The Slob BlogBecause slobs need love too!

MSNBC recently covered a story of two library books, returned 51 years late. The anonymous and obviously forgetful book-borrower, even included a $1,000 money order.

This story proves what I strongly believe, that slobs are just human.  Like everyone else, we make mistakes, and sooner or later, we feel guilty and want to make things right.  Often times, it is the guilt itself that KEEPS us from making it right.  We think that if we just cover our eyes and plug our eyes, the signs of our own stupidity will disappear.  They don’t.  Unfortunately, this story is starting to make ME feel guilty as, much like the slob in this story, I am no stranger to forgetfulness when it comes to library property.  I am pretty sure I still have a couple books on my shelf from the University Library from grad school.  I graduated like three years ago.  Maybe I should take a lesson from this guy and return them before I too, rack up a thousand dollar late fee.

When my boyfriend and I were first living together, we took great pleasure in our weekend morning routine of cooking a big breakfast, brewing coffee, and enjoying a movie or some mindless reality TV.  These days, we just grunt in a half-sleeping state, point at each other’s bed head and laugh mockingly, and stubbornly plop ourselves down on the couch until one of us grows desperate enough for caffeine to get up and brew some coffee.

One morning, we decided to make some of those buttery crescent rolls that come in a can.  These things couldn’t be easier to make, you pretty much just pull them out of the can, seperate them at the dotted line, plop them on a cookie sheet, and heat ‘em up.  No problem right?  Wrong.  The damn things require construction.

Unlike, biscuits which are just plop, bake, eat, crescent rolls must be formed into crescents.  These stupid pastries involved some sort of geometrically sophisticated maneuver in order to get them into the right shape, and for whatever reason, it was beyond my skill level.  I know what you’re thinking, and no…I’m not a monkey.  At worst, I’m a blond.

Normally, this situation wouldn’t bother me to much.  I’m a resourceful, problem solving type of slob, and just as I would if I had been alone, I got around my own fumbling incompetence by forcing the dough into a crescent shape with my fingers.  I molded it and pinched it, like Silly Puddy, into a pretty little moon shape.

My boyfriend, seized this as a golden moment to make fun of me ruthlessly.  He demonstrated over and over again how to roll the crescents correctly, but I just couldn’t do it.  By this time, I was ready to grab a snack bar and be done with the whole thing.  He made sure I’d never forget the humiliating incident by emailing me the manufacturers instructions, complete with diagrams, for rolling the perfect crescent.  Now I can’t even look at the moon without feeling resentful.

This situation was not my fault.  Furniture assembly requires instructions, delicious breakfast treats should not.  I am convinced that it’s not me who is too lazy and simpleminded, but it’s the world that is becoming overly complicated.

You may be wondering, after this long weekend, if it’s been too long since Thanksgiving to blame your Monday morning lateness and poor productivity on the holiday gobbler’s lethargic side effects.  The answer is no.  Take advantage of the fact that EVERYONE knows that turkey makes you sleepy, and add that the fact that EVERYONE also knows that thanks to refrigerators and freezers, your turkey leftovers will still be tasting plenty delicious come Monday morning.  Turkey it up my friends, and enjoy your guilt-free extra hour of sleep!

In yet another example of why truly organized people are out of their freakin’ minds, I submit table 20-1 from Organizing for Dummies.  The book suggests that mornings aren’t a great time for clear thinking (I agree wholeheartedly!), so one’s routine for getting out of the house in the morning should be planned just like any other project.  Um…no.  If I’m not thinking clearly, which I never am before about 10:30am, the LAST thing I want to get involved in is a project of any kind.  How does that make my life easier?  Getting out of the house is miserable enough…now it’s a “project”?  Delightful!

But the book goes on to provide this charming little mathematical equation, disguised as a to do list, so those of us hoping to turn around our disorganized ways can easily calculate how much time we’ll need to get out of the house.

Okay, I understand that putting a little thought into just about anything will make it easier to accomplish, but really, I can’t maybe ballpark this?  I need a whole chart?  And they’re not fooling me with this whole checklist concept, I know subtraction when I see it, and that’s my cue to start running.  I promise you that if math is involved, NOTHING is getting done faster.  Working with numbers is one of the most effective ways to slow my life down.  If it hadn’t been for math class, I’d probably have finished junior high school in three months.  I’m just saying.

So here’s the chart that’s supposed to simplify all our lives:

I resent the idea of this kind of chart to begin with,  not to mention the fact that they ask you to calculate coffee drinking and paper reading times, which I think just takes all the fun out of both activities.  I can also assure you that to actually make this chart work, if I was really going to bother with it, I’d have to take into account any number of impossible to predict variables that this chart blatantly ignores.  Oh, and by the way, you’re supposed to work backwards to come to the correct get-out-of-bed-time.  If these people are so efficient, why couldn’t they come up with a chart you can do forwards?

Here’s my version:

To use this chart correctly, I’d probably have to plan to go to bed during lunch the day before, a plan of which I don’t think my boss would approve.  I think I’ll stick with my current strategy of coming up with fabulously creative excuses for my lateness.  It seems to have worked for me this far.

Bills are an area in which many slobs struggle.  There is nothing particularly difficult about writing a check, licking a stamp, and sticking a bill in the mail, but there is nothing particularly interesting about it either.  Bills blend in with the rest of the pile of junk mail, and there is no question what they contain, so why open them?

All we see is an envelope that does not contain any of the mail slobs care about: a birthday card with cash, a personal letter, or items purchased from a catalogue. Companies are often coming out with commercials that claim it is exciting to open their bills, because of all the huge savings.  But slobs don’t think about savings, because we rarely notice or contemplate the amount on the checks we write.  We just know that it is money that we are not going to get to keep or spend on something interesting.  We when we think of exciting savings, we think about how much money we save by not opening our bills at all.  If utilities such as phone services and cable television really want to make opening their bills exciting, they should send us little surprises like:

• Cash
• Candy
• Movie tickets
• Romantic poetry
• The phone numbers of their cutest employees
• And space pens that write even when they’re upside down

If you handle money the same way I do, you’ll probably gonna’ want to check out these tips for how to deal with calls from bill collectors.

Unfortunately, the organized world has figured out a way to deal with disorganized slobs like us.  They hand out telephones to the most miserable bottom-feeding creatures they can find, and then they give them our phone numbers and tell them to call us up and try as hard as possible to ruin our day.  These wretched beings are known as bill collectors, and these are the type of beings who, once incarcerated, would never be offered parole because they are incapable of feeling sympathy for another human being.  Do not attempt to explain your situation to a bill collector, because understanding is beyond them.  The only way to react to bill collectors is to fight back.  As a human being, you are flawed, it is your right to be flawed, and it is insane for these troglodytes to imply that you are a bad person or that you should be ashamed just because you forgot to send a piece of mail.  It would be even more insane for you to believe them.

If a bill collector is going to insist on destroying your weekend by calling you at eight in the morning to harass you about money you already know you owe, the least you can do is make him feel just as miserable as you do.  These are just a few of the options for doing so.

1. Preach: When the collector asks why you haven’t paid your bill yet, go into a long sermon about how money is the invention of the devil. Shout, scream, cry, sing, and chant, or do anything else that you feel helps you get your point across.  Do not stop until you get him to hang up on you.  Collection calls are a sort of chicken fight based around intimidation and annoyance.  If you can get him to hang up first, you win.
2. Flirt: There is nothing more irritating when you are trying to intimidate and harass someone than the other person becoming turned on by it.  Find every threat he makes very exciting and tell him so.  When he asks you when you plan to pay, tell him, “When I have you here to pay in person, in sweet love and kisses.”  Again, this should keep him away for a few hours.
3. Tell him you will put him in touch with your financial secretary: Leave the phone with your cat to handle the situation.
4. Laugh: Again, the secret is reacting to their call in a way that infuriates them and makes them feel like failures.  Laughing in their ear should do the trick.  The meaner they get, the funnier you should find it.  Laugh so hard that you have to drop the phone, or call your spouse or roommate over to get in on the joke.
5. Play deaf: The more someone has to repeat himself, the more he loses track of the meaning of what he is trying to say. Don’t bother to ham it up.  Just keep it simple and keep asking, “What?” or “I’m sorry, one more time?”  He will give up eventually.  Or, he’ll lose his voice.  Either way you come out on top.
6. Distract: Keep him from getting his point across by telling him that you always wanted to be a bill collector.  Ask him how he got started and how you can too.  Be so friendly and happy to be talking to him that he questions his abilities and wonders if he should look into a new line of work.  If he stays on task for a while, act impressed by each bullying line he gives you, then repeat them back to him imitating his tone.  Be sure to ask how he thinks you did.
7. Blow a whistle into the phone

If you happen to forget one or all of the ingredients in a dish, or you find some entirely new and creative way to ruin it, there are several recovery steps you can take.

1. Rename the dish immediately!  You can’t very well call something “Meringue Pie” if you’ve forgotten to buy eggs.  Call it “Lemon Pudding” instead or “Lemon Flan”.
2. Add sugar.  Almost everything tastes better when it is sweet, and sweet foods are easier to forgive for being bad.
3. Add toppings.  Toppings such as whipped cream, chives, cinnamon, sprinkles, sour cream, cheese crumbles etc. can help a sad and ugly dish look festive.  If you’ve really messed up, use enough toppings to cover the dish entirely.
4. Add rice.  It’s amazing how many foods taste great mixed with rice.  It’s probably because rice doesn’t really taste like anything.  Rice even shows up in deserts, so don’t worry.  If you are short on ingredients, just add rice, and you’ll turn a couple cups of mush into a whole bowlful of dinner.
5. Use creative presentation.  Sometimes recipes don’t yield as much as we expect them to.  This is generally due to an agregious measuring error.  The trick to dealing with this situation is going gourmet.  Spend a little extra time arranging the small portion of food on each guest’s plate.  Add a sprig of parsley.  Parsley makes everything look prettier.  If the guests are convinced the food in front of them is “gourmet” they will be happy to be sent home starving.  They would normally pay through the nose to starve like that, and you have given them the opportunity to do it for free.
6. Go spicy.  The spicier the food, the harder it is to tell what it tastes like.  No one will know that you made a mistake, and they’ll be too busy drinking water and fanning themselves to care.
7. Change the place of origin.  If you say the recipe you tried is from your aunt in Long Island, guests will be much more appalled by its disgusting flavor than if it comes from New Guinea, or Zimbabwe, or Bangladesh.  People expect foreign foods to taste strange and have questionable palatability.

With the holiday season well under way,  slobs everywhere are making the ill-advised decision to host their own holiday parties.  Chances are, things won’t go so well, and only the strongest, most self-assured slobs will survive.  Just remember to smile, stay confident, and act like every disastrous mishap was exactly what you had been planning all along.  Just to reassure you that these holidays, too, shall pass, I’ll share a few personal accounts of social slobbery gone wrong.

A big part of what makes us slobs, is our disinterest in details.  We simply don’t have time for them, especially if they involve something we dislike doing…like cooking or cleaning.  Unfortunately, cooking for guests is all about paying attention to details.  It’s just that recipes are full of steps, and as slobs, we naturally find ourselves skipping steps without even noticing we’re doing it, or we may reinterpret the task to suit our own laziness and mood.

When my boyfriend and I were first dating, I wanted to impress him with a delicious pasta dinner.  Really this just involved buying premade ravioli with bottled spaghetti sauce and boiling it all in a pot.  I managed to fully cook the pasta, add the sauce, and transfer it all into a plastic Tupperware container.  Unfortunately, I set the container down on the burner I had just used to cook the pasta.

The container began to melt immediately, turning its bottom into gooey strings of plastic that were indistinguishable from the mozzarella cheese already in the dish.  My boyfriend sweetly ate every last bite, plastic and all, lying to me the whole time about how delicious it was.  I’m still surprised he didn’t die…or sue.  So let that be a lesson to you lovely slobs out there.  It pays to find a man who’s a good liar and who’s willing to risk death in exchange for sex.  Unfortunately, these days my boyfriend has discovered that it’s a lot MORE fun to ruthlessly mock me for my culinary incompetence.

Slobicity must run in my family.  My dad famously served a salad at a dinner party, and offered it to guest to toss.  As she tossed the greens, out flew the plastic pouch of salad toppings that came with the mix.  It hadn’t occurred to my dad that he’d have to unwrap or open anything.

He also made a dish that I can only assume was called “Chicken with Garlic Cloves.”  When my dad saw the word “cloves,” I guess decided that was all the information he needed.  The final disgusting dish was coated in the strong and offputting taste of cloves spice and may or may not have had any garlic in it at all.

My mom is no better.  She made a stew for my dad, when they were first married, that was supposed to include a hot chili pepper.  She mistakenly added a can of chilis instead, and my dad has had a slight lisp ever since.

As a slob, you’re a natural risk-taker, so I’m sure these stories haven’t discouraged you.  Just be prepared for the unexpected, and plan your emergency escape route just in case.

For more ways to cope with a social slob’s worst-case-scenario, check out these 7 Tricks for Fixing a Ruined Dish

Don’t decide!  Whatever you do, don’t let anybody convince you that you ever have to decide between one thing or another.  They’ll try to tell you that making a decision is simple…well it’s NOT.  Decisions are lose, lose situations and the only way to avoid losing is to avoid making the decision altogether.  Get someone else to do your dirty work.  Decisions are good ways to eliminate fun possibilities.  No matter what, something gets sacrificed.  You have to let go of one option to choose another.  I don’t know about you, but that sounds awful to me.

Worse yet, you may have choices that involve people.  Just leave the country or shoot yourself in the head, because there is absolutely no way out of that situation without pissing someone off.  And no, they won’t “understand.”  The better a friend they are, the more they will feel quite justified in being furious at you for choosing front row tickets to see your favorite band with a coworker over bleacher seats at her son’s junior softball game.  No matter how logical your decision may seem, you will be despised for it by one party or the other.  The only reasonable options are to come up with a fantastic lie, or to find a way to get someone else to make the call for you.

Be creative.  Is your friend a germaphobe?  Come down with some horribly contagious airborne illness like the swine flu, and remind her how badly you want to be there to cough all over her and her son.  I’ll bet you’ll find yourself dis-invited quickly.  Rather go to a movie with a friend than attend another friend’s birthday dinner with her parents?  Become a raging alcoholic and work quickly to develop a reputation for stripping down in public.  You’ll be surprised how well she’ll suddenly take the news of your absence.

Decisions are evil, and anyone who says otherwise is probably just trying to get you to make a decision for them.

Forgetting appointments can be tricky, because there is often someone else’s money and time involved, but don’t  let guilt take over.  Remember, it is normal to forget appointments now and then, so just stick to your guns.  What are you supposed to do, right down every little appointment and check the list every day?  You aren’t Santa Claus.  Below are ways to handle the situation with grace and style.

Take a Stance: Decide that this is the day you will become political.  Call up the doctor, or manicurist, or Pilate’s instructor and tell them that you are staging a protest against their services.  Come up with a reason, but don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense, they will be tuning you out at this point anyway.  Tone is important, however, so make sure you sound angry and driven to action.  Then, make sure you ask politely if you can reschedule.

Be Conveniently Confused: Go to the office, or beauty shop, or fitness center the next day and act irate when you see that the person is with another client.  Demand that they get themselves organized before making anymore appointments with you.  Be sure to mention that you value your time, and they should too.  They’ll be so embarrassed for you when they realize you are wrong that they won’t contend the point.  Make sure they give you the most convenient next meeting to make up for wasting your day.

Escape a Catastrophe: When the person calls to find out why you missed your appointment, act confused.  Say, “What do you mean I missed it, we were evacuated because of the chemical leak.”  When they ask you what you are talking about, become very concerned.  Say, “My god, you don’t even remember, you must have been very badly exposed.  You should get off the phone with me and call the doctor right now.”  Even if they catch you on this one, they’ll probably just label you as crazy, which is also a great way of escaping responsibility.