For the past couple of days I've also been dealing with the issue of a close family member in the hospital. It's hard to feel funny after spending ten minutes on the phone with a nurse going over lab test results (note-- my family member will probably be OK, however I can't help but worry. It's what I do). So in an effort to at least post something, I'm republishing a post from a year ago. Unless you were one of the handful of readers from the very beginning, I feel positive in saying that this will be a "new to you" post.
(Oooh, oooh-- I just found a new feature that I didn't even know I had on this website. If you hover over the photos below ,a caption will pop up momentarily. Cool! What other features do I not know about? I'll be pissed if there is a "press here for one hundred dollar bills" button that makes cash pop out of the CD/DVD door of my desktop).
Does everyone remember the first time they were called an asshole? To your face I mean. I do. It was the summer of 1994. I was studying Russian while in Moscow, Russia. I had joined an intensive Russian language program at the end of June. Most of the other students in the program had already been in Russia for a month, in St. Petersburg. I opted out of that first part of the program since I only wanted to study in Moscow-- that's where my friends were as well as my Russian fiancé. We were planning a September wedding. I only had a couple of weeks in June to get everything ready for the wedding because as soon as I returned to the U.S. at the end of August, I had to continue my graduate studies in another state. And I had to get ready to teach Russian for the first time. My dear friend David came to visit me before I left for Russia to help me pick out flowers and make other wedding related decisions. He was a florist at the time and he has good taste. He also has my same sense of humor. One time while we were out running wedding-related errands every station on the radio was playing a song by Rod Stewart. It was really odd. David mused out loud, "Maybe he's dead?". For some reason that struck us as really funny. We are bad people, I know. This small moment of humor lodged itself in my brain. When I joined up with the students in Moscow at the end of June, they had been cut off from the rest of the world for a month. This was 1994 and the only way you could get news (if you weren't fluent in Russian) was if you made the effort to pick up the English language newspaper, "The Moscow Times". I think it was published weekly. People were dying to know about current affairs. I remember being in a big group of people and being queried about the O.J. Simpson car chase. Then I told a lie. I don't know what compelled me do this; maybe because I had a large captive audience who would believe anything I told them. I told the group that Rod Stewart was dead. He'd been killed in a car accident. The reaction that people had was amazing. Some people just lost their shit upon hearing of Rod's untimely passing. I never knew he was so beloved by so many people. After a few days, the truth came out and for some reason some people didn't find my prank humorous. One of the girls was really angry and she called me an asshole to my face. I'm sure I'd been called an asshole many times up to that point (and have been many times since then) but it was the first time it had been said to me in person, in anger. I don't blame her though. What's funny is that this was around the same time that Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson got married. When I reported that bit of news to the other students, no one believed me. I had become the girl who cried wolf. Or rather, the asshole who had cried wolf...