Damien Galeone

It happened on a Tuesday. “I’m in a bad mood,” I wrote to a friend.

“Well,” she said, “if it makes you feel any better, I just came across a friend’s husband on Tinder.”

Not entirely sure why someone else’s misfortune in the form of a cheating husband would brighten my mood, I didn’t answer. Rather, I sought solace in mindless sitcoms and the adding of cheese to ground beef. I literally grumbled around my flat until it was time to sleep.

The Tinder thing kept coming back to me, though. Undoubtedly it is a tempting resource for those looking for play on the side. It is, after all, a Rolodex of single, pretty people within 10 miles of you. However, your understanding of reality has to be a bit lacking if you don’t think you’re going to get caught trolling for a rendezvous partner.

There are fail safes. I think one can hide their profile from a specific variety of possible swipers. I think it’s also possible to block your profile from being viewed at all, so that you can essentially window shop for a mistress with a mask on.

But overall, it just seems like a thing that’s going to blow up in your face. One of your partner’s friends or loved ones is bound to see you on there and if you are married or in a long-term relationship and polygamy or Tinder aren’t part of the deal, you are going to have a lot of explaining to do.

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I was a Libra up until a month ago. It was then that I saw a list of the “New Astrological Signs,” which that hussy sign Ophiuchus caused by showing up on our astrological doorstep.

While I have never been a devotee of our astrological guidance systems, I felt unsure about the news that I was no longer a Libra. It was as if I’d found that I was really from Dallas and not Philadelphia. In astrological terms, I spent 41.9 years as a Libra and 1 month as a Virgo.

I’d gotten used to being a Libra. It was comfortable being the only inanimate sign. I was the scales, just, balanced, diplomatic, and social.

To be frank, it never made a difference. It’s not as if I ever explained my dislike of loudmouths or my enjoyment of the outdoors by saying “Well, you know, I’m a Libra.” I never once offered my Libran tendencies as an excuse for why I’m indecisive or why I avoid confrontations.

But still, I was a fraud.

Now I have to be a Virgo. Worse still, I have to learn how to be a Virgo.

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Can I get a shot?

I am sitting in my local pub. No surprise there, they have a table dedicated to me. We are at a table near an open window which looks out from below ground level onto a walking path. The weather is still almost summer-like, so the Czechs don’t mind a draft of warm air invading their drinking environment. In four days, this will not be the case.

The first kid peers in from the window with curiosity. He stares wide-eyed at us as we sip our beers. I try to say the things you say to a kid who is openly staring at you: Hey buddy. Hello. How are you? I run out of things pretty quick and the kid bursts into tears. Fortunately the mother comes to take him away moments after the kid’s screeching wails interrupted her phone call.

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Not Pictured: Weeping Photographer

“I want to see some Japanese tourists cry,” says my sister.

We’re in Paris. Now, like most grown adults, I yearn to see Japanese people weep, but this is just one of those utterances you are completely unprepared for.

What would you like for dinner? The head of a human boy stuffed in a gopher’s kidney. Will you be home tomorrow? No I’m going to the moon tomorrow. What do you want to do in Paris? I want to see some Japanese tourists cry.

We’re walking towards the Eiffel Tower along Avenue Marceau when my sister relates this goal. We have just enjoyed a baguette on a bench across from the Arc de Triomphe, which I suppose was pretty Triomphe but for the traffic, the fender bender, and subsequent shouting match in French, which is just hilarious to behold.

The baguette was stale.

In the moment before I ask what the hell she’s talking about, I recall that she also expressed an intense desire to punt a pigeon across Trafalgar Square. And the day before, she bet me how many times the American girl at the table next to us would use the word “like” as a comma.

It was 29.

I won.

So there’s a precedent for her odd choice in holiday leisure activities.

Kick a pigeon.

Wager on an American’s discourse marker ineptitude.

See Japanese tourists cry.

“OK,” I say, “Why…exactly?”

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As I walk up the steps in front of the few hundred guests and students, I am giving myself two orders over and over again:

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Graduation robes are not made for short people. They are long and awkward. So while my hands are folded in front of me in a pose of academic integrity, they are really holding the robe up above my shoes. I am wearing a huge beret-like cap that belongs on Venetian merchant travelers who have water sports named after them.

Looking austere is not difficult. To look austere, one must appear to be unaffected, unimpressed, and intensely meditating a crime against humanity. Or math. Whatever the face, smiles don’t seem to be accepted academic fashion, and so I consider the plight of the Hopi Indians and step slowly.

It’s graduation day. I have been asked to represent the foreign languages department. It’s raining. I would bite the head off a live block of tofu to be in bed reading, but instead I dress as Dumbledore and tell myself not to fall down and to look austere.

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“Dinner!” my mother shouts upstairs to me.

“I’ll be down in 7 and a half minutes.”

“OK.”

When my mom asks about the seemingly random time, I explain that I was finishing a Pomodoro. She nods and hands me a bowl of asparagus. She doesn’t want to hear about this again, and is suggesting that I fill my mouth with food.

I have been quoting time in Pomodoros the last few days to the point where I may sound like the Count from Sesame Street.

“I have done three, three Pomodoros! Mwahahahaha!”

But you see, it’s necessary.

I have been in the U.S, or as I like to call it, Utopia, for two weeks now. I have spent some hectic days lounging on a rocking chair, reading, and greeting my dad’s patients as they arrive for teeth cleaning and root canals. When my mom gets home, she makes dinner and I bother her with questions about her day as she huffs around the kitchen cooking me things. Tis a grand life.

When I am visiting home my schedule is that of a retired beach bum. I am on vacation, I am treated like royalty by my parents, and it is as hot as hell’s space heater. Ideally, my mornings involve a good workout and writing, leaving my afternoons free to read and watch the Phillies get killed. However, I am sometimes carried away on the wings of lackadaisical slovenliness inherent to the summer vacation.

It’s on those lackadaisical days I speak in vague, lazy terms. I did a little writing. I did some work. I tried to get a bit done. It’s also these days whose events I can’t remember or whether they involved a shower.

Something needed to change. And it was on one lucky day in the middle of August that I stumbled upon Pomodoro, which is a time management system that entails focusing on one task for specific periods of time.

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I arrived at Philadelphia International Airport in the late afternoon. I had just stepped off of an airplane, and I was elated for that and other reasons. I was about to have a cheesesteak and see my family.

And, most importantly, I was looking ahead at an entire month of being home.

As I approached my parents in the arrivals lounge, I knew that how much time I had at home was going to be mentioned by my dad within a minute of greeting me.

Me: “Hey!”

Mom: “How was your flight?”

Me: “It’s over. That’s all that matters.”

All of us laughed nervously.

Dad: “Mom will order the cheesesteaks on the way home.”

Angels sang from Heaven.  

Dad: “OK, I’ll say it. You have more than four weeks before you go back.”

My dad and I laughed, my mother rolled her eyes.

I knew he would say this, because, aside from reading and watching baseball, my dad’s favorite pastimes are keeping track of how much time is between now and some activity in the future, and casually dropping the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, or his hatred of Donald Trump into any conversation, despite the topic.

In terms of obsessive time management, my dad is the tree and I am the apple that did not fall very far from it. It’s sort of an inherited obsession. Imagine an old man handing his proud son a cherished pocket watch. Now imagine them obsessing on what time they’ll go for dinner at J.B. Dawson’s.

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Langhorne, Pennsylvania

I spent the month of August in my parents’ house, living like a twenty-something college graduate in the room in the attic. My summer visits are often quiet, a time when I can recharge my battery to get through another school year.

My parents live in the country, head birds in an empty nest, my brother and sisters having long since moved out.

But this summer it was a full house.

My sister is transitioning between houses, so she and her two kids had been living there for about six months and were still living there when I visited. The second floor was occupied by my parents and the kids. My sister slept on the first floor.

It was the first time my sister and I had lived under the same roof in more than two decades. So I don’t know when she become obsessed with India, but a portion of my parents’ home is like stumbling into a Jaipurian Mahārāja’s den. Her bed sheets are a horoscope tapestry done up in sari stripes, two mobiles hang above the bed in which elephants dance in permanent repose under purple umbrellas. The bureau holds Mendhi candles and sandalwood representations of both Ganesha and an elephant.

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I have never really cared about fashion. Neither did my family. I grew up in a house of short Hobbit-like creatures whose wardrobes consisted of sweatpants ranked in ascending order of formality. “Eatin’ pants” were a soundly logical dress requirement.

Additionally, the males in my household wore shirts with condiment stains with such ubiquity that they were like inherited brooches.

Moreover, fashion is not exactly aimed at the short and stocky, anything being marketed towards my ilk typically offer a “straight out of the Shire” look. So I never really bothered all that much. And no doubt, for those of us not model-thin, “fashion sense” can mean an attempt to hide doughy parts of our anatomy, which often involves wearing dark, baggy, or large items of clothing in hopes of pulling off a smoke and mirrors sort of act.

In the past year or so through adherence to diet and rigorous exercise I have gotten into better shape, so I have gone from stocky to stocky. More specifically, I’ve gone from stocky (as a euphemism for fat) to stocky (broad and sturdily built – aka: its real meaning). There’s nothing like working hard for two years in order to make it out of euphemism.

Still, the clothes I owned were now so large and baggy that I looked like a little boy who had sneaked into his daddy’s closet and played a game of I’m Going to Work. These were not unpleasant realities, but the fact remained that I needed some new clothes.

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