When Central America doesn’t mean Iowa

After we sold our house at the end of last year, my wife Kara and I decided that, since we’d spent the past six months living on Ramen noodles and cereal that came in two-pound plastic bags with names like “Frosted Little Wheats” and “Sergeant Crunch,” we should treat ourselves to an adventure that didn’t involve closing costs and near-constant rejection.

“What about Ireland?” I suggested. The people there always seemed so clean and cheerful, at least in the Irish Spring commercials.

“We’d have to wait until May for the weather to turn around. We’ll be too old by then. What about a cruise?” she said.

“Cruises don’t really scream ‘adventure’ to me, unless you get on one that shows up on the news,” I said. “And then it might be too much adventure.”

We continued this process of narrowing down, tossing out ideas for countries that were warm, traveler-friendly and not currently putting on a revolution. And so it was that we found ourselves at a car rental desk at the Juan Santamaria Airport in San Jose, Costa Rica last week, at least 500 miles from anywhere either of us had ever been, following a trail blazed by the three bazillion American tourists who had come before us.

The man behind the desk pointed into the heavily trafficked street outside the window. “After the first stop sign, you have to stop twice more, but those are not marked.”

“So how I do know when to stop?” I asked.

“Common sense,” he said.

I turned to Kara. “Dude, if we’re going to need common sense to get around here, you’d better stay awake.”

The man behind the desk continued, “If you have to turn off the main road, which you probably will because of the construction, count the blocks so you can get back to it later.”

After waiting a moment for the “just kidding” that never came, I asked, “What’s the main road called?”

“It doesn’t really have a name,” he replied.

This was our first indication that navigation in Costa Rica would provide much of the adventure we had been seeking. Roads may very well have names there, but if so, they are a national secret guarded so closely that even Nicolas Cage and his toupee wouldn’t be able to piece them together. We soon discovered that getting to any destination correctly was a culmination of at least a dozen correct guesses, with each guess preceded by brief, heated rounds of debate and wild, usually opposing gesticulation.

As we blended into the stream of traffic for the first time, we were immediately struck by the chaotic but seamless coexistence of pedestrians, bicyclists, mopeds, delivery trucks, cars and dogs as they slowly made their way down the street. It was like we’d accidentally joined a parade.

After we cleared the city, the roads became so steep and curvy that you had to be careful not to rear-end yourself. Slowly climbing the switchbacks as dusk began to settle with the view of city lights opening up below, we watched in amazement as a moped came careening towards us in the opposite lane, doing at least 50 with the rider using only one hand for steering. He passed by us very quickly, so I can’t be entirely sure that my eyes weren’t playing tricks, but I swear he was doing something I’d never seen before on a moped.

“Did you see what that guy was doing?” I asked Kara.

“No, what?” she said.

“I swear to you, that guy was texting,” I said.

I can’t imagine what could be so important that you’d have to text somebody on your cell phone as you sped down a gravelly mountain road on a motorbike at twilight. Perhaps something like: “Goodbye cruel world. C u l8r.”

You can scream adventure to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Quantify my love

I just popped a little gizmo from outbrain.com on this blog that allows the reader(s) to rate each post, under the assumption that my fragile ego will be able to handle the assault. This should help me figure out which columns to send to random editors when I'm in the mood for rejection.

The default star system goes from 1-5 (Bad, Boring, Okay, Good, Excellent). That seems like a tough grading scale to me. Excellent? This isn't the Economist. Let's use the following rating guidelines instead:

1 – The column came out of the screen like the girl in the Ring and ate my face off. (And also, please install a crippling virus on my computer.)
2 – The column outed me to my grandparents.
3 – The column made me watch that movie with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson.
4 – The column put the toilet paper roll on backwards.
5 – The column was legible.

Also, if you notice that every post already has a five-star rating when it's posted, it's probably just a glitch in the software. And if there are two five-star ratings every time, it's probably a glitch in my mom's software, too.

When the cat’s away, the mouse sits on the couch

When my wife Kara recently announced that she was planning a girls’ weekend in New York City with some of her friends, my thoughts immediately turned to the provisions I’d need to sustain myself in her absence, namely video games and Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips.

To those who might think that video games do not qualify as survival necessities, I submit the following story.

Kara’s good friend from college, who for the purposes of this column will be named Martha, once decided to seduce her college boyfriend. She bought lingerie and spent a bunch of time in the bathroom doing, I don’t know, whatever girls do in there to make themselves look better in their own minds when they look perfectly good already.

When she slinked into the living room to suggest her ideas for the evening’s itinerary, her boyfriend didn’t look up from the TV screen.

“Not now,” he said, mashing the buttons on the controller. “I’m in the middle of a really good part.”

After some more discussion that really could have benefited from the application of the pause button, the evening ended with her exit from the apartment as he continued playing.

“I got turned down for sex because of a video game,” Martha complains whenever her long gone ex-boyfriend becomes the topic of conversation.

Upon hearing this story, every one of my guy friends has the same reaction. They’ll shake their head in disbelief, pause for a moment, then ask, “What game was he playing?”

When they ask this question, they’ll already be fishing in their pockets for their car keys, getting ready to roll through all the stop signs on the way to Best Buy. Surely, a game that good warrants at least a rental.

To anyone who worries that the current generation of young males is too obsessed with video games, may you at least take some solace in the fact that their chances of procreation are looking pretty slim.

Even though I’d miss Kara while she was gone, I was looking forward to getting some quality time with my much-neglected PlayStation 3. While some men may have taken offense at getting ditched by their wives for the weekend, I was glad that she’d have the opportunity to dance at a nightclub with her friends without involving me, potentially getting it out of her system.

In my life, I’ve seen maybe two guys who would qualify as good dancers and an equal number of girls who would qualify as bad dancers. The reason for the inequality is not immediately evident, but it’s my hypothesis that women have an extra hinge in there somewhere.

The objective for any male on the dance floor is to dance well enough to keep his partner (oh, please say there’s a partner) entertained, while blending enough to become invisible to everyone else. I’m 6’4” tall, which makes blending very difficult. When I’m dancing, I feel like one of those cell towers that’s been done up to look like a tree. Standing meters above all the other trees, I just keep saying, “See? I’m a tree, too. Please don’t look too closely.”

After Kara and her friends departed for the big city last weekend, a couple of my buddies came over for an Assassin’s Creed marathon. Sometimes we ordered pepperoni, sometimes we ordered half-pepperoni-half-plain. It’s important to have variety in your diet.

After one particularly gruesome kill, blood spraying all over the screen, my buddy Allen said, “So was Kara excited to get away for the weekend?”

“Yeah, but she was worried that her clutch didn’t match her outfit,” I replied.

“Her clutch?” he asked. I assume he was raising one eyebrow, though I didn’t press pause to look.

“It’s, uh, a little purse,” I replied, ashamed.

“Where I come from, a clutch is something that engages a transmission,” he said. That used to be where I came from, too.

You can do the Hustle with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Deflating Valentine’s Day

**Dear Internet -- I'm going all Jack Bauer and falling off the grid for a bit. I'll be back with a regular column next week. Until then, take care of all these electrons around here for me. Peace! We now return you to your regularly scheduled inane blathering.**

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, now might be a good time to turn to your significant other and say, “Baby, you’ve won the primary for my heart, and you’re polling very well for the general election.”

Or if you’re someone who doesn’t like professing your love on a particular day because Hallmark told you to, you can just buy heart-shaped stuff instead, which you’re going to have to do anyway. “Isn’t it enough to just give my love?” you may be thinking. No, no it is not. Take that love, go to the mall and convert it into something heart-shaped, chocolate or heart-shaped and chocolate.

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. Every year, my wife Kara and I agree that we’re not going to do anything special for Valentine’s Day, then she pounces on me with a heartfelt card or a bottle of cologne, at which point I say, “Oh, that’s so nice. Hey, is our milk bad? We need new milk. I’ll give you your present right after I get back.”

But this year, Kara’s not getting King Size Twizzlers for Valentine’s Day. I have no idea what she’s getting yet, but it won’t be from a store that sells prophylactics in the bathroom.

I recently resolved to be more romantic after we spent the weekend at a friend’s apartment for her birthday celebration. We’d never met most of the other people who gathered there that Saturday night. After everyone performed the mandatory shoe removal, the conversation turned to socks, prompted largely by Kara’s jack-o-lantern socks that she hadn’t intended to flaunt.

Another girl sitting on the couch held up her colorful socks for inspection, at which point her apparent boyfriend said, “Hey, those are nice!” as he grabbed her feet and commenced giving her a tickle torture, an interrogation technique that hardly ever yields credible information.

She laughed and kicked, and they collapsed in a cuddly puddle on the floor. It went on like that all weekend. They could usually be found standing in the center of the room, hugging, talking quietly and kissing. After a couple of hours with them, it hit me: these people must have met about three weeks ago.

“How long have you all been together?” I asked.

“Since around Thanksgiving,” she said. It was disconcerting to me that I already knew they hadn’t been together for long. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly; they just still had that new couple smell.

On Sunday morning, I deflated our new queen-size Aerobed to start packing it up, still marveling at how little beer the bed required to give a comfortable night’s sleep.

“Did you read the instruction manual?” Kara asked.

“The instruction manual? It’s an air bed, not a model rocket.”

“If might get a hole in it if you fold it up wrong,” she said. I continued folding it incorrectly, working faster as Kara fished the instruction manual out of the box.

It was a classic dispute between labor and management. I considered going on strike, but the only other room in the apartment contained the new couple, giggling and giving each other massages.

Of course, in the end, it was ten times easier to fold up the bed according to the manual. After almost eight years of being together, I should know by now that we get the best results when we’re working as a team, though I suspect, on our team, we both know who’s wearing the whistle.

In any event, I hope that the new guy is smart enough to at least splurge on the King Size this Valentine’s Day. And if they’re still enjoying themselves as much as we are after eight years, they’ll have plenty to keep on giggling about, even if he’d rather curl up with a good norovirus than read a than an instruction manual.

You can bite a chocolate and stick it back in the box at mikectodd@gmail.com.

To everything, a Turnpike

My buddy from New Jersey once complained that everyone thinks of the Garden State as just a big turnpike. “It’s not all toll booths and smokestacks,” he said. I agreed, noting that there is also the Molly Pitcher Service Area, where one can rub elbows with one’s fellow motorists, especially and unfortunately if the men’s room is crowded.

While everyone knows full well that New Jersey is chock full of beautiful places, it’s hard to ignore the importance of the Turnpike. While my buddy deplores the NJTP as the unofficial mascot of his state, the first question he asks when he meets somebody else from New Jersey is, “What exit are you from?”

I thought of this last weekend, as my wife Kara and I drove through Jersey en route to a friend’s birthday party. Our GPS unit, Jill, kept trying to steer us onto the Turnpike, her voice growing irritated with our continued refusals to comply.

“Recalculating,” she’d say after we blew past one of her suggested routes. Determined to put us on the Turnpike, I swear her voice started sounding snippy. “My algorithms were programmed by a team of engineers with advanced degrees, but you probably know the better way. Knock yourself out.”

Jill doesn’t know how good she has it. Kara completely coddles her, refusing to leave her alone in the car even if we’ll be back in a minute.

“Babe, we can leave a window cracked,” I tell her.

“It’s so nobody steals it!” she says. Sure it is. I’m starting to worry that Kara is going to switch Jill’s voice to Bruce, the Australian male, and run off to Sydney with him, though he’d probably insist that they take the Turnpike.

As we drove through the state, I noticed that the “wipers on, lights on” rule is especially well-documented in New Jersey. These signs don’t do much for me in the way of a reminder, as Toyota no longer allows drivers the ability to turn their headlights off in the first place. My headlights, like Law and Order reruns, are always on.

I’m glad that this safety innovation took place after I got through high school, as sneaking back home at four in the morning with the headlights blazing through my parents’ bedroom window might have been an insurmountable challenge, though pushing the car up the driveway every Saturday night might have been a workout regimen that I could have actually stuck with.

Even with the “car on, lights on” policy, Toyota still gives you a headlight switch on the multifunction knob, which is basically the vehicular equivalent of a Neuticle, the silicon implants that fake a dog into thinking it hasn’t been neutered. The switch makes you feel like you still have all the old functions that you’re used to having, but that’s actually its only purpose. The rigging’s all there, but it’s not connected to the mast.

Incidentally, in researching this column, I discovered that a single large Neuticle costs $79. If you’re going to go that far, though, you might as well spring for the pair at $129. That’s a savings of $50 on the second Neuticle, which can then be applied to some desperately needed therapy.

Speaking of being stripped of one’s manhood, it amazes me still that I am still not allowed to operate a gas pump in New Jersey. That’s the one car-related thing I actually know how to do, and the state has taken it away from me. Next, it’s going to come into our houses and open all the pickle jars for us, rendering people like me completely useless. How does that law stay on the books? It must have something to do with the powerful orange reflector vest lobby.

You can push Mike Todd into your cranberry bog at mikectodd@gmail..com.

Stripping isn’t for everyone

After spending the past week stripping wallpaper from our kitchen, I have become something of an involuntary expert on the subject. If you’re considering taking on such a project, the best advice I can offer is to throw out all your old scrapers, scorers and steamers. You’d be surprised how much easier it is when you decide to just douse the wallpaper with kerosene, set it ablaze and rebuild.

Of course, you may decide you’d rather do things the hard way, actually removing the wallpaper without destroying the house around it. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. People will tell you wild stories, passed down through the generations, of wallpaper that just pulls off, like you’re unpeeling a giant floral banana. This type of wallpaper probably exists in places where the streets are paved with gumdrops, but in the real world, the average sheet of wallpaper has been applied with more paste than resides in the collective digestive system of our nation’s kindergartners.

We should have known what we were getting into. A few years ago, we rented a steamer from Home Depot to remove some small pink borders in our old house, thinking that, worst case, it would take about an hour to take them all down. We slid head first into the rental department twenty-four hours later, exhausted and totally steamed.

Maybe we felt cocky this time around because we had our very own steamer. Turns out that, while it costs about forty bucks to rent a steamer for the day, you can buy one outright for fifty. Also, buying two four-piece McNuggets off the dollar menu is cheaper than buying a single six-piece. I’m afraid I just told you everything useful I’ve ever learned.

Before steaming a wall, you have to go over every inch with a scoring tool that pokes tiny holes in the paper. Never has so much scoring produced so little fun. But at least my wife Kara bribed me with food to get the job done. “I’ll cook if you strip,” she said. I rarely get solicited to strip, so I immediately set about stripping harder than I’ve ever stripped before.

Our steamer had this orange label stuck to it: “WARNING: This machine produces live steam and/or scalding hot water which could cause severe bodily injury.” I think it should have been a guarantee instead of a warning. After I started attempting to take the wallpaper down, I realized that I was really giving myself the third degree. The third-degree burns, I mean. I’m pretty sure that my wedding ring is now soldered to my finger.

When I mentioned this to some of my married friends, I found out that other guys take their rings off when they’re performing manual labor. That seems like it’s breaking a sacred trust. You should only take your wedding ring off when it’s absolutely necessary, like when you want to spin it like a top on a restaurant table or flip it like a coin as you walk over a storm drain.

My buddy Allen explained to me that he never takes his ring off because, “If you wear through your wedding band, that means you’re free.”

I don’t know about that, but I do know that it’s probably a whole lot easier to just decide that you like having a million repeating berries and flowers plastered around your kitchen than to actually do something about it. Why anyone has put up wallpaper since the invention of paint, I just can’t understand.

But somewhere, somebody is putting up wallpaper right now, hopefully not in a place that you or I will ever live. For every sheet that comes down, one must go up. It’s required to keep the universe in balance.

You can steam Mike Todd off your walls at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Can’t get there from here

When you ask my dad for directions, he’s likely to respond with something like, “Oh, that’s seven miles southeast of here,” as he points towards the living room wall. What you are then to do with this information, I’m not exactly sure. I suppose it would depend on whether or not you remembered to grab the sextant when you came in off of your frigate.

My wife Kara and I won’t be bothering him or anyone else for directions anytime soon, though, now that we have Jill in our lives. Her arrival in our household marked an abrupt close to the era of asking for directions. She is the voice of American Accent (female) on the GPS unit that Santa-in-law gave to us. If you’re not familiar with GPS devices, just watch the Super Bowl commercials this year and you’ll be all caught up. A little bit dumber, but all caught up.

We chose Jill out of a list of several accents and genders. We originally thought we’d stick with Daniel, the British male voice. Right after Christmas, we drove around with Kara’s sister Sarah and her boyfriend Brad in the backseat while Daniel calmly guided us along.

“This is awesome,” Brad said. “I feel like I’m Batman and Alfred’s up there telling me where to go.”

There is something upper-crusty about having a British guy giving you directions, like you’re driving to a place where meals are served under big metal doohickeys. Unfortunately for Daniel, he was programmed to say “R.T.” instead of “route,” and he couldn’t tell the difference between an “I” and a “1,” which made him less than ideal as a guide for dispensing our particular dark brand of vigilante justice.

As Brad looked through the list of available accents, he said, “Too bad they don’t have any fun accents in here, like a drunken Irish dude or James Earl Jones.”

I pictured a family in a minivan driving down a quiet country road as their GPS unit suddenly barked, “Oy! Turn lef’, ya bloody wankah!”

Still, maybe Brad was onto something with the James Earl Jones suggestion. Who wouldn’t like to take a road trip with James Earl Jones? Also, if you called him James Jones, would anybody know who you were talking about? It would be like saying John Booth or Kermit Frog.

I’m a big fan of James Earl Jones, despite being wronged by him a decade ago. When I was a student at Penn State, he came on campus as part of a Distinguished Speakers tour. I went with some of my friends to see him in the packed auditorium. It was surreal to hear the first few words out of his mouth, like we were all starring in a movie that he was narrating.

Then he proceeded to give a canned speech on giving more money to the arts that I’m pretty sure he downloaded off the internet. As the novelty of hearing his voice wore off, the only thing one could do to stay awake was to picture him in his role as Thulsa Doom, evil tyrant and beheader of Conan the Barbarian’s mom.

At the end of his speech, he allowed time for a short Q&A. A brave student walked up to the microphone in the aisle and asked, “Could you say ‘Luke, I am your father’ for us?”

We all leaned forward in our seats in anticipation. James Earl Jones hesitated for a moment and then said, “Oh, you could do it better than me,” before moving along to the next, much more boring, question. The curtain behind him billowed with the disappointed exhales of a thousand college students.

Regardless, it would be really cool to have him tell me the fastest way to the mall. I can just imagine how awesome it would sound to turn on the car and hear him say, “It’s seven miles southeast of here.

You can tell Mike Todd where to go at mikectodd@gmail.com.

When a house becomes an igloo

The day before guests were set to start arriving for the biggest party we’d ever attempted to throw, my wife Kara and I came home to find our first floor entirely without heat. Apparently, we had done something to anger the universe, like not inviting it.

“What’s the thermostat set to?” Kara asked, casting a suspicious eye on me as she hugged her jacket tighter. I have been known, on occasion, to turn down the heat without the express written consent of other parties in the house, parties who think that a heating system should regularly be cranked up to such a degree that it can perform other duties, such as browning potatoes on the kitchen counter.

“I swear, it wasn’t me this time,” I said, looking at the display panel on the thermostat. It was registering 49 degrees, a temperature perfect for preserving meat but not marital relations.

I pulled together all of my knowledge about heating, cooling and refrigeration systems to perform a complicated diagnostic procedure known in the business as “flicking the thermostat and cussing.” After that, the only thing left to do was shrug, cuss a little bit more and call a professional.

I’m always a little hesitant to call in for backup. Contractors can pretty much do anything they want once they’re invited into your home, like old college friends and vampires. But this was an emergency, and we were feeling fortunate to have a cavalry to call.

As we waited for the repair van to show up, icicles began to form on our vast collection of remote controls, each of which has exactly two buttons that we ever actually press. The temperature continued to drop. Packs of wolves tracked elk across our couch. While we had been intending to vacuum the entire house just before the party, it was becoming increasingly evident that we’d need a Zamboni instead.

After the contractor showed up and poked around for a few minutes, he used his best funeral director voice to inform us that we probably had a frozen pipe in our baseboard system.

“I expect there’s already some damage. We’ll have to get in there and warm up the pipes individually to flush out the blockage. It’s 600 dollars for the first two hours, 250 for each hour after that,” he said. “And we’ll probably have to cut into your walls.”

A single tear froze on my cheek. But without switching to a heating system based on whale blubber, we saw few other options. As the contractor and his crew worked in the basement, I went back to cleaning while Kara chopped vegetables in the kitchen with her jacket on.

Few things in life are universal, but it’s a pretty fair indication that good things are not happening when a contractor working in your basement comes running up the stairs and barreling through your kitchen, yelling, “Follow me and bring towels!”

The blockage and corresponding burst pipe had been in our laundry room. When the pipe was heated up and the ice melted, gallons of water poured onto the floor, down the wall and into the basement. As we ran into the laundry room to discover our newly installed (if somewhat shallow) indoor pool, a house spider surfed across the floor on a dryer sheet.

The water, having been enclosed in our heating system for quite some time, had a distinct aroma.

“It smells like asparagus pee,” Kara’s friend Curry, who had come early to help us get ready, observed as she draped towels over the mess. Fortunately for us, the cleanup went pretty smoothly. The contractors fixed the pipe in short order. We have yet to find out if our homeowners’ policy will cover any of the expense, but it has been my general observation that insurance doesn’t cover things that actually happen.

At least the heat was on before party time. Next time, we’re inviting the universe.

You can cuss and flick Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Beware the chocolate fountain

If we didn’t occasionally have guests over, our house would probably end up looking like one of the houses you see on the news about once a year, where police spend hours carrying out armloads of mangy-looking cats through the splintered front door after the neighbors report a horrible smell.

Of course, I’m exaggerating somewhat. Our house is unlikely to make the news without somehow being involved in the paternity of Britney’s sister’s baby. Still, I’m especially sensitive to how clean we can get the place before our friends start arriving this weekend.

Apparently, early January is the time to have a party. Everyone is just sitting around, trying to figure out how soon they can start pretending that their gym memberships have expired, waiting for an invitation. Several people we haven’t seen since our wedding three years ago accepted the invitation, and they’re not even going to get a nice meal out of it this time. We were counting on having a very low acceptance rate, but about triple the partygoers we expected have decided to matriculate.

The last time we had a party this big, it was really just a pre-party for the night’s main event, a show at local hotel ballroom put on by an X-rated hypnotist, a man whose livelihood depended almost entirely upon the willing suspension of disbelief and the ready availability of bananas.

This time, though, we do have one ace up our respective sleeves: the chocolate fountain we just borrowed from my parents. I’m a little anxious about using it without adult supervision, though. The last time my parents used the fountain, my friends offered to help clean it up afterwards. With the fountain almost entirely disassembled, my buddy Rob wanted to see what would happen if he turned it on again. The center piece spun around wildly, flinging gobs of chocolate indiscriminately about the kitchen. Those standing closest to Rob’s experiment looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger when he covered himself in mud so that the Predator couldn’t use infrared vision to find him.

Of course, I have no idea where we’ll put the fountain even if we do get it working. After perusing dining room sets, we decided we really didn’t want to afford one yet, so the dining room has been functioning as our trash room since we moved in. The trash room has turned out to be much more useful than a dining room anyway. I think trash rooms are the way of the future, like robotic dogs and Swiffer WetJets. Not many people know this, but Swiffer WetJets do not actually employ jet engine technology. Yet.

My parents have a trash room, too, though they call it the “storage room.” The storage rooms goes through its complete life cycle in about a decade; Dad will spend ten years filling it with karate pads and broken dehumidifiers, and Mom will spend a weekend throwing everything out. I don’t like it when the storage room is clean. It seems out of balance. It’s much more entertaining when you need a torch, a whip and a fedora hat to retrieve the hot tray. Besides, a trash room is nothing to be ashamed of. In college, I had an entire trash apartment.

You have to be careful how much junk you keep around, though. It’s a fine line between being a packrat and ending up on Oprah with the cameraman zooming in on verklempt audience members as the slideshow of your house rolls on.

At the very least, having a party is a good excuse to get the trash room cleaned out. And the party is likely to be a success as long as you don’t run out of game pieces, which is what my brother-in-law Chris calls bottles of beer.

“Can you get me another game piece?” he’ll say.

“A what?” people will ask.

“A game piece. For the game of Drink Beer,” he replies.

That sounds like a fun game. We’ll have to try it out this weekend, if we can’t find Scattergories in the trash room.

You can send your regrets (about reading this column) to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The Ghost of Christmas Presents

Like Ebenezer Scrooge, I’ve learned some important lessons this holiday season. For instance, if you see the back half of a good parking space at Home Depot on a Saturday, that’s because there’s a big orange shopping cart in the front half. I think I also learned something about caring for your fellow man by giving him a prize turkey, but I can’t recall the details.

This Christmas was much more relaxing than I’m used to, as my wife Kara has finally trained me to get our Christmas shopping done early enough to forego the usual ritual of calling stores on Christmas Eve to find out what time they close. That’s a bad feeling, walking through the mall frantically, knowing that you can’t leave without finding a present for some important family member, when suddenly the metal grates start to come down over the store entrances one-by-one, trapping you in the middle of the mall and narrowing your gift-giving options down to the Piercing Pagoda, the Verizon booth and Dippin’ Dots.

The Dippin’ Dots stand must be the saddest place in the mall, besides maybe the dark labyrinth of hallways leading to the restrooms. I’ve never seen anyone actually buying Dippin’ Dots. The sign reads, wishfully: “Dippin’ Dots: Ice Cream of the Future.” This sign hangs over the lone dude behind the register, who dutifully tries his best to stay awake, patiently waiting for the future to arrive. Every now and again, curiosity will get the better of me, and I’ll peer over the glass to see various vats of colorful beads. Each flavor looks, in its own special way, like the filling of a bean bag chair. Perhaps it’s due to my lack of business acumen, but it seems to me that ice cream is much more likely to be the Ice Cream of the Future.

Now that Christmas is over, it’ll be a while before I have a need to head back to the mall, though I think I might already be experiencing withdrawal. My eyes have become used to the twinkling displays of Christmas spirit, a spirit that can be measured in good will towards men and/or kilowatt-hours. And it’s tough to fight the urge to give my credit card to strangers, or to keep myself from walking on dawdling people’s heels, waiting for the cue from Kara to spring around either side of them and reunite on the far side. The worst part is knowing that I’ll have to wait a full three months before the Christmas displays are rolled back out.

While there are many things I’ll miss about the mall, I certainly won’t miss Kara saying, “Hold this. I’ll be back in a minute,” as she hands me her purse and disappears into the dressing room, ostensibly trying on clothes to make sure they’ll look good on somebody else. If I was a smart person, I’d run out at that moment and plant some corn by the shrubs at the mall entrance, entertaining myself with some subsistence farming as the seasons rolled by in her absence. After the harvest, I’d have plenty of time to sit back with some fresh corn on the cob, picking my teeth and pondering the continued existence of wool sweaters.

You never hear anybody say: “I love itchy wool sweaters. The more itch, the better. If you can’t find any itchy enough, just cut three holes in a burlap sack and give that to me for Christmas.” Yet the mall is filled with wool sweaters. Who is buying them? It’s almost like the stores think that wool is the Sweater of the Future.

In any event, it’s nice to slow down and spend time with family instead of throngs of shoppers, even though Kara and I end up driving all over the Eastern Seaboard to see everybody. During the holiday break, if you took a picture of me and Kara, we’d show up as animated red arrows stretching our way across a road atlas. Still, it beats being the Dippin’ Dots guy.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, you can still email Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Rubbing elbows, flossing noses

The bottom of the invitation to our neighbors’ Christmas party read like this: “We ask that each person please bring a fun activity to share: a joke, a song, a game, a skit, a story.”

Of course, my wife Kara and I figured that this part of the invitation didn’t really apply to us. We’re special. We also don’t feel like we should have to stop when new stop signs are installed. Once you’re used to driving on a road without stopping, you should be grandfathered in.

Instead, we decided to bring a bottle of wine, thinking that it could, in a stretch, count as a game. “It’s a little game we like to call ‘Social Lubrication,’” we’d say.

As we got up to leave for the party, I walked to the front door while Kara headed for the garage.

“You seriously want to drive there?” I asked. “We’re only going two houses up.”

“You’re not the one wearing heels. It’ll feel like three miles in these things,” she said. It’s true that her heels were tall enough that, had they been made of wood and hidden under flashy silk trousers, they would have been excellent props for a Cirque de Soleil performance. Unfortunately, neither one of us can juggle flaming objects, except for the occasional failed batch of garlic toast.

“But we haven’t even left yet. You could still put on shoes that allow you to wear them and walk at the same time,” I suggested.

Eventually, I “won” the discussion, but winning is a relative term when your wife is angrily clopping ahead of you down the driveway. Over the past few years of marriage, we’ve found that the important thing isn’t THAT you argue, but HOW you argue. We argue so well that we made up before we got to the mailbox.

The party turned out to be an intimate gathering of very friendly people, wonderful for getting to know our neighbors but terrible for hiding one’s lack of preparation. After a few minutes, the discussion turned to the activities everyone had brought, with the judges all agreeing that a bottle of wine was very thoughtful but that we’d have to come up with something else. Slowly, we began going around the circle, with Kara and I left to go last.

One couple brought a Christmas trivia game. Here’s one for you: “In the Little Drummer Boy, what kept time?” If you thought “a metronome,” too, it’s a good thing we weren’t on the same team. I still don’t understand how “ox and lamb” are supposed to be musically inclined, but that’s less surprising to me than the fact that somebody actually knew the answer.

The host of the party whipped out a banjo and played a medley of holiday songs from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. He played it like a pro, like he’d just come back from a gig played behind chicken wire.

I sat there wondering how I’d gotten to be thirty years old without developing a single useful talent. We didn’t have time for everyone to watch me play Elder Scrolls IV for five straight hours without taking a single bathroom break.

Kara and I had to come up with a party trick, and fast. I was imagining future conversations between our neighbors: “Whatever happened to that couple down the street?”

“Oh, you mean the talentless buffoons?”

I seriously considered the trick I’d seen on the Late Show where the guy snorted dental floss and brought it back through his mouth. Could a nasal floss be executed successfully on the first try? It seemed worth a shot.

In the end, we printed off one of my old columns and Kara performed a dramatic reading, which, despite the source material, she pulled off quite well, really nailing the “my wife Kara” parts and getting us both off the hook. In retrospect, they probably would have preferred the nasal floss.

Your email can jingle all the way to Mike Todd’s inbox at mikectodd@gmail.com.