You've stumbled upon the blog of Paul Malan. I love my family, I love to write, I love to ride my bikes, and I love to take pictures. Maybe someday I'll think of something clever or arresting to say right here.A girl in my marketing class has been engaged to four different guys. The guy next to her—a self-professed geek with oily skin and a slight build, met his wife at a professional wrestling event. The girl two rows behind him was born with webbed toes, a revelation that draws a series of impolite but sincere questions. “Can you wear flip-flops?” “Do you still get toe jam?” “Are you a fast swimmer?”
Without a hidden physical deformity of my own (webbed toes, how lucky is that?) I struggle to think of something interesting before it’s my turn to introduce myself. It’s the first day of class, and I’m supposed to say something unique—something that no one else in class can say, “Me, too” about.
“Why do professors love to do this to us?” I ask the guy beside me. “Not everyone has an interesting story to tell.”
“Oh I know,” he says. “I hate these things—I never know what to say.”
When it’s his turn he says he once crashed a snowmobile into a frozen pond and got stuck under the ice for seven minutes. “I was dead,” he says, “but then they revived me, and ever since then my jaw aches whenever I’m around bad people. It’s cool—all my sisters bring their boyfriends around to have me check them out before they get too serious.”
I’m stunned. This is the guy who never knows what to say? How could it get more unique than a brush with death and an evil-sensing mandible? There is no way I can compete with that, but it’s my turn and I have to say something.
“I’m Paul Malan, a comms studies major, and I love Desperate Housewives.”
I knew it wouldn’t be disqualified by any “Me, too” remarks—what self-respecting BYU student would admit to having watched even a single episode of such a trashy show?—but I didn’t anticipate the gasps and nervous giggles.
“It’s not that bad,” I try to explain to my once-dead classmate, but he turns quickly away, rubbing his jaw.
Maybe I should be a little embarrassed to watch Desperate Housewives, but I’m not; it’s one of our favorite weekly rituals. We wait for the kids to go to bed, fire up the Tivo so we can skip the commercials, and then settle in to catch up on all the seedy happenings on Wysteria Lane.
Last week the teenaged couple—they claim to be in love but we know he’s secretly hooking up with her gay friend’s younger sister (the poor girl is about to have her heart broken)—tried to get a birth control prescription.
“Why can’t you just use condoms?” demands his skimpily-dressed aunt, the neighborhood tramp to whom they have come for help.
“Condoms are only 85% effective,” replies the love-struck lass, and so the aunt agrees to get the prescription. Later, of course, the mom will find the pills, confront the aunt, and discover the lecherous liaisons of her daughter’s beau. It’s trashy TV to be sure, but the combination of ridiculously nefarious plots and unusually witty writing makes it the perfect escape.
While we watch the commercials zoom by at 32x speed, Wendy wonders aloud if condoms are really only 85% effective. We pause the player, performing crude calculations in our heads, and jokingly agree that if it were really true we would have roughly 45 children by now.
One week later, I sing the boys their nightly lullaby while Wendy queues up another episode of Desperate Housewives. In her hand is a well-used Kleenex, on our bathroom counter a pregnancy test, in our nightstand a box of 85%-effective condoms, and in our future another baby. We exchange a nervous, unsettled conversation, and settle in to watch our show.
On a far less trashy TV program, painter Bob Ross liked to say, “We don't make mistakes, we make happy little accidents.” Our happy little accident will be coming ahead of schedule—Wendy’s plans for a fit summer will have to wait another year—but we certainly don’t think of the baby as a mistake. I’ll be pulling for a girl with Corbin’s complexion and my blue eyes, and who knows—maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll be born with webbed toes.
Coincidently, Desperate Housewives is on at my house even as I read this entry! (but we don't get the current season here, so no condom conversations here tonight.)