Dez Vs. Nature

I've always had a complicated relationship with the outdoors--the complication being that I like nature, but I suck at it.  It all started when I was 12 years old and I went to a week-long summer camp in West Virginia with my best friend, Kristen.  Despite a variety of mishaps that indicated otherwise (including having a boy cast his fishing hook into my chest), I actually thought I was cut-out for camp life.  It wasn't until we embarked on our 3-day backpacking journey into the woods that I realized there was a problem.

We had partners for the hike that we shared a backpack with.  I'm not talking the latest neon-green JanSport that I had bought for my inauguration into middle school.  I'm talking one of those heavy-duty cross-country beasts.  A backpack of myths...something I had only heard about but certainly had never seen before.  Kristen, who has always been far more nature-inclined, offered to carry the backpack first so that I would take over at the half-way point.  After 4.5 miles, the time had come.

I've decided that it's best to convey what happened next in cartoon-format.

(Forewarning: I also have a complicated relationship with "Paintbrush for Macs")

I tried not to be intimidated:

But it was easily 3 times my size.  The camp counselor slung the beast onto my back and my body immediately started shaking.  The top of the backpack caved beneath the weight and formed a hat on the top of my head, covering my eyes.  It took all my strength to lift my right leg.  As I tried to find my footing for that first step, I kicked a tree root and it was game over.

I fell face-first into the dirt and couldn't get up.  I was being smothered by the backpack.  This is it, I thought.  This is how I'm going to die.  

Instead, the counselor made Kristen carry the backpack the rest of the way, allowing my traumatized self to enjoy a breezy 9-mile hike.

Fast forward to the present.  Now, I only camp during music festivals.  And even then, I cheat.  Refer to these loving portraits of me and my fan from our recent trip to Floydfest as proof:

How I do camping

It's the only way to go

While I've admitted to myself that camping isn't for me, I refuse to give up on hiking...but perhaps I should.  A couple of weeks ago, I went hiking in Shenandoah National Park with my friends Patrick and Chad.  The only thing funnier than going hiking when you suck at it is going hiking with people who are worse at it than you are.  This is what Patrick looked like the entire time:

Pretty much sums up Patrick's feelings about the hike

When Chad asked one of us to carry the backpack, I promptly fled and hid behind a rock.  I wasn't going there again.  On the way back, we were all pouring sweat and fed up.  The "gorgeous waterfall view" we were hiking to ended up being a tiny rock peeing way in the distance.  Chad had a grand idea of taking a short-cut that he knew oh so well...even though he had never been on this hike in his life.  Patrick and I were in the middle of smacking him (there was no way this was actually a short-cut) when we heard it.

A loud rustling in the trees.  What could it be?!!  It was getting closer.  Was it a bear?!  A wolf?!  A crazed lumberjack?!


We grabbed onto each other for dear life.   
SHHH!! 
DON'T MOVE.
DON'T SPEAK. 
DON'T BREATHE.

Huddled on an edge of this dirt path looking like a downtrodden version of Dorothy, The Lion, and The Tin Man, we waited anxiously.

A deer came into view.  It stopped to graze just before hopping onto the path about 10 feet from where we were standing.
   
Do deer hurt you?? 
They can!! If she has a baby around, she will attack us!!
We're dead.
Shhh!
I started pinching Chad on the arm.  This is all your fault!

We shared some panicked glances with the deer before she sprinted off.

What actually happened?

Peaceful deer stopping to graze right next to us, creating a gorgeous scene to end our hike.

What we saw?

Blood-thirsty savage

(My laziness outweighs my capacity for embarrassment, so instead of actually putting forth any effort on revising these cartoons, I posted them in their original glory.)

In light of this recent adventure, I think it's time to give up on my battle with nature.  I never stood a chance.

Summa Tiiime

What I've been doing this past month, which has lead to my MIA status in the blogosphere:

Drowning

Starry Night at Veritas Vineyard featuring the Hackensaw Boys

Lake times

DMB Caravan in Atlantic City!!

Floyd Fandango!

Floyd Fandango!

Hope everyone's having a glorious summer so far!  
More to come this weekend! (That is, after I see Harry Potter 7.2 and my whole childhood comes to an end).

Letter To My Upstairs Neighbors

Dear Heels and Man-Heels,


Let me start off by saying that I appreciate your need to exaggerate your height (someone once asked me if I was even 5 feet tall...DISCLAIMER: my Driver's License says I'm 5' 2" and we all know you can't lie on those forms...).  But when you are in the vicinity of your own home, are you for real (fast forward to 1 min. 53 sec).  I don't need to hear you stomping around in 6-inch wooden stilettos at all times like a pirate with two peg legs who's trying to find his way back to the ship.  And why would you even begin to start dancing??


Those cozy, fabric slippers that were left outside of your door circa Christmas time were NOT from St. Nick.  They were from a lesser-known, more pissed off St. Dez, who intended that they be put to good use.  Guess you were too tall for that.  I can only imagine that Man-Heels used them to mop up the excess of hair product that he slung all over the bathroom while getting ready in the morning (this isn't the Jersey Shore, dbag...and wearing a popped collar...on a sweater, while carrying an open Coors Light on the sidewalk doesn't make you cool).


Remember that time you were nursing a Rain Forest in your living room and all the water overflowed out of the pots and dripped through the floor?  Well, thanks for watering my brand-new TV.  With the proper amount of sunlight, I was able to ruin not one, but two, input ports.


Just so you know, no level of OCD makes it okay to vacuum at 7am or 1am for that matter.  And when I awoke to the loud crooning of your awful country music at 6am and screamed "shut up motherf#@*$!!!," it actually was not an invitation for you to turn the music up louder.


When you were showing your apartment to a potential subletter and they asked about noise level and you told them that you "knew a little bit too much about the girl downstairs," what exactly did you mean by that?  I should probably remind you that when you're in the middle of a domestic dispute or referring to your potential jail sentence, that it would be a good idea to whisper.


Regards,


The girl who's about to call the cops on you

Three Gold Coins

Last weekend I received a flyer in the mail from a local car dealership advertising a sale they were having.  But this wasn't just any flyer.  This flyer came with a key and a lottery.  There were three different scratch-able columns on the back and if one of column's numbers matched the group of bold numbers above it, then you won.  Shockingly, (although, as I was to find out later, not so shockingly) my second column of numbers matched!!  I opened up my flyer to see my prize options:

1. $25,000****

2. 2011 Toyota Camry***

3. $100**

4. Three Gold Coins*

I needed to go down to the car dealership sale to claim my prize.  Obviously this was just a ploy to get me to come and buy a new car, and every prize had an asterisk next to it.  So what?  I had won!  In all of my excitement, I didn't bother to read the fine print, but if I did, I'm sure it would have translated to something like this:

****Nah, this prize isn't real.

***Good luck with that.

**1 in 45,000 people win this (direct quote)

*And by Gold we mean Brass

It was only 6 o'clock on a Friday, I was fresh off of work and didn't have anything going on until later in the evening, so I thought it was the perfect time to collect my winnings.  Sure, my odds weren't great, but maybe I was the only person who would go claim their prize so they would have to give me the big prize by default.  Regardless, they owed me something.  I drug my friend, Margaret, along, and we headed towards the mall, where this dealership had temporarily camped out in the parking lot.  We walked up to the deserted tent and were greeted by a downtrodden girl with the voice/personality of Daria.

Daria: How may I help you?  Are you interested in buying a car today?

Me: (I wanted to play it cool.  There was no way I could let her know that we had driven all the way there in the hopes of attaining random scam mail lottery glory.) Um, yeah, we were...uh...chilling at the mall and then I remembered that I got this random thing in the mail and decided to come over here and claim my prize.

It was the least-cool thing I could have said.  "I was watching Star Trek alone in my room and decided to get out of the house" would have probably sounded better.  Telling her about my fake adventures at the mall on a Friday night led her to ask me if I was 16.  No wonder.

Daria: Do you go to the University?

Me: We did.  We already graduated

Daria: Oh.  Well, actually, I thought you were in High School.  Don't worry, though, I get that all the time.  Everyone always thinks I'm 16, but I'm actually in my twenties.  We'll appreciate it once we're older.

Me: Yeah, I'm also in my twenties...

I had suddenly lost interest.  I shoved my lottery flyer and accompanying key in Daria's face, as if to say, Let's get this over with, give me my shiz so I can go home.

Daria escorted me over to a car.  Alright, you can try your key to see if it fits.  But I doubt it will.

How encouraging.  I tried to coax my key ever so gently into the keyhole.  I wanted to prove her wrong but I knew it was useless...my key looked like a Fischer Price reject.

Defeated, I followed Daria into the tent and over to a Dry-Erase board, displaying a 7-digit code.  If your code matches this one, you win $100, Daria said mechanically.  I had 3 out of the 7 numbers.  I hung my head once again, but Daria seemed slightly encouraged.  I’ve never seen someone have so many matching numbers! She declared with a tone that suggested that she had just been told that her goldfish had died.  This was a step-up for her.


Lastly, she led me over to a table and made me sit down in a rickety folding chair while she fetched a scratcher card for me.  The card had about 20 boxes and I was only allowed to scratch 6 of them.  I had to scratch 6 different pictures of keys to win $25, 000.  The different types of keys were pictured to the side.  I knew that I was probably going to scratch a bunch of the same keys and get confused but I still had a glimmer of hope.  This was it.  My last chance.  For all the marbles (marbz).  I took a deep breath and scratched a box at random.  I unveiled a picture of a pair of scissors.

Crap.  I didn’t see that coming.

So does that mean I’m out already?!! I screamed desperately at Daria.

Yep.  Hold on, let me go get your coins.

While Daria went searching in the depths of the tent, I began feverishly scratching the other boxes to see if there were even any keys on my card.  All I revealed were random pictures of airplanes, flashlights, and batteries.  What was this mind-game?!

That’s when I saw it.  A cardboard box stashed behind a printer.  It was full of “winning” flyers.  So all of the flyers were winners, but they were distributed randomly.  All of my dreams were crushed.

photo cred

Daria returned with three $1 coins with creepy faces of Abe Lincoln giving me the stank-eye on the back.  These weren’t even real gold!!  I was hoping that I could at least do Cash-For-Gold, but nooo.  So this was the consolation prize they gave all the poor suckers who drove all the way up here just for this (or, who happened to be hanging out at the mall and then wandered across the parking lot, like me…)  I was debating in my head if it was worth the gas money to get there to win $3, or if I had actually lost money in the process.

What kind of car do you drive? Daria interrupted my thought-process.

A Mazda Protégé.

Ohh okay.  Daria was clearly judging me.  I wondered what my car said about me.  Probably just that I’m a gullible teeny-bopper who likes to chill at the mall on Friday nights and waste her time claiming meaningless prizes.

I used my “Gold Coins” to buy a giant Slushee from 7-11 the next afternoon.  At least I still have my pride.

photo cred

Canteen Stickers

Many people decorate their canteen with NOLS stickers or stickers of hikes they've done, places they've gone, etc.  After all, the act of owning a canteen in itself implies that you put yourself in situations that require you to use said canteen (AKA: doing a lot of outdoors-y things). 

But not me.  Case in point: I just added a Mono Loco sticker to my canteen.  That's right: I choose to decorate my canteen with stickers from restaurants I've eaten at.  I use it as a supplement to my dining-out fetish.  No thanks, waiter, I don't need a drink, I have my canteen stashed in my purse.  (This is completely unfounded.  I just came up with this idea, but I might actually start doing this...)

Anyways, if you've never been to Charlottesville, or even worse, if you live in Charlottesville and you haven't experienced the gloriousness that is the Mono Loco South American burrito, here is what you're missing out on:

Meeting David Sedaris

Last month, I met one of my favorite people, David Sedaris!!  Keeping in line with my usual routine when I'm nervous, I turned into a babbling idiot.  I wrote the following essay for submission to a magazine with the theme "Saying Too Much."  Keep your fingers crossed!

Let’s face it.  I’m no good at meeting famous people—especially ones who are my heroes.  But when David Sedaris came into town to do a book reading and signing, I had to go.  I had missed my chance at seeing him twice before and I wasn’t going to let that happen again.  So there I was,  snorting from laughing so hard, when he launched into excerpts from his journal.  A majority of his entries were about people he had met during his book signings.  He documented funny jokes people told him and made fun of the weirdos.  At this point, I began to get nervous.  I do NOT know any jokes...and I’m probably a weirdo.

I waited in line for over an hour at the signing.  The girl behind me was writing herself a script of what to say while the girl in front of me presented David with a manuscript she had written.  To calm my nerves, I concentrated on memorizing the script along with the girl behind me.  That way, I could recite it to David first, leaving her with nothing.  And we all knew that arriving at the signing table with nothing guaranteed that you’d be the biggest embarrassment there.

By the time the big moment came, David was munching on a particularly large salad.  As I approached the table, he asked me if I was Greek.  No, I told him.  My dad is Lebanese.  Thus began the whirlwind that was my conversation with David Sedaris.  Thankfully he did not ask me to tell him any jokes, but he did ask me if my dad had “one eyebrow” and “back-hair.”

“I have back hair.  It sucks,” he added.

“You should probably get that taken care of.”  Did I really just say that?

He asked me if I was in college and who I came with.  I had to confess to him that I came alone.  I didn’t want to tell him that I had plenty of friends who were interested in coming but that none of them wanted to cough up the money to pay for the pricey ticket, so I chose to let him think that I was a social outcast. 

Somewhere in-between providing a disjointed commentary on the benefits of psychological research and debating whether or not it was safe to travel to Lebanon (neither of which, I’m afraid, are topics of immediate interest to David Sedaris), I realized that I was in trouble.  I had not paused to take a breathe in at least 2 minutes.  Meanwhile, he was enjoying conveniently-timed bites of salad, chewing for what seemed like an eternity and staring me up and down, while I sweated profusely and rambled on.  I had this illusion in my head that I was a stage-monkey.  I was standing before him, expected to perform, and it was game on.  Otherwise I was going to end up as some mythical figure, mocked through David Sedaris journal excerpts in book readings to come.  Humorist-lovers around the globe would text their friends after a book reading: “David Sedaris told us all about this crazy fan at a book-signing in some little town in Virginia.  She didn’t stop speaking for 40 minutes straight!  After a while she forgot to breathe and the last 15 minutes of chatter spewed from a blue face.”

Unfortunately, I had already crossed that threshold.

At one point he asked me where I was from and when I told him, he asked me where it was located.

“About 2 hours southwest of here.”

“Hmm where?”

“Close to North Carolina, actually!  Wait a second, you did a reading there a few years ago and I was bummed that I missed it.”

“Oh I know, I’ve been there twice!”  He was just messing with me now.

He began to tell me about how his boyfriend, Hugh, had lived in Beirut, when I interrupted him, interjecting my thoughts about who knows what.  A red light was flashing in my head.  You just interrupted David Sedaris, who was about to tell you a story.  Stop. Talking. Just. Stop.  But I continued to babble.  I was obviously not built with an emergency break lever.  I needed the equivalent of a runaway truck ramp for 18-wheeler trucks whose brakes have failed them.  And I’m talking a serious one.  One of those steep gravel hills with what appear to be a 90-degree incline that veer right off the road.  Perhaps a brain-released chemical that paralyzed my tongue?  Or a chip in my brain that turned on during emergency situations, enabling me to only give robotic responses: “Yes. Please. Thank you. It. Is. Nice. Outside. Today.”

In the end, I had brought my two favorite books with me and couldn’t decide which one I wanted him to sign.  Typical.  Ultimately, he signed both, and in one he simply drew a dog.  I was in love.  Sometimes words just aren’t necessary.

In-Cognito Roux

I know that I should quit posting about my cat, but my friend sent me THIS video earlier and I feel the need to share.  That looks JUST like my cat, Roux (well, Roux with a pop-tart body).  I am so convinced that this is Roux that I'm now looking for ways to prove it.  I have always wondered what Roux does while I'm at work, earning my living and being a contribution to society.  Now I know.  She has been busy crafting her image as a pop-tart-bodied youtube celebrity that poops rainbows.  When I was unsure of who went through my underwear drawer, I was thinking of ways in which I could catch the culprit in the act.  Setting up a video camera didn't seem plausible, as I, 1. don't own one and 2. am cheap.  Plus it would have to tape all day and I don't think any battery life would last that long.

Then it occurred to me that I could buy Roux one of those animal collars that have cameras on them.  Life from Roux's perspective.  Riveting.  And obviously had all the makings of Reality-Show glory.  Love (the touching relationship between Roux and her Meow Mix).  Drama (where WILL Roux nap today?) and Adventure (imagine a scene in which Roux's tiny paws are venturing into the unchartered territory that is my dresser, making their way to the apex and opening up my underwear drawer, tossing the contents like a salad).

However, it seems that Roux has beat me to the punch and is already forging her own career.  My days as a stage mom are over.  But once I somehow prove that this is, indeed, my cat in this video, I better get my cut.