Pseudo-Philosophical Mumbo Jumbo: A Guest Post by Hubs

The following is a guest post by Hubs, i.e. my husband Ari, despite his attempts to delude you into believing otherwise.  (You'll see.)  I would give a brief explanation of how Hubs came to be guest posting on my blog, but he covers that later.  I should warn you, however, that Hubs is one of those writers who loves to deliberately confuse his readers.

For example, after he submitted the rough draft of this post to me and I was editing it, we had this conversation:

"This paragraph is so confusing--I can't even articulate why this confuses me."
"That's because you're not smart."
"You're just being a little too wordy, and it's convoluting your message."
"You're just not smart."

That said, Ari is a good writer.  He's had blogs before, which he tends to abandon after only posting once or twice, because he's really more of a fiction writer.  But I hope this short collaboration (his writing, my illustrations) will lead to more in the future.

So here, without further ado, but with due warning, is a guest post by Ari Wolfe.

~*~

Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves here. I'm not Haley. At least I'm "not her" insomuch as we have separate bodies, despite having largely merged into one two-headed amorphous blob.

I am The Hubs.

No, not him. ME.

That beard-thing takes forever to draw. I hope you're happy.

This is what is called a guest post. I'm not much of a blogger. When introduced to the word "blogosphere," I laughed. I made a stupid joke that went something like, "Between which two layers of the atmosphere does the blogosphere reside?"

Thank you edu.glogster.com for this helpful and educational image, which I found via a Google image search and defiled with my simplistic scribbling.

Like a normal person, Haley tends to get bored while showering. Or lonely, I don't know. She regularly insists that I sit in the bathroom to keep her company, which mostly involves me sitting or standing on the toilet and trying to have a conversation with someone whose face is being covered by a spray of hot water. The idea for me to write a guest post was posited during one such shower time. I asked her to include a drawing of this moment. She refused. For some reason.

Because I enjoy recursive humor and making fun of just about everything, I proposed writing a guest post about guest posting. She refused… at first. CHECK ONE VICTORY FOR ME.

So how does one write a guest post about guest posting? We discussed, and came up with, some really awesome ideas. I didn't write down a single one, so here's this pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo instead.

Blogs exist in their little bubble between the mesosphere and the thermosphere, possessing no substance save that which we give them. A writer on the Internet, blogger or not, is only as real as we perceive them to be. I know that my wife is real. I know that I am real. For those few of you reading this who know us both, you can confirm that as fact. Everyone else must take in good faith that as they scroll down Haley's Comic, the words and images they see laid out were created not by some very impressive facsimile of a person, but by a real living, breathing human being.

I'm not suggesting that the writing was done by a super intelligent computer program, but rather that it might be written by someone other than the person you believe to be writing it. Haley's Comic presents one wholly unique premise that its readership must choose to accept or not to accept. That Haley, and by extension those she writes about, are real. That her personality is as she presents it in written form. It is up to the reader to choose whether "Haley" is a character or not. A blog need not be fact. Fiction presents us with stories from a particular character (or characters') point of view.

However, that entire paragraph was pointless, because Haley is Haley, and I am not Haley. Or am I?

A guest post is only a guest post if you BELIEVE that it is a guest post. If I am not The Hubs as I claim to be, but rather Haley, then this is not a guest post. If The Hubs and Haley are the same person, then this is not a guest post. Of course it IS a guest post, so now we're getting needlessly recursive. This statement is false. BAM! Mind blown.

This guest post needs more art!

Ari's instructions for this illustration were, "Ari riding a T-Rex that is stepping on a bear while Ari fries a second bear with HEAT VISION. Bogo rides on his shoulder just to make the drawing extra complicated to piss Haley off."

For her next featured guest poster I was thinking Haley could use one of our cats. They sure seem to walk on our laptops enough. Maybe they think they're typing? Or Zombie Bob! He could do a guest post.

No, that would just be "Brains" repeated over and over again. Well I suppose for now you'll be stuck with me on the rare occasion I decide to do this.

Next I'll probably tell you about the time I got arrested. Haley always tells it wrong. Wait, if I'm Haley, does that mean I always tell it wrong?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled(*) programming.

(*)Scheduled programming may be preempted or altered without notification.

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The Sleepover

Tiffany's sleepover began with typical sleepover antics, and we were already deep in the midst of a frenetic, candy-fueled rampage when someone said, "Let's go outside!"

I was following the small pack of girls scampering into the night when whumf, the solid ground upon which my tiny feet had been galloping moments earlier suddenly vanished.

I had fallen into a small gap between the back door and the deck's edge.

I wasn't hurt.  For a fleeting moment, I thought I could wrench myself free before anyone noticed.

But my leg wouldn't budge.  Besides, I was already too late.  Eight-year-olds have extraordinarily keen senses.  Their ears prick up at the first sign of misfortune.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mrs. Tiffany's Mom rushed outside and examined my leg.  I can only imagine what she must have been thinking at that moment.

I sat helplessly as the girls crowded around me, fascinated.  At that moment, a strange calm washed over me.  My sobs subsided.  What was happening to me was so bizarre, so entirely unexpected and unprecedented, it had exceeded my mental and emotional capacities entirely. 

At first, the girls pelted me with eager questions.

Then they became overly solicitous, as though they were competing to determine who could be most attentive to my needs.

Then, sensing that no one was in immediate mortal peril, they got bored.

 

The sleepover resumed inside, at first in a subdued, deferential tone, until the girls simply could not contain their natural eight-year-old mirth any longer.  After a while, the indifferent voices of the Spice Girls blared from the living room, mingled with tiny stomps and gleeful shrieks, while Mrs. Tiffany's Mom and I sat in the dim glow of the porch light, waiting for her boyfriend to bring his truck.

Eventually, the boyfriend arrived and, after an agonizing period of fiddling and calculating, fastened his rear fender to one of the deck posts with a rope.  The girls gathered quietly in the doorway as his engine roared and his tires squealed in the mud.

 

To my astonishment, the deck really did lurch incrementally forward, just enough to free my leg.

I was led like a war hero into the master bedroom.  Parents' bedrooms are the forbidden paradise of sleepovers, and I felt like a pauper in a palace as I washed the small cut on my leg in the garden tub.  Tiffany's mom insisted I lie down for a while in her water bed.  The girls lined up to pay their bedside respects before being ushered to their sleeping bags on Tiffany's bedroom floor.  And the sleepover was done.  As I sloshed gently under the blankets, I contemplated the enormity of the night's events.

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The Time I Got Food Poisoning on Christmas Eve

In December 2008, I'd just started my job at the Big Fancy Resort.  I had to work on Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas, so it was the first time I wouldn't be spending Christmas with my family in Alabama.

I was especially dreading my Christmas Eve shift on barista duty.  I never had any desire to become a barista, but the gift shops I was working in also happened to contain a coffee shop under the same management, so they decided to use the same staff for both.  I don't even drink coffee, but I needed this job to pay for my expensive apartment, so I tried really, really hard to become the best barista ever.

During my training, I tried to stress that I knew nothing about coffee.

Unfortunately, I don't think they realized just how ignorant I was about coffee-related matters.

For example, this is exactly what I was told regarding caffeinated versus decaf.

Then one day, someone ordered a regular coffee, so I cheerfully poured it from a pot on the left burner.

Someone had put the decaf on the wrong side, and apparently I was the only person in the world who didn't know decaf goes in an orange pot.

I tried to explain the situation to the customer, but he didn't see the humor in it.

So I still wasn't feeling very confident in my barista skills when I showed up for my Christmas Eve shift in the coffee shop.

Luckily, there weren't many customers that night, and things were going well--until I took my dinner break.

The Big Fancy Resort had an employee cafeteria.  The food wasn't very good, but it was free, and the break wasn't long enough to drive anywhere else for food.  That night, though, the food in the cafeteria sounded especially awful.

I decided to just have a bowl of cereal.  The milk came from one of those weird contraptions with a lever and a spout.

It was that kind of extremely crappy skim milk that tastes like water gone terribly, terribly wrong.

I can't prove that what followed was directly related to the devil-milk I ingested.  All I know is that from the moment I ate that cereal, things deteriorated rapidly.

As soon as I returned from my break and my co-worker left for the night, my stomach started feeling like it was full of rocks.  Boiling hot, angry rocks that were determined to eat their way through my intestinal lining. 

At that point, everyone was gone--there was no night manager, and I was the only one working in the coffee shop.  If you needed a bathroom break on the night shift, you were supposed to call the security office and have them send someone to watch your store.  So as a torrent of molten lava accumulated in my digestive tract, I dutifully dialed the security extension and tried to sound nonchalant as I asked for a bathroom break.

I don't think the security officers really viewed bathroom breaks as one of their more important responsibilities.

When I finally got my bathroom break, I knew I probably had either food poisoning or some kind of stomach virus.  I hadn't had many jobs prior to this, and I had no idea what to do.  I thought about calling one of my managers and saying I was sick, but I was afraid they'd think I was faking so that I could go home early on Christmas Eve, and no one was going to come in at 8:00 PM to cover the rest of the night shift. 

So I returned from my bathroom break and worked the rest of my shift with food poisoning.

I got sick several more times, but I was too embarrassed to keep calling security for bathroom breaks, so I started waiting until I didn't see any customers nearby and then running down the hall to the bathroom.

The biggest problem, however, was the crippling stomach cramps.  It felt like something was trying to claw its way out of my intestines.  There was also the slight problem that whenever someone ordered a latte or cappuccino, the smell of hot, steaming milk made me want to vomit.

To conserve my strength, I spent all my time between customers (when I wasn't sneaking into the bathroom) slumped behind the counter in some kind of desperate anti-diarrheal yoga pose.  When I heard someone walk in, I poured all my energy and willpower into acting like a perky barista who wasn't nauseated by the smell of warm milk and didn't feel like her insides were exploding.

My shift finally ended at 10:00 PM and I dragged myself back to my apartment.  I don't remember much after that, other than becoming quite intimate with my toilet at four in the morning.  By the next day, my insides were basically empty.  For some reason, in my depleted, slightly-feverish state, I became convinced that I absolutely had to eat some broth or I would die.  Unfortunately, as I rifled through my closet-sized kitchen, all I found were frozen dinners and something that probably used to be a vegetable.

I was also severely dehydrated, but the city water in my apartment building tasted like recycled pool water, and the plastic container of distilled water I'd bought at the grocery store was empty, so I spent all day microwaving ice cubes.

Future Hubs called to check on me at one point.  I asked him to bring me broth and water.  He drove all over town, but no stores were open.  That's when I remembered it was Christmas.  I think I eventually found some rice in the dark recesses of an upper cabinet and ate that, but I had become so fixated on broth that I might as well have forced myself to eat gravel.  (The next day, even though I felt much better, I still went to the store and bought some broth, just to spite the universe.  Then as I was finally eating it, I remembered broth doesn't actually taste very good, but I finished the whole carton, because damn it, broth is what sick people are supposed to eat.)

And thus my first Christmas as a grown-up with my own apartment was spent pretty much like this:

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