There’s no Mike in team

Last week, my buddy Oliver asked me to join his basketball team for a friendly scrimmage in the after-work league. I told him I needed some time to think about it. It’s been six years since I’ve run anywhere further than the toaster in our kitchen, and I only do that when there’s smoke billowing out of the door and we need to invite someone in a CSI jacket over to make a positive ID on our garlic bread. Besides, anyone who’s watched old guys playing sports knows that friendly games are only viewed that way by the team that’s about to lose.

My first experience with after-work leagues came about five years ago, when a coworker needed a ride to the field for his ultimate Frisbee game. After dropping him off, I decided to stay and watch. The players were actually quite good, and they didn’t seem at all deterred that were playing a sport designed primarily for dogs.

Towards the end of the game, some trash talking on the field degenerated into a fistfight that had to be broken up by the refs. It’s a good thing everyone left their laptops in their cars, or a briefcase-clearing brawl might have ensued. After watching grown men turn violent over a game of Frisbee, I decided that playing in the leagues could never top the entertainment value of spectating at them.

But I started to seriously consider Oliver’s offer a few evenings ago when I got winded retrieving the plastic barrel of cheese balls from the top shelf of the pantry. Also, an evening of playing basketball would have helped preemptively counteract the Girl Scout cookies that were due any day.

Of course, the Girl Scout and her mother stopped by to take orders on the Saturday that my wife Kara was out of town, and my buddy Derek and I were playing Assassin’s Creed at two in the afternoon, still wearing our bedheads and pajama pants, sitting on the couch in full view of the window by the front door. If the Girl Scout had been a velociraptor, maybe we could have fooled her by remaining motionless, which was pretty much what we were doing anyway.

At least the best Girl Scout cookies, the ones with coconut waxed on, only have about three in a box, so they can’t be that bad for you. The rest of the box is occupied by plastic spacers that are wide enough to separate tractor tires. I don’t know what would happen if those cookies touched each other, but judging from the security measures that have been put in place, it must be something akin to what happens in Star Trek when there’s a breach in the antimatter containment field.

Unfortunately, I had no choice but to greet our neighbors unshaven and unshowered, hopefully ordering enough cookies to compensate for my appearance. In an ideal world, when they come back by to drop the cookies off, my pants won’t have penguins on them. In any event, it’s time to alarm the end of the driveway so I at least have time to put on a hoody.

Given those circumstances, I decided to go ahead and play ball with Oliver’s team. We were about thirty seconds into the game when I realized my mistake. These were the guys who MADE the team in high school, even if some of them had done so before the invention of the internal combustion engine.

I learned that night that old, short and bald guys (with ponytails, somehow) who had only minutes before been smoking by the door to the gym can very easily still be way better at basketball than you. And by you I mean me.

On a breakaway about halfway through the game, one guy from the other team dunked. It wasn’t like he just barely made it, either. It looked like one of the slow-mo dunks from the old Nintendo game Double Dribble, but with better graphics.

At least I’ll have my three Samoas soon with which to console myself.

You can alley Mike Todd’s oop at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Parental units on the fritz

As I was speaking with my buddy Josh on the phone yesterday, his pregnant wife Jaime came home.

“Jaime says ‘hi’,” he said.

“Say ‘hello’ to Jaime and her stomach for me,” I said.

“Mike says ‘hi’ to your stomach,” he said. But that didn’t sound quite right, like I was medically confused about her condition.

“Well, actually, I guess you should say ‘hi’ to her uterus,” I offered, waiting in silence as he demurred on passing that message along.

The reader(s) of this column may recall that when last we saw Josh and Jaime, they had decided on having a pug instead of a baby. Turns out, there’s room in their lives for two drooling, incontinent creatures.

Since acquiring their pug Lou last year (eschewing my much-more-masculine name suggestion, “Pug-of-War”), Josh has spent the better part of his life standing in their backyard, saying, “Go potty, Lou!” with levels of enthusiasm and encouragement that have surely prepared him for the little league bleachers. Incidentally, saying “Go potty, Lou!” when the pug is standing on their freshly installed carpet gives his owners more wings than a whole case of Red Bull.

“Are you ready for the baby, man?” I asked him on the phone.

Specifically, I was wondering if he was ready for the more unpalatable aspects of child rearing. I remember my parents talking about changing my diapers before they had become accustomed to the singular challenges that come along with changing a baby boy. If left naked and face up on the kitchen counter, for instance, baby boys predictably imitate their favorite geysers. Thinking of this story the last time I hung around with my friends who were changing their baby boy, I regarded the child with the same caution you might use to approach a Roman candle that had failed to ignite.

Josh replied, “Remember how we used to have twenty-page papers in college that we wouldn’t even think about until three days before they were due? That’s how I’m handling this, too.”

Even though all the excuses in the world won’t help negotiate an extension on this particular due date, Josh and Jaime wouldn’t need one anyway. They’ll be excellent parents. Their baby is only in its second trimester and it’s already reading at a third-trimester level.

Now that my wife Kara and I are entering our late twenties and early thirties (respectively, unfortunately), we’re beginning to see a clear line between our friends who have decided to start families and those who have decided that they need another decade or two to think about it.

Those who have decided to wait should probably start stocking up on the energy drinks now. Hanging out with a house full of in-laws last weekend, I was amazed at how quickly some of the kids had gone from Fillers of Detachable Car Seats into Little Humans with Personalities and Inexhaustible Reserves of Energy.

“You can’t get me!” our little cousin Sophie yelled while running around a single bush in the front yard for three hours straight.

Every now and again, the game would reverse, and whichever adult was next in the rotation (we worked in five-minute shifts) would become the target.

“I’m gonna get you!” Sophie would yell. Then she’d take about four steps in the running adult’s direction and say, “Hey, stop!” After complying with this directive, the adult would get gotten.

Explaining the inequity of the rules for this game did little to quell Sophie’s enthusiasm for it. Her little legs never stopped churning. One by one, the adults retired to the basement, feigning interest in the basketball game on TV long enough to attempt a quick nap, blissfully unaware that their status as ungotten individuals was soon to be revoked.

You can swaddle Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

A wife with all the trimmings

Last Saturday night, as my wife Kara approached me with the trimmer buzzing in her hand, I began to have some serious second thoughts.

“Are you sure you can do this?” I asked again.

“How hard can it be?” she said. “Now sit still.”

She was about to give me the first free haircut I’d had since college. Back then, my buddy Tim used to give free haircuts on Saturday mornings, which usually began just before dusk. Tim could easily cut twenty heads in one session, though he only ever gave one haircut. We all looked exactly the same, which was fine by us. A free haircut was a free haircut, even if it came with more verbal abuse than one would receive at a paying establishment.

“Man, you’re starting to thin out,” Tim would say. “Better get married young if you can.”

Tim’s military consistency meant we never had to go to the barber shop down the street, where the barber had hung a price list on the wall that included this item: “Fix Me Man, $5.00.”

A friend of mine inquired one day about what exactly constituted a Fix Me Man.

The barber replied, “It’s when your roommate tries to cut your hair, then you come in here and say, ‘Fix me, Man!’”

My thoughts drifted to the Fix Me Man as Kara closed in with the trimmers.

“Here we go!” she said as she made contact with the back of my head. A clump of hair fell onto my shoulder; the Rubicon had been crossed with Kara cavalierly plunging in.

We’d embarked on this adventure without really planning to do so. The sideburn trimmer I’d bought for fifteen bucks came with all the attachments to cut a whole head, so we started joking that Kara could be my barber. Then all of a sudden I was sitting on a stool in the bathroom with a tarp on the floor, which we’d spread out to catch any falling hair and blood spatters.

I wouldn’t have been so amenable to the idea if I hadn’t had the experience of trying out a new upscale barbershop about a month prior. I should have known something was awry when I saw the flatscreen TVs mounted on the wall and the sinks in the corner. Real barbershops have dusty radios with bad reception tuned to sports talk, and they certainly don’t have sinks, except maybe in the bathroom that you’re not allowed to use.

Halfway through the cut, the barber asked, “Would you like your eyebrows trimmed?”

Never having been asked this question before, I wasn’t sure whether the appropriate response was, “No,” or “God, no.” I’ve known guys who have spent a lot of time on their eyebrows before, and the result is always a little disconcerting. When it comes to eyebrows, I think most people could benefit from this guiding principle: If you have two, that’ll do.

The bill for the cut came out to $25, which is as close to John Edwards territory as I ever plan to get. Kara didn’t think that sounded like too much, but that’s coming from someone who gets her hair cut once a lunar eclipse.

So that’s how I came to be sitting on the stool in the bathroom as Kara orbited me, alternating between the scissors and the trimmers and mumbling quietly, “That’ll probably grow out.”

As far as I know, the last head of hair Kara had styled belonged to her childhood doll Baby, which, from the pictures, looked like one of the bad kid’s toys from Toy Story. As she snipped across my bangs, I’d already begun mentally composing a letter to Salman Rushdie asking for tips on laying low for a while.

The final result, though, actually came out looking pretty good, surprising us both. But I’m still waiting for my lollipop.

You can take a little off Mike Todd’s top at mikectodd@gmail.com.

My bobo and the honking thereof, part II

Proving once again that they don't read the submissions that editors send in, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association just awarded Just Humor Me the 2008 first place Keystone Press Award for Most Bitchin' Column in Division VIII, which is Roman for Division Awesome.

The graphics dude who made the little ribbon I used when I won the same award in 2006 doesn't work at the paper anymore, so I worked a little magic on it myself:

Thanks to everyone who visits this site to encourage me even when the column sucks, as it is prone to do from time to time, such as weekly. You all are the coolest and you kept me writing this thing even when I'd rather have been shooting zombies in the face, which was always. Not that the world would have exploded if I'd have quit, but thank you nonetheless. Your support is appreciated more than you know.

And not only do I get to post that awesome ribbon graphic again, but I also get this kickass PDF with my very own name somewhere on it. I'd better print that out and bronze it before they fix the glitch that allowed this travesty.

All pets, no peeves

Now that we’ve settled into our new house and my wife Kara no longer needs to send me links to websites featuring potential homes in which we could spend many years amassing positive memories and negative equity, she has turned her attention to websites featuring potential pets that could spend many years shedding on our sweaters.

Kara has heard the Call of the Domestic. She sends me emails with links to pictures of puppies on Petfinder.com, adding her own editorial comments like, “Aren’t they sooo cute?” and, “Check out these puppies!”

And of course they are cute. But certain recent cultural trends have made prospective dog ownership less appealing to me, namely those trends that involve plastic baggies and steam of unappealing origins. If you’re already a parent, there’s nothing about dog ownership to make you queasy. What haven’t you already had to touch with your bare hands? But people like me sit around wondering if it might be possible to train a dog to do its business on some sort of catapult or trebuchet-type device.

I actually can’t wait to have a dog around the house, my aversions to their byproducts notwithstanding. The real opponent to such a household addition is our ferret Chopper, who is an old man by varmint standards. We’re quickly closing in on the seventh year since he declared sole authority to relieve himself upon our carpets. His favorite pastimes are sleeping twenty-two hours a day and, presumably, not having his head stepped on by a galloping puppy on its way to gnawing the stuffing out of the couch.

As crotchety as Chopper has become, he still enjoys coming home after being boarded (most graciously) at my folks’ improvised weasel kennel. Upon returning with him from vacation a couple of weeks ago, Kara and I let him loose in the hallway to watch him take his traditional romp around the house. As I followed him into our bedroom, I flipped on the light to find a nasty surprise waiting for me.

“Babe, our bedroom’s been ransacked!” I yelled, looking at our things strewn all over the floor.

She came running down the hall and looked in. “No, that’s just how you left it,” she said. Then I remembered flying into a frenzy trying to find my good headphones before we left, a fruitless quest that resulted in the contents of my dresser drawers swirling around the room, a maneuver that didn’t help to find the headphones but still offered some therapeutic value.

Chopper prefers our house slightly on the disheveled side anyway, especially if there are some choice sweatshirts on the floor for him to sleep in. My slovenliness is really just an effort to create artificial animal habitats, like when they sink a ship offshore.

I wonder how things would have turned out differently all those years ago if Kara had let me get a fish tank instead of a ferret. She insisted a ferret would be more fun, and I eventually caved because I figured the two were pretty close, alphabetically.

After finding out more about what goes into fish tank maintenance, I’m glad Kara saved me from that fate. Our buddy Jon recently exclaimed over dinner, “I got a fish tank!”

But Jon doesn’t have a fish tank. He has a water tank. It may become a fish tank at some point in the future, but right now he just has a giant rectangular water cooler with no spigot. Parents spend less time preparing your average nursery than Jon has spent preparing this water tank.

“Well, first you have to grow bacteria in the water,” he explained. “The bacteria eat the ammonia and turn it into nitrites. Then a different bacteria eats lead and turns it into gold.”

Or something like that. I lost track halfway though his explanation, wondering why he didn’t try an easier hobby, like collecting coins or defusing land mines.

You can curb Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The language of third-row seating

**Note: I smacked some of our Costa Rica pics throughout this column, even though they have squat to do with the content. I hope that's cool.**

One of the tour guides on our vacation in Costa Rica two weeks ago explained that she wanted to learn French because, “Spanish is for my friends, English is for business, but French, French is for love.”English is for business? Since when did English become German? “English is for business” makes it sound so utilitarian, like we have to be careful when we talk or a minivan might fall out. Still, I was impressed with how casually she switched back and forth between languages, and how she spoke of picking up a third language like it would take about as much effort as picking up a pizza on the way home.

“How long have you been speaking English?” I asked her.

“Seven months,” she said.

I cringed. After the five years of Spanish classes I’ve taken in my life, I still couldn’t ask for directions to the bathroom without accidentally propositioning someone. To be fair, those classes were over ten years ago. I also can’t balance a chemical equation anymore or tell you the derivative of tangent(x). I’m getting dumber, is my point.

It’s very difficult to remain in the closet when you’re a homolingual traveling around a country that doesn’t generally speak your language. My attempts to speak Spanish reminded me of playing the game Taboo, in which you have to get someone to guess a word by giving them roundabout clues.

“Tonight, we like to eat the food after dinner,” I might say.

“Dessert?” the waiter would guess.

“Yes! We just scored a point!” I’d say.

Some of the natives spoke a language so universal that no pocket dictionary was necessary. On our third night there, at about one in the morning, we became introduced to the car alarm bird, a creature whose call perfectly mimicked a vehicular security device in every way except for our ability to ignore it.

“ooEEEEEoooo!” the bird said, repeatedly.

“I can’t take this,” my wife Kara mumbled. “I’m going to try listening to the iPod to drown it out.”

We were staying near the Arenal Volcano, a geologic feature that is, from what I hear, pretty neat looking. I can’t vouch for whether or not this volcano actually exists, as both of our days there were filled with rain and low-hanging clouds. Still, as much as I’m tempted to, I won’t whine about missing out on the sight of it. Going to the rainforest and complaining about the rain is like going to a NASCAR race and complaining about the mullets. We knew what we were getting into.

After twenty minutes, Kara ripped the headphones out of her ears. “That’s just not working,” she said. “This is how the Norah Jones song goes now: ‘Come away with me, in the ooEEEEEEoooo! Come away with me, and I’ll never stop ooEEEEEEEooooo!’”

“Try putting a pillow over your head,” I suggested.

“How about you go out there and put a pillow over the bird?” she asked.

Realizing the futility of attempting to sleep with the car alarm bird going off outside and Kara tossing and turning inside, I put on my shoes and wandered around in the small meadow behind the hotel, armed with a flashlight in one hand and a few small rocks from the parking lot in the other. Turned out, the sounds we’d attributed to the car alarm bird were actually coming from a jaguar, which I didn’t realize until the beam of my flashlight landed on its eyes. Not really, but that would be a much more exciting climax to the story. The real story ends with me winging a few rocks at a tree in the rainforest in the middle of the night, something sane people generally shy away from doing, though it did seem to have the intended effect.

I came back into the room saying, “I return triumphant! I showed that bird who was…”

“ooEEEEEEEooooo!”

You can put a pillow over Mike Todd’s head at mikectodd@gmail.com.

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.