Author Archives: Joel Derfner

All right, first things first. This is David. Faustus is away until Tuesday, and I

Tomorrow I am going to go buy smaller knitting needles.

Then I’m going to watch Let’s Scare Jessica to Death with this man and his boyfriend.

Then I’m going to London.

It’s not often that I feel like a glamorous jet-setter.

But every once in a while I do.

Like now.

Well, I started knitting the gloves I posted about two days ago. I figured the best thing to do would be to knit them for hands slightly larger than mine in diameter, so that at least I could start knitting right away, and then do the turkey thing next time I saw him.

But, looking at how the work is coming, I’m confident that the gloves I’m knitting will fit him extraordinarily well.

If he happens to have become a sasquatch by the time I give them to him.

Really, it’s just too tragic. The glove is so damn big you could fit a family of four inside it. I’m going tomorrow to buy smaller needles.

I will triumph in this endeavor, or die trying.

There is nothing I hate in the world more than hurting people.

So why is that all I’ve seemed to do this month?

I am knitting a pair of gloves as an early Christmas present for somebody I want to date.

I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. Do I

a) ask to measure his hands, thereby ruining the surprise, or
b) guess at his hand size, thereby preserving the surprise but greatly increasing the risk of giving him gloves that don’t fit?

The suggestion that I should knit the gloves to fit my own hands, since his hands probably aren’t that much bigger than mine, so that in the incomprehensible event he chooses not to date me I won’t have gone to all that trouble for nothing, is beneath contempt.

I spent all day today in the studio, editing, mixing, and mastering the demo CD of the Holocaust musical I’m working on.

After nine and a half hours of saying things like, “Okay, can we take it from ‘We’re dead even though we’re still breathing’ to the end?” and “No, the other take of ‘and if the sun should blacken, that would seem like justice’ was better,” I’m not really in any shape to form complete sentences, much less write coherently and amusingly.

Check back in tomorrow.

Unless, of course, the sun has blackened, in which case we’ll all have more important things to worry about.

Actually, the timing of my birthday on the one hand and yearbook deadlines on the other makes me realize that the dichotomy was fixed by seventeen.

Probably it was fixed by five.

Every year, in my high school yearbook, the seniors each got half a page to themselves; this was filled with their responses to a questionnaire that asked things like “Likes Most” and “Favorite Sayings.” In my senior year, of course I spent hours and hours honing my answers—this presaged the amount of time it takes me now to write a personals ad—and I remember particularly clearly the torture I went through trying to decide what my answer to “What I Have Learned in the Past Twelve Years” would be.

I am horrified and ashamed to admit that what I came up with in the end was “that people are inherently good.”

I feel slightly redeemed, though, by the fact that the instant the deadline for making any changes had passed, it occurred to me that it would have been much better to quote Ovid:

What I Have Learned in the Past Twelve Years: Rident stolidi verba Latina.

This translates as “fools laugh at the Latin language.”

What this makes me realize is that even at eighteen the central dichotomy of my character was already fixed: I believe in people deeply but I hate them anyway.

Today my acupuncturist had an open house. I foolishly ate lunch before going, and, because I was unable to resist the delicious spread of cheese and crackers and crudités she had put out, ate lunch again when I got there, which means that my goal of getting below 135 pounds before I go to a costume party Saturday for which my costume requires that I be shirtless is even less likely to happen than it was before and yet another opportunity for self-loathing is about to be opened to me.

In any case, at the open house, I had my antioxidant level tested. Apparently the average American has an antioxidant level of about 19,000. Since one in four Americans develops some form of cancer, one can conclude that 19,000 is an unacceptably low level. The people doing the testing (who were there as guests of my acupuncturist) told me what a better level to reach was; I think they said 50,000, but I have lost all certainty in my horror at having an antioxidant level of 13,000, which means I am going to get cancer and die next week.

I got extra veggies on the Subway sandwich I ate for dinner and I just ate two cucumbers for a nighttime snack, but I suspect it's too little too late.

It's been lovely knowing all of you.

At cheerleading practice tonight we learned a new cheer. It went like this (I can’t reproduce the accompanying arm motions on this blog, but rest assured that they were there):

S-P-I-R-I-T!
Spirit!
Let’s hear it!

The thing is, no matter how hard I tried, what kept on coming out of my mouth was S-P-I-T-E!

You can take the cheerleader out of the bile . . .