Everyone at some point in their lives have met someone who declared that he or she did not own a TV.

This statement was always perceived as some sort of “holier-than-thou” comment by someone “too good” to succumb to only the most important cultural invention in the past 70 years.

During my freshman year of high school, I had a crush on a girl named Paula, who was one of my sister’s friends. I liked her for three reasons: we once danced at my sister’s birthday party and she let me hold her hips; she once sat in my lap in a car (hilarity ensued); and she held my sweaty teenage hand when we watched Cry Baby in the movie theater.

But there was something odd about Paula and her family and I finally found out after weeks of pining for her. She didn’t own a TV.

When she told me this startling fact I looked at her like she was a Martian. A really hot Martian who liked to sit in my lap.

“So, what do you do?” I asked her.

I don’t remember what she said, but it had something to do with “reading books” or “talking with her family” or some other crazy behavior.

I never understood people who didn’t watch TV. They usually added to this fact by declaring that they didn’t even own a TV set. Television was the first widely available machine to which humans became addicted, bringing diverse people together, and allowing us to avoid eye contact with our friends and family.

But maybe Paula, and all the other aliens who pride themselves on not owning a TV, was onto something. Because on Tuesday night, after enjoying decades of staring at the socially relevant telecommunication system, I did something I am not proud of:

I voted on “American Idol”.

Specifically, I picked up my cell phone and texted the word “VOTE” to (866) IDOLS-02, just like the funny-looking Seacrest man told me to do.

A TV show I had once reviled for being a retarded popularity contest featuring karaoke singers got me this season to watch. And care. And vote. But, I believe, I had a good excuse.

For those of you who watched on Tuesday, you may remember that the phone number I mentioned above was the voting designation for Syesha Mercado (who survived this week’s vote in no small part thanks to me). Though she wept crocodile tears and compared her efforts on “American Idol” this year to those of the civil rights movement, Syesha was so amazing singing “Proud Mary” and, more importantly, looked so friggin’ hot, I was overcome by a desire to text a vote for her.

Turn away, I’m hideous.

Overcome by shame, I then texted my friend MJ about what I did.

Arjewtino: “I’m voting 4 syesha.”
MJ: “We might not be friends.”

MJ didn’t mean we wouldn’t be friends because I had succumbed to voting for some hot chick on a TV show (as opposed to being unable to vote in this year’s Presidential primary). She meant we wouldn’t be friends because she disagreed with my choice. (FYI, she voted for David Cook.)

Sure, my man card should be taken away. Sure, this makes me a hypocrite (big surprise).

But at least I own a TV.

FIRST PHOTO CREDIT

For years, The Princess has talked about taking a drive to Pennsylvania to visit Amish country. For years, I have refused.

Maybe it was my reluctance to feel like an outsider to what I would consider xenophobic people. Maybe it was the prospect of having a really boring weekend sniffing horseshit.

Or maybe it was because watching Witness when I was a child traumatized the living crap out of me. Seriously, watching Danny Glover slash a man’s throat in a train station bathroom and watching another man get buried alive under a silo-sized mountain of corn feed is liable to emotionally scar just about anyone.

In any case, I finally agreed this past weekend to take the 2-hour drive to Amish country. We traveled through towns called Cockeysville and Blue Ball before arriving in Intercourse.

FYI: At no point did these jokes get old.

We spent more than 24 hours among these misunderstood Anabaptist Christians, riding their horse-and-buggies, walking among their farms, and doing our best not to offend any of them. Knowing me, I’m surprised I succeeded. I even snickered when I heard some frat boy ask an Amish lady selling homemade root beer to take a photo of her only to have her respond, “I’d rather you didn’t.”

Here are three things I learned about the Amish this weekend:

1. Horseshit stinks.
2. Horses shit a lot.
3. There are a lot of horses in Amish country.

We got to Intercourse, PA, on Saturday afternoon after a meandering drive through northern Maryland and Lancaster County, PA. The Princess, who is nothing if not a well-prepared traveler, read her literature about what we could do in Pennsylvania and soon learned we had made a huge mistake.

Apparently, there is nothing to do on Sundays.

I knew the Amish were a religious bunch but I didn’t realize that meant that everything shut down on the Sabbath. When the Lord wants you to rest, he really wants you to rest. So we tried to cram as much as possible on Saturday.

We took a horse-and-buggy ride:

We visited Amish farms:

We found signs about Intercourse:

We haggled with Amish boys over the price of horseshoes:

We saved a group of kittens from religious persecution:

We drag-raced wild and reckless teenage Amish boys:

We read the Bible (something called the New Testament?) page left open in our hotel room:

And, of course, on Saturday evening, we revisited my traumatic childhood experience by watching Witness, which played in every room in the Best Western at 9pm. More than 20 years later, the movie had lost some of its power over me, I suppose because I no longer empathized with a young Lucas Haas witnessing a brutal murder. And Harrison Ford going ape shit against the local townies for spreading ice cream on the face of that immortal dude from Die Hard was pretty funny.

But man, Kelly McGillis as an Amish woman? Hot.

I am an incredible blackjack player. I’m not nearly as good as the card-counting protagonist of Bringing Down the House, but then again I’m not Asian.

More often than not, though, I win at blackjack. They key is to not play desperate, never bet more than you’re willing to lose, and know when to take a chance. Oh, and don’t sit at a table with retarded people.

Once in Vegas, I was at a blackjack table with my friends Blue, Big I, and Scotty. Also joining us was a guy who was a couple of bulbs short of a full deck.

This idiot savant could win. And he won big. Every other hand it seemed like he would draw 21. And every time he did, he would shout “Blackjack!” like he had won the fucking lottery. Oh, and he would start barking and meowing like a house pet.

Yes, the man barked and meowed. Out loud. He even once asked the dealer to hit him on 15 with the dealer showing a 5. He drew a 6. This ridiculous style of play royally fucked us up and we lost more than we won.

The one gambling game I suck at, though, is poker. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t bluff my way out of a paper bag or because I can’t tell when other people are full of shit, but I have always lost at this game.

Still, when my work friend Phillip the Frenchman invited me over to his apartment recently for a poker tournament, I thought I could reverse years of bad luck. The only problem was getting there.

This was the e-mail he sent to me and some other co-workers:

Pretty clear directions, right? You’d think. I walked over to the building and was buzzed in. I took the elevator to the 17th floor and found apartment 1703. I knocked on the door.

Nothing.

Thinking they were outside on the balcony smoking and drinking and couldn’t hear me, I tried the door knob and found it was unlocked.

I walked in to find an empty apartment.

“Phillip?” I shouted. “Phillip?”

Nothing.

I walked in to the living room and took a look around. They were not on the balcony. They were not in the kitchen. There was no one there. As I weighed my options, a girl came out of the bedroom.

I didn’t know Phillip had a female roommate, I thought.

“Can I help you,” she asked.

“Hi, yeah, is Phillip here?”

“Uh, no…you have the wrong apartment.”

Oh. Fuck.

“Is this 1703?” I asked while planning my escape route and hoping she didn’t have a gun. It was Virginia, after all.

“Yeah, but there’s no Philip here.”

Considering she was talking to a man who had just illegally entered her apartment, this chick was remarkably composed. She didn’t scream or feel threatened. In fact, she acted like this sort of thing happens all the time.

“Oh my god, I am so sorry,” I said as I left, trying my best not to seem menacing.

“That’s ok!” she replied.

I called Phillip from the hallway and asked him to verify his apartment number.

“1903,” he said.

Motherfucker.

I got to his place and told everyone what had happened. The first question out of their mouths: “Was she hot?

I lost $50 that night, though I felt like I played ok and even won a hand or two. We got drunk off our asses on scotch whiskey and had a good time.

Next time, though, I’ll be barking like a dog.

FLICKR PHOTO CREDIT

I didn’t want to write about this.

I wanted to write about my wild and crazy party weekend in New York City with my best friend Blue. I wanted to write about going to Shea to see the Mets and having a large drunk man fall on us in the stands. I wanted to write about beating Blue at Ping Pong for the first time in my life (bringing my career record against him to a blistering 1-73). I wanted to write about all the stupid jokes and funny stories that happen when you hang out with someone you’ve known for 26 years.

But then it happened.

Blue was taking me to a show. Not Broadway, as I had thought, but “off-off-off-off-Broadway”, according to him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was because he didn’t want me to go into it with any preconceived notions. So I didn’t know if we were attending a play featuring a naked Harry Potter or watching some bad street performance.

Turns out, it was a little of both.

The last time Blue and I went to dinner and a show was several years ago when we grabbed some pizza and attended “Taller Than a Dwarf” with Matthew Broderick and Parker Posey. The play was sort of interesting but not that memorable. The night, though, was.

During the play, my stomach started grumbling. So did Blue’s. As line after line was delivered and each act unfolded onto the next one, we began to realize that the $3 pizza slices might have been a bad idea.

When the lights came up, we bolted. For the bathrooms. We sat on those porcelain stalls like they were our lifelines, cursing the gods of baked dough and melted cheese and struggling to survive an embarrassing situation.

Eventually, a security guard came into the bathroom after the theater was empty and turned off the lights.

“We’re still in here!” I shouted.

“Hurry up!” he shouted back.

There was an awkward pause. Finally, I replied:

“We’re doing the best we can.”

Enough years have gone by that Blue and I can laugh about it now. This past Saturday’s incident, however, might take more time.

The mystery show turned out to be Fuerza Bruta, a surreal revolving stage performance featuring a lot of kinetic energy, wind, and water that looks like Circue d’ Soleil on LSD.

Blue and I had eaten at Arturo’s Pizza earlier, sharing the most incredible half-bacon, half-sausage pie (probably one of the best I have ever had). I finished a half-carafe of red wine on my own.

“Hmm,” Blue said, “pizza and a show in New York. Seem familiar?”

When we arrived at the Fuerza Bruta show, I was feeling a bit tipsy. We walked in and immediately I was wondering what the hell was going on. Everyone was forced to stand inside a circle in the center of a dark room. One guy took off his shirt. A bachelorette party came in with each drunk woman wearing a mask. I started to wonder if Blue had brought me to an orgy.

The show started with a man running on a treadmill above our heads. Strobe lights started to splinter the dark. Wind and water were sprayed everywhere. People started to jump, dance, and cheer. Everyone would move around in unison, pushing us around the “stage” into different formations.

I stared up and got dizzy. I lost my place. I lost myself. I looked for Blue and couldn’t find him.

And then my stomach started to hurt.

The ceiling above us became a see-through mylar swimming pool. Half naked women swam across it as we all watched and cheered.

I looked around for the emergency exits.

The swimming pool ceiling started to be lowered slowly. The wet women got closer and closer and soon they were claustrophobically on our heads. Everyone raised their hands to “touch” the swimming women.

I told Blue I had to get out of there.

Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the pizza. Maybe it was the Italian sausage and hot dog I had at Shea that afternoon. Maybe it was radically changing my diet after a week of observing Passover’s dietary restrictions. Maybe it was the heat in the Fuerza Bruta room. Maybe it was the strobe lights and the psychokinetic energy.

Maybe it was everything.

I buckled over and everything went dark. Blue pushed me to the red EXIT sign.

“Is he ok?” I could hear people ask.

I was catatonic. I couldn’t talk or walk. Blue somehow got me downstairs and to the bathroom. I sat on that toilet feeling like I was going to die. I sat there wishing I would die. This, I thought, is was being poisoned must feel like.

It took 30 minutes for me to open my eyes and stand up. The 70-minute show was still beating through the walls. I apologized to a sympathetic Blue and said, “Let’s catch the end of the show.”

We walked upstairs and entered the room. One minute later, the show ended.

Now, Blue says I didn’t ruin his birthday and that I shouldn’t feel bad for blowing the tickets he paid (discount price) for. But he did say that I shouldn’t sugar coat this story in my blog. That my best blogging is done not when I try to control my online image in a flattering way but when I’m honest to everyone about who I really am. Easy for him to say, he doesn’t have a blog.

So here’s my unflattering story, the one I didn’t want to write about, the one that doesn’t make me seem funny or witty or attractive to strangers. It’s very unflattering. Very honest.

And one more thing. On the way out of Fuerza Bruta, I heard a woman behind me sum up the show to her friend:

“This show would have been amazing if I was on psychodelic drugs.”

Really? I wanted to say to her, you should have had what I was on.

My friend GoPats asked me in today’s comments:

Why don’t you blog from the wired wifi super bus?”

Having known him 9 years, I knew he was due to come up with a good idea. So here I am, on my very first BoltBus trip, writing to a total of five readers who Sitemeter tells me are currently on my blog (it’s Friday night, go out). Our WiFi connection keeps going in and out so I can’t guarantee that I can stay online or that it will even be entertaining, but I’m nothing if not determined to make you laugh.

Like a clown.

6:27PM: The bus is about to leave and the very first thing I have noticed about BoltBus is the silly people with their silly laptops (I am NOT excluding myself). The first thing everyone did was look for seats with sockets in front of them. Not two minutes went by before everyone took out their laptops and checked their e-mails.

6:35PM: Arjewtino: “Excuse me, driver, do you have the network code to get online?”
Random girl who thinks I was talking to her: “You don’t need a network code.”
Bus driver who just became my new best friend: “Actually, yes you do.”
Arjewtino to random girl: “Suck it.”

7:36PM: We lost Internet pretty much when we started the drive. Everyone is freaking out. There’s pandemonium. If we can’t GChat while on a moving conductor we’ll just about die. I entertained myself by watching an episode from the first season of Perfect Strangers. Don’t judge me. It’s a great show. That Balki!! So foreign and stupid!

I’m taking the BoltBus to NYC tonight to see Blue. It’s his 33rd birthday and we’re going to par-tay like we’re 23 again. Which translates to Sega hockey, Chinese takeout, and a Broadway show. Hopefully, this time, with less racism.

Yesterday, while discussing with Blue all the par-taying we’re going to do, he mentioned my recent lack of blogging.

Blue: “You haven’t been blogging much lately. Are you thinking about ending it?”

Arjewtino: “I think about it sometimes. Maybe I’ll delete this blog, take a break, and then start a new, secret one. You know, where I can talk about my feelings.”

Blue: “You should call it Ar-Christian-tino.”

Arjewtino: “That’s a pretty good idea.”

Blue: “Think about everything you would write about and then write the opposite.”

Next week will be a better blogging week. I promise.

Fucking vultures.

Observing Passover is like having a systematic spring cleaning. Only with more persecution.

Part of this “cleaning” involves a major overhaul of dietary rules. Now four days (out of eight) into my ban on eating anything leavened or, you know, tasty, I’m starting to wonder if any of those fleeing Jews in Exodus couldn’t have waited just a few more minutes for the bread to rise.

I spent Passover weekend entertaining my 12-year-old cousin (again) and decided to make it the Jewiest weekend ever. So I did what any cool, older cousin would do in this situation. I got him drunk.

Actually, my friend Foxymoron got him drunk. Off kosher wine. At seder on Saturday night, Foxymoron pulled off an amazing meal, cooking the traditional foods, reciting the Passover prayers from the Haggadah, and blessing the candles and wine. And, of course, getting us all drunk.

To be fair, my cousin only had three glasses of wine, and they were more like half glasses. But that boy would not stop jabbering and laughing toward the end of the evening and talking about how much game he had with the girls at his leadership conference last week. Fucking drunk.

Earlier that day my cousin, The Princess, and I had gone down to the Mall to visit the National Air and Space Museum. Since my cousin wants to be a commercial pilot someday, he was pretty stoked.

That museum, though, is incredibly out-of-date. Between the broken displays, the low-tech features, and the barrage of immensely ugly children wandering around, it was a miracle we got out of there.

Rockets

What we look light in infrared light.

“Get off my plane!”

Of course, on the way to the museum, we had noticed a litany of police setting up along Constitution Avenue. The Princess walked up to one of the security guards nearby and asked what was going on. When he stopped staring at her cleavage, he informed her that they were preparing for a neo-Nazi rally.

“On Passover?” I yelled.

I then described to my cousin how our country’s first amendment allows bigots to scream hatred as long as they have an approved permit issued by the Park Police.

On Sunday, I tried to wash away the stench of neo-Nazis invading our city and took my cousin to see records of real Nazis at the Holocaust Museum. The Nazi-themed weekend took on an ominous tone when we noticed the Department of Agriculture’s exterior design:

Also, it being Hitler’s birthday and all (April 20) made me wonder if it all amounted to irony.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one:

Now, the Jewiest weekend since Yom Kippur involving the Ten Plagues, Hitler, and Nazis has given way to a week without eating any sandwiches, tacos, burritos, cheeseburgers, or sushi. And not drinking beer.

This has been harder than I thought and, I would argue, tougher to do than fasting for 24 hours.

For those who remember, I once wrote the following words on this blog:

…when I go out, I turn into Teen Wolf hooked on bread.
Bread? They have bread? Give me some bread! You have any more bread? Give me five motherfucking baskets of bread!

I better get a good seat in synagogue. You know, the next time I go.

During the 1982 Guerra de las Malvinas between the United Kingdom and Argentina, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” was played sarcastically by British regimental bands as they deployed to the Falkland Islands.

At least we’ve won a World Cup or two in my lifetime.

Thanks to Bridal Bird, who pretty much accounts for about 17% of all my blogging material.

I don’t have “game”.

I once walked up to a girl in the men’s razors aisle at Target and said, “So, picking up a little something for yourself?”

She responded with a look that would have made your balls fall off.

Another time, while in Boston, I was chatting with the very hot friend of a friend. She obviously wanted to get in my pants because she was asking what my plans were that evening and if I wanted to go to a bar. I told her, “I’ve been known to a have a drink or two in my lifetime”.

I didn’t hit that.

Back in my day, we didn’t call the act of flirting “game”. We called it “let’s see who gets shot down first”, which is much tougher to say when you’re drunk than you realize. I didn’t tell women they reminded me of my adorable little sister and the only “3-second rule” I was aware of had to do with dropped food.

So it intrigues me to no end these days when I hear my single female friends tell me about being “gamed” by dudes who rehash all of the same techniques that have been around since the first caveman clubbed a woman over the head. (That works, by the way.) These techniques might be moderately successful and give men the courage to hit on chicks, but in their quest to come across as unique, they are instead becoming a cliché.

Just this past weekend, my friend MJ was “peacocked” or “targeted” or whatever it’s called by a man with a misguided obsession with the Flintstones. In an e-mail yesterday, MJ broke down for me every “Pick-Up Artist” move this guy made that she had already seen on VH1:

At a party, “this guy comes up to us and asked who would make a better boyfriend, Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble. And since we’re nice girls, we’re not going to be completely rude, but really, you want to have a conversation about that?”

“It gets worse. He doesn’t even have his facts right about the Flintstones and claims that Fred works and Barney doesn’t. It’s simply ridiculous because we don’t want to argue about the freaking Flintstones. And i saw the Fred Flintstone line on that TV show.”

Either this guy owned stock in Flintstones vitamins or he needed a new TV show from which to steal. I hear Everybody Loves Raymond reruns are a veritable treasure trove of seduction techniques.

MJ’s night with the prick-up artist (see what I did there?) continued.

“So then he makes us guess his job. We said IT guy. He then brags about not even having a TV. Wrong crowd to think that impresses us.”

Being one of the world’s foremost TV junkie, MJ was at this point beyond annoyed.

“Then he goes, you look familiar. Do i look familiar? I go no. Then he goes, well you have a twin out there. She was really cool, I would have asked her out, but she had a boyfriend. I didn’t say anything to that.”

When “what’s your sign”-era attempts don’t work, you should always try sounding worldly.

“He then tried to convince us that he learned how to do massage therapy in Iraq.”

Maybe not.

I know I’m no expert at hitting on women. But the thing is, when I was interested in someone, I wouldn’t make it a game of making passes. I found that trying to hit on a woman was usually the best way not to go home with her. The trick, if there was one, was just to come across as a comfortable and confident man. That’s it.

I asked Roissy once if he felt like the “meat market” was being saturated by these self-professing “pick-up artists”.

He said, essentially, that yeah, it was, and that certain “routines”, like the “best friends test”, had become off limits due to its overuse.

I think MJ explained it perfectly:

“Obviously, you have issues if you are using lines like that. I don’t understand why this stupid approach is being encouraged. and it makes for REALLY awkward situations.”

PHOTO CREDIT

In the past week, I have been told by two separate people, in two wholly different settings, that I look old.

The first came thanks to a picture GoPats took of me at a Nats game. The second, just a few days later, courtesy of my friend Beth at a happy hour, when she noticed how long my hair has gotten and how it, I suppose, has affected the way I look.

I have processed their comments, mulled their meanings over, and come up with this carefully constructed synopsis about my challenged youth: WHAT THE FUCK?

I have mentioned before how much I’m looking forward to old age and everything it promises, mainly a healthy amount of dementia and telling kids to get off my lawn. But I didn’t mean that I wanted to actually look old when it happened.

Luckily for me, my 12-year-old cousin is in town this week at some young whippersnappers’ leadership conference and he stayed with me for the weekend. I say “luckily” because what I have obviously needed lately is an injection of youth (emotional age not withstanding). My pallid countenance has been starved for an exuberance that can only be found by hanging out with a kid nearly a third of my age.

Before he arrived, I said to myself, Self, what should you do with this rapscallion? I mean, what does a 12-year-old boy actually like to do? What do they think about? Unfortunately, getting him drunk and taking him to his first strip club was probably not feasible. Possible, just not logistically plausible.

So instead, I decided to look back at what I liked to do when I was his age (20 fucking years ago) and what I would have wanted to do with my cool, older cousin. I found an old journal (not a diary, diaries are for chicks who believe in unicorns and dot their “i’s” with flowers) that I kept as a 12-year-old. After reading through it for clues, I realized something important. I was a weenie.

The journal centers mostly around my crush on a girl named Tina. I wrote some really anguishing sentences about her, like:

The only one who knows I like her is [Blue]. I love talking to her. Now when we talk, her voice doesn’t crack like it used to. OK, get this. Predita asked me to go to her birthday party this Saturday night. So I made up my mind. I was going to ask Tina to go. Not knowing she had already been invited, I asked Predita if I could invite her. She asks, ‘We have another Tina?’ I gave her a puzzled look. She continues, ‘I already invited her. Why, you two going together?’ She said it in a sweet voice. I told her no, I just wanted to know if she wanted to go. I was so embarrassed.”

You’re embarrassed, 12-year-old Arjewtino? How do you think reading this makes me feel?

I had picked him up at Dulles on Friday, bypassing the TSA security line with a special pass since his parents wanted me to meet him at the gate. While his flight disembarked, a Virgin America employee announced over the loudspeaker, “Will the parents of [my cousin] please come to the front?”

I started to walk forward when she saw me and continued on the loudspeaker, “…or the daddy?”

I got to the gate and started chatting with her. I mentioned that his parents had wanted me to meet him at the gate.

“Oh, you’re not the father?” she asked me.

“No, I’m the cousin,” I told her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“That’s ok,” I told her, “it’s perfectly conceivable that I could have a 12-year-old son.”

Yup, definitely not feeling old at all.

I ended up taking my cousin to the Nats game on Saturday. I was planning on buying some cheap $10 seats in the stratosphere, but when we got in line at the box office, some random dude came up to us and handed me tickets to two seats in the 131 section, three rows from the field.

“Just take them,” he said. I kept waiting for the catch but he walked away. The seats were tremendous. And though my cousin, who is from the San Francisco area, wore his Giants jersey which I threatened to trash, I wore my Dodgers jersey and we both put on Nats caps.

We stayed through the rain delay, eating chili dogs that looked like, according to my cousin, “barf”, and watching video games in the Playstation 3 center behind right-center field. I felt young, vibrant, like a kid again. Let’s see someone call me old now.

On our way out of the stadium, my cousin asked me for a bucket of cotton candy. I thought about how much I used to love cotton candy, how I used to beg my parents for some whenever we went to a carnival or a Dodgers game. Now, though, all I could do was wince.

My cousin looked at me and said, “You look like your dad.”

Yup. Not old at all.