VH1: Behind the Spork

As promised, here is the story of how your weekly sporkful came to be.

I hinted in the 2005 Christmas letter that it started with the response to my 2004 Christmas letter. There were some requests that I would start a blog because it might be fun to read about me more than once a year. These requests were repeated several times.

I liked the idea. I enjoy writing, I have plenty of opinions, and it would probably be good for me to have the discipline of regularly scheduled output. And, I know that no matter how much I care about some people and enjoy their company, keeping track of everyone is hard, and something like this can help. It is amazing to me how time can pass without diminishing a relationship. When the reunion comes, you are just as happy to see the person and feel just as close, unless they dropped you like a hot potato because they finally got a boyfriend and completely forgot your birthday at a time when you were really vulnerable. I mean, if that ever happened.

There were also some concerns about blogging, the first one being my fear of becoming an insufferable twit. I have an acquaintance that sends out regular email updates about her life. She is self-absorbed in person, so it was not a total surprise, but she comes off as really annoying and I don’t think it is good to share some of the things that she shares. Since this will be a blog, where people can choose to visit instead of just being sent updates, that should help. I will just have to hope that I don’t suck.

There were also logistical concerns. I had a domain with my name, but I had never put anything up on it. That would have been a reasonable place to put it, yet I knew that at some point I would probably want to grouse about people I work with, or work itself, and people get fired for that nowadays. I decided that maintaining some anonymity would be best. It’s not that you can’t know who I am or forward things to other people. I would really like the more practical ones like DC Travel Tips to reach people. But if I ever call anyone a stupidhead I want to maintain plausible deniability.

The last issue was basically a procrastination one, which, I have to say, has affected pretty much every aspect of my life at some point. Months rolled by, until I finally decided to introduce it in my Christmas card, and then I needed to put off sending cards because I hadn’t done the blog yet.

I finally set up my account and created my first post the Tuesday before Christmas, around midnight. I knew pretty well what I wanted to say, but not whom I wanted to be. Yes, I am a fairly creative person, but I am horrible at creating titles. Of the projects that I currently have open, the documents are titled things like “screenplay”, “novella”, and “ghost story”. When I have created usernames in the past they have usually involved some combination of my names and initials and maybe my birth date if numbers were required.

I have never picked up many nicknames, either, so could not draw upon that. Usually when people want to embellish, they add “Miss” to my first name, or put my middle name after.

My first try was Easy Reader because I have been thinking a lot about Morgan Freeman lately, and I hope that the reading will be easy, but that was not available.

There is a comic strip I like, “Brevity”, that is fairly new. When it was being introduced, there were a couple of banner ads rotating on comics.com. The first, and most adorable, was four gorged, multi-colored hippos lying around, with one saying, “You know, I’m not even that hungry but when I see those marbles I just lose it.” The second was a picture of a spork and the word, sporktastic. Sporktastic was available.

So that is my new identity. Your username does not automatically become the subdomain, so that ended up being sporkful, like your sporkful of news, and then I can just be spork as well. It is appropriate because both sporks themselves and adding –tastic to words other than fan is inherently funny. Also, did I mention it was midnight?

Anyway, as spork, whether I am dishing out frothy fluff or meatier items, you have, well, pretty much a useless eating device. I mean, really, you can’t pierce anything with those short plastic tines, yet their presence there gives an escape route to any liquids for which you would use a spoon, making them only appropriate for KFC mashed potatoes. But it’s fun to say, so I’m keeping it. Also, I like mashed potatoes.

Family members were referred to by code names last week. Mama Spork and Big Sister Spork work for me. I can probably shorten Big Brother Spork to just Brother Spork, because he’s the only one. Sister in Law Spork is not great, because I feel that it emphasizes her relationship through my brother, when I have my own relationship with her. I may just use Spork in Law. Little Sister J and Little Sister M are again, a bit on the long side, even without putting in a spork. I toyed with Spark and Sperk or Spirk or something like that, but they don’t feel right. The Sporkfather will probably not get mentioned much.

I think it would be too complicated to nickname friends and pets, so they will just go by their own names, unless something seems to identifiable. I am totally not one to kiss and tell, but if I start dating someone seriously, they will probably come up sometimes. When the need arises I will choose a descriptive nickname, like Cute Cafeteria Guy, Mr. Intimacy Issues, or Gerard.

Now, I know that no biography special would be complete without a story about drug use, so here’s mine.

When I was going to have my wisdom teeth extracted, the oral surgeon prescribed a valium to take before I went in. I could feel myself losing control on the way over. I made a joke and could not stop laughing at it, even though I knew it wasn’t that funny.

I would like to take a moment to point out that they give you the valium so that you are kind of out of it when they stick a giant needle into your jaw. Despite this, and the numbing substance that they apply to the area, I still totally felt it and it really hurt.

Anyway, I was out of it for the rest of the day. Sadly, this was the day that my coworkers confronted our contracting company about the fact that they were cheating us and we knew it, and I couldn’t be there for them. I was loopy and I had big wads of cotton in my mouth. You just can’t live that way. Maybe if you are really rich and you have someone to do math for you and stand you upright when necessary, but it’s important for me to be present for people. I threw away the empty bottle, and never took Valium again. I’ve never told that to anyone before. It feels good to get it off my chest.

Actually, I did take a two-week course of Ambien a few months ago to regulate my sleep patterns. I did not find it at all habit forming or dependency inducing, so I wouldn’t mention it, but the word is that’s what Colin Farrell is currently in rehab for. I’m kind of assuming he was taking it for longer or at a higher dosage or mixing it with other things. I would sometimes get the effect of a mild hallucinogen, but it’s really mild and then you fall asleep so it’s not really an effective trip.

But wait, you say, tell us more about this mild hallucinogen thing!

Well, it can take up to an hour to kick in, so taking it and then hopping right into bed can be kind of pointless, but you wouldn’t want to start anything that takes close attention. I would usually be on the computer, surfing the internet, playing games, or reading documents. If I stayed on too long, I don’t know if it was that my eyes started to lose focus or my brain started to enter the dream state, but things would go kind of 3-D. The jewels in Jewel Quest would project out a bit and shimmy, and Word documents would sort of warp. Imagine that you typed on shrinky dink material, then cut it into irregular pieces and baked it. It was something like that.

Okay, my drug stories are pretty boring, but I think we can agree that my anti-drug policy is for the best. Can you imagine me on Angel Dust?

But just because I’ve never been in rehab does not mean that I have never had health issues or been hospitalized or severely incapacitated. We will cover that next week in the sequel to DC Travel Tips: My Last Day in DC.