The Trick to Having a Happy Halloween...

...is to paint a smile on your face.


But beware! If your wife wears an x-ray shirt, revealing that your baby is proportioned like a monkey...


...it might make you cry. And if you cry, your makeup will run.


I hope you have a non-traumatic Halloween!

The Advantage of Modern Technology

(Picture taken with my brand new webcam. The advantage of having a web-based job is that I feel justified in spending money on new toys essential tools.)

Signs of the Last Days

This is my 900th post. One month from Saturday I will turn 30. Yesterday FoxyJ told me that she thinks my hair is thinning on top.

It's all downhill from here.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Even my Lucky Brand glasses are celebrating:


For the sake of your clean thoughts, I won't post the photo of my green underwear.

Because Every Good Portrait Should Be Obamiconned

The New Me aka HRG Fob

Now with added happy pills!

The Old Me, Obamiconized

For Future Reference

The old me:

You know you're a grownup when Santa brings you underwear...

...and it's one of your favorite gifts.


Apparently Santa doesn't know what size I wear, though, as he got me a size too big. It happens a lot--my rear is surprisingly petite. Today a trip to Target alleviated that problem. (They didn't have any larger rears, but they did have smaller underwear.)

And now my belated Christmas present to you, dear blog readers, a picture of me wearing my new underwear:













...keep scrolling...













...you're in for a real treat...













...and here you go, a picture of me wearing my new underwear:




And looking pretty darn sexy, with that extra chin!

Spiraling Deeper Into Madness

I eat the blue ones last because they're the prettiest.

In case you're wondering what I do in my spare time

My brother gave S-Boogie a huge set of something like 250 crayons for her birthday. It's wonderful, but unfortunately the colors were just thrown in there haphazardly with no sense of order or aesthetics. It took me the better part of an hour, but I solved the problem.


I feel much better now.

Bas(k)e(t)ball

I am about as sports-ignorant as they come, but even I know that this is not what a baseball uniform looks like...
...and that's not how you spell "basketball."

Aliens Stole His Brain!

(And his clothes.)



Notice that they cut a little spot of hair off. I'm sure that will look really cool as it's growing back in.

Sí, que hubo mucha mierda

The plays went really well. There were maybe ten people in the audience for the dress rehearsal on Thursday night, which was a bit disappointing, but actually a nice way to ease into performing for real live people. At least our professor laughed at all the appropriate moments. Friday and Saturday night, though, we were completely sold out and had waiting lists of people trying to get in. The turnout completely exceeded anyone's expectations based on Spanish Department plays done in previous years. Friday night it was obvious that very few attendees spoke Spanish--it was a good five minutes and several jokes into the first play before anyone laughed. But then we got into some good physical humor and the audience started reacting. Saturday night, however, the audience was laughing from practically the first line, and that was certainly gratifying.

In the first play, "El retablo de las maravillas," I play Chanfalla, a conman who brings a "show of wonders" to a small town, explaining to the townspeople that in order to see the "marvelous marvels" of the show, they must not have any Jewish or Moorish blood (this was written at the height of the Spanish Inquisition) and they must be legitimate children of married parents. So when the show begins and no one sees these amazing things I'm telling them they should see, no one wants to admit that they see nothing, lest they be branded a convert or a bastard. Everything goes downhill, though, when an important military leader shows up demanding room and board for his soldiers, and when the townspeople realize he doesn't see the marvels, they determine that he's "one of them" and in the midst of their accusations he goes berserk and tries to kill everyone, barely letting me and my sidekick escape with our lives.

Here's a picture of me (in all my green-tights glory) with my sidekick, Chirinos:


And here's a closer shot with Chirinos and our grumpy musician, Rabelín:


During the second play, "El entremés famoso de los romances," which is either an inspiration for Don Quijote or a cheap knock-off, depending on when it was written, I go backstage to transform from Spanish con artist to Aztec royalty, ending up like this:


Not bad, eh? I think the Native American blood in my family (via my half-Indian half-sisters) shows in my very convincing portrayal of a sixteenth-century Mexican.

In the third play, "La loa para el auto sacramental de El divino narciso," an allegory written by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, I play el Occidente, who, together with his wife, la América, represents the native people of Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquista. My wife and I are just chillin', having a good time with our rituals of human sacrifice, when in come el Celo (Zeal) and la Religión, who represent the Spanish military and Catholic missionaries, respectively. El Celo is ready to kill us all, but Religión convinces him to let us live so she can convert us, so after he comes in and scares us with his raping and pillaging and we basically have nothing left, she then gets to work showing us how our "Great God of the Seeds" is really the one true Christian God, even though we don't know it. After a bit of arguing and el Celo throwing his weight around, finally we come to see the light and agree to be baptized, rejoicing in the day we came to know the true God of the Seeds.

Here's me with my equally Aztec-looking wife, together with our conquerors (el Celo played by DISOBM/DINKWM):


I enjoyed playing both roles, but for different reasons. Chanfalla is just a fun character, and I had a good time being a showman and making people laugh. El Occidente, on the other hand, I enjoyed because he was a challenge, and the play itself much more difficult to pull off precisely because it wasn't funny. Sor Juana wrote "La loa" as a Mexican nun, very aware of the tensions between her faith and that of her ancestors, and although she shows respect for both, she is clearly a Catholic writing for Catholics. While she and her audience would naturally find a resolution in which the natives are converted to Christianity satisfying, the same could not be expected of my audience or of me.

Because of this, I had a hard time figuring out how to play el Occidente. At first I had this vision of him as your generic noble savage, because that's how it seemed Sor Juana was writing him. He was regal, strong, and above all serious. After a couple weeks of practice, though, we realized the play needed something else, so we decided to play up the slight traces of possible comedy--found mostly in the fact that el Occidente is terrified of el Celo and is basically a tool who does whatever the women tell him to. This helped me get into the character a bit more, but it didn't feel right. Particularly as a white American, I didn't feel good about portraying this symbol of all native Mexicans as a buffoon, and I realized I had crossed that line when one of the directors said a couple weeks ago, "Be careful--don't make el Occidente seem ridiculous. Try to think about what he must be feeling through all of this."

It wasn't until this past Wednesday evening--the night before the dress rehearsal--that I finally figured it out. Yes, el Occidente is terrified of el Celo, but he also has nothing left to lose, so he's not going to back down from a fight so easily. And yes, he listens at first to his wife and later to la Religión, but again not because he's weak but because he has nothing else to hold onto. His world has been pulled out from under him, his people murdered, and the god he trusted to protect him did nothing. Why not, then, listen to what this strange white lady has to say about her God? With this perspective, it was easy for me to show at the beginning of the play my faith in the God of the Seeds, in the middle my genuine rage for el Celo, and not quite so easy, though I hope I pulled it off, my belief in la Religión's words at the end. The trick was that, even though this resolution is in my mind a tragedy, it isn't in the eyes of my character.

I don't know how successful I was, but my professor said I almost had him to tears. So maybe I have some acting skills. At any rate, it's been an amazing experience.

The Burden of Fame

The following poster went up all over campus today:


Now everywhere I go people stop me and they're like, "Are you the guy from that poster?" And I respond sheepishly, "Yeah, that's me." And they're like "NO WAY!" And I'm like, "Yeah, it's really me." And they're like, "Whoa. You are so cool." And I'm like, "Thanks, but really I'm no cooler than you, it just seems that way because I'm famous." And they're like, "Can you do that pose, the one from the picture?" And I pretend to be all hesitant so they'll insist, and they do, and then I strike the pose, and then one of them will stand behind me and put a hand on my shoulder just like my friend on the poster while the other one takes a picture, and then they switch places so the other one can be in the photo with me, and then I let one of them strike the pose while I take the picture so they can go to their friends later and be like, "You know who took this picture? The Poster Guy himself." And their friends can be like, "NO WAY!" And they can be like, "Yeah, it's really him." And so on.

I guess now I know what it's like to be Ken Jennings.



NOTE: Some or all of the facts in the above story may have been made up to make it more interesting. Forgive me if they fail to do so. There's only so much you can do when your claim to fame is a poster.

...and he knows how to use them...

Today I bought green tights that I will be wearing in the play I'm in next weekend. If that's not enough to make you get in line for tickets right now, I don't know what is.

Happy Valentine's from the Love Monster!

Last week S-Boogie and I made Valentine's decorations (at her request). We spent an hour or two making heart chains and cupids and then made, with the leftover pieces, the Love Monster. It will love you... to death! (I refer to it as it because I'm undecided on whether it's a he or she.)


My proudest creation is my Cupid heart, which I think of as my interpretation of Tolkien Boy's theory that if full-scale human cloning were a reality homosexuality would be much more common. Either that or the difficulty of flying as conjoined twin angels.


Tonight S-Boogie and I spent another two hours making Valentines for her classmates and teachers. After all that I am Valentined out. It's a good thing FoxyJ isn't expecting me to do anything Valentiney for her tomorrow.

Right?

Honey?

Autobiography of My Face OR Geography of a Battlefield of a War With Myself

From the top:

I have been at war with my hair for as long as I remember. I spent years dying it different shades of brown and black because I didn't want blond hair. I didn't realize that I'd won this battle until recently when people started asking where our kids get their blond hair from and I looked in the mirror and saw a (dye-free) brown-haired man staring back. I'm never happy with a hairstyle for more than a few months, so I cycle between combed parts, spiky messes, and the occasional shaved baldness. My hair naturally parts on the right but for some reason I've always wanted it to part on the left--most likely because all the best-looking superheroes part on the left. I've recently forced a victory in this battle, too, mostly in order to cover up the scars I'm collecting on the right side of my forehead.

You can't see them very well in the photo, but the scars are fairly visible in real life. There's a tiny one toward the middle of my forehead, where we caught the lesion in time for the dermatologist to freeze it off. Next to that is a larger red spot that we didn't catch so early. The first six months of this delay is due to my own lazy negligence; the next four is how long it took to get an appointment with the dermatologist, and one more after that to see the dermatological surgeon for a consultation. In a week and a half this red spot of basal cell carcinoma will be removed, leaving a bloody crater that will eventually heal into a white scar like the one just below it, now three years old. Basal cell carcinoma is generally not lethal, thank goodness, but every dermatologist I've seen has been shocked that I've had a single lesion, let alone four, show up before I'm thirty. This means I'm likely to spend the rest of my life freezing lesions off or, if I'm not diligent enough, cutting them out. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it, because the damage was done more than a decade ago by the series of sunburns I got while growing up in Hawai'i. I understand now, to a small degree, the despair many people with more deadly forms of cancer feel at the realization that their body is betraying them.

My eyes have been a source of grief for me since middle school. In elementary school I'd actually wanted glasses and was happy to get them, but by eighth grade I was ready for contacts. The problem is my eyes weren't. I blinked through gas permeable lenses for a few years before settling into slightly less discomfort with soft lenses. The lenses I have now are the best I've ever worn, but still my chronically dry eyes don't handle them well for more than a couple hours at a time. Discomfort and laziness prescribe glasses; vanity demands contacts.

One of the boys who delighted in tormenting me in tenth-grade P.E. asked once whether my nose was stuffed or my voice was just nasal like that. I answered, honestly, that my nose was stuffed and that it was always stuffed. I have always been a mouth-breather because I simply didn't have any other option. A couple years ago I finally got a prescription for a nasal inhaler that mostly clears things up, but I still default back to mouth-breathing once I fall asleep.

On the right side of my nostril is the small scar from the fourth lesion, hardly visible. The red spot you see in the photo is just a zit. At this point in my life I only get those once in a while and they don't concern me. Except when they're inside my nostril, which is just painful.

I'm fairly certain my crooked smile is genetic, as it matches perfectly my dad's and my brother's, but I've always associated it with a time in elementary school when I had one side of my face numbed for dental work. I smiled at myself in the mirror, amused at how one side of my mouth refused to lift. The thing is, it still refuses twenty years later.

The scar under my chin is older than my memory. I assume it was some chin-splitting fall I had as a toddler, the first shot fired in a lifelong battle between my face and me.

The nice thing about waging a war with yourself is that either way, you win. But then, of course, either way you also lose.

Papa Fob's New Skills

French braids:


Toddler haircuts:


The braid needs work, but I'm pretty happy with the haircut.

Judgment Day is Not as Tasty as I Anticipated

Mostly it tasted like hard marshmallows and mushy graham crackers. But, to be sure, the patrons of the s'morehouse learned their lesson.