Assembling the Environment Wednesday post yesterday got me thinking about a tale from the days when I lived in Oakland. I lived in a strange little neighborhood which basically consisted of a single block of really nice homes in the midst of a pretty sketchy neighborhood, which was definitely interesting. Many people were afraid to visit me. (Although that might have been because of my psychotic landlord, who ended up assaulting me, but that’s a story for another time.)

At any rate, when Halloween rolled around, I got the bright idea of making individual pumpkin tarts. I thought it would be kind of a cool thing to hand out to trick or treaters, and all Halloween themed, with the pumpkin. I labored in the kitchen for hours producing the tart shells and pumpkin filling, and decorating the tarts with various painstaking ornaments, like whipped cream puffs in the shape of ghosts, and I laid the tarts out on big trays.

Our house was down a steep path from the road, and the kitchen windows were the first thing that people encountered when they got to the house. So, we opened the windows in order to hand out treats that way, rather than forcing people to go round to the front door. I thought it was rather clever, myself.

But I had forgotten that I lived in Oakland, not a small, friendly town where one could hand out home made treats to people who were trick or treating. So people would traipse all the way down the path, and I would lean out the window with the tray, and one of two things would happen:

1. The parent would glare at me, say “no, Johnny,” and march back up the path.

2. The parent would glare at me and take a tart off the tray with the clear intention of throwing it out later.

I couldn’t figure it out. I mean I literally could not rationalize why handing out pumpkin tarts to children on Halloween would be a problem. I thought it would be a neat variant on the sugary, processed treats kids usually got, and that most people would be into it.

Later, a few of my friends came over to get ready for a party, and found me slumped at the kitchen table with a huge tray mostly filled with pumpkin tarts. I explained the situation, and one of my friends, in turn, gently explained why you can’t hand out homemade food on Halloween, while the others hoovered up the remaining tarts with evident delight.

It was the first of many crushing lessons in urban life for me.

Tonight is the night of the Vice-Presidential Debate, which promises to be a real humdinger. I don’t know about you, but I am more excited than a poorly trained puppy at Christmas, and I might just widdle all over the floor if I can’t contain myself. I think, like most people, that I expect Biden to win handily, hopefully wiping the floor with Palin, although one of my debate watching crew has pointed out that her gender may become an issue, in that Biden may feel the need to be restrained to avoid being accused of being sexist. Which is, of course, sexist in and of itself. Anyway, expect a report in the morning, and, meanwhile, a story from my past.

In November of 2000, I took a trip to Florida, generously paid for by an old family friend who apparently didn’t realize I was going to sit around on the couch the whole time and watch JFK documentaries. I was tired, burned out, and generally miserable with no clear direction in my life, so instead of exploring the Everglades (literally right outside her door) and experiencing Florida’s Cubano culture, I hid inside for most of the trip.

Now, when most people hear I went to Florida in November of 2000, they assume that the trip must have been politics-related, as did many of my friends at the time. The fact was that I would have gone to Minnesota, Texas, or pretty much anywhere else at the time, it just happened to be Florida. I needed to escape my environment, and Florida was it.

Even though I was bound and determined to hide indoors and nurse my burgeoning depression, it was kind of hard to miss what was going on, because every time we went out, people talked about the election. And, let me tell you, Floridians were pissed about what was going on in their little corner of the world, even the ones who had voted for Bush. And, yes, I did stop and help count ballots for a day in my host’s precinct, and, yes, there were a lot of shenanigans going on in terms of what we were allowed to count. (A vote for Gore and a write-in for Gore=spoiled ballot, for example.)

The cross-section of people I interacted with was pretty broad, and, I have to say, it was kind of exciting to be on the fringe of the thick of things. I think that Floridians were also quietly proud of the fact that they were basically deciding the election, even though they were also horrified by how the election was being decided. Florida was obviously important in politics before, but 2000 really drew a lot of attention to the state, which is why I am not surprised to see so much attention being paid to the swing vote in Florida.

But, you know what scares me? What scares me is that the last two Presidential elections in this country were obviously tampered with, although by how much no one will ever know. What scares me is how many people’s votes won’t be heard this year, and what that will mean for the election. I might have been too apathetic to realize what I was really in the middle of when I went to Florida in 2000, but, let me tell you, I’m not going to be asleep at the wheel this time around. Every vote in this country should matter, and we should not be letting Diebold and corrupt officials decide the outcomes of our elections.

And maybe that just means that we need to mobilize a majority so overwhelming that it’s impossible to rig the results, which means that we need to hit the polls en masse come 4 November. But I also think it means that each and every one of us needs to be alert to what is going on at the polls on election day, which is a little more than a month away. I’m sure that numerous watchdog organizations will be taking reports of irregularities, so if you see something going down that you don’t think is kosher, report it, and don’t wait, because we only have one day to change this country. We owe it to each other to look out for each other, guys.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my first pair of glasses. I think it may be because Baxt and I had a conversation not that long ago about glasses, and perhaps because my current glasses (acquired last year, as some may recall), may be due for a new prescription. I’ve noticed that I start thinking about glasses a lot when I start to have trouble seeing things I used to be able to see, perhaps as a subtle nudge from my subconscious. The decline is so gradual, however, that it’s hard to tell if my vision is always like this, or if it really is getting bad enough to require a new prescription.

But I digress.

Like most people who wear glasses, I remember my first pair of glasses very distinctly. Actually, I first got contacts, and switched to glasses in 2000, when I attended the Democratic National Convention and was afraid of getting peppersprayed in the eyes. I had worn glasses periodically before 2000, usually at night after I took my contacts out and on days of periodic contact shortage, and while I had intended to go back to contacts after the convention, glasses somehow became part of my identity, and I haven’t gone back since.

At any rate, and I really am starting to ramble here, I went to Ukiah for my contacts, and I remember missing a day of school to go over the hill with my father. I’m not quite sure why we went to Ukiah; it must have been cheaper to see an eye doctor over there or something. I got the full battery of basic tests which are familiar to the glasses-wearing among my readers, and then the doctor showed me how to clean my contacts, and then how to put them in.

For someone who doesn’t wear glasses, it’s kind of hard to describe your first experience of corrected vision. Imagine moving through an underwater world for most of your life, a world in which things are murky, blurred, and sometimes dangerous. It’s a world where you feel three steps behind everyone else, where you know something is off, but you don’t quite know what.

And then, suddenly, everything just snaps into focus, and it’s an epiphany. My first words, on glancing out the window, were “trees have leaves!” The doctor must have tested my vision again after that, and checked to make sure that the contacts fit, but I don’t really remember that. What I remember is driving over the hill with my face glued to the window, looking at the whole world which had suddenly opened up before me. That blurry green mass by the side of the road had turned into individual blades of grass, needles on pine trees, quivering leaves of alders. I could see veins of quartz in the rocks, the crisp edges of clouds wafting across the sky.

It was one of the top ten most exciting experiences of my entire life. You see, with most of us, our vision declines so slowly that we don’t really realize what is happening. We get the sense that we used to see better once, but it seems like we have always seen that way. To awaken and suddenly realize that in fact your eyes are totally defective, but completely correctable, is quite a heady experience.

A few years ago, I went on a trip to Hawaii, and I intended to do some snorkeling, but made the stupid mistake of not renting a prescription snorkle mask. I think I didn’t realize how bad my vision is without glasses, so I thought I would be able to tough it out, and cheerfully dove into the water, only to realize that I was totally disoriented. I had no idea what I was seeing, which way was up, and what was going on. I collided with coral, rocks, and my unfortunate co-snorkeling aunt. I saw vague flashes of color which might have been fish, but I was too busy trying to figure out what was going on.

I spent the rest of the trip on the beach reading a book.

Those of you who wear glasses: what do you remember about your first day with corrected vision?

Today I had the following conversation with my father the party animal:

Father: Hey, I brought by that book you wanted. Did you know there’s a head in your yard?

Me: Again? Still?!

Father: This happens often?

Me: Well, not really. There was a head, and then I buried it, so something must have dug it up again. Maybe it’s a sign that I should just leave the head alone?

Father: …

Me: Hey, I wonder if Baxt wants a head.

My great-grandfather was a stair builder. He lived to 103, and although I never met him, the fact that he was a stair builder tells me a lot about him. Stair building, you see, is actually an extremely specialized art, and it takes real skill to build stairs well. I’m not just talking about the obvious issues, like building well-supported stairs that won’t creak. You also have to build stairs with the right rise and width, and you have to be able to make tiny adjustments, because being off by a centimeter can throw the whole feel off. You have to build stairs that will fit into a room without shouting, stairs that will serve their intended function for a lifetime.

His name was Kuznetsov; he came over from Russia, and like many immigrants, he turned into a “Smith” at Ellis Island, despite the long history of Kuznetsovs in Russia. He fell in love with a Basque woman who lived through the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and died in childbirth not long after, but this story isn’t about her; it’s about my great-grandfather and my father, who worked for him one summer.

My great-grandfather’s stairs were famous. Sometimes, he got called in to fix a job a contractor or builder had messed up, and sometimes, he started from scratch on a project, called in specially. He always took his time on projects, never allowing himself to be hurried, and the summer my father worked with him, they started with a spiral staircase; one of the ultimate challenges in stair making.

First, they went to the site, and my great-grandfather smoked a cigar while he explored the whole room, sometimes standing still for moments at a time, and sometimes leaning down to listen to the floorboards. Every now and then, he scribbled a Cyrillic note or two on the back on an envelope, but mostly he just stood there. My father asked him what he was doing, and he said:

“Shh. Listen,” so they did.

Two days later, they arrived back at the house with a toolbox, after the lumber had been delivered. My grandfather rolled a utility spool into the room and he set up a chessboard on it, along with a bottle of vodka and two glasses. They started the framing, getting most of the framing done that day, with a stop for rye and pickle sandwiches and vodka around noon.

The next day, they arrived early in the morning again, and my great-grandfather made the opening move on the chessboard, and poured two glasses of vodka. My father made his move, and they drank their glasses, and then they started on the staircase again. Every time they finished a stair, they would move on the chessboard, and sometimes drink a glass of vodka.

My father, unaccustomed to these working conditions, began flagging by one, when my great-grandfather went out and returned with two hot pastrami sandwiches under his arm. The two ate their sandwiches, studiously ignoring the chessboard and the stairs. My great-grandfather didn’t like to talk while he ate. He liked to focus on the task at hand, so the room settled into companionable silence, until the homeowner came in, and asked what they were doing.

“Eating lunch,” said my great-grandfather.

“But shouldn’t you be working on the stairs?”

“No,” he said, “I think we should be working on lunch.”

“When will the stairs be done,” said the homeowner.

My great-grandfather paused for a moment, studying the room, the stairs, and my father.

“When the chess game is over,” he said, and he turned back to his sandwich, considering the conversation over. The homeowner blustered about for awhile, by my father followed my great-grandfather’s lead, and said nothing, and finally the homeowner left.

Three days later,  my father was in checkmate, and the stairs were done.

In honor of the Democratic National Convention, which starts today, here’s my story about the time I got punched in the face by a Senator. It’s a heartwarming tale for the whole family, so gather round, homechickens.

The summer of the 2000 Democratic Convention was hot and muggy. We descended upon the city of Los Angeles, largely without any major discernible purpose other than to experience the convention, and flooded the house of my movie-actress aunt with our unwashed bodies and ripe enthusiasm. The subway there had just opened up (I guess “reopened” is more accurate), and the cars were still clean and shiny with that faint scent of plastic, so every day we’d drive to the nearest station, dump the car, and then take the subway downtown to the convention area. The subway was so disorganized we didn’t even have to pay for tickets, half the time.

Los Angeles had prepared for the convention sort of like you organize for mass rioting. This was in the heady days before 11 September, so I don’t think terrorism was on anyone’s brain, but rampant hippies certainly were. We were cordoned to particular “protest zones” in front of the convention center, and the daily marches followed specific routes. The LAPD lined the routes, glowering and rattling their billy clubs in the store gratings, and most of us remembered that RAMPART wasn’t that long ago.

I had, needless to say, a blast. Indymedia had set up a temporary command post near the convention center, so we were in and out of that building all day, and I went to events at the Shadow Convention, and one of our party managed to score a press pass to actually get inside, instead of milling around outside. We marched in the heat and talked to police and waved at the citizens of Los Angeles as they leaned out their windows to stare down at the invasion. We ate weird food, pounded the sidewalk, and met all sorts of interesting people.

I still remember that I was wearing a hanky with strawberries on it to protect my scalp from the sun, but the rest of me was largely burnt to a crisp, as was everyone else. I found a picture from the convention the other day, actually, and there we all are, sunburned under a tree in my aunt’s yard.

At any rate, on one of the days of the convention, the protesters decided to try and block access for the delegates. This was actually pretty easy to do, because the system of protest zones and various inner circles made the number of entrances and exits rather limited; find the gaps, plug them, and no one gets in or out.

I somehow managed to get separated from everyone else, and I ended up linking arms with a massive Teamster on one side, and a tall history major with glasses on the other. This, I think, is why the Senator approached me, because I probably looked like a weak point in the line, weighing around 110 pounds soaking wet at the time as I did.

First, he tried remonstrating with me, and occasionally gesturing. His convention pass had slipped inside his suit, so all I could see were the top of the letters reading “SENATOR,” and his Aide next to him kept calling him “Senator” which was also a pretty good tip off. I held my ground, as did everyone else in the line (at least before the LAPD started hosing us from the fire hydrants, which was actually appreciated, because it was so hot), and finally, the Senator, irritated from the prickly heat and the unwashed masses, hauled back and decked me in the face.

I would have staggered backwards, but the Teamster and the history major had a firm grip, so instead my head bowed back from a moment, and then snapped forwards again. The Senator seemed sort of startled that I was still standing, although honestly he hadn’t hit me that hard, so I don’t know what I expected.

The Aide was aghast, and a little bubble of silence settled on our section of the line for a moment.It was the Teamster who broke it.

“You did not,” he said “just hit a woman. I could not possibly have just seen that, Senator.”

The Senator looked at the Teamster, and realized that there was a whole lot to look at, mostly muscle, and he started to back away slowly.

“Do it again,” said the Teamster, “and I’ll hit you so hard your liver will come out your asshole.”

With that, the Senator and the Aide melted back into the crowd, and sound seemed to rush back in. I peered up at the Teamster and shouted “thanks,” and he replied “for what?” And that was that.

Until the next morning, anyway, when I had the beginnings of a shiner and a story for the ages.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about athletes lately (it’s sort of hard not to, what with all this Olympics stuff going on). The place of athletes in our society and the veneration of athletes is something I find very intriguing, and also very difficult to swallow. I was going to expound upon my thoughts about this issue, but instead, I’ve decided to tell a story. Perhaps it will help me organize my thoughts so that I can talk about the Cult of the Athlete without foaming at the mouth. More importantly, I think it provides historical context.

When I was at Famous University, even the upper-division classes were usually so big that they had to be split into discussion sections to give students a chance to actually interact with each other, with an exhausted underpaid grad student at the helm instead of an actual instructor. We sort of got to know each other in the discussion section, not in the same way that students at a small college where people are actually encouraged to care about each other do, of course, but in a more vague “I recognize that face” sort of way.

One day, before our grad student arrived for a discussion section, several of us were talking about registering for classes. Registering for classes involved logging on to a massive automated system at a set day and time, and then picking several classes, and then getting another registration date to sign up for more. The system was, in theory, designed to ensure that everyone got a fighting chance to register for most of the classes they wanted, and there was a complicated ranking system which gave upperclassmen precedence, since they would be the most screwed if they missed critical classes.

I pointed out that disabled students were allowed to register before everyone else, which I thought was reasonable, given that some of the buildings on campus were not wheelchair accessible, and that disabled students probably had the need for certain accommodations.

“Actually,” another student said, “disabled students don’t register first.”

“Oh,” I said. “They don’t? But…who does?”

“Athletes,” she said, with a somewhat smug expression. “We get to register first.”

“But…why? That doesn’t seem entirely fair.”

She stared blankly at me.

“I mean, why should athletes be allowed to register first? They are students, just like everyone else.”

Now she was actively glaring, and she spat out “are you an athlete?”

There was a little pause, while I considered what I wanted to say. At Famous University, athletes were venerated in a pretty major way, so I didn’t want to say anything offensive, given that she was a discus hurler for the school. I am not, in fact, an athlete, although I respect athletes. I also don’t think that athletes should be elevated to a high position at an academic institution; encouraging students to be active is one thing, treating them like the geese that lay the golden egg is another. I couldn’t figure out how to articulate my feelings in a way which would promote further discussion, and I very much wanted to explore this intriguing state of affairs that allowed people with physical talents to jump the queue above all others.

Finally, I just said “no, although I have respect for athletes.”

“Well then,” she smirked, “you should just shut the fuck up then, because you have no idea what you are talking about.”

I was stunned.

What stunned me more was that no one else in the class said anything, and, in fact, I felt the mood of the entire group subtly shift against me. For the rest of the semester, I was an outcast pariah in the discussion section, all for daring to question the Golden Children.

And people wonder why I have a problem with the Cult of the Athlete in American society.

When I was in high school, a group of us went to Ireland. It was quite an adventure, not least because we made the idiotic decision to rent a cottage which was 17 miles away from the nearest city, and we didn’t think about the fact that none of us would be able to rent a car. So we spent a lot of time together.

And we spent some time with the people we rented the cottage from. Alex and Viv were a very sweet and awesome English couple who lived on the property in a main house, and rented out the cottage along with an auxiliary structure. I’m not sure what they thought about us, or what the rest of the community thought of us, but we adored them. We loved wandering around the property, which was covered in gardens and crazy art, and periodically we had to use their phone in the big house or do our laundry, so we were reasonably friendly with them.

Around halfway through our stay, Alex and Viv invited us to dinner. One of us was a vegan, and two of us were vegetarians, which created some lively dinner table conversation, and towards the end of the meal, Alex mentioned that there were some rune stones and old cottages in the area which we might be interested in checking out. He said that if we liked, we could take a walk over and see them.

We would like, we said, and plans were made for a walk. Alex was sort of vague about how far away the cottages were, or where exactly, gesturing vaguely at the surrounding hillside, so when we got up on the morning of the walk, we weren’t really sure how to prepare. Fortunately we only had brought one pair of shoes over each, so at least three of us had combat boots, and the fourth member of our party had sensible sneakers. Pants seemed practical for walking, as did sweaters, since Ireland’s weather can be quite fickle in the Spring. Brendan, I believe, seized on the bright idea of bringing water, and then we all trouped down to Alex and Viv’s to start off.

Later on in life, I learned about the British passion for taking crazy insane hikes through all kinds of conditions and calling them “walks,” but I didn’t know about this then. So when Alex started charging straight up a mountain, we looked at each other with trepidation, and then dutifully filed after him. We straggled up to the peak for the better part of an hour, but we had to admit that it was worth the view; from the rocky crags on top, we could see most of County Kerry laid out before us like a patchwork quilt, and we could see down into the deep valley we were supposed to be traveling into.

After a brief rest at the top, we started going down the hill. I was filled with exuberance, so I started running down the hill, shouting “wheeeeeeeeeee!”

Until I stopped, rather abruptly, and realized that only my head and shoulders were sticking out of the ground. I had fallen, you see, into a peat bog. The rest of the party was initially concerned that I had been injured, but when I assured them that I was fine, they all started laughing. Which is, I suppose, reasonable, I’m sure it was a fairly comical sight, and I may have been laughing as well, at least until they pulled me out and I was streaked in orangish brown slime.

For the rest of the trip down the hill, my boots squelched and squeaked, but I was determined to remain in good spirits. After all, falling into a peat bog is a sort of authentically Irish experience, as is wandering around in a valley looking for rune stones which never turned up. But, by God, we had fun, and as we ambled out along the road which led into the valley, I thought to myself “man, I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of this falling into a peat bog story,” and then I tripped over the remains of a dead sheep.

I went to a school of pranksters. This is not to say that we were all pranks, all the time, but that a fair amount of pranking went on in my school days. I suspect that many of you could say the same; I attribute the passionate need for pranking to repressed adolescent hormones. Whatever the cause, sometimes we came up with quite elaborate pranks in my high school days, facilitated by being in a very small school (usually less than 50 students, all told) of close-knit people who knew everyone’s secrets.

But the acme, the pinnacle of pranking achievement, was to prank the science/mathematics teacher, whom I will call Ferdinand, on the off-chance that someone Googles him. Ferdinand has since retired, but when I was in the school, he was still gearing up for retirement, and he was crochety, and pretty much tired of dealing with snot-nosed high schoolers. He was also an excellent teacher, and I had a lot of fun in his classes, especially Field Studies in Biology, which basically involved going on field trips and eating things we found growing in the woods. And, of course, pranking each other.

What Ferdinand was famous for, however, was his inability to be pranked. He had one of the most brilliant poker faces I have ever seen, which made it impossible to get him in broad daylight, because he just wouldn’t respond, and he wouldn’t hesitate to resort to dastardly schemes to prevent himself from being pranked on overnight trips. (Once, most notably, he swapped beds with another teacher because he had heard that something was in the works, and that teacher ended up being tied up, wheelbarrowed to the main lodge, and left on the counter with an apple in his mouth. All night.)

At any rate, his unprankability was viewed by many of us as a personal challenge, with everyone hoping that they could somehow get under his defenses and win eternal fame and glory as the student who had “gotten Ferdinand.” Of course, most of us realized that it would require a group effort, and thus it was that a cluster of us got the brilliant idea of trying to get Ferdinand on a Field Studies in Biology trip to Monterey.

We were stealthy. Oh, how stealthy we were. And the plan was simple: we intended to tie/duct tape him to his bed, get photo documentation, and then run before he managed to free himself with his superhuman strength. We duly laid in supplies and practiced; I and another student were delegated for the ticklish operation at the beginning, because we were relatively strong and quiet. Or maybe because we were gullible fall guys. I’m not sure.

That night, we waited with barely concealed anticipation. Several of us actually went for a late-night walk to ensure that he would fall asleep, and to work off some excess energy. Finally, the hour of two o’clock arrived, and Ferdinand appeared to be deeply asleep. We gently tiptoed into the room, pausing periodically to gauge the safety, and then the other student and I ghosted to either side of Ferdinand’s bed with some lightweight climbing rope.

The plan, as I recall, was to gently pass our ropes to each other under the bed, and then toss them over the bed and pull, hard, thereby trapping Ferdinand long enough for the rest of the team to slip in and secure him. We even wore camouflage paint for the occasion.

The group watched breathlessly as we silently passed the rope to each other and then crouched. Tristan, one of the masterminds of the plan, made a hand signal, causing the rest of the group to tense as we started to toss the rope…

And Ferdinand sat bolt upward in the bed, like Bella Lugosi in his coffin, causing the rest of the group to skitter backwards through the door. My accomplice and I, however, were less fortunate, because Ferdinand somehow managed to tangle us in the rope, so we were trapped helplessly, scrabbling on the floor.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!” said Ferdinand, flailing a very large hunting knife around.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” said my accomplice and I, trying to roll under the bed to safety. Had I not been so terrified, I probably would have peed in my pants.

And then Ferdinand collapsed back into bed as though nothing had happened, and resumed snoring, with one hand still tightly gripping the handle of the knife. My accomplice and I disentangled ourselves and fled the room, leaving trails of rope behind us. We might have considered creating an artful toilet paper streamer, but we decided against it.

The next morning, Ferdinand didn’t say anything, and in fact the incident never came up again. To this day, I’m not sure if he was just so highly attuned to our ways that he never fully woke up, and thereby didn’t realize who the culprits were, or if he just didn’t want to bother dignifying our woeful attempt with a response.

To my knowledge, Ferdinand remains unpranked.

Growing up, I usually strongly disliked my father’s girlfriends. Some of them really were losers, so I feel fully justified in disliking them (in fact I continue to dislike some of them even now), while others, I’m sure, were perfectly nice people. And a handful were actually likable, but this entry isn’t about them. It’s about the girlfriends I disliked, because, as we all know, I am pathologically incapable of even the most basic common courtesy, so it never occurred to me to conceal my dislike for the sake of household harmony. In short, my father’s dislikable girlfriends were fully aware that I disliked them.

Usually my dislike simply manifested in a tendency to absent myself, or to snipe at them. Perhaps unfairly, I was a rather well-educated child, so I was an expert sniper. I could snipe with the best of them, and in fact sometimes I sniped so craftily that the girlfriend entirely missed the fact that she had been hit. Alas. My father did his best, but you can’t make someone like someone else, so I think he just gave up, in the end.

For one girlfriend, whose name has faded into the mists of time, I really pulled out all the stops. I don’t really remember what the poor woman did to make me hate her so very much, but I did, and one day, I devised a foolproof plan. Bored in class, I carefully redesigned the labels for our shampoo and conditioner, and meticulously drew them on some oversized labels, decorating them elaborately with Sharpie so that they wouldn’t run in the shower.

I waited until the hapless girlfriend visited again, and then carefully applied the labels and waited. This particular girlfriend was a fan of taking showers in the morning, so I was confident that my wait wouldn’t be too lengthy.

The next morning, I brought my father his coffee as soon as the girlfriend had disappeared into the shower, and I challenged my father to a game of chess to distract myself. Almost as soon as I had set up the chessboard, there was a shriek and a strange crunching noise, and my father looked at me with deep suspicion while I tried to look innocent.

“I wonder what that was,” he said, while muffled shrieks continued to echo downstairs. I kept mum, but I trailed after him as he got up and went to investigate the situation.

To my delight, the house itself had taken revenge on the girlfriend; the floor of the shower had rotted through and collapsed, causing the girlfriend to fall through the floor. But only partway; her upper torso stuck out of the shower, while her legs dangled in the netherworld under the house, and water rained down on her, which explains the muffled nature of the shrieks. She had also taken the shower curtain down with her, so there was a widening pool of water outside the shower, and a single shampoo bottle had rolled across the room and come to rest on the large box we used for towels.

“GIRLFRIEND KILLER,” the label said. “Effective with only one application!”

“You’re wasting water,” I said, snorting with glee.