The Way I Am....Part 2...

So let's start with a little housekeeping. First of all, you'll notice there's a new layout. I tried the black background but it bugged me when I read it, so as you can see, it's gone. This one should work for now.

Let me also take a minute to comment on "The Way I Am" blogs. These are not intended to pick on anyone except me. The point is to explain how I became the way I am. My sense of humor, my lack of a verbal filter, my immense knowledge of useless trivia, it all came from somewhere. I mean honestly, how many of you could have the conversation with your mother like the one I had last night? I have pretty much no verbal filter because we've always been able to talk about anything. She can ask me why I didn't want to go out with Shayna Bagelstein from hebrew school in 7th grade and I can tell her it's cause she had a fat ass and pit stains on all her shirts. Perfectly normal conversation for us, no one gets bent out of shape and it's all good. My vast knowledge of useless trivia?...That's from all the books she read to and bought for me. Uncle John's big bathroom reader was one of my favorites and I highly recommend it to everyone. I can say with almost 100% certainty that I am the best adult male gymnast in just about every business meeting I have because she schlepped me to gymnastics 3 days a week for 8 years. You get the idea.

Now on to my wacked sense of humor. I think my dad is to thank for this. I think the best way to describe it is mildly offensive leaning heavily towards inappropriate.

Here's a few examples:

Exhibit A: I went to visit him in Palm Springs, CA during college. It just happened that several of my female friends were there the same week. We all went out to dinner and one of the girls made the mistake of asking my dad his absolute least favorite question....
"Don't you miss the change of seasons?" (Now just as a note, my dad spent most of his adult life in Rochester, NY. It gets about 60 days of sunshine a year and several feet of snow. Palm Springs on the other hand gets about 340 days of sunshine and Zero snow. So needless to say, there's not much to miss.)
So on to his response. He looked at her and without missing a beat asked her- "If you only had 4 periods a year instead of 12, would you miss the other 8?" As you can imagine, her jaw dropped, but she somehow managed to respond with..."Wow, ok...I get it." Pretty much the last thing you'd expect to hear from a middle aged jewish accountant the first time you met him, but a perfect example.

Exhibit B: My dad and I are walking around the Wal-Mart in Palm Springs, CA. (this was prior to Schnoozle working for Target, so it was ok...sort of) It was a saturday afternoon, so it was fairly busy. We got up to the registers and of course there were only a few open and all had long lines. My dad looks around and then blurts out "Jesus Christ, isn't there a 5 Mexicans or less aisle somewhere?"

Exhibit C: My dad, his wife and my grandma and I are all sitting in a deli ordering dinner, probably a nice pastrami sandwich and maybe some soup. I look up and see an older woman walk in with what had to be the biggest fupa I had ever seen. My dad looks up and notices too, he turns to me and says, "Holy shit, it looks like that lady's ass is on backwards"

So there they are, the roots of my useless trivia knowledge, my lack of a verbal filter, my superior gymnastics skills (I have videos to prove it), and of course my sense of humor. Put them all together and you get the lovely gentleman I've grown up to be...just like the lady in the deli, normal in most respects, but definitely a little ass backwards.