Planet Tad

by Tim Carvell

  I was over at Chuck’s house tonight. His older brother, Sid, is home for the summer from college—he’s a professional amateur skateboarder, but in the meantime, he’s working as a busboy at Applebee’s. He showed us the tattoo that he got of the Tony Hawk company logo on his bicep. It looks really cool, and we all agreed it sucks that his manager at Applebee’s makes him wear long-sleeved shirts to cover it up whenever he’s working.

  When I got home, I asked my mom when I could get a tattoo, and she said, “When I’ve been dead at least five years.”

  That seems like a really long time to wait.

  Sophie got back from camp today. We went to pick her up at the elementary-school parking lot, where the bus dropped her off. She ran over and hugged my mom and dad and said, “I missed you guys soooooo much!” Then she turned to me and whispered, “Hi, Tad. Do you have the $375 you owe me?”

  I’d kind of forgotten that today was the due date to repay my loan from Sophie. I went to my room and collected all my earnings from this summer so far: I had just enough to pay back Sophie, with $8.27 left over. Sophie took it and said, “A pleasure doing business with you.”

  I really hope that when Sophie grows up, she uses her powers for good and not for evil.

  I went to the dentist today for a checkup. I don’t think my dentist likes me very much. It’s partly my fault. I called him “Mr. Park.” And he said, “It’s Dr. Park. I’m a doctor.” And I said, “Really? Dentists are doctors?” And he said, “Yes, we are.” And I said, “But you just deal with teeth.” And he said, “Teeth are part of your body. We’re doctors,” and seemed kind of mad. Afterward, he told me I had two cavities, and added, “So I guess you’ll be back at this doctor’s office soon, for a doctor’s appointment, with me, your doctor.”

  I’m realizing that it might not have been a good idea to annoy the guy who’s going to be drilling into my teeth.

  It’s raining out, so there’s nothing to do. Sophie and I spent a little while playing Hangman. Hangman’s sort of a strange game, if you think about it. Supposedly, the idea is to avoid having your little stick-figure guy get hanged, right? But pretty much as soon as you’ve gotten even one letter wrong, you’re not just dead—you’re decapitated.

  I feel like once your head’s been hung, it really doesn’t matter if they hang the rest of you.

  Another rainy day. Watched The Wizard of Oz with Sophie. There’s all sorts of stuff I don’t understand about that movie. Like for instance:

  When Dorothy lands in Oz, three members of the Lollipop Guild show up right away to welcome her, and they’re like, “We represent the Lollipop Guild, and on behalf of the Lollipop Guild, we welcome you to Munchkinland.” How did the Lollipop Guild decide so quickly who would represent them? Like, somehow, within seconds of a house landing in their town, did they have a meeting to vote on who should go welcome the person in the house? Or does the Lollipop Guild have a standing committee on People-in-Flying-House-Welcoming?

  Also, why doesn’t the Wicked Witch of the West put diapers on her flying monkeys? As Mrs. Shelton learned the hard way during our fifth-grade field trip to the zoo, monkeys like to fling their poop at people. And flying monkeys would probably just poop all over everything. Sure, the Wicked Witch’s monkeys seem pretty well trained. But if I had a flying-monkey army, I’d make sure to keep them all diapered, just in case.

  And also: If having water thrown on you were going to make you melt, wouldn’t you be a little more careful about leaving buckets of water lying around?

  Aside from that, though, it’s a pretty good movie.

  I wonder: Is there any law against changing your first name to “Doctor”? Because it seems like there should be.

  I wonder when chickens figure out that they can’t fly. Like, does every chicken go through a period of looking at ducks and going, “One day, that’ll be me,” before eventually realizing that, nope, it’s never going to happen for them?

  I bet chickens get angry at birds who can fly but who choose to walk.

  If breakfast cereal is so popular, how come nobody makes dinner cereal? I’d eat it.

  Today, Chuck and I invented a fun new game called Guitar Villain. You play Guitar Hero, but instead of trying to get the highest possible score, you see if you can get the lowest possible score. If you play it just right, a song will sound like “SQUONK SQUONK SQUONK SQUONK SQUONK” for three straight minutes. We played it for about half an hour before my mom came downstairs and told us that if we didn’t stop making that awful noise, she’d make us go outside to get some fresh air.

  Dog the Bounty Hunter is an interesting show, but it’d be ten times more interesting if it were about a bounty-hunting dog.

  August

  Today on TV, I saw a guy say that a goldfish has a memory span of seven seconds. It made me feel kind of sorry for them, because I bet the only thing that ever goes through their mind is, “Oh my God, I’m drowning! No, wait, I have gills. Oh my God, I’m drowning! No, wait, I have gills. Oh my God, I’m drowning! No, wait, I have gills.”

  Sophie has her best friend, Amy, over for a sleepover tonight—they’re both sleeping in a tent in the living room. Originally, they were planning on going camping in our backyard, but then Amy said she was too scared to do it, because she might get bitten by a rattlesnake. My dad tried to talk her out of it by pointing out that rattlesnakes don’t even live in our area, and besides, “You’re twenty times likelier to be hit by lightning than bit by a rattlesnake.” And the good news is, Amy’s not afraid of rattlesnakes anymore. The bad news is, she’s now completely terrified of getting hit by lightning. Seriously. She may never leave our house.

  I’ve been watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica reruns lately. If you’ve never seen it, Battlestar Galactica is about people from a planet millions of miles away from Earth, and they have pretty much the same clothes, language, appliances, and expressions as we do. The only differences are that they use a made-up swear word that you can say on television, and the shape of the paper they use is different.

  I wonder what that show’s fan conventions are like. Does everyone just show up carrying around a piece of paper with the corners cut off, so that people know they’re dressed up as characters from the show?

  I went to the mall with my mom today to finally buy my summer reading books, Animal Farm and The Great Gatsby. My mom also dragged me along to Bed Bath & Beyond, which is such a stupid name for a store. The “Beyond” part makes it sound like they sell, like, tickets to Narnia or something, but it turns out, “Beyond” just means “forks and scented candles.”

  I rented season one of 24 yesterday to see if I could watch it all in a day. It doesn’t take a full 24 hours—it turns out that each hour is only around forty minutes, because the episodes on the DVDs don’t have commercials. Which is sort of weird, since the show’s supposed to take place in real time. I wonder what the characters do for those extra twenty minutes of every hour. Maybe that’s when Jack Bauer gets to pee.

  I had to hide what I was doing from my mom and dad, ’cause I knew they wouldn’t approve. So I spent most of the day in my room watching the DVDs on my computer. But I took a quick break for dinner, and asked my sister for the salt by saying, “Quick—the salt—send it over here! There’s no time to lose! Pass the salt! PASS THE SALT NOW!” That’s when my parents searched my room to see if I was on drugs, found the 24 episodes, and confiscated them.

  Thirty pages into The Great Gatsby, and I’m still waiting for him to do something great. He just seems like a boring rich guy to me.

  Bad news: Sophie found my copy of Animal Farm, thought the cover was cute, and read it. (She’s Gifted and Talented, and reads at a ninth-grade level. I know this because she keeps telling everyone she meets.) Now she keeps waking everyone up with nightmares about how the evil pigs killed Boxer the horse.

  There is one bright side, though. I got her to tell me everything that happened in the book, and now I don’t have to read it. I tried to get her interested
in The Great Gatsby by telling her it was about animals, too, but she didn’t believe me when I told her everyone in it was a weasel.

  My family’s leaving on vacation today. We’re going to spend a week in Florida, visiting my Grandma Judy in her new retirement home. Well, actually, just five days with Grandma Judy—it’s a twelve-hour, two-day drive each way. My dad’s excited about it, because Grandma Judy’s his mom. And Sophie’s excited about it, because my grandma takes her shopping and they sit together at night and watch home-makeover shows and eat ice cream together. My mom and I are less excited about it. I hate going shopping, and I hate home-makeover shows, and my grandma always calls me “Taddy,” which I used to be called back when I was, like, five, but nobody calls me anymore. And my mom doesn’t like my grandma. She never says so, but I can tell that she doesn’t, through little hints she drops, like asking my dad, “Why do we have to go visit her?” and always sighing heavily halfway through my Grandma Judy’s name, so it comes out as “Grandma … (sigh)… Judy.” I’m good at picking up on small clues like that.

  OK. My mom just came into my room and asked, “Are you packed yet for the trip to Grandma … (sigh)… Judy’s?” So I guess I should go pack. I’m packing my swim trunks—the one nice thing about going to Grandma Judy’s is at least I’ll get to go to the beach. It’ll be fun to go swimming. Plus, I’m super pale, so it’ll be a chance to maybe get a tan just in time for school.

  Uuuuuuugh. Today was a looooooooong day of driving. The first few hours of the trip were OK, because Sophie was watching a DVD of The Little Mermaid and I was playing on my GamePort XL. But a few hours in, the batteries died on my sister’s DVD player. My sister started whining, and my mom said to my dad, “I thought I told you to recharge them!” But my dad was like, “No, that was your job! My job was to drive to my mother’s!” My mom was like, “Well, it was your idea to go visit her!” and my sister just kept whining because the movie had stopped before the ending. I said, “You’ve seen the movie, like, fifty times. Did you forget how it ends? She gets legs.” And my mom snapped, “Tad! Be nice to your sister!” which I thought was really strange, because I was the only one in the car not whining or shouting at anyone.

  So then my mom told me to let Sophie play with my GamePort, but Sophie didn’t want to play with it, because it didn’t have any games involving princesses or cake, which are the only kinds of games that Sophie likes to play. And so my dad announced that we’d be entertaining ourselves the way that he did on car trips when he was a kid, by competing to see who could count more cows on their side of the car. Which is a stupid game, because winning and losing really depends on how many cows there happen to be on the side of the road. Sophie was cheating, which made me really angry, until I remembered that I didn’t actually care who won the game.

  Anyway. We just stopped at a motel for the night. It’s the second motel we stopped at. We checked into the first one, and Sophie got all excited because there were machines on the beds that made them vibrate if you put in a quarter, and my mom just picked up our bags, went to the car, and told my dad, “Find another motel.” I don’t know why. I think vibrating beds sound like fun.

  Well, this morning, we drove the rest of the way to Grandma Judy’s place. She seemed really happy to see us. Or happy to see my dad and my sister, anyway. She gave my dad a big hug, and turned to Sophie and said, “Sophie! You’ve grown so much! You’re such the little lady! I’ve got a whole Trading Spaces marathon saved up for us to watch, and a carton of Neapolitan with your name on it!” Then she turned to me and said, “Taddy, it’s nice to see you,” and to my mom she said, “Well, you’ve certainly put on some weight!” My mom was still trying to think of a response when Grandma Judy started carrying Sophie’s suitcase up to her room.

  After all that, by the time we got all settled in, it was too late to go to the beach. But my mom said we can go tomorrow.

  Man, this trip sucks. It rained today, so we wound up skipping the beach. But Grandma Judy turned to Sophie and said, “You know what the rain is good for?” And Sophie said, “Outlet shopping!” So we went shopping at the outlet mall. Outlet malls are like regular malls, only bigger, and without the only stuff that makes malls bearable, like food courts or bookstores where you can look through comic books.

  I was getting really hungry, so I was happy when Grandma Judy said that we would stop at the Cheesecake Factory on the way home. But it wasn’t the Cheesecake Factory restaurant, it was an outlet store for a factory that makes cheesecakes. Grandma Judy bought two, but wouldn’t let me eat any, because she was going to freeze them “for when company came.” Anyway, the weather guy on TV said that it’d be sunny tomorrow, and my mom promised that, no matter what, we’d go to the beach.

  Argh. Today we were supposed to go to the beach, but instead, Grandma Judy said she had a surprise for us: She wanted us to meet her friend William. He’s also super old, and he lives down the hall from her in the retirement home. He seemed OK, even though he did try playing “I’ve got your nose!” with Sophie and me, and pulling quarters out of our ears, which even Sophie’s too old for. I kept thinking that it would be funny to grab his dentures and go, “I’ve got your teeth!” but I knew everyone would be mad.

  Also, I didn’t want to touch his dentures.

  Anyway, hanging out with William was fine. The only weird thing was that my dad kept saying over and over, “You never mentioned that you’d made a friend,” which I thought was strange, because why would Grandma Judy call my dad every time she makes a friend?

  Well, we finally went to the beach today. We just got back, and it was a lot of fun—I went swimming, and helped Sophie build a sand castle, and we picked up, like, fifty shells. The only downside is, I didn’t get a tan at all—which is weird, because I wasn’t even wearing any sunscreen. (I knew I didn’t have much time to get tan, so I figured I’d wait till I was a little brown, and then put the sunscreen on.) I just stayed super white all day long. Anyway, I’m going to go ask Grandma Judy to turn up the air-conditioning, because for some reason, it suddenly feels really hot in here.

  Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

  I am covered in a giant, awful sunburn. Turns out, it takes a few hours for the sun to really change your skin’s color, so last night, my whole body turned from white, to pink, to red, to redder. Sophie spent a while last night trying to decide what color I was, and finally chose “Kool-Aid Man.”

  We were going to go back to the beach today, but it hurts whenever the sun touches my skin, so instead, I’m spending the day indoors, covered in Noxzema, sitting in the living room in a lawn chair because Grandma Judy doesn’t want the Noxzema getting on her furniture’s plastic coverings. I’ve been stuck here all day, watching TLC home-renovation shows with Sophie and Grandma Judy—I keep dozing off, and then waking up to them squealing any time someone sponge-paints a wall or adds a sconce.

  This is officially the worst vacation ever.

  Spent the day driving back from Grandma Judy’s place. We’re halfway home now. Nothing to report, except that there are 78 cows on the left side of the car on the way home and—according to Sophie—394 cows on the right side.

  Oh, and my sunburn is now peeling super badly. It’s itchy, but I’m trying not to touch it, in order to see if I can just slip out of a Tad-shaped skin husk, like a snake.

  Sooo nice to be home again. Crawled into bed and slept for twelve hours. Never want to see a home-decorating show, ice cream, or the sun ever again.

  Ugh. Our neighbor Dawn is here, hanging out with my mom, so I’m hiding up in my room. I don’t like Dawn. For one thing, she smokes, which is just gross. My mom will usually hang out with her on the back porch, so that our whole house doesn’t wind up smelling all Dawn-y. But the main reason I don’t like her is that she begins, like, half her sentences by saying “Frankly” or “To be perfectly honest” or “Truthfully,” which just weirds me out, because it always gives you the sense that, whenever she doesn’t begin a sentence that way, then she
’s just totally lying.

  Sophie’s been reading a book all about unicorns, but it doesn’t answer my big question about them: Why’d we stop at one horn? If you’re going to make up a mythical animal, why not make up bicorns, tricorns, quadricorns, and so on? I think that the octocorn would actually be kind of a cool animal.

  Today was Sophie’s birthday. She’s having a party this weekend, but for her actual birthday, we went out to dinner to her favorite restaurant: Red Lobster. I don’t get the restaurant name Red Lobster. Aren’t all lobsters red? It’s not like they have a rival called Green Lobster.

  Actually, on second thought, I bet the way Red Lobster happened was, the founder originally was going to call his restaurant Lobster. And so he painted it on the sign, and realized that the word Lobster looked kind of stupid up there all alone—like, it didn’t look like it was a sign for a restaurant that served lobster, it just looked like a sign a lobster would put on his house. But there wasn’t a lot of room to add anything, so he just squeezed the word Red above it.