vituperation

May 25, 2003

Attention, geocachers around me: I’ve placed another cache. If you’d like to look for it before it goes public on the geocaching site, here’s a link to see it.

You’ll need a boat to get to this one.

My father called me yesterday to tell me about what he found at this link, and how it had him bumfuzzled. We had a long and arduous discussion about how it’s a simple mathematical thing, and there’s nothing amazing about the puzzle always correctly picking the symbol you’re looking at.

It always comes back to the math, you know. The secret is in the nines. If you add the digits of a two-digit number, then subtract that sum from the original, you get a number that’s a multiple of nine. For example, let’s say you picked 47 originally. 4 + 7 = 11, and 47 - 11 = 36, which is 9 x 4.

"The symbols are just there to misdirect you," I said. "It’s like a good sleight of hand. The computer knows up front that you’ll get a multiple of nine, so it puts the same symbol by 18, 27, 36, 45, and so on. Then, when you do its little math trick and end up on a ‘nine’ number, it looks like the computer figured out what you were thinking."

My father disagreed, because it worked no matter what symbol you ended on. I explained several times that it put the same symbol by all the multiples of nine each time, but just picked a symbol at random before it did that and used that one. That way, you’d be more apt to notice the symbols were different than that you were always getting a number divisible by nine.

Our argument went on for a very long time, but finally he understood how the little trick worked. He thanked me and we hung up. I wandered into the computer room to see if Robyn was ready to ride to Decatur with me to place the previously mentioned geocache.

"Who was that?" she asked. "Your mom?"

"Nah, it was dad."

She began to laugh, loud and hard.

"What?" I asked.

"Do you realize you just said ‘love you!’ to your dad when you hung up? That’s why I thought you were talking to your mom."

Obviously, I need to pay more attention to what comes out of my mouth.

I was horrified. And3rson men don’t say "I love you" to each other, not unless one of them’s about to die. My father was probably right then telling my stepmother what I’d said, telling her between great sobs and cries wondering where he’d gone wrong in raising me. My face glowed a mighty red, which only served to make my wife laugh harder.

"Oh God," I said, "he’s going to think I’m going soft as I approach middle age."

I raced to the phone to call him back and apologize for my slip, for having possibly traumatized him and causing him to question my masculinity. It rang and rang, but all I got was his answering machine.

I fear I may have caused him to have a heart attack.

About eighteen months ago I went for my first massage, and loved it, save for one small portion of the session. Since that time, I’ve made a point to go for a massage every four to six weeks. Massages are wonderful things, and I highly recommend them to everyone.

Friday afternoon I decided to go get a massage after work. Despite this past week being my ‘off’ week for weight training (after every twelve weeks of hard weight training I take one easy week, wherein I either lift no weights or very little), I’d been goofing around with some of Robyn’s Firm videos on my normal weightlifting days and was sore because they’re so different from the style I normally do, so I was really looking forward to this massage.

I got the new girl this time, a mere slip of a thing perhaps 5′ 3" and 115 pounds. She was very chatty, regaling me with tales of various illnesses, her downstairs neighbors, the compact disc player that just got stolen from her truck, and numerous other things. I tried to zone out as best I could, not because I was bored or rude but because massages just do that to me.

After half an hour or so, she finished my back side (as opposed to my backside, you know) and told me to roll over. I complied.

"If you would," I said, pointing to two spots right below where my hipbones poke out, "please try not to get me here. These two places are insanely ticklish now, and actually flutter and cramp up if someone touches them. It’s weird; I used to not really be ticklish, but ever since my surgery those spots are very sensitive."

I realized I was babbling and shut up. The masseuse eyeballed the long scar splitting me from hip to hip like my own personal equator.

"What kind of surgery did you have?" she asked.

"I needed to have some skin removed," I said, noting once again that somehow I was talking about losing weight. "I used to be pretty fat, and when I lost all the weight my skin was too loose so I had the extra taken away."

She asked me how much weight I lost, and when I told her her eyes widened. She looked me over from head to toe as I lay there, naked but for a towel draped over my most sensitive parts.

"Wow!" she said, "You look pretty damn good. That’s great that you did that! Do you work out?"

"Oh yeah," I said, smiling. "I work out six days a week, running on three and weightlifting on three."

"Well keep it up," she replied brightly, "and you’ll tone right up in no time!"

Damn. Dissed by the massage lady again.