Worst of Netflix: The Corndog Man

First of all: they did make a sequel to The Human Centipede, and it did get banned in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I’m going to go to Norway next month, stock up on copies, and try to smuggle them in on a fishing boat. Meg will stick some in her brassiere and take the Channel ferry from France, and the ever-loyal Kevin Yang is going to fly helicopter sorties from the Isle of Man. Don’t worry, British readers. We’ll make sure you get all the butchery and coprophagia you can handle.

I’ve missed doing Worst of Netflix, but I’ve had a bear of a time finding the right movies to use for it. It’s a delicate balance: you have to find movies that aren’t very good, but that tried to be good, and are also eventful enough that you can actually write about them. I had high hopes for the homoerotic Japanese samurai drama Taboo, but most of the movie was aching glances and bland intrigue, all with the grainy color of a 1970s BBC drawing-room sitcom with a title like “Her Majesty’s Loyal Breeches.” The Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust knew it was terrible and loved it. You can’t really make fun of a movie in which a haunted dildo fights a haunted gingerbread man. Horror of the Blood Monsters was actually too bad to review, although God willing they’ll bring back MST3K and do that old dog up right. With commentary, it would be funny, but written it would just be “And then for some reason we’re looking at stock footage of baboons through a red filter…” over and over again. Jefftowne, a Troma documentary (yes) about an alcoholic with Down syndrome who sexually harasses women, was too depressing to review; ditto I Think We’re Alone Now, a documentary about two dangerously obsessive Tiffany fans. (I do, however, totally recommend that you watch I Think We’re Alone Now, especially the special features.)

Thank God for The Corndog Man. 

I have a special history with this movie. My freshman year of college, I spent a lot of time with “Sue,” a girl who ultimately had a The Da Vinci Code­-themed nervous breakdown in which she realized that she was a direct blood descendent of Jesus, despite being almost as much of an overbred WASP as I am, and needed to have a baby with her friend’s boyfriend, also a descendent of Jesus, in order to… something. She had a conversation with the color green, according to the hospital orderly. Anyway, before all this happened, Sue was good friends with The Prisons, a trio of guys from Maryland who had gone to jail their first night at college. This group of people was a lot of fun, and actually came up with the best idea for liquor marketing I’ve ever heard: “Russe face.” Crown Russe is a brand of plastic-bottle, college-cheap booze that makes Scotch, gin, and vodka. They insisted everyone who came around them take a shot of the Scotch, because “everyone has a Russe face!” Madison Avenue couldn’t have done better.

Another of their obsessions was The Corndog Man.

Sue: “Oh, God. Chris. Oh, God. It was awful. Ugh. There’s all this… ugh.”

Me: “I WANT TO SEE IT.”

Sue: “I’ll watch it with you, just not… yet. I need to heal. It’s very… much.”

Prison Joe: “Hey, Sue! I’M THE CORNDOG MAN!”

Sue: “Oh God.” (vomits in trash can.)

I finally saw it, and it was. Very. And now I’ve watched it again for you. I feel compelled to say that The Corndog Man isn’t objectively bad, really. It very much is what it is, like mayonnaise-based fruit salad or Star Wars. You’re either into it or not.

The first line of the movie is “I’ll sell a colored man a boat faster than a cat can lick its ass,” and you better believe I’m embroidering that on a sampler. We then cut to a “new guy in town montage,” in which a man in dingo boots rents a room, hooks up his phone, and unpacks a couple of photographs. His car has Florida tags that read C DOG MAN. He then calls Buford, the boat salesman of colored man/cat ass fame, to ask about buying a boat. Gradually, we become aware that ninety percent of the movie will be increasingly ominous phone calls between these two men.

Summarizing a phone conversation is about as boring as retelling a dream, so I’ll give you the high points. C DOG MAN calls Buford over, and over, and over again, harassing him to the point of lunacy. Buford lives on a houseboat with a long-haired white guinea pig and drinks a lot. He also has a black transsexual girlfriend about twenty-five years his junior who calls him “Daddy” and has the best line in the movie: Buford gets falling-down drunk and tries to piss against a wall, causing the girlfriend to shout “You are in front of a lady!” Alcoholism, star-crossed romance, whatever: just don’t let women see you urinate. Later, Buford and the girlfriend pull over by the side of the road to dance in the light of the car headlights; Buford projectile vomits, causing the girlfriend to fling up her hands in an oh-it’s-one-of-those-nights-God-damn-I’m-wasting-my-life gesture and walk off.

C DOG MAN continues. He tells everyone about the black girlfriend, sinks the houseboat, and one night when Buford is insensibly drunk paints him in blackface and sets his unconscious body in front of the store where he works. There’s also an odd little scene where C DOG MAN tricks Buford into smashing up a pink Cadillac with a hammer, and all the while calls Buford a dozen or more times a day.

I won’t go into details in case you want to watch it, but as you may have guessed, C DOG MAN is deliberately driving Buford mad in revenge for Something Terrible That Happened Long Ago. Ain’t that always the way in movies about the South? We don’t get good satellite reception, so we spend all our time doing Terrible Things so that we can entertain ourselves by waiting for them to come to light – and, of course, discovering Terrible Things other people did and bringing them to light.

Oh, and you never find out what the corndog thing is about. Either that or it’s too subtle for me.

Charlie Brown's Statutory Thanksgiving

Although Fall is always a very nostalgic time for me, this Fall in particular has made me incredibly nostalgic for college. Everything these days reminds me of it. The change of the seasons; the smell of the cold; cozy sweaters and Ugg boots; vomitting Goldschläger and wondering how many papayas in Zimbabwe those real gold flakes dancing around my toilet bowl could buy—it all just puts a little lump in my throat and makes me wish I could go back and do it all over again. Which is kind of odd, considering I spent a good 60% of my college experience hating life and wishing it was over and done with. But now that I've been out of school for three years and the Quarter-Life Crisis' claws have a vice-like grip around my life, I can't help but think, it wasn't that bad...was it?


I have a very complicated love/hate relationship with my alma mater. On one hand, I never actually wanted to go there in the first place. AU was my safety school and I guess nobody's really like, "HURRAY!!! WE'RE GOING WITH PLAN C!!!!" On the other hand, once I actually got there, I slowly realized that most of my new friends were smarter than me and it felt like maybe I should pipe down, feel lucky to be there, pick up a book and learn some shit. But then again, the giant bureaucratic circle jerk that is the AU administration made my life hell, and I loathed the average AU kid; or "WONKS", as I believe they're called now. (We just called them "ASSHOLES" in my day, but those were simpler times, weren't they?) But on the other hand, I met most of my favorite people at AU. Alex, Helena, Laura, both Andrews, Ex Co-Blogger Eddie, Ashleigh, Lara, College Roommate Danielle, Rachel, Dan, Jenna, Carl—all AU Eagles. But do I feel like I got an education there that I couldn't have gotten for significantly less money at UMD? Not really. See? I waver. But god forbid I hear someone talk shit about AU or I'm all up in their face with more glowing statistics about our academics and rankings than an admissions counseler on crack.


A few months ago (I think?) I was at a party or something talking with some friends of a friend (I know this intro sounds incredibly vague, but then again I don't remember an entire week of October. During these trying times, you're just going to have to bear with me,) and one of them asked me where I went to school. "Oh, I went to AU," I replied. Two of the girls instantly turned to each other and burst into laughter.


"Sorry, we don't mean to laugh, it's just we have this inside joke with our friends that AU is a fake school." That's when I gave her a look that clearly conveyed, "I have a liver full of three glasses of Robert Mandovi and a hot Irish temper—shall we dance?" and the other started to back-peddle.


"Well, I mean, we know it's a real school. It's just we used to drive by it on Mass every morning on our way to work and we never saw anybody walking around there. So we had this joke that nobody actually went there and it was like just some big conspiracy or something."


Now, from the amount of shit I talk about AU on a daily basis, you'd think I'd be like, "Ha ha, yeah, well, it might as well have been a fake school from the education I got," or something, but instead I freaked out all, "OH, I'M SORRY, BUT WE DON'T GO TO CLASS IN THE MIDDLE OF MASSACHUSETTES AVENUE LIKE A PACK OF WILD STREET URCHINS ROAMING THE CITY, PICKING UP BITS OF KNOWLEDGE AND HOT DOG SCRAPS WHEREVER WE CAN—WE HAVE AN INTIMATE CAMPUS TUCKED AWAY FROM PRYING EYES. THAT'S RIGHT, A CAMPUS IN THE CITY. IT'S THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS. AND IT'S A GORGEOUS CAMPUS, BY THE WAY. OUR FRIEDHEIM QUAD WAS DESIGNED BY FREDERICK LAW OLMSTEAD, DESIGNER OF A LITTLE SOMETHING CALLED CENTRAL PARK. EVER HEARD OF IT? YEAH. THOUGHT SO. EVER HEARD OF JUDGE JUDY OR GOLDIE HAWN? YEAH, TOKEN ALMUNAE. NO BIG DEAL. SO I RECCOMEND YOU SPEND LESS TIME MAKING INSIDE JOKES AND MORE TIME TRYING NOT TO SUCK MY DICK SO HARD."


And then six hours later and I was back to making "the Harvard of Spring Valley" jokes. 


But there's one aspect of AU that I have never, and will never waver on: the food. (Slightly predictable, I know.) The food at AU is delicious, and it certainly made those four years more do-able. I remember when I was a senior in high school looking through Princeton Review books, the little "at-a-glance" survey for AU was always like:

Campus Life

Liquor is popular

  Drugs are popular

       Most students smoke

                 Most students are unhappy

                                                  The food is amazing. But like, stupid amazing.

And that's when I said, "Sign this girl up."

Helena was over one night a few months ago and we started talking about how much we missed college and how our sophomore year was the best year ever, and we miss the food and OH MAN—REMEMBER TDR THANSKGIVING??!!

TDR Thankgiving was the pinnacle of our year. (Or my year, at least.) Every year, the week before Thanksgiving break, TDR (or, the Terrace Dining Room, if you will. Basements are called "terraces" at AU. It's kind of like how White Town calls being unsigned, being "an independently financed band." It just sounds more dignified. American University—polishing that turd since 1893.) holds a big, delicious Thanksgiving dinner and it was always the best day of TDR food evz. Suddenly Helena and I had hatched a plan to figure out the date of this year's TDR Thanksgiving; find a freshman who'd obviously have a shit ton of meal blocks leftover because when you're a freshman, your parents are like, "GET THE 5,000 BLOCK MEAL PLAN! MY BABY WILL NOT GO WITHOUT!" and then the next year they wise up and send you off with a pack of Luna bars and their best wishes; get them to swipe us in; and FEAST  slash relive some of our old college glory days. It was an amazing plan. But where to find that freshman...?

And that's when fate came a-knockin' on my door. Or blog, as it were.

And Bingo was his name-o. Well, Meaghan, actually. AND GOD BLESS HER HEART. Because last night she and her friends swiped me, Helena, Laura and Andrew of the Great Juno Debate into TDR Thanksgiving and then into our old dorm to let us wander around and reminisce. And the results were...mixed.

First and foremost, homegirl and her friends were friggin' adorable. I should really meet up with readers more often because I never don't like them. Although it did freak me out that they were all class of '14. '14! What's even the point of going to college at that point? We'll all be dead by then. But, really. Adorable. She took a picture with me to send to her mom. I mean, really.

Second and secondmost, TDR Thanksgiving did not dissapoint. Being in TDR felt like being home again, and I mean that in the least morbidly obese way possible. It's just whereas the rest of our newly renovated Mary Graydon Center now looks like a discarded set from a "Saved By the Bell" episode heavily centered at The Max, TDR looks exactly the same. And there's something oddly comforting about that. Come, take a walk down memory lane with me:

The old Salad Bar! This takes me back to four years of meals spent with Ex Co-Blogger Eddie being like, "Did you know that colleges wash their lettuce in sugar water so that the girls with eating disorders who only eat lettuce get some amount of sugar?" And me being like, "That's the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard. Because if that were true, how could diabetic students eat salad?" And her being like, "No, it's true." ...I don't really know why I told that story, except to point out one more time that I think I'm right.

The old Comfort Zone.

Truly the finest zone of them all.

This image is pretty much all I think of when I think of TDR. That queer little bin full of chicken and the vat of queso and hot dogs. 

And the french fry station and how the quality of my day was dicated by whether or not they had curly fries. This, clearly, was destined to be a poor night.

TURKEY CARVING STATION!!!1

That, again, has nothing to do with TDR. That's a picture of my freshman year Understanding Mass Comm professor, Daryl Hayes. His class came up in dinner conversation and I remembered what a huge crush I had on him. He had this absurdly soothing voice and he was always flicking the front part of his hair away with this graceful little -swoop!- and it was hypnotizing. He was also brutally honest that he was never going to remember all of our names, so on the first day of class, he took a picture of each of us holding a sign with our name on it in front of our chests. Just think, he has that picture somewhere...

Which is why I don't feel awkward that he's now my phone's screensaver.

So, yes. Dinner was magical, the reminiscing was magical, but then we made the mistake of asking if we could tag along and come back to the dorm with them. And eesh. Shit crossed over from, "OH HA HA REMEMBER WHEN?" to being curled up in the fetal position, weeping, and harrassing young students as they tried to study and/or go to bed.

Before I go into this, I just need to express what a poignant year of my life sophomore year, living on the second floor of Hughes Hall was. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. That year, by the fate of the Housing and Dining gods, a motley crew of 40 of the most random, off-beat, and fun people you'll ever meet were gathered together to live on the same floor and the results were, in my mind at least, epic. I would love to write a short story about said experience and the characters involved. Maybe I will. Good. Done. Goals.

Anyway, because I associate Hughes Hall with all of these powerful memories and because I hadn't been there there since moving out, being back there last night was an incredibly bizarre experience. Like the smell of it. It smelled like all of these random, yet oddly specific moments that weren't necessarily important to me, but are clearly still floating around my subconscious. I can only imagine what Meaghan and her friends thought of the four of us, barging our way into their dorm, wandering around, frantically sniffing the air and alternating between shouting, "THIS IS WEIRD," "I'M NERVOUS," and "DO YOU MIND IF WE GO SMELL THE FORMAL LOUNGE?!"

After we thoroughly sniffed out the lobby, we went upstairs and Meaghan showed us her dorm room, which is when Andrew got sufficiently spooked and bailed. Laura, Helena and I, however, wanted to press on and go downstairs and revisit the old second floor. To me, this seemed like a completely reasonable thing to want to do, but apparently to a bunch of 18-year-olds, it's kind of "weird" when three 25-year-old women come up to your place of residence at 10 o'clock on a Wednesday night to wander around all, "NO, IT'S COOL, WE LIVED HERE IN 2004!!!" 

Although, we did run into one kid who was actually pretty cool about us being there. (AN single kid.) He gave us the skinny on the floor's 2010 shenanigans and was even up for listening to us talk about how it was in our day, even if it was just because he didn't want to do his business homework. Although I did appreciate this conversation:

Kid: So where do you guys live now?

Me: I live in Dupont.

Laura: Cleaveland Park.

Kid: Oh, wow, that's cool!

Laura: Yeah. We moved slightly further down the red line. It is really...cool.

Things could have ended there and I suppose it would have been fine, but I got it in my head that I really wanted to see inside my old dorm room. (Remember: so much happened there.) In my head, this is how it would go: I'd go down to my old room, the door would be open, two kids would be listening to music and browsing the 'nets, I'd be all, "Knock, knock. Hi, I used to live here back in the day. Just thought I'd shoot down and take a gander." "Oh, that's cool." "Welp, thanks!" "Later." But of course, nothing in my life is ever that easy.

First, our new Hughes Deuce ambassador advised me that given who lives in my room now, he didn't think it would be a great idea if I asked if I could go in and see it. And look, I liked this kid. I trusted him. I was willing to abandon my dreams and let that be that. But then suddenly, a kid who looked pretty much like The Bee Keeper from Wet Hot American Summer, if he took a shower, walked off the elevator and into the lounge, and my new friend nodded in his direction and gave me a, "That's him!" look. Ok. Point taken. He looked sufficiently weirded out that we were even standing in the hall, nevertheless trying to get into his room. But I was still undecided. I asked Laura what I should do—"Let it go." I turned to Helena—"I say do it." Damn.

Suddenly, The Bee Keeper walked out of the lounge and started heading for the stairwell. My chance to see my old room was about to slip out of my hands. And that's when one of Meaghan's friends we went to dinner with, Alyssa, walked onto the floor and said hi to The Bee Keeper. WE HAD A MUTUAL FRIEND! Now it wouldn't be weird if I asked him if I could see his room! But he was about to leave—time was of the essence.

Thus, feeling the pressure, I lunged towards him and shouted, "CAN I SEE YOUR ROOM!??!?!"

OK, that wasn't quite the way I had originally planned on asking, yes, but the moment was slipping away from me and I had a goal. You would have done the same. DON'T JUDGE ME.

That being said, he looked at me like I had just asked if I could check him for ticks.

"Uh...you want to see my room?"

"Yeah. I used to live there and we're back tonight and I just was wondering if I could see it for old time's sake?"

After some cajoling, he begrudgingly agreed to take me down and show me the room. We walked down and he opened the door wide enough so I could see in, but not quite wide enough so that I'd feel invited to physically enter.

"Well, this is it," he said. 

"YES. IT. IS." A flood of memories, some good, some bad, came back to me. That year man. That fucking year. I was a bit caught up in my emotions while simultaneously trying to carry on a conversation with this kid who obviously didn't trust me or what I was doing there, and as we all know, multi-tasking is not one of my strong suites.

"So, which side of the room is yours?" I asked, somewhat absentmindedly.

"Uh, that one," he said, awkwardly nodding towards the far side of the room.

"That was my side of the room too!" I said. My eyes went up to the curtains and I imagined the star-shaped twinkle lights my roommate had put up hanging over them. My gaze wandered to the wall where I hung all of my pictures, down to the heater, and stopped at the bed. I imagined my navy sheets and the white and navy toile duvet cover I bought at Ikea the summer before on the bed where his blue rumpled sheets were currently wadded up in a ball.

"Yep, I used to sleep in that bed," I said. Except I didn't really say it like that. And he didn't know that I was thinking about my navy sheets and toile duvet cover when I said it. And when I feel awkward but am trying not to be, sometimes the tone of my voice auto-pilots onto: FLiRt! mode. So it came out sounding a little bit more like this:

"AHHH. Yyyyyep. I used to sleep...in that bed. Wiiiiink!" The Bee Keeper immediately backed into the hall, forcing me out of the doorway, and slammed the door.

"NOPE. NOPE. THIS IS TOO WEIRD. THAT'S ENOUGH. THAT'S BEEN ENOUGH FOR ONE NIGHT. YOU SAW IT, YOU CAN GO NOW." 

"No, wait! I didn't mean it like that!" I yelled after him, as my friends, Meaghan, Meaghan's friends and our newfound Hughes Deuce friend stood there laughing at me. "Well, thank you for letting me see your room!" The door to the stairwell slammed.

I think our original plan was to stick around and have a drink with the girls, but after that I just felt insanely creepy and wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as I could. A line had been crossed. Well, I think a few lines had been crossed (some by accident) but it was definitely time to go. 

We said our goodbyes to our new AU friends and ran across the street just in time to catch the shuttle bus. As we rode to the metro, I got more and more fired up about what happened with The Bee Keeper. I mean, first of all, I was obviously not trying to pull anything with that kid. And if I were to pull anything with anyone, it would have been with that Hughes Deuce kid because he wasn't horrible on the eyes and seemed to have a considerably more open mind. Second, you should be so lucky that I physically come to your person, ask you to take me to your room and pull something with you. My ex-gentleman friend from New York texted me, "text me something raunchy" last night, and I didn't solely based on the fact that I couldn't reach my phone without raising my torso and I was watching Netflix. YOU. SHOULD. BE. SO. LUCKY. Third, just be cool about shit, kid. That situation would have been infinitely less awkward had you not been so awkward about it in the first place. I wasn't asking to give you a colonoscopy with my beak; I just wanted to see my old room. React accordingly.

When we got to the metro and it was time to say goodbye to Laura and Helena, I was livid. "I MEAN, I'M NOT CREEPY, AM I?" I asked them.

Laura responded first, "I mean, I don't think you are, but then again I've fallen asleep with you before."

I don't know why, but that statement completely hit the spot. I think it's because it's just such an ass-backwards way of saying, "I don't think you're creepy, but then again we're friends." Oh, Laura.

I think all in all what I've learned is that although it was fun and meaningful at the time, it's probably a good thing that we're not in college anymore. Procuring the money to buy alcohol is hard enough, nevertheless having to go that extra step and hide it. Not to mention the actual work involved in going to school, which is an aspect I always forget about. I mean, nowadays when I have a hard day at work, it's generally because "Night Court" isn't available on Instant Watch, Subway doesn't deliver and I lost a few Twitter followers. Can you imagine if a group meeting was somewhere in that mix?? Although my (unemployed) lifestyle may suggest otherwise, adulthood can be pretty cool. 

Plus, those college guys are fuckin' prudes.

Hiwhat’syournamewhereareyoufromwhat’syourmajor?

Remember that set of questions from every single college party, ever? Remember answering them so often that occasionally a waitress would ask how you wanted your eggs and you’d say “Tulane Chris, Texas, history” like a parrot? Remember that odd little silence after you’d all answered those questions because, really, they didn’t give you much conversational opening?

“So, Texas, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ride horses to school?”

“Not since about 1890.”

“Yeah, huh. Did you vote for George Bush?”

“No.”

“I thought everyone in Texas voted for George Bush.”

“Evidently not.”

“Eat a lot of barbecue?”

“Yes.”

“So, history, huh?”

Eventually, you started to think of people by their descriptors. I’d be by the drinks table with Rachel Olympia History, watching Berg Baltimore Human Sexuality Studies and Sean St. Louis Undeclared try to coax Audrey Tulsa Evolutionary Biology into a threesome, because hey, we’re in college. It got especially bad after the hurricane. Since a lot of people left, some cliques had to consolidate to save money and to ensure a large enough breeding population, so there were always all these people around who you sort of knew, handing you Natty Light and obviously kind of wanting to have sex with you but not being willing to put the effort into it. I was the same way; it would have been nice to get laid, technically, but unless I happened to fall directly atop someone it was just too much… talking. Hi, what’s your name, where are you from, what’s your major? (My last year of college was essentially a big depressive episode shared with about four thousand other people.) These parties usually tended to be in the same house, and the directions given were always the same:

“Go down Calhoun the wrong way – what cops? What other traffic? – until you get to the 800 block. It’s in the only house that isn’t condemned. Second floor, obviously.”

…well, the nice little lead-in to my post turned into a moody little flashback, didn’t it? Here’s the point: wouldn’t it be swell if we standardized a few more good icebreakers, so we could finally be shut of “Hi, what’s your name, where are you from, what’s your major?,” its post-grad sequel “Hi what’s your name, where are you from, what do you do?” and the recession era “Hi, what’s your name, where are you from, have you moved back in with your parents yet, do you want to join my suicide pact?” So here are my candidates for new questions, along with my answers.

“What song will be your bathtub suicide anthem?” This is especially good for pink-slip parties. Imagine it: the cops break down the door to find your prune-toed little corpse in the tub – what song have you put on the stereo on repeat to ease your exit? I have to confess something for my answer to make sense: t.A.T.u. ruined my life. I’ve never been a fan of displays of emotion other than the Big Three (contempt, amusement, and worry), and so now when someone talks to me about their feelings my mind immediately starts playing “ALL THE THINGS SHE SAID, ALL THE THINGS SHE SAID, RUNNIN’ THROUGH MY HEAD…” because it’s the single angstiest song in the world. Mascara running, ashtrays being thrown, I’m drunk and I don’t know where I am and I just vomited in my purse and ruined my cell phone ANGST. So, of course, since suicide is inherently an angst-ridden act, my bathtub suicide anthem is “All the Things She Said,” by t.A.T.u.

“What was the lamest thing you ever did?” In high school, I lettered in theater, orchestra, and French… and Quiz Bowl.

“What is your most embarrassing fear?” I will not open tubes of biscuits or bottles of champagne because the “explosion” makes me nervous. The worst, worst is when you peel the little wrapper all the way off the tube and it still doesn’t open so you have to press on the seam with a knife or, if you’re me, jab furtively at it with a long spoon. I’m also hesitant to inflate air mattresses all the way for a similar reason: what if it bursts and a piece of flying vinyl hits me in the face and blinds me?

“What are your default drunk singing songs?”

God Defend New Zealand

Harper Valley PTA

Good Luck (Basement Jaxx)

“What’s the lamest thing you ever cried at?” Longtime readers of this site know about my love-hate (or hate-hate) relationship with emotions. I find them hilarious, but embarrassing and inconvenient. But hilarious. (At our last business meeting, Meg presented me with a Powerpoint presentation about her feelings about a proposed project. It was fifteen slides long, had sounds and transition, and was titled “I Have Emotions: A Meg McBlogger Production.”) I don’t have emotions in public for the same reason I don’t relieve myself in the middle of a crowded room: some things are private. That said, I once completely lost all control and sobbed at an episode of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the 1970s BBC series about the resident, both upper-class and servant, of a fine London house in the 1910s and 1920s. It was the episode when World War One starts while the servants are enjoying a day on the beach, and everyone at the beach spontaneously starts singing “Rule, Britannia” and I was GONE, like a Miss America contestant off her meds.

"Do you have any humiliating medical problems?" Sure do! As much as I talk about diarrhea, that’s more a side effect of a beer and bacon diet than any underlying problem (other than being a compulsive eater who drinks too much.) My embarrassing medical problem is a chronic, painful inflammation of the chest wall called “costochondritis.” It’s most common in women over 40, meaning that I officially have an old lady disease. As I write this, I’m in the middle of my worst attack ever in my life. It hurts to breathe, bend down, and even type – so you can see how devoted I am to my readers (both of them [Meg and Dad]) to finish this post. I’ve been wincing and rubbing my chest all day and the ladies I work with are all convinced I have some secret heart problem.

"What’s the most horrifically inappropriate sentence you’ve ever heard?" Technically, I wasn’t present for this, but it was reported to me by more than one trustworthy person. Did you have an Extra Friend in college? The Extra Friend is the girl (usually, but they can be male) who attaches herself to your friend group like a cheerful, judgmental lamprey and imagines herself to be b-b-b-BIFFLES with you all and you like her fine but clearly not as much as she does you and you’re kind of embarrassed to take her in public because she’s never quite appropriate even by your admittedly low standards? That girl. Ours would never shut up about female ejaculation (“I had to change my nightgown!”) which led to a lot of uneaten meals: Louisiana cuisine favors sauces, and her chronicles of fluids a-go-go could turn even the most dedicated eater off Hollandaise for a month. She was also the most disorienting person I’ve ever known in terms of beauty. When she was fixed up, she was absolutely gorgeous; when she wasn’t, she looked like she was having an allergic reaction to puberty. Anyway. The semester after I finished college, some of my friends were having drinks, and Extra Friend came. Gin in hand, she turns to the room and, as an icebreaker, says casually, “So, who here has been sexually assaulted? Mary?” in, like, the tone of voice a sane woman would use to say, “So, who here has been to the new bar on Magazine Street?” If you can imagine it, no hands went up.

Granted, these new icebreakers might lead to some awkward pauses, but isn’t that better and more useful than simple rote responses? And any awkward pauses you create with these will be shorter and less frosty than the one made when, turning in a wide arc to take in the whole room, rye sloshing out of your glass, you bellow, “So, who here has been sexually assaulted? Mary?”