“So, any big plans this weekend?” I asked the pretty brunette sitting across from me at a small West Hollywood restaurant.

“Nah, not really. Probably going out with the girls on Saturday night. Not sure where yet. I have some errands that I haven’t been able to get around to, so I need to do those. And then maybe I’ll try and squeeze in some Pilates.” She rested her chin on her hand.

“That seems to be the big craze these days,” I said, fiddling a bit with my dessert spoon. A light breeze blew in from the outside patio.

“Running errands? Yeah, it’s a pretty popular pastime.” She smiled at me and winked. A few of her curly brown locks fell beside her face. They almost glimmered in the early evening light.

I grinned back, trying desperately to think of something, anything. She was gorgeous and it was taking everything I had to force words out of my mouth. I covertly wiped my wet palms on my jeans.

“So… do you only do Pilates or do you do a traditional workout as well?”

Her eyes lit up. “Actually, yeah! I meet up with a trainer three times a week. His name’s Tony and he’s this ex-marine guy. Six-foot four and just huge.” She extended her arms out to emphasize Tony’s ‘hugeness’.

“He must be really good!” I said, taking a sip of my latte.

“Oh, he is! He totally punishes me.”

I set my cup back on the table. “Punishes you?”

“Oh, you know - screaming into my ear, calling me names, putting me down. All that stuff. He really goes to town and it just motivates me.” She smiled with perfect teeth as she lifted a small scoop of ice cream from her plate into her mouth.

“So…” I wanted to find a good way to word what I was going to say next.

No luck.

“You’re motivated by verbal abuse?”

“It just pushes me to do that little bit extra. You know what I mean?”

No. But I nodded and returned to sipping my coffee.

“I’ll be lying on the floor completely exhausted, absolutely sure I can’t do anymore, when he gets down right next to my face and yells,

‘Give me five more crunches you lazy whore!’”

The coffee went down my windpipe. I could feel the eyes of nearby diners glaring. I began coughing violently, struggling to breathe.

A sheepish grin crept across my date’s face. “Sorry, Mike. I get a little riled up when I start thinking about Tony’s routines.”

She scooped another dose of ice cream past her perfect teeth.

I was driving through Venice - windows down, Hey Jude blaring through my car speakers - and I got to thinking about how I was so very, very single. Gazing at the passing storefronts I began to wonder if there was a person out there somewhere just for me. My perfect match, my better half, my soul mate.

An aching pang of hunger struck me deep inside. I briefly misinterpreted this as a yearning for true love and lifelong companionship.

But then I thought,

“Is there such a thing as a Mexican restaurant soul mate?”

Is there a perfect hole-in-the-wall joint with rock bottom prices and high quality eats somewhere in Los Angeles just waiting to be found?

One that offers burritos the size of my arm that drip with cheese and enchilada sauce, burst with hearty slabs of chicken and come slathered in chunky guacamole and sour cream that is velvety smooth yet not watered down?

A place that sells horchata that cascades over my tongue with just the right amount of consistency and sweetness, providing the ideal amount of refreshment and hydration as I savor my arm-sized burrito?

That features salsa that is neither too thin nor chunky, allowing my free, perfectly salted appetizer chips to easily scoop generous amounts of it into my mouth?

A restaurant with the right combination of authenticity and cleanliness, but never too little of the former in service of the latter?

Is there such a place? Is it out there for me to discover?

If such a place does exist, I pledge the following:

Dear Perfect Mexican Restaurant,

Though we have yet to meet, I promise my unequivocal love and loyalty until the day I die, move away or you are closed under suspicious circumstances after a surprise raid by the INS. I will be with you through the good times and the bad, when I have too little money to buy one of your Super Burritos or when your sour cream tastes just a little too so.

I will visit you regularly, braving great distance, traffic and any guilt stemming from the abandoning of obligations I had that got in the way of us being together. I will nod even when I cannot understand your cashier, and I will forgive you if I receive the wrong dish because he misunderstood my frantic finger pointing and complete and total slaughtering of his native language. I will not be a jealous partner. Rather, I will share you with my friends, so that they may grow to appreciate and adore you in the way I know I will.

Through it all I will love you, I will cherish you and I will share with you my money, my time and my ever-deteriorating health. The only sin I shall commit is gluttony, but I believe this particular transgression is forgivable because, after all, you are a restaurant.

Always and forever yours,

Michael

My mom and dad tried to instill good eating habits in me from a very young age. Since I, like any other hyperactive three-year-old who instinctively craves sugar, preferred candy and sweets to broccoli and cucumbers, they did so by lying to my face.

If questioned (in a court of law, if I had any say), my folks would no doubt try and soften the charge. “We told a fib or two for the benefit of our young child’s health,” they’d probably claim. But who are you going to trust? The traumatized victim or the proven liars?

Their most infamous dupe of all time was convincing a young, so-gullible little Me that Ritz crackers were actually cookies. They would refer to them as such whenever I was within earshot, and whenever I’d ask for a cookie they’d simply hand me a Ritz cracker and send me on my way. This wasn’t too bad of a deal because I’ll be the first to admit - Ritz crackers are kind of The Shit. But who’s to say I wouldn’t have been just as addicted to chocolate chip cookies if I had only been exposed to them instead?

Do you see what they stole from me?

This despicable charade continued until I was about three years of age, when my mom made the fatal mistake of quickly stopping by the bakery of our local grocery store while I was in her shopping cart. The kindly old woman behind the counter spotted me and asked if I would like a free cookie. My mom must have cringed and no doubt muffled a few select curses when she heard that, fully realizing that her carefully fabricated illusion was about to come crashing down like the World Trade Center 1929 stock market.

(Yep, still too soon for 9/11 humor. Trying again in five years.)

I said I would absolutely LOVE a cookie, fully expecting a delicious, salty Ritz cracker. Imagine my surprise, confusion and complete disorientation when the woman instead handed me a sweet, perfectly warm chocolate chip cookie. I glanced down at said “cookie”, utterly perplexed. I then looked at the rows of similar-looking items atop the display counter, then up at the smiling old bakery lady and finally over at my now crimson-faced matriarch. It was like the final scene from The Usual Suspects and I was Officer Dave Kujan.

In the end I made a bit of a fuss, but really - how angry can a three-year-old be when he’s holding a freshly-baked cookie that’s absolutely bursting at the seams with semi-melted chocolate chip morsels?

Answer: Not very.

There was a woman at the gym today with inkblot sweat patterns. When she first got onto the elliptical machine in the row ahead of me there were two fairly large circles of sweat on her shoulder blades and one (and I don’t know how this works) donut-shaped sweat mark on the middle of her back. All together it looked like a surprised emoticon.

I zoned out for a little as I crosstrained, and when I looked back ten or fifteen minutes later the donut-shaped mark had filled in and expanded to a very large circle covering the entire middle portion of her back. The two circles on her shoulder blades had expanded upward and downward, transforming into ovals which now connected to the large circle below. A giant bunny rabbit’s head was now dominating the back of her shirt.

While that woman’s sweat was metamorphizing into different Rorschach patterns, the woman directly to my left was busy performing her own little personal Broadway dance routine. You know how you can kind of tell when someone near you is moving even if you can’t actually see them? Well I could feel her doing something on the machine next to me, so I glanced over to scope out the situation. Sure enough, she was striding along at a brisk! pace to what I can only imagine was a 1999 Jock Jams CD she had ripped onto her iPod nano.

You have two sets of handles to choose from when using the elliptical machine - an unmoving horizontal set directly in front of you that comes up about waist-high, and a set of vertical bars on the sides of the machine that move with the rhythm of your movement. This woman was taking advantage of neither option, opting instead to pump her arms at her sides. This works just fine on a treadmill. On the elliptical, because there is no impact, you appear as though you are running atop a field of clouds. Or cotton candy. Or fiber glass. I wish in this case it were fiber glass.

But wait! Lest we forget the jazz hands.

Some people choose to run with their hands balled up into fists. Others prefer the open-palmed method. You could say this woman was utilizing a “modified” version of the open-palm. Her hands were indeed open, but she was shaking them and twisting her wrists as if at any moment she might just jump off the machine, triumphantly throw her iPod to the ground and burst into a solo rendition of “And All That Jazz!”

I wanted to either

a.) Politely tap her on the shoulder and ask her to ” kindly stop because you are distracting me from my simulated no-impact crosstraining routine”

b.) Punch her on the shoulder and yell loudly over my iPod, her iPod, everyone else’s iPod, The Price is Right playing on five of the twenty nearby televisions, and The View playing on the remaining fifteen, “STOP WITH THE DAMN JAZZ HANDS! YOU’RE A HUNDRED YARDS PAST THE HILL YOU CLIMBED OVER TEN YEARS AGO, YOU’LL NEVER BREAK INTO SHOW BUSINESS WITH EPILEPTIC EXTREMITIES OH AND BY THE WAY YOUR CELLULITE IS SCARING THE CHILDREN.”

c.) Kill her and stash the body behind the vitamin display because no one ever buys vitamins at a gym because last time I checked thirty vitamins don’t cost sixty goddamn dollars.

By the time I had entertained option C to the satisfaction of my sadistic imagination, the sweat stains on the woman ahead of me had morphed into an animated GIF that was moving along jerkily to the awkward syncopations of Bob Barker’s bombastic barritone.

I had an enormous crush on a girl in my kindergarten class. She was beautiful and had laughter like sunshine and made me feel all mushy. I wanted to express my affection with a grand romantic gesture.

But before I continue, there’s something I need to get out of the way:

I never, ever believed in Cooties. From the start I knew they were a complete and total sham. There was absolutely no way such wonderful creatures could play host to such a horrific disease. If Cooties did exist, I reasoned it was something worth catching.

One more thing:

On the way to my very first day of elementary school, a woman stood out front greeting the incoming students. I saw her from across the parking lot - a picture of beauty with long golden locks – and was immediately enamored. My mom told me this woman was my new kindergarten teacher. As I approached, she crouched down so we were eye to eye.

“Well hello there! What’s your name?”

“Michael ______ ________.” I had a habit of introducing myself by my full name.

“Nice to meet you, Michael. My name is Ms. Williams.” She shook my hand.

At the tender age of five I had not yet become insecure and nervous around attractive members of the opposite sex. (Years of awkward pubescence and mandatory social rituals would see to that.) I blurted out the first thing that coalesced inside my swirling, spinning mind.

“I think you’re as pretty as a rose.”

So now we’ve established two important facts:

Fact 1: Although I played along and received a vaccination (“Circle circle, dot dot, now you’ve got a Cootie shot!”), I did not for one moment think that Cooties was a real, or at least very deadly, disease.

Fact 2: I was a hopeless romantic upon exiting the womb.

Our playground was a 40/60 combination of tanbark and blacktop. The two tanbark sections were connected by a very old-looking wooden bridge. You could get from one area to the other without using the bridge, but that’s not very fun.

The playground was also adjacent to a residential neighborhood, and as such there were two fences - a wooden one surrounding the respective backyards and a chain link fence encompassing our campus. Some of the yards had trees, and a couple of them leaned over into school territory. One such tree was adorned with flowers which happened to suit one six-year-old boy’s discerning romantic tastes perfectly.

After assessing the situation I decided that my best route to the flowers was via the bridge. It was a fool-proof plan: I would climb atop the bridge’s four-foot-high railing, lean towards the fence, stretch out my arm and snatch the nearest flower to give to my dream girl.

Ah, the logic of a smitten six-year-old. I never once thought what might happen if I were to fall.

And oh, did I fall.

My fingertips were barely touching flower petals when I lost my balance and toppled downward. I didn’t feel my arm get caught on the chain link fence.

I remember sitting on the blacktop looking down at my arm and seeing a sizeable, fleshy rip down the middle. Without words or tears I walked over to the yard duty to let her survey the damage.

She stared at it aghast for a moment before calling over a fellow student to escort me to the health office. He and I talked casually as we walked down the hallway.

The school nurse bandaged me up and sent me on my way. I put my sweatshirt back on and hid the injury from my mom until the following day. I thought she’d be angry with me. When she eventually found out, she was angry. At the health office. If they would’ve called her she could have taken me to get stitches.

Instead I have this five-inch scar slinking down my arm to remind me of a fact that’s held true ever since that fateful day in kindergarten:

So often have I risked for women I’ve loved, and as many times have I gotten hurt.

Bonus: Chicks seem to dig the scar.

Irony: It’s kind of like a soldier appreciating the bullet wound left by a comrade in arms.

I was leaving campus late one night my junior year after doing some work at the college radio station. As I pulled out of the school’s central parking structure, I came across the same three students I had seen only minutes ago wandering aimlessly in the opposite direction. I rolled down my window.

“Hey, where are you guys trying to get to?”

“The Segundo dorms,” said one of the two girls.

“Oh, OK. You guys just need to cut through campus by following that main road,” -I pointed- “all the way down about half a mile until you see a cluster of four large dorm halls. That’s Segundo.”

“Oh, ok, thank you!”

“Would you guys like a ride? It’s awfully cold out.”

The two girls smiled and their eyebrows spiked with enthusiasm. “Yes, please!”

The guy hesitated. “No, that’s ok. Thank you.” He held his arms out to block the girls from moving forward.

Only then did I realize it was 2 am in the morning and I hadn’t shaven in over a month. I half smiled, amused.

“Are you guys sure? It’s really no problem. It’s half a mile away.”

“No. We’re fine. Thanks,” he replied. The girls looked disappointed.

For the first and hopefully only time in my life I was on the opposite end of a P.S.A. commercial. I was playing the role of the dirty, shady potential kidnapper, and that freshman dude was the hero who did the ‘right thing.’

I thought about pulling out my school ID and proving myself a student. Then I considered bribing them with candy.

I drove off, feeling dirty and dejected, and all I did was innocently offer a group of cold, disoriented freshmen a ride.

Remember Kids!

Beards can keep your face warm in the wintertime, and they’re great for Grizzly Adams Look-Alike Contests, but every so often you will be mistaken for a rapist.

I’m sitting in my Children’s Literature class senior year when a student asks a question about the upcoming essay.

“Professor, is it OK to use personal pronouns?”

“That’s a very good question,” Professor Stenzel replies. “I’ve been having you write journal entries throughout the quarter to teach you to use personal pronouns in your essays. I want you to tell me what you think, not what some academic in a journal thinks. So yes, you may use ‘I’ in your essays.”

One of the TAs fidgets in her chair and mumbles loudly.

“Yes?” The professor looks in her direction.

“Well,” she says, “I just think you should make clear that there is a right and wrong way to use personal pronouns. I just don’t want the students using them too much.”

“Very good point,” he replies. “There is definitely a right and wrong way to use the ‘I’ pronoun.” He moves to the board and begins making columns of ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ ways to use ‘I.’

After finishing, the professor turns around and asks, “Does anybody have any questions?” A few people pose their own, and afterwards, just as the professor is about to move on to the next topic, I raise my hand.

“Yes, Mike?”

“Well, professor, I’m assuming it’s ok to use ‘I’ sentences in pairs?”

“What makes you say that, Mike?” The professor raises an eyebrow.

“Well, I figured we’re following the rule, ‘An I for an I’?”

In a lecture hall of 150 students you could hear a pin drop. No laughter. No giggling. Not even an asthmatic cough. Nothing but 5 seconds of horrible, awkward silence.

I clear my throat. “Wow, that went really badly.” More silence. “I definitely need some better material.” And silence.

“I thought it was pretty funny,” says the professor, attempting a save.
I fidget uneasily in my chair. “Well, *cough* I’ll be here until Saturday. Remember to tip your waitress.” This gets a few laughs, but they were most likely out of pity.

The professor picks up his thermos and takes a long sip.

“Mmmmm…” He pauses. “This is full of gin.”

Glorious laughter. The mood of the room I had so brutally killed is finally restored and the class can move on.
Class ends, and I walk over to where the professor is standing admist a group of concerned, questioning students. I had planned on apologizing for the horrible pun I made, but after waiting for 5 minutes, I decide to call it a day and leave the classroom.

I arrive home around 6:30, sit down at my computer and check my e-mail. A letter from Professor Stenzel is waiting in my inbox, entitled ‘Pun-ishment.’ It reads:

Dear Callahanmeister:

An I for an I…. Jeez, I thought my puns were lame! I almost said (when your row-mate talked about Tom Sawyer’s marble finding magic) that it was not so marble-ous.

–John

“So what can I do for you today?”

“Oh, you know. The standard trim.”

“Standard trim?”

“Yeah. The usual.”

“Sir, I’ve never cut your hair before.”

“What?

Beat.

“Oh.”

Beat.

“Buzz the sides, trim the top, please?”

Oh, Muse, you fickle bitch. You tell me you love me, that you can’t live without me. You even let me be Little Spoon!

Then you kick me to the curb. You leave me cold and shivering in a fetal position on your rubber welcome mat, scratching at the foot of the door and begging in a hoarse scream to be let back in, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

I took a sip of lemonade. We sat beneath a canopy amidst a large field of golden summer grass.

“That must have been so incredibly boring, growing up in the suburbs.” My back was to the sun, so she squinted as she spoke.

“Nah,” I said, “it wasn’t too bad. Yeah, there weren’t too many people, and the town wasn’t the most happening place on earth, but I still had a great time.”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s the most exciting, exotic place you’ve ever been?”

“Paris, France.” She moved a light brown wisp of hair from her eyes.

“Now, are your best memories about the actual things you saw or of the people with whom you vacationed?”

“Hmm. More about the actual things I saw.”

“I see.” I took another sip.

“I mean, Mike, it’s Paris.”

I looked down at my glass. Crescent-shaped ice cubes were melting.

“I think living in a small town isn’t any different from living in Paris. Eventually you run out of places to go and things to see and it all comes back to who’s standing next to you.”

“But Mike -”

As she spoke she lifted her glass to her lips, tipped it back and took two ice cubes into her mouth. Her cheeks made shapes as she moved the ice around. She crunched down hard. Her words were slightly garbled when she spoke again, and she moved her left hand quickly to catch the water dripping from her lower lip.

“- it’s Paris.”