Observations from a Broad: Annotated Edition

Contents

Acknowledgements

In The Beginning

Love…Or Food Poisoning?

Ring Me Once, Shame On You

Check The Label

Rules Of Engagement

A Marriage Of Inconvenience

A Shoulder Fad

Change Is Good

Fuzzy Wuzzy Had Gray Hair

Little Shop Of Horrors

Gimme a Break Up

Have A Nice Day

Optimisery

Significant Parents

Names Will Never Hurt Me

A Simple Question

Dating Resumes

Mental Rental

A Woman Thorned

You Say Potatoes

Valentine’s Day At The Jewelry Bar

Two If By Bus

UvecorsIdids!

The Perplexed Boyfriend’s Guide To Female Emotions

A Slight To Behold

Forty Days Of Lint

Chicken Soup For The Sole

This Time, It’s Serious

Warning! Bubbles Ahead

What To Expect When You’re Respected

Peanut Butter & Jelly

Land Of The Lost

The Potential Son-In-Law Renovations Program

New Shirt…No Problem!

The Third Male Emotion

An Empty Pitcher Is Worth 800 Words

And I Need Therapy?

Lost And Pounds

Lots And Lots Of Parking

’Twas Still Weeks Before Christmas

Remote Possibilities

It Ain’t Heavy (he’s my brother)

My Mother The Nut

Bear With Me

Fluff And Stuff

Emotional Cargo

Be My Guest

Chicken Of The Sea

Salutations From The Sandbox

There’s Always Room For Meatloaf

The Vegetator

Complimentary Refunds

Famous Last Words

Institutionalize Me

At The End

Dedication: To my wife and my children, my parents (and aunt) and my siblings, my friends and my coworkers, who have provided me with a seemingly endless supply of amusement and tolerance.

Acknowledgements  

The support of my family was essential to the completion of this book. My boys and my wife were very patient when I spent hours staring at the screens of a series of ramshackle laptop computers that I bought in various stages of disrepair.

Additionally, many folks volunteered (or were coerced) to proofread or edit for me, as I had been over these words far too many times to notice if they were correctly spelled, or had any semblance of a story to tell. Thank you to Doris Landaeta, Randy Santossio and Catherine Donroe for taking the time and the effort to make me appear far more professional and literate than I actually am.

Special recognition should go to Chris Nicholson and my wife, Denise. Chris, for putting the original version of this book together so many years ago, and for always giving me his honest opinion in an attempt to make my writing better. Denise, for chuckling once or twice while reading the rough draft, thus encouraging me to actually get this thing published.

Finally, to everyone who ever read my column, or anything I had written, and asked why I never wrote a book, here you have it…I hope you paid full price.

In The Beginning  

Original publication date: today, or thereabouts

I once heard a comedian say that there is a finite amount of intelligence per family. That is why, when you know everything at the age of seventeen, your parents know nothing. When I was twenty years old and in college, my parents must have been idiots, because I was sure that I was omniscient.

In the winter of 1991, I started writing a (usually) weekly column for the college newspaper. For two and a half years, until the spring of 1993, I wrote an ever-increasing assortment of words and observations (many of them in parentheses, with occasional italics). The fruits of these labors became this book.

In the summer of 1994 (or perhaps 1995), my friend Chris presented me with an early version of this book. Chris had been the editor of the school paper for a few years, and had surprised me for my birthday with a compilation of (nearly) every column I had written. It was a neat sense of closure for me, because I had no designs on becoming a professional writer. I was a computer science major. I will pause to let that sink in….

Actually, that’s not completely true. I was a computer science major with a mathematics minor. Then again, there was that one day in my (second) senior year that I became an English major for about 20 minutes. I had been writing the newspaper column for about a year and a half, and had become something of a minor celebrity on campus (at least in my mind I had…I told you I knew everything when I was in college). I met a slightly insane professor who became convinced that I should forego all of that logical, lucrative computer work and pursue a career as a freelance writer (or in my case, a freelance reader of rejection letters from most reputable publications, a few rags, several greeting card companies and those people who put pithy expressions on the tags of their tea bags). In any event, I was attempting to register for an independent study in fiction with my slightly insane professor, when the registrar’s office informed me that I could not register for an independent study because I was not an English major. Four forms, three signatures and two fees later, I became an English major, registered for the independent study, then changed back to a computer major. The course was then cancelled because my erstwhile mentor went on sabbatical. (At this point I feel the need to explain that everything I write in this book is true, except for the parts I exaggerate or invent to make it sound better.)

Anyway, back to my future of bits and bytes, instead of reads and writes. We printed about 25 copies of an early version of this book (this was in the days before the web was popular, and before I had ever heard of on-demand publishing), and sold them all (maybe that celebrity status wasn’t completely in my head). I have since gone on to a fairly successful career in the computer industry, gotten married, had three kids and settled down to a pretty happy life. My writing talent, such as it was, lay dormant for years, only surfacing in an occasional amusing (some would say long-winded) email or a funny company newsletter. However, many people have asked me over the years why I didn’t write a book, rather than waste my talents on the company newsletter. This was about the time I discovered on-demand publishing.

So, here you have in your hands the reworked version of my book from so long ago. Looking back on my words now some dozen or so years later, I sometimes cringe at my audacity…my naiveté…my vocabulary. My observations on relationships were (I thought) insightful, and now are laughable when viewed through the filter of 12 more years of living and almost ten years of marriage. I have (mostly) resisted the urge to change significant portions of any of the original columns (though I did excise a decent-sized chunk of PMS-related humor in one particular offering. At 20 and single, any time you could work the acronym PMS into conversation it was laughs-a-plenty. Long-time married and mid-thirties doesn’t find it quite so funny, and the hormonal behavior in question is not even all that disquieting when compared with the mood-o-rama that is a first pregnancy).

As an added bonus, I have included several columns that did not appear in the earlier edition of this book. Some were written during my college years, some were written specifically for this edition and others were written somewhere in between. In my opinion, they fit the sensibility (such as it is) of this book, and therefore were allowed to join in the fun.

In any event, if you received this book as a gag gift, or maybe discovered it left in a public restroom with no toilet paper, just trust me that it will get better. The first few columns are pretty rough, from a writing perspective. The later ones are more focused (and certainly way more funny than this introductory piece). I considered editing the early columns to be more on par with my later writing, but I figured the reader might be intrigued to see how my skills (the few I have) improved during my column-writing tenure. Plus, this way I didn’t have to do as much work.

I have taken the liberty of placing notes and comments before each piece…consider it like the audio commentary you find on DVDs of TV shows, only you’re not watching anything, and the dialogue won’t be talked over, and the commentary won’t be running while the piece itself is in progress, and you have to read it yourself, and it is occasionally insightful.

At some point in college, I did political commentary for a public access cable show, and some of my newfound interest in politics bled over into my columns. Nothing can make humor seem more stale than topical political references to events that fade from memory like cheesecake from the large intestine of a lactose-intolerant chubby guy in Bermuda shorts. Thankfully, the show only lasted two episodes, and the political references didn’t last much longer.

For those of you who were—inexplicably—waiting for the publication of this book like a tuxedo-clad virgin on prom night, I respectfully suggest that you break the tablets in half tomorrow when you take your obviously necessary medication. And thank you. Getting this book published was a big step for me, and I Plan to publish another one with additional observations on life as they have occurred to me over the years. I apologize to my wife (and children, for that matter), who figure to feature prominently in the next book. Not that it matters, because my wife generally doesn’t find me funny (and maybe you won’t either if I don’t wrap up this introduction in the next 50 words or so), so she may just skim it and turn on Trading Spaces.

In any event, thank you for reading this far, and I hope you enjoy the rest.

Love…Or Food Poisoning?  

JB: This was the first column.That’s pretty obvious, being that the book is organized in chronological order and this one appears first (or second, depending on whether you read the very first one once you realized it was an introduction). I was inspired to write a column (or attempt to write a column) due to columnist Michael Champagne. Contrary to the popular stories of the day, I didn’t, upon reading his column, think to myself I can do better than this! That’s actually the story of how I came to write for the yearbook, but that would be another story entirely. In point of fact, Mike was using his column to entice people to write for the college newspaper, because, as he put it, they had space to fill. That night, I sat down and wrote nearly 800 words, which I very cleverly titled Space to Fill, with Observations From Beyond suggested as a subtitle. I wrote a very nice cover letter and mailed it to the editor of the newspaper…and heard nothing for about a month.

On Valentine’s Day, my column appeared in the paper and I, with great trepidation, went to the newspaper office and asked if they would like more. Thus was born my pseudo career.

In other news, the professor that is mentioned in this column, the one who inspired and encouraged me to write, no longer teaches. Despite the fact that he said it would take an act of Congress to get him fired, it turned out that it merely took the annoyance of a new dean. That and the fact that he had lied on his resume and didn’t really have a doctorate…a fact that went unnoticed for some 20 years. I guess he taught me a lot about irony.

Original publication date: 2/14/1991

If you think you’re in love, are you in love? I’m glad you asked me that, but before I attempt an answer, it is necessary to explain where the quote came from.

Before I saw the light and matriculated at Sacred Heart University, I had a brief stay (one semester) at another small Jesuit school in Fairfield. For those of you who missed that, it was Fairfield University. Anyway, though I wasn’t there for very long, I did manage to take Freshman English with a professor whose name I will not mention (if you’ve ever met him or heard about him, you’ll know who I mean). He is the type of guy who would (and did) go up to another faculty member and, taking in his attire, say, I see Kmart is selling suits now!…crude at best but humorous nonetheless.

He reveled in this crudeness because, as he had tenure, it would take an act of Congress to get him fired. He was a published writer, a brilliant conversationalist and certifiably nuts. Needless to say, he and I got along very well during my visit to the campus. I still quote him at times; this is one of those times. The pearl of wisdom (?) above is something he once pontificated during class. (The title of this column is Observations From Beyond, not Observations From Me.) Beyond is where my former professor hangs out. I visit there often, and I’m going to take you there. But I digress…back to the original question.

If you think you’re in love, are you in love? The answer, quite simply, is yes. I firmly believe you can talk yourself into anything, including love. Do you know why I think you can talk yourself into it? Because I’ve seen people talk themselves out of it. What is love anyway? It’s just feelings, emotions. You can control them, with rational (or irrational) thought.

No? You don’t think so? If you’ve ever been in love, you know that there is a certain point you reach when you have to decide to let yourself fall in love. It is similar to being hypnotized: there comes a point when you have to make the conscious decision to let yourself be hypnotized. A better analogy for love is the trapeze. Sooner or later you have to let go of the swing you are on in order to grab the other. For that brief split second when you’re not holding onto anything, you feel the fear of falling. That’s what falling in love feels like; I don’t know who started the rumor that it is a wonderful feeling, but it was obviously someone to whom it had never happened.

My point, if I have one, is that no matter how irrational the feeling (and love is pretty irrational), you have to make a conscious decision to feel it. It’s a type of recognition. Love is a very personal, subjective feeling. Only you know what your concept of love is, so if you think that what you’re feeling is love, then it is.

This theory can also work in reverse. As I’ve said before, I’ve seen people talk themselves out of being in love too. I have a friend who just recently discovered that she is in love with her boyfriend. It was painfully obvious to anyone who had ever seen them together, but the concept eluded her. You see, she felt that certain feeling of being between the two trapeze swings, and she didn’t like it. She certainly didn’t think it was love…she thought maybe it was something she ate. Alas, the poor girl had never been in love before, so she was still under that silly delusion that it was supposed to feel wonderful.

This strange feeling made her more miserable by the hour, and eventually she decided that it wasn’t something she ate, but it had something to do with her boyfriend. Yes, that was it! It was he who was making her feel this way…dump him! Thank God she came to her senses before she made a big mistake, but the story could easily have not had a happy ending. She talked herself out of the feeling because it didn’t conform to her concept of how falling in love should feel. She fell in love not when she changed the feeling, but when she changed the way she thought love should feel. Then she allowed herself to fall in love. So, you see, you can control feelings