Category Archives: Stories

Jan 10 2012
4 Comments
Humorous, Stories, Three minute read

A Victim of Netflix Mania: Part Two

(continued from Part One. Doctor was just about to interview the patient)

Doctor (addressing the patient for the first time): Hi, I’m Doctor, and this is Nurse. We’re your friends! Can you tell us how you feel?

Me: (drooling, eyes unfocused, legs dangling and kicking) Uhhhhh….duhhhh…doh…..bababa. Lalalalalalala. Meow!

Doctor: Hahahaha! Good meow! Now can you make people words to tell me how head feels? (gestures at head)

Me: (waving right hand around wildly, as if grasping the remote control, appearing frustrated, brow furrowed, looking at doctor with dissatisfaction) TV breakie? (bursts into tears).

Doctor: TV breakie bad bad?

Me: (nodding vigorously, wiping nose on sleeve and then rubbing eyes) Uh huh….I sad sad.

Doctor (holding up dum dums):  You want snacky snack? We have tasty treat!

Me (with irrepressible joy and greed): MINE (grasps for the dum dums, shoves handful in mouth, wrappers and all)

Doctor (to the mother while patient happily chomps on the dum dums and spits out the wrappers and sticks): This is one of the worst cases I’ve seen. Usually they remember how to eat suckers. Instead, she’s become a sucker herself. (high fives Nurse).

Nurse: Nice one.

Mother: What’s happened to her?

Doctor: Ma’am, your daughter’s once healthy brain has turned into the equivalent of high quality dog food. One night of reckless Netflix usage has destroyed years of education, a college degree, and any semblance of social skills. Only electronic stimuli and pure sugar can get the neurons firing now. This is by far the worst case of Netflix mania that I’ve ever seen.

Nurse (in awe): whoa…..

Mother: Is there a cure?

Doctor: There’s no guaranteed way of reversing the damage. She may be left handicapped for the rest of her life, sitting in her own filth, clutching a jar of gummy bears as she watches progressively worse television year after year. Friends who once knew her will stop calling, and the family will grow weary of wiping the drool off her cheeks or closing her eyelids for her to sleep. The added tension will cause the family to fray, everyone’s temper growing a little shorter with the passing of the years, sharp words digging into each other’s insecurities. Friends will find excuses to stop coming over, and those who can get away, will.

Mother: (gasp!)

Doctor: But it doesn’t have to be this way. If there’s any hope for your daughter, it lies with you and your family. You will be vigilant, ruthless. You must not let her watch television for a month and monitor her constantly. During this time, you will force her to read and engage in conversation with humans. Begin by reading aloud to her and give her treats if she does it herself. Do not let her near a computer; she will only try to watch television. When she finally begins to speak again, she will attempt to quote things she heard on television. She must not be allowed to do this: you will make her brain revive the lost synapses. I’m also going to prescribe some logic puzzles for her to complete daily. It will be grueling, but in the end, you might have a functioning daughter instead of this pathetic example of lost potential.

Mother: But…what if…

Doctor: THERE ARE NO WHAT IFS. This is your daughter’s last chance. You, maam, are her only hope, and a sorry one at that. Only you, your family, your friends, and your medical practitioner-that’s me-can prevent heartbreaking failure. I have not thought of a plan B. Unless you want to start buying Depends in bulk, you need to get your mind together so you can save her’s. Do you understand me?

Mother: I….

Doctor: DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME!

Mother: Yes sir!

Doctor: Nurse, do you understand me?

Nurse: Yes, sir!

Mother (to Nurse and Doctor): Do you understand me?

Everyone, except for me: YES SIR!

Mother: Let’s do it! (high fives all around)

Me: Meow.

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Jan 09 2012
5 Comments
Stories, Two minute read

A Victim of Netflix Mania: Part One

(I watched a lot of TV and then my mind felt slow, inspiring this story.)

Scene: Doctor’s Office

Doctor (addressing Nurse prior to entering a patient’s room): Sir, hit me with the patient’s history.

Nurse: Sir, the patient’s family brought her in this morning. They had found her weeping while trying to hug the television. At the time, the TV was displaying the Netflix home screen. She is currently functioning at the mental capacity of a toddler. Her mother said that when they went to sleep last night, she was behaving normally. However, she had just discovered how to use the family’s Netflix account on their new television and was on her 3rd straight hour of comedy programming.

Doctor: And they just left her there?

Nurse: Yes, sir.

Doctor: Sir, what is this patient’s previous television viewing record?

Nurse: According to the family, the patient goes through bouts of extreme motivation, where she watches little to no television. However, during breaks from school or periods of emotional malaise, this motivation focuses on television and she consumes entire seasons of her favorite shows in days. She becomes inaccessible and irritable, insisting on complete solitude and/or demanding others watch with her. They told of one summer when she watched an entire season of True Blood in 3 days and would not “shut up” about it. They referred to it as “a scary time.”

Doctor: Television is not meant to be watched in this way. And what is her previous experience with Netflix, sir?

Nurse: Sir, she has never had access to unrestricted Netflix watching. The family thinks it may have caused her to lose her mind.

Doctor: They may be right, sir. She may be crazy. I feel we might be looking at another case of Netflix-induced mania. Shall we go in to see the patient? Do you have your rubber duckies and pipe cleaner handcuffs, just in case?

Nurse: Of course, sir. I am a nurse, sir, not an imbecile.

They enter the examination room, where the patient babbles, her mother hovering worriedly

Doctor (addressing the mother): Hi, thank you for waiting. I’m sure you’re quite concerned about your daughter. We’re going to do all we can to save her. As I once said: a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Mother (anxiously): Doctor, what’s wrong with my daughter? Can you help her?

Doctor (assertively): We’re going to get to the illness of this bottom. Oops! I meant bottom of this illness. (laughs heartily.) Don’t you hate it when that happens! Anyways, I’ve dealt with cases like this before and almost cured them. She’s in good hands. (shows her his hands). These hands.

Nurse: (holding up his hands) And these hands.

How do the symptoms represent? Will the patient be cured? Can this happen to you? Some or all of these questions might be answered tomorrow, when the saga continues.

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Jan 04 2012
2 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Stories, Three minute read

Gummy Dreams: Lisa’s True Story

just because they’re all gummy bears doesn’t mean they all look the same

What if a gummy bear was one of us, just a regular teenage mom trying to make ends meet? What if she had come from abroken gummy home, where dad ran off with a peach ring, and mom committed suicide by going hot tubbing?

What if the kids in elementary school called her dummy bear, gumtard, and sweet cheeks? What if every night of 1st through 5th grade she wept weird gummy tears before dreaming gummy dreams of a sweeter world? What if no one sat by her in middle school because of her pineapple b.o.?

What if she tried to go through a goth phase during freshman year of high school but had no facial features to coat with black makeup? What if no one asked her to the prom senior year because they didn’t want to be the one dancing with a gigantic 6 foot candy bear? What if her first love and father of her gummy cub said he wouldn’t marry her because he had fallen for a Sour Patch Kid?

What if, after she dropped out of high school, she was reduced to selling her body and being rented out for parties as a freak spectacle? “Mommy, mommy! Come look at the huge gummy bear!” The kids would say. Her name was Lisa.

One New Year’s Day, 3 years after dropping out of high school and after working a particularly grotesque New Year’s Eve party, Lisa decided she’d had enough of this life. She quit her job and got her GRE, passing the test with the highest score of the year. She made headlines that week: “Gummy Bear Mauls Test.” “Why couldn’t they use my name?” she sighed.

But the news caught on. Soon she was a local celebrity, attending mini league championships and appearing in car dealership ads. She started a blog called “Faceless” and it didn’t take long before she became a national celebrity after a youtube video of her in zumba class went viral.

Soon movie deals and invitations from talk shows were flooding in. She was already writing a book and starring in a wildly popular reality television series featuring her and her son called “I Want Candy.” Notoriety began to consume every second of her life. She grew weary from the fame.

She yearned for the days she would lumber home from school and spend hours reading and thinking about the absurdity of life. There was no time to think about anything anymore.

A few years after she had quit her rental job, she woke up another New Year’s Day. The night before was hazy and mostly forgotten, a collage of bright lights, glitter, and plastic. She gazed into the mirror and realized what she’d become: a true monster. That very moment she decided to leave it all, the celebrity, the cocaine, the lacquered friends.

She took her son and fled to a small but tolerant city in upstate New York, where people had heard of her but were too interested in living wholesomely to pay much attention.

Within a month she was signing the lease to a space where she was going to build her dream, a dance studio called “Bounce!” where women of all sizes were welcome. As she opened her front door after driving back from the real estate agent’s office, she exhaled deeply.

“I’m home,” she whispered, “Lisa’s home.”

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Nov 23 2011
4 Comments
Anecdotes, Stories, Three minute read

On Your Mark. Get Set. Fear!

Milk: Gotta Have It for Coffee

Cairo, Egypt.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011: A million man protest is scheduled for 4 o’clock pm. During our classes and breaks we watch tv and discuss what is going on or eavesdrop to other’s conversations. Life, for the most part, continues as normal. At 1 pm, the director of our program knocks on the classroom door. This is unusual.

She pokes her head in and calmly states that there is a city-wide curfew beginning at 3 pm, that classes were ending early, and that everyone should go home after stopping by the grocery store and stocking up on ramen noodles.

Did I freak out? No. Did I leave more quickly than usual, make an urgent phone call to my roommate, and then speed walk to find a taxi after not taking time to say goodbye to my fellow students? Yes.

All I could think about was getting to the grocery store. I was almost out of coffee. And milk, we needed milk. I could probably buy a few cartons of milk, and then ration them if I needed to. Yes. I need milk. How could I drink coffee without milk? What if there’s no milk? I have to get milk.

This sick internal dialogue was accompanied by terrifying images of ravaged supermarkets, bare shelves poking out everywhere and not a drop of milk to be had for the roaming groups of latecomers who pick over the off brand mayonnaises and weird canned meats others have left behind. I simply knew we would get to the store and find there was no milk left, the shelves on which it was usually stocked completely empty, only the dust revealing that anything had ever been there. And then what would I do? In order to calm myself down, I made a contingency plan: “ I might have to drink coffee without milk and that’s fine.” But it didn’t feel fine. It felt awful.

We took a taxi home and didn’t even stop by our apartment before heading to the corner store to get the necessities. Unlike the wasted aisles in my day-terror, the store seemed quite normal. I didn’t have to elbow any portly twelve year olds to get the last roll of Choco-Biscuits, and there were no flocks of mothers screaming at each other and their children while fighting over the last bag of rice. I bought two cartons of milk  (the long-lasting kind), and refrained from buying another. I was just so relieved it was there. I began to suspect the other people didn’t know about the curfew. They weren’t going to have any milk later on if they didn’t get smart. They also might be arrested for violating curfew.

We, on the other hand, went home and unpacked our groceries and prepared for a movie marathon complete with coffee and choco-biscuits. Curious, I checked the news to see what it said about the curfew. Interestingly enough, it said nothing.

I poked around a little more, searching in English and Arabic Western and Egyptian news sources, and found zilch. And then I went to the Twitter and searched “curfew.” Bingo. I discovered a slew of tweets deriding the curfew and alternatively begging others not to spread ridiculous rumors or mocking them for doing so.

Thus we found the curfew was, in fact, not real. I was glad I’d resisted buying 3 cartons of milk because then I would have really felt foolish. The lesson? Be careful about spreading rumors, including this one.

P.S. I am not one of the American students that was arrested. I’m not writing this from jail. They were all dudes anyways.

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Nov 03 2011
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Fiction, Stories, Two minute read

Jasmine’s Journey to Shubra

Destination: Shubra

The high from her rebellious escape soon wears off as Jasmine becomes stuck in traffic on the way to the city. Sitting on the highway, her tummy rumbles and the possible hour and a half of lurching before her doesn’t bode well for the meal situation. She had wanted room to run and prance and frolick, but now she can barely slam her high heeled snake skin boots to the gas for a split second before she has to switch to the brakes again. What will it take to be free?

After an hour of alternating between creeping and sprinting, Jasmine realizes it might be better to explore this city of hers on foot, the way many Cairenes do. This new idea is intimately related with the fact she totaled her father’s car in a bizarre car accident that left her completely unharmed, and a troupe of mimes in either a state of ecstasy or extreme pain. She bribed all the necessary people and walked away from the smoking, semi-silent mess unscathed, but confused. Where was she?

As she gazes around, cars whizzing by, she only sees an endless horizon of mosques, billboards, more highways, and brown buildings. Is this the people’s Cairo? Carless and clueless, she loiters on the side of the highway like an orphan child until a white taxi pulls up and announces itself: “Taxi?” Having never traveled by herself before, Jasmine is puzzled. What does this common person want? The taxi driver says again, more insistently, “Taxi??”

Finally, she understands and accepts this knave’s services, entering the back of the car and saying she wants to go to “somewhere common, where the people are.” The taxi driver is confused by this. Is this some kind of game? Is it a trick? Is she threatening him? Insulting him?

But no, she really is just that oblivious. Her stomach still growling, she states again that she just wants to go where “normal people live; a people place.” After repeating the word people a few times, the taxi driver finally gets an idea. He’s going to take her to the peopleyiest place all, the place where the popolo congregate, and the public gathers, a place where the common folk thrive and your average Mohammad tells jokes to his grandkids.

“Shubra it is” he says….and off they go.

(to be continued….)

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