Mind Your Own God Damn Business

There’s nothing like a new month. I get paid, I can tear off the ratty, marked-up sheet on my desktop calendar to reveal the clean one underneath, and I can pretend that I’m organized and productive for four, even five days before I’m back to my default routine of barely functioning. Part of this first week, when I’m working out regularly, getting regular sleep and brushing my teeth? Updating my blog! Lucky you!

Last semester, I finished taking the gen-ed classes that I needed to get certified to teach, so this summer I’m taking the necessary classes for the teaching program that I’m in. Long story short, I can’t stand it.

It’s not the classes – they aren’t my favorite, but I do feel like I’m learning valuable info from them.

It’s the other students.

I’ve mentioned this before, but non-traditional students piss me off, even though I am one.  They’re kind of confused, don’t really seem to know how to function in a classroom environment and are constantly interrupting the teacher so they can say as many pointless, random things as possible.

Fortunately, non-traditional students are usually the exception more than the rule. If you have three of them in all of your classes in a semester, you’re unlucky.

At least, most of the time.

Here’s the thing: the program that I’m in takes students who have a bachelor’s degree and then pushes them through a three semester program to certify them to teach. Do you know what that means? By definition, if you’re enrolled in this program, you’re a non-traditional student. The results are infuriating.

To give you an idea of what a typical class is like, let me show you the following: It’s an excerpt from a Saturday Night Live skit called “Little Sleuths”, where a crime solving team of kids want to help the police solve a crime:

Detective Maroney: [ interrupting ] Alright, fine!! You want to help me solve this case? [ slueths nod ] Here it is! We found a dead prostitute on Route 4.. somebody cut off her hands and feet.. and shoved a deli menu in her mouth!

Bookie Newton: Can we have a.. second, please..?

Sam: Uh.. uh..

Sam: First thing we need to do is find out what a prostitute is.

Bookie Newton: That’s where our Latin comes in handy.

Sam: Let’s break it down.. “Pro” means..

Bookie Newton: Professional!

Sam: Mm-hmm! And “stitute” sounds like.. “substitute”.

Bookie Newton: A professional substitute!

Together: Hmm… who would want to kill a professional substitute teacher??

Sam: And why would a professional substitute teacher want to eat a menu!

Bookie Newton: Maybe it’s a clue!

Together: Hmmmm….

Bookie Newton: Let’s start with the menu!

Sam: Well, a menu is made of paper..

Bookie Newton: And paper’s made of trees..

Sam: And trees grow in the forest!

Detective Maroney: [ starting to get it ] Yeah.. yeah.. this is starting to make some sense..

Sam: Yeah, yeah! and forest rangers wear badges!

Bookie Newton: Just like police officers!

Sam: And.. and police officers are heros!

All Together: Which is also the name of a sandwich!!

Lieutenant: That whore deserved it! I’ve got a wife and kids! That slut was gonna ruin everything!

Detective Maroney: [ outraged ] You disgust me! [ to police officers ] Take him away, guys! I doubted you little sleuths, but you proved me wrong. I’ll work with youse two’s any time! How can I ever repay you?

Sam: Candy!

Okay, see that part where the two kids go back and forth, talking about barely related things to figure out whodunnit?

- Make the things that they’re saying unfunny

- Add a rambling, unrelated personal story that takes five minutes to tell at the end of every association.

- Stretch the whole exchange from fifteen seconds to two and a half hours.

WELCOME TO MY SEMESTER.

Here’s an example of what I sit through for five hours a day:

"If peeing your pants is cool, consider me Miles Davis!" Sure it's hilarious, until you're trapped in a room with her for two and a half hours with four of her friends.

The teacher will get out four or five words about how to accommodate a disabled student in the classroom, when a student will raise their hand and the teacher will foolishly call on them. The student will then either A) tell a long-winded story about the time they were at the laundromat and a woman with a retarded child rudely took the student’s laundry out of the drier and just put it on a folding table, or B) and this is my personal favorite, the student will start arguing with the teacher about the best way to deal with a handicapped child in the classroom. It’s irrelevant that the teacher is currently working in a special needs classroom, or that the student has no experience with special needs children, or even that the teacher is simply explaining a law to us that isn’t up for debate. They will argue nonetheless. Then, at some point in their incoherent tirade, another student will hear a noun that reminds them of a story of their own, and the cycle continues as I seethe in the back of the room, my face contorted in rage and blood streaming out of my ear.

I’m not being entirely fair – I actually do like some of the people in my classes, and I just went over it in my head and there are only about five students who are determined to bring things to a screeching halt, but that’s more than enough to make things unpleasant, and my classes are only about twelve people. I’m getting kind of enraged thinking about it.

Well, that’s about all the productivity that I can handle for one day. It was good to use the old blog again. If patterns hold, I’ll see you all in mid-September.

I just wrapped up another semester of classes. Barring a meltdown of some sort, I now have another bachelor’s degree. I’m not sure how excited I should be about that, but it get’s me closer to a classroom and financial independence, so I’m just going to say that it’s awesome.

As another semester winds down and I get ready for my last year, at least until I graduate, refuse to get a job in a related field and then return to get some other random degree, I realized a problem that I have.

Oh look. It's me. T-t-t-t-TODAY, Joonyah!

I mentally put myself in a no-win situation with my school work. I’m about ten years older than most of the other people I’m in class with, and I feel some pressure to perform well in comparison to them. As a result, if I bomb a test or even just match the class average, I end up feeling like I’m mentally retarded. On the other hand, I’ve turned in a lot of good assignments, assuming that those assignments are papers of some sort, and I don’t really feel good about those either.

I’ve wasted who knows how many hours maintaining various blogs for one reason and one reason only: to do irreparable damage to my personal and professional life. An unintended consequence of my effort to ruin my life through the written word is that the quality of my writing has improved. I think it would be a reach to say that I’m “good”, but I’m pretty certain that I’m better than I was seven years ago, and almost certainly a better writer than an average 19 year old.

As a result, I tend to do well on assignments that require writing. Last semester one of my teachers told me that I turned in the best paper of all of his classes. This semester I had a professor stop class to tell me how awesome my assignment was, and another pull me aside after class twice to tell me that one of my papers was awesome and to save another to show future classes. This should probably just make me feel fantastic, and it kind of does, but it’s kind of embarrassing at the same time because I’m old. It feels like I’m a high school kid competing on a pee-wee football team – it’s kind of neat to be the top wide receiver on the team, but I have to wonder if I would be scoring as many touchdowns if I didn’t have a ten year, and, as a result, two foot and one hundred pound advantage over the safeties and linebackers who were trying to cover me.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and realized that I’m trapping myself – if I’m going to be upset with being at or below average and ashamed and embarrassed if I do well, I can’t win. I might as well just be happy, and stop finding ways to feel bad about receiving praise from people, because that’s moronic.

I think there’s another key point to remember, too. Let me tell you a story.

When I was attending community college…11 years ago…Jesus Christ…anyway, 11 years ago, in the late 90′s, when Bill Clinton was the President, Gas was a little bit over a dollar a gallon, the Playstation was the most powerful gaming system on the market, people used discmans to listen to music, and I was in Jr. College, I was enrolled in a creative writing course with my friend Dan. There was a woman in that class that was older than everyone else by quite a bit. She seemed ancient to 19 year old me, but it’s entirely possible that she was younger than I am now. Everyone over the age of 24 looks like they’re 50 when you’re that age. She was also, by far, the most outspoken critic of everyone else’s work. Every other student in the class was pretty diplomatic about their criticism, but this lady was not. If she thought you were turning out sub-par work (and she always thought you were turning out sub-par work), she would be sure to let you know that you had let her down again.

This isn't really related to my post. I just needed another picture, and I think that this is hilarious. Look at Darth Vader ride that cat!

Then came our final project. There are a lot of things that I DON’T remember about that final project. I can’t recall the requirements were for length, or format, or content. I don’t actually have any recollection of what I turned in for my final project. What I do remember is what the angry older woman turned in.

It was a children’s story called “Mr. Hedges’ Ghostly Christmas”. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree; that’s a solid gold title for a children’s story. I can only hope that since I saw her last, she has written an entire collection of similar stories – “Ernie Blumpkin’s Goulish Thanksgiving” and “Donald Fergason Files His Taxes and Fights a Werewolf”, just to name a few (Should I just be a children’s author? Those are some kick-ass titles I just came up with, and I could turn my Dr. Seuss-style story of The Juggalo into a full story – that’s three books right there!)

Unfortunately, the quality of the actual story didn’t match the inspired title. I won’t go into the gory details, because it’s like describing a funny conversation to someone who wasn’t there – to really appreciate the book, you would need to sit down and thumb through it with me (and you could, because I still have a copy). What you do need to know is that it wasn’t very good. You might even call it hilariously bad – the kind of thing that me and my friend Dan still giggle about eleven years later, especially when we think about the semester of abuse everyone in the class took from her over our childish, sophomoric attempts at creative writing (To her credit, we were a group of teenagers in a community college creative writing class – the older I get, the more likely it seems to me that all of that abuse was warranted. I just blew my own mind.)

The moral of the story is this: Old people can suck at stuff too. Most of the time when there are other nontraditional students in my classes, they only kind of seem to know what’s going on, so when I get compliments for doing a good job on something, I shouldn’t feel bad about it because I’m old. Just because I’m 30 doesn’t necessarily mean anything – when I have to write a 12 page proposal on how to fix OPEC, I could completely dominate the assignment and get the highest grade in the class, but I could just as easily turn in Mr. Hedges Ghostly Christmas, so, like I said, when people tell me I’m awesome, rather than put a bunch of cognitive energy into twisting that into something to be embarrassed about, I’m just going to be glad that I finally understand how to be a good student.

Idea: 1.Enroll in a Political Science class that I don’t need to graduate. 2. For my final, turn in a copy of Mr. Hedges Ghostly Christmas. 3. Carefully document what happens.

(I thought about breaking this up into two normal-sized posts instead of one giant one, but then I decided that the people who read this blog are too savvy to fall for that, and probably smart enough to stop reading on their own if it’s not interesting. It’s good to know that I have three papers due next week, and I’m putting all of my writing energy into blogging about the Insane Clown Posse. If anyone can think of a way that I can print this out and turn it in as a South American Geography paper, by all means, let me know.)

So I have some bad news, for me.

There’s been a ton of people making fun of Insane Clown Posse’s new song “Miracles”, which is, unsurprisingly, Insane Clown Posse saying dumb things over terrible beats. In this case, they’re talking about how “gee-whiz, the world is s such a neat place, it must be a miracle!” Here’s the video, in case you’ve somehow avoided it or you’re reading this post a week after it was written, which is about how long I’m expecting it to be before everyone completely forgets that this video ever existed.

This latest episode of everyone piling on to Insane Clown Posse for being stupid has had two effects on me, both of them negative.

1. I wanted to be part of the fun, laughing at how dumb they are, but I can’t enjoy it anymore. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s no denying that their new video is dumb, and the sentiments expressed in it aren’t anything that anyone older than fifteen will find clever or insightful, but isn’t that kind of the case with every song that they’ve ever done? I mean, normally it’s about killing people and smoking weed, but it’s always hard not to roll your eyes when you hear them rap.

2. After watching the “Miracles” video, I dug around some other Psychopathic records videos, and I’m getting dangerously close to getting into their music. There were several songs that I found myself starting to enjoy. Here are a few of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely in love with any of this. It’s not like I’ll be playing any of it at my wedding (Actually, maybe I should. That would be really funny. Yet another reason why I will end up never getting married.)

But I don’t hate it, either. In fact, I kind of like it.

Should I just admit that I like this music and become a Juggalo? Naturally, I decided that it was time to make a pro/con list to decide. That’s always what I do whenever I’m trying to decide if I should start consuming a type of pop culture that I previously ignored (note: no, it’s not.)

PROS:

It reminds me of being 18: As I’ve mentioned many times before, I’ve heavily romanticized my late teens. Whether it’s true or not, I remember that being a time where if I had a bunch of Dr. Pepper, a Playstation, some rap-metal CDs and a connection to the Internet, well, I had everything I needed. When ICP and Twiztid and all those other goofballs aren’t rapping about killing people or having sex with dead bodies, it’s usually about living a blue collar lifestyle, so even though I’ve never really listened to any of these artists, they seem to evoke a weird sense of nostalgia for me. The fact that they have such hardcore fans also reminds me of being able to shit my pants over the awesomeness of a band, which brings me to my next PRO:

Is it really any less ridiculous than the music I listen to now?: The answer is a shameful and unequivocal “No”. Up until my mid-20′s, I was in love with a band named “Limp Bizkit”. I used to listen to a band named Mudvayne, a heavy metal act who wore goofy makeup while they played. At various points in my life, I have loved the band Slipknot, a group of guys who wear SCARY MASKS and sing songs with tough-guy lyrics. At least, that’s what they did until Summer’s Eve started sponsoring them and they started singing songs about breaking up with just enough distortion in them that teenage girls could feel hard while they were listening. Compare this video, which I loved harder in 1999 than I will ever love anything again, with the ones above:

What are the discernible differences? As near as I can tell, there are only two: It’s a little heavier and harder to understand. More on that in a minute, but when you look at the music I currently like, becoming a fan of Insane Clown Posse seems less like a sea change and more like a logical progression.

Fly Juggalo Bitches: Okay, so, not exactly. But there are girls who listen to this music, and there are not girls who listen to metal. Don’t believe me? (Just kidding. I know you do, but humor me) My friend Christina shared the following study with me the other day:

‘Hard and heavy’: Gender and power in a heavy metal music subculture, Krenske, Leigh; McKay, Jim.
Conclusion: Study found gendered regime of power in heavy metal club. Women claim to gravitate to the heavy metal scene to escape, however they end up in another oppressive context where men dominate the scene and women are kept in their place.

See? It’s science. Metal is not an accommodating environment for the ladies.

On the other hand, as near as I can tell, the ladies love this trash. Observe:

Granted, I get strong vibes of  ”Crazy”, more than a hint of “Wal-Mart cashier” and a disturbing touch of “Still in high school” off of these girls, but it’s also pretty clear that they’re girls, and not fat sweaty dudes with long greasy hair, which is the demographic I normally share space with at concerts.

CONS:

You have to wade through an ocean of shit to find the good music: As near as I can tell, Insane Clown Posse and all of the groups on their record label make twenty or thirty albums a year, and most of them are filled with trash. As an experiment a few years ago, I listened to the entire ICP discography from start to finish. It took me about a week of constant listening. I don’t know how many albums they had out at the time that I did that, but they currently have 36 available for purchase on iTunes, and I don’t think it was much less than that. It certainly seemed like a lot. Twiztid have 18. Based on my original listening marathon, ICP averages about one song that I like every four albums or so. That’s, what, about a 40 hour week of listening for 9 songs I like, just to get through the Insane Clown Posse? I considered listening to the discography again and doing a running blog of it, but I don’t think I can handle it again. Maybe if I completely run out of ideas I’ll subject myself to that.

It’s painfully easy to understand the stupid, stupid lyrics: Most of the music I listen to is considered garbage, and falls into two categories: Metal and Techno. Techno doesn’t have any words, and it’s usually really hard to understand the lyrics to Metal. This is a good thing, because the lyrics to the music I listen to are typically embarrassingly bad. Insane Clown Posse is just as bad, but unfortunately, those assholes really enunciate, so when they say something like “Water, fire, air and dirt/Fucking magnets, how do they work?“, I can understand every syllable.

It's dripping blood, so you know it's hard.

Wardrobe: Essentially, I’m going to have to throw out every article of clothing that I own. To fit in, I’m going to need to invest in faux hockey jerseys, those goofy giant jeans that were cool in 1997 and oversized black t-shirts, all of which will need to be covered in that dreadlocked-clown-with-a-hatchet silhouette. I will also need to invest in a car, something equivalent to my previous ’91 Toyota Camry, and cover every available surface of it in those decals. A few tattoos wouldn’t hurt either. Juggalos take that shit seriously. Speaking of,

Some of the dumbest terminology ever: Like I said, I used to listen to a band called “Limp Bizkit”, but I can’t get over the fact that ICP fans are called “Juggalos”, a term that everyone knows the Wicked Clowns stole from the Dr. Seuss children’s story “The Juggalo”, a tale of a whimsical creature that teaches two inquisitive children the importance of recycling. I think everyone remembers sitting in second grade and listening in nail-biting anticipation when the children in the story first discover the Juggalo sleeping in their back yard:

“Then we saw us a sight that was something to see! A creature, asleep by our Muz-a-wump tree! Its fur was bright blue, which I found a bit weird, and a-perched on his face was a red bushy beard! Then the creature awoke from a slumberous sleep, and he stared at us both without making a peep! ‘What ARE you?’ I asked with a lump in my throat. ‘A Murfewlus Slark, or a Diddly Groat?’ Then you will not believe what that animal did! It blinked twice and said “I’m a Juggalo, kid!”

I’m just kidding. The Juggalo is actually a character in a Roald Dahl book, by the same name, about a little kid who’s really smart but badly mistreated by her family until the Juggalo comes and saves her and gives her family their much-deserved comeuppance.

I’m just kidding. It’s a monster in Alice in Wonderland.

I’m just kidding. It’s a slang term that the main character in A Clockwork Orange uses to refer to doughy, unpopular teenagers.

I’m just kidding. I don’t actually know what it means. I just know that it’s a really stupid word, and all the fans love it, and all the artists constantly say it in their songs, and I can’t take it seriously.

THE VERDICT:

Pros: 3

Cons: 4

Looks like the small amount of dignity I have is safe until I come up with one more reason why I should become a huge Insane Clown Posse fan! At least, as far as you guys know, because that’s my official stance on here. Anyway, It’s time for me to do something productive with the rest of my day, which certainly does NOT mean getting in my brand new 1983 Plymouth Voyager that’s decked out in hatchet man decals, bumping some Great Milenko, and cruising the Wal-Mart parking lot to try and find some hot methed-out 21 year old cashiers to impress with my bleached blond dreadlocks and tent-sized Jnco jeans.

FAM-I-LY!

There were some signs on campus today as I was walking home from class (Article here). The first was a smaller sign that said “WARNING: Graphic Images Ahead”. About, I’m going to say 10, maybe 20 feet behind it, there were various two-story-tall gory abortion pictures. Here are my thoughts, which are less about abortion and more about the marketing strategy the pro-life group was using today:

"That's so interesting! Lemme grab you another Zima, and then how about we go in your tent and you tell me another story about your cat?"

- Suppose, hypothetically, that there’s a forest with a gang of hoodlum bears in it. These bears patrol the forest searching for berries, fresh salmon, picnic baskets and unsuspecting campers to seduce and then have unprotected sex with. You know how bears are, too – real smooth talkers. They always say they’re going to pull out, but they never do.

Suppose that you want to warn people about these bears, maybe with a nice warning sign. Where do you think the best place to put the sign might be? Here’s my vote: In a location where people who read it are still in a position to avoid the bears. Maybe on the road leading into the forest, for instance. That way, when you see the sign, you’re still in a position to decide if you’re willing to risk a wild night in this specific forest when it might result in a scorching case of bear-hepatitis.

On the other hand, an example of a bad place to post the sign would be, for instance, on a chain around the bear’s neck, because by the time you actually see the sign, you’ve already shared a bottle of wine and are listening to records with him in your tent. The sign won’t warn you of danger until you’ve already been exposed to the thing that the sign was supposed to be warning you about. I feel like the people who set up the abortion protest on campus could’ve done a better job of placing their warning sign, since you couldn’t even read it until you already had a very clear view of a bloody fetus arm sitting next to a quarter. Bottom line: If they were really serious about warning squeamish people about their display, they should have consulted me when they were deciding where to put the sign, although I also probably would’ve suggested that they replace all of the dead fetus pictures with photos of Bootsy Collins while blasting his music. I think they would’ve gotten a lot more support, not to mention the fact that their protest was COMPLETELY devoid of funk.

I don't care what your cause is - if this is the face of it, you have my undivided attention.

- In the age of the Internet, I’m not entirely sure that bloody pictures have the same impact that they used to. Through regular Internet surfing, I see about ten or twenty things in a month that are thirty to forty times worse than the pictures that were up on campus (Don’t believe me? Google “Bear Porn” or spend a few minutes looking around www.stileproject.com. It’s fucking filthy). Hell, Cannibal Corpse album covers make me squirm way more than anything I saw walking home today . I’m not sure if my lack of a reaction to the pictures I saw today is a sadder commentary on the protesters or me, but either way, if you’re trying to sway people with shocking images, I think that it’s a much more difficult task now than it was twenty years ago.

- Speaking of shocking images, I think using them to sway people is a kind of cheap tactic, especially when they’re only tangentially related to what you’re actually protesting. Let’s head back to the forest full of grizzly Don Juans who will sweep you off your feet and then, after a night of smoldering bear-romance, will never call you back: Suppose that I am morally opposed to all of the free bear-love going on in the forest, and I want to orchestrate a protest to convince people that they should never be receptive to the advances of a bear, and that they should always say no even if the bear says that all he wants to do is put the tip in to see how it feels. Then, to do this, I print out some gigantic murals of bears having sex with morbidly obese men with swastikas tattooed on their butt cheeks. When people see the images, they have a very strong visceral reaction, but most of it has to do with the terrifying image of horrifically fat Nazis, not the bear sex.

If I were to do this, it would be kind of intellectually dishonest of me – nobody likes to see a naked six hundred pound white supremacist (actually, I should probably say “almost nobody”, since that’s more likely), and those photos will cause a negative reaction in the people that see them, but it won’t really have to do with the erotic bear action, which is what I’m claiming to be upset about.

HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY SUPPORT SOMETHING THAT LOOKS THIS UNAPPEALING? HELP US STOP BRAIN SURGERY BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!

The pro-lifers were doing the same thing, in my opinion. There’s no doubt about it – abortion is a gory mess; you’re cutting a fetus out of a person, so there’s going to be blood, and whether or not you consider a fetus a person, no one can deny that they have a lot of human-like physical qualities, so it’s alarming to see one in a pile of gore. But even though they’re trying to sway people with alarming pictures, pro-lifers oppose abortion because they think fetuses are humans, not because abortions are gory. A whole lot of surgical procedures are bloody messes that can produce shocking images. You could get some really horrifying pictures if you brought a camera to an appendectomy or a root canal, but that doesn’t mean that those things are inherently bad because of it. I mean, let’s be honest here – in terms of grossness, actually giving birth to a baby gives abortion an honest run for its money. There’s vernix and blood and afterbirth everywhere – it’s a fucking mess. That’s not really the point of birth or abortion, though, so I feel like using bloody pictures is a trick. They know most people will have a negative reaction to those images and hope that they can translate the negative feelings about how abortion looks into negative feelings about abortion.

- I’d be interested to see if a protest like that actually has any effect on the student population’s perception of abortion. I don’t have hard data on this, but abortion seems like one of those issues that people are for or against, and there’s essentially nothing you can do to change their mind once it’s made up. When I was younger, I was convinced that people who had different opinions than I did felt that way because they didn’t know as much about the issue as I did. Since then, I’ve realized that most of the time that isn’t the case. We’ve both looked at the issue, thought about it, and

On the ice or off, you'd better believe that this motherfucker is always going five hole.

just ended up coming to different conclusions. I’m not pro-choice because I didn’t realize that abortions are bloody and traumatic, so showing me pictures of them isn’t going to make me have an epiphany. On the other side, pro-lifers are equally aware of the facts and have come to a different conclusion. It’s one of those issues like religion, or Coke or Pepsi, or Republican or Democrat – people are in one camp or the other, and there’s not a whole lot that you can do to change anyone’s mind.

All things considered, I felt like I should’ve been more angry or shocked or something, but I found myself mostly interested with the techniques that the protesters were using that I considered manipulative. I guess I was just a little bit preoccupied with a more pressing problem. I’m speaking, of course, about erotic bear-lust.

I can’t keep you out of the woods, but for the love of God, please just take some condoms with you, and make the bear wear them, no matter how many times he tells you that it “just feels better” without one.

Good night, and be safe.

I'm only 45 more minutes of downloading away from jacking off to a small, grainy black and white scan of a swimsuit model! Jealous?

I always write about wishing that I could go back and relive certain parts of my life, either because there were things that I wish that I would have done differently or I’m convinced that a certain period was a fun part of my life, which is almost never the case, but just a matter of my brain taking the six fun events from a three year span and then deciding that they’re the only things that happened. Who can forget the delightful summer nights in Jr. High when I would stay up all night listening to music and playing around on America Online with a 2400 baud modem? Not me! What I apparently CAN forget is the awkwardness of 8th grade, my extreme discomfort around everyone, having a curfew, a soccer mom’s haircut, a body being ravaged by a scorching case of puberty and the painfully slow speeds one could expect from a 2400 baud modem.

And then there’s my early 20′s! I was young, I had a full head of hair, dreamy blue eyes and a hot little ass. College tuition was a little less than 1/3 of what I pay now, I had a job flipping burgers that I was just stupid enough to find kind of fulfilling and the ability to go for weeks without sleep. I kind of wish I would’ve spent those years plowing through a college degree, participating in extracurricular student activities, drinking too much and putting myself in a position to be an adult when I turned 30. Instead, I played a LOT of video games, worked a lot, only kind of pretended to go to school and stuck to hating myself. Hilariously enough, I’m willing to bet any sum of money that if I would’ve plowed through college, I would now maintain a blog filled with entry after entry lamenting the fact that I didn’t spend more time in my early 20′s playing games, relaxing, and finding my way through life at a more leisurely pace.

I realized today that for all my talk about the futility of wanting to travel through time so I can relive parts of my life with my current brain, that’s kind of what I’m doing right now. A large part of the reason that I had so much fun for most of this semester is because I feel like what I’m doing right now is what I should have been doing when I was 20, which is kind of cool and kind of depressing all at once.

The most recent part of this was joining the student radio station. There’s a guy that I’ve had at least one class with every semester since going back. He’s pretty awesome – tuned in, pretty interesting, and really sharp. I think he’s going to have some struggles figuring out what to do with his life once he graduates, but he may slide right in to normal life. Even if he doesn’t, if it takes him less than ten years to sort things out, he’ll still be ahead of me. Anyway, we were studying for a test a few weeks ago, and he suggested that I apply for a slot on the student radio station. I did, and now I’m on from 12-2AM on Sundays playing metal. I had orientation on Monday, which was basically “This is how to use the knobs on a mixer”, and tonight I sat in and watched one of the directors do his show, which was pretty wild, because the theme that night was music from his middle school and high school years. I never asked him when he graduated, but the night essentially went like this:

“That last song is from way, WAY back by a band that released their first album back when I was in middle school! Their hit single ‘Don’t Trust Me’ shot up to number 7 on the Billboard top 100 back before I had gone through puberty, that was 3Oh!3 on UNC student radio, I’m DJ Nick and the gentle sobbing that you hear in the background is our newest DJ, Johnny Castle! Coming up next, more oldies but goodies from my youth including Girl Talk, Electric Six and Justin Beiber, quit crying Johnny you’re scaring me!!” I was originally kind of worried that I wouldn’t sound professional enough, but not only will nobody be listening at midnight on a Sunday, I’m listening to the station right now and the DJ has been playing youtube clips and crank calling his friends and talking like Cornholio for the last hour or so. About half of the people aren’t answering, so he’s leaving crank voicemails. I think I’ll probably be okay.

"I DON'T KNOW HOW TO READ."

Either way, I’ve been kind of torn about the past few months. On one hand, I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job of being 20, in a way that I wasn’t when, well, when I was 20. It’s kind of satisfying. On the other hand, really nailing being a 20 year old when you’re 30 is kind of a hollow victory for obvious reasons. It’s like being a star forward on a middle school soccer team or getting a perfect score on a 5th grade spelling test. It’s neat, but I’m excelling at things that are designed for people ten years younger than I am. I also never quite feel like I belong there. I’m like the protagonist in “Never Been Kissed”, except instead of going back to school and trying to blend in order to get a hard-hitting news story, in my version Drew Barrymore is going back because she never got her G.E.D. (Coincidentally, “Never Been Kissed” came out in 1999, which means that most of people I go to school with were six when it came out and have never heard of it.)

I guess that the bottom line is this: most people say that their college years are some of the best of their life. If that’s the case, then I guess that there are worse things for me to do than stretch my college years out for over a decade.

Just call me Peter Pan, motherfuckers. And tune in on Sunday nights to hear my terrible, terrible show.

(Funny story – My lack of blogging is completely out of control. I tried to rectify that today, and as I was combing through my blog, I realized that I have a giant pile of 1/3 completed posts that I abandoned before finishing. As part of my attempt to begin putting information about myself on the Internet that ranges from uninteresting to dangerous again, I am going to start completing these old, crappy entries and then posting them.

Today, we’ll start out with one of my traditional “Let me reiterate that the Internet is awesome and that my brain is different now than it was when I was 19!” posts that I put up every few weeks or so. On top of that, I’m not entirely sure what the point was that I had in mind when I started writing this, so it doesn’t have a coherent ending. Unfortunately for you, I haven’t posted in two weeks and I’m not wasting 2000 words. I need the momentum so IT GOES UP!)

A few weeks ago, my friend Dan gave me a copy of Fargo Rock City by Chuck Klosterman. As I’ve mentioned before, I really like Chuck Klosterman – at least what I’ve read by him. All of the books I’ve read are essentially collections of short essays, each one exploring a random topic that up until that point I didn’t think that anyone else cared about. One of his essays documents a short span that he spends following a Guns ‘n’ Roses cover band. In another, he documents an interview with Val Kilmer. Another is about Football.

As it turns out, Fargo Rock City is a collection of essays about metal. I’m only about half way through, but he’s dedicated a lot more time and critical thought to Motley Crue and Winger than I’m guessing all of the other authors on the planet combined, and it’s a delight.

A lot of it is just the music. My enthusiasm for screaming and finger tapping in the music I listen to is at best tolerated by people who know me, but is more often met with irritation and condescension. I go through a very specific cycle with pretty much everyone that I know: At first, they think that it’s kind of funny that I really like metal, and they think it’s sort of cute that I say everything is “metal’ instead of “cool”, and that I throw up the horns for everything that I have even remotely positive feelings about, and always suggest that every movie, television show or awards ceremony would be way better if Pantera were somehow involved. Then, after a while, the novelty wears off, like I’m the drunk guy at a party who tells a joke that gets a laugh and then keeps repeating it again and again until no one can even muster fake pity laughter and kind of just slinks off. At this point, people usually just shrug it off and come to terms with the fact that if they’re going to be friends with me, it’s one of those things that they’re going to have to tolerate – Johnny’s an okay guy, but he’s always late, sometimes he just disappears into his room for a few days at a time, and when he is around, he won’t shut the fuck up about how excited he is for the new Deftones album.

Part of me knows that I shouldn’t do this, because I know people who are this way with music I don’t care about, and I find it kind of irritating when they do it. I had a conversation with a slightly to moderately drunk guy a few weeks ago where he told me that John Mayer was one of the greatest guitarists of all time, and that his music was amazing. Some comparisons to Jimmy Hendrix were made. He’s a nice guy, and I’ll probably chat with him again if I ever run into him, but I hope that the next time we talk, it isn’t about how amazing John Mayer is. Another time, a girl I know (Who had told me that she used to be a “music snob”, which should have concerned me, since no one who identifies themself as a music snob is going to think Slipknot is cool) wanted to see my iPod to see what was on it. She had to give it back in disgust after a few minutes because there was nothing good on it, specifically citing the alarming lack of Led Zeppelin and The Black Keys. In my defense, I have plenty of both on my computer, but only bring what I need to rock on my iPod. I like the Black Keys, but they’re not really driving or running music, and I have a weird hangup with Led Zeppelin because my Dad played them so much when I was a kid. I can tell that they’re good, but they just make me think of my parents, which is not very rock and roll.

The point that I’ve just spent the last three hundred words failing to articulate is this: I spent a lot of time convinced that the quality of music was an absolute value, and that music I liked was better than music I didn’t. After all, why would I like it more if it wasn’t better? Once I realized that this wasn’t true, and that taste in popular music is no different than taste in food or clothing, I also realized that liking metal didn’t mean that I knew something that everyone else didn’t; it just meant that I liked music that everyone else thought sucked. My friend Atkins kind of likes the same sort of music that I do, and my friend Brian appreciates it in a “This is like a joke that’s so stupid that it’s funny” kind of way, but other than that, there aren’t a lot of people who I can share my enthusiasm with who don’t think it’s annoying.

So it’s exciting for me to read a book by a guy who’s life was changed by Motley Crue’s Shout At The Devil and is willing to spend the duration of a chapter of a book analyzing the music videos that Winger and Bon Jovi made. Basically, it’s a subject that I haven’t really been able to relate to anyone with ever since I quit spending a significant amount of time hanging out with pancake house employees.

It’s not all about the music, though. I’ve never heard Shout At The Devil all the way through, and when I’m being completely honest with myself, I thought Van Halen was kind of stupid until my mid 20′s, when I suddenly decided that they were awesome. A large part of what I love about that book is that it’s reminding me about the kind of excitement that music used to elicit when I was a teenager. I still get excited about music, but there’s no good way to completely replicate the level of enthusiasm for a band that a typical 14 year old has.

I write forty or fifty posts a year about how things excite me less now than they did when I was a teenager, and one of the times I did that, my friend Anthony brought up that he used to spend hours watching Vh1 waiting for them to play a video that he was dying to see, and that people who don’t really remember life before the Internet don’t really know what it’s like to have to wait to get your hands on a song you like or to see a video that you’re into. I completely agree, and feel like part of what I really liked about music when I was younger was the amount of effort that went into getting it. They’ve done studies that people value things more when they have to work for them. I’m guessing that’s one of the reasons that boot camp is the first step in joining the army, why it’s so important to make fraternity pledges drink a handle of tequila and blow a Doberman pincer on live television to get into a frat, and part of why I was so obsessed with whatever band I thought was new and cool when I was in my teens.

First, I would hear it on the radio or see it on Musiclink (I barely remember any of my high school teachers or the people I went to school with, but the name of the public access music show that I used to watch as a teenager is apparently burned into my long-term memory permanently), then I would have to hope that they played it again so I could find out who the artist was and maybe get it on tape. Then, I had to scare up the funds to buy the record. Finally, I had to go to the record store, see if they had it, and then special order it if they didn’t. Now, it’s all there and it’s all instant.

I realized something else kind of interesting (to me, at least) – a lot of pop culture was more or less unaccessible after it’s initial popularity before the Internet. There was a window of about 15 years where if you wanted to see the music video for a Skid Row song or watch the pilot episode of a show that was cancelled after three episodes, you were basically fucked. If you didn’t tape it while it was popular, it was gone. I typically think of the Internet in terms of it’s ability to make it much easier and faster to find information, but when I think about it, a lot of that information wasn’t just more effort to dig up before Google and youtube, it was essentially impossible.

The more I think about it, though, I don’t think that the absence of the thrill of the chase is entirely to blame for my diminished enthusiasm. I think that if I woke up tomorrow and the Internet didn’t exist and I had to go back to camping out by my radio with my finger on the record button to get my hands on some song that I was excited about, I probably wouldn’t be willing to do it anymore. I’ll never be able to enjoy any album as much as I enjoyed Slipknot’s first album when I was 19, because my brain doesn’t work that way anymore. This is especially weird for me, because I don’t really like Slipknot’s first album that much now. I remember how it used to make me feel, but I don’t have that reaction to it anymore.

Now’s the point where I have to try to figure out what I was thinking when I first wrote this, and wrap up three different subjects (Chuck Klosterman likes his metal, it’s easier to get music than it used to be and I my brain chemistry no longer allows me to get “Teenage-girl-hearing-the-Beatles-on-the-Ed-Sullivan-Show” excited about a band.) I can only guess as to what my intent was with all of this rambling, so I’m going with this:

I almost always hate going to bars or parties where music is playing, not because I don’t like music or am just a bitch, but because it’s never music I like. If you love John Mayer, it has to be a fucking delight when you show up at the bar and some dude is playing his acoustic guitar and singing. It pisses me off, because I know that it means that I’m going to have to yell over Jack Johnson covers all night and clap and pretend that I really enjoyed the amateur rendition of a Sublime song that they just played.

So it’s nice to read a book by someone who likes the same kind of goofy, trashy music that I do, and know that somewhere out there, there’s someone else who grits their teeth when they hear the guy at open mic night start grinding out an atonal rendition of a Bob Marley song.

One of the benefits of my life being a cycle of going to school, stumbling around for a while, picking a different direction and then going to school again is that, at 30, I am still enjoying Spring Break. I’ve used the free time, as I often do, to get inside my own head and then sabotage myself.

Right now, I’m the happiest I’ve been since I can remember.

For the first time in my life, I think I have slightly below a normal person’s self-esteem, which is, by far, the highest that it’s ever been. This allows me to be happy during hours that I used to spend picking at my flaws or avoiding social situations that I would have enjoyed,  since I was convinced that no one wanted me there (even though they invited me and were obviously upset when I didn’t show up).

I have actual long-term goals that A) I’m actually working towards, B) seem achievable, and C) are sustainable, all firsts for me.

My attempts at school are a lot more successful than they have been in the past, and as a result, I’m enjoying school much more than I did in during my past attempts. 90% of that is that I go to class, which improves my grades, my relationship with the teacher and makes it easier to form friendships with the other students, who, thanks to my child-like senses of wonder, maturity and fashion don’t appear to realize how old I am. As a result, they think that I am some kind of 22 year old genius and foolishly accept me as one of their own.

Most importantly, I can play video games, which I avoided for a year, which not only helped me become more selective about what I play, but makes me appreciate it more when I do.

My life isn’t without it’s shortcomings, some of which are pretty significant, but enough things are going right that I’m feeling pretty good.

Which, naturally, sends me into a panic.

First of all, being happy has really brought how unhappy I was before into focus. More specifically, how brutal the years between the last time I was in school and when I re-enrolled were. My social circle constricted, the jobs I could pursue with my degree seemed like they would make me want to kill myself, making it almost feel like I didn’t even have a degree, and I got more and more down on myself.

Work wasn’t any better – Subbing is a good crash course in finding out if you’re interested in a career in teaching, but it’s not exactly a real job. Since I was at a new school every day, it was nearly impossible to form friendships with coworkers, further isolating me.

Don't let them see you cry, Johnny.

The results were devastating. I made a string of…let’s call them “questionable” relationship decisions, had less energy, was even less healthy than I normally am, and went a little crazy, turning into one of those bored people who magnifies the importance of the everyday minutia of their day because nothing else is going on. I was reduced to an old retired man who, when you ask them how their day is going, will get worked into a lather and rant for 45 minutes about last night’s episode of “America’s Top Model” because watching that show is the most interesting thing they’ve done in six months. There was one especially dark period where the highlight of my day was raiding with a bunch of people that I didn’t like in World of Warcraft. On it’s own, playing World of Warcraft probably isn’t that bad. There are plenty of functional people who play it regularly, and I’ve heard that they’ve added a lot of features to make it more fun for casual players, those motherfuckers, but it was the ONLY interesting part of my life. It was essentially the only thing I could talk about with other people, because nothing else was going on. It’s embarrassing to even talk about it, so naturally I’m going to put it out there on the Internet.

The worst part, though, was that I wasn’t really even aware that I was unhappy. I mean, on some level I probably knew, but I never really had a moment after crying and masturbating for a few hours or being completely stumped when someone I hadn’t seen in a few years asked me what I’d been up to since we’d last talked where I stopped and said “Holy shit. My life is in the fucking toilet!”

I would just stumble along, and then think to myself “I’m feeling a little bit down. Oh well, it’s nothing that a few hours of jumping through hoops in WoW won’t fix!” or “This girl that’s clearly a bad match for me will do a fine job of filling this gaping hole in the pit of my soul!”

Maybe things will be different when I graduate this time. Maybe if I’m watching for it, I won’t get blindsided.

Then again, maybe I will, it’ll be “Graduation II: Electric Boogaloo”, and I’ll be earning 3500 dollars a year, making out with a girl I shouldn’t be and getting choked up by episodes of “Welcome Back Kotter”.

You would think after fifteen years of constant Internet use I would realize things like this, but there are a surprising number of horrifying pictures that come up when you google "Older Man Younger Girl". This was the least creepy one by far. I'm probably on seven or eight government watch lists now. Maintaining life-ruining blogs for seven years and going strong!

I’m also in a strange spot with the girls I’m going to school with. I have enough self esteem now that I can kind of tell when there’s some interest, but it’s hard for me to know what to do. On one hand, almost every girl I know has some story about their early 20′s where, for a brief amount of time, they would date a “wiser, older man”.

At first, they were enamored with his sophisticated, worldly ways, gushing about how men their age were too immature to keep up with them so this older guy who had nothing better to do than hang out with a 21 year old was PERFECT for them, while all of their friends would talk about how weird and creepy it was behind their back, until two weeks later they came to their senses and dumped the old guy and would go on and on about what a weird, scarring experience that was to be in their early 20′s dating someone ten years older than they were.

I COULD BE THAT GUY.

On the other hand, being the wiser, older man has some requirements. Like your own place. And a car. And wisdom. And a willingness to forgo quite a bit of dignity and self-respect in exchange for some inappropriate relationships. I’ll probably have at least one or two of those things by next year, but then I won’t be in school, meaning I won’t be around the 20 year old girls anymore. IT’S THE ULTIMATE PARADOX.

Eh, who knows? I spend way too much time worrying about crap like this. The fact that I’ll be finishing college again is the same as it was in 2006, but almost everything else is different than it was when I finally made it through the first time. With any luck, that also means that I won’t spend the years after confused, lonely and INSANE.

Besides, as anyone who has followed my life at all over the past decade knows, this cycle will never stop. When I’m 60, I’ll still be living below the poverty line and in school with a wild hair up my ass about some random new career that I’ve decided is right for me. I should just enjoy the next few months.

I need a pick me up. In the form of a late 90′s slow jam that I will use to attract only the fliest of college bitches (kids still say “fly”, right?)

I’ll bring her back to the back of my parent’s minivan, light a few candles, crack open a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, and say something smooth like “This is what we got it on to back when you were six. Now let’s get you out of that skirt!”

I need to take a shower. This post is making me feel dirty.

It’s that time again: I need to gush about a bunch of bands that I like right now that I will undoubtedly be deeply ashamed about listening to in three months, but by then, it will be too late. The Internet will have documentation of my love of Hoobastank forever.

Lady Gaga

This isn't actually Lady GaGa. Based on her other wardrobe decisions, you wouldn't know that if I hadn't told you. That's kind of awesome.

Have you ever spent an evening hanging out where you have a good time, you’re feeling confident, and then you come home, look in the mirror and realize that for the duration of the evening, you had a bunch of snot hanging out of your nose, or your fly was unzipped and your balls were hanging out, or a mural of a horse’s penis was drawn on your forehead? And you feel this hot wave of embarrassment and shame roll over you, and then you spend then next three hours remembering the group of girls that kept looking at you and giggling that you thought were into you, but were actually probably just trying to guess your age by how low your balls were hanging? And then you kind of wonder why the fuck your friends didn’t give you a heads up on that?

That’s kind of how I feel about The Fame Monster being out for four months now and no one telling me to get a copy of it. This album is nothing but solid gold hits. A more savvy business person would’ve rationed these hot, nasty dance jams out at a slower pace, putting one or two them on an album full of filler every year or so. Apparently, Lady Gaga (Who I will refer to as Stingray Bearslayer for the rest of this post, because the name Lady GaGa is way too stupid to keep saying) is confident that she can keep producing club music that gets my nipples hard at a fast enough rate that she doesn’t have to make any filler to go with it.

No matter what the reason, I could’ve been listening to The Fame Monster for quite some time now if only my “friends” had brought to my attention that it was awesome. I’ll remember this, fuckers. If we’re hanging out sometime and you’re on fire, you might find out about it, but it won’t be from me.

Die Antwoord

I don't know why I think this is awesome, but I do.

I recently friended Robert Hamburger, the author of Real Ultimate Power on facebook, because the rest of my sorry-ass friends refuse to completely dedicate their profiles to ninjas, which is to say they waste my time (apparently I will be dedicating this post to badmouthing my friends. Good call, Johnny.) One of his random fans linked the video for “Enter The Ninja” by Die Antwoord. After watching a crazy white guy who looks like he’s older than I am, a dude with projeria (That condition where you age abnormally fast) and a hot little pixie chick with crazy bangs jump around and sing and rap, I had to find out more. As near as I can tell, they’re a few art school students who made a fake band that are roughly the equivalent of South African Insane Clown Posse. Given how I feel about Insane Clown Posse, the genre of music they play and the fact that the band appears to be a few hipsters that decided to make themselves into Cape Town Ali Gs, you would think that I wouldn’t like this band.

Which doesn’t really explain why I can’t stop listening to them.

Ever since hearing this, I’ve been yelling “You can hear me coming from the distance!” in my best 103-pound-South-African-girl voice. I like most of the rest of the album too, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s something different. Maybe it’s because even though it’s a joke, it seems pretty good.

Actually, as I think about it more, I think some of it has to do with the fact that it’s a joke. I can’t quite explain why, but once I realized that they probably weren’t serious (About the time that the guy says “Fuck – this is, like, the greatest song I’ve ever heard!” in the middle of the Enter the Ninja video and referred to the Internet as the “Interwebs” a few seconds later), I found myself suddenly more into them. That shouldn’t make a difference to me, but apparently it does. I think that it’s because if something seems bad on an album from a band who’s trying to be ironic, I assume that it was intentionally that way, which changes it from an embarrassing gaff to the punchline of  a joke.

The fact that this has an effect on how I enjoy music is kind of depressing for me for two reasons.

One, it means that there’s a large component to how much I enjoy a band that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual music that they play, which makes me feel like a shallow douche bag.

More terrifying, though is the dangerous precedent that this sets. I did a little test and watched this video:

I have to be honest – I don’t hate this nearly as much as I want to. I mean, it’s bad, but I don’t entirely dislike it. It’s just a LITTLE bit too stupid for me to get into.

But what if I found out that they were joking? What if I were to find out that the wicked clowns were a couple of dudes with finance degrees who thought it would be interesting to see how much money they could make by dressing up and writing goofy, ham-fisted lyrics about murdering people and reciting them over really shitty beats? Would I be into them? I want to say no, but I think I might.

The implications are horrifying: If I ever get an inkling that Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J are even slightly less sincere than I currently think they are, I may start liking Insane Clown Posse, a band that Chuck Klosterman says “mostly appeal to preteens who are even too dumb for Limp Bizkit.”

Q: What do you call it when your self image hinges on these two men being completely serious? A: An unenviable position.

The more I think about this, the scarier I find it – They wear clown makeup, spray their fans with Faygo soda and are constantly yelling about “The Dark Carnival” – suddenly, it seems way MORE likely that they’re joking than that they’re not.

And if I would love ICP if they weren’t serious, what else would I enjoy? How many bands do I think that I don’t like because of their music that I would suddenly fall in love with if I thought they were doing performance art? Am I going to be gushing about Fergie and Nickleback two weeks from now because I’ve decided that they’re hipsters who are only pretending to suck?

I can’t think about this anymore. I need something to listen to that doesn’t make me feel like this.

I have just the thing:

God Damn it.

I have a friend who was introduced to me through a mutual acquaintance. A few weeks after the friend and I met, he was telling our acquaintance that he thought I was kind of funny. Our acquaintance somberly explained to him that I wasn’t, in fact, funny, but that I just quoted funny lines from movies. I had a similar conversation with this acquaintance once where he explained to me that I only liked the music that I liked because the media told me that it was cool. Nobody told him to listen to the bands he enjoyed, he explained to me.

Give me a moment. I need to cool down after remembering that conversation.

Boys, boys! There's plenty of me to go around!

I have to disagree with the music argument. First of all, you NEVER question my love of Pantera, because my love for Pantera is as pure as fresh fallen snow. Second of all, if I based my music preferences on what was most likely to make me look cool, well, let’s just say that I bet on the wrong horse. A few weeks ago, I was driving home from the gym in a minivan singing along as loudly as I could to “Chains of Love” by Erasure, which I was blasting. In a brief moment of self awareness, I looked over at the car next to me, which had a hot (and what I’m guessing was college-age) girl in the driver’s seat, watching me. The look on her face could have meant a lot of things. She could have, as a mental exercise, been trying to figure out if there was any possible combination of actions that I could perform that would ever make her willing to sleep with me after seeing this (The verdict: No). She could have been alarmed at the fact that what appeared to be a clearly mentally handicapped man who wasn’t even wearing his safety helmet had somehow gotten his hands on a minivan. I suppose that it’s even possible that there was someone slaughtering a pig somewhere behind me, she was actually watching that and I mistakenly thought she was looking at me. Any one of those scenarios would have explained the look on her face. I’m not a psychic. I don’t know what was going through her head. I can say, with a fair degree of certainty, however, that “This is a man who’s choice of music makes him seem cooler in my eyes” was not going through her head. Worse, this is not a one-time event. The music and location change, but I do this to myself about once a month.

But what about the accusation that I’m not actually funny, but just a clever mimic who recites funny lines from mass media? I want to say no.

On the other hand, maybe I do.

You’ve probably seen the video of Bill O’Reilly freaking out when he was part of Inside Edition. If you haven’t, here it is:

As much as I want to use that as fodder to accuse O’Reilly of being a crazy asshole, that’s probably not fair. If you wanted to find a one minute clip of me being nuts sometime over the past twenty years, you could probably do it fairly easily. Either way, I was watching some studio footage of Dillinger Escape Plan that they put up to plug their new album. It’s mostly not that exciting if you don’t care about the album, but then I found these two clips:

You can skip to about the 30 second point for this one.

Notice any similarities between that and the clip of O’Reilly? Me too.

Now check out this one, starting at about the 50 second mark:

See where this is going? As near as I can tell, Dillinger Escape Plan has decided that any time you perform something at a high level, you are “Doin’ it live”.

Is this something that I missed out on or something they came up with on their own? Either way, I am on board. I’ve decided since seeing those videos that from here on out, any time that I do something awesome, I will refer to it as “Doin’ it live”. I’ve also decided that if I were ever to form a band, the clip of O’Reilly would be an awesome way to start a set. It will keep ramping up in intensity, until he screams “FUCK IT! WE’LL DO IT LIVE!”, at which point the band starts rocking.

Awesome.

All of this makes me wonder: did that acquaintance have a point? Do I just take the things I find funny, assimilate them recite them until I don’t think they’re funny anymore and then repeat the cycle? I’m not self aware enough to give an accurate answer to that, but I have three thoughts.

The first is that maybe he’s right. I certainly do it some of the time, as evidenced by the fact that I consciously made a decision last night to start saying “doin’ it live” instead of “demonstrating advanced mastery”. I also took a look at my last five blog posts, and their subjects are Valentine’s Day, video games, “floating”, Avatar and then video games again. I’m not breaking any new ground by writing about those subjects, or providing an especially unique perspective on them either.

The second is that I’m suspicious that everyone does a lot of this all of the time. There are six billion people on the planet, and billions more that came before the ones that are alive now. It’s pretty fucking challenging to come up with something that no one else ever has, or that isn’t at least derivative of something else. Unless you’re on the cutting edge of your field, most of your life probably consists of using information you assimilated from other sources.

It's not going to be easy to come up with an appropriate quote from Ghost Dad that will get me out of this situation.

Third, I don’t think it’s a constant thing, because it seems like it would be kind of challenging to purely quote other things. I’m trying to imagine having a conversation with someone where I have to frantically come up with an appropriate, topical line from a movie every time it’s my turn to talk, and I imagine it being really hard.

Fourth, since he knows the cheap, bush league methods I use in a desperate attempt to make people like me, it implies that it would be just as easy for him to sucker a few people into a few cheap laughs by reciting funny things like a parrot too; apparently, he just has too much integrity to stoop to my level and rip other people off to get a chuckle.

Either way…who really gives a fuck? I mostly brought it up in the first place because I needed an excuse to talk about the new slang I’ve decided to add to my vocabulary.

That’s how you fucking do it live.

As I’m sure you know, today is Valentine’s Day, bar none the holiday that I hear more people bitch about than any other. Single people are always angry about it because they feel like it’s a day designed to smear their loneliness in their face like they’re a puppy that took a dump on the carpet. A lot of people in relationships seem to be just as pissed off about it too, complaining that it’s just a day designed to force them to buy crap for their significant other.

"Oh-hoh-hoh! Hoota no bichu kan tu Han Solo!!!"

This makes me feel like I should be bummed out. I’m single, so I should either be bitterly complaining about what a shitty holiday Valentine’s Day is or crying and masturbating. For whatever reason, though, I’m only doing one of those activities, I don’t appear to care, and I’m not exactly sure why. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I have a guess.

First of all, being single means that I don’t have to do any work. I don’t have to put any energy into attempting (and ultimately failing miserably) to make it a good day for my significant other. And trust me, I would fail miserably. I am terrible at Valentine’s Day. One year the girl I was dating said it should be super casual and that we didn’t have to celebrate. I assume that you already know how this story ends, so I’ll skip through the middle and go straight to the end:

We spent about two days fighting, and I learned an incredibly valuable lesson that day: When a 20 year old girl tells you that something isn’t a big deal, make no mistake; she’s lying to you. If anything, it means that it’s MORE important than a normal event, and unless you like fighting, you should prepare for that event as though your ability to do anything over the next 48 hour period other than listen to a girl yelling at you depends on it. Seriously. Anytime you hear “It’s okay. You don’t have to (X)”, you need to pay close fucking attention and then do whatever it is that you “don’t” have to do, because the subtext of that conversation is “I want you to want to do this without me asking, so I’m going to say you don’t have to so I don’t feel like I’m forcing you into anything, but even as we speak, I’m oiling and sharpening my testicle shears just in case you fuck this up.” Just a friendly heads up for all of my readers who are in the market for 20 year old girls, which is exactly none of them.

I can write that one Valentine’s day off as me being really stupid, but there are plenty of other examples where I made an effort and ended up screwing it up, which is really just an extension of how I interact with girls. I try to be friendly or make a date special, and decide that the best way to do that is show up at her parent’s house naked with a severed horse penis in one hand and a DVD of homemade snuff pornography in the other.

Hey, don’t ask me. I think it’s a bad idea too.

One of the slightly less horrifying images that comes up when you google "testicle shears".

What I’m saying is that you don’t have to burn any calories having a bad Valentine’s Day if you’re single. You’re not doing anything wrong and pissing off someone important to you. You’re just ramming your face full of chocolate while you cry and read romance novels on the can.

Apparently this post is just going to devolve into me listing off random wacky scenarios. Oh well.

SECOND OF ALL, my last two relationships have been kind of rocky. Looking back on them, I think it’s pretty clear that the person I was dating and I weren’t very good matches for each other, and were just looking for someone to be with, because after the initial gloss wore off, we were left with hurt feelings, messy breakups and pro/con lists comparing me to ex-boyfriends. You know what’s way better than being in that situation? Not being in that situation.

I think this is all why I’m far more indifferent to Valentine’s Day than usual. I still feel a like I should be more bummed out than I am, though, because that’s normally what I do. Maybe my testosterone levels are dropping, or I’m just getting older, or I have a brain tumor. I don’t know.

Either way, it was a good day. I didn’t have pants on until noon, and I played a lot of games, which is probably apparent, since I’m posting this about an hour before Valentine’s day is over.

Happy Valentine’s Day.