The Turner-Neal Awkwardness Index

In all the talk about Wikipedia’s effects on academia, how people consume information, and the internet at large, I feel like one point gets consistently left out: it makes weird people weirder. I have obsessions I could never have imagined without Wikipedia. I wouldn’t have read a book about the Burgess Shale, and if you asked me what it was I would have said, “oh, wasn’t Burgess Shale a fixture on the Borscht Belt? Why, did he just die?” Actually, it’s a Canadian fossil bed that preserved what are politely referred to as “the weirdest fossils hell-damn-ass ever.” I could talk about how fascinating I find this for hours – which would be a mistake, since no one would be listening, largely because they’d want to tell me about the Nestorian Schism or myxomatosis, which they had just learned about on Wikipedia.

One of my favorite obsessions – and what previous generation even had the capacity to have enough obsessions to pick favorites? – is the Schmitt Sting Pain Index. An entomologist named Justin Schmidt had dozens of venomous insects sting him, ranked and ordered the level of pain on a scale, and added zesty descriptions. The sweat bee, at 1.0, has a sting that is “light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” The yellowjacket, doubling down at 2.0, is described as “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” The tarantula hawk is doubly disturbing, since not only does it eat tarantulas but has a sting that is “blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.” I can’t find the full index online, sadly. I don’t have the words for why I think it’s wonderful. It just is. It’s so aggressively weird and one of the most genuinely creative things I’ve ever seen.

So, of course, I decided to ape it, tailored for my area of expertise.

The Turner-Neal Awkwardness Index

0.0 – You are alone at home, with the door locked, asleep, fully clothed, in a dignified position on the bed.

0.5 – You can’t open a jar of pickles manually and have to pry open the edge with a butter knife that’s already bent from doing this yesterday on the jam. The cat sees everything.

1.0 – During a visit home, you’re watching a Very Special Episode of Roseanne and start to cry. Your father makes an excuse to leave the room, and your mother leans over to you and stage-whispers, “Are you still sad about Todd? You’ll find someone!”

1.5 – You trip and fall in front of several strangers who do nothing to help.

2.0 – You trip and fall in front of several strangers, all of whom rush over to help pick you up and dust you off, and one of whom insists that you take some ointment and a Life Saver from her purse.

2.5 – You forget to wear deodorant to a job interview and spend the whole time with your upper arms rigidly locked to your sides. The heat and pressure exacerbate the problem, so at the end, instead of shaking the interviewer’s hand, you wink.

3.0 – The same wave that tore off the ironic loose neon Jams you wore to the beach flings you several feet ashore. The next wave delivers a dead gull onto your head. As you hop about trying to get all the dead bird parts off, you overhear a discussion of why your pubic hair distribution is so markedly asymmetrical.

3.5 – Midway down the aisle, your body gives the signal, and you have to about-face and RUN to the ladies’ room. A bridesmaid and a washroom attendant have to hold your dress up as your wedding-jitters Taco Bell binge exits gracelessly. Since your dress has no pockets, you cannot tip the attendant. As you reenter the sanctuary, you realize that the odd marriage between the Lutheran Synod and particle-board construction means that everyone heard.

4.0 – Having mistimed the contractions, you give birth in a subway. Fortunately, your husband is by your side; unfortunately, the child is very apparently not his. Everyone on the subway feels free to comment on this, and two debating sides emerge as you try to rescue the situation by delivering the placenta into your purse. Too late, you remember your passport and keys are in there.

I thought of writing a 4+ to match the bullet and (“Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail grinding into your heel”), but awkwardness is finite. Eventually it either develops into a genuine crisis or you die, although at that point you may not care which.

State of the Tulane Chris: Part II

Tulane Chris is Relieved: Wacky Wanda is gone! We thought she left a while ago, but then she kept knocking on the door. We never saw her move out, but she hasn’t been seen in weeks. There’s no sight quite like two grown men crouched on the floor, taking shallow breaths through their mouths, gauging the distance to the knife drawer as the door goes tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. She had a long, emotional hallway goodbye with Girl-Who-Slams-Doors, thanking GWSD for all the “positive energy.” On the free table, Wacky Wanda left some tea, one small box of Sun-Maid raisins, one shoe, and about fifty CDs. They were all what I think of as 90s lesbian music (confirmed by Giant Camel, whose mother was a lesbian in the 90s): the Cranberries, Melissa Etheridge, Indigo Girls, Sinead O’Connor… This raises so many questions. She was so weird in big, huge ways that the thought of her being weird in an everyday way like being a lesbian just blows my mind.

Tulane Chris is Underslept: The other day, the fire alarm in our building went off for three hours. “The wiring” had gone wrong and no one could get it to turn off. The super lives an hour away and the alarm company’s 24-hour helpline is an answering machine. You know what Philadelphia’s like in the middle of the night? We tried to take a walk, but turned around when we saw a man literally fighting his reflection in a store window. Later, an extremely drunk African-American lady showed up and started making small talk. She asked if we were standing outside for some kind of protest. The woman she was talking to didn’t feel like dealing with a drunk just then so she left, causing the drunk lady to open up to Giant Camel and me about her experiences with racism. She was sure we’d had them too, because “you know how white people are…” Now, Giant Camel is technically white but ambiguously brown in appearance, but Pocahontas aside, you cannot look whiter than I do. If I were an X-Man, my superpowers would be getting sunburned, avoiding racial profiling, and getting good service at restaurants. I didn’t know how to answer this so I just said, “Oh, I think we’ve all had a bad night,” to which Giant Camel helpfully added “HE’S PRETTY WHITE, THEY CAN DO AN X-RAY ON HIM WITH A HUNDRED WATT BULB.” Later, when the alarm finally got shut off and we all went to bed, the drunk lady just went right on upstairs, but I’ve never seen her again, so I don’t know if she lives in our building or was incredibly confused in the morning.

Tulane Chris is Meta: I wrote a whole post about how it’s uncomfortable to blog about looking for jobs when you know prospective employers might read it, and then didn’t post it because I didn’t want prospective employers to read that. Then I got a job interview. So… good call?

Tulane Chris is Reflective: I started writing a memoir. My goal is to avoid being described as “the poor man’s Augusten Burroughs at risk for diabetes.” The first chapter is about my mother’s obsession with her reproductive organs and is called “Female Trouble.” There is also, apparently, a performance art piece about endometriosis called “Female Trouble,” which you can see a preview of at www.femaletrouble.org. I feel no need to see it because, as you will read in my memoir, most of my childhood was a performance art piece about endometriosis.

Tulane Chris Has Vague Opinions about Prominent Women: The night of the horny goat weed, I wrote “MICHELLE OBAMA JANE LYNCH” on the page of blog ideas in my notebook. I think my point about Michelle Obama is that she’s one of the very rare people who look better in still photographs than when actually moving and speaking – she moves her face a lot when she talks and I find it distracting. I don’t know what I wanted to say about Jane Lynch, but I like her.

Tulane Chris Learned Something Amazing: Roseanne made a kids’ sing-along video called Peanut Butter and Jellyfish. It’s enough to make me have children.

Tulane Chris is Judgmental: I saw two people at Starbucks who had taken chairs away from another table so they each had a chair just for their coats. The one was yammering about real estate on the phone, and the other was doing something on a Mac with a “Nightmare Before Christmas” sticker placed on it so that Jack and Sorry-Don’t-Remember-Her-Name were silhouetted in from of the apple. Don’t you feel like you already know way, way enough about them?

Tulane Chris Likes Labored Jokes: I want to start a band that sings about skin cancer awareness and immigration reform. It will be called “Irregular Borders.”

Tulane Chris Likes Social Commentary: You know what I realized the absolute defining activity of our generation is? Our Woodstock? Using food stamps at Trader Joe’s. We will absolutely reminisce about that in decades to come. (Guess what I was doing when I realized this.)

Tulane Chris has Body Issues: I have exactly the wrong amount of chest hair. If I had more or less I could manage, but as it is it looks like my torso was just now sodded. It’s also asymmetrical. This makes me feel like a freak.

Tulane Chris Remembers Childhood Summers: What the hell was that Tiger Blood flavor? Just grenadine? I got it because little boys like tigers and blood, but it didn’t taste good.

Tulane Chris Remembers High School: Do you agree that there’s such a thing as a High School Name? For example, I went to high school with someone named Amber Pajeski. Doesn’t that just sound like the name of someone you would have gone to high school with? Nathan Langford. Chase Hawn. Katharine Cunningham. Bill Schaffer. Sarah Brinsley. (I tweaked the spelling of these for obvious reasons.) I could name a dozen more. And these aren’t just people I happen to remember – I barely knew a couple of them, and am not in touch with any of them now – but they have such High School Names. They fit so well into the sentence “______ let ______ get to third base in his car and ______ told everyone.” I tried to generate fake ones as examples, but I couldn’t – you just know when you hear one.

Overall State of the Tulane Chris: C+

State of the Tulane Chris: Part I

Well, that sucked.

I had some blood drawn in December when I changed doctors, and about a week later the nurse called to tell me everything was “fine.” Well, last week I thought, “You know… college. I’d like to make sure my liver is working,” so I called to ask for a printout of the lab results, and everything is not “fine.” I’m not dying, but…

-     HOMEBOY IS TOO FAT. My blood is apparent the vampire equivalent of a Mallowmar. It doesn’t so much “flow” as “ooze.” My general cholesterol level is low, but it’s essentially all bad cholesterol – and guess who’s coming for dinner? Diabetes. It’s not here yet, but it’s got my address and is getting directions from Google Maps. It texted metabolic syndrome to see if it wanted to come too but hasn’t heard back.

-     HOMEBOY HAS AWFUL HEREDITY. Apparently I carry three out of four genes “associated with sudden ischemic heart disease,” or as I like to call it, “heart-gonna-explode-pox.” I also have a gene that means I can’t take popular cholesterol-lowering drug Plavix, because it might kill me.

-     HOMEBOY IS DEFICIENT. In Vitamin D and “omega-3 oils.” No wonder my bones snap in a stiff wind and my hair is dull and lifeless.

And this is just the shit I can understand. Silver lining is that my liver seems to be tootling along just fine, turning its homework in on time and getting eight hours of sleep at night.

Now, here are my emotions about the above:

-     GRANTED, I’m too fat. I did not think I had been NEARLY fat enough for NEARLY long enough that my pancreas felt it had to sit me down for “the talk.” I don’t think this is fair.

-     I have a guardian angel. About four years ago, I was so poor I almost took part in a clinical trial for Plavix. This involved taking enormous doses of Plavix and eating oranges “to see if it would still work.” I got strep throat the day before and couldn’t do it. This, you know, might have killed me. (I’m exaggerating, but not by a lot.) I like to imagine my guardian angel – I’d say it was Rue McClanahan because she apparently likes me (MORE ON THAT NEXT WEEK!), but she was still alive – floating to the hospital, touching her wand gently to a pile of medical waste, floating back over my sleeping form, and then scratching the hell out of my tonsils with her infectious wand.  (I also clearly like to merge the concepts of guardian angels and fairy godmothers.)

-     Sometime this week, my mother, uncle, and aunt will all get letters from me warning them not to take Plavix. I wrote these on postcards because I think if I amuse the postal workers they’ll be more likely to bring me my mail on time.

-     To remedy my “severe” omega-3 deficit, I’ve started taking fish oil. This results in three or four sardine-flavored burps each day. Since I can no longer have sweets, I’ve decided to try to think of the fish burps as a new dessert concept. It is not working.

-     I’m mad as a Goddamn hornet. Why the hell didn’t the doctor think this was worth telling me? It’s not like it takes much time to say “Lose thirty pounds YESTERDAY and occasionally make eye contact with a multivitamin.” I want to write a furious letter, but I’m afraid they’ll then want me to come back in and retake the bloodwork, and I want to have a few months to do better before being confronted with more red-bordered numbers.

-     I have a new game called “Diabetes Is Watching.” I’ve created a personality and work history for diabetes so I can think of it as a person I’m avoiding through good judgment rather than a fatal metabolic disease I’ll develop if I keep frying ice cream. Here are the text messages I sent Butter Legs about my new enemy diabetes last night:

Diabetes: it’s watching.

Diabetes: it knows the last four digits of your social security number.

Diabetes: it just made eye contact with you from across the bar and tipped its Kahlua Mudslide in a little salute while raising an eyebrow flirtatiously.

Diabetes: it has one IMDB credit – the prisoner early in “Silence of the Lambs” who sexually harasses Jodie Foster.

Diabetes: it thinks your screenplay is a weak attempt to be the next Todd Solondz.*

Diabetes: it saw a typo on your resume and didn’t tell you.

Diabetes: IT KNOWS WHAT YOU ATE LAST SUMMER

Diabetes: the honey badger of metabolic disorders.

Diabetes: it donated forty-five dollars to the Santorum for President campaign in your name.

Diabetes: it can tell you’re not a virgin.

You know what’s going to suck? Diet and exercise. I’d almost rather die, but I have so much TV to watch. If “Roseanne” isn’t a reason to stay alive I do not know what is.

*UM DID YOU KNOW THERE’S A SEQUEL TO “WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE” CALLED “PALINDROMES” THAT BEGINS AT DAWN WEINER’S FUNERAL AND IS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLL ABOUT ABORTION? I learned this recently.