I finally fixed it so that you can just put in www.mindyourowngoddamnbusiness.com to come to this page. You don’t have to slap on the “/wordpress” part anymore, although that way will still work too.

Just letting everyone know.

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A couple of days ago, I got a sweet, sweet case of strep throat. I’m apparently getting old or just becoming a sissy, because I don’t remember it hurting this much to swallow the last time I came down with strep.

Anyway, I’m drinking NyQuil by the gallon, eating a lot of popsicles and taking some sweet, sweet erithromyacin to kill all of the bullshit that’s decided to set up shop in the back of my throat. Unfortunately, I’m still a little bit too beat up to do anything much more strenuous than sit at my computer and type. The urge to start up my World of Warcraft account and start playing again is almost unbearable, but so is the thought of being back on the WoW wagon.

So I guess that I’m going to blog for a little while instead. My brain isn’t functioning quite like I would like it to right now, but I’m going to do my best to put something coherent together, because I’m starting to get a little bit tired of knocking myself out on the couch and waking up long enough to eat some chicken noodle soup and then knock myself out again. 2 days is enough.

First of all, I know that music recommendations in here are unwelcome and ignored, but has that ever stopped me before?

Daft Punk has a new CD out. It’s a live CD, which is normally the kind of thing that’s only cool if you’re already a huge fan of the band, but I think this is definitely worth picking up.

I’ve learned a lot of interesting things as a substitute teacher, and one of those things is this: Anyone much more than three years younger than me is completely unwilling to believe that techno is cool, was ever cool, or is good for anything other than background noise in cheap pornography.

It shouldn’t really surprise me, but it’s just another of those “Fuck. You’re old.” moments that I have on a more and more frequent basis, because when I was in high school, techno was still pretty cool. If you were a pretentious shithead, it was really important that you had a few techno CDs that you could whip out and pretend to enjoy. All the better if it was something really unaccessible and barely even music, like Plasticman or The Orb.

Anyway, the point is that 10 years later, the jig appears to be up. You need indy rock or emo that no one has ever heard of if you want to turn your nose up at everyone else.

Before I got off track, my point was that even when techno was cool, one of its common criticisms was that seeing it live didn’t add a whole lot to the experience. Most of the music isn’t created in real time, so most of the time you go to a show and watch a lights show while the guys from the band dance around and occasionally press “play” on their sequencers. Some bands pulled off shows pretty well, while with others it felt like you were paying 30 bucks to watch some guy take his album and pop it in a CD player on a stage.

Now that I’ve wasted all of that time trying to make a very simple point, let me bring it all full circle: Daft Punk’s new CD doesn’t suffer from the problem of sounding like they added a little bit of crowd noise to the background of a few of their old CDs and repackaged it. After hearing this CD, I’m tempted to try and see them live at some point. Well, maybe not. I don’t know. I’m hopped up on medicine. Cut me some slack.

Anyway, they get around the problem of not sucking live because they’re a techno band by turning the entire concert into a series of mashups of their songs, which is awesome in my opinion. They do a fantastic combination of “One More Time” and “Aerodynamic” on one track. In another, they put “Around the World” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” together in a way that makes the separate songs sound incomplete after hearing them put together. What I’m saying is that they do an excellent job of toeing the line between keeping the songs familiar enough that the fans can sing along and be pumped that they’re playing “That one song that they love” and changing them enough that no one feels like they’re just listening to the CD.

It’s called “Alive”. Go pick it up.

Whew! My jaw is a little bit sore from sucking Daft Punk’s dick for the last hour! I think that’s my cue to go eat a few more popsicles and take another nap!

But before I go, here is a video that you ungrateful assholes won’t watch of one of the songs off of the CD that I just spent an entire entry getting weepy about.





Bedtime. For the forth time today.

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(In celebration of my impending 10 year high school reunion, I have decided to start putting up videos of music that I listened to as a senior in high school and attempt to justify my love of them. Some of it is still pretty ok, some of it is terrible. Either way, here it is.)

My original plan was to start with Limp Bizkit, but here’s the problem: I planned on mentioning that the first time I heard Limp Bizkit was at a Sugar Ray concert. I feel like with both bands, I have to immediately follow up the statement “I liked them in high school” with “WAIT, WAIT! LET ME EXPLAIN!” I thought about waiting a week before explaining why I had paid money to see Sugar Ray, but my manhood was too threatened to let that sit.

So, anyway:

On my last day of Jr. High school, one of the tech lab teachers let me take home a Commodore 64 computer, which was badly dated even in 1995 when he gave it to me. My entire summer before starting high school was spent in the basement, dicking around with BASIC on my sweet ass C64, trying to trick Mary Beth Livermore into letting me do it on her face, and listening to KTCL. I can still almost smell the cool breeze that blew in my window at night after everyone had gone to bed and I was still plinking away at my Commodore and watching Conan O’Brian.

Let old Grandpa Trey wax nostalgic about KTCL for a moment, if I may: KTCL used to be an independent station that played a lot of music that you couldn’t hear otherwise, and if you were willing to sit through a lot of strange things, they would usually play some pretty cool stuff that other stations didn’t play.

In a strange coincidence or maybe just a celebration of my high school graduation, KTCL changed their format to “A 45 minute repeating playlist of alternative hits from the early 90’s” the year I graduated. Needless to say, I would rather fuck a dog than listen to KTCL anymore.

…ok, that’s probably not true. I mean, unless I had to listen to it for a really long time. Like, 10 years, nonstop. Then…well, I’m still not sure. Look, you know what I mean.

Anyway, that summer, listening to KTCL, I heard Sugar Ray for the first time. They played “Mean Machine” and was a fan.

Here’s the video for their first song:

This video really only kind of does the song justice, mostly because during the last guitar part, he screams “DON’T FUCK WITH IT!” in the unedited version. Who am I kidding, though. You didn’t know that there was a guitar part at the end, because you didn’t watch the fucking video, did you? I could tell you that at 2:54 in the song the drummer takes a dump on George Burns’ grave, and you would never know if I was telling the truth or not.

Whatever.

Here are a few more videos from their first CDs:


Sure, it’s not as hard as Pig Destroyer or anything, but they rocked pretty hard.

(I have to pause for another story for a moment - During a New Year’s eve party that one of my old girlfriends and her friends threw, I hijacked the stereo and put on Mean Machine and started blasting it when midnight hit. I’ll never forget how much fun Kevin and I had rocking out to it, or the disgusted, angry looks on all of her friend’s faces when I did it. There was one girl in particular that was especially irritated by everything that I did. I still have a very vivid mental image of her face, with that sour look on it like she just took a bite of a turd sandwich, because I saw that face pretty much every day for nine months. I could discuss the fact that the suffering of others seems to heighten my enjoyment of music, but we’ll save that for another day.)

Anyway, After two albums of rocking pretty hard, Sugar Ray realized that the music that they were playing wasn’t making them a lot of money or getting them laid, so they decided that it was time to start sucking.

All the way to the bank.

In a boat that was floating there on a river of 100 dollar bills and my tears.

Those motherfuckers.

Nonetheless, I will always have fond memories of rocking out to their music during my senior year of high school.

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***I’m not sure, but I think I write a Karate-Kid-related post once every three months. Get used to it, and get prepared for another one starting….NOW!***

A little insight into my resistance to pants:

I went over to my parent’s house tonight to see how they were doing. My dad and I chatted for a while, and he accidentally spilled his tea on the floor. I went into the bathroom and grabbed a towel to throw on it and blot it up. I was too slow, though. By the time I got back, my Dad was already hunched over the carpet, blotting up the tea.

With his pants and underwear, which he had removed. He told me that he saw no reason to waste a perfectly good towel on some spilled tea. He then calmly headed into the bedroom, dong swaying gently in the breeze, put on a clean pair of pants and went back to chatting like nothing had happened.

Welcome to life in the Castle residence (That’s my new name - I’ll explain later). You would think that after 28 years, my father’s cavalier attitude about nudity would stop surprising me, but it still always catches me just a little bit off guard.

I would also like to ask that all of you remember this story the next time that you come over to see me, and when I answer the door in boxer shorts and a hat, maybe be a little bit less sassy and a little bit more grateful that you can’t see my balls. Given the environment that I was raised in, I’m doing you more of a favor than you might realize.

Moving on.

I saw Dirty Dancing for the first time about 3 weeks ago.

As near as I can tell, “Dirty Dancing” is the female equivalent of “The Karate Kid” for girls in my age group. It’s a movie that every girl that is about my age thoroughly loved when they were young and still love now, but for completely different reasons.

Essentially, The Karate Kid seemed like a great movie when I was a little kid for the same reason that I loved a lot of movies when I was a little kid: At the beginning of the movie, the protagonist was someone who I could relate to and had problems similar to mine (albeit heavily exaggerated), but instead of just gritting his teeth and stumbling through those problems, the protagonist would go above and beyond anything I was capable of, and dominate every conflict in the movie.

Predictably, Daniel starts out as a kind of unpopular kid who can’t get the girl and gets picked on by dreamboat Johnny (so far, me) but instead of having to come to terms with being a dorky kid and settling for imagining himself coming up with really sweet burns while he’s walking home from school, Daniel kicks Johnny’s ass in front of everyone at the tri-state karate championship and then has sex with Elizabeth Shue (I haven’t done either of those things…yet. Call me, Liz <3!!!)

10 years later, that movie is still fantastic, but mostly because it's brimming over with unintentional comedy. Mr. Miyagi gives off a very strong "Asian pedophile" vibe, Daniel has a t-shirt with a picture of two pigs having sex with "Makin' Bacon" written underneath, the head of the Cobra Kai dojo screams things like "FEAR...DOES NOT EXIST...IN THIS DOJO! DOES IT?!" and tells Johnny to "sweep the leg" and "put him in a body bag!"

Most importantly, the song used in the karate montage, You’re the Best” by Joe Esposito is not only the best song ever, but should, in my opinion, be used in every movie montage, and I do mean EVERY movie montage.

Think about it. I mean, it’s an obvious pick for action movies, but I think it has some real potential in other places.

Footloose? Lady and the Tramp? The Breakfast Club? Any romance movie ever made? The montages would be immeasurably better with that song playing.

Did The Breakfast Club have a montage? I’m not actually sure. Whatever, that movie would still be better with that song in it.

So, yeah. The Karate Kid was a great movie when I was a little kid, and a great movie all over again for completely different reasons when I saw it again.

Dirty Dancing seems to be that way for girls.
Based on the reaction that I got when I told people that I hadn’t seen Dirty Dancing (a blend of confusion mixed with rage), I’m going to guess that all of you know the movie’s plot.

After seeing the movie and kind of paying attention, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that if I were a 12 year old girl at some point in the 80’s, I would have loved Dirty Dancing. I can also say as a 18 year old guy in 2008 that I love Dirty Dancing for completely different reasons that I assume girls also love it for. The music is comical, the plot seems a little thin, and Johnny Castle seems a little less dreamy.

I’ve just decided that I’m going to refer to myself in this blog as Johnny Castle. He’s awesome, and when I get caught blogging again, I’m really looking forward to explaining to a reporter why I chose to refer to myself as Patrick Swayze’s character in Dirty Dancing.

There was one moment that I didn’t quite know how to react to. The most famous line in the movie is “Nobody puts Baby in the corner”. Several people had told me about that line before I saw the movie and that Patrick Swayze’s character says it. I assumed that this meant that at some point in the movie, Johnny Castle was being put into a figurative corner of some sort, and, referring to himself in third person as “Baby”, he informed everyone that he would not be backed into it.
I was imagining an exchange something like this:

———-

CAMP DIRECTOR: Listen, Castle! I’ve had it with your shenanigans! I pay you to come in here and teach these people how to waltz and tango, not show up with your low-cut shirts swinging your pelvis around like you’re trying to mix a goddamn can of paint in those tight, tight jeans of yours!

JOHNNY: You paid me to teach these people to dance, and that’s what I’m doing!

CAMP DIRECTOR: You call what you do dancing? That’s preposterous! Dancing is graceful! Civilized! I’ve seen what you call “dancing, Mr. Castle, and I can only accurately describe it as dirty! You play by my rules or no rules at all, Johnny! You start waltzing, or you can waltz your skinny ass the hell out of my camp!

(Johnny seethes for a moment, the grabs his leather jacket off of a nearby chair and flings it over his shoulder. He storms towards the door, but whips around in the doorway, facing the camp director. He pauses for a moment and puts his sunglasses on)

JOHNNY: Nobody puts baby in the corner.

(Johnny slams the door. The sound of his car door slamming shut can be heard, followed by the roar of his car’s engine as he tears off)

———-

…something like that.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that he was actually talking to someone else named Baby. Ok, I thought, no big deal. Someone is trying to put Baby in a figurative corner, and he let’s it be known that nobody will be doing that.

Wrong again.

It’s the last night of camp, some of the people from camp are singing a boring song. Baby and her family are watching it from a table that happens to be in the corner. Johnny shows up, says the famous line, they do a choreographed dance that 30 extras join in on, and everyone sees that they were wrong to be such tight asses.

First of all, nobody really put Baby in the corner. She was just sitting at a table near a corner, and I don’t really get the feeling that anyone demanded that she sit there.

Second of all, I assumed that Baby was somehow getting punished in the corner, or backed into a corner, or that it was somehow a figure of speech, and so it surprised me that she just happened to be sitting near a corner. If Baby had been sitting next to the salad bar, the line would have been “Nobody puts Baby next to the salad bar”. Am I even kind of doing a good job of explaining why the context of the line was a little bit different than I thought it would be?

Anyway, it was kind of disappointing for me. At the same time, it almost made it funnier. I think I need to start using that line. Anytime someone is somewhere and I want them to hang out with me, I can just say “Nobody puts (name of person) in the (location that they currently are)”.

The fact of the matter is, however, that I can talk as much trash as I want about the movie, but I went out and bought a couple of 2008 calendars the other day. One of them is that little Domo thing, whatever the fuck that is. The other is a Dirty Dancing 2008 calendar. The Domo one goes at my computer desk, but I put the Dirty Dancing one at the foot of my bed. It’s the first thing that I see when I wake up in the morning, so I can enjoy some quality time with Baby and Johnny Castle. Sweetening the deal even more was the poster included with the calendar, which I put up next to my computer desk. What I’m saying is that there aren’t many places in my room where you can look without seeing something Dirty Dancing related, so maybe I liked the movie a little bit more than I’m letting on. Or maybe I just think it’s funny. Who really knows?

I’ll leave you tonight with a special, topical video, but be forewarned: the content of this video is decidedly…dirty.





I also just thought of something else: This movie has a montage of Baby falling in love with the Swayze and learning to dance. A montage with a song playing over it that ISN’T “You’re the Best” by Joe Esposito.

Advantage: Karate Kid.





No shoes.

No pads.

NO FUCKING MERCY.

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I let Technician McVicker know about the new blog.

The first thing he said was that a certain lawyer has probably already found it. The lawsuit was settled long ago and I haven’t worked at the filth factory in over a year. Now he’s just on a quest to ruin my life (faster than I’m doing it to myself).

Dan’s probably right. Somewhere on the campus that he works on, that son of a bitch is probably sitting in a dimly lit office at a giant desk , thoughtfully stroking his pet cat with his bionic arm and pouring over my blog posts. I’ll probably get two or three weeks out of this blog before I’ve put enough incriminating material onto here for him to compile a smear campaign against one of my former employers. One thing will lead to another, and it’ll all culminate with a call from a local reporter asking if she can get a few quotes for the article that she’s writing about me taking a dump in the heating duct of a local high school. I’ll shut down the blog for a few weeks, then start a new one that will be safe for a few days before his ip address starts showing up on my stats page.

I’ve just got to be careful about what I say.

On that note, I’ve decided to start doing gay porn.

Let me explain. There are two kinds of porn on HBO:
1) Documentaries about pornography that, instead of being hot, feature strange acts with terrifying people performing them and
2) Films that aren’t porn at all but are suggestively titled so I think they’re porn but turn out to be period dramas.

The documentaries are almost always terrifying exposes on creepy fringe sexual practices, ranging from people who like to dress up as horses and ride each other to a class on how to perform cunnilingus that was primarily attended (and taught) by obese 14 year old boys claiming to be lesbians in their early 30’s.

Well let me tell you something, “Cindy”: You’re not fooling anyone with your Ani DiFranco shirt or your “vagina”, least of all me.

The films that aren’t actually porn always just have promising names like “After Midnight: Ecstasy Unleashed”, but when I hit “Info” on my remote, it’s always something like “In this heart-wrenching romantic drama, Patrick Stewart (Star Trek, X-Men) is at his oscar-worthy best in a touching roll as John Huckabee, a widower looking for a second chance at love in a bubonic plague-ravaged 12th-century England.”

Anyway, Tom and I were watching one of the documentaries the other night, and they had a segment on gay-for-pay sex scenes.

Gay-for-pay, for those of you who don’t know, is when straight men perform in gay sex scenes. Why, do you ask, is a straight man willing to engage in a gay sex scene? Because said scenes pay approximately three thousand dollars, which is well above the amount one can make in guy-girl or girl-girl porn.

If you do a little bit of math, the facts become clear: If I spent two days a week filming gay porn instead of subbing, I would have two hundred eighty eight thousand dollars at the end of the year. I mean, Christ, if I bump it up to 4 days a week, I’m looking at over half a million dollars come tax time.

Do you see what I’m saying? Sure, I would have to do some things I wouldn’t be proud of, but it’s legal, I’m qualified, and at the end of the year I would have over 500 grand to spend on booze, rent, STD treatment and therapy!

Some people that I have run the idea by have told me that although my current job pays less, it’s far less of a compromise to my dignity. They’re right, but here’s the thing:

Doing one day of gay porn pays 37.5 times as much money as one day of subbing. Sure, there’s less dignity in it, but is there 37.5 times less dignity in it? Is putting my balls in some dudes mouth really that much less dignified than spending eight hours telling 14 year old girls to stop sending text messages?

I’m not really sure.

Despite these facts, I don’t foresee this happening anytime soon. After doing a little bit more research into the matter, I found out an alarming fact: in order to do gay porn, I would at some point be required to engage in a sexual act of some kind with another man, something that I am not comfortable with.

To make matters worse, my girlfriend pulled out the old “I’m pretty sure, and by ‘pretty sure’ I mean ‘certain’ that we would have to break up immediately if you started having sex with men for money” card, which is fine, I guess. I sort of figured that she would want me to be successful, but, you know, I guess that I was wrong.

Until then, I guess I just have to keep wearing a tie and yelling at kids for a living.

Damn it.

P.S.: The fact that I even find this video 12% entertaining is evidence that I haven’t grown up.

Good day.

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I think it’s time to start potentially stabbing myself in the back again. I mean, I’ve posted in here twice, and I haven’t screwed up yet. I’m past due.

This should be fun for two reasons.
1) I’ll probably end up putting in something that I will later regret, and
2) It’s a subject that I’ve covered at great length with the two people who currently read this thing.

It’s personal AND boring! I’m back, baby!

Sorry. I’ll quit apologizing and cut to the chase.

I’m seeing someone. She’s pretty awesome. I’ve been having a really good time with her. I think we’ve been a thing for two or three weeks now, and so far so good.

She’s been a little bit of a challenge for me, though, because she lacks something that my previous two girlfriends had in spades: A really bad case of crazy.

I mean, that’s a good thing, but I’m not used to it, and it’s really throwing me off. Sometimes, I’m a little bit late. I show up, ready to get punched in the face and it never happens. Sometimes I don’t respond quickly on myspace, and she doesn’t start fights with me over it. Sometimes I’m too busy to hang out or I have someone else that I’m hanging out with. I always brace for a huge argument when that happens, but it never comes. I include her in social events with my friends, waiting for her to get too drunk and start taking cheap shots at me in front of all of my friends, and all she does is smile, laugh and have a good time with them.

How the fuck am I supposed to handle that? I mean, my last girlfriend
- Spent a week crying and being snippy with me because she invited me to be myspace friends and I didn’t accept the invitation quickly enough.
- Got angry at me because she called me and I only returned her call once. After she finally broke down and called me, she spent the conversation demanding to know where our relationship was going and why I wasn’t interested in moving to a cold boring state that was hours from my friends and family.
- Started a fights with me because I wasn’t able to call her early enough on nights when I was working and when my car got stolen.
- Fought with me over whether we were “Dating” or “Going Out” (When she wasn’t able to give me any sort of real answer as to what the difference was, other than I was supposed to be her “support structure” if we were…dating, I think, I settled on “going out” because, well, I was in the middle of a fucking job when she decided that we had to have this fight).

The girl I dated before that…you know what? I could fill a few pages whining about her, but I remembered a good story that will get my point across better than any list could.

I was gushing about my current girlfriend to my mom the other day, and she asked if maybe we’re in a bit of a honeymoon phase right now (I think it’s highly possible, but I’m ok with that). She asked me how long that phase lasted with the girlfriend in question.
I thought about it for a minute, and realized that the answer was “two dates”. We hung out twice once we started going out. Then, one night, we were talking on the phone. We had no plans. She asked me what I was doing that night, and I told her that my friend was throwing a party, so I was going to go to it. Then, she started yelling at me because I wasn’t hanging out with her. Because I was a pussy, and probably because I was really startled by her completely bizarre reaction, I just got in my car and made the hour drive to her apartment, where she spent the rest of the evening accusing me of thinking that she was fat, and then eating fatty foods to show me that she wasn’t going to take any shit off of some motherfucker that thought she was fat. I remember being far too confused to run away, which, in hindsight, was the reasonable thing to do. Actually, now that I think about it, that was a lot of our relationship: Her getting angry at me for thinking things that I didn’t actually think, followed by her punishing me for said thoughts that I wasn’t actually thinking. It made for an exciting 3 and 1/2 years, that much is for sure.
…actually, let’s make it two stories. I think that I can completely describe the entire relationship in two stories. A few months ago, she called me and spent quite a while bitching about her current boyfriend (who I later found out is her fiance). It was poor form all around. That’s a shitty thing to do to someone you’re with, and she’s also not allowed to speak to me. It reminded me of the fact that when she had these perceived wrongs committed against her, she felt that it was her right and responsibility to do the meanest things possible to the person in question. Sure, she could’ve called her sister to lament what a lazy, unmotivated, immature jackass her fiance was, but she knew it would be meaner to call me and do it.

What I’m saying is that I had a diagram for understanding girls, it was a post it note that said
“1. Mean
2. Clingy
3. Unreasonable”
on it, and I’m realizing that it was completely unfair of me.

So now, I keep bracing for impact, waiting for her to get mad at me for some weird, arbitrary reason and subsequently start a weird, lengthy fight that leaves me wanting to punch her in the face, and it keeps not happening. I don’t get the feeling that she’s a doormat, and I’m pretty sure that she’ll let me know in no uncertain terms if I cross any lines, but as near as I can tell, her lines are not only reasonable, but clearly labeled.

I was explaining this to Technician McVicker (formerly known as Officer Danny, M.D.), and he said it this way:

me:I just keep bracing to get bitched out for weird things, and it keeps not happening.
Dan: yeah,
it’s like going from playing “Girlfriend”
on ultra hard
to turning on god mode

I guess that if I have to have a problem, “My girlfriend isn’t batshit looney and I’m still adjusting to it” is a good one to have.

Oh, and here’s my video. The Gorgeous was a band I loved about 2 years ago. I guess they released one more video and broke up, which makes me sad. The video is kind of neat, but only if you like the band.

Anyway, Here it is:




I miss you already, boys.

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