Although nobody ever comes to my house, I like to hang up lots of pictures of me from my times in the military and when I used to work in Antarctica. It's to impress any burglars that break in since they're the only visitors I'll ever get. It is possible that my neighbors may want to come over but I want them to like me so I haven't invited them. I'm not a recluse but if anyone wants to come in this house they'll have to be proactive, and by proactive I mean bust the door down with a battering ram. Even if they do make it through the front door there's no way they're seeing the robot room without me going all Ace Ventura on their butts.So I have one wall where I put up four big pictures of me in Antarctica along with a bunch of framed Antarctica postcards. Partly this is to remind myself that there was a time when I was awesome and not just some big stay at home dad, robot nerd loser. My mom was visiting from Texas last week and when she saw the pictures she said they were nice and she wished she had some like that. I heard once that if you go to a Japanese guy's house and compliment him on something he has, he will give it to you. I'm like that with my mom. I'm not like that with everybody, just my mom. So I gave her the four big Antarctica pictures figuring I'll just replace them later. It's not like anyone's coming over soon anyway, right?
What I forgot was that the next week we were scheduled to have the air conditioner checked as part of the monthly base housing maintenance checkups. So the air conditioner maintenance man comes and he's checking everything out and guess what happens just before he leaves? He catches his eye on the Antarctica wall, except instead of pictures of me being awesome, all he sees is four empty frames! Damnit! I missed out on a chance to impress a random stranger with pictures of me hanging out with penguins. All he saw was the postcards, and hell, anybody could have postcards. He probably thought I was an Antarctic postcard collector. He said, "One day if you save up enough money you may be able to go on a trip there." At that point I began punching myself in the face repeatedly.
2 comments:
You could just do like my wife makes me do and hang picture frames up without putting pictures in them (she'll get around to it one day.)
People are always asking me "who's that?" when they see some generic photo frame model's picture hanging on my wall. I like to try and make up bios on them all "Oh, that's my uncle Sam. You know, he invented the George Forman grill. Yeah, the company that sells it took his idea and had him killed so he wouldn't leak the story that George Forman didn't actually invent it," or "That's my cousin Jen. She was kidnapped in Cartegena and sold into sexual slavery."
That guy in the picture is my favorite Ninja Warrior guy. I even saw the episode where he won the whole competition!
Regarding posters, I had scanned old Garbage Pail Kids cards and enlarged them to 12" x 18". I printed them out and taped them to the walls.
Post a Comment