There's just ssssomething about the way I talk

I talk funny. Everybody who knows me knows this is true, but most are too polite to say anything about it. It's not my fault; I have a space between my two front teeth--nothing huge and David Lettermen-esque, nothing a child might accidentally fall into--but a space nonetheless. And because of that space, I say my S's funny.

I sound like steam escaping, like Satan in the Garden of Eden, trying to convince Adam's girlfriend that God is being completely unreasonable over that whole apple issue. It's the sort of voice that, when I speak earnestly and with incorruptible integrity, people tend to assume I'm lying. It's a shyster's voice, the voice of a carnival barker asserting that everybody wins, the voice of the soon-to-be ex-wife telling her husband she worked up this sweat at the gym, the voice of Nixon assuring the American public he is not a crook, so there!

And that's a shame, because I am, for the most part, honest. No, really. Oh, I suppose I occasionally massage the truth just a bit here and there to make a good story better, or to spare someone's feelings, but just plain lie? Never. Well, almost never. OK, sometimes.

The point is, many times when I am being entirely truthful I'm thought of as a Big Fat Fibber anyway. All because of those darn S's.

My girlfriend, Anne, claims my slight lisp is "cute." Yet I can't help notice she seems dubious when I relate the tale of the time I single-handedly rescued several hostages from a prison camp in Cambodia. (I'll admit it's possible I'm confused on this one and that's just something I saw in a Sylvester Stallone movie. Regardless, my S's make me sound like I'm lying, even when my statements have nothing at all to do with Cambodian prison camps or super-human feats of courage.)

My lisp isn't so pronounced that everyone notices it straight away. I mean, I don't sound like the Grand Marshall in a gay pride parade or anything. But it's there just hissing away for those who take the time to really listen.

Because of this, I drive speech therapists nuts. They can't stand to be around me for more than a few minutes at a time. If I'm at a party and a lady who otherwise seems to be having a great time leaves early after having conversed with me, it's a sure bet she's a speech therapist. They just can't handle the white noise that accompanies my every utterance.

Back in elementary school, the speech therapist would each Thursday pull me from class and drag me down to the broom closet that served as her office. There she would diligently teach me to press my tongue tightly to the top of my gums and repeat lines like, "Suzy sells sea shells by the sea shore" and "Sad sammy sees something silly." Every week I would try my best--mostly because speech therapy, embarrassing though it could be--was still better than arithmetic, which is what all my classmates who could pronounce the word "Swiss" without attracting the attention of nearby rattlesnakes were doing while I tortured my poor speech therapist with unrelenting waves of sibilance.

In the end her only success was teaching me to say "house" instead of "howsh," which is how I pronounced the word prior to her intervention. For that, I owe her a debt of gratitude.

Properly pronouncing "house" may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but at least it's ssssssomething.

Mike Taylor's recent paperback, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at www.mtrealitycheck.com and as an ebook at Borders, Barnes & Noble and other online book sellers. Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

It’s official, I’m a genius

I’m a genius. The Internet said so, and the Internet would never tell a lie. (There really are planet-sized spaceships orbiting the sun, President Obama really is a space alien, the Aztecs did accurately predict the end of the world, and Nostradamus was not just a “lucky guesser.” You get the idea.)

Until recently I was unaware of my genius status, owing in large part to the fact I barely made it through ninth grade Algebra class and that was only because Mr. Paepke couldn’t stand the idea of seeing me yet again the following year.

Though I did fairly well in college, I had to study really, really hard for my grades.

I learned to talk good (“speak well,” my English major girlfriend would no doubt say) in an effort to disguise my somewhat limited cognitive abilities (psst: my dumbness).

As an elementary school student, my younger brothers and sisters—all of them, even my brother Bobby who will never be mistaken for a genius—could kick my butt at flash cards, a fact my old man pointed out at every conceivable opportunity.

So you can see why I hadn’t previously recognized my genius-ness.

In fact, I might have gone my entire life without realizing how smart I truly am had it not been for an online IQ test. According to the IQ website the test would measure my intelligence in several areas; math, language, spatial relationships, problem solving, ability to walk and chew gum at the same time, and so on.

Since the test was free and I had a ton of work waiting for me that I did not want to do, I took the test. It wasn’t particularly hard, even the math portion, but it did take significantly longer than I was expecting. Minutes turned into a half-hour, and then an hour…finally I clicked in my final answer and pushed the “submit” button.

My laptop hummed away contentedly while my test responses wafted over the coffee house’s wifi signal to IQ Central, which tallied up my score and returned my results.

“Congratulations!” came the reply. “Your IQ is 142!”

According to the IQ website, this put me somewhere between “gifted” and “highly gifted.” I immediately felt smarter than I have in years. If my old man had been on hand, I would have printed out the results and stapled them to his forehead!

Even the people at the IQ website were excited by my apparent brilliance. So much so, in fact, that they were willing to let me into their exclusive genius club! All I had to do—now that I was a certified genius—was give them my credit card information and sign up for my first month’s membership.

Hmm…OK, maybe I’m not a genius after all. But I am smarter than that.

Mike Taylor’s new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com. 

Psst…ya wanna know my secrets? All my secrets?

I’ve lost my entire life. Everything from my gym locker combination to my credit card numbers to my Facebook password; it’s all gone, and I have no one to blame but myself.

Also gone: my banking info, the access code to my home wireless Internet connection, the weekly tally of people who have visited my blog, the correct meanings of the words “affect” and “effect,” the complete manuscript of my recent book, all my newspaper columns from the past 15 years, the birth dates of my children, my entire iTunes catalog, my Paypal, Amazon and Gmail account numbers and passwords, and a personal journal I’ve kept since 1989 containing entries that—if read by anyone else—would undoubtedly lead to my compulsory institutionalization followed by a lengthy regimen of shock therapy.

And it’s all just laying somewhere, clinging magnetically to a tiny USB “thumb drive.” A thumb drive which used to be attached securely to my key chain, where it safely (and I use the word loosely) backed up all the important data located on my laptop’s hard drive.

I noticed it was missing last Thursday as I was gassing up the car on the first leg of a trip from Detroit to Grand Rapids. How can I describe the feeling? It was similar to strolling through a crowded shopping mall and suddenly realizing you’re buck naked. I felt exposed, vulnerable.

My laptop is password protected, meaning it would take a clever third-grader with a half-hour’s spare time to get to my personal information. My USB drive has no such password. Anyone who picks that thing up and plugs it into a computer is going to know more about me than does my girlfriend, my kids or my priest.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t confess to any murders in my journal, but I might have. I’m almost certain I didn’t save the Google Map showing where the bodies are hidden, but man, it has been so long…I just can’t sure.

Anyone finding that USB drive could easily steal my identity, though at this particular point in my life, the thief would undoubtedly be willing to pay good money to get me to take it back.

Suddenly, I can understand how Nixon felt when prosecutors started rooting trough those White House tapes.

The drive may have fallen off my keychain and gone straight down a sewer grate, lost for ages like the One Ring to Rule Them All. Or it may be laying beneath a table at the public library, just waiting to be discovered by a kid who would consider it the height of hilarity to post the drive’s entire contents on the Internet.

Worst case scenario: see previous paragraph. Best case: the damn thing remains lost for 100 years or more, only to be discovered by future archaeologists who plug it in and say, “Mike Taylor? Oh my stars! Do you know what this means? We have in our possession previously unpublished works by the brilliant author who outsold Stephen King ten-to-one and single-handedly saved the publishing industry from extinction!”

Yeah, I think I’ll hope for that one. Meanwhile, I have about a hundred passwords to change.

Mike Taylor’s new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com. 

Toilet paper shouldn’t have to be this embarrassing

I’ve embarrassed myself hundreds, maybe thousands of times over the years. From the afternoon I forgot to wear pants while washing the car to the time I sat on a playground swing moments before the chain broke and hit me on the head, my life has been one long litany of red-faced vignettes, executed to the delight of nearby friends and family.

You might think this much practice at looking foolish would somehow have inured me to the condition, but nope, every time I do something stupid—depending on who you ask, this takes place on a daily/hourly/ongoing basis—I feel like a doofus.

It doesn’t have to be some supremely dorky moment, even everyday circumstances conspire to make me look a fool. This notion was played out recently in a Detroit area mall.

I was going out to pick up a few sundry household items and my daughter, with whom I was staying at the time, asked if I’d also grab a package of toilet paper.

Now, as far as I know, everyone in the civilized world uses toilet paper. But it’s one of those things “polite” folks (I’m not one myself, but I’ve heard they exist) don’t talk about in mixed company. Considering its intended purpose, I suppose I can understand that.

I mean, every time I see that TP commercial featuring the bear family (that does you-know-what in the woods) I die a little inside. I’m not particularly squeamish, but really. Bears?

At any rate, unlike in my married days, when I was occasionally forced to pick up euphemistically-named “feminine hygiene products,” buying toilet paper doesn’t—as a rule—cause me any embarrassment.

This trip was different.

The mall at which I was shopping is very upscale. Though anchored by two mega-retailers selling discount items, the rest of the mall is crowded with snooty little jewelry stores, designer boutiques and chic salons. My first stop was the discount store, where I found a great deal on toilet paper, a giant-sized block of “southern cleansing enhancer” as big as a Buick.

There was no bag large enough to contain this monstrous slab of tissue, so I lugged it into the mall balanced precariously on my shoulder, hopeful I would not be bumped, thereby causing me to drop the cube and crush any nearby children or little old ladies.

By the time I had tracked down all the items on my own shopping list, I had been sniggered at by zit-faced teens at Spencer’s Gifts, the skinny 20-somethings stationed just inside the Gap and perhaps worst of all, the gorgeous sweeties hawking male fantasies at Victoria’s Secret. A little old lady checking out orthopedic shoes shook her head and smiled at my plight. (I considered dropping the cube and crushing her, but that seemed a little drastic.)

Everyone uses toilet paper! But you can bet I won’t again be advertising that fact at the mall.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com. Mike’s new book, Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at mtrealitycheck.com.