I am skinnier than the average guy. According to a quick Google search, I am also skinnier than the below average guy and the underweight guy.

You know those growth percentiles parents can’t stop sharing sharing? (Amelia Rose is in the 75^th percentile for her weight, 64^th percentile for height, 98^th percentile for head size, etc.) Those were the most important stats of my teen years. The doctor would bring my mom in after a physical and give her a grave look.

“Dustin is doing well, but…”

Here it comes.

“He is in the 5 percentile in weight for his age.”

Sigh of relief and silent celebration. I had been in the 4 percentile the previous year.

Although living below the 7 percentile has had its benefits from time to time (hide-and-go-seek, reaching change between car seats, etc.), it’s not something I’ve always been happy about. Especially in high school. Continue reading →

My wife Deserae, and I recently took a once-in-a-lifetime-now-we-can-have-kids trip to Australia. Going to Australia has been a dream of mine ever since I was little, and it exceeded my expectations in every way. Well, maybe except one – the trip back home.

Between America and Australia is a mysterious thing called The International Dateline. I’m still not sure what The International Dateline is all about, but I do know that it involves a fair amount of time travel and can make for some very strange days. In our case, The International Dateline gave us The World’s Longest Day.

From midnight in Brisbane to midnight when we finally fell asleep in a Dallas hotel, 40 hours had passed. In those 40 hours, we encountered the grumpiest Australian, a homeless Spider-Man, a team of racist breakdancers and the best meal of our lives.

You may enjoy a running diary of the day’s events. Continue reading →

Hello, my name is Dustin, and I am addicted to iPhone games.

I don’t know how it works for most people, but when I download a game, I am unable to stop playing it until I beat it. This is a problem for two reasons.

1. Most iPhone games are really long.
2. I am terrible at all of them.

Over the last several years, I’ve gotten smarter about downloading these games. For example, I deleted Candy Crush after two hours when I realized the game has 500 levels, forcing me to choose between nine months of colorful candies and my marriage. After the Plants vs. Zombies 2 disaster of 2013, I finally decided to become an iPhone teetotaler, and stopped downloading games all together.

I had been clean for five months, then 2048 happened. Continue reading →

The Cleveland Marathon is this weekend. I ran the race five years ago and wrote about my experience. If you’ve ever wanted to find out what it’s like to run a marathon without actually running one, this is for you.

Pre-race
It’s 5:45 on the morning of the race, and I’ve just discovered my car has been egged.

I promise, I’m not surprised. In the weeks leading up to the race, I’ve dreamed that my car wouldn’t start, that I had forgotten to sign up for the marathon all together, that I’d gotten lost on the way to the race, and, of course, that I had run the whole thing in my underwear. Really, I’m relieved that an eggy car is all I have to worry about. Continue reading →

The other day, I was thinking that I hadn’t done anything worth writing about for a while. Then I poked myself in the eye with a stick.

I had been breaking branches off a small bush in the backyard when somehow a twig splintered off and flew into my eye. If you’d like to know what it feels like to have a twig fly into your eye, dig your fingernail into your eyeball and leave it there for the rest of the day. Continue reading →

Perhaps you remember the greatest television advertisement of 2013: the Geico Hump Day commercial.

In the ad, a camel walks around a workplace asking people what day it is. (The people may be his coworkers. It’s unclear. The camel is not wearing a tie.) When he finally gets an answer (Hump Day), he lets out a “woo woooooo,” the Geico guys tell us that people who switch to their insurance are happier than a camel on Wednesday, and everyone buys Geico car insurance. Continue reading →

Recently, the company I work for (STACK.com, Where Athletes Get Better©®™) partnered with Yahoo. It’s very exciting news that means everything we write gets exposed to a new crowd of horrible, horrible people.

Obviously, the vast majority of people who use Yahoo aren’t horrible. I enjoy Yahoo a lot, as do many of the non-horrible people I know. The company itself is great. The horrible people I am referring to, of course, are the commenters.

It’s not Yahoo’s fault. The anonymous Internet commenters of the world flock to places like Yahoo and YouTube where they can critique free entertainment from the safety of a username that combines their passion with their high school graduation year (Hanshotfirst98).

You know Steve, that guy at your work who seems vaguely racist but doesn’t really talk that much? You can find out just how racist Steve actually is by learning his favorite 70s rock band and graduation year, then checking out the comments on a Cleveland.com article about a basketball player in trouble with the law. Continue reading →

Wicked, the musical event of the century, came to Cleveland around Christmastime last year. If you are unfamiliar, the play is about the two witches from The Wizard of Oz becoming friends and having adventures and arguing and singing and it is quite a production.

Unfortunately, a decent ticket to Wicked costs roughly as many dollars as a month in Europe. Which is a bummer because my wife, Deserae, and I enjoy going to plays.*

*I should clarify that we actually would not enjoy most plays. For example, as I write this, the local theater is showing Yentl, a play about a girl who decides to cut her hair and dress as a male so she can live in secret and study the Talmud after her rabbi father dies. I feel comfortable assuming this not a play I would enjoy. Upcoming productions that we might also not enjoy include Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, Tyler Perry’s Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Scorned and Menopause: The Musical. Continue reading →

A hot water tank doesn’t seem to be something that should break that often. It’s got one job: hold hot water.

As I’ve recently learned, however, hot water tanks are a lot like bulldogs. You’re happy if they last 12 years, although you may have to deal with some leaking toward the end.

Last week, my hot water tank started leaking. A lot. Which is the type of thing that happens when I start feeling a little manly. Continue reading →