Please Buy My Stupid TV

I don't have a photo of my TV. Please enjoy this picture of a baby walrus.

I am desperately trying to get rid of my stupid TV. 

I purchased said stupid TV off of Craigslist five years ago, when I was young and naïve. Now I am older and wiser, and I want this brick of electronic annoyance out of my life. I am also moving, and I would rather fend off a small pack of miniature Italian greyhounds than lug this TV to Portland.  

About the TV: The TV is in fine working order. In fact it works perfectly, and I’ve had virtually no problems with it the entire time I’ve owned it. So why do I hate it so much? This TV weighs about as much as a baby walrus. 

When I purchased this TV, the near hobbit-sized man to whom I wrote the check lifted it effortlessly into my car. When my roommate and I got it back to our apartment, we nearly buckled under its weight as we carried it to the second story of our apartment building. Both of us had visions of dropping my Craigslist purchase down the concrete steps, smashing it to a million, slightly less heavy pieces. Luckily-- and amazingly-- this did not happen. We had to wait for a third friend to arrive before lifting the beast into the built-in entertainment center. And there it stayed until I moved to a new apartment. 

The following people have successfully lifted this TV: Iron Man competitors, REI employees, ex-military personnel, and that hobbit-sized guy who was moving back to Canada. That last one remains a mystery to me. 

The TV is a 27” flat-screen Insignia model from 2006. Don’t be fooled, as I once was, by the mention of “flat screen.”  While the screen is technically flat, the back protrudes awkwardly a good foot or so. It’s a bit like looking at a thin woman who, when she turns, reveals a tremendous backside. The J. Lo effect, if you will. I believe this is why the TV weighs as much as a flabby marine mammal. 

The future owner of this TV should be able to move it without any help from the seller. I simply cannot help you. When my kick-boxing instructor at the gym tells me to grab a heavy bar, I choose the 18 pounder. I also have bad shoulders. 

And because I am single and an opportunist, the buyer should preferably be an employed single male between the ages of 25 and 33, possess a witty sense of humor and possibly a beard. 

I'm asking for $25, or, honestly, if you can just come and take the thing away, that would be great. Please email for more information.  

See the actual Craigslist posting here:  http://bend.craigslist.org/ele/3801219787.html

I Dislike this Age We Live In

Sometimes I feel like the proverbial old man on the porch, shaking my fist at the modern age.

There are two types of people in the world: those of us looking at screens and those of us who are thoroughly annoyed with the people looking at screens. I mostly fall into the latter category, and because of this, I am rapidly becoming the proverbial old man on the porch, shaking my fist at the world. 

The world I am talking about is, of course, the modern one. The one in which you can sign up to share photos of your breakfast (That's the most beautiful piece of peanut butter toast I've ever seen!); shoot your 140-character thoughts into the universe; plan your perfect DIY wedding via virtual pin boards (Mason jars. Burlap. Twinkle lights. Done.); and basically construct your virtual identity from the ground up. It’s the world in which the primary motions are staring and scrolling. Staring and scrolling, occasionally typing, and taking the rare pause from it all to pay attention to something that has managed to capture our attention. 

Six Stages of Social Media

Nora Ephron, of You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle screenwriter fame, has an essay titled “The Six Stages of Email” in which she recounts the evolution of email from infatuation to death. (Infatuation: Look how fast I can communicate! Isn’t this fun! I don’t have to bother with envelopes and stamps and walking to the mailbox. It’s all here! Look, a message! Death: How on earth do I have 1267 messages in my inbox? This is not fun. Where’s that friendly little voice telling me I’ve got mail? And where is Tom Hanks? If I get one more newsletter from that arthritis organization I supposedly unsubscribed to, I will scream.)  

Well, let me tell you how I've applied Nora Ephron's ideas to my life. I think about the six stages. I think about the number of social media sites I subscribe to. I think about the multiplication charts of my youth and land on a number. I get overwhelmed. I bang my head against the wall.

Unlike my losing battle with email, my neglect of social media is visible. If you Google me right now, you will find the skeleton of a LinkedIn Profile I signed up for and never bothered to fill out. You will discover my Twitter account, last updated seven months ago, during a rare moment during which I needed to tell the world I was making savory oatmeal cookies. You may come across my Pinterest boards, and while I have upwards of 1200 pins, Pinterest enthusiasts would consider me a moderate contributor. I still log in to Facebook, but I’m more of a creepy voyeur than an active participant. Instagram and I went through the 6 stages so quickly I never even signed up for an account. What's worse is that these sites, and my resistance to update them, read like timestamped chronology of my social media negligence. 
 

If a tree falls in the forest and no one Instagramed, Tweeted or tagged it in a status update, did that tree exist? Did it have any friends? Was it liked? Probably not. 

I’m not shaking my fist at Twitter or Facebook. I'm not upset with Instagram or social media in general. I’m shaking my fist at the idea that I have to have both a social media presence as well as a "real-life" one. I'm shaking my fist at the generation of screen-staring morons we have become, the people gazing into phones, stroking polished screens as if they were flat and tiny beloved pets. I’m aggravated because if we are looking at screens, we are not as likely to look at what else is happening around us. If we are looking at screens, we are not giving attention to whomever we happen to be with. If we're constantly updating and grooming our social media selves, what happens to who we are in the real world?

One of the most disappointing evenings of my twenties was a “Friendsgiving” spent with fifteen other twenty and thirty-somethings. I was a fringe friend to this particular group of people, and had spent the past year or so wishing they would invite me to more of their gatherings. 

During dinner we prayed, dished up food, and then passed around an iPhone to watch a video of a ribbon dance performance at some mega church in Texas. And since YouTube videos are like the Lays potato chips of modern media, “Pass the iPhone,” became a more prominent dinner request than “Pass the salt.” Following dinner we settled into the living room, turned on Elf, and every iPhone-toting hipster in the room downloaded the same game and set about trying to one-up everyone's high scores. I sat on the couch with the screen-staring ghosts of Friendsgiving present and wondered what could possibly be so compelling about a game that—as far as I could tell—involved maneuvering a virtual ball through a hamster maze. And as I considered this thought, I became more and more irritated with the whole ordeal.

I’ll admit that I can be idealistic. I'll admit that my idea of holidays may be traditional or even old-fashioned. I’ll admit that, on this particular night, I had Scrabble tiles in my purse, in case anyone was up for a game of Speed Scrabble. I'll admit that I may not be cut out for Friendsgiving gatherings with twenty-something hipsters. 

But I had been looking forward to hanging out with these fun, interesting people and having fun, interesting conversations with them. Maybe my disappointment came more from unmet expectations than the actual behavior of the group. It could have been an off-night. Perhaps there was some other group dynamic I wasn’t aware of that caused them to withdraw into their tiny screens. 

But I left Thanksgiving feeling confused, frustrated and sad. How was it that I could spend an entire evening with 15 people and feel like I hadn’t connected with any of them? Were these people really having more fun than I was, or was that just how it seemed on Instagram? I never saw any photos from that night, but I’m guessing they were lovely. I wish I could have been there. 

Back to that old man...

While I may have proverbial old-man-on-the-porch tendencies, I don’t wish to throw out the proverbial screen baby with the social media bathwater. Social media is not the problem. Screens are not the problem. What makes me shake my fist is the fact that screens eclipse the things I love. I love long, lingering dinners with friends and family. I love sitting at the dinner table, long after a meal is over, picking at bits of arugula still left on my plate, listening to stories and following rabbit-trail conversations. I love filling my coffee mug for the third time, pouring another glass of wine, putting the kettle on for tea. I like being present. I value quality over quantity. Enter screens and social media into the equation and you get a different outcome.

Deal or Ordeal: House Sitting Part 2- The Chicken Debacle

Maybe a commemorative stamp will make me feel better about my situation.

It's time for another round of Deal or Ordeal! You may remember that my last house sitting gig involved a galling band of neurotic animals, cleaning animal waste off of a lot of unusual places (upstairs carpet, laundry room sink), and getting locked out of the house on a Saturday morning. So when my neighbors asked if my roommate and I could care for their garden and chickens while they went out of town, we said...sure, no problem! We don't even have to set foot in the house, I thought. Piece. Of. Cake. 

Let me tell you how well that played out... 

Deal: Water the garden and care for the chickens while your awesome neighbors (the ones who sleep in a giant teepee in their front yard) go to Burning Man. You get all the garden produce you want, fresh eggs, and a boatload of good neighborly feelings.

Ordeal: On the fifth day, you walk across the street- not into an idyllic land flowing with kale, fresh eggs and the contented clucks of urban chickens- but into a CHICKEN MASSACRE. Two of the six chickens lie motionless on the other side of the chain link gate. They have not just fallen over from heat exhaustion or food poisoning; they are mangled, bloody, and one of them no longer has a head. 

The remaining chickens seem to be in a state of shock, wandering the yard, clucking softly, unsure of their next moves. You join them in this state, trying to fulfill your original duties as responsible chicken sitter. You fill water containers, check the coop for eggs, and step over bloody carcasses four or five times before realizing I have to do something about this! There are two dead chickens lying on the ground, and I have to do something about it!  

So you leave the yard, start walking down the street, and call your mom. She will recommend that you call your friend the forensic scientist since she is used to encountering repulsive things and properly disposing of them. You call, and she graciously agrees to drive across town to help you out. She also recruits her husband, who has dealt with dead chickens before. 

In the meantime, you walk over to the neighborhood restaurant where your roommate works, sit yourself down at the front counter, and share your sad story with anyone who will listen. Soon enough, without even ordering, you are presented with a hard cider,  cheesy sticks, and an overflowing dish of pasta. You make friends with the regulars eating burgers a few seats away, chat with your former bosses’ wife (this is a small town), and carbo-load your cares away. You remain in this happy state of avoidance until you receive the text informing you that your friends have arrived at the site of the massacre and the inevitable is before you. 

The inevitable involves the following: a pair of rubber gloves, heavy duty trash bags, a can of wasp spray and an iron stomach. The forensic scientist's husband declares the cause of death: raccoon, and carries the body bags to the trash cans in the ally. You close the lid and thank your friends profusely for saying yes to one of the worst questions asked in friend history: Do you want to come over and help me remove some wasp-infested chicken carcasses? When all is said and done, you return home, close the door, and vow never to house sit again.

Epilogue: I opened this card from my cousin right before I went across the street and discovered the chickens. "I thought I would send you a smile today," she said. It wasn't until later, while on the phone with my mom again, that I looked down and realized how apt it was. And, as the card suggests, I laughed. And then I laughed again.

Love Tried: A C+ Caper Inspired by Bob Goff

How can you resist a book with balloons on the cover?

Bob Goff is the kind of crazy person I like. He talks a lot about whimsy and going on capers and how he stuck sandwiches under the wiper blades of his wife's car for months to try to get her to notice him. His book Love Does is full of crazy stories about unknowingly becoming the Ugandan consul, riding around town on a skateboard after his jeep is stolen, and inviting world leaders to sleepovers with his kids. According to Bob Goff, love just doesn't sit around and think about changing the world; love does something about it.

My roommate Ashlee and I spent the summer sitting on our front porch, drinking iced coffee and reading Love Does together. (Yes, please take a moment to acknowledge how adorable this is. Ok, your moment is over.)

After a summer of being inspired by Bob's crazy life* we decided it was time for our own caper. So we hatched a plan and set our alarms for 5:30 the next morning. 

*Note: This was also a summer of fulfilling the role of “requisite single girls” at various weddings. While I do enjoy a good hands-in-the-air-waving to celebrate this fact once in a while (many thanks to Beyonce for the fun anthem), it can get a little tiresome. So our caper included a subtle hint of let’s do something related to the fact that we don’t have boyfriends right now. But only a hint. Ok, we had balloons. More on that later.  

Time for a Caper 

Our good friends at Google told us the sun would be rising at 6:08 that morning, but it was completely light when we left the house at 6:15.

As we climbed up to a butte overlooking the city, the sun was still low on the horizon and almost as red as the deflated balloons we carried with us. Yes, we had deflated balloons. They were meant to be inflated balloons, but didn’t survive the extreme heat in our apartment the night before. Unfortunately our city does not have much of a market for 6:00 a.m. balloon peddlers.  

I’m not sure what one is supposed to bring on a proper caper, but this is what we lugged with us: 

• a thermos of Via coffee (there's a chapter in Love Does about its creator, Don Valencia) and coffee mugs
• zucchini bread
• our copy of Love Does
• two sad, red balloons 
• a Sharpie

We sat on the rocks, poured coffee, prayed, ate our breakfast, read the last two chapters of Love Does, and chatted until it was time to start our normal mornings. 

And There Were Balloons

We brought out the red balloons for our caper's grand finale. We wrote “Love Does” on one side and “The Kingdom of Heaven is near” on the other. While the latter seems like a creepy, End-Times-cultish thing to write, it is merely a joke about current relationship statuses (i.e. whenever people say things like “I feel like your time is coming soon” in relation to getting married, I think about passages in the New Testament that say Jesus is coming soon. Yes, that was more than 2000 years ago.). 

The balloons were supposed to add just a touch of whimsy to the morning. But due to their sad, deflated state, when we released them on the count of three, they just sort of...tumbled to the next layer of rocks below. 

So we packed up, left our strange doomsday litter for confused joggers or playing children to find later, and made our way back down the hill. 

Even though we didn't catch the sunrise, our Via coffee was a little too bitter, and our balloons were more pathetic than whimsical, we were satisfied with our first caper. It was a little C+, but I'd like to think Bob Goff would be proud.

Deal or Ordeal? The House Sitting Edition

Are you ready to play Deal or Ordeal? Actually, you're probably playing already.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, stressed-out dogs and annoying cats, I'd like to introduce you to an astounding, life-altering game called Deal or Ordeal!

What is this game, you ask? This is a game of life, a game of making choices, anticipating outcomes, and ultimately winning or losing. In fact, you're probably playing it right now. 

Come again? 
Throughout the game, you are presented with various scenarios. You must maneuver through these scenarios, take correct action and ultimately identify each as either a Deal or an Ordeal. 

Ok, so what do you do? 
A round of play can begin at any moment: over your morning coffee, on your drive home from work, or upon receiving that cryptic 1:17 am text message.

The player is then presented with a scenario. Through a combination of conscientious choices and circumstances beyond the player's control, the player's scenario develops into either a Deal or an Ordeal. 

Ready for an example? 

Scenario 1
Free Couch on the Side of the Road: Deal or Ordeal? 

Deal: It's amazing! It's wonderful! It's free! Take it home and love it forever. 

Ordeal: It's amazing! It's wonderful! It's free! Call up that friend with a truck and convince him/her to help you move your amazing, wonderful, free couch. After transporting said free couch by way of borrowed truck, discover that you have to remove your front door to fit the unwieldy piece of furniture into the house. After much lifting, maneuvering, and angling, it turns out that your beloved free couch simply will not fit. Also, your friend with the truck curses your name and refuses to answer phone calls for the next four months. 

Great! I think you've caught on. This week's scenario is: 

Scenario 2
House Sitting: Deal or Ordeal? 

Deal: Getting paid to hang out, eat someone else's food, water some plants, and basically enjoy a stay-cation 2.3 miles from your own home. 

Ordeal: House sitting a passel of nervous, pooping animals who may or may not do the following: 

• Nearly bites the hand that feeds him. (Hamster) 
• Uses the laundry room sink as a personal bathroom. (Indoor Cat) 
• Uses the whole upstairs as a personal bathroom, multiple times. (Dog) 
• Travels from window to window, repeatedly batting at her own reflection. (Indoor Cat)
• Does the above at 2:00, 4:00 and 6:00 in the morning. (Indoor Cat) 
• Requires that the garage door be open just a crack. In the process of moving the door to the appropriate height, it apparently gets off its tracks, rendering the garage door opener useless. (Outdoor Cat/House Sitter) 
• Ate the other pet's predecessor and must be separated at all times. (Indoor Cat and Hamster) 
• Demands a litter box despite the fact that there are plenty of outdoor spaces at his disposal. (Outdoor Cat) 
• Jumps on the house sitter's face while she is trying to sleep. (Indoor Cat) 
• Weasels through every open door, disappears for a time, and eventually shows up again, preferably after the house sitter has fallen asleep, scratching at the door. (Indoor Cat) 
• Does not know how to eat celery properly. (Hamster) 
• Bats at the other cat's water bowl, causing the house sitter to spill the water, stumble into the garage, pull the door shut and lock herself out for the next 40 minutes. (Indoor Cat) 
• Stares at the frantic house sitter out the window as she feverishly tries removing screens and opening windows. (Indoor Cat and Dog) 
• Greets the house sitter (after she, wearing pajamas and no shoes, has found the one and only neighbor who answers the door at 8:15 on Saturday morning and sends her husband over to climb into an open second-story window) with her shoe in his mouth. (Dog)

On a happier note, the house sitter did enjoy an unlimited supply of Lucky Charms, as well as internet and laundry facilities and will be getting a nice check on Thursday. That's the thing about an ordeal; there's always a deal in there somewhere. 

C+ Budgeting (also, things we shouldn't say in church but want to)

This is Dave Ramsey. He wields giant scissors and likes to put his face on various products filled with good thoughts about being financially savvy.

Last year I dragged my friend Esther to a financial class at our church. If you are thinking, That is an incredibly nerdy and boring thing to do, you are somewhat correct. Let me explain. Esther has owned her own business. She is good with numbers, computers, equations- basically all the things that give me pause in my daily life. I was an English major. Dragging Esther to a financial class is actually a genius thing to do.

During the nine-week course, we started getting together to do our monthly budgets. These meetings consist of Esther carefully syncing her accounts with Mint and me blinking at my Excel spreadsheet, asking a lot of annoying questions. Esther, what exactly is an IRA? Esther, what's the deal with growth stock mutual funds? Esther, what kind of wine should I buy at Grocery Outlet? 

Over the last year we've added a few friends to the group, all hauling out our laptops once a month, eating brownies and drinking tea. In the fall, our little ragtag crew of good financial efforts will become an official community group at church, with a spot on the church website and possible onstage plug during a Sunday service. So this last week I hung out at Esther's house again to come up with a written description of our group. 

And then we needed a name.

Esther, I just can't think of anything more interesting than "Monthly Budgeting Meeting."

We started brainstorming. We needed something that encapsulated the group's casual tone and something to do with budgeting that didn't convey feelings of sudden onset narcolepsy. Interesting things happen when you have a 9:30 pm brainstorming session on a Monday evening. For example:

Rejected Budgeting Group Names

• The English Major's Guide to Finances
• Poor, But Not Broke
• Casual Joe's Guide to Financial Responsibility 
• Budgets R Us
• Budgets We Do
• The Poor Person's Guide to Budgeting 
• The Poor in Spirit 
• Inheriting the Earth 
• Let Them Eat Cake (And Do Budgeting)
• Intentional Budgeting (sounds like a disease) 

There were a lot of budgets and guides and poor and financial thrown around. And then, from the recesses of my tired, and slightly absurd mind, out slipped this gem: Broke Ass Budgeting.

Perfection. And, because I am secretly a 12-year-old boy who finds the word "ass" especially hilarious, I laughed until I cried. Then I imagined myself or Esther onstage, inviting people at church to Broke Ass Budgeting. I also imagine that this would become quite a popular community group. 

So that's the story of how Esther and I became the founding members of Broke Ass Budgeting. Unfortunately, for church website-related purposes, we will be calling our group Brownies and Budgeting. This is not nearly as fun as saying "ass" in church, but I suppose it gets the point across.