My Father's 20 Rules of Life *

1. Always be the second-fastest car on the road.

2. West Coast road and highway signage is superior to the rest of the country’s.

3. New Yorkers are bad drivers because they get their license later than most others, and it is always better to learn things when you’re young.

4. Never play a New Yorker who challenges you to a game of ping-pong.

5. Never play poker with someone who has more money than you and isn’t afraid to lose it.

6. When leaving the house, always have something with you to read.

7. The size of a hotel’s swimming pool is directly proportional to the luxuriousness of the hotel.

8. If you’re in an electronics store and need help, find the pear-shaped and/or Asian guy.

9. Dutch people are tall. Also, they are more like Americans than any other nationality (excluding, perhaps, Canadians).

10. Real estate prices aside, the San Francisco Bay Area is the greatest place to live; if you can afford it, there is no reason to live anywhere else.

(10a. But if you're not already here, please stay away -- traffic and supermarket lines are bad enough as it is.)

11. Eat your fiber. And start young. Also, organic is not a fad.

12. Every disease is at least partly contagious, even those that are considered “genetically programmed/predispositioned” and/or “environmentally triggered.”

13. Always, always carry it on if they let you.

14. Drugs and prostitution should be legal. Immigration should not be. Gasoline and cigarettes should be taxed through the roof and then the clouds. California should be two states. The highways should move, not the cars.

15. Always double-check the bill -- restaurant, credit card, whatever -- before paying it.

16. Doctors are bad businesspeople.

17. Republicans are bad people, period. If you vote Republican, it’s because you are either selfish, stupid, or both.

18. Unless you’re a police officer, a criminal, or a biathlete, there is no reason to own a gun.

19. The further east you go from California, the more people smoke: East-Coasters smoke more than West-Coasters, Europeans smoke more than Americans, and the Japanese smoke more than anybody.

20. It’s not a morning without a glass of orange juice.


* Caution: May not apply to life in the 21st century.

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.