Guyana is in South America, not Africa.

This is important to know if you ever meet Eon Chapman, one of my favorite roommates from college. The first time I met him, I learned that he had just arrived from Guyana and asked a question about Africa. Eon stared at me and shook his head.

“Whenever you Americans see a black person, you automatically think they are from Africa.”

Eon is one of the most energetic people I’ve ever met. At 5 a.m. on the first Sunday of the semester, my other roommate Josh and I woke up to lights and loud music. Eon had apparently decided to start the day with our without the rest of the room. Josh nearly killed him.

Eon could not keep all that energy in the room, so two weeks after arriving on campus, he made a decision. He was getting a driver’s license. I kept telling him that I was pretty sure he’d have to be in the country longer than a month to get a driver’s license, but he wouldn’t listen. He walked to the DMV, where he was given a packet stuffed with forms and lists and brochures and told to return when he could figure out what to do with it all. Continue reading →

I love my sister Amanda. She’s funny and generous and the hardest-working person I know.

She’s also The Human Plague.

Two years ago, Amanda came home from college with one reddish eye. Five days after she arrived, everyone in our family had raging pink eye. If you, like me, have forgotten how bad pink eye is because you haven’t had it since you were in third grade, let me reassure you that, outside of maybe leprosy, it is the most disgusting disease a human can get. We all spent January glaring at Amanda with glowing red eyes.

This type of thing happens to Amanda a lot. My theory is that she pushes her body so hard that every once in a while it says, “CANCEL EVERYTHING!” and gets super sick and spews germs at everything for a few days.

Anyways, a few weeks ago, The Human Plague came home for Christmas. And like clockwork, I started developing a scratchy throat a few days later. I called my mom and mentioned that I thought I was getting sick.

“Yeah, Amanda said she’s starting to get sick too.”

AHHHHHHH!!! Continue reading →

NOTE: This will be the last post of 2014 since the next two Wednesdays fall on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. See you in 2015!

When you live in Ohio, going to college in Florida is great because you get go to the beach every weekend while everyone at home is freezing their buns off. What’s not so great is the fact that Florida is far away from Ohio, and you’re in college, which means you don’t always have the best car for a 15-hour drive.

Usually everything works out fine. But sometimes

Screeeeaaaaeaeaeeee…

When you’re driving down an empty Kentucky highway at midnight

…eeeeeaaaaEEEEEEAAAA…

Your luck runs out.

….EEEEEECLUNK CLUNKCLUNKCLUNKCLUNKCLUNK.

My luck finally ran out one cold December night my sophomore year of college. A few hours past Nashville, my car decided that enough was enough. It started making the aforementioned screaclunkclukclunk sound, forcing me to get off at the next exit: Mumfordville, Kentucky – proud home of a Sonic, Super 8, Marathon gas station and, as I would later discover, one very crabby mechanic named Buck. Continue reading →

Deserae recently shared five pictures of our home decorated for Christmas on Facebook with the one-sentence caption “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas at the Brady house!! :)”

The pictures currently have 56 likes, which is about 53 more than this post will get. I can see why. The pictures make our home look perfect. I could see them being featured in a magazine with the caption, “Awwwww,” alongside a newlywed couple kissing under mistletoe with their Goldendoodle puppy sitting nearby looking embarrassed.

As someone who was there, I feel obligated to share a little behind-the-scenes on those perfect pictures.

Enjoy!! Continue reading →

I hate writing.

I know that may seem hard to believe because you’re reading this on a blog that I write for zero dollars, but trust me, I haaaaaaaate writing.

I hate writing so much that I will do literally anything to avoid it. On Friday, I had the whole day to myself. My only goal was to finish this blog a couple days early. Instead, I replaced the laundry room faucet – a job that I’d been putting off for two years. This morning, I vacuumed our room. That didn’t take very long, so I also cleaned the kitchen. (As you may have guessed, Deserae is a big fan of my writing process.)

Sometimes, I’m a little less productive. Here’s my Google search history during a recent “writing” session:

• quick change magic act
• quick change magic act slow motion
• quick change magic act explained
• espn nfl power rankings
• how to view someone’s linkedin profile anonymously
• captain america 2 chase scene
• velociraptor

I really wish I didn’t hate writing so much. People describe writing in a state of “flow” where they get lost in their work and the words start pouring onto the page and they eventually look up at the clock and oh my have four hours gone by already? That seems nice. I can kind of relate, because that’s what happens when I start clicking on Wikipedia links. Continue reading →

If you’re still on the fence about hitting the stores on Black Friday Eve (Or “Thanksgiving,” as some insist on calling it), read about my experience for a shove in the right direction.

As a newly married couple, Deserae and I got off to a great start. We had a beautiful apartment, a tan from an amazing honeymoon and enough love to last for a lifetime. By the time November rolled around, we lacked only one thing – a gigantic TV.

I mean, we technically owned a hand-me-down tube TV that “worked,” but no one could expect us to survive on that for long, right? We held out as long as we could (Black Friday Eve), and dove into the Thanksgiving ads.

That’s when we saw it: Target’s 46” flatscreen 1080P LED for $200. We looked at each other.

“Do you want to?” she asked.

“YES!”

I truly could not think of a better way to spend my evening.  Continue reading →

I’ve lived in Cleveland my whole life, which means I root for the Cleveland Browns. This is unfortunate, because the last time the Browns did anything good, I was three years old and really into Winnie the Pooh.

So why root for the Browns? Nobody comes to the door on Sundays to check if you’re cheering. This is America, and you’re allowed to turn the TV off or even root for a team that occasionally wins. After watching another horrific Browns loss on Sunday, I started thinking about why I even care about this team. And then I thought about my own football career.

My football career was both long and illustrious. (Illustrious means “tried hard,” right?) Every week during junior high and high school, sometimes two or three times a week, my brother Jesse and I would take on my neighbors Eric and Ryan in a game of two-on-two street football.

I now know that if I lived on a street where kids played this version of football, I would shoot them. That’s because, despite our street being 7 yards wide and filled with parked cars, we insisted on punting the ball every kickoff. And when an unathletic adolescent tries to punt a football down the street, there is a .1% chance of the ball landing in the arms of the returner and a 200% chance of it falling straight onto the hood of a car, pointy side down.

In between checking our neighbors’ cars for dents, we would play football for hours. We didn’t keep good stats during those years, but I would estimate mine and Jesse’s record over that time to be 0-126. Continue reading →

A few months after we got married, Deserae and I took a weekend trip to New York City. When we reached our destination, I got a much more intense welcome to the city than I had bargained for.

“YES!” I shouted as we neared the Lincoln Tunnel.

Deserae rolled her eyes.

Not to brag, but I am AMAZING at holding my breath. I don’t get opportunities to showcase this skill very often, so I hold my breath every time we drive through a tunnel to impress my wife. After four months of marriage, Deserae was tragically already losing interest in this trick.

I took three deep breaths, timing my last one perfectly as we entered the Lincoln Tunnel. I puffed out my cheeks and wiggled my eyebrows at Deserae.

I’ve discovered the secret to holding one’s breath for a long time is to relax. Don’t think about anything—just reach the state you get into right before you fall asleep and float there.

While floating in the Lincoln Tunnel, I noticed two things:

1. I’d have to hold my breath for 30 minutes to make it through the tunnel with this traffic.
2. A rumbling had begun deep down in my bowels.

Continue reading →

You may recall that I recently got tickets to last week’s Cleveland Cavaliers home opener, the “hardest-to-find Cleveland ticket since the last good sports thing happened here 20 years ago.” Well the game was last Thursday, and it went exactly like you’d expect if you’ve lived in Cleveland any time during the last 20 years: A full day of hype, followed by ten minutes of hope, followed by an evening of crushing despair.

But it’s OK, because the day was never about the game itself. It was all about…well I was there, and I’m still not sure, but it was about SOMETHING. A lot of something. Here’s what I’ll remember about the night.

Miles of sweaty bodies

Deserae and I went to the Winking Lizard downtown for dinner at 4. We got a table at 4:15, and by 4:30, the aisles were clogged with so many people that the only way to go to the bathroom was to crowdsurf there. Outside, the streets were packed with more people than live in the city of Cleveland. People were hanging outside of apartment windows and peering out of parking garages. Nobody was quite sure what they were looking for, but at least they were smiling. Continue reading →

Have you ever had a nemesis? I have. I’ve had many nemeses.

Almost all of my nemeses (it is “nemeses,” I looked it up, don’t bother) came during college. You know the kid who would sit in front of every lecture and makes dumb jokes to the professor and asks stupid questions and occasionally look around the classroom with his big, punchable smile? He was my nemesis.

I don’t think any of my nemeses ever knew they were my nemeses. They didn’t even know my name because I never actually confronted one. I just sat there and glared and stewed.

That all changed the day I met Vincent. Continue reading →