Christmas On Valentine's Day

Twenty-nine years before I was born, I had been christened Nicholas. I suppose the name fell into everyone's favor because people still call it out when I'm not paying them enough attention. I was born at approximately 6pm on February 15th of this year and died after falling asleep that evening.
I write this to you after my death.
The day I was born was a holiday unlike any other before. In playing God, we gave birth to the Sunday of holidays because, despite the other six days of the week, humanity still needed an alternative.
Like Planned Parenthood, it materialized under the careful process one goes through in picking out a lasting gift for a special someone. And as judiciously as a mother might name her child, our gift was unwrapped to the world as Christmas On Valentine's Day.
The two holidays by themselves were fertile soil for the weeds of disappointment but only because the celebrations had been left in the hands of popular expectations. And popularity being a business, these heartfelt holidays tend to implode under the paradox of overpriced shallowness, even if it is topped with a darling bow.
What you're about to read is what exactly might await you if you're lucky enough to live and die this Christmas On Valentine's Day.
That morning in playful, adoptive motherhood, Bethany Jo had closed in on my ear and whispered her philosophy to my youth like a mother might talk to her stillborn child. She and Daisy had promised themselves that Christmas On Valentine's Day would be anything we wanted it to be and that it could be a different anything to suit the desires of another lifetime.
Bethany considered herself a tall, brown-eyed girl and Daisy, at four feet and ten inches, considered herself fucking adorable.
The pair took on social activities as a team. Their team even had player identities like designated numbers on a sports jersey. Polar Bear and Panda Bear, they called each other, with Bethany taking the name of the taller specie. And for abbreviated occasions, they applied the title of P-Bear, which was even more convenient due to its interchangeability.
After familiarizing themselves with the world of their alter egos, they developed code-names for their team, like the Pandemonium on the Polar Caps they might unleash or the P-Pickles they might get into and on especially characteristic nights, they might go all out, P-ing all over the place. But after a few, especially defined mornings, they developed an understanding that sometimes a little too much Pandemonium on the Polar Caps incurs the necessity of a P-demption.
The P-Bears bade me goodbye at this point to collect party favors, leaving me to my new roommate, Joel. Joel is the kind of twenty-something who has already answered man's middle-aged calling to grow a beard. But on the inside, he's just an ex-army brat turned hippie. Daisy had networked him into transforming our garage into a bedroom merely because she valued the prospects of renting out a room we never use.
It’s disorienting seeing twin oil stains side by side in a bedroom.
Joel shared his rented space in the world with a big, gentle, black dog named Karma.
"She's sweet", he'd tell me, "But Karma can be a bitch sometimes."
Joel is a library of chemical knowledge, down to the dense, pictureless pages. Don't ask a nerd a question unless you want socially unacceptable detail in his reply. But nerds, like brainy sidekicks, come in handy.
Hall house has an old intercom system that was installed back when bell-bottoms were huge. Moments after he moved in, the nerd in Joel found a way to install his Ipod to it. Now if you were to walk about Hall and turn each room's dial to full volume, it transformed our home into a solid house of sound.
Another (unintentional) contribution of his was a long, glass-topped table that was taking up space in his bedroom. He had hauled it out of storage and left it out on the Frackyard for the time being. (The front of the house is located at the back of the lot and our driveway leads to the back of the house located at the front of the lot. And so, Frackyard, Bruntyard.) But I had been born under the impression that everything in life should have a purpose, even unhappy, unused, patio tables.
I called Joel outside in the wild and directionless momentum of a brainstorm. We ransacked the house, searching for appropriate, plundered spoils of former roomies. Nobody actually knew the original parents of these orphaned electronics. Being uneducated and confined in the garage with nothing else to do, they would gradually breed into ghettos of DVD and CD players, computer monitors and keyboards, television sets, speakers and boxes of miscellaneous equipment and cables. We returned with armfuls of components only to realize we didn't actually have any idea how to run electricity to what we immediately dubbed TV Island. But the hard part of choosing location was over. We’d figure the rest out later.
"Everything needed to be shiny and kaleidoscopic, lots of colors."
That was Daisy’s parting advice to get the most out of Christmas On Valentine's Day and I meditated on it like a priest might contemplate a chapter of the Bible. It drew me to an old box of Christmas lights, appropriate for our holiday hybrid. I combined them with Joel’s own collection, annual hand-me-downs of mutually spent money toward capitalism's favorite holiday. I prophesied we could get the most out of them if they were somehow interactive, like say, stringing them throughout the house in a maze.
On the ceiling.
There they could wink at us from above, confidentially letting us in on a secret adventure that had no end. Like a carousel. Or a Ferris wheel.
But on the ceiling.
As Joel switched up the house music to pre-party acoustic, I pulled out a dining room chair and nailed the unlit, forest-green strings up through the house. They snaked from the living room to the breakfast nook and from there to the kitchen. Passing the refrigerator, they constricted the dining room chandelier like a neon boa. And dashing across the band room ceiling, they strangled the foyer chandelier before moving on through the optional door of the first bedroom. Exiting the bedroom's initial door and gliding back and fourth in the hallway, the strings formed a glowing web of lights above our heads where all the bedroom doors met.
The trail ended at the bathroom. That’s where I had a problem.
After discussing our options with Joel, I scrapped that idea altogether. I had a really bad feeling about not being sober inside an electric bathroom.
There’s a brick pathway on the side of our garage leading up to the house and as it meets the front porch, a skinnier pathway flows away to the left along the front of the porch, taking a sharp right around it to the side bathroom door. In between the left side of the porch and the backdoor was a typical Florida plant that looked like an over-sized cluster of floppy, six-foot blades of grass.
I dragged an orange extension cord over its flattened, uninspired leaves. Popping it through a hole in the screen, I plugged it into the porch wall. This developed a compromised by continuing the maze of lights outside the bathroom backdoor.
Colored lights inside. White lights outside.
I piled the white bulbs over green palms and pink-flowered bushes and aligned the strings with one side of the little, red brick road. Slithering like a vine up a sprinkler pole and up the screened porch, the forest-green strings roped over to the shade of trees that overlooked the pathways and the television, commencing a marriage of tree greens and white lights. Sliding down the oak trunks in candy-cane twists, here finally, was our solution to a source of electricity for TV Island.
The corner patch of earth in front of the porch shaped by the two pathways was the coordinates of TV Island. In front of a jungle of palm fronds, between the candy-caned oaks, under the canopy of leaves and lights, beneath a 4 o'clock showing of Aladdin, lower than the table itself, lay a full, shag carpet of leprechaun-green clovers. The lucky leaves gave the corner its triangular shape through an uninterrupted shade of Irish green.
Staring at our work in its completed, yet unspent, form fueled me with the kind of anticipation that comes with unspent youth. Anticipation I redirected to the prospects of the P-Bears' homebound return from their holiday shopping, toting bags of prizes to be unwrapped. The nervous excitement only doubled after I calculated the time it might take Geoff to make it here from Tally and doubled with every text he sent verifying his exact location for state of progress.
Just past downtown...
Turning onto University exit...
ON HALL RD!!!
It was a familiar, childhood kind of seasonal hope for that big, expensive gift that, as an extra bonus, could be merged together with the rest of the gifts.
After thirty or so texts, Geoff's signature, lanky figure lead him up the pathway to our porch at the tail end of 5pm. Geoff has the unique look that comes from combining the height of a basketball player with the disposition of a rock n' roll junkie. Long, stone-gray drainpipes were matched with his stylishly unstyled burst of raven-colored hair, which only made him appear even taller. And for the occasion, he sported a very peculiar t-shirt. The top half of an otherwise white shirt had a print of multi-colored triangles overlapping each other and centered where his neck popped through. The bottom half was a perfectly mirrored print of the top half. (I took note that the design looked vaguely like Egyptian ornamental garb.)
He greeted Hall house as Father Christmas, bearing a gift that would later contribute to my birth. It’s a very coveted gift Geoff got a hold of, like that hip toy every parent hunts down before the big day. It has many pet names and unofficial slang to make its identity socially unrecognizable. We don’t actually have a name for our gift because, apparently, there was a present inside our present endearingly named Doc, we later found out.
We have no idea what Doc actually is.
With me, Joel, Karma and the P-Bears huddled about him like kids around a decorated evergreen, he opened this main gift first. It was that rare kind of big present you opened first. In this case, open any of the smaller gifts first and you might give away the general theme of the big gift.
Our presents looked like several, tiny, cardboard squares with a happy, little sun printed on the front of each square. Each bouncy kid was cut four slices, except me, who held only two in his hand and kept his disappointment inside. I am the runt of this family.
"Oh no, Nick, I don't think you could handle more than that," I was informed by everyone on separate occasions. But I feel "you couldn't handle it" is a nicer way of saying "we couldn't handle you".
For this lifetime, the other four had inherited a keen adaptation for our birth, their bodies evolved through a line of biological experience in the matter of our gift. I am not as fully experienced as they.
With the portions divided, we were told by Father Christmas to chew them like gum.
And like a child lacking the maturity to deflect the spell of uncontrollable excitement, I swallowed. The time was approximately 6pm.
The sun must’ve been setting as we congregated on the porch for that anxious waiting period because by the time it developed into quality time, we could only see by artificial light. It cast a yellow tint over the white cinder blocks of the porch walls and left a glossy gel over the eclectic paraphernalia that layered our abused and conveniently holiday-red tablecloth.
As the night spent its youth, the table would become a pillar island of Thailand, colorful, plastic fauna resting any place gravity didn’t yank it off; flowers of unfilled balloons and bottled bubble solution; shiny boulders of metal keys and drums of clay sealed with color-coded lids; bouquets of cigarette packs and lighters with our swirly pipes as stems; a green Mario Brothers 1up mushroom I kept smokable trees in; dead, volcanic cliffs of ash trays; an overgrowth of beer cans and tall, wine-glass trees full of red Jell-O sap and branches of spoons jutting out in silver arcs; a purple, rubber, tenticled local that lit up when it was moved; sparkly bushes of tinfoil wrappers and torpedo-shaped, empty nitrous shells. As the night grew old, the table would become uncontrollably overpopulated.
My family had all been sunbathing in the yellow light around the island when it hit me.
After merely ten minutes had passed, a living spirit made of cotton excreted and expanded from my skin, pushing me up and elevating me above my chair. Suddenly, the wind was crisp and each bulb had those exciting beams shooting out from all sides like a twinkling star and contrasted the dark night the same way it did in all my exotic dreams. The dark was not to be feared. The dark was to be made love in.
My disconnected head floated there observing everyone laughing at actual jokes and carrying on comprehensible conversations and still staying stinking sober.
So they were right about me.
Fuck them.
Fuck this.
I denounced Joel's sober conversation with a royal demand that the Beatles be summoned from his Ipod. His playlist didn't date back to the 60s so he hooked his computer up to the intercom system instead. Of course, the entire house is a hot spot, a Narnia-esque portal opening to an alternate world of endless sound.
At some point in humanity, we invented music and then we invented recording music and then we invented selling music and now humanity has gotten to a point where we can no longer be reliable to buy music. So we’ve sort of come up with an unspoken agreement on whoring our eyes off to unrelated advertisements in exchange for sweet, streaming sound.
If we’re not thieves, we're whores.
You know, humanity hasn’t really changed.
The moment I heard the Fabulous Four, I lost control of myself like Nebakanezer in the Old Testament, romping his royal heart out through the desert. I would not wake up from this animalistic self-unawareness for the next two hours. I ended up on the roof eating red-flavored Jell-O out of a wine glass with my hands. I sat baffled on the angled shingles wondering how the hell I got up here and how the fuck to get down. I wouldn’t even know I had two hours missing from my life till we later assembled the scattered, puzzle-piece memories of Christmas On Valentine's Day.
It’s funny remembering everything clearly, yet understanding that in no way had I any control. It was like being an alien visitor invading a human body, not to take the reins but only to observe every act this human is capable of. Like taking a theatre seat behind someone’s eyes.
I typically hallucinate in space or tropical themes.
After the opening, mystery chords of A Hard Day's Night, I remixed every dance move television had taught me while my Converse'd toes nudged my dance partner (an inflated, red balloon) to keep up with me.
Under some unconscious notion that spinning around in circles was a worthy pursuit, I watched the living room revolve around me like vertical ending credits: the squat, glass coffee table and the matching, white, leather love seats, the dark-cherry piano, an unused, Florida fireplace, the lights leading away into the kitchen and Daisy and Joel on the yellow porch, laughing back at me through the grilles of the French doors.
Stepping off my homemade carousel, I walked back out to see everyone was halfway through a game entirely centralized around what appeared to be a whipped cream canister. Polar Bear had been reloading bullet-shaped cartridges at the efficient speed a seasoned soldier might assemble his ol' Bessy.
When it came to my turn, excited as I was, I had no idea what to do with this shiny, silver contraption she placed in my hands. To defuse this confusion, I came up with a strategy that solely consisted of staring at it in stuporious amazement. I hadn't thought much farther than staring. It was a very shiny, silver contraption, after all.
"No, Nickypoo. Like this."
She parted her lips with the whip cream nozzle.
"Now you just squeeze and suck it all in!"
Mimicking her procedure, I expected sweet whipped cream. Instead I instantly felt a rush of cold, dry air forcibly expanding my lungs and synchronized with the sound of an unsealed, vacuous space. Something happened afterward that I never imagined could even happen in real life. This is the only way I can describe it.
In this movie I forced myself to see, it is scientifically plausible that a nerd can inherit superpowers after getting fang-raped by a radioactive version of a species just above insects on the food chain. Some argue he is the greatest work of the spandex-prone and for some unexplainable reason (possibly involving voodoo), the trilogy is up there with the highest grossing movies of all time.
Turns out if we suspend enough belief, radiation won't make you sterile. Instead, radiation can make some fortunate nerd’s brain activity so acute that subjectively fast movements, like a punch from a bully, seem like a sloth attempting fisticuffs.
We are to assume this is because the accelerated brain of Four-Eyes is functioning at a higher rate than the spite of a dumb mammal.
(Since I need all the suspension of belief I can get for my dating life, I no longer force myself to endure the recommendations of human lemmings.)
I turned to Bethany’s voice and her image scrolled toward me at the speed of a picture downloading through a phone connection. I turned to hear Joel laugh and the situation was alarmingly the same. I spoke and my vocal cords enunciated a single word in the time it takes to look up and read the definition.
"IIIIISSS THIIIISSS REEEEEALLL?" I called out, sounding like a Walkman running out of batteries.
"YEEEEESSSSSSSS!" They all replied in a solid harmony of deep, happy, elastic voices.
"WAAW-WAAW-WAAW-WAAW," my ears shouted.
This conspiracy startled me and instantly I bolted from my chair. In my airborne motion, I casually observed where my body no longer touched the chair or met the ground, like watching a goldfish imperceptibly change directions. I sensed the gradual weight of my body settling on my right foot as I landed. Running felt like swimming through a wax. I have no idea how my body consistently synced my athletic stability for the minutes it took to run fifteen feet with the actual, objective seconds it would have taken a sober mind. It never occurred to me that when you run, you lean forward at an angle you would normally fall over if you were standing.
This is what I pondered in the extended time it took to tear around Joel to where Geoff was yacking a racket on the couch. (Hall's porch comes fully furnished). It was blocking my assault so I simply tucked my legs in and, Geoff and all, cleared it in the momentum. All of it rolled under me like rocks under a canoe over clear water drifting lazily downstream. I watched my feet gently land on the ground like a docking space ship to where Daisy had been dancing in circles with her eyes closed the entire time.
Looks like someone else in my family finally caught up with me. About time.
We danced together like bobbing and bending characters in the Matrix. I watched her tiny figure lift into the air like a balloon. Just before Panda Bear reached the point where gravity recovered its control, her hair floated up like spaceship debris gently tumbling out into space. As she turned to me, it gently fell back down around her like fall leaves. Her eyes yawned open like she was waking from a satisfying dream. Having processed my presence somewhere in the wide swings of her brain activity, her eyes lit up. And like a shy flower reversing its bloom, she lethargically shut her eyes from me and glacially curled her signature smile through her glossy locks. She looked as if she was dreaming of us dancing together. Her smile wrinkles youthfully curved her hair from her features like curtains spreading for the big feature. If she were a cat, she would have been purring.
And just like that, real-time resumed and the whole experience ended.
I sat back down again. I felt strange. I felt really strange. I was warned of this. Bethany said if the porcelain throne accepted my company, I'd get twice the results. Geoff declared that he never gave in. I tried to dance it away but something was not at all right.
"I feel funny," I told Daisy and made a face probably patented by the makers of Pound Puppies at some point in the 80s.
"Aw, I’m sorry, Nickypoo," Daisy purred and made a face reserved for mothers of children new to emotion.
I could see in her eyes that her previous lifetimes had blessed her with experience. My eyes revealed I had no idea what to expect. And I tried to champion my expression like it was a password for her secret. But she added nothing else, turned and danced away somewhere in Hall.
I sat there in frustrated paralysis as everyone explored the house in and out of my vision. I felt like a dog waiting by a full table of feasting humans. I mustered all my innate curiosity to fuel the course to my room. There I sat on the carpet and stared at the subliminal designs my DVD collection created from all the angles they rested in on the tall, corner shelf. As my attention span atrophied, my mind raced through the options of a new member to the brotherhood of cripples.
"You must not forget the popcorn ceiling," the P-bears had donated to my inexperience.
"Never miss the opportunity."
I lay on my back and stretched my limbs out for the moment to present itself. Almost instantly afterward, the bumpy, dirty-white, popcorn pieces slowly moved together like water droplets and formed themselves into dozens of cartoon representations of Santa Clause. After fully developing, they dripped from the ceiling toward me in their perfectly intact, cookie-cutter shapes. Soon the room was packed with as many varieties of cartoon Santa Clauses as there are fingerprints. I crawled out into the bathroom at the speed of a terrified snail, leaving behind endless new Santas to drip from the ceiling without me.
I continued slithering till I made it out the bathroom backdoor and found a perfect compromise on the small, brick road where it angled around the porch. I could see through the open bathroom door, to the open, hallway door and straight into Daisy’s open room. I caught glimpses of all my colorful friends passing by, drawn forward by the lights that reflected its holiday glow off their upturned faces.
All I had to do was turn my head right and I was outside again among the garden of white lights, accompanied by Bugs Bunny banished to TV Island. From my position, I could see the French doors and my colorful friends still chasing the lights inside, outside and around me.
The more I sat watching the haves from a have-not perspective, the deeper a feeling embedded itself in me like an alien hatchling.
For you boys, it's that chemical by-product of an encounter with the untouchable, new girl. For you girls, it's the chemical reaction that cultivates the obsession over whether or not he likes you. It's the restless, caffeinated charge that activates the need to always be doing something at all times while shrinking the attention span it takes to finish anything.
It’s the experience of your stressful and unchallenging office job after downing six stackers. It is an unquenchable desire that consumes reason and control.
"What do I do?" I desperately consulted Daisy.
"You must find your IT."
"What's an IT?"
"IT is whatever you want, whatever you desire. You might search all your life without finding IT. But you must try to go out and find your IT anyway. You must keep searching till you find your IT."
"I don't understand."
"See Bethany over there with that noisy, orange, plastic accordion tube thing?"
"Uh-huh."
"See her face?"
"She’s thrilled."
"She found her IT."
I tried to defend my mental state from the hostile takeover with a stream of eligible, temporary appeasements. I went on a scavenger hunt, uncovering the girl's party favors. The glow sticks always brightly gave away their hiding spots. The orange, red, blue and green Freeze Pops tucked in the freezer tried to hide from my mouth.
I lay down on the brick pathways and joined Geoff who had done nothing but stare bug-eyed at palm fronds for the last two hours. I pointed up at the strings of white lights which had developed the ability to sway back and fourth on their own like an invisible, ghost child on a swing set.
I weighed myself down with rings of connected glow sticks, utilizing anything on my body that resembled a limb. We assembled an army (army equals my family) of glowing space cadets and marched into the Dark Room (Daisy's room, conveniently sealed from light). Panda Bear cranked the radio up till the DJ's thumping bass was powerful enough to affect our heartbeats (thank you Daisy for dating a DJ). Dozens of glowing rings danced about the darkness in midair.
None of this was satisfying.
After the bass and drum had thoroughly rattled my heart like a paint shaker, I escaped onto the dark Frackyard with my hands clamped over my ears. I dropped onto my back and from all around the perimeter of my body, the squishy, sticky sounds of bugs rustling toward me grew louder. They arched their backs like friendly cats, stretching their little bodies above the grass line, hoping to caress my aura like a moth hopes to make love to light. I laughed like a tickled child.
Suddenly, I snapped to attention. Something was watching me. I looked up and found the stars looking back at me. A shuddering sonic boom shattered the night silence and the bugs scattered away in fear. They knew something big was about to happen.
As I squinted in focus, it appeared that the night sky’s starry eyes were welling up with tears, each jiggling drop holding its own watery color of amber, blue, orange, red, green yellow and white. The Archer was the first to fall free, as he was my sign. He popped right out of space and melted down toward me in his perfectly intact, cookie-cutter shape. Aquarius, the water-bearer, observed his absence, grew lonely and joined him. The others immediately followed his lead. Orion. The Big and Little Dipper. Centaurus. Pegasus…
I had been so enchanted by their performance that I hadn’t noticed they were heading straight toward me! As the falling stars hit our atmosphere, they were filtered into glow-stick-purple rain needles. I tore off for the sanctuary of Hall house as the sound of pounding raindrops gained on me at the speed of a hungry lioness.
Safely inside, a new development troubled me. I hadn’t exactly used protection during my aura’s flirtatious escapades out on the lawn and the concept of being covered in bug spooge spurred me toward the bathroom. Propelling out of my shirt, pants, shoes, socks, hat, jewelry and underwear, I left a trail of Nick-wear leading up to the shower.
"You're ass naked in front of 6 o'clock traffic, idiot," Geoff casually informed me and shut the bathroom backdoor from the headlights of Hall Road.
I gawked at my naked, wet body in apprehensive curiosity because all my body fat was shrinking like a draining balloon. I streaked out and put on each article of clothing as I picked it up. Except for pants. I decided to change into my Batman jammies because I wanted to remind myself that I was a superhero.
I picked up the Hall cat till it occurred to me that I was holding nothing more than a bag of fur encasing meat, muscle and blood, like a stomach might hold digested food.
I then concluded that he involuntarily shared his flesh with other tiny, living pieces of meat wrapped up in their hard, protective shells.
So I scribbled down a list for future reference.

• Girls, fun.
• Cats, not fun.

I grabbed a girl named Daisy by the hand and took off after the lights on the ceiling. We rose and fell in our pursuit at the steady beat of a carousel revolving around and around. Landscapes of lighted rooms and glowing gardens flew by, making it impossible to tell if you were indoors or out. We dodged household objects under the Christmas glow like I was again a part of that childhood adventure of dashing about a carousel's clown-painted horses.
We ejected ourselves from the house out onto the dark Frackyard whether our eyes were adjusted or not. Without visuals, the black silence triggered the feeling of tumbling out into anti-gravity. Stars appeared above us, behind us and underneath the path where there should have been grass.
I swung Daisy around in the desperation of a screeching u-turn. She burst out laughing at the overwhelming sight that lay before us. The path was a warm tractor beam drawing us into Hall station. It floated in silence among the stars that surrounded its bulky figure in all directions.
At our approach, Hall's windows blasted jet flames of alternating colors. They burst on and off in booming bass beats turning Hall's behemoth mass to accept our return. (The thunderous booming was uncannily similar to the DJ's thumping beat!)
Rocketing back into the house and turning my head to one side, I briefly caught the image of Bethany shrieking with laughter as Geoff chased her with my acoustic guitar. It was like being inside a speeding subway car and watching the milling commuters frozen in motion. (You can only catch one frame of each movement before your eyes pass over another as the subway car flies past the station thus creating a length of images frozen in action.)
That was the moment Daisy caught sight of her IT, wrenched her hand from mine and left me with a tremendous debt owed to my desires.
I tried to walk around and observe everyone's ITs, to adopt one as my own. But nothing worked. And nobody seemed to notice. Everyone seemed satisfied. Everyone but me.
"I don't understand," I confided in Dad over the phone. (Apparently, the polls show my most popular time to call Dad is after midnight while intoxicated.)
I related to him the long story of my lifetime and he listened attentively.
"I've done everything I thought I wanted and everything everyone else wanted but I never stop wanting! I tried the popcorn ceiling! I even used color pencils to draw a theoretical interpretation of alternate universes from an intellectual standpoint!”
(One looked suspiciously like tic-tac-toe.)
“I see everyone wandering around with the attention span of a goldfish! After a short while, we are so overwhelmed that we forget what we're doing or where we're even going or who we're supposed to be! But these ITs still remain! All I do is want and want! But all of these ITs never give me satisfaction! Oh, keep in mind, I might forget everything I've just said."
After a contemplative moment of silence, my dad cleared his throat.
"Hm," he noted, "Sounds exactly like Life ...by the way, what's an IT?"
"Oh hi, Dad!" I perked up, "What are you doing up so late?"