Ninjutsu

I see a therapist. (Make any and all judgments now so that we can continue un-hindered.) We have monthly appointments, sometimes we work on CBT and sometimes I go on existential and/or nihilistic rants and sometimes we sit in silence while I stare at my fingernails, although recently, we've been playing Scrabble.



I went through several therapists in an impressively short period of time but prior to that, all of my knowledge about psychiatry and/or seeing a therapist came from Jamie Lee Curtis' character in "Freaky Friday" and reading Gary Larson's The Far Side. Since my understanding was limited to talking cows and a movie that involved Lindsay Lohan, I had no idea what to expect the first time we walked into the waiting room of a psychiatry practice.

It was disappointingly normal.

Finally, after about three years of sitting in ugly chairs and wondering what was wrong with all of the other normal-looking people, it happened - the experience I'd been waiting for.
And it was beautiful.


There were four of us in the waiting room on that particular day. Normally, I plop myself down directly next to another patient even if there are a bunch of empty seats so that I have at least one last-minute exposure to tell my therapist about. On this particular day my selected victim had been called in for his appointment right after I sat down, so I was alone against the back wall. A guy who could've been anywhere from 17 to 24 sat opposite me, sexting his girlfriend. (Wild guess.) Perpendicular to us against the main wall was a generic middle-aged white couple.

I was reading the same sentence in my book over and over again when the door from the offices into the waiting room opened and this rather large, blonde guy in a dirty t-shirt and sweatpants walked out. I was reminded of a member of Count Olaf's entourage detailed by Lemony Snicket in Series of Unfortunate Events; the large person whom the orphans could never identify as a man or a woman. This guy was obviously a man, but everything else about him was ambiguous. Age, mood, sanity, homelessness, et cetera. He had short blonde hair and now that I think about it, kind of looked like he had been drawn by the previously mentioned cartoonist, Gary Larson.

He was giving off some seriously weird vibes, but I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt since I can be pretty weird myself. First, he turned around and tried to go back into the offices but could not - there's a lock that you have to enter a key code into, which had always seemed unnecessary to me until just now. Being denied access, he turned and leaned his weight on the counter by the window, engaging the reluctant receptionist in conversation.

"Have you ever heard of a side-effect of schizophrenia that gives you the power to learn martial arts in your sleep?"

At this point we all thought he was making a weird joke. Sexting Guy and I shared an amused glance.

"Because when I woke up this morning, I knew Ninjutsu."

I was still under the impression that he was joking, but then he set his jumbo-fast-food-beverage down on the counter and in a miraculous demonstration of agility for his heftiness, suddenly chopped the air with his hand in a wide arc, stumbling forward a little bit as a result of the wild motion.

The four of us in the waiting room all jolted simultaneously. Sexting Guy and I stared at each other wide-eyed, the situation having officially crossed over from funny to scary.

The receptionist was impressively composed. "Wow! Look at that."

"It's the strangest thing - I've never had any training." The guy flailed around a little more doing nothing that looked like "the martial art, strategy, and tactics of unconventional warfare and guerrilla warfare as well as the art of espionage purportedly practiced by the shinobi." (I google-d Ninjutsu when I got home.) He motioned around to the four of us and said, "I could take on everyone in here." (The alarming truth is that he was probably right.)

The receptionist quickly changed the subject. The next thing I recall the man talking about was astral projection, which he claimed to practice regularly.

He had allegedly done the following things through out-of-body experiences in the spirit world:

• Met what I suspect were some anime characters
• Learned ninja secrets
• Lost his virginity.

Just when I had come to my senses and realized that I needed to remember everything this guy said for storytelling purposes later on, an older, female version of him strode through the door from the back offices and dragged him behind her out of the waiting room without breaking her stride. 

For a few minutes we sat in stunned silence, unsure of the appropriate way to react. (If anyone understands how un-funny mental illness can be, it's a bunch of people in a psychiatrist's waiting room. Then again, I think it's absolutely necessary to find humor in hardship.)

Finally, the middle-aged man broke the silence. Quietly and seriously, he said to the receptionist,


"I am also a master of Ninjutsu."

Connor con Queso

It was July of 2012, and my good friend Connor and I had just started dating.

(For those of you confused by my cryptic wording, Connor is a current good friend and former boyfriend but for some reason that's ridiculously hard to phrase without sounding fickle. Unrelated side-note, I'm obsessed with writing about a super-villain called the Fickle Pickle. Trademarked by Grace.)

Early on in our relationship, when we were getting to know each other, Connor and I played the Question Game via Facebook message. (Question Game: Must ask another question after answering one.) We eventually got around to "biggest fear," then the far more interesting "biggest irrational fear," or what some may call "phobia." Here's my list:

• Horses*
• Escalators
• Open water*
• Daddy Long Legs
• Those little monkeys that wear diapers**
• Orangutans***
• Pregnant women's bellies

Granted, I have a rather hefty list. Truth be told, I can ride an escalator if I absolutely have to and I could probably hold myself together if I had the opportunity to gallop to someone's rescue on the back of a horse. See corresponding footnotes for related stories.

Connor's list was only two things.

• Being attacked/murdered while in the shower
• Anyone (including himself) putting their finger in his bellybutton

I really do respect irrational fear. I'm not the kind of person who rubs my hands all over someone when I find out they have OCD. (Do people do that? I couldn't think of a better example.) I never entered the bathroom while Connor was showering without clearly announcing myself.

That being said, I, like most human beings, do have occasional moments of pure evil. 

July of 2012, I'm sitting on a white vinyl bench on a pontoon boat in a lake in Northern Michigan. There are about 6 or 7 people on the boat; myself, Connor, Connor's brother Brendon, and several of Brendon's friends including Shawna and Melissa. (The only two I remember.)

Connor has this really, really frustrating ability to fall asleep whenever and wherever he wants in about 30 seconds, and at this particular moment had dozed off whilst shirtless, his head in my lap. I was instantly bored. Boredom, as everyone knows, is a dangerous sensation. All of my truly evil moments are manifested from boredom. 

I scanned the boat for entertainment and my eyes instantly went - as if drawn by a magnet - to Connor's belly button. I began looking frantically around me for something funny to put in his belly button. All I could really see was a life jacket, cigarette butts, and a few pairs of sunglasses. Cigarette butt was too mean. I sighed audibly and made eye contact with Shawna or Melissa (don't remember which) who was sitting across from me.

"I'm trying to find something to put in his belly button." I explained. Shawna/Melissa laughed and contemplated for a moment before having a stroke of genius; she went over to the driver's seat of the pontoon boat where the boys were and came back with a jar of Chi-Chi's queso dip that had been brought on-board to accompany tortilla chips. I could barely contain my delighted freak-out; I couldn't have asked for anything sillier. 

I stuck my finger in the queso and got a nice big blob of it and very carefully dropped it into Connor's exposed belly button. He didn't stir. I added just a smidgen more so that it was sufficiently visible. Connor woke up moments later with a groan. 

"Wha... what? Awwww, maaaan." Connor groggily noticed the queso and acknowledge my hilarious prank with a groan. I had expected that he would jump in the lake to wash it out. That's where the story gets better.

To Connor, apparently, hunger for queso takes priority over irrational fear. When he was done grumbling, he stuck his own finger into his belly button.

"Ahhhhhhhhhhh!" He grimaced in agony at the sensation. I started to say that he could jump into the water and he wouldn't have to do that.

Until I figured out what he was actually doing, which was eating the queso out of his own belly button. I have to admire his perseverance - he had to go back in three or four times before he got all of the queso. The man is truly unbreakable. 

When I decided to post the story, I mentioned it to my friend Josh, and as soon as I brought up the irrational fear of someone touching/poking your belly button, "Oh my god! No way! That is seriously my one irrational fear! I'm not kidding!" While my parents and I were watching the Modern Family premiere, I was looking up phobias online and the fear of having one's belly button touched or poked is called omphalophobia. Even better, there's an online community of people who share the common issue of omphalophobia! Apparently it's not horribly uncommon! Who knew?

Here are some of the more entertaining phobias I found in my quest:

Consecotaleophobia- Fear of chopsticks.

Eurotophobia- Fear of female genitalia. We have all had this fear at one time or another.

Papaphobia- Fear of the Pope.

More than you'lll never know.

Gymnophobia- Fear of nudity.

*Both of these fears originated with an early childhood viewing of "Black Beauty," the only scene from which I can remember is a large boat sinking and a little boy and horse ending up on some random beach, where the horse got spooked by a snake and flailed it's deadly hooves all around on the screen. Also, my parents had told me about Christopher Reeve breaking his neck by being bucked off of a horse, and in my mind it had turned into "a horse crippled Superman."

**The episode of "Malcolm in the Middle" where Craig has a homicidal helper-monkey may have something to do with this.

***I was at the zoo once and was at these glass windows that looked into the orangutan enclosure, and there was this orangutan who came up to the glass and I got all excited because I was going to connect with a monkey like Jane Goodall, and he seemed really curious and friendly! I got all excited and turned around to yell for my mom to come over and see the orangutan. When I turned back, the orangutan was rubbing this slimy, bright green goop all over the glass directly in front of me. The people around me were making "Eeeew" noises and turning away. I could not for the life of me figure out what the green stuff was, it was definitely not feces and the orangutan was having a ridiculous amount of fun rubbing it on the glass. Here's what I missed when I turned away to beckon my mom, drawn very, very poorly:

Of course, now that I've expressed my association of orangutans with nausea, I cannot not love this guy:

Gail v. Robespierre

I've been saving this work story for a while because I couldn't come up with good cartoons to go with it. I finally compromised and drew one unnecessarily-detailed cartoon.


Gail
A middle-aged, horse-loving, mini-van-driving, serial-dessert-baking vet assistant and mother of at least two with whom I used to work. (That may not have been a complete sentence but I went out of my way to avoid ending it with a preposition.)

Gail is funny. I really didn't like her at first - she just rubbed me the wrong way. Then one day she walked in with her usual "Good morning, Gracie!" and I suddenly realized that she'd grown on me and without knowing it, I had begun to adore her. The things that used to get under my skin became things that made me laugh, and not in a sarcastic way.

She had a tendency to scurry around the clinic like a chicken with her head cut off, doing random things like "cleaning all the dust pans" or Lemon Pledge-ing the wooden railings.To me, eventually, she seemed to take on a "mother hen" role. (I did not plan for those metaphorical clichés to match so well.) The bottom line is that Gail could be neurotic, but in a stressful work environment it meant a lot to have someone call me "honey" and make me feel appreciated.


Robespierre
A small, bean-shaped French Bulldog puppy who was born with a cleft palate. One of the technicians at the clinic took him home to do the rigorous tube-feeding required to nurse a pup with a cleft palate and he blossomed into a less-small, bean-shaped Frenchie with the derp-iest face I've ever seen on a canine and eyes that pointed in two visibly different directions.

He always had this "crazy-eyes" face that my dog gets when he's about to do something that he knows is blatantly against the rules. He looked like he was continually saying "Hit me, bro!" He didn't bark, either - he had a velociraptor-like shriek that sometimes sounded uncannily like the scream of a hysterical human woman.


The Showdown
I was standing in the main office filing paperwork. Robespierre was hanging out in the practice manager's office with a baby gate blocking the door while the technician taking care of him was at work. There were at least two pee pads laid out on the floor for him to use.

Which was, of course, wishful thinking, because the moment the manager stepped away he squatted in the center of the office and took a dump on one of the very few patches of floor that was not a pee pad. See left for a detailed but not-specific-enough-for-anyone-to-recognize-it-because-I'm-paranoid-that-I'll-get-in-trouble-even-though-I-haven't-said-anything-bad-about-the-hospital-and-I-don't-work-there-anymore map of the manager's office.

Gail happened to be passing through the office at that moment, and the sudden inspiration to do dirty work hit her - albeit not for a client's animal, but it was still a triumph. She grabbed a few paper towels and stepped over the baby gate into the office.

As soon as she moved towards Robespierre's poop, he starting freaking the hell out. He was squealing and screaming and snapping his crooked little mouth at her and would not let her take his feces.

Gail started "Oh!"-ing, all flustered the way she gets - "Oh! Oh no! Oh dear!" (and so on.)

Neither the receptions nor I thought to help her because we were too busy busting a gut watching Gail get terrorized by a tiny, retarded bulldog intent on literally guarding his poop.

Both parties made a valiant effort, but only one could win. Gail eventually rallied, got the best of Robespierre, and robbed him of his precious creation... although not without getting poo on her finger.



When Robespierre was older, an animal neurologist confirmed that his neurological issues were abnormal and irreparable. This is my homage to that crazy little mo-fo who terrorized poor Gail more and made me laugh harder than any dog ever has.

Today in Grace History: Late Submission Wins Pun-Based Pet Name Category

Today was my last day at work.

Also, today was the day poor Spotnick lost his crown to the new front-runner in pun-based names, his presence in the original competition non-existent for the sole reason that he had not yet been run over by an ATV and brought in to the clinic...

Didgeri-Don't.

Here, Beowolf.

I've always loved naming things - I was one of those kids - and I love a good, weird name.

Unfortunately, when I got my current cat, a moment of misguided charity and uncomfortable-ness made me decide to keep the name Rosie after an adult handicapped lady told me that she named her and then kissed the top of Rosie's head.

I regret this decision now.

That woman absolutely does not remember my cat and has probably named at least three more cats Rosie since then. I should have changed it to Jennyanydots when I had the chance. 

All personal regrets aside, one of my favorite things about working at the vet is hearing some of the crazy pet names. People who name their dogs Bella and Buddy seem so dull, although I do acknowledge that saying that makes me a huge hypocrite. Anyway, since I'm leaving my job soon to focus on school, I decided to indulge my curiosity and compile a list of the best of the best pet names and give them awards by category.
Enjoy.

Best Full Name

Second Place: Harvey Wallbanger (Canine)

First Place: Thadious Hoppington (Rabbit)

Best Food-Inspired Name

Second Place: (Tie) Kielbasa, Pork Fried Rice

First Place: Pou Pon (Feline)

Pets Named After Celebrities, In Order from Worst to Best

Charlie Sheen

Dale Earnhart

Bruce Lee

Bill Nye

Freddie Mercury

Best Names with the word "Fat" in them

Honorable Mentions: Fat Boy, Fat Head, and NINE pets named "Fatty"

Second Place: Fatapuss (See also "Best Puns")

First Place: Fat Bastard

Classiest

Honorable Mentions: Sinbad, Siegfried, Octavius

Third Place: Toulouse

Second Place: Hildegard

First Place: Alowycious

Best Descriptive Names*

Third Place: Fussy Butt

Second Place: Toe Licker

First Place: Tuna Breath

Honorable Mentions: Mustache Louie, One-Eyed Jack

*Fun fact, all winners in this category are cats.

Most Baffling

Third Place: Mr. Thumbs

Second Place: Oy

First Place: Pubert

Surprisingly Cute Names

Toggle

Segway

Velcro

Sequel

Jenga

Sandman

Malarkey

Best Puns

Third Place: My-Newt (Species said "Other," so I'm assuming it's an actual newt.)

Second Place: Catty Wompus

First Place: Spotnick

Worst Puns

Third Place: Maybullene (English Bulldog)

Second Place: Tie Deeogy (D.O.G.) and Shinopi (She No Pee)

First Place: Semper Fido

Honorable Mentions: Vincent Van Cat and Purrsilla.

Awesomest

The Wolfman

Snicklefritz

Robespierre

Beowolf

Avogadro

Megatron

Danger Kitty

Most Hilarious 

Mr. Noodle

Uncle Salty

Boobie

Spanky

Poop, Pooper, Poopie, 

Poopsie, and Poop Stain

Proud Mary

Spleen

Totally Inappropriate Names

Three-Way Tie: Osama, Hitler, and "Sexy Cat."

Animals with Best-Suited Names

Honorable Mentions: Hound named "Messerschmitt," Cornish Rex named "Nefertiti," and a French Bulldog named "Mavis."

Third Place: Doberman Pinscher named "Jebidiah"

Second Place: A dachshund named "Schnitzel"

First Place: (And I'm completely serious about this) A one-eyed basset hound named Whiskey Joe. (I've actually met Whiskey Joe, he looks like he just got back from snoozing on a front porch in the background of Fievel Goes West.)

Some fun statistics to wrap everything up:

- There are 11 orange cats named "Hobbes"

- 2 cats named "Crookshanks" and 1 actual rat named "Scabbers"

- 16 Cheechs, 1 Chong (I don't get it, either.)

- 5 Goobers and 8 Boogers

Moral of the story: It really doesn't matter what you name your pet, you're just going to end up calling it "dumbass" all the time anyway.

Leave Amanda Alone

Ah, the early 2000's. I vividly recall one of my very first ventures onto the internet - this was before I frequented the "Polly Pockets" website to play awful G-rated games - it was on our now-rustic family PC and I went to amandaplease.com, because Penelope Taynt (who I later learned was Amanda in a wig - 10-year-old mind blown) told me to. Then I sat in the office chair for an hour waiting for a 30-second clip to load and doing absolutely nothing else. I was so happy. I got to watch this pixel-y little video of their parody of "The Brady Bunch," the one where Alice is a man in drag. I was mousy and socially retarded and had all of the defining features of pre-pubescence as well as somehow, tragically, size 10 feet. Those were the days.

Remember "What I Like About You?" What a good show. How in love did you fall with Henry when he said that he'd propose at the dump?

The thing about Amanda was that she was an icon for the rest of us. She was unique and funny and true to herself - that was the best thing about her.

Now, see, my webcam does not work in the sense that it does not record video properly. All I end up with is a video of myself getting increasingly faster with audio that stays at the normal speed. Otherwise, I would have put on a long blonde wig and rolled around in my sheets dramatically. Alas, technology fails me and I must stoop to the written word and deprive the internet of five minutes of me trying to achieve the most flattering webcam face-angle and admiring my own hair.


Leave Amanda alone.

As the Season 2 Finale of "Sherlock" taught us, what the press reports is not necessarily true. Now, to clarify, I'm not saying that Amanda didn't throw a bong out of the window of a high-rise,* among other things - there's just no way for us to know the whole story. (Although any story with a flying bong is usually at least entertaining.)

Anyway, that's what's been on my mind today instead of the online exam for my last summer course. As much as I'm predisposed to harshly judge people who pierce their cheeks, (WHY DO PEOPLE DO THAT???) I hope Amanda finds her way and that I never have to hear her rap.


*Note: Add "hit by falling bong" to Worst Obituaries Ever list.

Is that rigor mortis, or are you just happy to see me?

My first real pet was a guinea pig. Three guinea pigs, actually, all of whom were equally useless creatures. The first time I ever set foot in the vet hospital was when one of them - a white, red-eyed little bastard - got a weird anus rash and we took her to the vet so she could pee down the front of my legs in the exam room. Anyway, there were three of them - Pokey, Taffy, and Flash.

Taffy was the Bunnicula doppleganger, Pokey had the appearance and personality of an elephant turd, and Flash was small and black and as it turned out, short-lived.

I was somewhere around 9 years old. Flash got sick very suddenly. I found her lying on her side in the guinea pig pen, twitching. My parents had me hold her for a few moments until she kicked it, although I don't recall the exact moment. They put her in a shoe box and put the shoe box in the garage to wait for the ground to be less frozen so we could bury her. 

The whole time the shoe box sat in the garage waiting, (a total of three or four days) I found myself strangely, magnetically drawn to it. My morbid curiosity was practically leaking out my ears, but I was socially aware enough to know that it would probably be unacceptable for me to fondle my guinea pig's corpse in the presence of others. I nursed that creepy sense of suspense and secrecy for all that it had while I waited for an opportunity to privately spend time with a dead thing for the first time ever.

When my parents were gone, I went out to the garage, took out the shoe box, and opened it. She was dead, all right. A dead guinea pig. I touched her fur - it felt the same, but the skin beneath it was cold and firm. I examined her still-open eyes, her mouth, her paws frozen in position as if she was running. I touched only her fur - I wasn't quite brave enough to do anything more. I put her back and went inside.

Over the next few days, I would sneak away to look in the shoe box. I thought of the creepy little visits as spending time with my pet, the concept of body v. soul foreign to a 9-year-old. 

I was visiting Flash one night when, in a sentimental moment, I tenderly reached into the box and picked her up. When I lifted her rear end, however, the rest of her kind of just lifted right along with it. It took a second for the horror to register, but I had a moment of terrible, terrible realization as I held her aloft - I was sitting in my garage, holding a furry black plank.  

Flash was not Flash anymore. It was both a tremendous growing-up experience, and in retrospect, a really hilarious situation. 

Sufficiently scarred for life, I dropped Flash back into the shoe box, put it back on the shelf, and ran inside to wash off all of the corpse bacteria that I could practically see crawling up my arms.

Now that my sense of soul v. body has developed, I can understand the reasoning from an 8-year-old - but it boggles my mind when adult pet owners spend unnecessary amounts of time with their pet's dead body. Due to what I now know is called rigor mortis, the aforementioned tendency also poses a significant problem to myself and the other veterinary assistants. Prime example - a challenge faced by myself and Little Dan.

There had been a euthanasia in one of the exam rooms that morning, and apparently the owners had spent several hours with the body afterwards. It's common to have to bag-and-tag a body a couple times a day, since the vets perform euthanasia and we have one of the only veterinary emergency rooms in the area. It was no surprise when Little Dan and I were asked to stretcher a dead dog back to the freezer. It was an old German Shepherd and he was already on the stretcher, so we quickly took him back and got out a bag. 

The trouble started when we began to ease the dog into the bag - he was immovable, and had stiffened into a position where his legs were splayed out in several different directions. Bagging the dog would've been an easy task if a) he'd been smaller or b) he'd been in a floppier and more bendable state, which he would have been for the first hour or so after his death. That window of opportunity had closed, however, and we were left with an impossibly rigid body and a bag that just wasn't quite big enough. 

I think we both knew that it wasn't going to work, but Little Dan and I were both fairly new assistants, so we kept our mouths shut, silently thanked the lord that there were doors separating us and our spectacle from the rest of the staff, and started by sticking the dog's upper half into the bag.

On the way in, the dog's frozen front paw caught on the bag and ripped a hole in it before either of us could respond. With a few muttered swear words, a sheepish apology to the dog, and some improvisation, we realized that the leg could not be bent without breaking it, so quickly got the dog back out and tried again.

On the second shot it seemed like the torso had gone in seamlessly. However, when I paused to pull the bag up over the dog's hips, I was greeted with a crusty snout sticking out through the hole previously created by the front paw. The situation continued more and more to resemble a slapstick comedy bit as we tried various ways to get the body bagged, our doggy friend's glassy eyes gazing back at us as if mocking our inadequacy. 

What we ended up with was two large red garbage bags and about a pound and a half of tape keeping the dog contained within them, the tip of a paw peeking out of the hole still. It was a huge fucking mess. 

In the end, appearance didn't matter - it was just going to be cremated anyway. But I'll be damned if that dog didn't put up a surprisingly fair post-mortem fight. 

The moral of the story - live adventurously, and give 'em hell once you're dead. Coincidently, I plan on that day being the first and last time I get punched in the boob by a dead dog.