Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Tomorrow morning, I am teaching my first ever group fitness class at a gym. Wish me luck (ex post facto, if you’re reading this after ten in the morning, Eastern Standard Time).

When the gym’s group fitness manager called me to ask if I wanted to sub for a cardio sculpt class, I was thrilled, because of course what else could students in a “cardio sculpt” class do except perform autothoracotomies, reach into their open chests, pull out their still-beating hearts, and shape them into little animals and flowers and mugs to take home to their families?

Alas, when I attended another instructor’s cardio sculpt class in preparation for my own, I found that, in fact, the answer to the above question is “fifteen minutes of uncomplicated aerobics followed by thirty-five minutes of straightforward weight lifting and five minutes of vaguely dance-like relaxation movement.”

At first I thought the crushing disillusionment I felt at finding out we weren’t going to sculpt our own hearts would be the death of me, spiritually if not physically, but I seem somehow to have endured, bloody but unbowed. And for the last two hours I have been aerobicizing and lifting around my apartment, shrieking things like “Grapevine right! And pivot! Grapeveine left! Single hamstrings! Double!” at the top of my lungs, practicing for the moment less than twelve hours from now in which the people standing in front of me (well, technically, behind me, but I’ll see them in the mirror in front of me) will believe that I have the power to make them hotter.

Maybe instead of the vaguely dance-like relaxation movement I’ll quickly and efficiently instruct students to mold their hearts into ash trays.

In my first quilting class, a couple weeks ago, we learned how to make quilt blocks. So I did:

In my second quilting class, tonight, we learned about low contrast vs. high contrast.

Back to the drawing board.

I have a new favorite book. I haven’t read it yet; in fact, I don’t even own it yet, but I will, very, very soon.

It’s called How to Goodbye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way? and was written by a man named Hiroyuki Nishigaki, who, if his publicity is to be believed, was given the ability of space travel by a female inorganic ally not once but twice, at the ages of 10 and 56.

Here is an excerpt from another work of Mr. Nishigaki’s:

I had hated several big vinyl houses in front of my house for about 20 years because the vegetables in these houses have the same feeling of melancholic…A week ago when I walked beside these vinyl houses, I talked to the vegetables in these vinyl houses. By using my third attention, I said to these vegetables ‘Please, excuse human beings who will eat you soon. Don’t get perverse as long as you live on the earth.’…When such a message could reach the vegetables in the vinyl house by me, beautiful transparent flash suddenly lightened in the vinyl house by me and the vegetables turned to be lively. Then I could feel relieved and joyful.

I am so very, very excited.

My secret hope is that along with the book I’ll get my own female inorganic ally.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that my doctor boyfriend is also a painter?

For my birthday in January, he gave me a coupon redeemable for one painting. I asked him to paint a portrait of my dog, and this is what he came up with. You don’t quite get the full effect seeing it online, as the actual portrait is two and a half feet by three and a half feet–her nose is bigger than my fist–but this gives at least a sense of the thing. (You can click on the picture to see a larger, slightly nicer version.)

Not that I’m bursting with pride or anything.

Words I have had trouble remembering in the last week:

luminary
algorithm
commemorate

I see two possibilities:

1. It’s early-onset Alzheimer’s.
2. The gods are punishing me for the paper I wrote in eighth grade about weathermen in which I suggested that people start getting less intelligent once they hit 30.

Either way, my chances don’t look too good.

Those of you who have had the good fortune to meet my dog A. will undoubtedly testify that she is the friendliest creature on the planet. Anytime she comes within yards of a human being, she goes nearly mad with joy, leaping about, tail wagging, hoping against hope to be petted or talked to or played with, and, even if that hope is left unfulfilled, generally so glad to be alive she can melt even the coldest of hearts. Furthermore, she is utterly indiscriminate in the bestowal of her affection; I suspect that even a reprobate on the order of Injustice Antonin Scalia would receive the same treatment as wonderful people like you and me.

So.

The other night, A. and I were at E.S.’s place. I was surfing the web, E.S. was studying in the next room for some sort of test the hospital was giving him the next day, and A. was lounging on the couch with him, when there came a knock on the door. Now, E.S.’s building is very small; the only other people who live there are the owners, E.S.’s sister, and his ex-boyfriend E.W., who hates my guts. Neither E.S.’s sister nor the owners ever stop by, so this had to be E.W. In the past, when E.W. has knocked on the door, I have tended to hide either behind the refrigerator or in the bathroom. But this time, E.S. was in the other room and didn’t hear the knock, and so, despite E.W.’s terrible, terrible temper, I thought, “Oh, fuck it. I’m sick of hiding from this man either behind the refrigerator or in the bathroom and I’m sick of his refusing to speak to me or even look at me when I do have the misfortune to encounter him. I’m going to answer the door and he can just fucking deal with it.”

So I did. And we had a remarkably civil and pleasant conversation in the brief time it took E.S. to make his way to the door from the other room, followed by A. E.W. looked at her, bent down and beckoned, and said in a dog-friendly voice, “This must be A.!”

And she didn’t move a muscle.

My dog, who would dance happily around Tom’s de Torquemada if he happened to walk through the door, stood stock still.

He tried again. “Come on, A.! That’s a good girl! Come on, A.!”

At which point she went and hid under the table.

“Sometimes she gets shy around strangers,” I lied gleefully.

The three of us finished our conversation and E.W. left. A. emerged from under the table to fulsome praise from Yours Truly.

It’s one thing to have a cute and cuddly and furry and friendly animal that gets so excited every time you come home, you feel for a brief moment that you’re not totally alone in the world.

But an animal that hates your enemies is a gift with a price above rubies.

My friend N.M. says that, whenever she hears anybody speaking German, no matter what they’re actually saying, she thinks they’re saying, “Jews, get on the train.”

Last Sunday, I planned to meet E.S. for lunch during the gay pride march. Uncharacteristically, I was on time; even more uncharacteristically, he was late. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said, “but I was watching the parade and the gay policemen and firemen came by, so I couldn’t leave.”

I’ve known for some time that E.S. is a sucker for a man in uniform, but I didn’t know that the effect was so strong as to overcome his almost pathological compulsion to be on time.

This started me thinking. “I know E.S. is really into me and thinks I’m really sexy,” I thought. “But if I become a fireman, then he’ll think I’m even sexier than he already does.” I started fantasizing about life as a fireman, going out and saving lives and then coming home all dirty and sweaty and having E.S. massage my sore muscles and strip off my fireman’s uniform and–well, you get the idea. Plus, becoming a fireman would allow me to do something with my life that helped people in a very real and concrete way–I mean, writing pretty music is all well and good, but sometimes the benefits to humanity are a little hard to make out.

In any case, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. Finally, yesterday, I went to the New York Fire Department web site and started investigating.

And was stopped cold by the realization that I am too old to become a fireman. To be eligible to take the open-competitive Firefighters Examination, you have to be under 29 years old; the next exam is in October of 2006, at which point I will be 33.

Devastated, I called E.S. and told him all about the destruction of my dream. He consoled me with the information that, if I’m too old to become a fireman, it also means I’m too old to develop schizophrenia.

I told him the voices said he was wrong.

Monday evening I had some friends over to do something so shameful that I hesitate to blog about it. One might suspect that the orgies, sex clubs, and pornographic movies that have comprised my not-so-distant past would place me safely beyond the reach of shame.

One would be wrong, however, because what we did was play Dungeons & Dragons.

For those of you who were normal, well-adjusted teenagers, Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game invented by a crazy person named Gary Gygax in the mid- to late 1970s and popular since then with high school nerds and social misfits of all ages. Players create characters of various races (elf, human, gnome, etc.) and classes (mage, paladin, druid, etc.) and band together to go on adventures, fight monsters, win treasure, and forget momentarily the fact that they are acne-ridden losers who will go to their graves without ever having sex.

Though I certainly played my share of Dungeons & Dragons as a youth, I seem somehow to have overcome both the acne and the lack of sex. However, in recent conversations with various friends, I discovered that they, too, played Dungeons & Dragons as youths. Perhaps there’s something about a hidden shameful past that draws people who share it together, sort of like how the closeted gay kids in high school all seemed to become friends without saying a word about their secret. I’ll skip over the details of how the members of our cabal found each other; suffice it to say that at 6:00 Monday, seven hardy souls, whose names I will never reveal, not even under torture of the worst kind, gathered together to play D&D.

At first we were utterly overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the rules. I am amazed that I ever even comprehended them, much less knew them intimately enough to play with confidence. There were charts for how fast you could move depending on what you were carrying, charts for how vulnerable you were to attacks by petrification, charts for how likely you were to be able to memorize a spell you found. Terms like THAC0 and Armor Class and Hit Dice jumbled themselves confusingly together to befuddle us all.

In the end, we decided more or less to wing it.

The first thing you have to do when playing Dungeons & Dragons is create a character. My character was a human mage named Zoltan the Vengeful; Zoltan was an exact physical replica of me except ten pounds lighter. He was accompanied on his adventure by Friar Thomas of Middling Tolerance, a human priest; Treegrass Rootleafstamen, an elven ranger and secret environmental terrorist; Sunshine Joyslayer, a half-elven bard; Pennyroyal, a dwarven fighter/thief [N.B.: pennyroyal is an herb that was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to induce abortion]; and Spotsylvania Jones, M.A., a thief who was either a gnome or a half-elf (the player started out as a gnome but for some reason my memory is telling me he changed his mind and became a half-elf). My backstory was that Zoltan the Vengeful was a closeted homosexual and was in love with Sunshine Joyslayer; I confided this information only to the Dungeon Master (the player running the whole thing) and to Spotsylvania Jones, M.A.

For the next four hours, we all sat appalled as sentences like “I speak Orcish–I listen through the door and try to understand what they’re saying” and “I have a 30% chance to detect hidden portals” flowed ever more easily from our mouths. At one point, we turned a corner in the ruined castle and a “jelly-like substance of a disgusting ochre color” fell on Treegrass Rootleafstamen and Pennyroyal. “Zoltan leaps out of the way,” I said, “to make sure his robes aren’t stained.”

I’d intended to give Zoltan a gradual and tortured coming-out process over the course of the game. At first this went well, despite Spotsylvania Jones, M.A.’s thinly veiled threats to expose Zoltan unless he agreed to go left at the fork rather than right. Soon enough, though, I was so addled from trying to keep track of the rules and so horrified to be saying things like “I cast a Burning Hands spell at the wraith” that complex character development was beyond me. Eventually I gave up and said, “While we’re recovering from the gargoyle attack, Zoltan puts the moves on Sunshine Joyslayer.” To my delight, Sunshine Joyslayer felt desperate enough in his girlfriend’s absence to succumb to Zoltan’s advances. Unfortunately, however, the honeymoon didn’t last long.

“Through the mist in the tunnel,” said the Dungeon Master, “you see a giant centipede curled up.”

“Zoltan holds hands with Sunshine Joyslayer,” I said.

“You can’t hold hands with me,” said Sunshine Joyslayer’s player. “I’m trying to play a morale-boosting song on my harp.”

Men have said that to me before and I’ve always taken it at face value, but somehow this time I found it hard to buy.

By the time the clock struck midnight, we were all exhausted and, though we were only halfway through the dungeon, we decided to call it quits. The Dungeon Master revealed the secret of the ruined castle, we all gasped, and everybody went home. The only mystery left is what exactly Spotsylvania Jones’s M.A. was in.

Perhaps, if we don’t all die of shame, we’ll play again someday and find out.

After I graduated from college, I hung around for a couple years trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life before I came to an inevitable bad end; while I did this, I served as a resident advisor in a freshman dorm. This mainly involved listening to my students cry and organizing parties. This was most easily done by coordinating with the holidays: a Hallowe’en party in October, a Thanksgiving party in November. Come December, many of the RA groups arranged Secret Santa parties.

This is, for those of you raised by wolves, how Secret Santa works: members of a group gather and all write their names on pieces of paper, which they then put into a hat or bowl or similarly concave container. Everybody picks a name and, for X number of days before Christmas (or whatever date has been selected for the Secret Santa party), people leave anonymous gifts for the people whose names they’ve chosen. This all culminates in an event at which people try to guess who their anonymous benefactors have been during the previous days.

In any event, many resident advisors, aware that the demographic of the college was not uniformly Christian, came up with other names for the event so as not to marginalize or exclude students of other faiths. One RA did “Secret Snowflakes,” which, while it did the trick, made me want to hurl. Another did “Secret Non-Denominational Holiday Gift Givers,” which I must admit to liking; the problem was that it didn’t take into account students who didn’t traditionally celebrate any sort of winter holiday, denominational or no. Forcing them to be Secret Non-Denominational Holiday Gift Givers might marginalize or exclude them, which would defeat the purpose of renaming the event. Other RAs came up with other solutions, but none of them really worked for me.

So I decided that my group would do Secret Saturnalians.

Saturnalia was, for those of you raised by wolves, the ancient Roman holiday (celebrated on December 25) that eventually gave way to Christmas. I had a student from Hungary and another from Greece, but as my charges were all under the age of 19, it was a scientific impossibility that any of them could have been born in the Roman Empire before 391 A.D. (the year Emperor Theodosius outlawed the traditional pagan Roman religion). So by celebrating Saturnalia, my students would not only spread joy and goodwill throughout the group but also learn to appreciate a different cultural tradition. I didn’t make them wear ancient Roman dress, but they did have to wander around wishing each other “io Saturnalia” (the traditional greeting), and I threw a party at the end. I wanted to make some traditional ancient Roman holiday snacks, but I couldn’t find a single pet store willing to sell me a thousand larks once I told them I was going to cut out the larks’ tongues and marinate them in red wine.