Congratulations Curry John!

You didn’t ask for this name.  You didn’t like it in elementary school, where people called you “Curry Johns,” which was, the kids eventually decided, a joke about how it looked like curry when you shit your pants which, of course, you did all the time in their collective imagination.  You didn’t like it in high school, when people called you C-John and asked if you were selling weed, despite your straight edged rep.  And you absolutely hated it in college, where people constantly made jokes about you “currying favor” with faculty.

Your life hasn’t been the best, we won’t lie.  But other people have had worse lives.  I mean, just think about everyone in Yemen.  Egypt is nuts right now.  It’s important to keep things in context.  Still, life hasn’t been amazing.

You tried to run from your name, but a trust established when you were a boy by your father and a serious inability to hold down a normal, paying job has insured that you cannot, for financial reasons, ever actually change your name. You haven’t known a moment’s peace in decades.

Today you’re going to turn a corner.  Today you’re going to enter culinary school.

Today you’re going to become a world class chef, specializing in Punjabi cuisine.

The school will be in India.  It’ll be relatively cheap and, thanks to your trust, you’ll be able to live quite comfortably while you attend it.  Today will be your first day which, of course, will be tedious.  Filled with paperwork and meetings you’d just as soon have skipped.  But in the weeks that come, in the months that come, you’ll find that you actually quite enjoy cooking.  Not curries, per sec, but briyanis, vindaloos and khormas.  You’ll have a knack for curries, sure, but your passion will be cooking traditional Punjabi food with a sort of ineffable western flair.

You’ll graduate at the head of your class, move back to upstate New York and spend your late twenties to early thirties introducing white people to amazingly tasty Indian food.  When you are finally called to your father’s death bed, decades from today, you’ll kiss him on the forehead and thank him.  He’ll smile and tell you he was always proud of him.  Then he’ll shit the bed as he dies, because that’s apparently a real thing.  It’ll be gross, but part of an amazing catharsis, so we think the whole affair constitutes a net positive.

And it all starts today.

Congratulations Curry John!

Congratulations Bus Driverman!

When you were born your hick parents named you “Bus.”  They thought they were being clever, the same way Kanye thought he was being clever when he named his poor, defenseless daughter “North.”  The Drivermans thought that calling you “Bus Driverman” would make your life a neverending slurry of friendships and affable jokes carried out by acquaintances and friends from the town over.  They never thought they’d be condemning you to a life where people shout at you “You’ll never be more than a bus driver man!” from their IROCs as they drive by, but that’s probably because they weren’t terribly bright people to start and, as such, didn’t really understand what they were doing.

But you decided, somewhere around high school, that you weren’t going to take this shit from those assholes.  So instead of getting all sad and methy like most outcasts at your high school, you went the other way: you decided to become the best student you could.  You worked constantly, tirelessly, studying for tests, engaging in charitable projects, saying no to drugs even though the druggies were the only kids who were really even moderately nice to you in passing.  It was rough.

But it paid off, sort of, because today you’re going to start on your journey to law school, because today you’re going to be accepted to Brown.

Sure, it’s not Harvard, and sure, that’ll be the first thing your parents say to you, but you’ll know, deep down in your heart of hearts, that that’s just their way.  Or at least, you’ll tell yourself this, that this is simply the means by which they try to motivate you to escape this horrid life.  The reality, which will dawn on you midway through law school, is that your parents are royal dickholes.

Congratulations Bus Driverman!