Author Archives: Joel Derfner

The group fitness manager at one of the gyms where I teach forwarded an email several weeks ago asking for volunteers to tape a workout video for a study being done at a local school of social work. Since I will do anything to avoid the work I’m actually supposed to be doing, I emailed back and said I was interested; the next week, I went in so the people running the study could meet me and I could find out what the study was about.

It turned out that the video was going to be part of a wellness and safer-sex program aimed at HIV+ people recovering from cocaine and heroin addiction.

You can imagine that, once I found this out, I would have clawed the eyes out of anybody who tried to stop me from doing it.

So I put together a routine and some music and went to rehearse it with the people who’d be following me in the video (all of whom worked in the school office). After I ran through it once to show it to them, the head of the program complimented the routine and said she thought the study participants would enjoy it. “I’m not sure, though,” she said, “if the best music to use for an exercise program for recovering drug addicts is ‘Love Potion #9.'”

Whoops.

So I reworked the music and made some adjustments to the routine; we’re filming on Friday.

I’m going to be the Denise Austin of the drug-addict world!

I should note that the moves I sketched out are saved on my computer as a Word file called “smack routine.doc.”

Okay, let me start by saying that I have always kind of had a little bit of a thing for Mormon guys. It’s not on the scale of my thing for Australians or for Chris Meloni, but there’s something about those fresh-faced, clean-cut boys that I respond to.

That said, I’m not sure quite what to think of hotsaints.com.

On the one hand, it’s not really any different from something like gayjews.net. I have no objection to members of a religious minority who want to date within their religion.

On the other hand, I don’t know, there’s just something . . . creepy about it. Maybe it’s just that the slogan “Chase and Be Chaste” makes me think these people are out of their fucking minds.

Of course, I see a lot of guys on the site for whom I’d gladly be a “friendly witness” if they did “something super-ninja cool,” like, say, ask if they could fuck me.

But I’m really not sure how likely that is to happen.

Since they’re probably all bottoms anyway.

Crap. Yesterday was my bloggiversary and I forgot.

Clearly I have been doing this for too long.

Okay, I figured it out. I’m writing a song about orgies.

If you live in or near New York City, you should hasten to buy a ticket to next Tuesday evening’s WYSIWYG event:

I will be singing a song I’m writing (here, you should understand “writing” to mean “vaguely considering thinking about beginning to try to have an idea or two for”), and many other fine bloggers will be reading.

The name comes from the fact that this is the one-year anniversary of the WYSIWYG talent show. It’s been run thrillingly every month by the sexy triumvirate of Chris Hampton, Andy Horwitz, and Dan Rhatigan. The show has deservedly developed quite a following by presenting readings of consistently high quality.

And, hey, if I can figure out what the hell I’m going to write, it’s entirely possible I won’t ruin their track record.

The summer after my junior year of college, I spent a couple months in Berlin learning German at an intensive language-immersion program. When I arrived, I got myself into the intermediate class by faking my way through the placement test. Unfortunately, since I had done so by relying on the German I knew from Bach and Schumann songs, whenever I opened my mouth I sounded like a raving lunatic.

“Kind sir,” I’d ask the teacher, “hast thou a pencil? For, woe betide me, I have left mine own in the apartment of my landlord.”

“Faustus,” he would say, looking at me as if I might at any moment sprout a third arm, “it’s ‘in my landlord’s apartment,’ not ‘in the apartment of my landlord.'”

“But why should it not be as I spoke it?” I would insist. “One says rightfully ‘in the kingdom of my Father,’ does one not?”

The teacher would sigh. “Faustus, when are you going to start speaking normal German?”

“Nevermore.”

I honestly wasn’t trying to sound like I’d just stepped out of Werther; this was simply the only vocabulary I knew. In the end, my prediction turned out not to be completely accurate, as eventually I began to understand that patterns of twentieth century speech and of eighteenth century religious poetry were different. I also learned how to say things like like “cock” and “fuck,” and by the time I left my German actually wasn’t half bad.

Then I took a terrific German class fall semester of senior year, with a professor who gave us handouts like this.

Then I took another German class spring semester, with a professor who hated my guts. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this out until I got my first paper back with his scathing comments on it. That night I had dinner with my friend A.N., who told me that this man had been in the Hitler Youth as a child. She also told me that he had been on former President Bush’s committee to determine what to do when the flying saucers came.

Unfortunately, by this time it was too late to drop the class.

By the way, when I created a link in this post to what I called a “fabulous evite,” I wasn’t just linking to evite’s home page. I really was linking to an evite I’d spent hours crafting. Since no one commented on it, I’m going to assume no one followed the link because everybody thought I was posting to some lame evite page (because of course the other option is that no one commented on it because everybody followed the link and was so appalled that silence seemed like the best option, and that is a thought too horrible to contemplate).

In any case, please take a moment and look at the evite I created for the event that never happened.

Well, my birthday happened. Just not the party.

One of the many jobs with which I keep body and soul together (or at least within spitting distance of each other) is a gig for a company that helps students prepare for standardized tests. I work with the programs for elementary and middle school New York State math and English tests; this means I go into schools populated by poor kids of color and subvert the racist and classist educational system by teaching them test-taking tricks that rich white kids get for free with the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of education their parents buy them.

The main thing that worried me when I first started working for this company was that I would have to come into contact with actual children, a population I both fear and despise with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns. Luckily, however, I ended up in the “professional development” branch; this meant that I simply went around New York City training teachers in using the company’s materials. This has been a fairly satisfactory: though the commute is often unpleasant (once I had to go to Canarsie, for God’s sake), the money is good, and the sessions rarely last more than two hours, so if I get stuck with a particularly obnoxious teacher, I know that in less than 120 minutes I’ll never see him or her again.

Then, three weeks ago, I made the terrible mistake of accepting a different kind of assignment: I would go to one school for seven Wednesdays in a row and work with teachers in the classrooms, making sure they were using the program correctly and generally being a cheerleader (a function I can still perform even after being kicked off the gay cheerleading squad). I would also do some teaching myself.

I never used to have a strong opinion on corporal punishment in schools. Well, I thought, I don’t see the harm in smacking the hand of a kid who misbehaves. On the other hand, I also understand that that’s probably not the most effective way to win kids’ trust and respect. In other words, I really could have gone either way.

I have been to this school for two Wednesdays in a row, and now I think that children who misbehave should be put to death instantaneously, in as painful a way as the imagination can compass.

I can’t even begin to tell you how horrible it is. I’m dealing with four classes of sixth-graders. One of them is almost bearable; they sit quietly and listen to me as I talk to them about math, and they answer my questions. To be sure, there are occasional outbursts of youthful vigor, but my heart is not made of stone; I smile indulgently and continue with the lesson. Two of the classes are made up of heartless recidivists; half the time they listen, and the other half they shriek wildly amongst themselves, gibbering in their utterly incomprehensible adolescent language, impervious to any pleas on my part for silence and attention.

They pale, however, in comparison to the fourth class, which is populated solely by monsters in human form. They laugh and scream and run around no matter who is in the room. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them rise up as one and eat whoever they decide is the runt of the bunch. Or me, for that matter. Even their regular teacher, a lovely woman who clearly adores children and has the patience of a saint, can’t control them; how then can I possibly dream of doing so except by judicious application of a machete? I wake up in the morning thinking about them and fearing the day I next have to see them. I loathe them. I abhor them. I would give my immortal soul not to have to see them ever again.

On the other hand, the school principal is a totally hot latin daddy type, so maybe I can stand another Wednesday or two.

Oh, my.

Distasteful, my ass.

I sense a porn movie in the offing.

For those of you who haven’t seen Judy Bachrach’s delectable savaging of Brigitte Quinn on the subject of President Bush’s second inauguration, go here. I promise it’ll be worth it. It’s safe for work, unless of course you happen to work in, you know, America.

And regarding another matter: two more people have done this. I now have a wonderful DVD of The Royal Tenenbaums, which I have already watched, and a wonderful vegetable peeler, with which I have already peeled three cucumbers (for entirely innocuous purposes, I promise you). But, again, there were no names or return addresses. While I love receiving gifts, I love being able to thank people for them even more. So if you sent me a pie protector, a vegetable peeler, or a DVD, would you mind too terribly emailing me your name and address so I can write you a proper thank-you note?

Thank you.