I pulled out what I thought was a pair of my boxers. It turned out that these red boxers were actually my favorite red sweater. As I held up my shrunken sweater and stared at it in disbelief, I caught the eye of one of my classmates who was at the other end of the laundry room. I immediately recognized this boy from one of my classes, who I had seen earlier that day come up with a method for breaking the speed of light. He too was holding a shrunken sweater.

As we stood there holding up our sweaters that looked like they belonged in Baby Gap, I suddenly realized that behind all these brilliant, intimidating minds there were confused, overwhelmed teenagers. As my year progressed I noticed more and more similar instances of fallacy, immaturity, and irresponsibility. Whether your cell phone rings to the tune of “Inspector Gadget” while you are making a presentation to the class or you get a concussion from sledding off the roof of the library on a tray you stole from the dining hall, all college students are connected by this struggle to simultaneously grow up and stay a kid. No matter where you go to school, no matter how successful the people who surround you may seem, everyone is overwhelmed by this “transitional period” of life that goes by its more common name: college. So to all of you incoming freshmen: remember that you are never alone in your stress. Behind every seemingly confident student who has it all together, there is a boy who doesn’t know the right time to use cold, warm, or hot water.

Read My Lips: I Don't Use Cliches

I heard through the grapevine that someone said I use too many clichés in my writing. Whoever thinks that doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. I avoid clichés like the plague, and, in my humble opinion, my writing is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but anyone who thinks otherwise is as blind as a bat!

If my writing isn’t your cup of tea, that’s fine. Just don’t get on your high horse and start spreading rumors that I use clichés like they’re going out of style. I wasn’t born yesterday –I know that you’re purposely trying to make a mountain out of a molehill just to get under my skin. Falsely accuse me all you want, but I’m going to stay as cool as a cucumber. I know in my heart that my writing is free of clichés and that you lie like a rug.

I’m willing to admit that, once in a blue moon, I may use a cliché. But this only happens when I am really stuck in a rut and fresh out of ideas. Writer’s block happens to the best of us, so you can’t blame me if I use one little cliché when I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas.

Will I use clichés one day when my writing career is all washed up? To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’ll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.