“So you take the fork and poke it into the forehead between the eyes, then you drag it along the spine back to the tail. Strip off the skin and scales and separate the top half of the meat and pop it in your mouth.” Mr. P is stripping the meat off the fish and washing it down with black coffee. I am doing the same. “That’s how you eat a chubb,” he says. It is 8:30 a.m. “Do you like gin martinis?”

“Yep,” I say.

“We’ll have those at lunch.”

Being a Philadelphia native I have always been proud of my city’s exceptional ability to make one fat through food. We are the owner of the cheese steak, which is the filet Mignon of fatty foods. There are a thousand world-class pizza joints with some of the most-delicious, cholesterol-filled pizza and hoagies on Earth. We have scrapple, which is a hotdog-quality breakfast food for which I would kick a puppy in the nose. We have Tastykake cupcakes, soft pretzels and deli sandwiches that will end your life ten years earlier than planned.

My pig to truffle-like ability to find unhealthy cuisine led me to Prague. Gulaš, pork and dumplings, liver dumpling soup, Svíčková, cakes and, of course, beer. These two cities satisfy the gluttonous goblin that lives within me with their different varieties of fat-laden grub. I figured that I would have to look no further to quench this urge.

But then I visited Wisconsin. And what’s interesting is that in Wisconsin not only have I found a cuisine that will add to my waist size, I have found a new cuisine that will add to my waist size.

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I encounter a fearful sight as I walk down the aisle to my rightful spot on the metal death tube (airplane) this morning: There’s a person in my seat. I am taken aback and let out a sigh. This is a problem for so many reasons.

First of all, 24J is a perfect seat, made just for me. It’s a mid-plane window-seat, which provides a perfect view of the wing and if you are a terrible flyer you know that you gotta watch that bastard or it’ll fly off the plane. Moreover, window seats allow you to avoid almost everyone else on the entire plane except for the person who brings you drinks, the guy next to you and the cement-kneed martial artist behind you. Second, I don’t like confrontation. I’m usually either wrong and irrationally aggressive or right and too timid to push the point. Third, the occupier of my perfect seat is a child.

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I open the door to the Doghouse and take in the surroundings. Lee has set it up nicely; it is just as I have always imagined. There’s a beer cooler, an ashtray, a small TV and a book entitled ‘1001 ways to end up in the doghouse.’ He is jotting in a notebook with the words ‘What I have Learned in This Doghouse Visit’ on the cover. He is wearing a navy blue robe and listening to Jimmie Hendrix. The robe almost appears to be a membership garment.

It’s very nice, indeed. Lee spends a lot of time here.

There are several hundred ways for a man to end up in the Doghouse. Usually it involves drinking too much or missing an appointed curfew. Sometimes it involves a seemingly minor disagreement or smiling for a split second too long at the blonde cashier selling you catnip at the pet shop. Hypothetically.

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The old man sitting across from me is preparing to tell a joke. He is muttering to himself, then looking up words in the dictionary. He then brutalizes the pronunciation as he jots it onto a piece of paper in front of him.

When he has all the words he needs, he goes through the list and whispers to himself, organizing the plot and characters of his joke. When he says something like, “yes, yes…,” I know he’s about ready. So I prepare myself by ordering two shots of our favorite drink – Becherovka.

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I seem to have a love hate relationship with inanimate objects. I have shoes that constantly reform themselves into implements of pedal torture. I have a pillow whose three feathers tickle my nostrils every night and a schizophrenic shower head which was clearly a Gestapo torture expert in a former life.

So, as I prepare to go to the Krkonoše Mountains for a holiday/English course it promises a reprieve from these little immobile monsters. Aside from that, a week at a mountain chalet, Moravská Bouda, teaching English and hiking acts as a meditative retreat from my daily life. The air is cool and clean; it is void of cars, trams, and (most importantly) questions like this: “How can you me fail Professor Damieleone, me you never saw?”

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“So, I love this part when your date starts calling you fat. That’s probably the best part of the story and I think you should draw that out more.” I am speaking on Skype, so my position is prone and languorous. The pre-rain muggy weather has forced me into a pair of the loosest shorts I own and a T-shirt that was built for spaghetti stains. As M begins to speak, I take the opportunity to cram a few cheese doodles into my throat.

“Yeah, I agree,” she says. “I want to focus on how upset I am here. I want to look more pathetic, but how?” A high-pitched squealing comes from behind her somewhere. “My dogs hear your voice; they are eating their squeak toys again.”

It is good to know that my voice has a dog-whistle effect on canines.

“Oh, I know…were you sweating on the date?”

“Oh yeah; it was in August.”

“OK, from where?”

“My boobs. I always sweat from my boobs.”

“Great! OK, get it in there that you were sweating from your boobs when he called you fat. That’ll make you more pathetic.”

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I wait in the hallway, my knees on the seat of an office swivel-chair. My colleague, G, is kneeling on a chair beside me. The wheels of the chairs whine against the wooden floor. We are both officially wearing a game face, which means that I look like a Cro-Magnon on a quest for fire and G has begun sweating into the chair.

Being a university teacher means that pressure is seasonal and intense. These are periods marked by gallons of coffee and cold sandwiches inhaled while grading tests and correcting essays. They are blurry with lessons and leave me sapped at the end of the day. In these periods of intense pressure I arrive at the office greeted by a line of students holding notebooks and confused frowns.

This is not one of those periods.

I turn to G and say, “My friend, you are going down like Jenna Jameson on a movie set.”

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Kinoshita picked up the sword; he had been waiting a long while for this confrontation with the demoness. It had all come down to this moment, one of them was going to die and the other would have Taki’s soul. As he moved toward the demoness, the room filled with a gaggle of young, beautiful girls dressed in what appeared to be sheer dinner napkins. Kinoshita struggled to maintain his composure in the presence of such flaunted nubile skin, but even the demoness shrugged at him and put down her kanabō.

Having discarded their weapons and altogether forgetting why they had wanted to destroy each other in the first place, they both took a seat in the Shinto shrine and enjoyed the phenomenal spectacle of young women in a Prague summer.

The preceding delusional fantasy is a pretty solid representation of what it’s like trying to concentrate on anything on Prague public transport in the summer. The three things Czech women do best in hot weather are be beautiful, close windows and wear very little. This means productivity gets beaten down like a Justin Bieber fan at an Anthrax concert.

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Situation

So you’re a normal everyday schmuck, gliding through life on the internet feathered wings of procrastination. You have a brainpan full of excuses and a full DVD collection so you’re all set.

Doh!

And then, out of nowhere, you‘re told by a far more responsible classmate that your major academic work, hypothetically let’s call it an MA thesis, is due in seven days and not the 24 days  you were counting on.

the problem is that it’s far enough away that you must try to beat the deadline, but close enough that it’s going to be a headache the likes of which usually come from distilled fruit.

Damage Control

How to handle this scenario? Following these five rules will help you get that (hypothetical) thesis in on time with a minimum of blood spilled, public weeping and destroyed relationships.

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Place: Student Studies Department

Date: June 8th, 2012

My interpretation of events:

I walk into the Student Studies Department and ask a question to which I believe I already know the answer. To the best of my recollection, the following conversation is 100% accurate.

“Hi L, I’m just checking, the deadline for handing in MA theses is June 30th, right?”

“Hi. Yeah, pretty much. June 15th is better, but you should be able to get it in on the 30th. No problemo.” She stares at me in what can only be described as a painfully withheld demonstration of lust. “Your haircut makes you look tall and slim.”

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