Damien Galeone

The B Monster came out of the closet just for this post

The first time I ever heard the term “Gay Friendly” in reference to me I was somewhat surprised. It went: “Someone asked if you were gay and I told them you were just gay friendly.”

Hm.

As a bartender in Pittsburgh, I had heard the term “Gay Friendly” before, and due to my cat-like mental reflexes + context + superhuman wits + asking a gay friend, I was able to piece together what it meant.

But to hear the term used about myself was a bit odd.

Honestly, it was more surprising than hearing that someone had questioned my sexuality. I was sort of used to that. I had lots of gay friends, they taught me how to buy clothes and make martinis. I liked showtunes and was usually single. It’s essentially the same specs as now, except that I am forty-one, have a cat, and once went on a Southern Italian holiday entitled “Spritzerfest” with two friends who happen to be a gay couple.

I get it. I also don’t give a shit.

But I’m “gay friendly?” Now that was odd.

While I understood, even appreciated, the sentiment – context + superhuman intellect strikes again – I have to say that I was a little shocked. You see, I never considered myself gay friendly; I have always just been friendly.

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We Want Croissants!

A few months ago, on one of our Sunday afternoon chats, I casually mentioned to my dad that I’m visiting France over the summer to visit friends in Lyon. I further added – nonchalantly – that he might consider looking up flights for a short trip to meet in London or Paris.

Dad: “Well, I don’t know, I’ll take a look. But to be honest, I doubt it’ll happen.”

Me: “Oh hey sure. No worries. I know it’s a long shot, but I just thought I’d ask….”

To be clear, it was at this moment that

1. I knew we were going to meet in Europe, and
2. I felt a little bad. Sort of like I’d tricked a little kid into walking into a bear trap.

When it comes to travel, my dad is a big kid in a bigger candy shop. I knew that all I had to do was plant a trip seed in his head and just sit back and watch it grow like chia on a terracotta ram. I knew he was almost certainly going to find a way to join me. There’s a specific routine he goes through, and by two days later, it was in full gear.

In two days he asked for confirmation on my dates of travel. I told him I’d let him know as I wasn’t sure yet. A few days after that he was listing pros and cons of London and Paris. I still hadn’t confirmed on my dates of travel, the only problem of which was that it gave him time to let the seed of travel explode. A week later, I got a call that I knew was going to come.

“What do you think about Madrid?”

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Neighbor Betty Calculates

I am undeniably a Cat Guy. These days, the Internet allows us Cat Folks to indulge in a dedicated worship of our furry like companions. And we know this gets on Non-Cat People’s nerves.

That’s fair.

Sometimes I post a cat-related blog or Facebook joke and imagine the eye rolls it will elicit. This doesn’t bother me. It’s the same eye roll I do when you post a melodramatic rant laced with passive aggression, or pictures of your kids putting on socks or every meal you eat.

In any event, you Non-Cat People don’t have to worry today, because this post is about my neighbor Betty.

My neighbor Betty is a bit of an odd ball. And I am not convinced that she wasn’t on drugs the other day when she was chasing some flies and shouting at birds on the balcony. She always makes a scene; all the other neighbors know about her. She only decided to come in when a wasp made its appearance. Her pupils were dilated. Her hair was standing straight up in the air; I mean downright bristling. Then she threw up on my floor.   Read the rest of this entry »

Who Knew?

A few weeks ago, I wrote this message to a friend on Facebook:

Hey, let’s grab a beer this weekend!

The friend is female, Czech, and a person I had seen socially a few times recently. She wrote back:

Hey! You are so great and so much fun! (enter 30 emoticons here)

Me: Thanks! (because who doesn’t love an unsolicited compliment?)

Her: But…

Me (in my head) But? But what? My anxiety took off into a variety of trajectories. Had I done something wrong? Had I been rude? What was this “but” business about?

Her: I’m just not feeling it! I’m sorry. Still, you are so awesome, you deserve someone who appreciates you.

It was then I realized what was happening: I was being dumped. Nobody likes being dumped. It hurts. It sucks. Songs and books and movies and art have been created in order to detail the misery that follows being dumped. And surely this dumping would have come as much more of a blow if I had also realized that I was dating this person.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to save face. I have been dumped and I have been dumped hard. One thing women never seem to have a problem doing is breaking things off with me. I have run the gamut of being dumped, as well. I’ve been dumped in bars, on dates, on first dates, before first dates, and by women who didn’t know they were dating me. I’ve been let go in several date venues: restaurants, pubs, theaters, bowling alleys, at dances.

Moreover, I’ve been dumped using a broad range of conduits: by girls, their friends, their mothers, their answering machines, via email and text message, over the phone. I’m just waiting for the day that I get dumped on a Jumbotron at a baseball game or in skywriting at the beach.

But these were relationships I was actually in. Now, it seemed that women were first inventing a relationship I wasn’t part of, and then ending it. Apparently, simply being dumped wasn’t enough for the women of the world, they had to begin an offensive assault.

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We are at Letna park having a goodbye picnic thrown by one of our Master’s groups. I have known some of these students for five years and reflect that I will miss them in a teacherly way, a personification of “Boy those guys were much nicer than [insert course number of current pain in the ass group here).”

Anyway, we are having a lovely time.

The students have cooked and brought wine. The weather is nice but not so warm that I am sweating. There have already been pictures and a sneak peek reveals that I do not look like my typical photogenic persona of constipated Hobbit.

All is well.

Then one of the students hands me a box. Unless it explodes, it is a gift. I begin to unwrap it.

I never know what to do when students hand me a gift. If it’s before the exam, I usually make a joke about this being a pretty obvious bribe, everyone laughs and the awkwardness is slightly abated. If it’s after the exam, I stammer a bit, say a bunch of tidbits like ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!’ open it, and thank them until profusely becomes pathological.

It’s not them, I just get awkward.

In my seven years at the university, I have received a few gifts, Some groups simply give a fond – or not so fond – farewell at the end of the year. Sometimes I meet students for the first time at the end of semester exam. The only gifts these students bring are excuses so far-fetched that I write about them on this blog. A genuine “thank you” from others is always appreciated. Other students simply leave my life forever, which they seem to inherently understand is the best gift they could ever hope to get me.

And some students give me a small gift. These gifts are often suited to my interests, and I’m always delighted that we have gotten to know each other a bit. There have been books, books in Czech, pens, gift certificates. Many very appreciated things.

Sometimes the gifts are a bit odd. One student gave me a bell. I mean, a handheld town-crier style bell. She said every teacher needs a bell. Another student got me a pack of dirty playing cards. I didn’t know what she was trying to tell me, but she handed them over with a wink and a crooked smile. A group once got me a Czech-English vulgarity dictionary, which was appropriate since this group made me stretch the limits of my own internal vulgar lexicon on a daily basis. Another student bought me a pair of sandals at a local Vietnamese shop. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him what that was all about, but I did wear them at home until the strap broke later that afternoon.

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If there’s one lesson I learned as a teenager, it’s that, well, girls don’t like sweat. But a close second is that everyone wants you to be awake.

Everyone.

My mom and dad were the first two people in that line, my exasperated teachers behind them. A slew of coaches, siblings, bosses, and others who needed me awake so that I could perform some promised duty, give someone a ride somewhere, work part of a job in return for a wage set on an hourly basis, or play baseball.

Or, really, just become part of human daytime society.

But I liked being awake at nighttime, so mornings for me were nothing short of sunny torture. While I’d eventually crawl out of bed and walk amongst the Day People, for an hour or so my brain cursed everyone and was daydreaming about night dreaming. And probably in there somewhere I was thinking about sex.

Some things haven’t changed.

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I am a normal schmuck. I do normal schmuck things like drink too much on a Tuesday, binge watch TV shows, and tell ten to twelve lies a day. Moreover, I surround myself with normal schmucks, they do normal schmuck things too. Sometimes we do them together.

Though some out there might disagree with “normal,” one thing’s for sure: I am not a hipster. I couldn’t be one. I can’t wear skinny jeans without getting a stomachache and everyone has heard of my favorite bands.

That said, I have no problems with hipsters. There are lots of them in Prague and despite all the anger and hype against them, in general I have found them to be a friendly, good-humored crowd of people. Besides, I have always had a soft spot for dorky glasses.

But “hipstery” is different. When something is hipstery – an article of clothing, a flavor of water, a band – we are placing it on a list of things that make us roll our eyes and yet whose irritative agent is not fully explicable. It’s one of those “I know it when I see it” sort of things.

When it comes to things people say, “hipstery” is an enormously applicable term. Sometimes a person comes out with a statement, complaint, or question so inherently “hipstery” that it elicits an eye roll and a spark of inexplicable irritation. And yet if we were asked to write a paragraph on why, we probably wouldn’t be able to clearly pinpoint the reason for our irritation.

For example, read these three sentences pulled right off of the website Stuff Hipsters Say:

My music doesn’t really have a genre, but if you had to define it, I guess you’d call it “organic garage.”

When I die I’m leaving my body to art

Lana Del Rey is one of the best musical exponents of her generation.  

Now, tell me you didn’t roll your eyes once and I’ll come to your house and sing you a Lana Del Rey song in the organic garage genre.

Now, seeing as I am a normal schmuck who gets annoyed by hipstery quotes, it surprised me a month or so ago when I realized I had said something that clearly fell under the category of “hipstery.” I jotted it down in my moleskine (totally hipstery), and decided to keep notes. At the end of the month I was annoyed with myself. I was also depressed and, to be honest, even thought I should go get some skinny jeans.

Here is a list of the most hipstery things that have come out of my mouth in the last month.

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So Young. So Awkward

We are sitting in the Sokol on a Tuesday night. Beer. Becherovka. It’s a way to celebrate a good day or forget a bad day while handicapping the next day. Somehow we get onto the subject of our awkward teen years. The things we did.

My friend confides that were I to visit his neighborhood a few decades before, I might see him wandering around, running errands, doing garden work, and even working his part-time job at a video store in a full gi (aka: karate uniform).

Not to be outdone in the awkward area, a space in which I can confidently and comfortably assert myself, I tell him that from the age of ten(ish) to fourteen(ish) I desperately wanted to be in the army. I dressed in fatigues, boots, marched everywhere in close order drill, and nicknamed my bedroom The Swamp, after the surgeon’s tent from M*A*S*H.

We laugh hard. But the speed with which we order another round of shots is no coincidence.

Oh there’s more, too. So much more.  Read the rest of this entry »

Mystery Toblerone

The Toblerone is on the keyboard on my desk. It sits perfectly in line with the keys, suggesting that it’s been placed there and not, for example, dropped accidentally out of someone’s pocket.

This is a surprise. It’s also the moment my day starts to look up. Til now it’s been a bitch. There have been articles to write, tests to make, workouts to suffer through, and courses to plan.

I’m downright pissy.

The only thing that can quell my rising pissiness is bourbon or chocolate. And since I have just walked into work, chocolate will have to suffice.

I immediately break it open and shamelessly begin chomping on one end of it. I don’t care who’s watching. This is a Vishnu-send.

It occurs to me a short while later that if I were in a British detective series, I’d be dead. Or rather I’d die later in front of a class while extolling the virtues of the Oxford comma. The second thing that becomes clear is that I don’t care. Well, I sort of don’t. Well, I tell myself I don’t. I do things which tell myself and everyone around me I don’t care. I post a joke on Facebook about the ease with which an enemy could assassinate me with cyanide.

Shortly after making that joke on facebook – and to anyone within a thirty foot radius of me – its truth begins to fester like my brain after a batch of hemlock-laced chocolate chip cookies.

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