Underpants On The Outside

I’m a big fan of 24. Sure, the story is good [Ed note: not last year!], but I’m mostly impressed by how much Jack Bauer manages to squeeze into a day. To illustrate, I compare each hour of Jack’s day to the corresponding hour in my own day.

Jack’s Day, 10-11 AM: Arrrrrgh.  Already we’re off to a bad start: due to a DVR mix-up, I don’t start recording the show until 10:35.  Thankfully, Fox puts the full episodes online.  I’m sure my five-year old Toshiba laptop will be more than capable of duplicating the viewing experience of my high-def TV.

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I’m a big fan of 24. Sure, the story is good [Ed note: not last year!], but I’m mostly impressed by how much Jack Bauer manages to squeeze into a day. To illustrate, I compare each hour of Jack’s day to the corresponding hour in my own day.

As you’ll recall, Tony, Jack’s presumed-dead sidekick, had obtained a circuit board that could hack into our nation’s infrastructure, meaning power plants, water treatment facilities, airports… basically, Tony could play a really awesome game of SimCity, with a lot less Sim to it.

Jack was about to get some info that would have led him straight to Tony and ended this thing, except, as you’ll recall, the first five or six episodes of any 24 season are always chock-full of futility. In this case, a sniper who killed Jack’s lead.

Jack’s Day, 9-10 AM: You know what Jack always says: when life gives you lemons, grab a pen and threaten to stab the lemons in the eye until they piss lemonade. One informant might be dead, but Jack knows that the sniper will know where Tony is, and as long as he’s got a head… shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes… then Jack can work with him.

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We’re just gonna go ahead and skip the long cutesie intro for this one. Due to an excess in digression, my first 24 post (see below) of this season took five pages to get through 16 minutes.  That is unacceptable.  After a couple good nights of sleep (and a double dose of Vivarin) I’m ready to get back into this.

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I’m a big fan of 24. Sure, the story is good [Ed note: not last year!], but I’m mostly impressed by how much Jack Bauer manages to squeeze into a day. To illustrate, I compare each hour of Jack’s day to the corresponding hour in my own day.

Jack and Zach are back!  I wasn’t sure I’d every do this again, after that last travesty of a season.  For inspiration and guidance, I just re-read a few of the last 24 blogs I wrote and they’re nearly incomprehensible, so much so that I actually looked up the definition of the word “frenetic”, to see if it was really strong enough.

“Wildly excited or active; frantic; frenzied…alteration of Greek phrenitikos… ‘inflammation of the brain.’”  Yep, that pretty much describes it.  To new readers, those posts probably sounded like I was trying to write them while waiting in line for a funnel cake at a topless amusement park.

In my defense, last season was brutally awful.  That last month or so, I wasn’t happy to see ‘24′ waiting for me on my DVR list.  New characters came in every two episodes: my recaps are filled with hackneyed nicknames like Cheetara, Silver Spoon, The Widow, Agent Cockblock… and it’s not like knowing their actual names makes it better.  Who the hell was Wayne? I don’t know, but count him among the twenty or thirty people who Jack begged at some point.  And didn’t Jack have a son or something?  Jesus.

Luckily, I didn’t read these recaps before starting this new season.  As always, Fox was wise to start 24 following a playoff football game, meaning that by the time the show started I’d spent the previous couple hours consuming beer and food with no nutritional value and I was wearing a dull-eyed, slack-jawed look that said: whatever Jack Bauer’s selling, I’m buying.   Let’s do this thing.

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I’ve been published in Geek Monthly – hooray!  For those of you who don’t know, that means I’ve hit the big time – I’m in print.  I imagine you’ll all want to buy yourself a copy as a collector’s item.  You should be able to find yourself a copy at most comic book stores or distinguishing magazine racks. If for some reason you can’t find it, check behind Girls and Corpses magazine.

Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about!  Girls and Corpses!  Because “Girls With an Enormous Number of Deep-Seeded Psychological Issues” was too hard to fit on the cover!

This thing really exists.  On the January issue’s cover, there’s an attractive girl with a samurai sword and what really appears to be an actual human corpse.  Part of me wishes I had looked inside more that I might better report back to my readership, but there’s no unremarkable way to take an issue of Girls and Corpses down from the rack. (“Girls and Corpses?  Oh, no, I just read it for the stories…”)  They even keep it on the top shelf so there’s no way for you to take a copy down without making a spectacle of yourself.

Think I’m lying?  Check out the piece they did on G&C magazine on Attack of the Show.

Here is some interesting trivia:

• G&C has over two million readers.
• G&C has been around for five years.
• All of you just re-examined what you do for a living or whether or not you want to bring children into this world.

I now know the elation that comes with appearing in a magazine for the first time.  [Shit, I was gonna write a blog post about it!]  First thing I did, I called my family, so naturally I began to reflect on the family dynamics that might bring a woman to become a “Slaymate.”  [I don't know if they're called Slaymates.  I just made that up myself.  In fact, I pray they're not called Slaymates, because if they are I'm getting divorced in three...two... one...]

Okay, actually, I’ve spent over an hour trying to come up with a family background traumatic enough to lead to the cover of Girls and Corpses magazine while still remaining plausible.  This is the closest I’ve come:

• Ma always pressured her to carry on the family business.  That donkey show had been passed down through six generations.
• Typical family dinner was a salad made of cigarettes drizzled with rye whiskey.
• Pa never paid much attention to her, working nights at the funeral parlor.  But he tried to provide: her fondest memories are of Christmas mornings, when he would come home with a paper bag for each of the children.  Inside was a rag soaked in embalming fluid, and they’d all sit around the tire-fire, huffing, sharing stories, and roasting squirrel.

Seriously: nothing says “Dear Dad, you’ve failed epically,” like a spread in Girls and Corpses magazine.  Somewhere there is a clown with his dick in a garlic press saying, “Girls and Corpses?  Man, that’s fucked up.”

But wait – don’t forget: this post started because I’ve finally been published in print.  We’re here because that milestone of my writing career was stashed BEHIND Girls and Corpses.  And let’s also not forget that this is the article that was supposed to run back in October, which would have coincided nicely with my appearance on the “Contributors” page.  (This month, I’m not as prominently featured on the contributors’ page, and my name is spelled “Zacj Olberman.”)

You know what, though?  I couldn’t care less.  I’m in print, motherfuckers.  And while they may not be the biggest game in town, and they may have the occasional editorial slip-up, I genuinely like Geek Monthly magazine, particularly the January issue, with Janeane Garofalo on the cover, a tremendously funny article on page twelve, and most importantly, my name spelled correctly in the byline.

In the words of the immortal Peter Gabriel: “BIG TIME!  I’m on my way, I’m making it…”

An era ended yesterday. After almost ten years, I finally gave up my old L.A. phone number.  To illustrate just how old that phone number was, I received a call on it six months ago from MY VERY FIRST GIRLFRIEND. [That was fun.  No, wait, I mean awkward: (To protect her identity, I will refer to her instead as Charlie.  This is funny for people who knew she was Vietnamese.)

"Hello?"

"Hi... Zach?"

"Yeah?"

"Hey, it's [Charlie.]“

“Oh… Uh, hey… how’s it going?”

“Wait a minute… is this Zach OBERMAN?”

“Yeah…”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry… I called the wrong Zach.  I’m so sorry.”

It’s like they say: once you go Zach, you never go back, though the specific Zach may change.  I just have to wonder: what was I doing in her phone?  I deleted her number sometime in 2000.  Yeah, there’s good odds I was sobbing when I did it, but whatever. I know I lay the pipe well, but she’s got to give up the ghost.]

I moved to New York four and a half years ago.  At first I kept my number because my dad is a skinflint, and he wanted to avoid long distance charges.  I don’t even know if phone companies have domestic long distance charges anymore.  One day he’s going to say something like that to my kids and they are going to stare blankly at him.  I’ll have to remind them to humor the crazy old man, just like when he starts going on about the “CD player,” “gasoline” or “Taiwan.”

More importantly, I kept my number because it was one of the greatest numbers of all time:  310-488-1488.  Look at that repeating 488 sequence!  When have you seen something so sexy? Its curves are so sensual, yet the four gives it an edge. The eights say, “when you’re sick, I”ll give you soup and a grilled cheese sandwich,” while the four says, “and a blowjob, first.”  I thought I would never give up that number, but I’ve got a new love now, and her blowjobs are much less metaphoric.

Wonder Woman and I decided to join a family plan, which will save us a good deal of money.  What we didn’t know is that to be on a family plan, all of the phones must have numbers in the same “market”.  Again, the idea of “area codes” seems like an outdated concept.  Let’s just accept that phone numbers are now just ten digits long and move on with our lives.   But that still left us in the phone store with a dilemna: one of us would have to change our number or we wouldn’t be able to get the family plan and save that money.

I was speaking with John Law about this yesterday and he told me that when he and his wife ran into the same conundrum, they forwent the family plan altogether.  [Did you know that forwent was a word? I sure didn't.  It looks wrong, but who am I to argue with an animated paper clip?]  If I didn’t know them as well as I do, I would think this is a bad omen for their marriage.  I can just see them in a delivery room:

“What should we name the baby?”

“Theresa.”

“I was thinking Samantha.”

“Well, then you’ll just have to have your own daughter then.”

“Fine! Dibs on this one!”

“No way! I saw her first!”

“THAT’S BECAUSE SHE WAS COMING OUT OF MY VAGINA!”  (and scene!)

Because I’m as stingy as my father, WW and I both knew we were going to join the family plan come hell or high water; it was just a matter of deciding who was going to give up their phone numbers.   If you haven’t done it lately, it’s a scary prospect.  All of a sudden you find yourself imagining the tremendous list of people who will need to be notified.  You picture nightmare scenarios of people frantically trying to contact you: what if your stockbroker needs to tell you that your $26 is now only worth $13? Or what if your junior-year lab partner finally finds your pencil?  Or what if your ex-girlfriend needs you to tell you that she is sorry for everything that happened (because it was all her fault) and that no other man has ever measured up to you, and that she only pretended to have called the wrong Zach because she was afraid you’d reject her when she begged you to take her back?

Then you think about your spouse.  After all, why can’t he or she change his or her number?  Nobody calls them!   Goddamnit, why do they have to be so selfish all the time!  Why must I sacrifice so much of myself!?! You wonder how the statement, “Judge, I had that number for nine years!  NINE!” would play in a divorce hearing.

All of this takes place in three minutes, and neither of you says a word.  Instead, your faces contort between anxiety and rage while the AT&T rep debates how long she has to watch this pantomimed marital drama before she moves on to the next customer.

Eventually I gave in, because I realize that WW’s phone number is on a lot more important documents than mine.  I’m not saying she’s a more important person, I’m just looking at the facts: she’s a lawyer; I aspire to write dick jokes professionally.  I also see it as a gesture of my overwhelming willingness to compromise, which I intend to hold over her at the movies tonight. [It's all worth it if I don't have to see Benjamin Button.]

If there is a silver lining, it is that I no longer have to deal with Larry Goldstein.  Larry Goldstein used to be a broker for Merrill Lynch if I remember correctly.  He also was the previous owner of my 310 number, and I have every reason to believe that when he changed his number he looked at his address book filled with hundreds of contacts and said to himself, “Fuck this; I’m going to Chipotle.”  [I imagine Larry going to Chipotle because it is the nastiest approximation of Mexican food, made by people who have clearly never met a Mexican person. I can't understand why it is popular, and I've concluded that it's because assholes - like Larry - eat there.  Also... it just occurred to me for the first time that Larry might have died.  Just now. That's how long my brain needs to think "outside the box."]

For the first year I averaged at least one call a day for Larry.  I used to plead with the callers that when the found Larry: would they please ask him to notify his contacts?  No dice.  Sometime in year two when the calls showed no signs of abating, I decided that Larry was my new archenemy, beating out my previous archenemy – American cheese – by a wide margin.  It was time to hunt Larry down.  First I got his last name, simply by asking, “Larry who?  Oh, Larry Goldstein???  No, he’s not at this number anymore.”  Then with the next caller, I pretended to be Larry’s assistant, and I took down the caller’s info.  Then I called back immediately and apologized, saying that I actually worked for a different man – Harry - and that I hadn’t been paying attention, and sorry, Larry wasn’t at this number anymore. [I really did this.  I was bored a lot back then.]

The next part of my plan was to wait a day or two, then have one of my cute-sounding female friends call up Larry’s contact and explain that she had been trying to contact Larry, and that the nice young man who had answered the phone referred her to this number in case he knew of a way to reach Larry.  Then I was going to use that info to hunt Larry down.

Except then I started playing Halo and that was pretty much it for my grand scheme.  The calls gradually stopped, though even after this much time I still got one or two a year.  Ah well; they’re someone else’s problem now, along with a call from my ex-girlfriend in about five years.

So that’s it.  I have a new phone number.  I emailed most people about it, but I’ve never been the most thorough of people. Don’t take it personally if I didn’t email you; if you are under the impression that I like you, please email me and request my new number, and we’ll find out once and for all whether you’re correct.

There are certain dates of such personal importance that I will remember them every year for the rest of my life. I was married on October 11th. My brother’s birthday is the 21st of October.  My wife’s birthday is somewhere around April-ish.Well, now I have a new day that will always hold a place in my heart: December 21^st, THE DAY I WON MY FANTASY FOOTBALL LEAGUE.

From an objective standpoint, I shouldn’t like playing fantasy football: I spend four months being nervous; on Sundays I am unavailable emotionally, physically and intellectually (not everyone considers this to be a bad thing), and the amount of time I spend performing “research ” could be dangerous for my career.  Each week, winning brings me no joy, just relief, while losing makes me despondent.  And at the end of the road, the grand prize is $180.  Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but if you break it down to an hourly rate it’s on par with most small-market lemonade stands.

But I won.  I. WON.

Do you know what this means???  It means I know a lot about football.  Like, Vince Lombardi, Mike Shula, Mike Ditka… Z. It also means I am a better human being than my friends. Case closed. QED.

See, fantasy football isn’t just about football – it’s a measure of integrity, leadership, moxie and most importantly, penis size.  Ultimately, it’s about one winner (with a big dick) surrounded by a whole bunch of losers.

Speaking of the losers, I’d like to take some time and recognize a few of them.  First of all, I couldn’t have done it without Roommate Mary.  Our draft was scheduled for the same weekend as my bachelor party, and while I was in Vegas testing the limits of acceptable pre-marital depravity, Mary stepped up and drafted me a team full of winners.  I only wish that her own team could have fared better.*

Next, I’d like to thank our league commissioner, but I’m not going to until I get my winnings.   Bitch better have my money…

Lastly, I want to thank D, the owner of the team I faced for the championship.  No, I’m not going to thank him for losing – I’m not THAT much of an asshole. I want to thank him for being cool.  Let me explain:

Every season, the first thing I get all stressed about is what to name my team.  Just before the first game, I noticed that D had named his team Papi Del Sol (referring to his son, Solomon) so I thought it’d be funny to name my team “Solomon’s Real Dad.”

I knew we’d all get a laugh over it, but D is from Long Island.  (Side note: People there call it “The Island”, which was very confusing to me, as there is another island really close by that is arguably a bit more important.  Y’know the one… MANHATTAN.) They’re weird about respect on “The Island.”  I wasn’t alone in expecting that D would call me up soon after and say “Hey – a joke is a joke, but your team name implies you humped my wife; take it down.”  I would have complied, of course, because he is my friend.  He also used to play lacrosse, which means you can hit him with a stick and he won’t stop whatever he’s doing.

To our surprise, D was a good sport about it all season long, allowing fate to bring us the poetic Super Bowl of Papi Del Sol vs. Solomon’s Real Dad.   The Commish aptly titled the game “The Paternity Test.”  Did I mention I won?

When the kid is about five or six years old I’m going to start sending him a card every year for his birthday.  I’ll say things like, “Went to a Padres game this week.  It made me sad – I always dreamed of taking my son to ball games.”  Inside will be $10, and I’ll sign it, “Your Real Dad.”

And D will punch me in the face.

*Though not better than my own.

About two weeks ago, I had an operation to repair a hernia in my belly.  Technically, these were “sports hernias,” though given my sedentary lifestyle, I was reminded of a line by the late, great Mitch Hedberg (I’m paraphrasing): “If I ever got athlete’s foot, my first reaction would be, ‘those aren’t my feet.’”

In the grand scheme of things, a hernia operation is a minor procedure.  The anatomical equivalent of an oil change.  Three tiny holes, bada-bing-bada-boom, and you go home that same night.  What I seemed to have forgotten is that any time “bada-bing-bada-boom” is happening in your body and it’s not within the boundaries of previously approved orifices, your body assumes something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

The fun started as I was waking up. I was dimly aware that the doctors were wrapping things up, but there still seemed to be a bunch of tubes in my face and torso.  I didn’t want the doctors to forget them there – medical equipment is so expensive, after all – so I thought I’d lend a helping hand and wrench them out violently.  The doctors held me down and assured me they were still using those, thanks.  I apologized, explained that I’m not a morning person, and demanded an IV of 50 cc’s of coffee, stat.  That joke would have killed if I hadn’t unwisely decided to tell it in Portuguese, especially since I don’t speak Portuguese.

After a brief commercial break in consciousness, I found myself lying a recovery room with various beeping machines hooked up to me. Wonder Woman came in to see that I was okay and to tell me that she’d be waiting for me when I was more awake, and I tried to tell her how much I love and appreciate her without using consonants.  Then I thought I’d pass out for a little while longer, except as I started to drift off, the machine to my left, which had been chirping away happily, started to make an insistent sort of “bong” noise.  No need for concern, so long as I had never seen an episode of ER, Grey’s Anatomy, House, Scrubs, Chicago Hope or M.A.S.H. Unfortunately I have; that’s how I knew I was about to die.

The fear of imminent death perked me up a bit, and just as suddenly as it began, the machine to my left went back to making happy little meeps.  Sweet, but when I started to nod off a second time, it started clanging again.  Whatever it was, that machine didn’t seem to think it was wise for me to go to sleep.

A cute nurse came by.  I slurred at her, and she assured me that things were fine.  Then I asked her what the machine was.  She said it measured the oxygen in my blood, and suggested that I remember to keep breathing.  I let her know that usually I’m much better at remembering to do that.

On one hand, I was heavily sedated.  On the other, the evidence suggested that if I slept, I’d stop breathing and presumably die.  That’s a fun way to spend a couple hours.

I won’t bore you with all of the details; for the most part the recovery went as you’d expect.  There’s really only been one little wrinkle, and while the doctor warned me this might happen, I really wish I’d paid more attention.

It seems that hernia surgeries – like anytime someone takes a knife and starts fucking around in your abdomen – cause  bleeding. Because of the miracles of laproscopic surgery, this bleeding all happens on the inside of your body, so when you stand up, gravity causes the blood to drip down into a nearby vessel, where it basically starts to behave just like a bruise.

Oh – did I mention that vessel is your scrotum?

For the past two weeks, my nuts have been one gigantic (THAT’S RIGHT, GIGANTIC) bruise.  I’m talking about hues of black and purple that are beautiful in a sunset but downright terrifying on a reproductive organ. I looked like I had withheld some very critical information from Jack Bauer.

When the doctor warned me this might happen, I thought it’d be funny.  I mean, my gnards would LOOK really bruised, but it’s not like they’d actually feel bruised, right? …. right?  WRONG.  They hurt when they swung.  They hurt when they bounced.  They hurt when I sat down and they hurt when I stood up.  Apparently, my gnards are sissies who flip out at the sight of blood, so when it came pouring down from on high like at the end of Carrie, my boys sent up an alarm the only way they know how: pain.  Good times, had by all.

Thankfully, the trauma is behind me now and I feel terrific.  Big props go to Wonder Woman, who was, well, wonderful as she helped me recover.  The recovery was more than I bargained for, but if there’s an upside, it’s that for the next few months I can consider jerking off to be “rehab.”

Very few of you will notice or care, but I have deleted the Underpants post where I mention the company where I now work.  Moving forward, please avoid referring it to name – if you must call it anything, let’s go with “The Magic Kingdom.”

This new policy is in response to an article sent to me by Robbb, frequent commenter and co-counsel on the Underpants legal staff. (Because you can’t spell “pro bbbono” without “robbb.”)  The article basically explained that when bloggers mention their employers in the same place where they talk about really depraved shit, they frequently become significantly less employed.  As it turns out, The Magic Kingdom is pretty good at tracking down information, so let’s keep things incognito so I can be free to talk about things like the following:

It is no secret that kids are always on the lookout for new ways to get themselves intoxicated while avoiding detection from their parents and/or authority figures.  Procuring legitimate drugs or alcohol is so hard that half the time you’re huffing the air from tennis ball cans just in case you get lucky, so when you actually score something good, you don’t want to have your stash jacked because you ran out of gum.  One of my favorites was taking the cardboard from a roll of paper towels, stuffing it full of dryer sheets and using that as some kind of catalytic converter for marijuana smoke. If my parents ever got suspicious by my friends coming over and holing up in my room for hours on end, their minds would surely be at ease once they realized we were doing laundry.

Now I discover that our efforts were amateurish at best. If we were really hardcore, we would have soaked tampons in vodka and shoved them up our asses, the way that kids these days are doing it.

If you need to, take a couple minutes to absorb this info (pardon the pun, haha.)  Come back when you’re ready.

There are so many things I have to say about this, I don’t really know where to start.  First, a quick aside about the article in that second link.  Did you notice that the subject of the article, “Milagros Rios” is a fictitious name?  That’s a writer with some style, right there.  Hats off to you, Maria Castro (if that’s your real name!!!)

But what really fascinates me about this phenomenon is that there aren’t a lot of lingo names for it.  The only thing I can find is that the practice is referred to as “slimming,” and frankly, I’m disappointed.  Teenagers are usually much more clever than that, as anyone who knows what the “Hoover” and “Two Dogs in the Shower” are could tell you.

I want to believe that you, the Underpants readers, could do better.  I gave it a couple hours of thought (okay, okay, a couple of days), and here’s what I came up with:

• Clogging the Drain
• The Russian Cyclops
• Dronking (Like drinking, but kinda different)
• Taking the Brown-Eye Flight

I’m hoping you guys can come up with a few funny ones.  I’m also having a pretty good time imagining how things might have gone if kids in my school had been doing this.  For instance, Underpants commenter John Law was always a bit of a lightweight back in our high-school days.  Does that mean he would have stuffed his ass with tampons soaked in wine coolers?   Does Grey Goose go down (or go up – you decide) smoother than Popov?

Can we discuss this a lot?  I’m still giggling about it.

I have a hernia.

It’s small, and I’ve had it for years, because it hardly gives me any trouble. That makes me sound like some kind of anatomical landlord, but it really hasn’t. It doesn’t hurt very much or very often.

Mine is located about halfway down the waist-dick meridian, and every once in a while I’ll exert myself or cough, and the skin will bulge out like I’m smuggling a bullfrog.*  No big deal; all I do is shove it back down and we’re all good.  As an added bonus, having an abdominal Whack-A-Mole game officially makes my pants an amusement park. (It also sometimes bulges out when I’m… uh… sexually, er… y’know… banging. I think it’s rather thematic, don’t you? At those times I think of it as my Northern Boner Annex.)

The past couple weeks my hernia has been hurting more than usual, and it’s time to have it repaired.  Today I went in for a consultation with a surgeon, which meant an afternoon off of work, though I wasn’t looking forward to it.  I’ve actually described a hernia examination on the Underpants before, but for those of you who love my talent for imagery, let me give it another go:

Imagine someone trying to use your pelvis as a glove.  What I mean is, the doctor places one or two fingers in that below-the-belt-but-not-quite-second-base area, then shoves her fingers in and up until it feels like she’s wrist deep in your groin.  If I was a doctor, I don’t know how I’d ever resist the temptation to then say, “Okay, now I’m going to drink this glass of water while you recite the alphabet.”

That’s right, I said “her fingers.”  Did I not mention my doctor is of the second-X-chromosome persuasion?  Well, she is, and that brings me to the point of this blog post.  (Not that I need one; dick jokes justify themselves.)

Last night, I was getting ready to take a shower.  Wonder Woman was taking her sweet-ass time** in there, so I found myself standing in a room, cold, pondering my nakedness. Looking down, it occurred to me that in a half-day’s time a woman was going to investigating THAT area, and I started to wonder if I should trim.  Not to make me look huge, or anything; it just seemed like it might be the polite thing to do. Sure, she’s a doctor, and she’s undoubtedly seen worse, but it looked like my junk was putting on a live-action performance of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch.

So I pulled out (or shall I say, “whipped out”) my clippers, when I started to wonder about which guard I should go with.  Based on experience (I’ll tell you about it another time) I know that anything under a half-inch itches like a motherfucker after about a day.  Besides, if I went too short it might seem smarmy; the kind of thing a guy might do before giving his dick a spritz of Axe body spray or Drakkar Noir.

Now, I know that the Underpants’ audience consists of dudes who have no problem talking about their junk, but we are also lucky enough to have at least three medically-trained ladies along with us.  I’d like to hear your thoughts on the matter: what’s the etiquette here?

As for myself, I ended up choosing a one-inch guard.  I felt it made a statement of considerate, yet casual.  (I also went with Eternity for Men.)

Not like it mattered. I was so disheartened when she told me, “please drop your pants, but you can keep your underwear on.”  She didn’t even ask me to lie down – we just did it in a corner, standing up, with my pants around my ankles.  I felt so cheap.

*I really thought I could make an Alien joke there, but I kept getting caught up in the fact that the only way for me to have an alien burst out THERE is if the “facehugger” gave me a blowjob instead.  I’m not saying I’d turn it down… I’m just saying it’s unlikely.

**As a married man I am obligated to make at least one “boy, my wife spends a lot of time in the bathroom” joke annually.  In fact, I take far longer showers than her, even though I come out far less clean. I won’t lie: I fucking love showers.