The Bumper Sticker Project

I attend grad school at a mostly-undergraduate, formerly-all-female, formerly-countercultural-but now-"alternative"(-because-"countercultural"-is-more-of-a-'60s-term), small East Coast liberal arts college. There are a lot of fundraisers for Underserved Bhutanian Transsexual Day Laborers Held Unjustly Hostage by Tsunamis. There are also a lot of bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lots.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by the bumper sticker he has on his car. (They say you can tell a lot about a person by a lot of things, but so what -- stick with me, here. (Stick with me -- heh heh...)) It follows that you can tell a lot about a community by the bumper stickers they sport collectively, or even, I would argue, the fact that they sport them at all. What follows is a compilation of the bumper stickers I saw at my school. Note that this is not a selected list; I have no agenda here. (Okay, maybe I do have an agenda here. But I want to be objective in establishing support for my agenda.) The following were all the bumper stickers on cars in one parking lot (one rather small parking lot) on one day:

Committed to the Core

*Vote the Environment*

This car is on a low-carbon diet.

CoolDriver.org

WTF {picture of smiling Bush here}

{a 'W' with a line through it}

Let's not elect him in 2004 either

ear X-tacy

[I don't know what this means either. -- HJR]

{picture of mushroom cloud}

War is the real enemy

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Attack Iraq?

NO!

[Bush must not have seen this car when he made his decision.]

BE KIND In Memory of Louise & Buddy

Honor the Dead

Respond With Peace

{a number of symbols -- the Islamic crest, the peace sign, the male/female Roman symbols, the Star of David, the yin-yang circle, and the cross -- spelling the word
'COEXIST'}

Howard Dean for America

A Man of Quality Is Not Threatened By A Woman Seeking Equality

Make Art

Not War

Support Our Troops
Bring 'Em Home Alive

'COEXIST' [again]

THE LABOR MOVEMENT

"The folks who brought you the weekend"

CIVIL LIBERTIES
Don't Leave Home Without Them

Visualize Whirled Peas

And the following were all on one car (and check out the car below -- and note the type of car it is! Hullo, Prius??):

radiowoodstock.com

Creek Freak

{surrealist portrait of Janice Joplin}

{Grateful Dead icon}

2001 Support Your State Troopers

American Assoc. of State Troopers

As you know, I prefer to keep my bloggy identity anonymous, but I will reveal that I do not attend BYU.

Some days, though, I wish I did. I have to see those same damn stuckers every fuckin' day. It's almost enough to turn one Republican for a minute. Almost.

Do Your Ears Hang Low?

It’s been said a million times: we all have our imperfections; we all have things we don’t like about our bodies. In our world of glossy dual-page spreads and celebrity idolatry, those imperfections -- the things, as it’s been said a million times, that make us human -- inevitably merge with what we dislike about ourselves and become the very things we cover up, disguise, minimize, lament.

Me, I’ve never worried all that much. And trust me: it’s not because I don’t have my fair share of asymmetries, blemishes, and strange-looking nipplage. I’m as bent-nosed as the next guy (or at least the next guy who got clocked on the schnoz by a Pogo Ball as an eight-year-old). I guess I’ve always just had bigger problems to worry about. Lately, however, when my obsessive-compulsiveness (one such bigger problem, incidentally) has flared up and rendered me particularly obsessive and/or compulsive, I’ve noted for the first time all the imperfections I previously merely noticed. My response has been neither lamentation nor the happy acceptance the same beauty magazines that airbrush their models exhort their readers to feel (“Embrace your curves!”). Rather, I’d classify my reaction as one of... oh, let’s call it amused curiosity. I look at my nipples and think, "Damn, that’s some fucked up shit right there. Nice going, Darwin." I suppose I view my nipples as proof that nature has a sense of humor.

Here is more proof:

• When I urinate, it comes out in a spiral. I shit you not. (Er, I piss you not.) It’s true that once it hits the toilet bowl (or misses), it has already normalized into what I presume is the more traditional "taut spaghetti" form. But right out of the eye, it’s shaped like a helix, and it’s been like that as long as I can remember. [Incidentally, we have a urologist cousin who has made quite a name for himself (or as big a name as you can make as a urologist, anyway) by using his patients’ urination, uh, trajectories to determine the health of their, uh, urologies. Again, I piss you not -- his vanity license plate is "WEWEDOC." No joke. Anyway, Cousin Norm, if you’re reading this, feel free to drop me a line and let me know if I should get that helix thing checked out. (And also that burning sensation -- is that normal?)]
• I have freakishly large pupils. An ophthalmologist once told me I had the biggest pupils he’d ever seen, which is basically akin to having the largest feet a podiatrist has ever handled, or being the best lay Paris Hilton’s ever experienced. In other words, it’s sayin’ something. Anyway, we all know what they say about guys with big pupils… That’s right: they end up with terrible red-eye in photos. I’m not the most photogenic person to begin with; eyes that glow like tale lights don’t help the cause. It’s ridiculous, really. If you were to look through my old photo albums, as I do whenever my unnecessarily dilated pupils don’t get in the way, you would find dozens of group shots of me with the people in my life. There -- those are my family and friends, smiling and presenting as normal, happy people. And that there -- that’s me, with my arms around them, looking like the spawn of Satan Himself.
• My fourth toes curl under my third. That may seem impossible -- or at the least, impossibly uncomfortable -- given the mechanics of upright locomotion, and you’d think the same thing were you to see my toes (and you should be thankful you haven’t -- they’re not a pretty sight). But there’s really no better way to describe it: each of my fourth toes doglegs inward and slips neatly (if I may say so myself) under the middle of each third toe. And the only effect it’s had on my locomotion is on the shape of my footprints. Apparently the condition is genetic: my paternal grandmother’s toes do the same thing.
• I can turn my tongue upside down. This is another one I’ve heard is entirely genetic. (My dad can do it; my mom cannot.) I can only flip it clockwise, though, and it’s far less exciting than the cherry stem thing (which my sister can do).
• When I cross my legs, man-style (ankle on knee, rather than thigh-over-thigh, which, I still maintain, must have deleterious consequences on one’s sperm count), I can only go left over right. I assume this is a flexibility issue as opposed to a genetic one, but the disparity between the two positions is extreme: it’s not so much a preference as a physical limitation. I literally cannot put my right ankle on my left thigh without lifting it with both hands and then simultaneously pushing down on my right knee with my elbows. My New Year’s resolution for 2011 is to start doing yoga. Maybe that will help.
• My left nut hangs lower than my right. I am pretty sure yoga will not fix this, but I’m not overly concerned, since apparently most men suffer from some, uh, asymmetry on one side or the other. (Yes, I looked it up.) (What, like you wouldn’t have?) My own discrepancy seems to be rather extreme, however, and widening every year. By 2019, when I have that right-over-left thing mastered, my left nut will be bouncing off the curb. On the bright side, it’s a well-known fact that left-nutted people are highly logical and facile with numbers; I credit the 800 I got on my Math SAT to my testicular imbalance.
• There’s a strange hair that grows out of my stomach, at the bottom left can in my six-pack. It’s all alone and perfectly white and longer and finer than any other strand on my body (or head, for that matter). At least an inch, I’d say. And whenever I pluck it out, boing! -- it sprouts back at some random time, seemingly to full length overnight. I’m looking at it now, as I type this, and wondering if perhaps I should leave it alone this time, if it might not be a source of some power I just haven’t harnessed yet.
• I cannot straighten my pinky fingers. When I hold out my hands in front of me, as flat as they will go, the pinkies remain slightly bent at the first joints, forming perfectly imperfect 170-degree angles.
• My left ear sticks out further than my right. I noticed this particular irregularity a while ago, but it didn’t occur to me until a year ago what caused it: sleeping on my right side my whole life. As resilient as the human body is -- I assume it does what it can to maintain its symmetry -- twenty years of eight-hour load-bearing sessions will do that to a flab of cartilage. When I realized my sleeping habits were to blame, I immediately attempted to reverse two decades of habit by trying to fall asleep on my left side. The thing is, I actually prefer the aesthetics of my somnambulantly altered ear -- the "natural" one sticks out too much -- so sleeping on my left side into the mid-2020s would actually create an artificial symmetry more handsome than the original, plastic surgery be damned. The problem was -- and is -- that I can’t fall asleep on my left side. I thus settled for a happy medium: I now sleep on my back. My ears will be forever imbalanced, but only moderately so. Worse things, I suppose, have been borne of childhood.

So there you have it. That’s me: warts and imbalances and freakish disfigurations and all. My self-portrait is below. Since this will forever remain an anonymous blog and I will never post my photo, the MS Word drawing tool-generated version below is the closest you will come to glimpsing ol’ Homunculus. However, the devoted readers of this blog who know me -- i.e., my parents -- can attest that it is a fairly accurate representation of what I actually look like.

Now it’s your turn. If you’ve read this and become inspired to catalog and then reveal your own endearing deformities, please do so by posting them in a Comment below. The readers of this blog -- i.e., my parents -- might respond by growing brave themselves, and it could soon snowball into some revolutionary sociological experiment and eventually put every beauty magazine on the shelves out of business. That’s what my magic stomach hair is telling me, anyway.