The substance of Current Life Issues, as best I remember, broke down something like this:

Week 1: Alcohol

Week 2: Drugs

Week 3: Sex

Week 4-15: CONSEQUENCES

The CONSEQUENCES phase had two parts. The first was a fear-mongering recitation of the ways in which any combination of the topics from Weeks 1-3 could ruin your life. Alcohol and Drugs? Death by DUI. Drugs and Sex? Death by AIDS. Alcohol and Sex? Rape. Alcohol and Drugs and Sex? Death by Rape. If you were one of the lucky few to dabble in one or the other and escape your dance with death, you graduated to the second part and had a baby.

The last half of the semester was consumed by babies. Five pound babies. Made of flour. You were put into pairs with a member of the opposite sex, given a 5lb bag of flour, assigned a gender for your baby, and told that you had to "dress" and name him or her in a fashion appropriate to their gender. One or both of you were required to have your flour baby with you AT ALL TIMES.

Like any group project at any middle school, the burden each person in the group carried was inversely proportional to their popularity. Couples whose individual popularity sat at relative equilibrium shared the responsibility equally. Or neglected it equally. For pairs in significant popularity imbalance, one person did the majority of the work. Being Oakland in the late 80s/early 90s, this meant lots of Chinese flour babies named after New Kids on the Block and members of various Bay Area sports teams.

My baby mama and I were in the same general popularity strata, so we put in roughly the same amount of minimal effort to get a good grade. The only aspect of the project we spent a lot of time on was naming our baby girl. My partner wanted to name our baby 'Kelly' because she LOVED that new show Beverly Hills 90210 and her last name was Taylor. I strenuously objected on two grounds: 1) I'll be goddamned if any child of mine gets named after some girly soap-drama, and 2) I'll be goddamned if any child of mine doesn't have my last name. I told her to pick another name. She chose Brenda. I told her to stop being a retard and she told me to pick a better name then! I chose Moonbeam.

Get it, FLOUR child! Yeah, I know, gayer than a George Michael concert. But when you're 12 and your adolescent brain has made that connection, there's not a chance in hell you're going to let go of it. Hence, Moonbeam.

My partner wanted no part of it. All her arguments were valid. It was "stupid." We would get "made fun of." No one would "get what the hell I was talking about." So we compromised and, after much negotiation, became the proud fake-parents of little Moonfrye Parker Taylor. She got the surname, I got Moonfrye. It was totally worth it, too. Who doesn't love Punky Brewster?

Of course no one ever learned anything from the Flour Baby assignment. Who in their right mind is going to internalize the lessons of alcohol-soaked unprotected sex when they come in the guise of a 5lb bag of baking goods? Babies have immediate needs. They emote. They respond to negative and positive energy. Unlike their "all-purpose" substitutes, babies do not thrive at the bottom of a backpack, or stuffed haphazardly into a locker. When you bring your baby home for the first time, you are supposed to bond with it, not resist the urge to toss it up in the air and hit it with an aluminum baseball bat.

It's no wonder so many people--no matter how otherwise mature they seem in the rest of their lives--have children before "they are ready." They've done nothing to prepare for it. I would have included myself in that group if I'd had a kid before yesterday, when my mother finally got home from the hospital.

TO BE CONTINUED...

That's the goal of higher education, isn't it? To expose young people with a thirst for knowledge and experience to people and places and things they would never ordinarily confront? We all want our lives to look something like this I think

and college is what's supposed to propel us on that trajectory through our twenties until we achieve another level of wisdom in our thirties, upon having children before we are ready and getting married because there is nowhere else to take a relationship after 5 years once you've moved in together and bought a dog and a car together.

I was very much on that path until I settled into a well-paying paralegal job right out of college that required long hours and very little critical thinking. My first assignment was to put 75,000 printed out emails in chronological order and remove the duplicates. It took four months and a piece of my spirit. A year later, I was charged with assembling the Plaintiffs and Defendants trial exhibits from a previous case into binders for review. Each side had 2500 exhibits. By this time I'd earned enough leeway in my position to make certain executive decisions. It was up to me, and me alone, to determine which set would go in blue binders and which set would go in black binders. The Defendants exhibits would go in the black binders, I decided, because the Defendants were bad and black is the bad guy color. This project took two months to complete and culminated in a knockdown, drag out scream fest in my manager's office during my review when she told me the main reason I wasn't getting a full raise was because the exhibit binder project took longer than it should have. Shit like this went on for close to four years.

You'd think at some point I might start to question my intelligence, my competence. Start questioning the wisdom of my post-college decision making. You'd be wrong. I reverted back to my pre-college ways. I grew more intractable with subjective issues of good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, smart vs. dumb. Because I'd graduated in four years from a good school and I was smarter than most everyone I worked with, I didn't just think I knew everything...I KNEW I knew everything. The fact that my intellect was stagnating and my intellectual curiosity had all but disappeared never dawned on me. Until I realized what the hell I was doing about a year and a half before I quit and went to law school, my trajectory looked like the S&P 500 after Black Monday.

That was five years ago. I've spent much of the intervening time on a personal intellectual reclamation project. Questioning assumptions. Trying things I'd once hated. Watching, listening, and reading things I'd previously refused to watch, hear, or read. I've been remarkably successful, I think. My head is screwed on pretty straight for a guy who still cannot shake the innate sense of awesomeness that roils around inside him. One of the only things that has not changed since those early days, however, is my absolute disgust with olives, pickles, and Brussels sprouts. Although, now that I think about it, even that's not true.

The Brussels sprouts smelled like rotting human flesh. The lemon butter sauce smelled like anti-tetanus ointment I had to use years earlier when I pinched my little hand in a rusted folding beach chair I'd perched atop a stack of tires at Sears Point Raceway to get a better view of my uncle racing. The smell and the taste were so bad not even my dog would eat them when we cajoled him under the kitchen table and sneaked the turd pearls down to him. He was a yellow lab mix who would ordinarily eat anything besides grapes that you put in front of him. He sniffed the smegma-colored garden dingleberries only once and scurried out from under the table with his haunches down and his tail between his legs like we'd tricked him into a trip to the vet.

I had Brussels sprouts only one time after that--at a dinner party thrown by a girlfriend's mother about ten years later. These were steamed, but not sauced, and their texture engaged my gag reflex with nearly every bite. Of the 7 or 8 generously spooned onto my plate, I managed to force down 1.25 of them. They were enough to ruin the rest of the dinner for me. It should be no shock that this dinner, at the nadir of my Black Monday arrogance and ignorance, was the beginning of the end for that relationship.

Fast forward to November 2007 and The (New) Girlfriend and I have decided to spend Thanksgiving in DC with her best friend from back home and her husband. They've become good friends of both of ours, so it took the sting out of being unable to go back to California for a home-cooked Thanksgiving. After the pleasantries, the "can I take your coats" and "what can I get you to drink", I ask our hosts, "so what's for dinner?" They run through the menu going from biggest to littlest until they land, with a thud, on Brussels sprouts. My face dropped noticeably. "Don't worry," they tell me, "you'll like these. Even our little nephew who doesn't eat anything green unless its candy likes these." To say I was skeptical is to say only half of it.

Dinner rolls around two hours later and there they sit. A large rustic bowl filled with Mother Nature's shit grenades. Fittingly, the bowl ends up right in front of me, staring me down, mocking my provincial refusal to consider them. Our friend watched me reject them. "Try it Nils. I promise you'll like them. They're sauted in butter with bacon and onions and a little garlic." Well, hello nurse. I can think of very little that does not taste good when combined with butter, bacon, onions, and garlic. I'd eat out a dead hooker if she were lightly cooked with those ingredients. I scooped out a few sprouts and quickly popped one in my mouth just to get it over with. I took a bite and chewed. Then I took another. And another. Each bite was an explosion of flavor. Buttery, bacony, oniony, garlicky flavor. I was flabbergasted. Surely these were some other kind of sprout. There's no way Brussels could have just up and changed their sprout recipe after all these years. "No," they assured me, "those are good ol' fashioned Brussels sprouts." I had four or five more.

I was converted and my gastronomic IQ took off like the price of Google stock. Maybe someday the same thing will happen for me with pickles and olives, although I doubt it. I know what's good and I know what I like, and those two things are neither.

Green-lighting a second season for a fantastic show like this seems like a no-brainer to you and me, but it was not such an easy call for NBC. The show suffers from chronically low ratings, thanks to a phenomenon in network television I like to call "People are Fucking Stupid." Some, like executive producer Jason Katims, blame the corporate marketing strategy as well. Regardless, the producers and the network are doing whatever they can to ensure that FNL succeeds this fall.

After two-stepping across NBC's primetime lineup last year, the show's eagerly awaited second season is scheduled to air in the more drama-friendly 9pm time slot on Friday nights (imagine that!). In addition, the DVD set of the first season is set for release in August, a month before it's second season premiere. The support and promotion efforts do not stop there, however. Producers are committed to leaving no creative stone unturned, no matter how odious the creature they may find underneath. And therein lies the rub.

TV Guide is reporting that the producers of Friday Night Lights are entertaining the idea of casting Rosie O'Donnell in a small, potentially recurring role in the upcoming season. From the article:

FNL execs are wooing the ex-View lightning rod to appear in an episode this fall. "Rosie's a big fan of Friday Night Lights, as we know from The View, and we heard she was interested in being on the show," executive producer Jason Katims tells me. "Usually we don't do any stunt casting, but we have a character coming up -- six or seven episodes into the new season -- of a female soccer coach who is really angry about all of the school's resources going to football. It's a really funny character and I think she'd be perfect for it.

"There's a scene where she comes in to see Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and slams a dead soccer ball on his desk and basically says, 'You're the guy who gets everything!'" Katims continues. "It's a really fun scene, and it's the one time I'm thinking of stunt casting."

Rosie Motherfucking O'Donnell.

That's quite the way for a show to jump the shark. The big fat, sweaty shark. Have Bissinger, Berg & Co. shot their entire creative load in one season? I suppose it's possible. American literary history is littered with authors who only had one great book in them. There's no reason to believe some television writers can't suffer a similar fate. Maybe FNL was destined for a single season run. Sure there are still several unresolved story lines, but the Dillon Panthers did win the Texas State High School Football Championship in the season finale. Maybe "stunt-casting" a lesbian water buffalo is a good way to generate viewership in a show that has already peaked. Of course, I don't think that's the case at all. Friday Night Lights boasts some of the best writers in network television, with the capacity to develop intriguing story lines for several seasons to come.

That said, how on Earth does anyone with artistic integrity (or a soul) even consider this move? You have a critically acclaimed show with a large ensemble cast that has, within a single season, grown into something greater than the sum of its parts. And in the service of better ratings for a network that has no business canceling a show right now, you want to add the ignorant, divisive, loud-mouthed star of "Another Stakeout"? That's like a chef spending a year working out his cassoulet recipe and then, once he's perfected it, deciding to add a turd because the restaurant hasn't been as busy as he'd like and he knows that a turd will get people's attention. I don't know about you, but I prefer my cassoulet the old fashioned way: turd-free.

In that vein, I hereby begin my campaign to KEEP ROSIE O'DONNELL OFF "FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS". Everyone who cares about the quality of television and the fate of its greatest network show should sign THIS ONLINE PETITION to do their part. This is as much about Friday Night Lights as it is about any other great show. Would you want that abrasive sea monster sliming her way across your favorite show?

I didn't think so.

SIGN THIS ONLINE PETITION and forward it along to your friends who aren't fucking stupid.

When we got to the frame store and she unfurled the poster so the framer could take its measurements, I was pleasantly surprised. The artwork was sleek and cool, and the concert the poster was from took place at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. That alone gets it a pass, I suppose. What does not get a pass is how fucking expensive framing is. I honestly had no idea. Somewhere in my mother's basement I still have a couple dozen movie and concert posters from college rolled together with their corners torn to shreds by scotch tape and thumbtacks. Hell, the last thing I tried to frame was my sister when she was 11, for flinging plastic bags of dog shit onto our neighbor's roof (there's no way an 11 year-old girl has that kind of arm).

Admittedly, the frames The Girlfriend selected were awesome. One beveled black. One almost scalloped and rustic gold in color. No matting, just frames. And it cost more than Robert McNamara paid for his entire education at Berkeley in the late '30s. Is that a fair comparison? Probably not. I don't really care. The point is, it wasn't cheap. Once The Girlfriend finished signing away her pound of flesh to Shylock the Framer, we stepped out into the bright, breezy spring afternoon and decided on The Cheesecake Factory as a good enough place to stop for a late lunch.

With the wait for a table near half an hour, we elected to sit at the bar. Immediately, we realized it was the right choice. The 4th quarter of the Nets-Cavs game was on the TV behind the bar and the bartender, a short young gregarious fellow, was in no hurry to flip our spots like most waitresses are with their tables. Good thing too. While The Girlfriend knew going in that she wanted a salad and could thus confine her perusal to two pages, I hadn't the first clue what I wanted to eat. "What are you in the mood for?" she asked. Well, I said, maybe something tangy, or something spicy. Something hearty, but healthy too. That description covers at least 70% of the menu, including the drinks.

I flipped through the book-sized menu like a multiple choice final I hadn't studied for, hoping, praying I could find a question I actually knew the answer to.

Ugh. There was something good on every page. Tex Mex Eggrolls? Yes, please. Beef ribs? Uh-huh. Double B.B.Q Bacon Cheeseburger? Splooge. By the time I'd finished ¾ of my giant mojito and narrowed my selection criteria down to tangy and/or spicy, two items stood out from the rest: 1) Spicy Chicken Chipotle Pasta, and 2) Bang-Bang Chicken and Shrimp.

I liked everything in the pasta dish. Grilled chicken breast, shitake mushrooms, asparagus, yellow and red bell peppers, chipotle cream sauce, linguini. Unfortunately, too much dairy tends to increase the volume and intensity of my snoring at night, and asparagus makes the fluids coming out of my wiener smell bad. If I was going to take full advantage of the enormous mojito The Girlfriend was sucking down next to me, I should at least be smart enough not to turn my penis into a repellant.

Bang-Bang Chicken and Shrimp it would have to be. Another wise choice. This is how it's described on the menu:

A Spicy Thai Dish with the Flavors of Curry, Peanut, Chile and Coconut. Sauteed with Vegetables and Served over Rice.

That's one way to put it. A better way might be to call it

An enormous lake of meat-filled curry with a peak of rice rising skyward from its center.

When I looked down at my plate, I felt like I was looking at an aerial shot of Crater Lake if it were situated at the mouth of the filthy brown Ganges, rather than the crystal clear mountains of southern Oregon. Regardless, I ate every last morsel. The plate was the size of a baby (and probably as heavy) and it was fucking delicious.

The only confusing part was the name of the dish. "Bang-Bang Chicken and Shrimp." For all it had going for it flavor-wise, it wasn't even remotely spicy. Now granted, I have an incredible tolerance for spicy foods thanks to five years in a kitchen with a bunch of Mexicans who like to torture the pinche gringo by daring him to eat raw jalapenos like carrot sticks. But still, even butter-chugging Minnesotans would have been unfazed by the spice-level of the curry. Taco Bell has spicier stuff.

After seriously contemplating (and declining) a giant piece of artery-stuffing chocolate cheesecake for dessert, The Girlfriend and I stepped back out into the lazy late afternoon. A quick stop into Crate & Barrel for a desk lamp and we were on our way home to do nothing for the rest of the day. We weren't five minutes in the car before I began to understand from whence the name of my lunch came. The soupy kaleidoscope of flavor I spent much of the meal and this story raving about had shot through my GI track with unprecedented speed and was packing itself into my large intestine like shot in a musket.

It was time to floor it.

We got home with more than enough time to spare, but when I finally settled onto the toilet my colon became an ass grenade; my tightened sphincter, the pin. If I pulled it there would be no going back. I let go thinking soldiers get purple hearts for shit like this. It was only seconds before the force of my over-stuffed bowels shotgunned a stream of shit against the back of the porcelain bowl and down into the standing water below. It was one of those instances when the velocity of the bowel movement practically cleans your ass for you--like a power washer, almost. A couple quick, spotless wipes and I was up to survey the damage.

Remarkable. I covered every inch of the back rim of the toilet bowl with an even spray. It reminded me of the scene near the end of Boyz n the Hood when Ricky gets gunned down with a double barrel shotgun by the banger in the back of that red Nissan Sentra. The spread of the shot from the shells covered his entire back and soaked his shirt completely through with blood in mere seconds. That's what I'd done to the back of the toilet. I'd Ricky Baker'd it.

Washing my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror trying to figure out what had just happened. One minute I'm having a delicious, filling lunch with my girlfriend, the next I'm re-enacting the Witches of Eastwick cherry-vomiting scene with my butthole. For some reason, I couldn't wrap my head around it.

I guess it's just one of those freak things that hits you, like bang-bang....

Think about that for a minute.

It wasn't long ago that bald men could barely get in the door simply to interview for vacant head coaching positions. The conspicuous lack of bald head coaches on NFL sidelines has irked smooth-pated players and assistant coaches for years. It came to a head, finally, in 1997 when the San Francisco 49ers, led by an abundantly coiffed Carmen Policy, hired a young, similarly coiffed college coach by the name of Steve Mariucci; passing over, much to the dismay of players and fans, the team's legendary bald offensive line coach, Bobb McKittrick.

Subsequently, McKittrick fell ill with an aggressive form of bile duct cancer that killed him a mere three years later. Many close to both McKittrick and the 49ers front office blame the spread of the cancer on the effect Policy's snub had on McKittrick. Put plainly, it broke his spirit. When reached for a response, Policy said "Who are you? How did you get in my house?" McKittrick was unavailable for comment..

The ensuing furor in 2000 reached such a pitch that the league's owners, at the urging of Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, hastily passed the Jack Kent Cooke Rule whereby teams are mandated to interview at least one bald person for each available head coaching slot.

Of course the rule came under immediately scrutiny from traditionalists and those in football's hirsute, old boys club who felt they were being railroaded into offering employment to potentially less qualified applicants. If you can't hold your hairline, the thinking went, how can you be expected to hold your O-Line? Ridiculous on their surface, these criticisms gained traction with the hiring and firing of Mike Tice by the Minnesota Vikings. It was a setback that nearly cost Lovie Smith his opportunity to coach the Chicago Bears.

Yet here we stand. February 1, 2007. The Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears are in the Super Bowl. And they are being led into battle in front of a global audience for professional football's most sought after prize by two bald men.

To the contrary, Dungy and Smith are respectful (and respected), well-spoken, intelligent family men who take pride in their work and their ability to take care of those families. They go to church every Sunday, they love their mothers, and they don't blame anyone for their problems.

They are role models for both the bald and the un-bald. Which brings me to the larger point: if they can be role models for everyone, then why are we all making such a big deal about the fact that they're the first bald men to coach against each other in the Super Bowl? Isn't it enough that as good, hard-working men they traversed treacherous 16-game schedules to lead their respective teams to their sport's biggest stage? It's not like getting to the Super Bowl is easy...no matter how much hair you have.

Steve Mariucci, Dennis Erickson, Dom Capers, Jim Mora, Joe Bugel, Bruce Coslet, Jerry Glanville, Pete Carroll, Wayne Fontes, Ted Marchibroda, Dave Campo, Wade Phillips, Mike Sherman, Dave Wannstedt.

None of these guys coached a team to the Super Bowl and they've each got thick heads of hair. Hell, a couple of them haven't even won a playoff game. Ask them if they think having hair gave them a leg up. Each one of them would probably punch you in the mouth if they weren't already retired or out of the playoffs and on vacation.

Marshalling your team into the Super Bowl has nothing to do with hair. It has everything to do with that little bit of luck every coach hopes for and that whole lot of hard work that every coach puts in. It's time the media and the fans of professional football realize that. I'm tired of all the "by the way"s and the "it's interesting to note"s that come along with reporting on Super Bowl Ex El Eye. It's patronizing and it diminishes their accomplishments as coaches and as men.

Dungy's and Smith's greatest accomplishments this year were not overcoming the stumbling blocks inherent in being bald while coaching in a league run by dudes with lots of hair. On Sunday, what Dungy should be heralded for is his ability to coax out back to back high quality performances from his much-maligned and often times porous defense. On the other sideline, Smith deserves a standing ovation for finding a way to get steady, mistake-free play from his underwhelming, mistake-prone offense. These were colossal feats irrespective of hair follicle density.

There is no debate, of course, that bald people have faced a rocky road to general acceptance in this country since its inception over 200 years ago. It's no coincidence that Ben Franklin was never elected President, just as it should be no surprise that the only way we ever elected a bald man like Eisenhower to this country's highest office was to focus on the fact that the man was a General and a decorated war hero.

We've made long strides as a people since those days. Balds model now. They can go on television without a wig and host game shows where hot chicks open suitcases while standing on risers. It was only a few years ago that it was trendy to date bald guys and bring them home to meet your parents just so you could show them that they didn't own you and that you were independent. True, that was just a phase and most of those relationships never lasted--I mean c'mon, it's cool to date one for awhile, but to marry one and have kids together? What would the neighbors think? What about your grandparents? You come home for Thanksgiving one year and you have little bald babies running all over the place. You could kill your grandmother.

The point is, as a nation--as a People--we will never be able to overcome the prejudices seemingly woven into our cultural DNA until we are able to look at bald men like Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith with admiration and respect simply for their abilities as coaches of football and managers of men. Personally, when I look at them I don't see a couple of bald guys in funny hats. I see a couple of exceptional coaches in funny hats. And that's how it should be.